Wicked Angel (Blackthorne Trilogy) (22 page)

      
Alex nodded with an ironic smile. "If you think Lady Cybill will be so foolish as to whisper British Foreign Office strategy in my ear, I'll try to learn what I can from her."

      
"Splendid, Mr. Blackthorne, splendid."

      
"There is one more thing, however. If I learn anything that materially affects my father's people, I will warn him about it." He watched as the ambassador considered.

      
"I suppose that is only fair," Russell said at length.

      
"Then we have an agreement," Alex replied, rising from his seat.

      
"I knew your country could rely on you."

      
Alex shook the charge d'affaires's hand saying, "Now I'll just have to see if I can rely on Lady Cybill."

      
"From what I have heard regarding your prowess with women, I should think she will fall in line quite handily. There is a ball at Lord Aston's Tuesday next. Mrs. Chamberlain will attend. If you would like—"

      
"No, I prefer to reacquaint myself with the lady in my own way," Alex said as they walked to the door. He considered informing Russell about his recent marriage, then decided against doing so. It would require too many explanations regarding his personal life and Joss's. He felt suddenly protective of her and did not want their arrangement to be the subject of gossip or speculation.

      
Little chance of avoiding that, he supposed, once it became obvious that the marriage was one that fettered neither spouse. Joss's crusade among the indigent would continue to horrify Suthington while her husband would acquire yet another in his succession of mistresses.

      
As he climbed into a hackney, he thought with a twinge of amusement that there would be one unexpected benefit of this peculiar assignment. Constanzia had grown annoyingly possessive of late. He was pleased to have an excuse for pensioning off the beauteous Spaniard.

* * * *

      
In keeping with her wedding night vow, Joss confronted Alex the following day and made clear her determination that they should resume their old friendship as if the marriage had never taken place. Alex seemed relieved at her declaration and pledged that he would treat her just as he had before the wedding. He even apologized for his absence the preceding night, although he did not give any reason for his abrupt departure.

      
Together they called upon the earl to announce their nuptials, which were written up in all the newspapers the following day. The interview with Suthington was ugly in the extreme and ended with the apoplectic old man calling down the wrath of heaven on them for such perfidy. Afterward Alex and Joss shared a good laugh over the unliklihood of anyone in the firmament heeding an invocation from Everett Woodbridge. Joss suspected that the earl was secretly relieved to be rid of his unmanageable niece and her hound from hell.

      
In the weeks that followed, they each went their separate ways, attempting to rebuild their previous lives as if the marriage did not exist, which in fact it did not. They saw each other little more than they had before. Joss rose with the dawn to begin her tasks at hospital and school while Alex slept late, spending afternoons at the shipping office and his nights in clubs and gaming hells. They did from time to time share a brief luncheon or afternoon chat. On the surface, their friendship had been renewed, but it remained irrevocably altered.

      
The spring of 1812 was cool and tranquil, although the political situation was not. When American forces moved into the Gulf Coast region surrounding the Bay of Mobile, the British government sent a harshly worded protest and the two nations slid another step closer to war. Heartened by favorable reports from Wellington on the peninsula, Britain was in no mood to brook insolence from her brash, land-hungry former colonists.

      
Closer to home, the ton was utterly titillated by gossip about the smoldering relationship between the wicked American and Colonel Chamberlain's beautiful wife. They were seen together dancing at balls and riding on Rotten Row. The fact that both were married only added spice to the forbidden stew. After all, wasn't it Alex Blackthorne who had crippled Lady Chamberlain's husband in that infamous duel? And wasn't Jocelyn Blackthorne the reforming zealot who shocked London by running away from the Earl of Suthington's household to elope with the American? How utterly delicious it all was!

      
Alex's pursuit of Cybill Chamberlain proceeded according to plan. The lascivious lady eagerly responded to his advances, fairly gloating with satisfaction when he encountered her in public. The problem was, Alex found that he did not enjoy the chase as he always had in the past. He ascribed this disconcerting fact to his ulterior motives and her marital state, not his own.

      
His life was on course, he assured himself. Work at the shipping office was going smoothly and his luck at the gaming tables had been especially good of late.
Lucky at cards, unlucky in love,
he mused.

      
"A penny for your thoughts, darling," Cybill purred, pressing her breasts against his shoulder as she leaned around to nuzzle his throat and brush his lips.

      
They were standing by a huge bow window overlooking the rose gardens at the Marquess of Brownlea's country estate, where they had been invited for a weekend of hunting and parties. Alex turned into her eager arms, expertly moving her behind the cover of the draperies as he returned her kiss.

      
Cybill Chamberlain was a beauty, no doubt about it. Her raven hair gleamed with a blue-black luster and lush, milk- white breasts spilled from the top of her low-cut gown. He looked down into brilliant violet eyes framed by thick black lashes. "The marchioness will send us packing if you persist in such public displays, pet."

      
"Bother the old biddy, everyone in London knows we're having an affair," she replied as one busy hand insinuated itself inside his waistcoat and slid beneath his shirt, while the other one rubbed the bulge in his trousers with practiced, deft fingers.

      
He lifted one eyebrow sardonically. "We haven't
had
an affair ... yet."

      
"And whose fault is that? You seduce and promise paradise ... and then something always intervenes," she said, pouting. "I'm tired of excuses."

      
"Half the thrill is in the chase, rather like foxhunting. Which reminds me, we're supposed to ride in a quarter hour and you're not dressed."

      
Cybill licked her lips with a small pink tongue and whispered, "We could ride right now ... and I need not dress at all."

      
"Tempting," Alex replied, extracting her hand from his clothes and pressing a kiss on the soft palm. "But we'd be missed, I fear. The old marquess is a stickler for having everyone participate in the hunt."

      
Her violet eyes glowed with pure lust. "Very well. I shall leave you to eat my dust... until tonight when you may feast on something else ... I shall slip into your rooms. The marchioness always gives the largest beds to her gentlemen guests."

      
He chuckled, giving her well-padded rump a swat as she turned to walk away. Once she vanished up the circular staircase to the second floor, his expression turned sour. Tonight he would have to bed her. She was beautiful, experienced and lusty, precisely the sort of female he preferred. Why then did the thought of tonight's assignation hold so little appeal?

      
Cybill was right. He had invented continuous excuses for not consummating their relationship. To date he had learned only bits and pieces of information to pass along to the charge d'affaires. Chamberlain was indeed somewhere out of the country, although she did not specify where, and he found no subtle way to press her for more details. He had learned the reason Chamberlain's injury had not cost him his commission. The colonel had taught himself to use his left hand with as great a proficiency as he had previously used his right. Cybill could not resist taunting him with the threat of another challenge from her still deadly husband.

      
Alex was not certain what her motives really were. Did she desire him because he was the only man ever to best Chamberlain? Was it simple lust because her husband was absent? Or did she play a deeper game? No matter what her reasons, tonight she would get her wish. He would bed her. Silently damning life in general and Jonathan Russell in particular, Alex headed toward the sound of baying hounds and laughing houseguests.

* * * *

      
Everything around her was a fuzzy blur, as if she were underwater, trying to see shifting distorted shapes through the murky haze. Drat, where were those accursed spectacles? She always felt so helpless without them. In early childhood she had been plagued with this disorientation, feeling utterly at the mercy of her surroundings, until her father had had her fitted with her first pair of eyeglasses. Even now the terrifying memories still frightened her.

      
Joss rummaged through the pockets of her dress searching for her spare pair, which she was never without—until now. How had she become so forgetful of late?

      
Poc gave a startled yelp when she accidentally stepped on his tail. "Sorry, fellow, but I can't see a thing unless I

get down on my hands and knees and crawl about like a charwoman cleaning floors."

      
Sighing, she knew there was no help for it. She would have to do just that. Her spectacles had fallen from her face to the carpet while she was roughhousing with the dog. Somehow they must have bounced, because they were nowhere nearby. She lowered herself to the floor, groping very carefully so as not to step on them and break the lenses inadvertently.

      
Poc followed her every move now, brushing against her shoulder and planting a series of cold, wet kisses on her face to cheer her on. "Pray, don't you step on them," she scolded, trying to shove him back as she made a circuit around her bed.

      
Just as she reached the edge of the Tabriz rug, her hand came in contact with a wire earpiece. "Thank heaven," she cried, reaching out her hand to seize them while starting to get to her feet. When she stood up, Joss forgot the end table situated at the foot of the bed. Her shoulder struck it and she flinched, feeling the delicate narrow top teeter on its high spindly legs, setting off a fearful clatter of china vases, brass statuary and candlesticks.

      
Candlesticks! The lighted branch of candles tumbled off the table directly onto the thick cushion of the bed, setting fire to the sheer bed curtains. Joss clamped her glasses on her nose and glanced frantically around for something with which to smother the flames.

      
A blanket lay folded at the opposite end of the bed. In her haste to reach it, she forgot about Poc, who stood beside her sniffing at the smoke. When she turned she tripped over him and sprawled headlong across the carpet, landing in an ignominious heap across the floor while the fire blazed on.

      
By now thick, black smoke was beginning to fill the room. Joss's coughs were punctuated by the dog's alarmed barking. She scrambled to her feet, calling loudly for help as she fought her way to where the blanket lay, miraculously still untouched by the flames. Seizing it she rushed over to dunk it in the basin of water on the dry sink, then threw it over the curtains, which had burned free of the brass frame suspending them around the bed. As the flaming material fluttered onto the satin spread, the heavy wet blanket followed it down, snuffing out the conflagration.

      
Unfortunately by this time the fire had already jumped to the lace doilies on the bedstand and the linen scarf on the table across from it. Shrieking "Fire, fire!" at the top of her scorched lungs, Joss grabbed up the blanket and attacked the spreading blaze.

      
By this time her cries and the dog's frantic barking had brought two footmen, the cook and her helper all scrambling to help put out the fire. Within a few moments, which seemed like hours to Joss, they had the flames subdued to a smoldering mess of foul-smelling bed linens and charred wood.

      
Joss surveyed the once beautiful room's soot-stained walls and paint-bubbled furniture. "What will Alex say?" she wailed. "How could I have been so clumsy?"

      
"It weren't yer fault, mistress," Bonnie the cook replied, patting Joss's arm with a beefy red hand. "That silly chit of a maid set that brace of candles where they wasn't supposed to be."

      
"Yes, they belong on the pier table against the wall," Archie the footman said. The servants rallied around their sobbing mistress, whom they all loved dearly for her kindness, attempting to cheer her.

      
"Don't fret. The master is a good 'un. He'll not have a care about refitting the room. No real damage done that a coat of paint, some refinishing and a few new linens won't fix," Bonnie said, ushering Joss from the wreckage of her bedroom. "I'll have Mary fix up the bed in the next room for you to sleep on tonight."

* * * *

      
Sleep eluded her. Her nose was stuffy and her throat raw in spite of the posset the cook had insisted she drink at bedtime. She coughed, then sneezed. Utterly wretched, Joss sat up and blinked owlishly in the darkness. As usual, she could see nothing but fuzzy outlines blurring into the inky blackness.

      
The pungent odor of smoke still hung heavy on the night air in spite of the window she had flung wide open before retiring. Unfortunately, the window was in the fire-damaged bedroom. The small one in this room had been so thoroughly painted shut that she could not budge it.