The Hunter (18 page)

He’d never before considered that they actually might have to … interact with her in the years to come.

“I’m going to give it to her on her birthday,” Jakub ventured, studying his work and pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his small nose.

“It’s a remarkable likeness of her.”

Swiveling his head on his thin neck to study him, the boy’s exaggerated eyes narrowed. “You’re saying that to be kind,” he accused.

“I say nothing to be kind,” Argent informed him stiffly. “If it was a dreadful painting, I’d advise you not to give it to your mother, as it would make a terrible gift.”

A tiny lip quirked upward and the boy motioned him forward. “The nose is off,” he challenged.

Another step brought him closer, and the floor didn’t fall out from beneath him. “I’m sure that can be fixed.”

Nodding, the boy bit his lip and turned back to the canvas. “Do you know what is the most difficult about painting her?”

“No,” Argent answered honestly, and reached for a strip of linen that looked clean enough, thrusting his suit coat up his arm and wrapping it around the knife gash to stem the bleeding while the boy’s notice was absorbed elsewhere. It wasn’t bad enough to need immediate attention. He’d have to stitch it later.

“Mama has dark eyes, like these I painted, but there’s a light … behind them.
Inside
them. I can’t—I can’t get it just right. I don’t know how. I have a feeling the trick isn’t in the eyes, themselves, but in the shape around them. In the brow, and the cheek, and…” His little shoulders drooped and he speared him with another solemn glance. “You probably think I’m talking nonsense.”

Argent shook his head and finished the one-handed knot on his makeshift bandage. “No. I know exactly to which light you are referring. I’ve noted it on more than one occasion.”

With a tentative caution, the child peered over his shoulder. “Is that why you kissed her?”

“Partly.” Argent might not know much about children, but he knew better than to describe all of the other reasons he’d kissed the boy’s mother. And why he’d been in her vicinity to begin with.

Shyness gave way to sly temerity. “Are you going to kiss her again?”

“Yes.”

Straightening, Jakub lifted his chin and stuck out a rather concave chest. “Are you going to marry her first?”

Something heavy dropped from the top of Argent’s stomach into its depths. “What in God’s name would make you think that?” Women didn’t marry men like him. Ever.

Jakub wrinkled his button nose. “At school, Rodney Beaton said if a man kisses a woman on the mouth then he has to marry her or the woman is ruined.” Anxiety stole back into his expression as his spectacles made their unruly way back down his nose. “You’re not going to ruin Mama, are you?”

Argent couldn’t bring himself to answer that, couldn’t examine the question too closely, not while his blood still sang with violence and the picture of bespectacled innocence blinked up at him with unsettlingly familiar eyes.

Ruin had many different meanings, all depending upon the perspective of the deciding body. In some circles, standing in the same room with him would be enough to ruin a woman. Imagine if they were privy to what he planned to do to her once he got her alone. Among the whores he’d used, they didn’t seem to be particularly ruined by him. In fact, one or two had been in a snit when he’d opted not to employ them again.

Which made no sense, whatsoever.

But … ruin? After Millie had spent her obligatory night with him, would she consider herself ruined? The oily feeling returned and for the first time in decades, Argent wanted to squirm away from even himself.

Why should it matter?

Looking away, he muttered, “Rodney Beaton sounds like a first-class idiot.”

“That’s mostly what Mama said, but that’s because I asked if you were my father. Do you want to see my treasure?” he asked, brightening.

Argent choked on a swallow, and the chatty little being again assumed any sound that wasn’t a no was automatically an ascent.

Father?
The notion would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sobering.

Retrieving the small box he’d been clutching during the tussle with Dorshaw, Jakub motioned for Argent to take a seat in a plush chair and pushed his spectacles back where they belonged.

Argent complied for lack of a better thing to do.

Jakub’s voice turned rapturous. “Look,” he breathed, unlatching the box and pulling it open.

Argent frowned. “It’s—paint.” Lord, he hoped it was paint; the alternative would have made even him a bit squeamish.

“Not just
any
paint,” the boy insisted, his features taking on the kind of reverence only seen in a religious icon. “This particular shade of crimson is produced from the plucked wings of the cochineal beetle in South America. It’s the truest red. The most beautiful and costly. I’ve only ever used it for the roses in Mama’s painting. At first, I felt sad for the beetles because their wings were taken from them, and they could no longer fly. But then, I thought, if I was a cochineal beetle and someone asked me to give them my wings for such a color, I’d do it. Gladly.”

Obviously the boy had never been locked up. Never been trapped behind walls of iron and stone looking at the sky and actively hating the birds that could come and go at will. “Were I granted the ability of flight, I wouldn’t give it up for anything in this world.”

For some reason, Argent didn’t have such a hard time meeting the dark blue gaze of the child in front of him, not even when the boy studied him in that stoic way of his.

“You think that way because you’re not an artist.”

“Fair enough.” But they often painted the walls with the exact same shade of red.

“But, I believe, we can think differently and still be friends, can we not?”

Argent shrugged. “I don’t see why not. My mind seems to work a great deal differently than almost all of my allies. Doesn’t stop us from attaining our goals.”

Jakub latched his treasure and put it away. “I like you, Mr. Argent,” he announced. “I like that you don’t lie to me because I’m not yet a man. You can go on kissing my mother if you want, so long as you don’t ruin her.”

Christopher stopped just short of informing the child that he didn’t require his permission. All traces of fear and tears had disappeared in their short but diverting conversation. Young Jakub was passionate about his art, and discussing it with someone had distracted him from his ordeal with Dorshaw. Argent didn’t want the distraught boy back, wouldn’t begin to know how to calm him down until his mother arrived. Tears were decidedly a woman’s purview.

Also, a memory two decades gone tugged at the inky darkness of his past, threatening to surface from the cold void where it was locked away. A boy’s fierce vigilance over his mother. An instinctual responsibility that fell on thin, young shoulders in the absence of a grown man to protect and shelter this pitiful family of two.

This acceptance. This … permission. It was rare, and it came from a place of respect not easily won and trust not freely given.

Argent nodded at the boy. “I—”

“Jakub!” The frantic call accompanied by the sound of running feet set both of them on alert.
“Jakub.”

“Mama?” the boy called, sounding infinitely younger.

Millie exploded into the room in a flash of color and sobs. The boy was wrenched off his feet and pulled against a bosom heaving with panic and strain. “Jakub, my son, my boy,
moja słodka piȩkna syn.
” She simultaneously dissolved into hysterics and her native language.

Relieved of his need to be brave, the child clung to his mother with both arms and legs and released tears of fear into her neck. They stayed like that for a long moment, weeping. Clinging. Long enough for Inspector McTavish and a man just as heavily made up as Millie to file into the small room.

Argent had to take the entire moment to recover from the shock of seeing her again. Almost like he’d forgotten in the moments they’d spent apart just how dynamically beautiful she was up close. That beauty struck him like a physical blow.

The newcomer’s eyebrows, already drawn comically high and darker than his silver hair, crawled dangerously close to his receding hairline as he inspected the scene. His impeccable black evening suit and gloves as white as an angel’s hide were strained at every possible seam. “I say!” he boomed in a voice more suited to the stage. “Is the lad cut? There’s a spot of blood on the carpets.”

Argent hid his wounded arm behind his back.

With a sound of distress, Millie sank to her knees with her son, setting him down and running her hands over his hair and his face. “God, Jakub, are you bleeding? Did he hurt you?” She ripped open his tiny jacket and searched for injury.

Jakub made a grunt of protest and wriggled out of her grasping fingers, the stress of an all-male audience overriding his need for maternal care. “I’m all right, Mama.” He sniffed, composing himself. “He didn’t touch me … He was after you.”

“My
heavens,
” the elder man exclaimed.

It took Argent a moment, but he recognized the man as the dramatic master of ceremonies from when he’d seen the play.

“I’m absolutely agog, how did you survive?”

Jakub pointed to where Argent held vigil by a mannequin laden with shawls. “Mr. Argent told the man to get the fuck out.”

McTavish covered his snort of laughter behind a fit of coughs.

“Jakub!” Millie gasped.

“What?”

Her multitude of ringlets caught the lantern light and gleamed as dark as the eyes that darted up to stare at Argent as though only just realizing he was in the room.

He expected censure for his profanity in front of her boy but, in truth, he couldn’t identify what swam in her gaze along with her tears. She didn’t look angry.

Argent said nothing, deciding that was the safest course, and kept his own features firmly neutral, though he abruptly felt anything but.

“What I can’t figure is how the villain got backstage.” The theater employee pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket and handed it to Millie, frowning when she used it to wipe Jakub’s nose instead of her own eyes.

“Dear Lord.” Millie’s brow pinched with concern

“Do you remember anything else the intruder spoke of, lad?” McTavish asked, a pencil poised over a notepad he’d produced from the depths of his suit.

Jakub’s eyes turned dead serious. “He said he wasn’t going to hurt me … just you, Mama, and that he was going to deliver me.”

“Deliver you where?” Even beneath her layers of paint, Millie’s skin visibly paled.

The boy shrugged. “I don’t know. Mr. Argent told him not to say your fuckin—”

Millie pressed her fingers over her son’s lips. “Let’s not repeat anything else that Mr. Argent said until you and I have a talk, all right?”

The boy nodded and his mother sent Argent a look that would have withered a lesser man.

Jakub nodded again and continued once his mouth was released. “He didn’t say anything else, Mama. The man threw a knife at Mr. Argent and he smacked it, right out of the air!” The boy became more animated as he mimicked Argent’s movements and pointed to the chink in the arabesque wallpaper where the knife had been embedded.

They all turned to examine it.

“Then Mr. Argent
kicked
him against the door.” Millie had to lean away in order to dodge the errant foot of her son. “And took the knife from the wall and they
stabbed
at each other, but Mr. Argent made him drop his knife, and then threw him on the ground, and they rolled.” The boy spun in a vertical adaptation of the motion. “And Mr. Argent pinned him down with a knife right above his eyes.” A stabbing motion with his small hand sent a visible flinch through Millie. “He told me to look away.”

“And did you?” the old actor asked, his eyes wide and enraptured by the story.

“I did, but then the police arrived. And Mr. Argent said—” The boy clamped his lips together between his teeth and pushed his glasses up for the umpteenth time. “I think I know which word you don’t want me to say, now.”

Millie reached out and softly took her son’s hand, pulling him back into her arms where he squirmed for a moment, then relented. “You were such a brave boy.” Argent could feel her trying to capture his gaze, but he couldn’t bring himself to look directly at her.

“Where are these knives now?” McTavish queried.

“The one that was dropped is under Mama’s skirts.”

Millie made a choked sound and gathered armfuls of her costume until the blade was uncovered.

McTavish bent to retrieve it. “I should collect yers too, Argent, for evidence.” He took one look at Argent’s expression and blanched. “Or, ye keep it, this should be sufficient.”

“Egad, man, did it truly occur the way the lad described?” The foppish man skirted mother and child and approached Argent.

“More or less.”

“Well, Mr. Argent, was it? You are a champion if there ever was one. I am Mr. Kelsey Throckmorton, the master of ceremonies and stage manager for the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, and let me be the first to extend you our sincere and humble gratitude for your heroics tonight on behalf of the belle of our stage.”

Argent doubted there was anything sincere or humble about the man, but he nodded to him all the same.

With an overdramatic gesture Mr. Throckmorton asked, “Are you a particular … friend of our Miss LeCour’s?” The question was so rife with innuendo it should have put off an odor.

Millie intervened. “Due to the danger I’m in, I’ve employed Mr. Argent for protection.”

“Well.” Throckmorton gave Argent a very thorough once-over. Twice. “That must cost you quite the pound of flesh.”

Argent nodded again. He didn’t have the weight quite right, but he’d certainly guessed the currency.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

To Millie his regard was like a tangible caress reaching through the layers of her clothing and consciousness to touch places she’d previously been unaware of.

The year prior, she’d taken Jakub to the fair and a traveling snake charmer had the most extraordinary creature in a glass box. A long-fanged terror, the length and width of her arm, with a dark, unsettling rattle at the end of his tail. The performer had called him a viper of the New World and explained that when the creature coiled into a perfect spiral, it was at its most dangerous. The rattle warned that attack was imminent. And when the beast struck, Millie had never seen speed and lethal force of the kind before or since that day.