The Lady Chosen (27 page)

He looked back at Gertie. “Whorton—I assume he’s the captain she’s talking with?” Gertie nodded. “Why do you call him a blackguard?”

Gertie narrowed her old eyes at him. Her lips compressed in a tight line, she considered him closely; from the first, she’d been the less encouraging of Leonora’s aunts, yet she hadn’t attempted to thrust a spoke in his wheel. Indeed, as the days had passed, he thought she’d come to look on him more favorably.

He apparently passed muster, for she suddenly nodded and looked again at Whorton. Her dislike was evident in her face.

“He jilted her, that’s why. They were engaged when she was seventeen, before he went away to Spain. He came back the next year, and came straightaway to see her—we were all expecting to learn when the wedding bells would ring. But then Leonora showed him out, and returned to tell us he’d asked her to release him. Seemed he’d found his colonel’s daughter more to his liking.”

Gertie’s snort was eloquent. “That’s why I call him a blackguard. Broke her heart, he did.”

A complex swirl of emotions swept through Tristan. He heard himself ask, “She released him?”

“Of course she did! What lady wouldn’t, in such circumstances? The bounder didn’t want to marry her—he’d found a better billet.”

Gertie’s fondness for Leonora rang in her voice, colored her distress. Impulsively, he patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry—I’ll go and rescue her.”

But he wasn’t going to make Whorton into a martyr in the process. Aside from all else, he was damned glad the bounder hadn’t married Leonora.

Eyes on the trio, he tacked through the crowd. He’d just been handed a vital piece of the jigsaw of Leonora and her attitude to marriage, but he couldn’t yet spare the time to stop, consider, jiggle, and see exactly how it fitted, nor what it would tell him.

He came up beside Leonora; she glanced up at him, smiled.

“Ah—there you are.”

Taking her hand, he raised it briefly to his lips, then placed it on his sleeve as was his habit. Her brows lifted faintly, in resignation, then she turned to the others. “Allow me to introduce you.”

She did; he heard with a jolt that the other lady was Whorton’s wife. His polite mask in place, he returned the greetings.

Mrs. Whorton smiled sweetly at him. “As I was saying, it’s proved quite an effort to organize our sons’ schooling…”

To his definite surprise, he found himself listening to a discussion of where to send the Whorton brats for their education. Leonora gave her opinion from her experience with Jeremy; Whorton quite clearly intended giving her advice due consideration.

Contrary to Gertie’s supposition, Whorton made no attempt to attach Leonora, nor to evoke any long-ago sympathies.

Tristan watched Leonora closely, but could detect nothing beyond her customary serene confidence, her usual effortless social grace.

She wasn’t a particularly good actress; her temper was too definite. Whatever her feelings over Whorton had been, they were no longer strong enough to raise her pulse. It beat steadily beneath his fingers; she was truly unperturbed.

Even discussing children who, had things been different, might have been hers.

He suddenly wondered how she felt about children, realized he’d been taking her views
vis à vis
his heir for granted.

Wondered if she was already carrying his child.

His gut clenched; a wave of possessiveness flowed over him. He didn’t so much as flutter an eyelash, yet Leonora glanced at him, a faint frown—one of questioning concern—in her eyes.

The sight saved him. He smiled easily; she blinked, searched his eyes, then turned back to Mrs. Whorton’s chatter.

Finally, the musicians tuned up. He seized the moment to part from the Whortons; he led Leonora directly to the floor.

Drew her into his arms, whirled her into the waltz.

Only then focused on her face, on the long-suffering look in her eyes.

He blinked, raised a brow.

“I realize you military men are accustomed to acting with dispatch, but within the ton’s ballrooms, it’s customary to
ask
a lady if she wishes to dance.”

He met her gaze. After a moment, said, “My apologies.”

She waited, then raised her brows high. “Aren’t you going to ask me?”

“No. We’re already waltzing—asking you is redundant. And you might refuse.”

She blinked at him, then smiled, clearly amused. “I must try that sometime.”

“Don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because you won’t like what happens.”

She held his gaze, then sighed exaggeratedly. “You’re going to have to work on your social skills. This dog-in-the-manger attitude won’t do.”

“I know. Believe me, I’m working on a solution. Your help would be appreciated.”

She narrowed her eyes, then tipped up her nose and looked away. Feigning temper because he’d had the last word.

He swung her into a sweeping turn, and thought of the other little matter, a pertinent and possibly urgent matter, he now had to address.

Military men.
Her memories of Whorton, no matter how ancient and buried, could not have been happy ones—and she almost certainly classed him and the captain as men of the same stamp.

“Excellent!” Leonora looked up as Tristan walked in. Quickly tidying her escritoire, she shut it and rose. “We can walk in the park with Henrietta, and I can tell you my news.”

Tristan raised a brow at her, but obediently held the door and followed her back out into the hall. She’d told him last night that she’d received quite a few replies from Cedric’s acquaintances; she’d asked him to call to discuss them—she’d made no mention of walking her hound.

He helped her into her pelisse, then shrugged on his greatcoat; the wind was chilly, whipping through the streets. Clouds hid the sun, but the day was dry enough. A footman arrived with Henrietta straining on a leash. Tristan fixed the hound with a warning glance, then took the leash.

Leonora led the way out. “The park is only a few streets away.”

“I trust,” Tristan said, following her down the garden path, “that you’ve been exercising with your dog?”

She shot him a glance. “If by that you mean to ask
have I been strolling the streets without her, no. But it’s definitely restricting. The sooner we lay Mountford by the heels, the better.”

Bustling forward, she swung open the gate, held it while he and Henrietta passed through, then swung it shut.

He caught her hand, trapped her gaze as he wound her arm in his. “So cut line.” Holding her beside him, he let Henrietta tow them in the direction of the park. “What have you learned?”

She drew breath, settled her arm in his, looked ahead. “I’d had great hopes of A. J. Carruthers—Cedric had communicated most frequently with Carruthers in the last few years. However, I didn’t receive any reply from Yorkshire, where Carruthers lived, until yesterday.
Before
that, however, over the previous days, I received three replies from other herbalists, all scattered about the country. All three wrote that they believed Cedric
had
been working on some special formula, but none of them knew any details. Each of them, however, suggested I contact A. J. Carruthers, as they understood Cedric had been working most closely with Carruthers.”

“Three independent replies, all believing Carruthers would know more?”

Leonora nodded. “Precisely. Unfortunately, however, A. J. Carruthers is dead.”

“Dead?” Tristan halted on the pavement and met her gaze. The green expanse of the park lay across the street. “Dead how?”

She didn’t misunderstand, but grimaced. “I don’t know—all I do know is that he’s dead.”

Henrietta tugged; Tristan checked, then led both females across the street. Henrietta’s huge and shaggy form, her gaping jaws filled with sharp teeth, gave him a perfect excuse to avoid the fashionable area thronging with matrons and their daughters; he turned the questing
hound toward the more leafy and overgrown region beyond the western end of Rotten Row.

That area was all but deserted.

Leonora didn’t wait for his next question. “The letter I received yesterday was from the solicitor in Harrogate who acted for Carruthers and oversaw his estate. He informed me of Carruthers’s demise, but said he couldn’t otherwise help with my query. He suggested that Carruthers’s nephew, who inherited all Carruthers’s journals and so on, might be able to shed some light on the matter—the solicitor was aware that Carruthers and Cedric had corresponded a great deal in the months prior to Cedric’s death.”

“Did this solicitor mention exactly when Carruthers died?”

“Not exactly. All he said was that Carruthers died some months after Cedric, but that he’d been ill for some time before.” Leonora paused, then added, “There’s no mention in the letters Carruthers sent to Cedric of any illness, but they might not have been that close.”

“Indeed. This nephew—do we have his name and direction?”

“No.” Her grimace was frustration incarnate. “The solicitor advised that he’d forwarded my letter to the nephew in York, but that was all he said.”

“Hmm.” Looking down, Tristan walked on, assessing, extrapolating.

Leonora glanced at him. “It’s the most interesting piece of information we’ve found yet—the most likely, indeed, the
only
possible link to something that might be what Mountford seeks. There’s nothing specific in Carruthers’s letters to Cedric, other than oblique references to something they were working on—no details at all. But we need to pursue it, don’t you think?”

He looked up, met her eyes, nodded. “I’ll get someone on it tomorrow.”

She frowned. “Where? In Harrogate?”

“And York. Once we have the name and direction, there’s no reason to wait to pay this nephew a visit.”

His only regret was that he couldn’t do so personally. Traveling to Yorkshire would mean leaving Leonora beyond his reach; he could surround her with guards, yet no amount of organized protection would be sufficient to reassure him of her safety, not until Mountford, whoever he was, was caught.

They’d been strolling, neither slowly nor briskly, towed along in Henrietta’s wake. He realized Leonora was studying him, a rather odd look on her face.

“What?”

She pressed her lips together, her eyes on his, then she shook her head, looked away. “You.”

He waited, then prompted, “What about me?”

“You knew enough to realize someone had taken an impression of a key. You waited for a burglar and closed with him without turning a hair. You can pick locks. Assessing premises for their ability to withstand intruders is something you’ve done before. You got access to special records from the Registry, records others wouldn’t even know existed. With a wave of your hand”—she demonstrated—“you can have men watching my street. You dress like a navvy and frequent the docks, then change into an earl—one who somehow always knows where I’ll be, one with exemplary knowledge of our hostesses’ houses.

“And now, just like that, you’ll arrange for people to go hunting for information in Harrogate and York.” She pinned him with an intent but intrigued look. “You’re the oddest ex-soldier-cum-earl I’ve ever met.”

He held her gaze for a long moment, then murmured, “I wasn’t your average soldier.”

She nodded, looking ahead once more. “So I gathered.
You were a major in the Guards—a soldier of Devil Cynster’s type—”

“No.” He waited until she met his gaze. “I—”

He broke off. The moment had come sooner than he’d anticipated. A rush of thoughts jostled through his mind, the most prominent being how a woman who’d been jilted by one soldier would feel about being lied to by another. Perhaps not quite lied to, but would she see the difference? His instincts were all for keeping her in the dark, for keeping his dangerous past and his equally dangerous propensities from her. For keeping her in sublime ignorance of that side of his life, and all it said of his character.

Her eyes on his face, she continued slowly strolling, head tilting as she studied him. And waited.

He drew breath, softly said, “I wasn’t like Devil Cynster, either.”

Leonora looked into his eyes; what she saw there she couldn’t interpret. “What sort of soldier were you, then?”

The answer, she knew, held a vital key to understanding who the man beside her truly was.

His lips twisted wryly. “If you could get access to my record, it would say I joined the army at twenty and rose to the rank of major in the Guards. It would give you a regiment, but if you checked with soldiers in that regiment, you’d discover few knew me, that I hadn’t been sighted since shortly after I first joined.”

“So what sort of regiment were you in? Not the cavalry.”

“No. Not the infantry, either, nor the artillery.”

“You said you’d been at Waterloo.”

“I was.” He held her gaze. “I was on the battlefield, but not with our troops.” He watched her eyes widen, then quietly added, “I was behind enemy lines.”

She blinked, then stared at him, thoroughly intrigued. “You were a
spy?
”

He grimaced lightly, looked ahead. “An agent working in an unofficial capacity for His Majesty’s government.”

A host of impressions swamped her—observations that suddenly made sense, other things that were no longer so mysterious—yet she was far more interested in what the revelation meant, what it said of him. “It must have been terribly lonely, as well as being horrendously dangerous.”

Tristan glanced at her; that wasn’t what he’d expected her to say, to think of. His mind ranged back, over the years…he nodded. “Often.”

He waited for more, for all the predictable questions. None came. They’d slowed; impatient, Henrietta woofed and tugged. He and Leonora exchanged a glance, then she smiled, tightened her hold on his arm and they stepped out more briskly, circling back toward the streets of Belgravia.

She had a pensive expression on her face, faraway and distant, yet not troubled, not irritated, not concerned. When she felt his gaze, she glanced at him, met his eyes, then smiled and looked ahead.

They crossed the thoroughfare and paced down the street, then turned into Montrose Place. Reaching her gate, he swung it wide, ushered her through, then followed her in. She was waiting to link her arm in his; she was still deep in thought.

He stopped before the steps. “I’ll leave you here.”

She glanced up at him, then inclined her head and reached for Henrietta’s lead. She met his gaze; her eyes were a startling blue. “Thank you.”

Those periwinkle blue eyes said she was speaking of much more than his help with Henrietta.

He nodded, thrust his hands into his pockets. “I’ll have someone on their way to York tonight. I believe you’ll be attending Lady Manivers’ rout?”

Her lips lifted. “Indeed.”

“I’ll see you there.”

Her eyes held his for a moment, then she inclined her head. “Until then.”

She turned away. He watched her go inside, waited until the door shut, then turned and walked away.

Dealing with Tristan, Leonora decided, had become unbelievably complicated.

It was the following morning; she lolled in her bed and stared at the sunbeams making patterns on the ceiling. And tried to sort out what, exactly, was going on between them. Between Tristan Wemyss, ex-spy, ex–unofficial agent of His Majesty’s government, and her.

She’d thought she’d known, but day by day, night by night, he kept…not so much changing as revealing greater and ever more intriguing depths. Facets of his character that she’d never imagined he might possess, aspects she found deeply appealing.

Last night…all had progressed as it usually did. She’d tried, not too hard, admittedly—she’d been distracted by all she’d learned that afternoon—but she nevertheless had made an effort to hold to a celibate line. He’d seemed even more determined, more ruthless than usual in storming her position—and taking her.

He’d whisked her off to a secluded room, one draped in shadows. There, on a daybed, he’d taught her to ride him—even now, just thinking of those moments made her blush. Remembered sensation sent warmth washing through her. The muscles in her thighs now ached, yet in that position she’d been better able to appreciate how much pleasure she gave him. How much sensual delight he took in her body. For the first time in all their interactions, she’d taken the lead, experimented, and gloried in her ability to pleasure him.

Addictive. Enthralling. Deeply satisfying.

That, however, had been the least of the revelations the evening had brought.

When, finally slumped in his arms, heated and replete, she’d nipped his shoulder and told him she liked the sort of soldier he was, he’d sent one hard palm stroking slowly, pensively, down her spine, then said, “I’m not like Whorton, I promise you.”

She’d blinked, then struggled up onto her elbows to frown down into his face. “You’re not anything like Mark.” Her mind had been groggy; the rock-hard, tanned, scarred body beneath her was nothing like what she’d ever imagined Mark’s might be, and as for the man within it…

Tristan’s eyes had been dark pools, impossible to read. His hand had continued slowly, reassuringly stroking. He must have read her confusion in her face. “I want to marry you—I won’t change my mind. You don’t need to worry I’ll hurt you like he did.”

Realization had dawned. She’d pushed up, stared down at him. “Mark didn’t hurt me.”

He’d frowned. “He jilted you.”

“Well, yes. But…I was actually quite happy to be jilted.”

Of course, she’d had to explain. She’d done so with greater candor than she’d previously brought to the subject; stating the reality aloud had more clearly established the truth in her mind as well as his.

“So you see,” she’d concluded, “it wasn’t any deep and lasting slight—not in any way. I don’t have any”—she’d waved—“adverse feelings toward soldiers because of it.”

He’d considered her, searched her face. “So you don’t hold my former career against me?”

“Because of what happened with Whorton? No.”

His frown had only deepened. “If it wasn’t Whorton
jilting you that gave you a distaste for men and marriage, what did?” His gaze had sharpened; even in the shadows she’d been able to feel its edge. “Why haven’t you married?”

She hadn’t been ready to answer that.

She’d brushed it aside, clung to a more immediate point. “Is that why you told me about your career—to distinguish yourself from Whorton?”

He’d looked disgruntled. “If you hadn’t asked, I wouldn’t have told you.”

“But I did ask. Is that why you answered?”

He’d hesitated, his reluctance clear, then admitted, “Partially. I would have had to tell you sometime…”

“But you told me this afternoon because you wanted me to see you as different from Whorton, different from how you imagined I saw him—”

He’d hauled her down and kissed her. Distracted her.

Effectively.

She hadn’t known what to make of his reasoning—his motives, his reactions—last night. She still didn’t. Yet…he’d obviously felt threatened enough by her experience with Whorton, and how he believed that affected her view of military men, to tell her the truth. To break with what she suspected was habit and neither hide nor conceal his past.

A past she felt sure none of his family knew. That few others of any sort knew.

He was a man with shadows behind him, yet circumstances had dictated he step into the light, and he needed someone—someone who understood, who could understand him, someone he could trust—beside him.