The Problem with Seduction (3 page)

She froze in her chair. It couldn’t be Lord Constantine. He’d already been paid.

“The devil you will,” Rand growled. “I have every intention of smashing your pretty face through this wall first.”

The door opened, followed by a man’s gloved hand reaching in. Then Lord Constantine himself ducked into the room, presumably avoiding Rand’s right hook, and slammed the door closed. “If this is what passes for hospitality around here…” he muttered, straightening his bottle green coat before he turned to her.

She remained seated, though her instinct told her to run. He posed no threat to her. Except, perhaps, the threat of a handsome near-stranger. He
was
sinful good-looking, to quote her maid, if one liked impossibly tall men with straight noses and a permanent furrow between their brows, which she very much did.

The door burst open and Rand’s burly build filled the frame. “I’m going to—”

Lord Constantine turned in place to face his opponent. He shook his head as if talking to a child. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“What the h—”

“It’s quite all right,” Elizabeth broke in before her butler could recover his wits and do actual, bodily harm to her guest. “Lord Constantine is the father of my child. I suppose that means I must see him on occasion, if only because I cannot legally keep him from seeing his son.” She gave her intruder a narrow smirk, sure now that she had nothing to fear from him. He’d won entry. Let him try for anything else.

If Rand’s wits had been addled by Lord Constantine’s tongue-in-cheek greeting, they positively scrambled at Elizabeth’s pronouncement. He stood upright, mouth agape, shoulders pulled back and hands fisted at his sides like the prizefighter he used to be. “
Lord Constantine,
madam—?”

She didn’t give his question time to hang in the air. The less said in front of Nelly, the better. “You know Lord Constantine,” she said with a husky laugh, as though they had indeed been lovers once and perhaps still were. “He’s always had a way of seeing me, even when he shouldn’t. You may leave now, Rand. Nelly, fetch another rag. Oliver is feeling damp again.”

Lord Constantine flinched, presumably at the thought of a wet babe. She smiled to herself, enjoying his discomfort. He had, after all, barged in on her.

Then the door closed behind her maid and suddenly the room felt cramped. Not because a cradle, rocking chair and two chests of drawers took up much of the space in the room. She was very much alone with a man whose broad shoulders and fashionably mussed hair once could have made her whisper an indecent proposal into his ear.

She laughed to herself. She
had
whispered an indecent proposal into his ear. It simply hadn’t been the kind that made a man hard. The opposite, in fact.
“Lord Constantine, how do you feel about becoming the father of my child?”

Looking at the tall, well-formed man in buff breeches and black boots, she still couldn’t quite believe he’d said yes. Though she’d approached him precisely because she knew enough about him to suspect he’d agree, he was still very much a stranger to her. She liked it that way. She didn’t need him here, in her nursery, invading her privacy. In fact, it violated the terms of their contract.

She arched a single brow at the handsome rogue who watched her with a wrinkled, slightly pained brow. “My lord, I pray you don’t mind my saying so, but there is nothing more I want in this world than for you to
see yourself out of my house.
”

His answering grin caused a little flip in her belly. She was a mother, not dead. And he
was
sinfully good-looking. “I’ll be delighted to do so, but first, I must insist Oliver accompany me when I do.” He had the gall to look sheepish as her world teetered at a ledge. “Father’s rights, and all that. You do know what I mean, I think—Elizabeth?”

Chapter Two

FOR A MAN BORN into a family of rakes, Con hadn’t quite managed to perfect his way with women. Elizabeth’s gray eyes went wide with fear, then crazed with an unholy light that caused him to step back. After escaping Captain Finn’s fists two nights before, Con was feeling a bit invincible. Her butler—if the ship-sized creature in her entry could be called such—had hardly fazed him. Regarding Elizabeth across the room now, however, his luck seemed to have run out. Slowly, mechanically, she rose and placed a baby into a cradle tucked into the corner of the room. More slowly still, she faced Con. Her pale features had taken on an uncanny brittleness he found terrifying. “I think perhaps we ought to take tea before we make any hasty decisions—” he began.

She took a small step forward, then another and another until she was at a full-fledged run. Her balled fists found his chest as she beat him with ineffective wallops that might have made him laugh except she was half-gurgling, half-screaming, “You monster! I will
never
give him up!”

He caught her wrists and held her apart from him so he could look into her eyes. Tendrils of dark brown hair wisped around her face, highlighting high cheekbones, full, generous lips and those gray eyes he found so startling. “Elizabeth! Be calm! Surely we can talk about this rationally. Don’t you trust me?”

No, of course she didn’t trust him.
She’d paid him to lie to the entire
ton.
Still, he felt like that should count for something. They were now a team, weren’t they?

She stopped fighting long enough to hiss in his face. “You snake! We made a
deal.
You have no right to Oliver. No right at all.”

“Yes, but—”

“You
promised
not to make any claim on him. You signed your
name.
”

“It’s not like what Finn wanted,” he said. What the devil was she so upset about? “I mean, it
is
like what Finn wanted, in that I need to see my son—”

“He’s
not
your
son
!” she shrieked.

The door burst open. Iron arms banded around him and the butler’s deep voice vibrated in his ear. “Let her go.”

“You, again?” Con sighed and dutifully released Elizabeth.

She hastily scrambled back. “You are
heinous
! I will never let you take him. Why would you even…” She brushed away a lock of chestnut-colored hair curling in her face. Her chest heaved and her cheeks flushed pink with fury. Again her fingers tucked the lock into place, but when a lone tear rolled down her cheek he knew the real reason why she’d raised her hand. She hastily rubbed the glistening trail away. New, fresh fury sparkled in her eyes. “I am
done
with crying. I am done, sir, with you. Leave. Now.”

He struggled against his human restraints before giving up. It was a futile attempt to retain what little dignity he could muster, for fighting a man twice his mass only made him look silly. He had to make her understand, though. He needed her to cooperate, or at least stop attacking him. “I’m afraid you’ve put us both in a bind, you see,” he tried to explain. “I have a bad enough reputation as it is, so far as responsibility goes. I can’t let this baby be one more I ignore.”

The last of his breath whistled through his teeth as his captor cinched Con’s upper arms hard and fast enough to almost crack his ribs.

She stared at him incredulously. “You expect me to care about your reputation enough to hand over my
son
?”

It did sound foolish, the way she said it. Oliver wasn’t even his child. What did it matter if he ignored the boy for the rest of his life? Surely Con was old enough now to take his family’s disappointment in stride.

Her eyes narrowed. “This is about money. Ten thousand wasn’t enough? Well, I
won’t
be threatened. You won’t squeeze another shilling from me. I won’t have it—you can take your conniving, blackmailing ways and go
hang.
”

“All right, all right.” It wasn’t worth upsetting her any more than he already had. He didn’t even want children. Or a half-crazed woman with an unholy hatred of him—that was, in fact, one very good reason why he wasn’t married. He held up his hands as best he could, given his arms were trapped at his sides. “It was a stupid idea. I’ll go father my own by-blow and then take care of
him.
”

Her face went white. “How can you say such a thing? He’s an innocent
baby.
It’s not his fault he was born on the wrong side of the blanket.”

Maybe that
had
been too much. Con had nothing against bastards in general, Oliver in particular, or her, for that matter. Borrowing the baby for an afternoon was just an idea he’d had when his mother had looked at him with eyes filled with disappointment and a sad, brittle smile on her face.

“It was just for the afternoon,” he said suddenly, feeling terrible. He didn’t want to face his mother without his supposed baby, but he also wasn’t a giant cad like everyone seemed to think. “I shouldn’t have slighted your son. I’m sorry.”

“Just the
afternoon.
” Her voice dripped with disbelief.

No one trusted him anymore. His heels dragged along the carpet as the hulking butler forcibly heaved him from the room instead of setting him down. Con pulled an
I suppose this is it
face and attempted a shrug, but neither cracked Elizabeth’s pale, stony stare.

When he’d been dragged half the length of the hallway, he realized she thought he meant to take Oliver permanently. Nothing could have scared him to death more than the thought of being saddled with a motherless child. “Elizabeth!” he called down the hallway, “Elizabeth, I think you might have misunderstood me. Really, it
was
just for the afternoon. It’s about my mother, you see—”

The door slammed hard enough to rattle the portraits on the walls.

Well. That hadn’t gone quite the way he’d intended. His mother was going to be disappointed in him. Again.

At least things couldn’t get much worse.

She’d expected Nicholas. Or at least a fight from Nicholas. The Nicholas Finn she knew never walked away from a good row. In the three years on and off that she’d spent as his mistress, she’d learned precisely how far she could go without driving him to a physical response. Not that sex wasn’t a physical response, a form of punishment for riling him past reason, but he’d never laid a hand on her that she hadn’t secretly wanted.

Her mouth tasted sour now, thinking of his hands on her at all. What a fool she’d been.

She
hadn’t
expected Lord Constantine just now. And after he left, she knew better than to let her guard down again. She was more prepared to maintain her composure when Nicholas did arrive, shortly after Lord Constantine was tossed out on his backside. Literally tossed, for she’d enjoyed watching from the window as Rand had ejected him from her rented townhouse into the street.

Rand tapped lightly on her door to inform her of Nicholas’s arrival himself. Unlike with Lord Constantine, this time she did give Oliver to his nurse. Though Nicholas had never manhandled her, she couldn’t risk him taking her baby right from her arms.

She paused to check her reflection. The redness in her eyes couldn’t be helped, but she pinched her cheeks to restore some of her natural glow, and twirled her fingers through the curls framing her face to restore the carefully-tonged locks as best she could. Vanity was a courtesan’s primary weapon. Without it, she’d never be able to hold her head high enough to look down her nose at the men who sought to use her.

She made her way to the drawing room. The entire length of the house, she steeled herself against the man she was about to receive.

He stood in her vestibule, looking impatient. She paused at the foot of the stair. Once, her heart had seemed to stop every time she saw him. Nicholas Finn was tall, and possessed of the confidence found in a man who’d scrounged the money to buy a commission, then gone on to earn honors reserved for Britain’s finest men. His wavy brown hair appeared windblown, a careful effect he took pains to perfect. And he was handsome. Of all the men she’d taken into her bed, he’d been the one with the broadest shoulders, the most satisfying to pleasure, with the slightly-too-heavy weight of a man in good health and the strong hands of a skilled lover.