Instead, he grazed his knuckles lightly across her cheek, saying with his touch what he couldn’t in words.
“You haven’t compromised yourself at all,” he said, mirroring her tone of urbane detachment. “Not yet, at any rate. I must be losing my touch.”
“I don’t know why I even bother with you,” Mary agreed, tilting her head back and looking him challengingly in the eye. In the depths of her gaze, something desperate glittered, something desperate and anxious, brilliant with the fierceness of unarticulated fear.
The answering spark lit in his eyes, blazing through his veins like wildfire, urgent and reckless. His voice dropped to a seductive drawl as his fingers tangled in her hair, pulling her closer. “Then I’ll just have to remind you.”
She laughed deep in her throat, a low sound of anticipation and triumph that set his blood pounding, and turned the question of her seduction from academic to inevitable.
Until a broadside of light assaulted his eyes and his own name was cracked over him like the blast of a cannon.
In the harsh morning light streaming through the window, a dark form loomed like an avenging archangel, seven feet tall, with a flaming sword in his hand.
Vaughn released Mary so quickly that they both nearly tumbled off the settee.
As his eyes adjusted to the light, the figure in front of the window shrunk to human proportions, and recognizable ones, at that. It was the master of the house himself, Mary’s former suitor and current brother-in-law, looming in front of the window with one hand still holding the drape he had just yanked back. It wasn’t a flaming sword in Pinchingdale’s other hand, but Vaughn’s own stick, which he held aloft in a way that boded no good to either Vaughn or his cane.
“What are you doing?” demanded Mary.
“I found this in the hall,” Pinchingdale bit out, brandishing the stick like an angry aborigine.
Regaining his accustomed poise, Vaughn held out one hand. “How kind of you to return it to me, Pinchingdale,” he drawled. “But it was really quite unnecessary. I would have collected it when I departed.”
Pinchingdale’s lips tightened, but he managed to hold on to his temper. Vaughn’s opinion of him went up a notch. A small notch, but a notch nonetheless.
In carefully controlled tones, he inquired, “May I ask what you’re doing here, Vaughn?”
Before Vaughn could give the obvious and inflammatory answer, Mary intervened.
“I invited him to call,” she said shortly.
That piece of intelligence did little to sweeten Pinchingdale’s disposition. “
You
summoned
him
.”
Under other circumstances, Vaughn might have objected to being referred to in that sort of tone, but he was too busy watching Mary, who lifted her chin and skewered her former suitor with an imperious stare. “There were certain things I needed to discuss with Lord Vaughn.”
Pinchingdale looked pointedly from one to the other, from Mary’s tousled hair to Vaughn’s rumpled linen. “A proposal of marriage, one hopes?”
For a brother-in-law, Pinchingdale was altogether too damn proprietary.
“I had heard that you prefer to deal in elopements,” said Vaughn silkily.
“I am asking you, Vaughn, as one
gentleman
to another, to have a care for Miss Alsworthy’s reputation.”
Lifting his quizzing glass, Vaughn trained it on the other man with deliberate insolence. “As you did?”
The words sizzled in the air between them like a flaming gauntlet.
“Hello!” Pinchingdale’s little wife stuck her freckled face around the door. “Why are the drapes closed?”
The rest of her followed her face around the edge of the door, garbed in a cheerful, flowered muslin that would have looked more the thing for the country than the town. It was a source of ongoing amazement to Vaughn that she and Mary had sprung from the same family. There was only one possible answer. Mary was quite definitely a changeling.
Rising, Vaughn acknowledged her presence with a carefully calculated bow. “So people won’t shoot at us through the windows,” he explained. “Naturally.”
“If you would like to be shot at from within the room,” said Pinchingdale shortly, “I would be more than happy to oblige.”
“I don’t think that would be very good for the wallpaper,” said Letty, moving to slip her arm through her husband’s in a gesture that was one part affection and two parts restraint.
“Blood does stain so,” agreed Vaughn.
“A risk I would be willing to take,” said Pinchingdale grimly, but Vaughn noticed that he made no effort to extricate his arm from his wife’s. That might have been because she was holding on to it with both hands.
“You needn’t bother,” said Mary in a voice whose edges cut like glass. Rising with a dignity that commanded the attention of all, she placed herself deliberately between Vaughn and her former suitor. “Why kill Vaughn, when the Black Tulip is planning to do it for you?”
For all Pinchingdale’s other flaws, no one could accuse him of being dim. His expression changed in a moment from anger to reluctant comprehension. He would, Vaughn had no doubt, have far rather blasted his brains out for seduction of his sister-in-law than joined forces with him over a common enemy. But Pinchingdale was nothing if not honorable, and when England called, he obeyed.
“Ireland,” said Pinchingdale grimly.
“Among other things,” said Vaughn, deriving great enjoyment out of watching Pinchingdale squirm. It was almost worth having received that bullet in the arm. “The Black Tulip has added two and two and emerged with forty-five. He thinks I am the Pink Carnation.”
“But that’s absurd!” exclaimed Letty. Flushing, she added, “I didn’t mean
It’s just that, well
”
“I couldn’t agree more,” said Vaughn genially. “I only wish the Black Tulip felt the same way.”
“An ingenious story, Vaughn, but do you have any proof?”
Mary drew herself up to her full height. In her white gown, she looked like an avenging goddess who had forgotten her helmet and breastplate. “Isn’t a bullet in his shoulder proof enough?”
“It isn’t actually in my shoulder at the moment,” clarified Vaughn helpfully. “It only stopped in passing.”
Pinchingdale cast his eyes briefly up to the ceiling, as though seeking for divine intervention.
He received a response rather more quickly than one would expect. A new tread sounded in the doorway, and a footman appeared, bearing a letter on a silver salver.
“A message for his lordship,” he intoned.
Pinchingdale moved to take the letter.
“His other lordship,” corrected the footman hastily, thrusting the tray towards Vaughn.
Pinchingdale cast him a startled look. “How is it that you’re receiving notes in my home, Vaughn?”
Scooping up the folded piece of paper, Vaughn cracked the seal. “I can only assume that whoever it was must have followed me here.”
Letty reached the drapes seconds before Mary.
“I do need some light to read,” said Vaughn mildly.
Without further ado, Mary snatched the letter from him and held it up to the light herself. It was short; no longer than three lines, and whatever it was made a grim smile spread across Mary’s face.
“Ha,” she said.
Vaughn cast her a sardonic look. “As edifying as that syllable was, would you care to elaborate further?”
Mary waved the letter in the air like a triumphal banner before relinquishing it into his outstretched hand. “This proves my theory. It’s from
her
. She wants to see you.”
“I don’t follow,” said Pinchingdale, as Vaughn skimmed the three lines of the note.
It was, indeed, from Anne. They had much to discuss, she said. She hinted at a deal. A deal certainly hadn’t been in the cards yesterday, when she staked her claim at Mary’s expense. Yesterday, when the Black Tulip seized the opportunity opened by his confusion to put a bullet through him. Unless the Black Tulip hadn’t so much seized the opportunity as created it himself. With the help of Anne.
“Who is
she
?” asked Letty, moving straight to the meat of the matter. Her brows drew together as she cast a startled look at her husband. “It couldn’t be”
“No,” said Pinchingdale. “It couldn’t be the Marquise de Montval. She was quite dead.”
Little did they know that dead was often a negotiable category.
Shaking out the lace of his cuffs with studied nonchalance, Vaughn braced himself for the inevitable. They would have to be told about Anne. Vaughn had a feeling that Pinchingdale was going to be even less pleased at the notion of his sister-in-law canoodling with a married man than he had been when that man was merely one’s resident roué.
“If you must know
,” Vaughn drawled.
“The writer is a former lady friend of Vaughn’s,” Mary broke in, crisply and clearly.
That was one way of putting it.
Vaughn looked at her sharply, but Mary angled her head pointedly away, refusing to meet his eye.
Pinchingdale’s keen gray eyes followed them both, reaching the obvious and erroneous conclusion that the woman in question was a former mistress of Vaughn’s and that Mary did not approve.
Brava
, Vaughn thought. It had been beautifully done.
With her nose firmly planted in the air, Mary went on, “I believe that she has been colluding with the Black Tulip.”
Pinchingdale’s eyes narrowed. “You and the Black Tulip seem to share a great many of the same lady friends, Vaughn.”
“Only one other,” Vaughn said shortly. Something in the expression on Pinchingdale’s face moved him to defend Teresa’s memory. Such as it was. “She was a clever woman.”
“And a vicious killer.”
“Everyone has their little flaws.”
Mary clapped her hands sharply together. “Boys,” she said pointedly. “Might we get on?”
“Yes,” Letty jumped in before the two men could shift their bad humor to Mary. “What does the note say?”
Vaughn’s eyes dropped to the few sparely written lines, not at all like Anne’s usual diffuse style, although it was undeniably her hand. “She asks for an assignation. This afternoon.”
“Where?” asked Pinchingdale, abandoning private quarrels for the public good. At least, for the moment. Vaughn had no doubt that Pinchingdale would like nothing better than to haul out the family horsewhip the moment the Black Tulip had been safely dispatched.
The address wasn’t one Vaughn recognized. “Her lodgings. They appear to be in Westminster.”
“It’s clearly a trap,” Mary put in. “An attempt to finish what the Black Tulip failed to accomplish yesterday.”
“That does seem like a reasonable conclusion,” seconded Pinchingdale.
“Then what do you suggest I do about it?” Balancing his snuff box in one hand, Vaughn neatly flicked open the lid, as though the entire discussion were one of merely academic concern. “You are, after all, meant to be the expert on this sort of affair.”
If Pinchingdale caught the implied insult, he chose to ignore it. “Keep the assignation,” he said briefly. “Keep it, but go armed.”
Letty nodded decisively. “I like it. They wouldn’t expect you to walk knowingly into a trap.”
“That,” interjected Mary, “is because no sane person does.”
Inhaling his snuff, Vaughn coughed delicately. “Then it ought to be perfect for me.”
“Perfect idiocy, you mean. I’ll come with you.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” said Letty matter-of-factly.
“And what might that be?” Mary asked icily.
“Lady Euphemia’s play.”
“Oh,” said Mary.
“You are the princess,” added Letty apologetically.
“Catch the prince’s eye and you might be a real one,” drawled Vaughn.
“Isn’t there the small matter of his wife?”
“A trifling difficulty.”
Mary sighed. “If only.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ay, now the plot thickens very much upon us.
George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham,
The Rehearsal
V
aughn went to his assignation doubly armed. He had a sword at his hip and Pinchingdale up a tree.
He hadn’t intended either Pinchingdale or the tree. But whether it was for Mary’s sake or, as Pinchingdale claimed, because he had as much of an interest in catching the Black Tulip as Vaughn did, Pinchingdale had insisted on following along.
“I should think,” Pinchingdale had said, with a brow raised in challenge, “that you would be glad of the extra protection.”
“I would,” Vaughn had replied, just as dryly, “if I could be sure that you intended your bullets for the Black Tulip, rather than me.”
