What an Earl Wants (9 page)

CHAPTER SIX

T
HE
WINE
IN
J
ESSICA
’
S
SITTING
room, again tonight, was of good quality, but there was an
insufficient quantity of it for his needs. There might not be enough wine in all
of London sufficient for his needs, as his need was to drown the disquieting
feeling he’d taken some sort of fateful step into an unknown he did not
recognize and had little chance of escaping unscathed.

“What in bloody hell just happened in there?” he muttered,
directing a fierce glare toward the bedchamber door before downing a full
measure of wine and filling his glass once more.

He’d set out to prove a point. He’d set out to taste the wares
so blatantly put on offer the previous evening. He’d been out to convince
himself that a night spent wakeful, consumed by thoughts of what he would like
to do to Jessica Linden, had been an aberration, perhaps caused by some juvenile
fit of pique over that ridiculous pistol, possibly brought on by simple
curiosity: Could she live up to the intriguing expectations he’d felt as he’d
helped her unbutton her gown?

He damn well hadn’t expected what had happened. He felt half
defiler of innocence, half possibly king of the world, as she’d been so
genuinely passionate, so clearly astounded as he took her over the top with him.
She’d seemed eager at first, then resigned, even detached from her surroundings,
a whore who would endure, even attempt to feign interest, if only her client
would take what he’d paid for, and then let her get back to work.

And then...
damn.
He’d nearly lost
himself in her then, hadn’t he? That never happened. There was always a part of
himself he withheld, that part of him he shared with no one, tried to believe
didn’t even exist.

She’d seemed so vulnerable. He didn’t want vulnerable, had no
use for vulnerable. He wanted expertise, and he paid for it. Paid well for it
and then walked away when it suited him to be gone.

She’d made him want to stay in the bed with her, she’d made him
want to hold her, feel her heart beat against him, listen to her breathe as she
drifted into sleep, her head on his shoulder. By God, he couldn’t get out of
that bed quickly enough!

Was that something she practiced? That intoxicating mix of
reticence and passion? If so, she’d definitely perfected her technique, because
he wanted more. He’d been satisfied, but certainly not satiated; she shouldn’t
still be in his mind, but she was.

He should leave. What was she going to do, chase him down
Jermyn Street? Confront him again in Portman Square? No, of course she wouldn’t
do that. She hadn’t been anywhere near Portman Square last night, yet he’d done
nothing but think about her.

He’d simply have to get her out of his system, that’s all.
She’d hit him unawares, unprepared, the mistress of whatever game it was she
played. She’d been married, she lived her life on the fringes, she’d probably
had more lovers than many women had consumed hot dinners. She’d offered her
body, clearly not for the first time. Her trick was in somehow making him feel
she’d offered more.

A week, two, and he’d wonder what he’d ever seen in her that
had attracted him in the first place.

Gideon nodded his head, as if in agreement with himself and his
plan, and then settled down on the slightly shabby sofa, glass in hand, to await
her exit from the bedchamber. She’d walk in, that chin of hers held high, so
like how Trixie faced down the world, and he’d close up her buttons while he
recited verses of
Paradise Lost
inside his head to
keep his mind occupied, and then they would discuss his father’s damnable
Society.

Not that he’d tell her anything too specific...just enough to
keep her interested until he lost interest in her. As for her assertion they
weren’t to become lovers? Let her lie to herself if she wished, let her repeat
that lie each night as he left her warm and rosy from his lovemaking.

Yes, two weeks. Perhaps a month. No longer. Until he figured
her out, until he figured out what had just happened.

Tonight, once he’d shared some small morsel of what he knew, he
would escort her downstairs, he’d carefully lose five hundred pounds at the faro
table in lieu of actually offering her payment for her services, and he’d return
to Portman Square, lock himself in his study and drink until dawn.

It wasn’t much of a strategy, and thank God both Valentine and
Max were not in residence, but for the moment, the plan satisfied him.

He could hear her moving about in her bedchamber, and a very
long ten minutes later the door opened. She was once again clad in that damn
black gown, so at odds with the flowing mane of red hair that put the lie to the
prudish ensemble.

Without speaking to him, she turned her back and employed both
hands to lift her hair, giving him access to the long row of buttons...and her
bare back. What woman shunned at least a chemise, wearing only a pair of those
flimsy French drawers tied at her waist? What torment for a man to look at that
high-necked gown, those modestly covered arms, knowing what lay beneath! Modesty
and vice. No and yes. Prude and wanton. Oh, yes, the mistress of the game she
played.

Gideon drew his finger down the length of her spine, and she
shifted her shoulders slightly, either in delight or to warn him to stop. He
couldn’t know, and he doubted she would tell him unless he could goad her into
an answer.

“Perhaps an hour was an insult to myself,” he whispered beside
her ear as, instead of putting his hands to the task of closing her buttons, he
slid them inside the gaping fabric, to gently cup and squeeze her unbound,
uplifted breasts, his thumbs circling her taut nipples.
Item three on the list of things he wanted to do to Jessica Linden he’d
composed in his head during his near-sleepless night.

For a moment, she seemed ready to melt against him. For a
moment.

“Richard was correct in his assessment. You are your father’s
son, aren’t you, Gideon? Does nothing save rutting occupy your mind for more
than a minute?”

“You—” He withdrew his hands, closing his mouth on the word
bitch,
and buttoned her gown as impersonally as
he’d pull on his own boots. He’d figure her out, there would come a day when he
called the shots, when she would be rebuffed, left feeling like a pleading,
bleating fool.
But clearly,
he told himself,
not yet.

“Thank you,” she said as she lowered her hands, and her
luxurious curls tumbled free past her shoulders. She then immediately sat down
and looked up at him, clear-eyed and composed, as if they’d just come upstairs,
and nothing had happened between them. “How do you know my father and Clarissa
were murdered?”

That she’d traded her body for information was clear now. She’d
let him have her so that they could get down to business. A cold woman.

Gideon took up his wineglass once more. He could play the game
as coolly as she did, better. He’d had considerable practice. “I don’t know if
your stepmother was deliberately killed. She may simply have had the misfortune
to be in the coach. But Turner was definitely murdered. Their hired coach
supposedly overturned at night, with the full, lit coach lanterns breaking, the
oil spilling out and igniting. Trapped inside the coach, your father and his
wife were burned to death.”

By now, Jessica had her hand to her mouth, finally shaken out
of her reserve. “My God. I always believed he was destined for hellfire. But not
while he was still aboveground. Yet, clearly an accident. Why did you question
it?”

Gideon set down his wineglass. “I was already aware of other
deaths, other members of the Society perishing in
accidents.
All, like your father, wearing the rose. Orford, last
spring, shot by mistake by another hunter in his party—just whom, nobody could
say, as they were all drunk, all shooting as fast as their bearers could load
for them. Sir George Dunmore drowned six months ago after somehow toppling into
the Channel from a friend’s yacht in the middle of the night, the conclusion
being that he must have slipped on the rain-wet deck and tumbled overboard.”

“Both plausible conclusions,” Jessica said. “But there was
another one?”

“Yes, the one that finally aroused my suspicions. A few months
later it was Baron Harden’s turn to be careless. He took a tumble down a dark
flight of stairs after leaving his mistress. When I heard of your father’s
accident just outside London, most especially the part about the coach lamps, I
was already past believing all these accidents were a matter of coincidence. I
immediately traveled to the estate, to view the bodies for myself before they
were interred.”

Jessica’s brown eyes widened. “That’s ghoulish. How could you
even look at them?”

He was in no mood to tread softly. “The bodies were in no fit
condition to be laid out in the house, thankfully. So the answer to your
how
is, with a fat bribe to the groom guarding the
remains in the stables until the interment, my extremely discreet physician
brought along for his expertise, my valet, Gibbons, holding up a lantern for us,
handkerchiefs tied around all our faces and wearing riding gloves we immediately
consigned to the waste bin.”

She folded her hands in her lap. “I believe I was asking a
rhetorical question. But thank you for that explanation. You are a determined
man, aren’t you?”

“When I want answers, yes, I go after them. They actually
didn’t die in the fire, Jessica. From what my physician could tell, admitting my
own limited contact with dead bodies, they’d both sustained pistol shots to
their skulls. Fire doesn’t melt bones, most of all, the skull. With a little
prodding at the remains, the holes were not that difficult to spot.”

Jessica had gone rather pale. “Shot. Not an accident at all. At
least they didn’t burn, thank God.”

“No, the fire was meant to obscure the wounds. The coachman,
alas, was long gone, so I couldn’t question him.”

“Had he shot them? Perhaps set the coach on fire to cover what
he was about. A robbery, I would suppose?”

Gideon shook his head, amazed at her sangfroid. She was
shocked, but she showed no signs of subsiding into a swoon; her mind was ticking
along in a rational fashion. “Anything’s possible. Am I being too suspicious,
Jessica?”

“No,” she said quietly. “My father was always tight with his
purse, so the fact he’d hired a coach rather than bring his own cattle and
servants to London isn’t surprising. Lord only knows
who
he hired. Their deaths could have been a result of a robbery,
but when combined with the other supposed accidents? All of the men members of
your father’s Society?”

“They wore the rose. To me, that links them. Four accidents
stretches coincidence a step too far.”

“I only wonder why he and his wife were traveling to London at
that time of year. No one can count on the roads being anything but snow-filled
or quagmires. Did your sleuthing extend to finding an answer to that
question?”

“No, but you’re right, I should have thought of that. I was in
London to settle some financial affairs for my former ward, turning them over to
her bridegroom’s man of business, or else I wouldn’t have been in town
myself.”

“Lucky for you, I suppose, and your theories.”

“Yes, I suppose so. Damn, why didn’t I think to ask myself that
question?”

“How lowering to discover one isn’t omnipotent, Gideon,” she
said sweetly, so that he glared at her. She shrugged. “I was only thinking it
would be interesting to know their reason for the journey. A fanciful mind might
even consider the notion they were on their way to a meeting of the Society
you’re so certain was dissolved two decades ago.”

This wasn’t the first time she’d alluded to that possibility.
He might as well tell her the rest.

“We’ve had some curious happenings at Redgrave Manor in the
past year. Glimpses of lit lanterns moving through the estate at night, strange
holes appearing inside the greenhouse which, when investigated, seem very much
to have been caused by the cave-in of some sort of tunnel being dug beneath it.
Oh, yes, and my father’s crypt was broken into. His remains have gone
missing.”

“What?”

Well, at last! He had begun to wonder if the woman was
completely unflappable.

“Yes, that was very much my reaction, as well. However, in the
interests of full and honest disclosure, save for the rare sightings of curious
lights at night this past month or more—possibly poachers—I can’t for certain
say when the tunnel was dug, but only when that portion of it collapsed. As for
the theft of my father’s body, that was only discovered when lightning struck a
nearby tree and it fell, a large branch breaking one of the stained glass
windows. We none of us enter the mausoleum unless it’s to shelve another
Redgrave—we’ve got enough of them in there that we stack them up like bolts of
cloth in a Bond Street shop, you see, and then wall them in. The stone used to
wall up Barry was on the floor of the crypt, broken in two, the body gone. But
again, the theft could have occurred any time in the past twenty years.”

Jessica was quiet for some time, her hands twisting in her lap,
before she looked at Gideon again. “Do...do you think perhaps they took him—your
father, that is—almost immediately? To, um, to perform their own ceremony? Oh,
Lord, that’s disgusting.”

“And only one of several possibilities,” Gideon said, just
voicing his thoughts of the past few months aloud easing his mind somewhat. “To
whit—propping him up on some throne to overlook their
activities?
To grind up his bones into powder, mix that in with
sheep’s blood or some such ridiculousness, and
drink
the man? To slice him up, as they did the saints of yore, with each member then
blessed to carry a knucklebone as a memento, a holy relic? Don’t answer yet—I’ve
had time to consider more than that. There’s one more. Did his followers, as my
father was the acknowledged leader, believe the supposed treasure was interred
with his bones, and come looking for it?”