A Midsummer Night's Sin (6 page)

“You’ll keep your eyes and hands off that one,” the viscount warned. “Reginald Hackett has plans for her, and they don’t include marriage to some jumped-up by-blow. I know what happened last year with your brother and Brean’s chit, but Brean is an ass. Reg is not. And he’s mean. Mean straight through to the bone.”

“Yes, thank you, I’ll keep that in mind,” Puck said smoothly. “But I’ve had a thought. Being by inclination a rather observant man, it has occurred to me that being beholden to Mr. Hackett for more than you already might be could be said to hold little appeal. Therefore, I would like to gift you with a sum of money you might use to employ the Runners. Oh, shall we say, two hundred pounds? And as a gift only, my lord. With only one small string attached, that I would be allowed to escort Miss Hackett home this evening.”

Puck knew, and Viscount Ranscome knew. A Runner, three Runners, could not cost more than ten or twenty pounds. Puck was offering the man a bribe—a
ridiculously generous bribe—in exchange for his cooperation tonight and in future, if need be. Not that either man would say so. Puck was too smart…and Ranscome too greedy.

The viscount goggled and gasped at Puck, rather like a fish that had just unexpectedly found himself tossed onto the bank of the stream, only to be offered a helpful lift back into the water. “You…a
gift,
you said? You wouldn’t wish repayment?”

“You insult me, sir. Are we agreed?”

“It’s the girl. You want the girl. I know what you’re doing here. You want my help, or my silence. He’ll kill you. With his bare hands.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, also, but I hardly think so.” Having hatched much of this plan whilst Gaston was fussing over him as he tied his cravat, Puck had put more than one small but heavy purse in his pocket. He extracted the second, heavier purse and, with his back to the ladies, briefly flashed it to the viscount. “Take it. Take it now, or the offer is withdrawn. Ah, very good. You show some small spark of intelligence. The rest, tomorrow, sent over by messenger. Now I shall turn slightly so that the ladies can see, and you will smile and shake my hand. If we meet in public in the days and weeks to come, you will behave likewise. I am your friend, my lord. Your new bosom chum. Even if it kills
you.
”

“You are a bastard, aren’t you?”

Puck smiled in real delight as the two shook hands. “In every way, my lord, yes, I am.”

R
EGINA KEPT HER
eyes facing toward the front of the coach as Puck sat himself beside her on the seat. “You could have told me.”

He adjusted the lapels of his black evening jacket and shot his cuffs. “Told you what, Miss Hackett?”

Where could she begin?

“You could have told me your circumstances. That would have gone a long way in explaining why…why…” She was suddenly at a loss for words.

“Why I behaved like such a bastard in the gardens?”

She shifted about on the seat to glare at him in the near darkness. “That is not what I meant! Besides, we are both going to forget about that entirely. Is that clear?”

“Clear and yet, I fear, impossible. You have a glorious mouth, Regina. I live only to taste it again.”

She was going to die. She was going to sink straight into these cushions and expire.

“You can’t say things like that to me.”

“I can’t? But I just did.”

She couldn’t take her eyes off him. She wasn’t sure she wanted to. She felt…she felt so
alive.
“You’re being purposely obtuse.”

“No, I’m being brutally honest. And, yes, perhaps provocative. I enjoy doing things I’m good at, you see.”

She drew her hands up into fists in her lap. “My cousin has been abducted!”

“Yes, and I am still amazed that you seemed to grasp the
why
of that abduction so easily. Do a lot of reading of penny dreadfuls, do you? Chaste maidens, snatched
from the bosoms of their families for their beauty, carried off to foreign parts, lost forever behind the walls of some harem. Until the hero saves her or she, to preserve her virtue, takes her own life? Only after twenty pages of hand-wringing and virtuous speechifying, of course. Did you ever wonder, Regina—what good is an intact virtue when you’re dead?”

She faced forward once more, not without effort, because it was difficult to look away from his face, those fascinating eyes and their mischievous sparkle that, she was realizing more and more, hid a rather terrifying intelligence. “My father owns ships. Trading ships. Quite a few of them. He has been all over the world and seen things most of us wouldn’t believe. He…he has told us stories, and I see no reason to believe he was lying. But I didn’t think something so terrible could happen here, right in London.”

“Bad things happen anywhere, Regina. One of the servants I applied to with your cousin’s description informed me that a barmaid in a tavern he frequents disappeared last week. And he knows of another girl, a milliner, who went missing a few days ago. He said there were more. All of them looking much like your cousin, all of them small, all of them blonde. You and I saw the state of her mask, the obvious evidence of a struggle. She may have gone out into the gardens willingly enough, but that’s not how she departed them. No, we can’t be completely certain that your cousin was abducted by the same persons
collecting
pretty, petite
blondes, but I don’t think such a conclusion is too far-fetched, do you?”

Regina remembered the ruined mask, the green glass stones in her reticule. “She didn’t go willingly. We were only going to watch, perhaps…flirt a little. It was silly, it was
stupid,
but it shouldn’t have been dangerous. And Miranda never would have gone off willingly with anyone and left me alone. It…it was only supposed to be a lark. A little…a little fun.”

She took the handkerchief he offered and wiped at her eyes.

“Your uncle will be hiring a brace or more of Bow Street Runners in the morning. Those Robin Redbreasts must have heard about the other disappearances by now and have some idea where to look for her. Nobody can vanish completely.”

Regina turned her head to face him once more, looking deeply into his eyes. “You don’t believe that, do you? She could already be aboard some horrible ship, waiting for the tide so that it can sail to some foreign port. I’ve been to the docks with my father, you know. There are so many of them and hundreds of ships. Miranda could even now be in any one of them. Oh, God,” she said, her voice breaking, “I’m so frightened for her.”

The next thing she knew, Puck had pulled her against his chest, his arms around her as he rested his chin on her hair, rocking her slightly as if she were a child he was attempting to comfort. She wrapped one arm about his waist, holding on, hoping for strength.

And felt something else stirring inside her, some
thing she shouldn’t have felt. Not now, with her cousin in such dire straits. Not ever.

Regina had never had anyone to cling to like this. Certainly not her mother, whom she loved dearly but who was as useless as a parent as ears would be on a turnip. Certainly not her father, who had made it clear he saw her as a commodity to be, as he’d baldly told her, “bought low and sold high.” Why, she’d never even had a pet that she was sure would have loved her unconditionally.

At last, as his coach slowed, she pushed herself away from him. “I have to stop this. I’m feeling sorry for myself, and that’s ridiculous because it is Miranda who’s in danger. Oh, and you’re horrid, Mr. Blackthorn, because you were about to take advantage of my overset state, weren’t you?”

“The thought had danced fleetingly across my mind, yes. Are you certain you’re totally against it?”

Regina glared at him, but then her bottom lip began to tremble, and she laughed. “You’re incorrigible. A true Puck.”

He put his bent index finger beneath her chin to hold it steady and then leaned in and placed a short, chaste kiss on her mouth. “For courage,” he said when he withdrew just far enough to look into her eyes.

Regina realized that the coach had come to a halt. She was home.

“I think I probably need it. Will you come inside?”

He shook his head. “I believe it would wiser if my name were kept out of any explanations you will offer
your parents. I’m convinced the viscount won’t be mentioning it, at any rate. But don’t worry. Your father will be much too overjoyed to know that his daughter is safe and will not be asking for too many details. As for your mother…?”

Regina winced. “She won’t be a problem.”

“I’m sorry,” Puck said, stroking her cheek.

“Why? You aren’t the cause of any of this.”

“No. I’m sorry we have to say good-night. By tomorrow, you will have remembered just how unsuitable I am.”

She lowered her head. He was right. He was nothing she could think about the way she was thinking about him now. Her father wouldn’t allow his
commodity
to be thrown away on a bastard son, no matter that his sire was the Marquess of Blackthorn.

“We…we are only caught up in the moment,” she told him, still not raising her chin. “I have suffered a considerable—several considerable shocks this evening. And you…”

“I am a very bad man,” he finished for her.

“Sir,” a footman said, having opened the door and put down the steps. “We have arrived.”

Puck grinned, looking young and silly, so much so that it startled her. He had so many different sides to him, and she knew she was compelled to learn about all of them. “Some people find it necessary to state the obvious, don’t they? My footman will escort you to your door and make certain it opens to you.”

Regina nodded and then made a decision. She raised
her hand to his cheek, lifted her head and kissed him, squarely on the mouth, and then withdrew before he could react.

“Tomorrow at eleven. In the park,” she said, quickly gathering up her reticule and all but stumbling out of the coach, his laughter following her.

She hiked up her skirts rather inelegantly, belatedly remembering that her shawl was still inside her uncle’s coach, but hopeful none of the sleepy Hackett footmen or the butler would notice.

And she probably would have made it to her bedchamber, where she longed to be alone and think back over every moment of the evening, save for the fact that she heard her father’s voice calling to her from the drawing room. The last thing she’d expected, considering what he had been about the last time she saw him, was for him to have returned home so early.

Her shoulders sagged; truly, her entire body sagged, suddenly exhausted. But she dutifully turned and headed toward the sound of his voice.

“Good evening, Papa,” she said, dropping into a small curtsy, because that always seemed to please him for some unknown reason. Besides, it was either that or kiss him on the cheek. After where he’d been tonight and what he had been doing, she would rather kiss the fireplace grate.

“Where’s your mother? No, never mind that nonsense. We’ve more important things to discuss.”

Reginald Hackett was still a relatively young man, and tall, towering over most other men (although not
quite so tall as Puck, she realized with a ridiculous spurt of pride). He was thick in his body, most especially in his chest and shoulders, for he had spent many years laboring alongside his crews, climbing rigging, loading cargo. Regina knew this because her father had told her the stories, taken her to the docks, showed her what he had achieved and recounted again and again how hard he’d worked for his success, how grateful she should be for the fine clothes on her back, the food on her plate, the roof over her head.

And then he’d tell her how she would repay him. “Nothing less than an earl, girl, you hear me? Then squirt out a brace of sons for him, make me grandda to the heir, and nobody’ll dare remember Hacketts were ever in trade. Two generations from the docks, girl, that’s all it takes. And you name the first whelp Reginald somewhere in his string of names. I’ll go the blunt for that, as well. I promised m’mother as much, and that’s how it’s going to be, understand?”

His mother. Grandmother Hackett. To her father, everything that was right and good about the world. To her mother, who had been forced to have the coarse, domineering Alice Hackett live in her house until the woman died, the bad angel who sat on Regina’s shoulder. Her mother loved her daughter, but Leticia could never quite hide the fear that Regina had the makings of a lowborn peasant deep inside her, just waiting for some inopportune moment to pop out and sully her and her family escutcheon.

“Papa, I have terrible news,” Regina said as her
father had recourse to the gin decanter, the only thing that bonded him to her Uncle Seth. She had hoped to be able to put off the telling until the morning, but that was impossible now. “Our coach took a wrong turn tonight and brigands attacked us. I’m fine,” she added quickly, as her father had whirled about to look at her, his face a thundercloud. “But Miranda was…”

“Well? Spit it out, girl. The idiot girl was what? Beaten? Shot? Raped?”

Regina sought out a chair and sat down. “No,” she said. “Taken. Miranda was taken.”

He raised one inquisitive eyebrow at her. No sign of caring, of compassion. Simply inquisitive. “Is that so? Taken where?”

“She was abducted by the brigands.” Regina hated that her voice was shaking, hated that she was afraid of her father. But she was. He was so large, so physically imposing. She reassured herself that anyone with half a brain in his head would be afraid of her father. “Uncle Seth has already begun making inquiries,” she lied quickly. “There is a great fear that Miranda has been kidnapped in order to be sold somewhere. I was left alone because I’m not what they wanted. It’s just as you told Mama and me. Terrible men, buying and selling people as if they were bolts of cloth.”

“I see,” Reginald Hackett said slowly. “And you’re not lying to me? She hasn’t talked you into going along with some farradiddle about slavers to cover that she’s run off with some idiot young pup who thinks he loves that penniless twit?”

“No! Papa, this is
real.
”

“And you didn’t help her make up the story, thanks to me telling you about such things? Come on, come on—the truth!”