Everything I Ever Wanted (7 page)

Her tone was positively arid. "Experience as a governess."

He chuckled as he knew she meant him to. South was enjoying her company too much to respond contrarily. There was a story here, though. It was one he decided he would hear another evening, preferably when Miss India Parr's complexion was flushed with sleep and loving and her pale hair lay soft and silky against his forearm. He could wait, would even enjoy it. The consomme might be a diversion, but Miss Parr did not seem to understand that anticipation was the real aphrodisiac.

India served the main course. South watched her manage this small intimacy with apparently no self-consciousness that it was one. His mother did not serve his father in such a manner. Nor would it have occurred to her to do so. There were servants to perform these tasks then soundlessly whisk away the platters and half-eaten remains.

"Will you tell your friends you were here this evening?" she asked.

South knew he would not. While normally circumspect, he might have done otherwise if he had not been about the colonel's business tonight. He wanted no speculation among the other members of the Compass Club. Northam had his hands full, and South was willing that it should remain so. "Tell my friends that I dined with the most lauded and applauded woman in London?" he asked. "The same woman we insulted with our inconsiderate behavior not above a week ago? I think not. Their imaginations are too constrained. They would not credit it."

"I think they would," she disagreed. "I know something about your reputation."

"As a brilliant thinker."

"As a rogue."

"Hardly."

"A rake."

"No."

"Rogue?"

"My dear Miss Parr, your sources are alliterate but ill-informed. However, in keeping with your theme, let us say that I am a romantic."

"Like Byron."

Southerton was patently horrified at the thought. "Heaven help us all."

"Then you do not write poetry?"

"Only very bad rhymes. Sonnets with fewer than fourteen lines. That sort of thing."

India laughed. She wondered if he was truly a romantic or merely entertaining her with the notion. And she was entertained. Vastly so. It made her want to put off the moment of truth a while longer because, once their link was openly revealed, it would be only the nature of their business that would occupy them. It had to be that way. She would insist upon it. "So you are a romantic," she said softly. "And you admit it freely. Many of your set would rather take refuge with rakes and rogues."

He sighed. "It is the inevitable comparison with Byron that forces their hand. Better to be thought rather heartless than to have to set one's heart to paper. It is all well if one has a talent for it, but most of us do not, and the literary world is the better for that admission. So is the muslin set. If you insist on poetry, then I shall be forced to steal it. Deuced hard, that, what with you knowing most of Master Shakespeare's lines. Marlowe. Jonson. You'll have me there as well." He looked at her questioningly, and she nodded. "Shelley?" She nodded again. "Donne?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Then I would have to steal from a more obscure source, and if he is obscure, how good could he have been in the first place? It is one thing to steal the stuff and pass it as my own, but then to discover one has stolen poorly written sonnets?" South cut a sliver of lamb and raised it to his mouth. "You can see why a true romantic is an adventurer, not a writer at all. Be damned with the pen, I say, and take up pistols. Dewy dawn mornings in the park. One's, best friends as witnesses. Ten paces marked. The potential for blood. A real or imagined slight righted. A lady's honor served."

India's lips twitched. "I am persuaded. You have experience, I collect."

"What? With dueling?" He swallowed, waving his empty fork with a flourish. "Foolish business. Too many rules, and I dislike early risings. I find I possess a happy talent for talking my way out of difficulties."

Her smile deepened. She had no trouble believing that. "Your arguments are absurd."

"A moment ago you admitted yourself persuaded," he reminded her. "It is only when you realized I had no notion of what I was talking about that you changed your opinion. In circumstances of life and death I do not let on that I have no notion of most things. It is impossible to be convincing otherwise. One must first convince oneself."

India leaned forward and held up one hand, palm out. "Oh, please, do stop. I have lost all the threads of our conversation, but I am convinced you are in the right of everything."

"That is all that is ever important," he said wryly. "I am satisfied you are a perceptive woman." South bent his head and applied himself to his meal, pretending not to notice that this last observation had caused his hostess to gape at him. Without looking up he said, "The lamb is tender. My compliments to your cook."

India knew she should not permit herself to be baited and reeled and released so easily, but she was persuaded Southerton would have the last word. An entire soliloquy, if she wasn't careful. It made her wonder again what sort of man had been sent to her this time. It also crossed her mind that he hadn't been sent at all and that she had very much mistaken the matter. With some small shock, she realized she would be sorry either way.

They finished the meal in companionable, comfortable silence, a state that agreed with both of them. At the end, India rang for the table to be cleared. South afforded himself a snifter of her good brandy while India had a second glass of wine. She chose the chair near the hearth. South flanked her first at the mantel, while he poked at the fire and warmed his brandy, then on the settee.

In an absent gesture South pulled lightly on the sleeves of his jacket, returning the tailored line to his broad shoulders and doing the work of his valet and shirtmaker proud. He sat back in the corner of the settee much as he had in the hack. He would have not required much encouragement to fall asleep. The manner in which India was eyeing him suggested that she was in anticipation of its happening.

"I can sleep anywhere," he said.

"Another of your happy talents?"

South shrugged. "One learns the trick of it on his Majesty's frigates."

"You were at sea?" That made no sense to her. He was a viscount. Not a younger son, but the only son. He was the heir to the Earl of Redding's title and fortunes, and by all accounts, that fortune was considerable. The Viscount Southerton's quarterly allowance was more than India Parr could reasonably expect to earn in a lifetime spent at her craft. "You were a passenger, of course. Returning from the Continent. Displaced during the war with Boney, perhaps."

South did not correct any of her notions. They were the familiar conclusions drawn by those outside his family who knew he had been at sea as a very young man, but could not fathom the reasons or satisfy their curiosity by asking outright. His service in the Royal Navy was not at all the usual thing, the result of his romantic, adventuring nature and a father's life lesson disguised as indulging his son. Southerton had been taught something about his father by the experience, but perhaps not has much as the Earl of Redding had learned about his son.

"I was at sea," was all South said. "And I learned to catch sleep as I could. It was kind of you not to make much of that earlier."

"I made you wait in the cab rather a long time."

"It was graceless of me."

"Not at all. I found it" She paused, searching for what had struck her at the time.

Southerton said, "Insulting?"

"Charming," she said. "I found it charming. Unaffected."

That could only mean he had been snoring. He wondered if he had been slack-jawed and drooling as well. There was nothing for it but to grin at this picture of himself, the would-be suitor made hapless by boredom and the necessity of sleep.

India went on, reminding him, "Circumstances being what they were, I slept also."

His grin deepened. "An odd beginning for us, wouldn't you say?"

"Oh, was that the beginning?" " For us ," he had said. She did not want to dwell on that, yet the idea of it enticed her. "Then I should not mention the disturbance from your box or the"

"Eastlyn's box."

"What?"

"It is East's box. Not mine. Let us be clear on that point."

"Or the bruise on your chin," she said, knowing she must finish or he would spin her in circles yet again. In the future they would refrain from even a mention of their sleep-filled cab ride to her home or the late supper they shared. Their real beginning would start now. It only depended upon one of them to say it.

India's own safety dictated that it must come first from him. She was touched by what she perceived as his reluctance to broach the matter.

South rolled the snifter of brandy between his palms. The crystal rim reflected the warm yellow glow of the lamplight. He did not look at her. He had a picture of her in his mind several of them, actually. India Parr on stage: bewigged and rouged and costumed, a slight, willowy figure commanding almost as much space and men with as few words as Admiral Nelson had. India Parr in her dressing room: polite now but somehow reticent, estranged from the very crowd that had come to pay homage, the woman inside the dress and paint closer to the surface. India Parr in the dimly lighted carriage: weary, without protection, pale hair secured in a few combs, and a stem of a neck that was too slender to support her. And India Parr in this room: charming and cautious by turns, gracious, fighting her natural inclination to be alone, still wearing her woolen shawl as if it were a breastplate of armor, while speaking of Cyprians and disabusing him of the notion that he might share her bed.

He looked up and met her dark eyes waiting for him a deep, direct gaze but not without expression. He thought they hinted at sadness.

"It is the colonel, of course," he said quietly.

She nodded slowly. There, it was said. "You might have told me before."

"No."

Then he had been given instructions to wait. She did not examine what reasons Blackwood might have had. The colonel's own thinking could not concern her. She never knew enough to make it her concern. The part she played in his dramas was but a small one, and she accepted that. Indeed, she would have agreed to do nothing else. "You understand I couldn't be sure," she said. "I had to hear it from you."

He nodded. "And if I had only been an ardent suitor, more fortunate than most for getting this far? What then?"

"I would have thanked you for the pleasure of your company and seen you out. You had not much time left to speak before that would have been the outcome."

South had suspected as much. "And if I were neither ally nor admirer?"

"You mean if your intention was to harm me?"

"I mean if my intention was to kill you."

India shrugged indifferently. "I considered it," she said. "More carefully than you. Doobin knows that you are here this evening. My maid and footman also. The hackney driver. I believe I can expect some discretion from them if nothing untoward happens. I cannot be persuaded that they will hold their tongues if I disappear or am murdered."

"So you assessed the risk to your life against the odds that I would be caught."

"That you would not want to be caught. It is a different thing."

"It is," he agreed. "And you concluded you were most likely safe this evening."

"Yes."

"And in the future?"

"There would be no future, my lord. We would never be alone again. "

South mulled over what she had said. "You did indeed give this some thought."

"Yes." She frowned slightly as she watched Southerton's light-gray eyes take on a certain steely strength she had not seen before. "What is it?"

"It is only that your thinking presupposes the most obvious: that it is the colonel who sent me to kill you." He watched India's chin come up and the delicate wash of color in her cheeks disappear. "If that were the case then you know I would never be caught. There would be no witnesses. Those who are not already in my employ would simply disappear. You would do well, Miss Parr, to never suppose that you are even a half-step ahead of the colonel. Am I clear?"

"Yes." By great effort of will she held herself still. Not for anything would she have Southerton see that he had frightened her.

South set his brandy aside. "Enough of that. You are quite safe with me. My purpose here is exactly the opposite of the scenario I just proposed. I am to manage your protection. However that might best be accomplished remains to be seen."

"Manage my protection?" she asked carefully. "Offer it, you mean."

"An offer is something you can turn down. That is not what Blackwood intends."

In spite of her wish that it might be otherwise, India could feel herself shrinking back into the corner of her chair. The heels of her hands pressed whitely against the cool damask arms. Once she was aware of this posture, she forced her fingers to relax and curl lightly over the fabric. "Then Mr. Kendall has been found." Which, perforce, meant the man was dead.

South nodded."A sennight ago. Floating in the Thames."

India did not gasp, though she couldn't say why. It felt like that inside her. What she did was breathe deeply through her nose, her nostrils flaring ever so slightly. She held the breath, this air she needed, so that she was almost lightheaded with the effort; then she released it slowly and drew another, more shallow this time, until she was breathing with the even rhythms of one who had not just been delivered a blow to her midsection. "I was hoping for a different outcome," she said at last. "There was a woman, you see. Someone for whom he had a tendre . I thought perhaps he had gone to Gretna." Actually, she had prayed that had been the case.