Improper Gentlemen (8 page)

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Authors: Diane Whiteside,Maggie Robinson,Mia Marlowe

Tags: #Historical romance, #Fiction

BOOK: Improper Gentlemen
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To Match a Thief
 
M
AGGIE
R
OBINSON
Chapter 1
 
Jane Street, London, October 1820
 
L
ucy Dellamar looked down with dismay at the diamond brooch in her hand.
It had happened again.
She hadn’t meant to steal it, though it was clear she had, for why else would it be cutting into her palm? But there it had been, carelessly twinkling on the bedside table of her neighbor Victorina Castellano, where anyone might come upon it and pocket it. At least Lucy had not taken Victorina’s matching earrings that were right beside it, although she probably should have. Sets were more valuable when kept together.
Botheration. No time for regrets about her light fingers and inadequate forethought. Lord Ferguson would be happy, and that’s all that counted. It meant a roof over her head for another month at least, and perhaps a choicer cut of meat even if the cook had already quit. She would buy it and cook it herself.
Lucy was hungry right now. Thieving was hard work, though whoring was worse. It hadn’t come to that—yet.
Even if she did live on Jane Street, ‘Courtesan Court,’ the most wicked street in Mayfair.
Lucy lived a total lie. Oh, too many ‘ls’ upon the tongue, but there it was. Six years ago, she had been plucked out of obscure quasi-poverty by Lord Percival Ferguson and offered a job she could not refuse.
There was no reason to say no. She had been a twenty-four-year-old spinster, deserted by her fiancé, a thief far more cunning than she ever aspired to be. For all she knew he was dead—there had not been a word from him in over seven years.
Lucy’s new job was remarkably easy. Lord Ferguson had asked her to pretend to be his mistress, because it was expected that a man in his position in Society would keep one. She was in fact, one of a long line of women that poor Percy had kept over the last twenty years.
The earl swore he’d never touched a one of them aside from a gentle steer of an elbow, which she could easily believe, as he was having it on with her strapping young butler, Yates. Percy and Yates had been lovers for quite some time, and the Jane Street address had proven a convenient spot for their assignations. Everyone in the ton thought Lord Ferguson was visiting Lucy, when it was really Yates’s bed he sought. Lord Ferguson could be himself in his little house, and if that meant borrowing Lucy’s rouge pot and silk stockings, what was the harm, really?
But some months ago, Percy had lost most of his fortune through spectacularly unwise investments, and Lucy was very much afraid her days on Jane Street were numbered. The maid and the cook were gone, resulting in Lucy herself dusting and polishing the few bits of silver that were left and tying her own laces. She supposed it was only right that she begin to earn her keep, for really, the past six years had been a blissful blur of indolence and amusement. Percy had exquisite taste and had dressed her in everything he himself would want to wear—and did—so she had been turned out beautifully. Expensively. Totally a la mode. There had been nothing new—not so much as a plain-edged handkerchief for either of them—in seven months, and Lucy had resorted to selling a few of her older dresses to help pay for candles.
Percy’s mother was pestering him to marry an heiress, which would never suit. He couldn’t touch his Scottish estate or his London townhouse—they were entailed for the heirs he would have only with the most miraculous of miracles—but the Jane Street house would fetch a pretty penny. Everyone in the ton would forgive Lord Ferguson if he was forced to sell his love nest due to financial reversals. They would not forgive him if they caught him in Lucy’s black lace peignoir, nor would the inevitable heiress his mother would force him to marry if she had her way.
Percy looked better in the peignoir than she did—black washed her out. She was too pale, her milk-white skin and red-gold hair better suited to pastels. Of course, a courtesan was expected to wear more vibrant colors, so she did, much to Percy’s delight.
The clothes were an improvement over what she had been wearing the day Percy found her in her aunt’s Edinburgh millinery shop. He had stepped in to get out of the rain, he’d said (but truly, he had been drawn by a lovely peacock-blue hat trimmed with matching feathers Lucy had set in the window fifteen minutes before). She wore a plain gray dress with a starched white apron, its pockets holding needles and her long-shafted scissors. When he’d offered her a job, she’d been so shocked she sat down and stabbed herself in the thigh.
Percy hadn’t hired her because she was beautiful, although she was more than passably good-looking. She’d turned a head or two in her time, not that she wanted to remember
those
days. No. He said as soon as he looked into her light brown eyes—directly into them, because she was just his height—that he’d known she was just the girl for him. And when he glimpsed her enormous feet, he was in transports.
Lucy was very tall for a woman, and slender—flatchested, if one wanted to be brutally honest. She and Percy were nearly identical in size, so she was able to fulfill his lifelong dream to deck himself out in the best women’s clothing without arousing suspicion. Of course Lord Ferguson accompanied Lucy for her fittings at the finest London dressmakers’ shops. Of course he fingered the fabrics, suggested the styles—he was paying the shot and knew what he liked to see his rather gargantuan mistress in.
Under Percy’s tutelage, she had blossomed—the awkward ugly duckling had turned into a graceful, gliding swan, whose irregular height set her far apart from the ordinary. Lucy would be lying if she claimed she didn’t like to play dress-up, and her current position had released her from the tedium of pleating velvet onto straw and sewing stuffed songbirds onto bonnets and listening to her aunt’s continuous opprobrium. Her aunt now had to harangue some other girl, and pay her, too. Lucy had received very little for her efforts save the roof over her head and poor fare on her aunt’s table. Percy had made her eat so she could order bigger clothes to fit him.
Her eating days were coming to an end. She could not keep stealing from the courtesans on ‘Courtesan Court.’ They already looked at her with distrust, and her invitations to the weekly amusements the girls hosted while they waited for their protectors had dried up. Stealing was
wrong
, even if the girls had more useless trifles than they needed at the moment. But someday their fabled beauty would fade—they’d grow stout and whiskery, and then all the diamond pins in the world could not replace their golden youth. A mistress had to make provisions for the future.
But so did Lucy. She was thirty years old, after all, already well past her prime even if she didn’t look like an old hag—Percy’s special skin potions had seen to that. She just had to find a better—legal—way to secure her future. She didn’t fancy getting transported to the antipodean penal colony.
She might bump into someone she knew.
No, she would not think about
him
now. He’d done enough to ruin her dreams without taking over her waking hours too.
She fetched a hat—a quite pretty one she’d made herself, red ribbons and cherries to match her red pelisse, and went to see Mr. Peachtree with the pin tucked into her reticule. He was an honest, honorable broker who believed her lies and thought he was helping her to get free of the wicked Lord Ferguson. The fact that Lord Ferguson gave his mistress such odd gifts—mismatched teaspoons, jeweled snuffboxes, small
objets
that could easily be stuffed into pockets or down bodices—hadn’t seemed to occur to him yet.
Lucy was
not
a thief, although she had been taught by the best. And he had stolen her heart and sent it back broken.
Chapter 2
 
N
o one who saw him now could ever guess precisely how primitive Sir Simon Keith’s beginnings were. Thanks to Providence, his teeth were mercifully straight, his black hair clipped a la Brutus, his shirtpoints starched high, his cravat snow white, his jacket tailored to perfection—the list could go on and on with a plethora of commas. He was a veritable nonpareil, tall, dark and almost too handsome.
It was only when one noticed his long fingers, nails irrevocably grease-stained from years of manual labor in its truest sense, that one realized that Sir Simon had not been to the manor born. He’d been very good with his hands (whether with women or machinery or removing the odd watch from an unsuspecting cove’s pocket) since he was a boy on the streets of Edinburgh. When he joined the army at the age of seventeen, under some duress if it be known—there was a price on his head and the local constable was keen on his trail—the military seemed preferable to prison. His superiors had soon discovered that whatever one put in front of Private Keith he could fix. When he put his mind to something, he could turn a bit of string and a scrap of metal into anything one would like. His mid-battle adjustments to a crate of useless but much-needed rifles earned him a rapid promotion, until he was taken out of the field altogether and put to work at a drafting board in the War Office. One thing led to another, and now Sir Simon owned his own foundry and a fistful of patents.
With peacetime cutting into his profits, he’d seen the way to convert his materiel to less deadly accoutrements and was now deep into the promulgation of a railway system that would stretch from one end of Britain to the other, using his own engines, of course. He had been knighted for his service to the Crown in squelching that fiend Napoleon, was unbearably rich and only thirty. Who knew what his future held?
It
should
hold a wife. Some nice, proper well-bred girl who would help him advance in Society. She needn’t be rich—he had more money than he knew what to do with—but she’d have to have a pedigree to make up for the one he lacked. Simon supposed a girl like that would be rather dull in bed, but that was all right. He had an appointment this very afternoon to meet with Lord Percival Ferguson, a fellow Scot. The gentleman was a bit eccentric—the earl preferred to wear his kilt even in town—but Simon didn’t mind. He’d heard old Percy was hard up and planned to sell his Jane Street house. Simon could set up a mistress there to escape from his boring future wife.
If Simon purchased a property on that sought-after street, he really would consider himself ‘arrived.’ Imagine, a boy from the Edinburgh slums keeping a high-class London courtesan. What would Lucy say?
Ah. Poor Lucy. His lost love. Dead and gone for years. Whilst he was out and about fighting and inventing for King and Country, she toiled like a slave for her wretched aunt. He’d come back for her too late. The aunt had chased him out of her hat shop with a fistful of hatpins and he’d lost himself in a pint or two for longer than he cared to remember.
He’d promised to return, and had, once the war was over and he had something to show for it. But she’d died six years ago, poor wee thing.
Well, ‘wee’ was not precisely correct. His Lucy was a Valkyrie, an Amazon among women. But she’d fit against him to perfection and he missed her every day.
Calf love it may have been, but it had stayed true. Simon had even taught himself to read and write to surprise her. He still had every one of her letters—all five of them—unopened of course, because at first he could not admit to being such an ignorant sod as to need someone read them to him. His old gran had sent them after he was safely established in his regiment, if “safe” meant not having his head shot off yet.
By the time he knew how to read, he couldn’t bear to be reminded of what they had shared. Poor Luce must have given up hope on him, or counted on the Corsican monster to win.
But England had prevailed five years ago, in no small part due to Simon. And Simon would prevail too—buy Ferguson’s house, acquire a mistress to put in it, find a wife. Have a few little Keiths—for that was his name now—although with his imposing height, they wouldn’t stay little for long.
 
Lord Percival Ferguson looked ill at ease, and well he should. It was not just because he was wearing a fine suit of gentleman’s evening clothes, either, although he had chosen a blindingly puce vest to add a bit of color. “All I’m asking you to do, my dear, is give the man a chance.”
“How could you, Percy? You cannot sell me along with the house!” Lucy paced her sweet little sitting room, her long legs making short work of the distance. Pale copper braids flew behind her, striking her cheek when she turned.
“Lucy, darling, I’m not selling you. I thought to give you some security, chatting you up with Sir Simon. You and I have been good friends—the best of friends—for six years. I don’t want to imagine you out in the cold.”
And it
was
cold. October chill had set in. Winter would be upon them soon, and where would she go? “I suppose you’ll want to keep my fur cloak, too! Damn it, Percy, you can’t pass me off like a basket of dinner rolls.”
“Just one meeting, love. If you don’t like him, you don’t need to stay. We can make some other arrangements. I can’t give you very much in the way of any congé, though, you know. I’m beyond broke. But I sang your praises—”
“Lied, you mean!”
“Nonsense. I’m sure you’ll be very skilled in the bedroom if you put your mind to it. There are books to help you, you know. That neighbor of yours writes them.”
Lucy shot daggers at him at the idea of reading dirty books, even if she already had a time or two, so he changed his tack. “Sir Simon is handsome. Rich. If I didn’t have a tendre for my Yates I’d be quite taken with him myself. And he’s much taller than you, no easy feat. The man is an Atlas. I got a crick in my neck looking up at him, and we were sitting in chairs at my club.”
Simon
. The name alone was an ill omen. Just what she needed as a reminder of her past. Why couldn’t the bluidy man be called Harold or Henry or George? “And he’s a complete, utter stranger! Percy, you have gone too far.”
He shrugged in apology. “That’s what I do, my dear. I’ve never known my limits. Bane of my existence. Mama’s, too.”
Lucy did not wish to think of Percy’s dragon of a mother. She held a hand against her flat chest, as if to keep her crumbling heart from bouncing out and shattering on the carpet. “This is intolerable. I’ll have to go back to Edinburgh.”
“You know your ghastly old aunt won’t have you. She’s told everybody you’re dead. You’ll scare the life out of the old neighborhood if you turn up. You’re pale as a ghost as it is.”
Lucy stopped her march to the wall. “To her I
am
dead. She thinks I’m a Fallen Woman.”
Percy cleared his throat. “You
are
a Fallen Woman,” he reminded her gently.
“I should never have told you about that boy! And anyway, I was practically a child. I didn’t know any better.”
“I know. You placed your fate in the hands of a handsome thief.” Percy sighed and looked rather like a sympathetic basset hound, all mournful eyes and wobbly jowls.
Lucy and Percy really
were
friends, really almost like sisters, so to speak. They had confided nearly everything to each other over the years. He knew all about that bastard Simon Grant, or as much as she was willing to tell him, and she knew—well, she knew enough to blackmail Percy for the rest of his life if only he had any money. She flung herself down on the sofa, allowing her misery to swallow her up.
“Och! I’ll nae be able to do it!” she said, sobbing into the sleeve of her sensible white night rail.
It was unusual for her to lapse into her Scots accent. Percy had drummed every conceivable ladylike lesson into her, and that included erasing the nature of her humble origins. She spoke English far better than Queen Caroline, and dressed more elegantly too.
“Oh, you’re breaking my heart,” said Percy, tearing a lace-edged handkerchief out of his pocket and sobbing next to her. “I wish I’d never listened to that dastardly scheme to import those mulberry trees and silkworms from China. But I could have cornered the silk market! Just think of the dresses we could have had.”
Lucy hiccupped. “You couldn’t have known the trees were diseased and the silkworms would become poisoned and die.” That had just been one catastrophic business failure. She was too kind to bring up the others, but Percy did himself after he blew his nose.
“And that Nigerian prince took me in as well. All that money transferred to him, and he was nothing but the son of a goatherd. There isn’t even a king in his country! Well,” Percy said, flourishing his rather damp handkerchief, “I expect my luck is about to change. Steam engines, Lucy. That’s the future. Sir Simon has assured me that to invest with him will bring me untold fortune.”
“Percy! Don’t tell me you’ve traded this house for shares in some fly-by-night enterprise! Again!” She smacked Percy on his hollow chest.
“No, no. Nothing like that. Sir Simon says—”
“I don’t give a fig what the bluidy man says! It’s cash you need, Percy, and a lot of it! How will you be able to pay our dressmaker?”
“We’ll come to terms, never you fear. In six months I’ll be rich as Croesus. But not,” he said, wiping a tear from his watery brown eye, “in time to save you. It’s all I can do to find Yates a job at Mama’s.”
Percy’s mother lived at Ferguson House in Portman Square, which was of course Percy’s and not his mama’s at all. If it were up to Lucy, she’d send the witchy old countess back to Scotland and hope she got lost in a Highland snowdrift.
Percy brushed her tear-stained cheeks with a dry corner of his handkerchief. “Just try to like him, Lucy. That’s all I ask. He’s a wee bit rough around the edges—his knighthood’s a recent thing—but he seems a gentleman. And he is very good-looking. He wants a place to entertain his investors, and Jane Street has cachet. Think of the dinner parties you can preside at as hostess.”
“You sold the damned dining table, Percy,” Lucy reminded him. Now she ate down in the kitchen or on a tray in her sitting room if she ate at all.
“It was a signed Sheraton—of course I did. You should wear the fern-green-striped gown with the cream Brussels lace when he comes to call. The emerald parure, even if they’re paste. And you might want to pad your bosom until you sign your contract. After that, it’s every man for himself. Caveat emptor, don’t you know.”
Lucy smacked him again, but her heart wasn’t in it. What choice did she have? This Sir Simon might not even like her anyway, unless he wanted to borrow her clothes. She was not the usual run of mistress, especially since she hadn’t bedded a man in thirteen years. She would always be too tall, too pale, too opinionated. Percy had done her no favors dragging her down here into this hotbed of sin. She could have happily gone blind stitching rosettes and ribbons to hats for the rest of her life, waiting to inherit her aunt’s millinery shop.
All possibility of that was gone now.
Lucy wiped her nose on her sleeve, eschewing Percy’s offer of the snot-ridden handkerchief. “When is he coming?” It had better not be tonight—Percy had found her with her hair in braids in bed with a good book—well, it was a very bad book, really, and that was the whole point—to tell her he’d given her away.
“He’s going to call on you tomorrow morning. He says he wants to get a good look at you in daylight.”
Lucy narrowed her eyes at Percy. If she didn’t love the benighted man, she’d wish him to the devil. “Like a horse.”
“Now, now, like a beautiful woman who needs no dim candlelight to shine. But—er—ahem—I would appreciate it if you didn’t divulge the precise nature of our relationship when you speak to him.”
“Of course I won’t betray you! Haven’t I been loyal for six years?”
He took her hand and kissed it, the only part of her body his lips had ever touched. “I know you wouldn’t mean to, but he might ask unsettling questions.” Percy was blushing. He had a great deal to blush about.
Lucy snatched her hand away. “Your reputation is safe with me. If your mother couldn’t worm it out of me the horrible day she came to visit, I doubt this Sir Simon will rattle me. But I will keep my fur cloak, Percy. It’s only fair. The red fox matches my hair.”
Percy sighed. “Oh, all right. It’s too hot to wear indoors anyway. But I expect Sir Simon will want to dress you in new clothes. Perhaps we can put my things in storage for happier days ahead.”
Lucy did not think there would be happier days ahead for her. In all likelihood, she would have to make the role of courtesan she had played for the past half-dozen years come true. The tiny bit of virtue she still possessed as a thief and a liar was about to be tossed out onto the cobblestones of Jane Street. “I haven’t agreed to become his mistress yet, Percy.”
Percy grinned. “But you will. I believe he’s perfect for you. I have a feeling about these things.”
Lucy knew all about Percy’s feelings, and wished she had never, ever put that peacock-blue hat in the window.

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