A Lady’s Lesson in Scandal Page 7
Losing her was not an acceptable outcome. Holding her against her will would be problematic in regard to his larger goal.
He ignored the impatient hand she extended and settled against the edge of a heavy reading table. “The first is from Jane Lovell,” he said.
“Who?”
The light from above was falling across her face at an angle that erased the freckles and the worry line between her brows. She looked girlish. Innocent. He supposed she was innocent in every way that mattered to this moment—which he suddenly sensed was going to be more delicate than he’d imagined.
This brief pang of compassion irritated him. He’d spent sleepless hours last night marveling at his good fortune. She had dropped into his lap like a gift from the gods, and nothing—least of all her—would convince him to waste the opportunity she presented. Compassion was not only unnecessary, then, it was entirely hypocritical.
“I assume she was the woman who raised you,” he said. “But to begin with, she was your mother’s maid. Lady’s maid to the Countess of Rushden.”
“Go on.”
Her face might have been a mask for how little it revealed. He studied her as he continued, alert and ready for the slightest crack in her composure. “She stole you from the nursery. It seems she had an affair with your father—or perhaps not so much an affair as an encounter. By his account, it was not a long-standing arrangement.”
She made a small and indelicate noise, generated in her nose. When her lip twisted, he recognized the noise as contempt. “Encounter,” she said. “I suppose that’s your fancy word for rape.”
“No,” he said. “I’ve never heard it described as such.”
“Sure and you haven’t.”
Her words had the flavor and lilt of a jeer. He smiled in sudden recognition: this situation held a unique, gorgeous irony. Defenseless women were his least favorite type, but if word escaped that he’d held an urchin in his house overnight, nobody would be surprised. Titillated, yes; amazed, no. Up to his old tricks again, society would say, shaking their heads even as they blithely issued invitations to him for dinner.
Cornelia’s own father, in spreading tales of Simon’s exploits, had guaranteed that none of his peers would take Simon to task for misbehaving with her.
The idea inexplicably unnerved him. “Regardless of which word you use, the result was the same,” he said. “In the aftermath, the old earl lost interest in her, and Jane Lovell did not take it well. Indeed, she seems to have lost her wits. For revenge, she took one of the earl’s daughters when she fled. That daughter was named Cornelia.”
She still had him fixed in that flat, unspeaking look. “Not the rarest name.”
“You have a twin sister,” he said. “The resemblance is … extraordinary.”
Not the least of that resemblance lay in the long, haughty nose Nell now stared down. The last flicker of Simon’s doubt winked out. For three seasons, Kitty Aubyn had frightened scores of her fellow debutantes with this look. On Nell’s face, it might have caused a grown man to think twice.
“So,” she said. “You think I was the girl this lady kidnapped.”
“Yes.” He paused, because now wonder was ripping through him, and it was a heady sensation, novel enough that he wanted to savor it.
Cornelia bloody Aubyn. For sixteen years, old Rushden had ripped apart the country in search of her. And now, here she sat.
He cleared his throat. “She did not take you to ransom, I should add. She simply … took you.” He lifted the letter. “This is the note she left behind. It reads, ‘To His Lordship—’”
“I can read,” she said. “Hand it over.” Leaning forward, she plucked it from his grip. As she considered the note, some expression fleeted across her face—surprise, confusion, he couldn’t say. It did not show in her voice as she began to read, slowly but clearly. “‘I have taken a payment for what you took from me. You reviled me for a low woman; now your daughter will live as the low women do. As for her sister, she will have to look to you for providing her comfort. I hope you prove better to her than you were to me.’”
She shrugged and handed the letter back. “Whole lot of nonsense, sounds like.”
“The ravings of a madwoman,” he agreed. “But you see what it means.”
“Can’t say I do.”
“Then you’re not attending. You are the daughter she took. You’re the legitimate child of Lord Rushden and his lawful wife. You—”
“I’m listening,” she said sharply. “And I’m not deaf, so you’d best keep your voice down.”
Simon paused. “I wasn’t yelling.”
Now the girl looked uncomfortable. Glancing down to her hands, she lifted her shoulders in a jerky movement. “Guess you weren’t.”
Somebody yelled at her, Simon gathered, and on regular occasions. An alarming possibility occurred to him. “Good God. Are you married?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Eight times,” she said. “Twice this week. What’s it to you?”
A good deal, in fact. But he didn’t think this was the right moment to explain himself. “Curiosity. Humor me.”
Her lips thinned. “Not my job,” she said. “You can hire someone for that.”
“Touche.” She had a fresh brand of cleverness about her. It occurred to him, too, that her concern this morning had been for the wages she’d miss, not for the husband who would be alarmed by her failure to return home.
No, he thought, she wasn’t married.
He smiled down at the letter. Even had he been a praying man, he would never have thought to pray for Cornelia Aubyn’s return. But this heiress extraordinaire, the former fixation of a shocked and anxious nation, had turned up in his bloody bedroom—and in the guise of a grimy, half-educated factory girl with no idea of her entitlements. No idea that she had the right to demand anything.
I could tell her whatever I liked, he realized.
The temptation was so dark and powerful that he actually felt the hairs lift at his nape.
Anything at all.
Old Rushden must be writhing in his grave. For years, he’d reviled Simon as a black-hearted bastard. Now his own precious daughter had reappeared, desperately poor, desperately needy, with a waiting fortune of a million bloody pounds.
The world had curious ways of balancing the scales.
He exhaled. “This other letter,” he said with remarkable calmness, “would be one of the many that the earl received in the years before his death. First, though, I should say that your father did look for you—searched the entirety of Britain, in fact. Articles in the newspapers, sketches of you and Jane Lovell posted in the train stations, all of that.”
Judging by the depth of the line between her brows, frowning was a customary expression for Nell Aubyn. “How do you know all this?”
“I’m thirty last January,” he said. “I remember it. And I have cause to know the details. The late earl became my guardian two years before you disappeared.”
Old Rushden had wanted to groom his protege. Simon’s parents hadn’t even protested. Dazzled at the prospect of their son becoming an earl, they simply had handed him over. Simon supposed his mother might have wept, once or twice.
“Oh ho,” said Nell, “so I should have shot you, then. You’re practically him!”
Simon gave her a half smile. “There is no one on this earth whom your father would consider to be less like him than I.” Rushden had nursed great pride over his lineage. He hadn’t liked having to draw from the shabbier side of the family tree. It had fed and combined with his larger fury against the unjust fate that had deprived him of sons and a daughter besides.
That daughter now smirked. “You’re trying to talk your way out of a bullet.”
“Not at all,” he said politely. “I already confiscated your pistol.”
She cast a hopeful look around the room. “Could brain you with a fire iron.”
“I don’t allow fires to be lighted in the library. All that ancient paper.”
&nbs
p; “Where’s that knife?”
“Patience,” he murmured. “You can gut me later. For now, the matter at hand. The key thing is, he looked for you everywhere. But nobody saw hide or hair of you, although every lunatic in Britain had a theory of your whereabouts. The flood of letters did slow, eventually, but even in the last month of his life, one or two arrived that claimed to know where you were.”
He’d said something very wrong. Her whole body shuddered as though she’d touched an electrical wire, then stiffened to a rigidity other women achieved only with a corset. “You get his letters, do you?”
Simon quickly wracked his brain for possible missteps. “No, he had a secretary for that.” His oldest, closest friend, now Kitty’s guardian. Grimston had always thought too highly of himself to admit he served as an amanuensis in exchange for the money Rushden “lent” him, but he’d handled Rushden’s correspondence for as long as Simon could remember.
He noticed that Nell was going very white. “And the letters that came after he kicked the bucket?” she asked.
His instincts reminded him that discretion was the better part of valor. “The executor for the estate would deal with those.” Grimston, also.
“What’s his name?” she asked flatly.
“Later,” he said, for it was clear she found the information important, and he would collect any bargaining chip available.
She nodded once, grimly. “Well,” she said. “Let me see this letter, then, that his lordship’s secretary thought worth reading.” She stuck out her hand.
He handed over the letter, which was only a copy; the original was in Grimston’s possession, having been submitted by his solicitors to the court to support the idea that Cornelia might still live. The irony was enjoyable, but Nell’s peculiar remark distracted Simon from dwelling on it. She could mean only one thing by her questioning. “Did you write to him?” If Grimston had gotten letters from her and chosen to destroy them … well, that complicated matters. It meant this would be quite the bloody battle ahead.
He felt an anticipatory thrill at the very prospect. He’d lost once to Grimston and Kitty. He would not lose again.
“Hush,” she said curtly. “I’m reading.”
This time, she read silently. At one point, her lashes flickered as though in startled recognition, but when she handed it back to him, she said only, “That’s a lot of money someone wanted.”
“Yes.” He supposed fifty pounds would seem like a fortune to her.
“Did he pay it?”
He nodded.
“Just to find out where I was?”
The question sounded awed, which stirred in him an odd, itching urge to wince. “It isn’t that much money, Nell.” He’d spent more on tips to the dealers at Monte Carlo.
“Maybe not to you,” she snapped.
This was a pointless line of argument. “Of course he paid it. He wanted very much to find you.”
“I guess they never told him where I was, though?”
That she sounded uncertain struck him as interesting. He’d always assumed the letter was nothing more than an extortion attempt, or a clever forgery fashioned under Grimston’s direction to support Kitty’s case. Certainly the wretched penmanship and mangled spelling had seemed too overdone to be real. “Do you think the writer actually knows you?”
She did not answer that. “To pay that much to a stranger … Those are some very deep pockets.”
He bit his tongue. Old Rushden easily had spent five hundred times that amount on his various investigators and advertisements. “Your father was a very wealthy man,” he said. “And he left all of it to his daughters.” Every goddamned penny, and every single property for which he’d managed to break the entail. In the months before his death, he’d set men onto the estates like vultures onto a corpse. They’d liquidated what assets they could, then bound up the profits in a trust for the girls.
“You said I was one of those daughters,” she said softly.
Finally, greed won the day. Simon smiled encouragement. “Indeed, I am convinced of it.”
A cynical little smirk crossed her face. “So I suppose you will give me that ten pounds, then.”
Christ, could her brain not budge from these trifling amounts? Five, ten, fifty—what matter? Look around you, he wanted to say, but he restrained himself, for this was the crucial moment. “You’ll receive a great deal more money than that, provided you can prove that you’re Cornelia Aubyn.”
“Ha.” It was little more than an exhalation of breath, but she suddenly looked weary. “Figures. I’ve no way to prove anything.” She gave him a quick little sideways look. “Ten pounds would do me just fine, though.”
He recognized that look. It was the quick calculation of a street dog that had spotted a bun dangling from a careless hand.
Perhaps the analogy was too apt. It called to mind, vividly, the fervor with which she’d—eaten was not the right word. Attacked the food more accurately captured it. The unsettling sensation he’d felt while watching her now resurfaced, a sort of revolted discomfort he recognized, belatedly, as his conscience.
He easily silenced that long-disused organ. It wasn’t as if he were lying. Even if Kitty surprised him by uncovering a strain of sisterly feeling—or, more unlikely yet, an urge for fair play—her guardian would not prove so angelic. Simon had long suspected that Grimston had an eye to marrying Kitty himself, and was only waiting to determine how to accomplish this feat without producing a scandal. At any rate, he would do everything in his power to prevent his ward’s fortune from being halved—particularly by an unknown guttersnipe of uncertain allegiances.
To secure her rightful share, Cornelia would need Simon’s help.
“I’d be willing to assist you,” he said. “There are ways to go about this sort of thing. Of course, it takes a legal fight, and that requires money in itself. But I could fund your efforts.” He still had a few accounts tucked away, yet to be drained.
She gave him a sly little smile, crooked and slightly toothy. Bizarrely attractive. “But you won’t help for free.”
Ah, yes, he hadn’t mistaken it: this was a carnivorous smile she was offering. One alligator’s congratulation to another: I see what you’re doing here.
Perhaps she did see. Perhaps she saw him more clearly than most people did.
Or maybe she didn’t see him clearly at all, for suddenly he wondered if he would have helped her, regardless, out of sheer, libidinal curiosity. Such pluck she had. What would it take to make her tremble?
“Perhaps I’d help you only for the pleasure of it,” he murmured. “What do you think?”
She came closer. Simon put his elbow on his thigh and leaned in to meet her. Her father would have died several years sooner, no doubt of apoplexy, if only he’d foreseen this moment: his despised heir and long-lost daughter inclining toward each other like lovers. “Can’t cozen a cozener,” she said.
Her self-possession was a gorgeous thing. A dare he had no intention of resisting. “Rarely,” he said. “But it’s always fun to try.”
One slim brow lifted. “Maybe you should just give it to me straight.”
He felt his smile widen. He would give it to her straight anywhere she liked. On a whim, he reached out to touch her face.
She went still. Those magnificent blue eyes locked on his as he stroked her cheek. No, not magnificent: they were too much like Kitty’s eyes. Yet beneath the grime, her skin was as soft as new velvet, and the discovery made his own skin prickle. A peculiar pleasure flooded through him, sharp edged, greedy, curiously prideful. It was a feeling he associated with the discovery of a rare genius, some talent that others had overlooked—a pirate’s triumph, really: the thrill of finding and seizing buried treasure.
All for me, he thought.
“Take your hand away,” she said, “or I’ll knock your teeth in.”
He almost invited her to try. She fenced so well with her wits. It might be entertaining to see what she could do with her fists.
He withdrew the reluctant hand to his thigh, where it dug into his quadriceps in the effort to behave itself. What would she look like once he’d cleaned her up? Like Kitty, his mind insisted, but his intuition spoke differently. The light in her eyes seemed too militant and keen now to be confused with her sister’s.
“Honestly, then.” He paused to clear the hoarseness from his voice. Had he ever had a woman quite like her? He didn’t go trawling in the East End for bed sport, of course. But this bizarre attraction seemed to have less to do with her dirt than with her demeanor.
Due to the circumstances, his lust also contained an element of possessiveness. Quite novel, this covetous feeling. But natural. For his plans to succeed, nobody else must have this girl. Only him.
Indeed, she might well have been fashioned just for him. No family to placate. No tiresome expectations of romance and chivalry. No expectations whatsoever.
It dawned on him that her mood had changed. She had scooted forward to the very edge of her seat and now rested her weight on the balls of her feet, poised to spring up and flee.
He forced himself to sit back and cross his legs, creating the picture of a man at ease. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t enjoy catching her. But it always worked better when a woman wanted to be caught.
His posture communicated the desired message. She eased back in her chair.
He gave her a pleasant smile and borrowed her language. “To tell it to you straight, then: I inherited the earldom and a few crumbling and unprofitable estates. Your father took great pains to see that I inherited nothing else.”
She watched him expressionlessly. “Why?”
He shrugged. “He thought very highly of the Aubyn lineage. My conduct … failed to satisfy him. At any rate, all the true wealth went to his daughters—at this point, to Katherine. As a result, everything left to me stands at risk. The estates are going to seed. I’ve no money to support or improve them, and this is widely known, or will be, soon enough. Paired with certain other considerations”—chiefly, his reputation—”this prevents me from finding a quick solution to my financial difficulties, such as—”