A Much Compromised Lady (12 page)

That she would not give up. It felt far too
tenuous a tie to her real self—her real life.

Ah, but this took more courage than had
thought it would, to step into this earl’s world and have
everything about her change into nothing she knew.

Except for the Earl of St. Albans.

A kind word, a sympathetic look, and she
would have been in his arms. The thought of it tempted as nothing
ever had in her life. Her throat ached with the need for comforting
arms about her. And in the dark of her room at night, she curled up
tight and lay there, her eyes open, telling herself this would not
go on forever, and feeling so very alone.

If it had been only for herself, she would
have fled. She would have run back to her Gypsy life and would have
forgotten the fine clothes that lay light as gossamer on her skin.
She would have left the soft bed, and the foods whose smells made
her mouth water. She would have even left the hot baths behind.

She ached for something familiar. The hard
ground. The owl’s hoot, and the crow’s sharp caw. The smell of the
air after rain. She wanted something to hold onto, for she felt as
if she was falling. And she wanted someone to hold her and to tell
her that it would be alright.

Ah, but it would not. Not until this was
done. Fate had put her feet upon a path and she must ask God to
give her the strength to walk forward.

And all the while her
gaujo
smiled so
charming, and acted as if he lived for nothing other than to please
her.

When her new clothes arrived—clothes that fit
her almost too well, she thought, for they showed every curve of
her body—he took her driving in the park. She craned for a glimpse
of Lord Nevin’s carriage, but St. Albans merely smiled and told her
to be patient.

Bah—patience! If—when—this ever ended, she
wanted never to hear the word again.

And the Earl took her out with him in the
evening, to places that left Glynis’s eyes wide for how little the
women wore. She stayed very close to St. Albans on those nights,
for she did not like the look in other men’s eyes as they stared at
her in her low-cut silk gowns. She glared back at them, until they
grew uncomfortable and turned away. And she knew, when this was all
over, it would be a relief to live anyplace in England except this
city that smelled of too many horses and people and chimneys. She
longed even more for her simple house in a village.

Each night, she left her bedchamber windows
open, and peered out into the darkness before retiring.

But Christo did not come.

Had he lost track of them? Had something
happened to him? She fretted even more about that.

On her sixth night with St. Albans, she
pleaded a headache after their drive—he had made good on his
promise that day to take her about London, and had done so,
spending the whole day on her, as attentive as any girl could wish
for. He had smiled at her, and had even made her laugh with his
comments, and she knew that she could not dine with him alone that
night. She was starting to like his company too much. She was
starting, in fact, to crave his presence. To depend on him. And
that was not a safe thing at all, she knew.

So she told him she was tired, and she gave
him a smile, and she fled, her heart in her throat, and half
wishing he would follow her up to her room.

He did not.

Rake!
What sort of rake was he that he
left a woman alone in her chamber night after night, her bed empty
of anything but those dreams that plagued her.

Ah, but it was better this way, she told
herself fiercely as she brushed out her hair. She had learned to
allow the maid to help her dress, but she undressed herself. It was
the one pattern left from her old life. She clung to it as dearly
as she held onto her worn blue gown.

Wrapping herself in one of the high-waisted
brocade dressing gowns that the Earl had provided for her, she
opened the window and leaned her elbows on the sill. The faint
sweetness of jasmine lay in the air, offering a promise of summer
heat soon to come. Spring was slipping by so fast.

Going back to her bed, she curled up, her
candle still lit.

She did not want to sleep, and she while had
raided his lordship’s library for a selection of novels, none of
them appealed tonight. She wanted company. She wanted to talk to
someone—to St. Albans, in fact. She wanted to tell him more of her
life, and she wanted to ask him about his.

She wanted to trust him.

“Oh, don’t be a fool,” she muttered to
herself.

A scrabbling noise outside her window pulled
her upright.

Getting out of bed, she padded across the
floor and peered outside. Her heart lightened as she glimpsed
familiar broad shoulders; her pulse raced as she saw how perilously
he clung to the ivy that climbed the wall beside her window.

“Are you going to help me, or are you too
fine a lady for that now?” Christo growled.

“Hush. You’ll wake someone,” she said, taking
hold of his arm.

The vine trembled as if the trellis would
collapse, but Christo grabbed for her window and caught the ledge.
Grasping his belt, she pulled him in. They tumbled into the room
with him on top of her.

Immediately, she swatted at him. “What took
you so long?” She wrapped her arms around him and hugged tight.
“Ah, I’ve missed you so.”

“
Dromboy tume Romanle
,” he said,
offering the Romany greeting with a smile in his voice and his arms
about her.

From the doorway, a deep, lazy voice from the
doorway cut across Glynis’s joy, and she could not mistake the icy
anger that lay underneath. “My dear, if you wish to have visitors,
I must insist that you invite them in through the front door.”

St. Albans lowered the pistol he had brought
with him. After Gascoyne’s alert that an intruder had entered the
gardens, he’d had a suspicion he would find this Gypsy fellow here,
and caution seemed in order. It was a touch tempting, however, to
shoot the fellow and toss his lifeless body out the window. But, to
judge by his Gypsy’s welcome for the fellow, he could not do that
without alienating her affections. He would have to endure.

His Gypsy rose to her feet, as did her
companion, moving with easy athleticism. “I didn’t think I would be
welcome,” the fellow said, his tone insolent and his expression
even more so.

St. Albans raised an eyebrow, and turned to
Glynis. “You are hardly a prisoner. And while I have been aware
that your...”

He hesitated for an accurate description, and
as he did, his Gypsy’s chin rose. “My Lord St. Albans, I think it
is time you formally met my brother, Christopher Chatwin Dawes—the
rightful Lord Nevin.”

The rest of St. Albans prepared speech went
out of his head. Every muscle stilled. And an unaccountable relief
mixed with his astonishment.

The rightful Lord Nevin?
What in
blazes would she next be inventing—castles in the sky? And
yet...had she not said that she was after an inheritance from
Nevin? Hers and her brother’s it seemed.

At the moment, her brother was hissing
something at her in his Gypsy tongue, and she was answering back,
her eyes dark and flashing.

A brother, eh? The tension eased from St.
Albans’s shoulder. The fellow would no doubt prove a
nuisance—family always did—but he had disliked excessively the
thought that his Gypsy might be sneaking a lover into Winters
House.

“I do hate to interrupt this family
squabble,” he said now. “But I suggest brandy, a fire, and then
explanations.”

Without waiting for any agreement with his
plan, he moved to the bellpull. His Gypsy’s brother—this Christo
fellow—began to mutter something else to her, and after ringing for
Gascoyne, St. Albans gave the fellow a cold stare. “And you may
either keep quiet, or speak for all to hear. I have had enough of
your poor manners.”

The man’s jaw tensed, and he glared at St.
Albans, but the Earl took no notice of it. He still held his
pistol, after all, so let the fellow be surly. However, he was done
with them sharing secrets in their Gypsy language.

Gascoyne arrived, prompt as ever.

Giving orders for a fire to be laid and
brandy to be brought, St. Albans put his pistol on the mantle in
the salon and waited for more candles to be lit.

When they were comfortable enough—the fire
blazing, glasses and decanter on a satinwood drum table, his Gypsy
curled up on the couch with her brother next to her—St. Albans
leaned against the mantle, within reach of his pistol. His Gypsy’s
brother, after all, had come rather close to skewering him, and the
fellow’s black eyes still glittered darkly.

“Now you may explain this claim of yours,”
St. Albans said.

Silence greeted him as brother and sister
exchanged a glance, the brother’s stare glowering and suspicious,
the sister’s questioning.

Now that he was looking for them, St. Albans
saw the strong resemblance between them. Not just in dark coloring,
but in the arch of eyebrows, the strong nose and high cheekbones,
the slanting shape of their eyes. Glynis was the far more
fetching—her features more refined, her ears small, her chin more
rounded—but this Gypsy fellow would clean up well enough if his
hair was trimmed, the dark stubble on his cheek shaved off, and his
clothes cut to fit.

The silence stretched until only the hiss of
coal burning filled the room. St. Albans gave a small sigh. It
would have to be up to him, it seemed. “There is no point in
keeping anything from me. I have my own ways of finding the truth.
For example, I am well aware that your brother here has been
skulking about for the past few days.”

“I was not skulking,” Christo said, teeth
gritted. “I was keeping a watch.”

“Well, if you were also doing the same with
Lord Nevin, you have no doubt set his staff on alert as well.”

The Gypsy fellow gave a derisive snort.
“Those fools. They know nothing.”

“Arrogant of you to think so. However, I will
grant that Lord Nevin is—”

“He is not Lord Nevin, my brother—”

St. Albans held up a hand. “Yes, I know, your
brother claims that title—the imperative word here being
claims
. However, to prevent argument, we shall keep to given
names and leave titles out of it. And while Francis Dawes—whom you
do claim for an uncle—is no doubt full of his own conceit, he does
not lack intelligence. If you were lucky, his staff took you for no
more than just another garden-variety thief.”

The impudent fellow smiled and leaned back.
“My sister is the one with the light fingers in the family.”

St. Albans’s irritation with this fellow
deepened. This Gypsy lounged here, brandy glass in hand, as if he
honestly was a lord. Instead, he was likely an imposter, a liar,
and very much as bad as his host.

So what did that make his sister?

Glancing at his Glynis, St. Albans found her
frowning at a pillow, tugging on its gold braid, and
uncharacteristically quiet. If he did not know better, he might
have thought her pensive stare held a touch of shame at this
mention of her past. That seemed unlike her. But he found he also
did not like that she had been made uncomfortable.

St. Albans turned back to the brother. “I am
well aware of your sister’s...borrowing abilities.” He smiled,
recalling how they had met—and how she had looked half undressed.
And he had to forcibly drag his attention back to this moment.
“That is not under discussion. What I wish to hear from you is as
much of the truth as can fall from your lips. Just who was your
father, and why should you think you are legitimate heirs of the
Dawes family?”

The fellow’s black eyes glittered again,
hostile and bright. With his disheveled hair and jaw shadowed by
beard, he looked a hang-gallows. “Why should we tell you
anything?”

St. Albans smiled. “Because you are both in
my power, and I can do you a good deal of harm, or good, as my whim
takes me. It is quite up to you which direction I am swayed.”

“Let me tell him, Christo. It is time. And he
has no reason to betray us.”

Pressing his lips thin, St. Albans kept back
the words that slipped into his mind. In truth, he had every reason
to prefer that his Gypsy remain a Gypsy. If she became the
recognized, legitimate sister of the Baron of Nevin, that gave her
a measure of protection from him that he would just as soon she not
have.

However, he had never allowed a lady’s birth
or status to interfere with her ruination—not if the lady willingly
participated. But it was an uncomfortable thought that she might
not be the wild Gypsy that he wanted her to be.

“Well?” he asked. Pulling out his snuff box,
he helped himself to a delicate pinch. It was a habit he had taken
up over a decade ago, when he first came to town and shortly after
the one disastrous entanglement of his life. Its use really was
more as a prop, something to do with his hands, so that he never
fidgeted, a habit he had deployed in himself when he was as young
as these two.

His Gypsy shot her brother a glance. The
fellow looked as if he wanted to say something—no doubt in Gypsy.
St. Albans kept his stare fixed on the fellow. He really would
shoot the man if he said a word that was not in English. The
fellow’s jaw worked, his mouth pulled down and at last he waved his
hand at his sister and turned to stare into the fire.

Glynis glanced back to St. Albans, an
expression of relief upon her face, as if this was a secret that
had become too heavy to carry.

“My father was Edward Dawes—the late Lord
Nevin’s eldest son. He married my mother—honestly married her—at a
small church in the village of Nevin, near to the Welsh
border.”

“And how do you know this—your mother told
you?” St. Albans asked, trying to keep the skepticism from his
voice.