To Tempt a Saint (19 page)
Authors: Kate Moore
When Cleo was dry, changed, dressed, and ready for her evening, she stood at her window and stared into the London dusk of a clear, cold night in which smoke from hundreds of chimney pots rose ghostly and straight toward the distant heavens. No leaves hung on the trees.
The longing he stirred so easily in her receded, leaving her hollow. She stared unseeing into the dark.
The trunk of the nearest tree seemed to shake in the cold. Cleo’s senses came alert. Without moving she fixed her gaze on the quaking tree. A pinched white face glanced up and met her gaze for an instant with a look of potent longing. Then the shadow shivered, turned, and bolted for the back of the garden. Cleo could not describe the face of her uncle’s spy, but she knew the strange, haunted look in the boy’s eyes—hunger.
Chapter Thirteen
X
ANDER’S grip on her arm stopped Cleo in the shadowy rear of the theater box. Around and below them in the tiers of gilded boxes the crowd twittered and stirred, a restless flock of birds with gorgeous nodding plumage.
ANDER’S grip on her arm stopped Cleo in the shadowy rear of the theater box. Around and below them in the tiers of gilded boxes the crowd twittered and stirred, a restless flock of birds with gorgeous nodding plumage.
“How badly do you want your money?” he asked, the low vibration in his voice starting its usual answering quiver in her. She noted the white scar across his ear, realizing for the first time that he didn’t hear perfectly on that side. He smelled of soap from his bath, but she was most aware of how his manner changed in public.
Here, they were not among his friends, prosperous, civic-minded Londoners, men of enterprise and science, who invited him to their homes or came to his. Here, people she knew or had known, people she had once counted as friends, looked on. When they stepped forward in the little box, all the blue-blooded misses and all the Miss Finsburys of London would gasp at the baron’s daughter become the bastard’s bride. Any friend Cleo thought she might reclaim would turn away. She might as well toss her newly printed calling cards on November’s Guy Fawkes bonfire. Appearing with Xander Jones in this most public way would proclaim them married.
His studied indifference to the crowd below told her he knew what her choice meant. And more, it told her, she could wound him somehow with her choice. An unexpected surge of power swept her, almost dizzying in its intensity. The same reckless impulse she’d felt from the first moment of their acquaintance prompted her again.
She slipped her arm from his grip and faced him, undoing, with trembling fingers, the ties that held her cloak in place. The black silk slid from her shoulders, and he caught it, a gentlemanly reflex. His gaze claimed her throat and the daring décolletage of the last of her Perez gowns. She was conscious of a warm pulse beating where his glance burned.
In flint is fire.
In flint is fire.
She smiled up at him, offering her gloved hand and naked arm. “Oh, I want my money.”
She turned, stepped into the light, and leaned her hand on the edge of the box, a black fan dangling from her wrist. He stepped to her side, his hand came around her to cup her shoulder, and she tilted her face up to his.
The crowd paused in its seeing and being seen as Cleo’s husband leaned intimately toward her, reporting on the hiring he planned to do. He had the gasworks going now, and he had chosen a route for the first pipes to light the dark heart of London.
She knew what he was doing, putting on a show for the gossips below. She realized she should most distrust those moments when he seemed open to her. She really knew nothing of him and his intentions. Still she grew edgy under the effect of that gaze and the low, intimate voice. “If you are going to look at me like that and talk of pipe feet and gas capacity, I won’t be responsible for my actions, in public though we are.”
“You object to my besotted husband look?”
“Deeply. Since it’s all a hum and you don’t mean to act. Very wounding to a woman’s vanity.” At least that was the part she wanted him to believe he wounded.
“I thought we had resolved the issue of your wounded vanity this afternoon.”
She tried to read his expression, but the besotted look had vanished, and she saw only cool detachment.
“That moment was meant to be a compliment? When in spite of your evident readiness for the most carnal of embraces, you shoved me through a door and locked it? My vanity might never recover.”
“You just don’t recognize male sincerity.”
“Maybe I need practice.”
He actually laughed then, and heaven help her, she liked the sound of it. She looked out over the crowd and caught the startled glance of a tall, silver-haired gentleman entering a box opposite theirs and offered him her most dazzling smile. The Marquess of Candover, with the same brow and carriage as his son, turned back to his party at once.
“Your father’s here. Did you know he would be?” She risked a glance at him and caught a fierce look, instantly quelled.
“Our paths sometimes cross. I don’t plan my life to avoid him.” He looked away, and Cleo found she had an excellent opportunity to study his profile and that ear with its white scar and the place above his collar where his dark hair curled, and which she suddenly wanted to explore with her fingers.
“Did he do nothing for you?”
“He made me. He was young, however, and careless, and it certainly was not his intention.”
“You, on the other hand, are careful.”
He turned back to her, his expression closed. “I’ve learned to be careful.”
The buzz in the theater began to subside. He offered his hand and led her through the formalities of a gentleman seating a lady at the theater in full view of London. His warm palms slid down her arms briefly and slipped away, leaving her skin slighted. Cleo had no other word for it. Her skin craved his attention, his notice, and the withdrawal of his touch felt like that moment when a friend turned away.
A thought occurred to her then that his reason for refusing to get her with child had less to do with a distaste for her than with all the slights and difficulties of his own past. But she looked at the vast, dazzling crowd and knew that their fickle interest in scandal would not save her from her uncle.
She stared at the stage. “My Uncle March has done something to Mr. Tucker, hasn’t he? That’s why Evershot was so cagey about our funds, isn’t it?”
“Tucker is in Newgate on a charge of perjury.” Her husband leaned back and reached into his coat, offering her the pig-sticking knife. “Keep it for your real enemy.”
Cleo took it from him with unsteady hands and returned it to the sheath inside her gown in the border of black jet beads.
“Has the hearing been set?”
“No. Norwood has won us another delay.”
Below them the manager came to the stage front to announce a change in the program. One of the dancers, Miss Becky Lynch, was to be replaced by an understudy, Miss Eliza Hunt. The change seemed to cause considerable consternation among a group of fashionable gentlemen standing quite near the stage. A smattering of boos greeted the announcement, and a pair of young men had to be restrained by companions from coming to blows. Then the gold-tasseled curtains parted, and everyone turned to the play.
“I won’t lose to my uncle, you know.” Cleo leaned and whispered in his ear over the orchestra’s rousing opening.
He turned, and his breath stirred her hair. “Trust me, and we both win. Tonight all London thinks that we are well and truly married.”
At the interval a message arrived, and her husband left her alone in their box. Cleo assumed her haughtiest look and kept an unfixed gaze over the heads of the crowd. From the back of the box came a knock, and the door opened to admit one of her former friends. Cleo summoned the name, Millie Eldon, not a close friend, but someone with whom she had shared the delights of many a ball. She felt her spirits lift.
Millie had a bobbing feather headdress and diamonds strung like lanterns across her chest. “Cleo, how lovely, you’re back in London!”
Cleo’s spurt of gladness died. Millie greeted her from well back in the shadows at the rear of the box. A wise precaution, Cleo had to admit, as she moved to join her visitor. No sense in involving anyone else in her ruin. “Yes, I married Sir Alexander Jones. You may have seen the announcement in the
Chronicle
.”
Chronicle
.”
Millie’s perfect oval face expressed a kind of greedy horror at the idea. “You are safe, then? You’ve not been abducted or sold to this man?”
“Quite safe, just getting settled, is all. I shall make some calls on old friends soon.” Cleo let Millie take that as she would.
Her delicate nose twitched, and Cleo had a perfect recollection of talking with her in the past. “He’s handsome as sin, of course, but the stories. I heard he went on a debauch and lost his brother in London, or the boy was murdered or something.” Her gloved hand covered her mouth.
Cleo almost laughed. “Oh, if only he were the violent sort. I’m afraid he’s more likely to bore me to death with the details of his gaslight project than to cut my throat with a knife.”
Again Millie’s little nose wiggled. It was plain she wouldn’t let Cleo’s remark interrupt the flow of lurid tales. “Oh. Well, he did bed who knows how many ladies of quality. His knighthood made such a scandal. The prince only went through with it, you know, to embarrass Candover. There’s no good feeling there. But no one dared call him out, your husband, I mean. No
gentleman
could meet him on the field of honor.”
gentleman
could meet him on the field of honor.”
Cleo had her own idea of why no man wanted to meet Xander Jones on the field of honor, but she did not speak it. “What about you, Millie?” she asked.
“I married Trentham, naturally. You remember how he always doted on me. We live with his mother, but she could go any day now, so it’s really quite all right.”
The tide of visitors heading back to their own boxes sent Millie on her way with a cheery farewell, but not so much as a squeeze of Cleo’s hand. Cleo saw her appear three boxes down and immediately fall into conversation with her neighbors.
The red curtains parted for the second half of the performance as Xander Jones stepped back into the box.
Cleo had no cause to object to his husbandly behavior again until their carriage stopped a short block beyond the Opera House. She was thinking that with a postponement of their hearing, she could wage a slow campaign of seduction. Maybe she would start by leaning against her husband’s shoulder on their way home.
A man rapped sharply on the coach window. When Xander opened the door, the stranger muttered a single terse sentence. Cleo’s husband descended and vanished into the night.
Trust me
, he had said, but how could she when he disappeared before she could even remove the pig-sticking knife from her skirt to stab him in his false heart?
Trust me
, he had said, but how could she when he disappeared before she could even remove the pig-sticking knife from her skirt to stab him in his false heart?
Chapter Fourteen
W
HILE Cleo sat stunned, Opera House traffic brought the carriage to a halt. She slipped her knife from her hem, pulled her cloak over her hair, and pushed open the door. Isaiah protested as she slipped into the dark, but she knew he would not leave his horses.
HILE Cleo sat stunned, Opera House traffic brought the carriage to a halt. She slipped her knife from her hem, pulled her cloak over her hair, and pushed open the door. Isaiah protested as she slipped into the dark, but she knew he would not leave his horses.
She moved down the line of stopped carriages, scanning the moving shadows, and cut back to the pavement behind a monstrous coach. Xander Jones’s wide shoulders and purposeful stride made him easy to spot, and she set herself to follow, heart beating high, between determination and uncertainty. He was likely going to some low pleasure palace in Covent Garden. That would not violate the strict terms of their agreement. A whore was not a mistress, after all, but she didn’t want her fears confirmed. And she wasn’t sure she had the nerve to follow him into an actual brothel, to find him in another woman’s arms.
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