The Devil May Care (Brotherhood of Sinners #1) (7 page)

This mission was bad enough to begin with. This morning, he’d have sworn nothing could possibly make the situation they found themselves in any worse.

Now it was worse.

Now it felt like outright catastrophe.

Chapter Four

Given all the things conspiring to kill her, Rachel wasn’t sure she’d survive the night.

Already, she’d spent a half-hour with shears snicking near her flesh while Jenny cut her hair to match Sarah’s. Weighty hanks slid down her back, years of growth hitting the floor like so much scythed wheat. The marquess stood by the entire time, implacable as an executioner, swirling blood-red wine in a crystal glass.

Now they sat in his carriage, rattling headlong through dark, narrow streets in a part of London famed for gruesome murders. Lady Barham, he’d explained, enjoyed a bit of slumming in her glittering life.

The air inside the vehicle was distressingly close, concentrating the neighborhood reek of boiled cabbage and a fetid hint of raw sewage that, whatever its exact source, was nowhere near far enough away. And outside, a world of threatening shadows raced by, punctuated by shouts and cries that sounded as much animal as human. The wheels bumped and lurched alarming, careening, perhaps, over carelessly discarded corpses. Of course, what awaited them at their destination was even more frightening: at Lady Barham’s, she’d either prove herself in the role of Salomé Mirabeau or be exposed as a fraud.

Sebastian—so Sarah had called him now, so she wouldn’t slip up in company—lounged in his seat at his usual princely ease. He was handsomely garbed in cream breeches and a velvet coat dark as midnight, with a gold-headed walking stick held loosely in one hand. His gaze skimmed over her, critical, detached, the one readable emotion a vague amusement at her discomposure.

Still, that gaze felt like a touch. Her heart hammered harder.

She was dressed as Salomé, jewels at her throat, an ivory fan at her wrist, and a soft green silk gown cut shockingly low at her bosom. Simultaneously ornate and laid bare. Artfully wild ringlets spun free around her face, with two tortoiseshell combs sufficient to hold up what remained of the length. The skirts of her gown skimmed so close, the least motion displayed the outlines of her hips and belly and thighs.

Winter air pricked everywhere at her flesh. Sarah, apparently, had never bothered with cloaks—too much wrinkling of her silks.

“All right, my dear?” asked Sebastian, the icy glitter of his eyes showing he knew she wasn’t.

“Excellent well, thank you,” she answered, in the French accent Sarah used as Salomé. Rachel flicked open her fan, gave it Salomé’s insouciant wave. She mimed the wide, inviting smile he’d made her practice
ad nauseum
.

His lips curved upwards very slightly, but his eyes remained arctic. “Now tell me about Lord Cardross.”

She dropped the smile. Would he never leave off quizzing her?

“Lord Cardross,” she answered, snapping her fan shut against her knee. “Given name Eustace Brigham. Thirty-six years of age. Taller than me by a hand. Broad pug nose, brown hair, small yellowed teeth, half-inch crescent scar under the left eye. Wealthy. Much enamored of Salomé. Runs to fat, with an unfortunate taste for brightly-striped waistcoats.”

“His drink of choice?”

“Scotch whisky, if a good make can be had. If not, a superior vintage of burgundy.”

“And where did you first meet him?”

“Two years this past October, at Lord Shelbourne’s very private masquerade. Cardross came costumed as a goat. With full anatomical enhancements.”

“Correct.” Sebastian let out a short breath, but a hardening of his mouth made it seem her answers angered him somehow. He’d been like this for the three days of her training, strict and cantankerous as a ninety-year-old violin master.

And about as bloodless. After that brief, heated encounter in her bedchamber, he’d turned back into a creature of unfeeling stone.

Just as well. That moment of heat had nearly undone her. Afterwards, her nerves jangled, buzzed, jolted, for days. She’d felt hot everywhere, remembering his hands roving over her, and she was sensitive even to the slightest pressure of the air.

A forgivable reaction, considering the shocks she’d been through since coming down from Lancashire. Losing Sarah crushed her, leaving her insides nothing but a void to fall into, and never stop falling. So when Hawkesbridge touched her, her body had seized the excuse to keep her heart pumping, her lungs drawing in air. It had been instinct, nothing more. Sheer animal refusal to give up on life.

But still, she felt like a fool. While she’d all but fallen back on that satin-covered bed and let him ravish her, like any round-heeled milkmaid in a haystack, Lord Gargoyle had merely been trying to educate her. Trying to relieve her of her ridiculous prudishness, her provincial gaucherie. For the sake of their mission.

Thank heavens she’d come to her senses just in time.

She’d barely escaped with her virginity.

Her dignity, though, was probably lost for good.

The coach jostled her as it took a curve into a narrow lane, and then she realized it was slowing.

"Ready?" asked Sebastian. For the first time, his tone held a hint of uncertainty.
Because of her
.

The moment of truth.

They alighted beside a decrepit wood-beam and plaster building that might have been a thieves’ tavern two hundred years ago. But through the shutters warm firelight glowed, and bursts of raucous laughter spilled into the street. So did the rich smell of roast goose and new-baked bread, and of some steaming mix of lemon and sugar and spices and rum. Despite her odd taste in locales, Lady Barham clearly had no lack of funds. Or of friends.

Rachel took a bracing breath. The people inside had known Sarah—or Salomé—well. She released the breath slowly, relaxing her shoulders in the louche way Sebastian taught her, while tensing the muscles of her tongue and lips and jaw to make the sounds of French. She’d lived years with religious zealots who punished severely for any lapse in faith—she knew how to project conviction she did not feel.

Sebastian raised his fist to knock upon the door.

To her surprise, his other hand slipped into her own, his fingers wrapping hers in a quick squeeze. His grip was warm and strong and solid, and she took more comfort in it than she would have expected, or than she’d ever admit.

Then they were inside.

A tableau spread before them that, despite the modern clothes, might have come straight from a dissolute Roman orgy: men and women draped together on low couches, feeding one another tidbits of elegant food, with a few apparently feasting instead on one another’s bared flesh. On gentleman was sprawled back against blue velvet, his breeches undone, while a lady with wild chestnut curls knelt between his legs, her curls bobbing vigorously up and down as she made him gasp with pleasure. Another lady, if indeed either one of them was a lady, had her gown opened to the waist, her round breasts entirely bare. A man in a gold satin jacket was nuzzling shamelessly at one nipple, while busily working his hand up under her skirt.

That lady looked up in surprise as Rachel and Sebastian entered. “Gracious heaven!” she exclaimed. “Look what the wind blew in!”

The babble of voices hushed for a moment as a dozen more heads swiveled their way. Then a general outcry erupted, and a flood swept towards them, a rush of perfume and noise and body heat.

For the first moment, pure, blind panic knifed through her.

Then her mind moved into higher speed, noting age, hair color, height, distinguishing scars or distinctive noses, matching them to Sebastian’s descriptions—and the scene shifted and sharpened, and individuals emerged. It was not unlike beginning a difficult text in Greek, finding one thread she could follow, with which she pulled meaning from the rest.

The first to reach them was an easy call: a voluptuous, barely-faded beauty of late middle age, still blonde, still trim in the waist, still glad to expose most of her capacious bosom in an immodest gown of rose silk and ivory lace.
Lady Barham
.

Her ladyship flung herself upon the marquess with a girlish leap, her elbows clouting the sides of his skull in her enthusiasm. His face was pulled into her plumped cleavage. “You’ve come!” she cried gleefully. “My Sebastian, back at last! It’s such a delight when you actually keep your promises!”

Sebastian chuckled and planted a kiss right in the valley between her breasts. “You look well, as always, dear Lady Barham,” he declared warmly. “And Lord Barham is in excellent health, I trust?”

The lady chimed with laughter. “Lord Barham is very well, indeed—happily abed back home in Regent Street, with all the lapdogs. Respectable as my Great Aunt Gertrude.”

“The more fool he,” replied the marquess, and kissed her again, this time on her lips, wrapping his arms about her back and lifting her until she stood on tip-toe.

A strange burning sensation flared just under Rachel’s ribcage, as if a live coal had lodged itself there. How easy such dalliance was for him, how little it must mean. How humiliating for the women he took in his arms.

And there were, apparently, plenty of them. A whole troupe of females—opera dancers, courtesans, and exceedingly merry widows—surrounded him now with kisses and embraces, their bejeweled hands slipping inside his jacket and waistcoat to caress him against his shirt. If not slipping rather scandalously lower.

He only smiled and flirted more with every touch.

Distressingly, Rachel fell under an assault herself as a crew of lavishly-dressed men pressed in to welcome her, their hands clutching everywhere like the tentacles of a giant sea monster. Several men eyed her with a look of unmistakable knowledge, and of open invitation, that made her stomach churn.

What had been an abstraction before, the notion that Sarah had actually used her body in the service of England, became abruptly
palpable
.

The smile became ever harder to affix to her face.

One of the gentlemen she recognized as the titular duc du Bourge, a broad-shouldered French
aristo
with thick, wavy black hair and handsome, shining black eyes. According to Sebastian, he’d had escaped Paris and the clutches of Robespierre at the age of twenty-five with little more than his exquisite manners and his life, and he now depended entirely on the good graces of the sixty-two-year-old Countess of Leeds. That kind lady had managed to set him up in his own London townhouse, and kept him there quietly for more than a decade, virtually under her husband’s nose.

Du Bourge must have slipped his lead tonight, for the countess was notably absent, and the duc stood far too close to Rachel’s side, gazing at her with almost pathetic longing.

“
Chère
Salomé,” he exclaimed, waving a hand with an ostentatious signet ring glittering with rubies. “We have been so anxious! Such rumors we have heard!”

“Rumors, merely,” she said, remembering the French accent only just in time. She uttered a quick silent prayer of thanks for her tutor Mr. Rapson’s excellent ear. Sebastian had declared the pronunciation he’d taught her suitably Parisian, and quite identical to Sarah’s. “I assure you, my lord,
je vais très bien
.”

“
Grace à dieu
,” the duc murmured, and pressed his lips into her open palm.

Du Bourge had a rival in none other than Lord Cardross, the man in the gold satin jacket, who just moments before had had his hand up that other woman’s skirts, and whose waistcoat striped in lurid rose and violet left his identity in no doubt.

Cardross lingered pointedly over her other hand as he took his turn to kiss it. “So wonderful to have you back, darling Salomé,” he declared. “We’ve been bereft, and of course worried sick about you. So many different stories reached us—strange things—we did not know what to believe.”

“I took ill for a time, that is all,” she said. “I am most well-recovered now,
mon cher
.” Cardross seemed to expect something more, so she braced herself against the training of a lifetime of reserve, and brushed a hand down his coat sleeve, favoring him with what she hoped was an alluring smile. “And
most
eager to resume my life in full.”

Cardross grinned brilliantly at that, and du Bourge regarded her from beneath his thick lashes with a look of naked anticipation.

Some giant fist had seized her heart and was squeezing hard. Surely any moment now, someone would cry out,
Look at that ridiculous girl—can’t you see she’s a fraud! An English governess! A virgin! A little nun!

Cardross, though, merely resumed his attention to her hand, his lips working their way slowly up towards the crook of her elbow. His mouth was unpleasantly damp, leaving a trail of slime like a garden snail’s. Her shoulders tensed, and her arm itched to pull free. Frustrating, that her body’s incendiary response to Sebastian’s touch seemed to be specific to him alone.

Closing her eyes as though Cardross’s caresses plunged her into ecstasy, she tried to conjure up the sensations Sebastian had aroused in her, that heated, loosening feeling.
That
was how a woman like Salomé responded to men.