A Reckless Desire (2 page)

“Enough,” he said, a single word of warning.

Surprised, Everett nodded. Indulgently he winked at the girl.

“Very well, lass,” he said, attempting an empty show of kindness. “If you feel you're worth more, then I'll raise my stake to a round one hundred guineas.”

She gasped, her eyes even wider as she looked to Rivers. “I'd make you proud, my lord,” she said eagerly. “I swear I would.”

Rivers smiled, liking the young woman more by the moment. It took courage for her to speak up like this, especially after Everett had been such an ass. Her spirit intrigued him. She was a bold little thing, and he'd always had a weakness for women who weren't afraid to speak their minds.

“What do you say, Fitzroy?” Everett asked. “Will you take on this little scrap as your pupil?”

“Of course he will not, my lord,” Magdalena said indignantly, sliding quickly from Rivers's knee to pull the girl's arm free of the baronet's grasp. “Lucia is a cousin and an orphan, entrusted to our care and keeping, and I won't have you ruining her usefulness for the sake of some foolish gentlemen's wager. Back to my room with those flowers, Lucia,
pronto, pronto
!”

She gave Lucia a light smack between the shoulder blades with the flat of her palm to urge her on, and the girl curtseyed and hurried away, the flowers held high in her arms for safekeeping. But as she'd curtseyed, Rivers had glimpsed regret in those large dark eyes, a genuine wish that things had gone otherwise. Could she truly want to be part of this, of what Magdalena had accurately described as a foolish gentlemen's wager? Would she really have wanted to cast away her lot on the whim of a man she didn't know, gambling that he could do what he'd grandly claimed?

As Rivers watched her slender figure weave among the others, he wondered, speculating as to whether he could have made so great a transformation. He tried to imagine her commanding both a stage and an audience as she played a queen.

Could he have done it? Could she?

Yet as soon as she disappeared from the room, she faded from his thoughts as well, and within minutes he'd forgotten both the girl and the wager entirely.

Lucia di Rossi dressed as quietly as she could, not wanting to wake the other two girls who shared the small room and its single bed with her. Because their room was in the attic, directly beneath the roof, the beams overhead slanted sharply from one wall to the other, and she was forced to crouch down before their tiny looking glass to make sure her hair was as smooth as possible, with no curling wisps slipping free of the tight knot at the back of her head. She knew she'd never be a beauty, but at least she could be tidy. Satisfied, she slipped her white linen cap over her hair, and tied her flat-brimmed hat on over that. For luck, she patted the strand of coral beads that had been her mother's, her fingers circling the little Neapolitan cameo that hung from it.

One of the other girls stirred and squinted at her.

“It's so early, Lucia,” Giovanna said groggily. “Mother in Heaven, where must you go at this hour?”

“An errand,” Lucia whispered, purposefully vague.

“You mean an errand for Magdalena,” the other girl said. “Who else would be so cruel to send you out at this hour?”

For the rest of the world, the hour wasn't particularly early or cruel. Lucia had just counted eleven chimes of the church bell in the next street, and she prayed she wasn't already too late.

Now she merely shrugged and let Giovanna think the worst of Magdalena.

“I must leave,” she whispered, wrapping her shawl over her shoulders. She looped her fingers through the latchets of her shoes, not wanting to put them on until she was downstairs. “You go back to sleep.”

Giovanna grunted and pulled the coverlet over her head, and Lucia slipped through the door and closed it as gently as she could. She padded down the winding back stairs in her stocking feet, past the other closed doors, where the rest of the company remained soundly asleep. The lodging-house catered exclusively to foreign-born dancers, and the landlady respected their hours so long as they paid their reckoning on time.

Muffled sounds from the wide-awake London streets contrasted sharply with the sleeping house, and from the kitchen in the back of the house, Lucia heard the first crashings and thumpings of the cook beginning late breakfast. At the bottom of the staircase, she leaned against the door to buckle her shoes. Then, at last, she slipped outside, and she was free.

She walked swiftly, scarcely noticing how the neighborhoods changed from the crowded, narrow streets around Covent Garden, north and west toward Marylebone, where the houses were larger and more modern and their occupants more wealthy and more respectable. She knew the way, for Magdalena had sent her there before, carrying letters that she hadn't trusted to the lodging-house boy.

This time, however, Lucia was going on an errand of her own; one that, if things went as she hoped, could prove to be a thousand times more important than any of Magdalena's silly love-notes. With each step she rehearsed what she'd say. She so seldom was permitted to speak for herself that composing the proper words now wasn't easy, and she'd lain awake most of last night considering her speech.

All too soon she was standing on the immaculate white marble steps of the brick house on Cavendish Square. She knocked briskly, and because the butler who opened the door remembered her from other visits, he let her inside. After the bustle and dust of the streets, the front hall seemed cool and serene and impossibly beautiful, with its black-and-white stone checkered floor and the grand staircase rising up so gracefully that it might as well be ascending to Heaven itself.

The butler looked down his long nose and silently held out his hand to her, no doubt expecting another letter from Magdalena.

“I don't have nothing,” she said. “The message's so private, it's not written. I must speak it to his lordship myself.”

The butler frowned imperiously. “Careless girl,” he said. “You lost it, didn't you?”

She raised her chin, refusing to be intimidated. He was only another servant. He wasn't any better than she, except that he wore fancy livery with gold lace.

“I didn't,” she said, “and I'm not careless, not a bit. I told you before, it's a most private message, meant for his lordship's own ears alone.”

The butler's frown deepened. “His lordship does not wish to be troubled with no reason. If this is an idle invention born of your wickedness—”

“It's not,” she said doggedly. “It's born out of a private conversation with his lordship last night.”

He gave her one long, final look of judgmental disapproval.

“Very well,” he said. “You stay here whilst I see if his lordship is in. Touch nothing.”

“Very well,” she echoed, not to be impertinent, but because she thought it sounded like a grand and noble way of saying yes. “Although I'd think being his lordship's butler, you'd know whether he was in or not.”

He glared at her, saying nothing more. As he headed up the stairs, he passed by a footman standing at attention like a sentry beside one of the doors.

“Watch her,” he said.

It offended Lucia to be taken for a thief, simply because her clothes weren't as fine as his. But she'd come this far, and she didn't want to be pushed out the door now. She didn't dare sit on one of the straight-backed chairs along the wainscoting, fearing that it might be considered touching, so instead she simply stood where she was, her hands clasped at her waist where the footman would be sure to see she wasn't slipping anything of value into her pocket.

She did let herself look, though. There could be no harm in that, and she looked eagerly, searching for clues to the man whose grand house this was. Not that she found any. A large painting of a sunset over the ocean, a blank-eyed statue of a naked lady, an elaborate vase on a marble-topped table: what could any of that tell her of his lordship beyond that he was very wealthy, which she already knew?

She sighed restlessly, and touched her necklace again. She hoped he remembered his offer this morning, and she hoped he could do as he'd said. He'd smiled, not as if it were all a jest, but as if he truly believed it was possible. To be able to become a dramatic actress, to earn her own wages and have her own lodgings, and to be finally free of Magdalena and her endless demands—oh, it was beyond imagining!

She caught sight of her reflection in the looking glass that hung in a gold frame on the far wall. She appeared tiny and insignificant, a small, dark blot in a straw hat in the corner of these magnificent surroundings.

She sighed again, and steadfastly turned from the looking glass.

She hoped he remembered
her.

The butler was coming back down the stairs, each step filled with disdain as he came closer to her. She'd no doubt he was going to send her away, and she'd a sickening dread in the bottom of her stomach. Her dream would be over before it had begun, and then—

“His lordship will receive you,” the butler said, making it clear this was not his decision, but his master's. “This way.”

Now dread of a different variety washed over her as she hurried after him up the stairs. The words that she'd so carefully composed last night had vanished from her head, with nothing to replace them but a babble of incoherent desperation.

The staircase didn't lead to Heaven, but to a short hallway with more heavy paneled doors. The butler stopped before one and knocked, and a muffled voice from within told him to enter. He did, standing to one side to announce Lucia, and she'd no choice but to enter, immediately dropping to a deep curtsey, her head bowed.

“The young person, my lord,” the butler said wearily over her head.

It wasn't until then that she realized she hadn't given her name, nor had the butler bothered to ask it. Once again she'd been reduced to insignificance, one more example in a life full of similar indignities. But this time the slight didn't wound so much as it made her forget her nervousness. It
irritated
her. She was tired of being overlooked. She was after all a Di Rossi, and she longed for the attention of the center stage as much as anyone else in her family.

“I have a name, sir,” she said, her head still bowed in her curtsey. “I am not merely a ‘young person.' I am Lucia di Rossi.”

To her chagrin, she heard his lordship make an odd, snorting half laugh. She hadn't meant that as a jest, but as a declaration. Oh, already things were not going well!

“Come here to me, if you please, Lucia-Young-Person-di-Rossi,” he said. “I must see this prodigiously brave woman who dares correct Mr. Crofton.”

She rose as he'd asked, and crossed the room to where Lord Rivers sat in a leather armchair. Beside him was a small mahogany table laid with a white cloth, a silver coffeepot, and a large porcelain cup filled to the brim with lethal-smelling coffee. Although it was the middle of the day, only the curtains to one window had been drawn, and most of the room remained in a murky half-light.

It was, however, obvious that the room was being kept that way at his lordship's orders, and to Lucia the reason for those orders was clear enough, too. In the three years that she had been with Magdalena, she had become familiar with how a gentleman looked in the morning after a rich and eventful night, full of riotous company and strong drink.

Lord Rivers had that look. He was sprawled in the armchair, his long legs stretched before him and his head resting against the back of the chair. There was, she suspected, ample reason for that inky black coffee and nothing else for his breakfast. His golden hair was loose and rumpled around his face, and his jaw was dark with the beard he hadn't yet shaved. He wore a yellow silk dressing gown over dark linen breeches; he hadn't bothered to close the gown, and a wide stretch of his bare chest was on display. Rolling from his bed (or another's), he hadn't taken the time to locate either shoes or stockings, and his bare feet were thrust haphazardly into embroidered backless slippers.

“I know you,” he said, squinting at her. “You're Magdalena's girl.”

“Forgive me, my lord,” she said. “But I'm not her girl. I'm her cousin.”

He turned his head slightly to one side, considering her. “But she treats you as a servant.”

“As a Di Rossi, I work for our company however I can,” she said carefully. “All of us who are in London do the same. My uncle is our
maestro di balleto—
ballet-master—and it is for him to decide what roles each of us shall take for the good of the family. I am a tiring-girl, helping the dancers with their costumes and performing other errands for them.”

She hoped that would suffice as an explanation. She'd no wish to have to describe exactly why she did what she did.

To her sorrow, it wasn't. He leaned forward in the chair, resting his elbows on the chair's arms to study her more closely. In the half-light, he apparently didn't see what he wished, and he waved his hand toward the butler, who was still standing by the open door.

“Crofton, the curtains,” he said, not looking away from Lucia. Dutifully the butler drew them, and sunlight flooded the room. Lord Rivers winced and blinked, but still continued to look so intently at her that her cheeks warmed beneath his scrutiny.

Yet she met his gaze, refusing to give in and look down. If he studied her, then she could study him as well. She'd only seen him by the candlelight in the dressing room or by the lanterns in the street as he'd handed Magdalena into his carriage. He was more handsome than she'd realized—astonishingly, achingly handsome, with his golden shock of hair, his bright blue eyes (albeit bluer this morning for being a bit bloodshot), a jaw fit for a marble god, and a full, sensuous mouth that smiled easily. The glimpse of his bare chest, firmly muscled, was most distracting. He was the only gentleman that Magdalena welcomed back into her company once they'd ceased being lovers, and seeing him now like this, Lucia understood why.

“Why aren't you a dancer, too?” he asked bluntly, looking her up and down. “You're a little wisp of a girl, to be sure, but with a few good meals and the usual paint and spangles, you'd do well enough in the chorus.”