Brazen Temptress (4 page)

Lady Jersey scoffed. "I'd be careful there. Too well connected for your taste," she warned him. "Their fathers won't take it lightly if you toy with their affections."

"Never fear, I have designs elsewhere tonight, but I want my quarry to wait a bit longer." He knew this bit of information would delight Lady Jersey.

"The poor girl. You'll probably send her and her chaperone home with a case of vapors. But I'm dying to find out who this newest victim of your affections is to be, so of course, you wily cad, you've tricked me into helping you once again."

If Lady Jersey was affronted, it was hard to tell by the gleam in her eye as she steered Julien toward the clutch of waiting girls. "You are the worst, Julien D'Artiers, the worst."

They stopped before the open-mouthed group of girls. All stared wide-eyed at Julien, as if they expected him to devour one of them as an evening snack.

Lady Jersey made the introductions, ignoring the dark looks from several of the matrons at the sidelines. One mother hustled up and hauled her protesting daughter away before the fateful introduction could be made.

The others grinned with malicious delight at their friends misfortune.

Julien bowed low to his new conquests. "Ladies, it is an honor to meet you. I can see I've been away from London far too long."

They tittered behind their gloved hands and wavering fans.

"Now, tell me, which of you are spoken for, so I don't have to meet any angry betrotheds at dawn? It's been at least a month since I've been in a duel, and I fear I might be rather rusty."

This delighted the girls, and they all shook their heads.

"Not one of you is betrothed?" he asked. "Have the young men in London gone blind?" He winked at the girl at the end, a Lady Annabelle, if he remembered correctly.

Lady Annabelle's face turned bright pink and then went white, as her legs started to give out beneath her.

Julien knew all the signs only too well. It happened at least once a night when he was in attendance at Almack's. He immediately stepped forward and caught the unsteady girl in his arms.

"Oh, Mr. D'Artiers, you saved me," she whispered, while the other girls surged forward, offering their fans and advice, ranging from burnt feathers to a good pinch. Each one seemed pea green with envy at not having thought of the stunt first.

Lady Jersey rolled her gaze heavenward.

He carefully righted Lady Annabelle and smiled at her. "I think you should be steady now."

"Oh, yes, quite fine," she said, her words ending in a soft little sigh. It was said her father, the Marquis of Sandre, had numerous investments with Lloyd's. Lady Jersey's introduction might net some added dividends to his plans for the evening.

"Oh, Mr. D'Artiers," Lady Annabelle said. "May I ask another favor of you?"

"Anything."

"A personal question. A matter we were discussing before you came over."

Several of the girls looked at their daring friend with alarm. Julien could only guess what their diabolical schoolgirl minds had been concocting. "What is it?"

Lady Annabelle smiled, her long golden lashes fluttering with all the coquetry of a high-priced mistress. "Is it true that no lady has ever held your heart? That you've never loved anyone?"

Her daring took him aback, used as he was to the truly inane chatter of young girls in their first Season. Even her friends appeared stunned, silenced and aquiver like a group of birds having spotted a hawk on the wing.

"That happens to be two questions, my Lady Annabelle," he told her, trying to think of a way to extricate himself. But at his side Lady Jersey seemed to be just as taken with the question as the girls.

"Yes, Julien," she said. "Do tell. You did promise the girl anything, after all."

"Has a lady ever caught my heart?" he repeated.

"Oh, yes, have you been in love?" another girl begged.

"No, never," he lied.

All at once their faces fell into dismay. "I can't believe that," Lady Annabelle said. "Everyone falls in love once, especially when they are young. You were young once, weren't you, Mr. D'Artiers?"

Beside him, Lady Jersey was doing a miserable job of holding back a most undignified outburst of laughter.

After Sophia's jab about
men his age
and now this pointed comment from a girl barely old enough to pin her hair up, Julien was starting to wonder if nine and twenty really was as old as everyone seemed to be implying today.

"Well, let me think," he said. "That was such a long time ago."

The girls immediately began to look hopeful.

He didn't know whether it was the blue eyes of one of the girls or the rapt expressions on their faces. Or maybe it was Lily's words about his lack of family ties. Or his advanced age. But something inside him, something he usually held so tightly in check, gave way.

"Yes," he started slowly. "I did love someone once."

"I told you," the girl with the blue eyes told her friends.

"What happened to her?" This barely audible question came from a shy girl at the opposite end of the gathering, far from Lady Annabelle's more boisterous companions. No one seemed more surprised at this inquiry than the girl herself. She blushed and stepped behind one of her taller friends.

"She was lost to me. Drowned."

His admission brought the inevitable onslaught of memories he always fought to shut out. The sound of battle — cannon fire and shot whistling through the rigging overhead. Shouts of agony. Wood splintering around him.

Don't jump,
he'd cried.
Please don't jump. Let me explain.

On the edge of the railing stood a woman. A dagger in one hand, the other clutching the rigging.

Her gaze, angry and hard, bore into him with more searing heat than a red-hot piece of shot.

Don't do this,
he'd told her. But she'd leapt into the churning water before he could cross the deck to stop her.

Leapt to her death, the waves closing over her, reclaiming their own.

"Drowned," the girl with the blue eyes said. "How dreadful. Was it a boating accident?"

A boating accident?
How calm and peaceful that sounded compared to the truth. "Yes. A boating accident," he said, not wanting to look into those blue eyes.

Feeling a pall fall over his audience, he knew he needed to change the mood. Better to lighten their hearts and remove the chains from his. He leaned forward and whispered in a conspiratorial tone, "That is why I never take sea voyages or travel over water."

They nodded solemnly, until the far reaches of his words stopped them.

"Surely you jest," Lady Annabelle said. "You must cross a bridge occasionally."

"Only very sturdy ones," he told them solemnly.

They all laughed, like happy little songbirds once again.

"Mr. D'Artiers, what did she look like?" the duke's daughter asked, preening in her elegant gown and tossing her perfectly coiffed curls. Not one of her friends missed for a moment the implication of her question: Their vain friend wanted to know if she favored the missing love of his life.

"Oh, yes, what did she look like?" several of them asked at once, happy to get to a subject they all were well versed in.

What did she look like?
He'd almost forgotten. The years had erased so many of her nuances from his memory — the way she walked, the sound of her voice, how her hand felt clasped in his. These details had slipped away, but he had never forgotten her eyes.

Eyes the color of the waters off a forgotten cay in the West Indies. Eyes that looked right down to a man's soul. Eyes that still scorched his heart with anger as they had the last time he'd looked into their stormy blue depths.

He shook off the maudlin thoughts, teased from him by a clutch of romantically inclined girls.

"Oh, Mr. D'Artiers, what did she look like? Surely you must remember what she looked like," Lady Annabelle persisted.

And when he looked up, he glanced around the circle of enraptured faces, all eagerly awaiting his revelation.

"What did she look like?" he said. "Well, she looked like ..." His voice trailed off as his gaze rose beyond the perfect English misses in front of him, and he found himself staring across the Assembly room at the latest arrival and her matronly escort.

Tall and stately in her demure white muslin gown, the lady was as out of place as a swan among seagulls. The haughty tilt of her chin and the bored expression on her face told everyone who looked at the lady that she wasn't here by choice.

Julien opened his mouth, like a fish out of water sucking for air. The sight before him had to be a trick of his eyes, an apparition born of his tale to the girls.

But as she moved closer, his memories sprang to life. She continued forward like the sea breeze that had fostered and nurtured her most of her life. Her hair, though well contained in the latest fashionable style, still held the dark, rich essence of ebony.

Unlike the other misses, with their downcast glances and shy manners, this woman entered the room as if it were a dockside tavern, head held high, eyes alert for danger, her shoulders thrown back in a daring manner.

It couldn't be her, he tried to tell himself. After all, she was wearing a dress. The woman he'd known and loved had conceded to wear a dress only one other time.

On the day he'd married her and made her Maureen Hawthorne de Ryes.

Maureen entered Almack's with no small measure of impatience. She'd spent the last month cooped up in the Johnston house, enduring numerous fittings, lessons, and countless other indignities. Used as she was to the freedom of the sea and being the commander of her own fate, she found her prison, regardless of its comforts, unbearable.

The only thing that kept her sane was the one thought, the one driving desire.

Find de Ryes. Make him pay.

She'd waited eight long years to see this happen. And now, perhaps even tonight, she would see her long-sought revenge finally come true.

She had wanted to start weeks ago, but the Lord Admiral and Lady Mary had made it clear that Maureen was under no condition to be presented to society until she demonstrated the ladylike behavior necessary to move amongst London's finest.

The Lord Admiral's rules were very clear. She would follow Lady Mary's instructions to the letter. She would not venture out into public until it was determined that she was suitably prepared; this included walks in the park or visits to dressmakers and other shops.

When Maureen had balked and told him she'd rather take the gallows over this high-handed treatment, she found him intractable.

To Maureen's further dismay Lady Mary had taken to her new duties like a newly promoted squadron leader, eager to do battle and prove her worthiness, especially with the Lord Admiral's considerable purse at her disposal. And where her Aunt Pettigrew had given up, Lady Mary only dug her aristocratic heels in deeper and made Maureen's life a living hell.

Lessons in serving tea. Curtsying. How to enter a room. How to dance. How to hold a fan. Conversation that neither began with such salty phrases as
blasted, lazy sod,
or
bloody
nor included any other of the colorful expressions with which Maureen usually peppered her speech.

Much of it she remembered from Aunt Pettigrew's endless lectures, but remembering and putting into practice notions she hadn't considered in over ten years were another matter.

No, becoming a lady, Maureen decided, was akin to being keelhauled — without the advantage of drowning halfway through the punishment.

The only thing that bore her through more than one painful hairstyling session or visit from the pin-wielding seamstress was the thought of watching de Ryes's miserable carcass swing through the air.

The wretched bastard. The scurvy sod-kissing ...
Mentally she cursed his hide with every phrase she was now forbidden to use out loud.

"Don't you dare scratch," Lady Mary whispered to her as they walked down the steps.

Maureen lowered her hand, wondering for the thousandth time at Lady Mary's unerring ability to perceive when she was about to commit another social gaffe.

But the lady's command did nothing to alleviate the blasted itching from the ribbons at her sleeves. Or stop her slippers from pinching her toes.

"So this is your blessed Almack's," Maureen commented. "Not much, is it?"

Lady Mary looked at her as if she'd just blasphemed the pearly gates. "I will have you know that it is only by a miracle that you are seeing the inside of this place. Many other young ladies," she said, "are home tonight and would give anything to be in your shoes."

What Lady Mary had left out of her censure was the word
deserving.
Deserving young ladies. Well-bred young ladies. Not ladies who climbed rigging, lived with sailors, and smuggled brandy and tea for a living.

The vouchers to Almack's had been hard won, Maureen knew, but their arrival the day before had made even the unflappable Lady Mary break into a gleeful smile of pride and almost, if Maureen dared say it, a small jig.

This again had been the Lord Admiral's doing, but Lady Mary couldn't have cared less. To return to Almack's, Maureen surmised, was as close to gaining entrance to heaven as could be found in the dirty and clogged streets of London.

She looked around the Assembly room and wondered what all the fuss was about. Well-dressed young ladies stood on either side of the dance floor, shadowed by matronly figures who watched their every move. Young bucks, in their dandified fashions and prancing mannerisms, stalked through the eligible young misses like lions grazing through a field of nervous antelopes.

"Poor wenches," she muttered, looking at her female counterparts, trapped as they were in this prison of muslin and manners.

Lady Mary shot a hot glance over her shoulder.

"I was saying, is it always so poorly attended?" Maureen said, struggling to cover up her lapse in speech. "What did you think I said?"

Lady Mary's expression was one of disbelief, but she wasn't about to launch into a tirade of reproofs. Certainly not within the hallowed halls of Almack's.