The Corrupt Comte (14 page)

“I must go.” His English was more rusted than ever, hoarse like sandpaper. “You are…are…messy, yes?”

She nodded. Messy. Yes, she was messy. In so many ways.

“Turn left, and there is a salon two doors down on the right. After, go home. Sleep.”

A solid plan. “Where are you g-going?”

Cupping her face in his palms, he leaned down to gently rub his lips over hers in a slow, lazy kiss. An affectionate kiss, but a lead ball formed in her stomach as he ignored her question and said, “I will find you tomorrow night. At the
duc d’Évoque
’s ball, I will find you.”

She laid a hand on his chest, needing to touch him again even as she used it to put distance between them. “I’ll b-be there.”

He straightened then and, with a quick nod, left their hidden corner to turn right and stride down the hallway away from her—allowing her to slip to the ladies’ salon unnoticed, with no one the wiser as to who she’d been sneaking around with.

She buried her resentment until she reached her bedchamber forty minutes later. Then it was her turn to shake.

Chapter Eight

“We’ve got a problem.”

Audric Faron’s words chilled some of the drowsy heat swirling through Gaspard’s limbs as he strolled into the library. His spine still tingled with the aftershocks of sated pleasure, and he couldn’t shake the vision of Claudia on her knees before him, his cock heavy and thick between her lips. Blinking, he tried to focus on the three men who’d obviously been awaiting his arrival.

He failed. All he could see, all he could
feel
, was her painfully lovely face and the rhythmic contractions of her sleek throat as she swallowed his come.

“Toussaint, did you hear me? I said, we’ve got a problem.”

Gaspard had a problem. He’d told her about the whores. He’d told her he wanted her, only her. That the words felt true didn’t matter. What mattered was that he should never have said them. If she kept stripping him of his control like that, there would soon be nothing left of him, and he already had so little of himself to spare.

He’d never considered himself an optimist before this moment, but the cold, hard light of reality put his scheming on harsh display, his idiocy in glaring reflection. Lust for Claudia had made him lose his head.

And she was going to marry Évoque. Their engagement was going to be announced at the duke’s ball tomorrow night. Good God, he’d forgotten all about it until he told her he’d find her.

There were no means of saving his estate or his title, no chance that his wages from Évoque would cover the debts. The idea of marrying Claudia and securing her dowry within days was a ridiculous fantasy, one he’d spun for himself, and it proved he understood nothing of this classist world he inhabited.

He refused to contemplate a return to the poverty he’d known as a child. He refused to reclaim the common name of his birth. He wasn’t that hungry boy anymore.

Now he was a hungry
man
.

His best choice—his only choice—was to prostrate himself at Évoque’s feet and beg for a loan, else watch his blood-drenched title disappear. Or…or he could use that tiny nugget of blackmail he’d been keeping up his sleeve, as if his subconscious had known he’d need this leverage someday. And as the duke likely still intended to marry Claudia, Évoque could be quite keen to pay a tidy sum for Gaspard’s silence.

Perhaps a sum of ten thousand pounds.

So. That was that. Gaspard would let her go. She had never been his, not really, and now she never would.

His stomach rolled over, a wave of sudden nausea wiping any trace of recent pleasure from his limbs.

“Gaspard?” Sabien’s concerned tone cut through the screaming match taking place between Gaspard’s temples.

Gaspard swallowed around the lump in his throat. “What’s the problem?”

Faron eyed him suspiciously for a moment before using one dirty-booted toe to kick the leg of an empty chair, indicating where Gaspard was meant to sit. He took it and glanced at the serious faces of the three men completing the small circle off to one side of Maxence’s richly appointed library.

It must be quite the problem—Max didn’t look bored, for once.

Sabien spoke first, a cut-crystal tumbler of liquor gripped tightly in one hand. “We’re starting a revolution.”

“How exciting,” Gaspard said, voice bland. “Should we alert the peasants?”

Faron shifted his stocky frame in his armchair, obviously uncomfortable to be sitting and not in action, as was his wont. “Consider me alerted. What did Évoque do with that list of names?”

“Burned it, just like you said.”

“Whose names?”

Gaspard looked at Sabien as he answered the lieutenant’s question, shrugging. “Three stable hands working at the opera house, I believe. Renaud, Vireux and Louvel.”

“I looked into the names.” Faron shifted again. “Turns out Louvel is a saddler in the royal stables. Not only that, he’s…obsessed. With a member of the royal family.”

Sabien drained his drink. “One of the princesses, no doubt.”

“No. With the Duke of Berry.”

Silence reigned for several long moments. Then, “What sort of obsession?” Max asked, standing to retrieve a decanter from the desk on the other side of the library. “Sexual?”

Gaspard could feel each man very pointedly
not
looking at him.

Faron shook his head. “No, nothing like that. But I talked to some of the hands who work with him, and it sounds as though Louvel hates the Bourbons. Tends to rant on and on about needing to kill them off ‘for crimes against France’ when he’s had some drink in him.”

“Yet he works
for
the royal family?” Max returned to his seat with the decanter, refreshing Sabien’s when the other man extended his glass. “That seems odd.”

Gaspard cleared his throat. “Are we sure this is the Louvel from the list?” He thought back to the manager of the opera house, Hubert Loureilles. A silly man, to be certain, but not dumb enough to put an employee of the king on a list of names belonging to lowly stable hands. “What about Renaud, or Vireux?”

“There’s only one Louvel in Paris, and it’s Louis Pierre Louvel, the saddler. As for Renaud and Vireux, both work in the stables on
rue de Richelieu
, for the opera house.” Faron’s pale gray gaze clashed with Gaspard’s. “You were in charge of getting that list, on Évoque’s orders. What else does he want from you?”

What he’d suspected after accepting Évoque’s invitation to the opera last night. “He wants me to kill the Duke of Berry.”

Sabien’s drink paused halfway to his mouth. “Christ.”

Max took a swig directly from the decanter itself. “Berry’s had a price on his head for weeks, but most of us just thought it was talk.”

“Most of us?” Faron reached for the decanter, but Max withheld it, tauntingly.

“Aristocrats. Berry’s enjoying the attention, from what I can tell, but his wife looks worried.”

“She is,” Sabien muttered. Another glass emptied.

They all looked at Sabien, and for a moment Gaspard’s brain veered away from trying to make sense of the whirling chaos of new information. “And how would you know what the duchess is feeling, Sabien?”

Sabien scowled. “What do you think I’ve been doing for the past three months, since I returned from London?”

“The seduction of Princess Caroline.” Max
tsk
ed as he finally handed over the bottle to Faron, who’d landed a heavy punch on his upper arm. “You scoundrel.”

“I demanded a rendezvous with her tomorrow night. She’ll leave at intermission.” A flash of regret danced across Sabien’s handsome features before his face resumed its solemn mien.

The puzzle pieces began to slowly fall into place. “Another request from Évoque?” When Sabien nodded, Gaspard continued. “So the duchess leaves the opera house before the performance is over, the duke is left vulnerable momentarily in the wake of her leaving and I…”

It was Faron who had the answer. “You dress as a stable hand, and you kill the duke. Later, when witnesses are trying to remember what the culprit looked like and Monsieur Loureilles is asked to name those in his stables, Louvel’s name will be on that list.”

A chill slithered over Gaspard’s nape. “So the list I procured—”

“Évoque was simply verifying he had all the chess pieces on the board,” Max answered, his cultured voice cold. “Louvel’s name was probably placed on the opera house’s payroll months ago.”

The valuable information Gaspard had whored for proved to be nothing more than a receipt of sales, in the end. “There’ll be a trial, you know. For Louvel. They won’t execute him right away.”

“He’s insane,” Faron said succinctly. “He’ll take the blame—he’ll
want
it.”

“How do you know?”

Faron’s scowl darkened. “I know insanity. Trust me.”

“Just…make sure he’s nearby. I don’t want to be arrested accidentally.” Gaspard fell back in the chair with a heavy exhalation. The stolen moments with Claudia in the alcove seemed as though they’d taken place months earlier, instead of mere minutes. Évoque had obviously been planning for this eventuality, had taken great pains to ensure it occurred to his decree. And yet, no one would know him as the puppet master. No one would even think that the wealthy duke, a prestigious cabinet member and close confidante to Prime Minister Decazes, would be plotting to kill the last heir to the house of Bourbon.

With the Duke of Berry gone, hereditary right would eventually die out. Power would fall more and more to the cabinet, the prime minister. The people.

France without a king… Gaspard leaned his head against the upholstered chairback. They’d tried that. It hadn’t gone so well.

Apparently, the other men’s thoughts had taken a similar bent. “What is Évoque planning to do?” Max glanced over at Sabien, who had turned his empty tumbler upside down and was busy catching errant drops with one fingertip as they fell, then licking his finger clean. “You said ‘revolution.’”

“I had a feeling this was about the rumors of Berry’s ‘foretold’ death. And a prince dying before his time…doesn’t that sound like revolution to you boys?” The words slurred together, and Gaspard stared at his friend more closely. The lieutenant’s eyes were bloodshot, his skin unnaturally pale beneath a drunken flush, and the stiff set of his shoulders belied the fluidity of his loose-limbed movements. The man was drunk.

Not just drunk.
A
drunk. And now that Gaspard knew more of the story, it seemed likely to conclude that Sabien was miserable over the duchess, Princess Caroline.

No wonder Claudia couldn’t hold his interest.

Claudia.

Could Gaspard really leave her to Évoque?

—hands on his lower back, stroking too softly over his raw skin.

Gaspard had known exactly what sort of villain Évoque was, and he’d been naive to think any course of action the duke set Gaspard on was for some altruistic purpose, to somehow better the lives of the people of France.

Proving that Gaspard wasn’t smart enough to be anything other than a pawn in these games. He was a dog on a leash, given just enough lead to believe he possessed some measure of autonomy, only to be yanked back in and choked with the evidence of his own audacity.

He was never going to escape this life, or Évoque. He was never going to escape France.

He was never going to have Claudia.

But he would bargain with the devil, and he’d use that nugget of blackmail. He’d stay under Évoque’s thumb, but he’d do it on his terms—with a title and a castle and a comfortable fortune in his accounts.

He would forget Claudia Pascale ever existed, starting now.

“So, tomorrow night…” he glanced at the tall grandfather clock across the room from where they sat, “…or tonight, now, I suppose. Sabien will have his rendezvous, Faron will get Louvel to the opera house, and I will thrust home the knife.” It wasn’t the first time he’d killed. It probably wouldn’t be his last.

“Where will you be, Denney?” Faron asked, handing the baron back the bottle.

“At Évoque’s soirée, his Red-and-White Ball. I have no orders for this little charade.” Max shrugged, finishing off what little liquor was left in the decanter. “He has me working another scheme.”

“I hope it’s less messy than this one,” Sabien mumbled. “Is the whisky gone?”

“For you it is.” Faron’s gaze chilled on Sabien. “You need a clear head tomorrow.”

“What if I don’t want a clear head?”

Gaspard didn’t want a clear head, himself, but he was a man of limited means. He had been before, as well, but those limitations had been financial, more than anything. The constraints of his work, his misplaced loyalty to his employer—all surmountable limitations. But it was time to stop functioning on instinct and embrace cold fact.

Gaspard Toussaint had become an unwilling whore for a man at age sixteen and roughly a decade later, he was still a whore for men, pimped out by a different master. It was illogical to assume he’d ever escape this trajectory. So if he had to be this man forever, he must accept his situation for what it was—a life sentence.

In a matter of days, Claudia had warmed him, soul deep.
Consider that fire doused.