Dangerous to Love (14 page)

As they climbed the stairs to the roof, Flynn propelling Serena with a hand on her elbow, he whispered encouragingly, “Would I allow anything to ’appen to m’ darlin? ’Ave no fear, princess! I shall get us out of ’ere.”

They halted at a half-landing with a window giving onto the back of the house. From below came the sound of doors slamming, and the thundering of feet, as though an army had been given the order to charge. Serena’s eyes widened in horrified comprehension as Flynn removed a ladder from a small closet. With Lord Alistair’s help, he maneuvered it out the window, till they heard it thunk on something solid on the other side.

“I’ll go first,” said Flynn, and leapt onto the ladder, balancing like an acrobat.

“Hold!” said Lord Alistair. “If you are caught with me, you won’t stand a chance. This is where we separate.”

Flynn laughed, and to Serena’s ears it seemed that he was enjoying the whole thing immensely. “We won’t get caught,” he said. “Soon’s we get out of ’ere, I’m going to show you
my
London. We are going down, below ground, to the warren of drains and sewers them Romans left behind.”

“But we are miles from the docks, man.”

“True. But we are very close to Raynor’s place. ’E’ll shelter us, ’cos he owes Miss Serena, ’ere, a favor, see?”

Serena gasped. “Flynn, I’m warning you now, I won’t go anywhere near Raynor’s place, and that is final.”

“Fine,” said Flynn. “Then you best tell us what’s to be done.”

“There they are!” came the shout from below. Serena swallowed hard.

“Well?” said Flynn.

“You win,” she said, and grasped the hand he held out to her.

J
ulian sat at his large leather-topped desk in the office of his gaming establishment, scanning the contents of a letter which he had found waiting for him when he had entered his office a short time before. The perfumed notepaper was too sweet and cloying for his taste, but the message titillated his interest. It seemed that Lady Amelia Lawrence had given her present lover his marching orders, and to prove it, she had enclosed the key to the side door of her house in Whitehall. It was an invitation Julian must regretfully decline.

Whistling the refrain of some bawdy ditty he’d picked up around army camp fires, he contemplated the author of the letter for a moment. Lady Amelia was all satin-soft curves and voluptuous, flash-fire heat, the way he liked his women to be. She wasn’t popular with her own sex, but that was to be expected. The lady attracted gentlemen like flies to sugared water. She was, Julian admitted, a born predator, not that he cared one whit about that. Their former liaison had been unabashedly carnal, and that had suited him just fine.
Former liaison,
Julian reminded himself. That was all in the past, and the sooner the lady understood it, the better it would be for all.

A picture of a different kind of woman drifted into his brain. He had an impression of something cool and distant, something tantalizingly just out of reach. Serena Ward. Remote, unattainable, cool as a mint julep. But that was only a first impression. The image became sharper—thick-lashed, wide-set eyes flashing blue fire; a lush ripe mouth begging to be kissed into silence; fireworks,
Catherine wheels, rockets exploding overhead with all the velocity of a sudden summer thunderstorm.

It was sheer lunacy to pursue his present course. He’d done his bit; he’d gone hat in hand to try to make restitution for what, in his mind, she had invited on herself with her outrageous conduct. And what had he received for his pains? Exactly what he had expected to receive. She had given him his character, spat on him, and had sent him off with a flea in his ear. And even in the weeks following that interview, after Flynn had come to him and had persuaded him to continue, he had tried to make himself agreeable to her. And still she fought him at every turn. A sane man would let it go at that. His conscience should be clear. He should forget her.

Flynn would not let him forget, and Flynn was more tenacious that his own conscience. But Flynn had not been there when she had refused his offer of marriage in no uncertain terms.

Libertine.
He could feel his hackles rising as he remembered how her nose had turned up when she had flung the word at him. Actually, she hadn’t flung the word at him. It had dripped from her beautiful mouth like poison. Libertine! He was no libertine. He did nothing to excess. He wasn’t a saint, by any means. He was a male, not one of those rouged, simpering milksops, who danced attendance on her, and who wouldn’t know what to do with a woman if their lives depended on it. But he had known, and he was never to be forgiven for it.

Suddenly conscious that his lips were twitching, he frowned.
Lunacy,
he warned himself, and sighed. In an effort to banish the provoking image of Serena Ward, at least for the next few minutes, he flipped through the documents which he had been perusing before he had come upon Lady Amelia’s letter. They were all here, all the mortgages and notes he had surreptitiously acquired
in the last year, the combined worldly wealth of the Ward family. To his knowledge, there was nothing left to mortgage or sell. All he need do was wait out the few months until they fell due and he would have Sir Robert Ward exactly where he wanted him.

It was unfortunate that in ruining Sir Robert, the other members of his family would not come out of it unscathed. Unfortunate, but unavoidable. Sir Robert was the one who had set this inexorable chain of events in motion and Julian refused to feel even a twinge of remorse for what he was about to do. The Wards were grown men and women and well able to take care of themselves. They would survive. Whereas his family .  .  .

He touched his fingers to his brow as his thoughts lost focus, and he fought memories that were so painful that sometimes only the oblivion from a bottle of brandy could gain him respite.

For a long, long time, he sat motionless, staring into space. Coming to himself by degrees, he picked up the mortgages and notes he had been perusing. He rose and moved to the dumbwaiter behind his desk. Feeling with one hand, he moved a lever. There was a click, and a panel fell open. He tossed the documents inside, closed the panel, and shut the doors to the lift with a snap.

For the next several minutes, he worked on his ledgers, studying columns of figures, making notations from a sheaf of promissory notes he held in his hand. Gaming, his books told him, was a very profitable business indeed. And that was all it was to him—a business. He was not an inveterate gambler. He had a flair for it and could calculate the odds and probabilities with lightning speed. He never bet when the odds were against him. He never overreached himself. His flair and patience had brought him more wealth than he knew what to do with, perhaps more wealth than was good for him.

For the most part, gentlemen paid their debts with hard cash. There were times, however, when cash was in short supply, when Julian had to make do with other forms of security. There was the property in South Carolina, as well as a fine house on the outskirts of London and a hunting box in Scotland. Fine plate, costly jewels, thoroughbred horses, shares in thriving business ventures—Julian had amassed them all without a ripple of conscience. He reasoned that if it were not he it would be somebody else. Gambling was so ingrained among the English upper classes as to be almost second nature to them. Moreover, the pigeons whom he fleeced were well feathered. They could afford their losses. He knew this because the membership committee of his club was very careful to screen prospective members.

His thoughts were interrupted by someone rapping on the door. Julian went immediately to answer it.

A gentleman who was attired in much the same manner as Julian—fashionable but not to the point of foppishness—entered the room. Like Julian, he wore no smallsword, which immediately identified him as belonging to the house. Instead of Julian’s restrained elegance, however, he gave the impression of a soldier out of uniform, which is exactly what he was. His hair was unpowdered and his broad, craggy face was wreathed in a smile. David Black, more commonly known as Blackie, advanced into the room. Julian returned to his desk.

“Well?” asked Julian. “Has the parson arrived?”

“He has, and as instructed, we fitted him out and he is presently sitting at your board, eating the best dinner he has ever had in his life. Julian, what are you up to?”

“One of our patrons wishes to get married. You know the house’s policy. Whatever a gentleman wants a gentleman gets.”

“But that policy only applies to the dining room, you
know, for out-of-season tomatoes or strawberries and suchlike. And who would be so foolhardy as to enter into a Fleet marriage? That is no marriage at all.”

Julian leaned back in his chair, grinning unrepentantly. “Now that is where you are wrong, Blackie. I’m not saying that Fleet marriages are regular. I’m not saying that they are irregular. It all depends on what the couple wishes to make of it.”

Blackie shook his head, recognizing that Julian was not in a confiding humor. “At any rate, that’s not why I interrupted you. There is someone downstairs who wishes to speak with you.”

“Yes?” said Julian negligently. He was tidying papers on top of his desk, looking for Lady Amelia’s note.

“A young lady. Quite frankly, my first inclination was to show her the door. Her dress, her hair.” He shook his head. “I mistook her for a woman of the street. As soon as she opened her mouth, I could tell I’d grossly mistaken the matter. Haughty,” said Blackie, nodding his head sagely.

Julian’s dark head came up. “Go on,” he said.

“What? Oh, appearances to the contrary, it would not surprise me to learn that she is a duchess or very close to it. ’Course, I did not recognize her because she is wearing a mask. But that’s not all, Julian. It seems that she and her two escorts entered by the secret passage, the one that comes out on Billing’s cockpit.”

“Serena,” breathed Julian, so softly that Blackie did not catch it. “Where are they now?”

“In the crimson drawing room. Am I to understand that you know the lady?”

An unholy light glittered brilliantly in Julian’s eyes. “Oh yes, I know her. Serena or Victoria. She must be one or the other,” and with that cryptic remark, he left the room.

*  *  *

She had never felt more humiliated in her life, or more frightened, or put upon, or enraged. She wanted to tear her hair out. No. She wanted to tear Flynn’s hair out. He was playing Cupid—the traitor!—and nothing could convince her otherwise.

They could have made a run for it, and now it was too late, or so Flynn insisted. She was not sure that she believed him. It seemed to her as if he had deliberately delayed, giving the militia time to catch up with them at every corner. She shuddered in reaction, thinking of that awful chase through the sewers. Surely it had not been necessary to come to Raynor’s place? How could she tell? She didn’t know her way around that horrid labyrinth, and Flynn had held off telling her what was on his mind until they had burst into that fiendish cockpit.

It was so humiliating. They were to throw themselves upon Raynor’s mercy, Flynn told her, and beg him to support their story of an elopement that had gone wrong when Flynn, catching sight of their pursuers, had panicked. Who was she supposed to be eloping with? she had wanted to know.
Raynor,
Flynn had brazenly flung at her, robbing her of speech for the next several minutes.

Raynor?
She would rather it was anyone but Julian Raynor! Only her dread for Lord Alistair could make her go through with it. Poor boy, he was very subdued. It had turned out that he had a phobia of small, confined spaces. Underground passages made him almost swoon away in terror. It was perfectly true that they could not have gone on much longer.

She flashed him a kindly smile as he mopped at his brow with a white linen handkerchief. Her eye was not nearly so kind when she turned it on Flynn.

“Nice place Raynor’s got, ain’t it?” said Flynn, breaking the long silence.

Halting in her pacing, Serena glared at him. “Nice place?” Her tongue dripped venom. “You should be ashamed to bring me to this den of vice.”

At this, Lord Alistair pocketed his handkerchief and looked about him with interest.

“Den of vice? Nothing of the sort! This is a respectable establishment, I’ll ’ave you know, and not like some I could name.”

“You call this respectable?” She made a motion with one hand, encompassing the luxurious interior. All the furnishings were done in a color that put her in mind of juicy, overripe plums. But her mind was burning with far more than the decadence of her present surroundings. She was thinking of the scene that had met her when she had come out of that horrid, horrid cockpit and had stumbled into the entrance hall, her eyes momentarily blinded from the glare of a thousand candles in the chandeliers overhead. When her vision had cleared, she had gaped at the white marble and gilt-edged Ionic columns, and the murals on every available surface depicting lascivious nymphs and satyrs in every conceivable depravity.

No less decadent than the house was the crush of noisy fashionables who jostled her—gentlemen with powdered wigs, attired in richly embroidered coats in every hue of the rainbow, and masked “ladies”—hah!—in waist-hugging hooped skirts with little more than a wisp of gauze to cover their bared breasts. And champagne, naturally, flowing like water.