The Problem with Seduction (2 page)

Con felt the first twinge of guilt.

“Well,” he continued when Finn’s only reply was a deepening of that discomfiting stare, “why did you think she was in Devon? It wasn’t to see her family. They live in Shropshire, and besides, I hear they aren’t on speaking—”

“What are you trying to say?” burst out of Finn in harsh, clipped syllables. His lips didn’t quite touch afterward, lending him a feral appearance. Con had never had a man bare his teeth at him before. Not in all seriousness, at least.

God. He really,
really
didn’t want to get shot tonight.

But if he had to choose between a bullet and the gaol—a very real choice he could be making in the morning—the bullet might be more survivable. Just the thought of being relegated to a damp, dark box weighed on his lungs until it felt as if an entire militia were stomping across his chest. When it came time to face being locked away again, his own terror might do him in. Now it helped him to sound beleaguered, as though it pained him to explain what he’d hoped would be obvious by this point. “
I
live in Devon. She went to Devon to have
my
baby. That’s what I’m trying to say.”

Their onlookers’ collective gasp preceded several occurrences of “I say!” and one “Really, that was not well done of you, Alexander.”

Finn seemed to double in size, as though his outrage made him physically larger and not just more intimidating. “That’s absurd. Elizabeth panted after my attentions for three years. She would never have—” But he stopped.

Con barely kept from smiling with relief. He’d done it! It
could
be his baby. Even Finn had to admit it. Not that the notion was that far-fetched. Elizabeth was a courtesan. Certainly, she need not remain faithful to a lover who’d repeatedly and publicly tried to wash his hands of her. Who’d spent so much time sailing the oceans that she might have taken a legion of bedfellows without his knowing a whit of it.

Whether or not she had done so, Con really wasn’t in a position to know.

Finn advanced a step, testing Con’s ability to stand his ground. “She’s
my
mistress. Not yours. You cowardly, bloody
whelp.
I demand your retraction. Go on. Take it back.” He swung his arm wide and Con flinched, belatedly realizing Finn had meant to include the gaming hell crowded with men in his declaration, not plant Con a facer. “None of you laid a hand on her, not in the last three years. She’s mine. Elizabeth Spencer is
mine.
”

A choked cough somewhere in the back of the room drew a new level of silence. Awkwardness hung thick in the air, as each man discernibly struggled to decide if it had been a tickle in a throat or a smothered admission of guilt.

Finn spun in the direction of the cough. Finally freed of his drilling stare, Con breathed a bit easier. He rubbed his damp palms against his coat. Yet his heartbeat thumped in his chest so hard, surely everyone could hear it. He hadn’t
yet
convinced Finn his mistress had been unfaithful. The child wasn’t in Con’s arms—yet. He wasn’t clear of King’s Bench—yet.

“Who did that?” Finn demanded. “Which one of you sniveling bastards wants to join young Alexander in a fist-pounding?”

Seconds of silence felt like minutes. Con resisted the urge to shift uneasily. If one more man would come forward, this would be so much easier. But the silence held.

Finn turned to face him. “See? You’re a liar.”

“She isn’t yours now, though, is she?” Con’s steady voice surprised him. He could’ve sworn Finn’s boot was already pressing on his throat. “And she hasn’t always been, even in the last three years. You’ve given her up a time or two, if I recall correctly.”

Finn glowered. But he didn’t argue the fact.

Con drew his shoulders back. As he’d done with every creditor who’d ever dogged him, every angry friend who’d ever demanded he fulfill an IOU, he feigned nonchalance. “You replaced her just a month ago with Millicent Kimble. A delectable piece, I credit you, as was Mrs. Brooks before her. And a little over a year ago, if I may relate your history aloud, you were keen on Beth Rawlings. I can’t fault your taste, Finn, but I must say, women do have a strong dislike of being jilted.”

Murmurs of agreement wound through the gentlemen present. He and Finn didn’t run in the same crowds, Con being far younger, but even he knew that the captain liked to flaunt his wealth in the form of expensive whores. Despite Con’s status as fourth son of a marquis, he couldn’t afford any of the costly women Finn used and discarded without a thought, and he had always been appalled by both Finn’s excess and his callousness.

“By my math,” Con said again, feeling surer of himself the longer Finn remained quiet, “the child you’ve been tricked into acknowledging is actually mine. I
am
sorry, old boy. But if you don’t mind, I’d like my son back. He was the cutest little imp when he was born, you see, and I will never forgive myself for quarreling with Elizabeth just a few days later.” He laughed quietly. “It’s too easy, is it not, to rile her passions. I ought to have minded my tongue when she was at her most vulnerable. I sent her running straight back to you instead.”

Finn’s eyes darkened, and the bronzed skin of his brow creased as his eyes narrowed further. That bit about Elizabeth’s passions had done it—just as she’d said it would. For she and Finn
had
fought like man and wife, even up to the end of their acquaintance. And last year, Finn
had
briefly cast her aside to pursue a new conquest.

Con was a devil of a handsome man. An objective evaluation, based on his observation that his twin brother was an out-and-out rake. Finn was realizing the crux of it now: Con was worthy competition. And beautiful, wealthy, self-made Elizabeth Spencer did not like to be crossed.

Con almost felt sorry for him. He couldn’t take too much time to pity his opponent, though. He didn’t have the baby yet. Only when Finn stormed out of the room, growling, “That duplicitous little slut. I’ll be damned if she sneaks your bastard under my nose,” did Con finally relax. And later the next morning, when a runner knocked at the door of Merritt House, rousing the staff with the announcement that a
baby
was to be delivered that very afternoon, did the dread in Con’s belly begin to uncurl.

But it was the ten thousand pounds quietly transferred into his account that fully unwound his insides and allowed him to take an unfettered breath. When the last IOU had been ripped asunder and even the smallest of his creditors walked away satisfied, Con exhaled a deep sigh of relief. He even had a few coins to spare.

Coins he might not have much longer, as he was in the mood to celebrate his own resourcefulness. Until he returned to Merritt House, and his mother greeted him at the foot of the stairs. “Constantine, where on
earth
have you hidden my beautiful little grandchild? Mr. Benjamin seems to think you’ve no intention of raising him here, but I told him that
cannot
be true. You wouldn’t keep your own son from his family, even if he
was
born on the wrong side of the blanket.” Her blue eyes dampened and her voice trembled. “Oh, Constantine, you
wouldn’t,
would you?”

He opened his mouth to reply, but he had no answer. He merely stared at his mother, powerless to reassure her that no, he wasn’t that kind of father. The uncaring kind. The absent kind. The kind
his
father had been.

It was his first indication that, perhaps, he hadn’t thought this scheme entirely through.

Elizabeth Spencer would have paid Lord Constantine twenty thousand pounds for the return of her son. Even more, had he asked. She’d not told him so, of course. She’d let him name his price, then bargained him down until he’d threatened to walk. It was not by accident that she had started out penniless and become a celebrated courtesan with an impressive collection of assets.

It was to her benefit, then, that he’d been as desperate for her money as she’d been for his services. After paying for his silence, she still retained more than enough in her accounts to sustain herself and Oliver for the rest of her life. She need not return to her old tricks. A relief, for she’d had a month to come to the realization that she wanted nothing more than to become worthy of being Oliver’s mother.

She would have done it, though. Selling her body was a pittance compared to what she would have done to get her son back. She would do anything
—anything—
to keep him. Nicholas had stolen five weeks of her son’s life from her. Five weeks of watching him grow, of
holding
him— She gasped for a breath. Surely nothing was crueler than Nicholas’s wielding the law to steal her child. Nothing except, mayhap, the false hope he’d given her prior, for after setting the three of them up as a family, and doting on her and Oliver for two glorious months, he’d had a change of heart. He didn’t need her to get to his son. He’d made short work of her, then.

She’d barely survived the heartbreak of losing her baby. The unbearably long separation, the weeks of Nicholas keeping her child from her, the days and nights knowing another woman was caring for
her
son, that she was never to see
her
son
again, had felt like death. She would have done anything to have him back. Even after a full day of having him with her now, she hadn’t grasped the reality of Oliver’s presence. He was hers again.
Here.
At last.

Gazing into his beautiful little face, she touched his soft cheek and sighed the first real sigh of contentment she’d felt since…it didn’t bear thinking about. The past was the past. Nicholas was gone. Oliver was her joy, her life.

He squirmed in her arms, then eyes as pale as her own opened. He cooed and she smiled. “Well, look at you, there,” she murmured, nuzzling his tiny nose with her own.

Her vision was blurred by welling tears. Never again. She would
never
allow Nicholas to take him again. Even if she must live in fear of discovery for the rest of her life, she would do whatever it took to keep her child. Steal, lie, cheat. Nothing was worth the heartbreak of being separated from Oliver.

A scratch at the nursery door preceded the entry of her upstairs maid. Nelly, a girl with curly red hair peeking from beneath a mobcap, entered. “You have a caller, ma’am.”

Elizabeth didn’t need to be told it was a he. There was no other kind of callers. “Who is he?”

“Not one of the usual, ma’am. I didn’t recognize him.”

Elizabeth frowned. “Rand ought to have given you his name. You must ask next time.”

Nelly bobbed. “Yes, ma’am, and I would have done, but the man refused to give it. I know because I took a peek over the banister when I heard all the going-on. He’s sinful good-looking. But he didn’t come in a crested carriage or nothing that might give a clue as to who he is. I did try, ma’am.” Her pretty brown eyes shone with fear of reprisal and the thrill of a handsome stranger.

Elizabeth had taken her fill of handsome strangers. The bundle in her arms was the only male in her sphere now, and if the choice was between setting her son down so that she might nip at the lure of a mysterious caller and staying right where she was, there was no question. “Inform him that I am unavailable.”

“Do I ask him to return at a more opportune time?” A hopeful note in Nelly’s voice betrayed her new allegiance to the mystery man.

Elizabeth tucked Oliver’s swaddling more tightly around him. “I’m permanently unavailable to any man who expects me to dangle after him.” She ignored her maid’s titter of amusement. The girl was very young, not at all like the jaded maids Elizabeth was accustomed to. She was one of the girls Elizabeth had hired to attend her in Devon, where Oliver had been born. A more innocent staff had been required there, for Elizabeth had foolishly thought to escape her reputation and raise Oliver as the son of a brave captain who’d had the misfortune to perish at sea. Then Finn had arrived and importuned her to come back to London. She hadn’t had the heart to let Nelly go. Nelly had no family and no prospects. Elizabeth knew all too well the fate that awaited a girl who had no family, no prospects and no employer.

Minutes after her maid departed, the unmistakable cadence of masculine footfalls vibrated outside of the nursery door. Elizabeth frowned. There wasn’t time to set Oliver down before a solid rap against the frame caused her to startle. Even if there had been time, she wouldn’t have let her son out of her arms, not for a man. Especially not a rude one. How dare he barge in on her privacy after she’d already told him no?

Nelly’s pitiful protests were almost drowned out by Rand’s insistent demands that the man leave. A
thunk
against the door followed by a male grunt and Nelly’s screech caused Elizabeth to smirk in satisfaction. There was a reason her butler had the physique of a dockside worker. Let Rand see him out bodily, if that was what it took.

“Elizabeth,” a deep voice called through the wood paneling, “you have five seconds to make yourself presentable before I come through this door.”