Luck Is No Lady (6 page)

That he was the club's owner also meant this was most likely the house of “moral corruption” Lady Winterdale had so scathingly mentioned.

With a subtle twitch of one dark eyebrow, Mr. Bentley asked, “You are here to apply for the bookkeeping position?”

The rich tones of his voice reminded her of how he had whispered to her in the intimate darkness of Hawksworth's study. Her nerves danced nearly out of her control before she sharply reined them in. She could manage this.

The chances of Mr. Bentley associating her with the woman from that night had to be slim to none, considering all he had to go on was the sound of her voice in a low whisper. Certainly not enough to entertain the possibility that the same woman would reappear in his club, seeking a position as his bookkeeper.

So why did it feel as though her heart beat at twice its natural pace?

Emma tried to get past her anxiety and view the situation rationally. She was here now. She just needed to make it through the interview without doing or saying anything that might give her away.

And try again to forget the excitement of standing in the dark with him, and the stirring sensation of his lips on hers.

Emma Louise Chadwick!

She could manage this.

She had to.

But even if she made it through the interview and he actually offered her the job, could she fathom working for this man every day?

He was still waiting for her answer.

She cleared her throat. “I am.”

The expression on his far-too-handsome face did not change. “What is your name?”

“Mrs. Adams, sir.” The name fell oddly from her tongue. She hoped he would not notice.

Emma had thought about it on the drive over and decided not to provide her given name. It was vital no one discover just how bad the Chadwicks' circumstances were. And a married woman garnered more respect, influence, and protection than an unmarried one.

“I am Roderick Bentley, owner and proprietor of this club. Have you any references, Mrs. Adams?”

“No, sir,” she answered.

“Any record of your past employment?”

“No.”

One slashing brow arced just a bit over his steady gaze. “Have you
had
any past employment?”

Emma resisted a frown. He certainly got to the point, didn't he? The trepidation that danced down her spine spread across her shoulders, making them ache with discomfort. She had hoped to have an opportunity to prove her abilities before hashing over these unfortunate details. “No, sir, I have not.”

He paused for a moment before asking, “What exactly qualifies you for this position?”

Though his expression remained emotionless and quite businesslike, Emma detected a note of amusement in his voice. She felt herself getting defensive.

“I admit my experience to date has been limited”—she would need to stretch the truth a bit—“but I am adept at various applications of mathematics and accounting. I am confident I possess the skills necessary for managing the financial accounts of a successful business.”

Nerves made her answer sound stiff and arrogant, but she saw no reason to elaborate further. Either he would be able to look past her lack of experience or he wouldn't.

He did not reply right away. Leaning back in his chair, he rested his splayed hands on the surface of his thighs and stared at her over his desk with a strange sort of quiet concentration. It was as if he was searching for something that could not be seen.

Though nothing in his expression changed, he tilted his head to the side.

Emma was reminded of how he had studied her in the same way behind the curtain. Then, he could not possibly have seen anything beyond the shadowed outline of her person. But now, she felt terribly exposed under his regard as she stood in the center of the room.

She fought to keep herself standing confident and strong. She would not be intimidated by his manner or distracted by his striking attractiveness.

After a long, distressing moment, he leaned forward again and rested his forearms on his desk. His features relaxed in a way that did not manage to ease Emma's concern. In fact, the glitter in his gaze and the hint of a smile hovering around his lips triggered a rush of self-awareness.

“Do you understand the type of business I run here?” he asked.

Hearing the patronizing tone, Emma responded with a tight little smile. “It appears to be a social club.”

“Is that all you know?”

The tone of his voice lowered. It was as if he were trying to discomfit her, make her uneasy and self-conscious.

It was fortunate for her she was already as nervous as she could get.

She raised her brows in innocent query. “Should I know more? Is your club infamous, Mr. Bentley?”

His lips twitched. Emma got the impression he detected the sarcasm in her response and it amused him.

“Some would say so,” he replied. “Does that concern you?”

Of course it did.

“Of course not.” She kept her tone steady, refusing to show the slightest hint of apprehension. She first needed to succeed in obtaining an offer for the position, then she could decide if she would actually accept it.

A thought occurred to her and she decided to ask a question of her own. “I wonder, sir, if you pursued this line of questioning with your other applicants?”

He smiled in full. The angles of his face sharpened and his blue eyes flashed.

Emma's frazzled nerves went into uproar.

“My other applicants were not female,” he answered.

“And that makes a difference?” Emma countered, her anxiety overruled by her growing irritation.

“It does.”

She had not expected him to be so blunt about the matter of her gender. Then again, it was a gentlemen's club. Clearly, he was having a hard time envisioning a woman managing the books for such an establishment.

She would have to broaden his perspective.

“I seem to be a bit dense on the issue.” She did not even try to keep the exasperation out of her voice. “Perhaps if you enlighten me as to what my gender has to do with the ability to manage financial accounts, I will better understand your concerns.”

His brows lifted at her haughty tone and he sat back again in his chair. To her surprise, he did not appear offended by her impudence. Rather, she noted a spark of curiosity lighting his blue eyes.

“I am starting to believe you may have tougher skin than I first thought, Mrs. Adams.”

“Is that also a requisite for the position?” she asked with another tight smile.

He lowered his chin and gave a short chuckle then looked up again to meet her eyes. A subtle ripple of heat traversed through her system. She wished she knew better how to counteract his bold manner, but had no experience with men like him.

“It is, in fact.” His casual tone contrasted with his intent gaze. “Bentley's provides a wide range of entertainments for our members, some of which may be offensive to delicate sensibilities.”

He undoubtedly referred to the gambling and drinking that probably occurred in abundance in the public rooms. Recalling Lady Winterdale's obvious disdain—no,
disgust
—of the place, Emma realized she herself was not so prudish about such things. Hadn't she spent years living with her father's pursuit of the very same self-indulgences?

“As the club's bookkeeper, would I be expected to participate in any of these diversions?”

His brows lowered briefly into a frown before relaxing again. “Of course not. It would be a rare occasion you would even be in the building during public hours.”

“Then I see no problem,” Emma stated firmly in an effort to convince herself as much as Mr. Bentley. “Are there any other qualifications you require? Aside from a tough skin, that is.”

“I will be sure to let you know should I think of any.” His mouth curled as he leaned forward to slide a small stack of documents across the desk toward her. “Now, since I have no desire to go through a litany of your experience with figures and sums and other such fascinating evidences, I have devised an audition.”

His attention remained focused on her as she stepped forward to take the paperwork in her hands. Ignoring his penetrating stare, she gently sifted through the material and saw it consisted of various invoices, receipts, IOUs, and other such documents of expense and profit.

“You may take a seat over there and bring to me the final figures once you have finished.”

Following the direction of his glance, Emma turned to see a small desk set off in a corner of the room. It did not seem to belong in the space, and she suspected it had been brought in for the specific purpose of the
auditions
.

Sparing a quick glance over her shoulder at Mr. Bentley, she saw he had drawn a ledger from the stack on his desk and spread it open before him. He appeared to have dismissed her to her task, but she was not fooled by his apparent distraction. Something in his manner gave the impression he would be fully aware of her throughout the duration of her work.

She crossed the room and settled herself into the wooden chair, tucking her legs neatly beneath the desk. She did not bother to remove her bonnet or pelisse. There was a possibility she would not be there long enough for it to be necessary. She did, however, remove her gloves to better handle the slips of paper as she began to organize the various documents into stacks of like items. She sorted through them, and the familiarity of the information they contained softened some of the tension infusing her muscles. Feeling a return of her fading confidence, she drew a sheet of blank paper from the supply set on the corner of the desk and dipped her pen into the inkwell.

As she worked through the figures, her focus sank gratefully into the comfortable patterns of computation. Numbers never lied or caused disappointment. There was infinite beauty in the consistency of mathematics.

This here was what she understood.

Roderick stared at the woman seated behind the small desk. Her workspace was cramped and ill suited to her task, yet she kept her spine straight and her head tipped at a genteel angle while she moved the pen smoothly over the paper. Her manner was unhurried and efficient. She barely made a sound as she sifted through the various documents one by one.

It had taken all the skill he'd developed over the years not to give away the flash of exhilaration that ran through him when he had looked up to see the young woman from Hawksworth's ball standing in his office. His glimpse of her face that night had been brief, but the details had been burned into his mind. There was no doubt the woman who had spirited herself away from Marwood was here now.

Keeping his reaction from being revealed in any outward expression, he had waited for some indication she recognized him as well. But she remained entirely unperturbed, fully composed.

What the hell was she doing here?

A daughter of the beau monde did not seek employment at a gambling hell.

He studied her in her common garb. He may never have guessed she had been gowned in fine silk and lace of a high society debutante only a week prior. Her dress today was simple and clean, but worn at the hem. Her pelisse was quite dull and her bonnet was of a style he hadn't seen around in years. Nothing about her appearance now would suggest she belonged in the ballrooms of London's highest society.

She was intentionally practicing a deception. That much was clear. What Roderick needed to know was whether or not her deception involved any threat to his club.

His experience with women of her social standing was limited and unfavorable. Yet she did not behave as those ladies had. Not so far today, and not when they had met in Hawksworth's darkened study. That night her witty retorts and thinly veiled sarcasm had helped him forget he stood in the enemy's lair. Her manner had been far more self-assured than he would have expected from a young debutante.

That same self-assurance had lifted her chin defiantly when he suggested the position as club's bookkeeper might not be suited to a modest lady. He sensed her indignation even before she challenged his implication. She had a sharp tongue tucked behind her even teeth, though he suspected she did not allow herself much occasion to use it.

None of it explained why she was here.

Relaxing his gaze, he made conscious effort to clear his mind. Whenever he was in doubt about anything, from which card to throw down to which road he should take, Roderick relied on his gut feelings.

As he sought to identify what his intuition might be telling him about the young lady before him, he experienced a strange tightness in his chest. It was not a sensation he had felt before and it took him a moment to get past the odd feeling. When he did, he did not notice any rise of trepidation or tremor of caution through his psyche. There was no tug of reluctance or flash of warning.

There was just an intense tightening sensation spreading out in thin rivers of awareness through his person. It was a sort of inner urging.

She may have applied for the position as the club's bookkeeper under less than honest circumstances, but there was something about her…something that made Roderick wonder if she might be exactly what he needed.

He didn't believe for a moment Mrs. Adams was her real name, but that did not bother him so much. Many of Bentley's staff members did not go by their given names.

He had made it a policy long ago to judge no one by their past. He measured people by their ability to be loyal to him and to Bentley's. Whatever they may have done or whoever they were before coming to him was irrelevant as long as he was able to trust them to carry out the tasks he assigned and maintain the best interests of the club. He had never gone wrong in this approach.

Until Goodwin.

Roderick lowered his gaze to the incomprehensible markings in the ledger before him. He fought off the frown threatening to weigh his brow.

The rows and columns spread across the page before him wavered under his steady gaze. He had spent hours over the last two weeks intent on discovering the mysteries contained in the orderly itemizations of notes and figures. But he had gotten no closer to solving the problem of his skewed profits.

He knew something in the ledger was wrong, but he was horrible with calculations and abhorred the tedious process of figuring sums and products. He had never been able to force numbers into making proper sense, and he had long ago given up on trying. He employed a bookkeeper for the express purpose of not having to.

Roderick accepted the uncomfortable twist in his gut when he thought of his former accountant. He may never figure out how Goodwin had managed to fool him, but he would not allow that failure to affect his confidence in his own judgment.

Freddie Goodwin had been with him from the day Bentley's opened its doors nearly four years ago. Goodwin's financial reports were produced promptly when requested, and the information was always presented in a way Roderick could easily decipher. Roderick never considered it odd that Goodwin preferred to handle every aspect of the books personally, even when he went out of town on holiday. It made sense the accountant would not want someone interrupting his system. Besides, Bentley's turned a steady profit, and as long as their stores were full and their coffers sufficient to hold for the time Freddie was away, Roderick saw no reason to cross that threshold.

He never once sensed anything deceptive in the accountant's modest character. Roderick may be a horrid hand at figures, but he had always been able to trust his intuition.

Then fifteen days ago, Freddie Goodwin disappeared.

On that day, while Roderick waited for his bookkeeper to come to his office for a scheduled appointment, a sick feeling settled in his stomach. The longer he waited, the worse he felt. When he finally decided to search for the man, he discovered Goodwin's rooms within the club had been emptied sometime the night before.

Tracing back through everything he knew about Goodwin, Roderick had hoped to discover some clue to his former employee's motivation and his new whereabouts. Unfortunately, every lead ran into a dead end. Frederick Goodwin didn't seem to exist beyond the scope of his dealings as Bentley's bookkeeper.

Goodwin did, however, leave behind the ledgers detailing Bentley's accounts from day one to present. It was as if he didn't even care to conceal his actions now that he had gotten away. He was clearly quite confident in having made a safe escape. That, or he didn't think his employer would find anything useful in the accounts.

Most everyone assumed Roderick's acumen with investments involved mathematical skill. It didn't. He made his money on the exchange the same as he made it at the gambling tables: through pure gut instinct.

Goodwin had been with him long enough to know that.

Still, Roderick had quickly gathered up the ledgers to review the club's financial data, searching for evidence of embezzlement. Despite hours of studying the rows and columns of numbers and symbols, he never got beyond the feeling he was trying to read ancient hieroglyphics.

He finally accepted that he would need to bring in someone with the proper skills to decipher the accounts. But he was not going to make the same mistake twice. After placing the advertisement a full week ago, Roderick had received numerous applicants, all of them quite adequately versed in the required skill set.

He had hired none of them.

Not one of them had discovered anything out of the ordinary in Freddie's accounting. They had all, each and every one of them, come up with the exact same total the bookkeeper had documented in the ledger. Yet Roderick remained convinced there was something off about the calculations. He just hadn't the skill to find it. And apparently, none of the applicants had either.

It was terribly frustrating.

He returned his gaze to the young lady calling herself Mrs. Adams just as she rose abruptly to her feet with her gloves in one hand and the financial documents held delicately in the other. She had finished the calculations much faster than her predecessors.

When she saw him staring at her, she hesitated.

He did not shift his focus, and after a moment, she came forward to set the paperwork on the desk. Taking a step back, she drew the serviceable gloves back over her hands, linked her fingers in front of her, and waited. She moved as though she had carefully calculated the amount of energy required for every physical adjustment and did not expend the slightest bit more than absolutely necessary.

She was rather attractive in a buttoned-up, impervious sort of way. Perhaps even more so than when she had been in her ballroom finery. Her figure was gently curved and perfectly proportionate to her height. He might have called her petite if not for the fact that the strength of her presence belied such a diminutive description. But more than the pleasant makeup of her physical attributes, an element of mystery lay carefully concealed beneath her subdued appearance.

Roderick narrowed his gaze.

She allowed very little to show in her expression or manner, but he noticed one thing she could not disguise. If he hadn't been so familiar with the look of desperation, having seen it a thousand times in his life, starting with his mother, he might have missed its presence in this woman. But there it was, crouching in the shadows of her intelligent gaze.

Right alongside the desperation, Roderick detected something his mother had never possessed: fortitude. The young woman's strength of character was present in the taut line of her delicate jaw, the tension in her mouth, and the way her eyes, a crystalline shade of gray, met his with unwavering focus, despite the fact that he had been rudely staring at her for an inordinate amount of time.

She was not one to back down from a challenge.

Desire flared in an acute response, taking Roderick by surprise.

It had been the same the night of Hawksworth's ball. He hadn't intended on stealing the chaste little kiss. Then as now, desire had come upon him unexpectedly in an impulsive reaction to the unusual intimacy of their encounter. But once he felt the texture of her lips beneath his, it had not been an easy thing to release her.

He cleared his throat. Perhaps he had gone too long without a female companion.

What had it been? Four months?

No, seven since he ended the arrangement with his last mistress.

That had to be the cause of his restless libido.

Forcing his attention in another direction, he drew the sheet of her calculations from the neat pile of paperwork. His desire, appropriate or not, was not the important issue at the moment.

Roderick took a moment to note the perfectly ordered rows and columns written in tight handwriting, which allowed all the figures to fit on one sheet while still keeping the information readable. He ran his gaze down to the final total in the corner and felt a slide of raw disappointment through his gut, but to be sure, he turned his ledger to the appropriate page and found that her amount matched Goodwin's to the penny.

Was it possible he had chosen a selection with no discrepancies?

No. He didn't think so. This was the last selection of documents Freddie had worked on before vanishing. Roderick felt certain there was some evidence to be found there.

But it had not been revealed in her work.

Resistance reared its head over what he had to say. “Thank you, Mrs. Adams,” he said stiffly. “I appreciate your time, but I do not believe you will suit.”

The words of dismissal came uneasily to his tongue. His gut twisted in rebellion. He wrote off the insistent urging as a residue of his physical attraction.

He would never risk the livelihood of Bentley's based on a wayward attraction. He needed more than a competent bookkeeper. He needed a mathematical investigator who could resolve the mystery Goodwin had left behind.

“It is not the figure you were looking for?”

Her tone was even more rigid than his had been. He looked up to see her still standing stern and unmoving on the other side of his desk. Her irritation was palpable.

“No, it is not,” he replied.

Her intensity did not waver as she held his gaze. The impact of her steady gray eyes angled straight to his center.

“May I ask one thing before I take my leave, Mr. Bentley?”

He should refuse.

He gave a short nod.

“Did you set me up to fail your audition because I am a woman?” Her voice was clipped and sharp in the manner reserved for offended females.

Stiffening at the accusation, he narrowed his gaze. “Excuse me?”

“Did you intentionally withhold the information necessary for me to provide an accurate total?”

A keen spark of hope flared to life. He had provided her with every document pertaining to the accounts for one entire month. “What makes you believe anything is missing?” he queried.

She paused for a long moment, and Roderick got the impression she was trying to decide if his inquiry was genuine. Then she stepped up to the desk and gently separated some of the receipts and invoices from the rest of the stack. She turned them and spread them out for him to view.

“As you can see on these statements, there is a small notation marked either in the lower corner, or here near the middle to the right side. It is a significant variation from the symbol typically used, but I am quite certain it references a refund due on the accounts.”

Roderick lifted one of the receipts and studied the strange marking—what could possibly be a small and barely discernible
R
beside the rows of figures. He hadn't thought anything of it.

“A refund? Why would you suspect that?”

“In this instance,” she said as she pointed to an invoice from the candle maker, “the amount charged in advance for a month's supply of candles is highly overstated. Considering there is gas lighting in your hallway, and I suspect in much of the public areas as well”—she lifted a brow in question, and he nodded confirmation of her assumption—“then a place this size would not use nearly the amount of candles estimated here. Unless the invoice is false and the order in fact covers more than one month, or a credit was carried over to the next order, there would have been a significant refund due. That, or your closets are currently overflowing with a ridiculous supply of candles.”