My Pleasure (10 page)

DeMarc spared him little thought; he’d been consumed by a need to know whom the vicar had thought he’d recognized in that boyish form. So he had gone after the slight figure, instructing his carriage to follow the hansom cab the woman had hired.

And there, in Vauxhall Garden, the bright globe lights had revealed what the vicar had seen: Helena Nash.

DeMarc’s fury compounded his sense of betrayal. That she would seek such low entertainments! Be dressed so shockingly—no, so scandalously! But far worse, that she could forget for an instant her duty to him was unconscionable! Insufferable.

So he had followed her, trailing far behind, and when she hurried down the notorious Lovers Walk, he followed her there, too, gall rising in his throat when she met a young man. Then she’d sent him away, and he’d thought she would leave.

She hadn’t.

He came. His sparring partner. His instructor. His… what had that foolish Prussian woman had the audacity to proclaim him? His master. Ramsey Munro.

He came, and she had blossomed in his presence like some wickedly ripe flower, and Munro…? He fair shimmered with carnal appetite.

DeMarc opened his eyes. They were gone.

But he knew where to find her. Just as he knew what to do to remind her to whom she belonged.

INSISTENCE:

forcing an attack through a parry

RAMSEY MUNRO LED HELENA along Lovers Walk until it intersected with another path called the Druid’s Walk, he informed her politely, because of the many coyly posed and cunningly illuminated statues amongst the greenery. From there, they entered the broad, brightly lit Grand Walk.

Here the clandestine atmosphere gave way to a festive one. A monkey leapt from his trainer’s shoulder to steal the feathers from ladies’ hair and return them with a bow as he held out a small tin cup for a coin. Jugglers wove through the multitudes, and cartmen selling cakes and savories rolled along the avenues while boys laboring under great canisters of arrack punch strapped to their backs hawked mugfuls for half a bob.

Helena drank it all in, the color, the noise, the scents of garlic and perfume, wood smoke and bakery goods underscored by the briny stench rising from the Thames. People of all sorts and sizes, some richly costumed and others covered by cheap dominos, sauntered by, laughing and joking, listening to the various musicians, watching the mummery shows, and pausing to inspect the elaborate dioramas.

Helena could not help but notice that as many women covertly inspected Ramsey Munro as they did the exhibits. But it was not only the ladies who were drawn to him. Several times gentlemen clapped him on the back with exaggerated bonhomie. His discomfort with such familiarity was obvious, but he greeted their blusters politely. Oddly, his tolerance for their brazenness did not extend to her. He stepped in front of her at their approach, obliquely shielding her from their curious glances.

“A student?” Helena asked after the last such encounter.

“An applicant.”

“You are highly regarded.”

“I am currently en vogue,” he said, regarding her lazily, yet she could not help but feel that razor-sharp attentiveness lurking behind his detachment. “I fill a special niche in society. I live at the sufferance and behest of my betters. Which is, I suppose”—his mouth tilted up at one side—“a good deal better than not living at all.”

“You teach fencing,” she said. “That is hardly scraping and bowing.”

“Not all bowing is a matter of bending at the waist,” he said. He held out his arm, and she placed her hand upon his hard, muscled forearm, keeping pace with him as he moved. “I am regarded as something more than their servant, something less than their tailor.”

“Hardly,” she disagreed. “Those gentlemen would never greet their tailor so enthusiastically.”

“You think not?” he asked in a bored voice. “Perhaps you are right. I have a skill they pay me handsomely to teach. Since it is not a skill that makes a person in any way more useful or even more ornamental than say, a tailor’s craft, Society, following the vagaries for which it is noted, deems it more romantic than those more practical services. And thus my own poor self more worthy of their interest.

“ ‘Who is he?’ they ask themselves. ‘Where did he learn to gut a man in two slight moves? How terribly savage! And how can I learn to do it, too?’ ”

Put thus, it did indeed seem absurd. But his words gave rise to a hundred questions. Where had Ramsey Munro been these past four years? Where had he been before that? Before the French prison? What had he been five years ago? Ten? She frowned. Who was Ramsey Munro?

“Men are at heart bloodthirsty beasts,” he was saying, drawing her along as easily as if they were strolling through Hyde Park after Sunday services, “fascinated by violence and those who are able to harness it to their purpose. Tell me, do you not find it quixotic that I am invited into their drawing rooms when the tutor or governess who has custody of their offsprings’ character isn’t allowed through the door?”

He stopped before a blooming topiary. “Oh, not every drawing room door.” He flashed a smile. “Some people maintain standards.”

“You sound as if you despise the skills you teach.”

“No. Not a bit of it,” he corrected her with unwilling gravity. “But then, I was taught swordplay as a discipline, not a sport.”

“A discipline?”

“Yes. The mind translated to physical expression, precision and instinct honed by long years of practice before being married to imagination. I never even held a sword until I had mastered the elemental footwork. It took me a year to do so, and I was an adept student.

“Given my druthers, I would teach it the same way. Hone my students’ skills like my masters honed their blades. But I haven’t the time. I haven’t—” He broke off, essaying a brief, shattering smile before turning his bright gaze away from her, concealing once more the core of him.

“Be damned!” he drawled. “As improbable as it is, I swear I begin to bore even myself! I commend you, miss, on your apparent ability to perambulate while asleep. Because I cannot for the life of me conceive how you could have remained awake during that self-aggrandizing little sermon.”

“On the contrary, I found it fascinating.”

“Did you?” he asked, looking amused and cool and invulnerable. “Lud, my dear, you must contrive to get out more often. Shall we continue on?”

He set out to charm her, droll and wry and a little bit wicked in his observations. He led her from amusement to amusement, purchasing ribbons and silk flowers to pin to her sleeves, plying her with the delicious arrack punch and tiny iced cakes, and stopping once beneath a giant beech tree to listen to a string quartet play one of Handel’s sonatas. In short, he did exactly as he had promised. He showed her a new world and made her feel irresistible.

Luckily, she had been admired before. Luckily, she would not read anything into that. Luckily, her head could not be turned by the intensity of his regard. She knew better. She would not become smitten with him. Ramsey Munro was adept at making a lady feel attractive and interesting. Wasn’t that a rake’s stock-in-trade?

Their path eventually led them toward the crescents of dinner boxes lining either side of The Grove, where a party of masked revelers had begun a riotous country reel. Helena had paused, her foot tapping to the beat of the snare drum, when she felt a slight chill creep up her spine. She looked about, unable to shake the unpleasant feeling that sinister eyes watched her, but she saw no one. She glanced at Ramsey.

“See that lady over there?” he asked, nodding at a buxom American Indian princess twirling arm in arm with a young sailor.

“Yes?”

“She is a famous marchioness as well as a newly made grandmother. Her reputation is impeccable, and her social hauteur alarming by any standards. Yet here she is, enjoying herself immensely all because she knows she can be as anonymous as”—his gaze slipped down and touched her face—“as you.”

Helena regarded the breathless woman collapsing, laughing, into the arms of her sailor. “Who is the sailor?”

“A sailor.” He grinned at her skeptical look. “Truly. He is a junior lieutenant in His Majesty’s Navy. I spoke with him earlier. His ship arrived from Egypt last week.”

“But if she is so great a lady, is she wise to risk being here?”

“Wise?” he asked. “Perhaps not. But she may well feel the risk worth the reward. She will go home tonight happy and tomorrow will perhaps be a bit brighter for remembering what it was to be young and carefree. And dance a reel.”

She looked up at him and his smile was almost winsome, hiding nothing. “And the young lieutenant,” he continued, “will someday tell his children how once upon a time, for a few bright moments, he held a marchioness in his arms and made her laugh. No,” he mused softly, “perhaps she is not wise. But some things cannot be gain-said, no matter how unwise.”

His gaze drifted over her masked visage. “Are you always wise?”

She wanted to tell him no, that she was not always wise, that she wanted—oh, very much!—to be unwise. But he knew nothing about her other than that she was a lady, and the only inference she could make from his interest was that she presented him a challenge. She shook her head sadly, regretful not that he was amusing himself by attempting to seduce her, but that she was wise enough to realize it.

“Yes, I am always wise.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.” He turned away from her for a few seconds, ostensibly to watch the dancers, and when he turned back to her, his charming smile had returned in full force, and nothing clouded the extraordinary blue of his eyes.

“Where next, little tourist?” he asked. “There is a hermit lurking somewhere nearby who will tell you your future for a penny. Or I believe Mrs. Bland is scheduled to sing some of her famed ballads in the Rotunda, and the fireworks are scheduled to begin at ten o’clock.”

“Oh, I won’t be able to stay that long,” she declared.

He frowned. “Why not? It’s only another quarter of an hour.”

A quarter of an hour?! Dear Lord, how had it grown so late so swiftly? Flora would be beside herself waiting for news of Oswald. She had forgotten Flora. She had forgotten everything.

“I have to go.” She wheeled about. He caught her arm.

“No.”

“I do,” she insisted, guilt filling her. “I have to. Someone waits for me—”

His hand tightened. “Who? A man?” he asked. “Another adventure ?”

“No!”

“You promised me this night. You made a bargain.” He was angry. It flared in his eyes and in the set of his mouth, even though his expression remained cool and his tone offhand. “And I accepted your bargain. Because of your insistence that a woman has a sense of honor.”

Oh! He didn’t fight fair! “I will keep my promise if you insist, but I would not like to do so when it will cause another pain. She will be most anxious for my return.”

“She?”he repeated. “You expect me to relinquish what I want simply to appease some ‘she’?” His lips curled. “Clearly our evening together has not brought you any insight into my character.”

But it had.

“Be reasonable, Mr. Munro,” she said. “You don’t want me.”

“Don’t I?” he asked with icy politeness.

“You want what you bargained for, and now you feel you are being cheated.”

“Is that what I am feeling?”

She ignored that, dared not read anything into it. “Yes. I ask again that you release me from our bargain. Please.”

He studied her behind half-closed lids a long moment before finally uttering in a hard, careless voice, “As you will.”

“Thank you.”

Wordlessly, he escorted her beneath the arched passageway that led to the entrance and exit gates. The cobblestones magnified the sound of his boot heels beneath the vaulted ceiling, the light from the lanterns diffuse. From here she could see Kensington Lane, where the hacks and carriages stood in line awaiting their fares. He stopped. “You will have no trouble finding a conveyance,” he said.

The realization washed over her that her adventure was ending. She hesitated, feeling abruptly forlorn. She turned, looking up into his face. “Goodbye, Mr. Munro.”

His expression was enigmatic. “Goodbye.”

She held out her hand, determined that he would be able to recall her as a well-mannered distraction if not the unassailable femme fatale she’d wanted him to think her. He looked down at her hand with a bemused expression.

She cleared her throat. “You are supposed to take my hand and bow.”

“Ah!” he said pleasantly. “Thank you for the instruction. One quite forgets what is required of one.”

“Balderdash.”

He took her hand, snapped his heels together, and bowed low over her fingertips, brushing his lips across her gloved knuckles. Then he straightened, but neglected to relinquish her hand.

She strove for the right tone: sophisticated, a trifle put out, a bit amused. “Very good, Mr. Munro,” she commended him. “Now you are to let go of my hand.”

“Yes,” he answered, his eyes fast on her face. “Yes, of course. But if I hadn’t promised you—”

He broke off.

“Promised me what?” she asked curiously, breathlessly.

“That I would not touch you without your express consent, I would be kissing you right now.”

“You would?” she swallowed. She couldn’t be that brazen…. No, tonight she could be anything she wanted to be. “You could always…ask.”

He gave her his wicked, wonderful, lopsided smile, a deep dimple scoring his lean cheek. His fingers tightened fractionally around her hand. “Ah, but lass,” his burr was there in full force, deep and vibrant, “I have two great failings. The first being that I never ask permission.”

Her face fell.

“And the second being that I’m a bloody…great…liar.”

He jerked her against him with a single yank, wrapping his arm about her waist and lifting her until her face was even with his. His hand cupped the back of her head as his mouth covered hers.

It was a hard, punishing kiss, in no way demonstrating his former languid expertise. His heat poured into her, through her. His mouth moved fiercely, possessively on hers, his crushing embrace not giving her any room to struggle.