Forever Your Earl (10 page)

She must be used to dining with starving writers and actors, to find a man simply eating lamb chops to be a sensual act. Yet watching him dine was a pleasure, so much so that he eventually glanced up and said, “Your meat's getting cold.”

So much for being discreet. Well, she could throw him, too. “My meat's perfectly hot.”

He raised a brow.

“Juicy, too,” she added, and popped a bite into her mouth.

The earl coughed.

“Something caught in your throat?” she asked sweetly.

He glowered at her as he took a long drink of ale. “I thought it was my job to shock you.”

“Then you'd better get to it,” she answered. “The score is decidedly in my favor.”

He set aside his cutlery. “I wasn't aware we were keeping score.”

“We are now. Unless you're concerned about being beaten by a woman,” she added.

“But you aren't a woman,” he countered. “At least, not tonight.”

“Have you forgotten my true gender already?”

“Unlikely,” he said with surprising vehemence. “Not the way you eat.”

She rolled her eyes. “There's something inherently feminine in my eating habits, too?”

“It's not your fault you're a woman through and through.”

“Thank you for your tolerance,” she said drily.

He gave a small bow. “I am all consideration, madam, I mean—­young Ned.”

They resumed their meal. She tried to eat in a more manly fashion, but without resembling a prized boar, which was her first impulse. “Being a man is a tiring business.” She sighed.

“Truer words,” he muttered, and took another bite.

She tried to concentrate on her meal, but his very presence distracted her. She needed to remember exactly what she intended to reap from this venture with the earl, and why she was engaging in this escapade in the first place.

He had the most incredible hands she'd ever beheld—­broad, long-­fingered, exquisitely masculine.

Always fall back on the journalistic line of inquiry.
It never failed to protect her from feeling too much. “You inherited your title at an early age.”

He lifted his brow again, the model of an imperious gentleman. Perhaps he used that as
his
protection. “Is this for the article?”

“Would you answer my questions if it was?”

“Are you in the habit of answering questions with questions?”

“Are you?” she countered.

He leaned back. “Do you think anyone asks me many questions?”

“Don't legions of servants wait on earls?”
Ha!

“How much experience do you have with earls?”

She scowled. He was better at this game than she had anticipated. “Isn't it possible for me to extrapolate?”

He grinned. “Based on what evidence?”

She fought a growl. Letting him win would be unthinkable. “How much would I need to make an accurate assessment?”

“Isn't that what this whole venture is about?”

She banged her fist on the table. “Point to you, Ashford.”

Damn him if he didn't look handsome, even when gloating. “You make a worthy opponent, Ned.”

And damn her if that little bit of praise didn't feel like a shot of warm brandy swirling through her belly. “Yet you didn't answer my initial question.”

He fixed her with an intense, piercing gaze. “Anything I tell you about me or my family would have to be left out of the articles. Again, if I see one word appear in the paper that I don't sanction, I'll denounce you in as many periodicals as exist in the whole of Britain.”

She leaned back, slightly stunned by his fierceness. “You cannot have it both ways, Ashford.”

“As you're so fond of reminding me,” he replied coolly, “I'm an earl. I can have it as many ways as I desire.”

That, she didn't doubt. She herself had little recourse, as a business owner and as a woman. When it came to power, the deck was stacked in his favor. Maggie's words of warning drifted through her mind again. Eleanor would have to be on her guard around Ashford. For many reasons.

She could let the matter drop. If what he said couldn't be included in the article, did it matter? All she needed to do was accompany him on his rakish activities, not learn who he was beneath the libertine's veneer.

Yet she did care. She wanted to know. To know him. Even if only for her own understanding.

“As you wish,” she said at last, yet she couldn't help but add for emphasis, “my lord.”

He gave a clipped nod. Instead of looking at her, his gaze roamed around the chophouse before finally settling on his knife lying beside his plate. Distractedly, he ran one of his long, square-­tipped fingers up and down the handle of the blade.

“My mother died in childbed,” he said after a long pause. “She and her newborn daughter are buried in the family plot at the church in Somerset.” His voice was stark, almost cold, yet resonant with old pain.

“I'm sorry,” she said. Nothing else seemed to be appropriate.

His gaze flicked up to her, and past hurt continued to reverberate there. “I was only three at the time, so I don't have many memories of her. Just the smell of lilacs and the feel of her coral beads in my fingers.” He looked down at his fingers, as if recalling the sensation. Then his hand curled into a fist. “I didn't have any other siblings, and my father didn't remarry.”

She sensed he didn't want to dwell overlong on the painful aspects of his past. “Risky, if you were the only heir.”

“I have cousins,” he said. “Decent enough blokes who would've been perfectly acceptable as heirs.”

“That's quite a ringing endorsement.”

He shrugged. “I'm sure they'd say the same about me. Perhaps even worse, given that I am a reprobate
rake,
after all.”

“
Reprobate
is your word, not mine,” she noted.

“True. I'll just have to prove how much of one I am. Flirting with a married woman doesn't seem to have convinced you of my less savory qualities.”

“Pfft. Haven't you read my paper? Dalliances are far more common than passionate, faithful marriages.”

“Except in the case of my father,” Ashford noted bitterly. “Poor sod. Oh, he took a mistress after my mother died, but he refused to marry again. Still, there are romantics of the older generation that said when he died, it was of a broken heart.” He made those words sound as impossible as magic spells.

She asked, “Are you a romantic of the older generation?”

“I believe too much port and mutton caused my father's death, not a broken heart.” He gazed at her cynically. “Come now, you cannot write what you write and believe in such tripe.”

She sighed. “I wish I could say that I cling to the legends of true love, but if I ever did, experience has taught me otherwise.”

Setting his hands on the table, he asked, “Experience that you write about, or your own?”

She forced out a laugh. “I thought I was the prying journalist, not you.”

“More evasions.” He shook his head.

“We're experts at that art.” She pushed her plate away, no longer interested in her food.

Spreading one of his hands on his chest, he affected a shocked expression. “I am the very soul of disclosure. Haven't I just spun the woeful tale of my own family?”

“That you did, and every word of it shall remain carefully locked away in here.” She tapped her forehead. Intriguing, how he played the role of the cynic, especially when it came to his history, but he hadn't been able to fully disguise the loss he felt at his parents' passing, especially his mother.

If this was something that he normally kept hidden, what other secrets were buried in the earl's heart? And what would she give to learn them?

It shocked her to realize that she truly did crave knowing more of him. His secrets. His truths. The man, himself. And not just for
The Hawk's Eye
. But for herself alone. And therein lay the greater peril.

 

Chapter 6

Oh, gentle readers! The sights I witnessed! All that I might report back to you on the wickedness that dwells beneath the surface of our seemingly pious Town. It must come as a stunning surprise, as it did for this unassuming author, that behind the porticos of some of this city's most esteemed neighborhoods exist temples erected to the pursuit of that most elusive and fickle of women, Lady Fortune. And she keeps company with our nation's honored gentlemen, though after last night, I hesitate to use the term “gentlemen” . . .

The Hawk's Eye
, May 4, 1816

“T
he infamous Donnegan's,” Daniel said as his carriage pulled up outside the gaming hell.

“It can't be very infamous if I haven't heard of it,” countered Miss Hawke. She peered through the carriage window to get a better view of the place.

He tried to see it through her keen writer's eyes. The building itself looked like any house in this part of Mayfair—­large and austere, with tall columns and potted plants adorning its white façade. Hardly the sort of place a notorious rake might disport himself.

“There are more scandals in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” he paraphrased. As the footman jumped down from the back of the carriage and opened the door, Daniel added, “Sometimes, a scandal truly does want to be hidden.”

He stepped down from the vehicle and waited for her to join him. She alit, her movements in the unfamiliar male clothing seeming to grow easier with each passing moment. It was a convincing disguise, but he couldn't forget that the breeches she wore covered
her
legs, and though her calves were padded, he still kept looking at them in their stockings. What might she look like in such an ensemble without all the padding and cosmetics?

Too appealing, he decided.

“Then why take me here?” she asked, standing beside him. “Haven't you any loyalty to your fellow profligates?”

“None at all. Nor they to me. We'd all push each other in front of the omnibus if it meant our own benefit.”

“There's that honor among aristos,” she said drily. Still, he could hear excitement in her voice—­likely at the prospect of being in an all-­male enclave. Well, it wasn't entirely devoid of female company, but she'd learn that soon enough. A pulse of his own excitement worked through him—­the thrill of experiencing Miss Hawke's discovery.

How long had he felt much exhilaration about anything? Searching for Jonathan didn't fill him with pleasure, only the need to see it accomplished. But this—­taking part in his world through a new set of eyes, and not just any eyes, but Miss Hawke's—­was a new gratification.

He ascended the steps, with her accompanying him. A liveried footman bowed and opened the inconspicuous door. Once inside, another servant took their hats and canes, then ushered them down a hallway.

The corridor opened up into a huge, cacophonous room. Daniel had seen the interior of Donnegan's hundreds of times, but he kept his gaze on Miss Hawke, watching her reaction.

“If you're overwhelmed,” he murmured, “just pretend you're a boy down from the country.”

She nodded but hardly paid him any mind. Instead, she gazed with wide eyes at the enormous room crowded with tables, where every sort of game of chance was played. Card games, dicing, and roulette, imported from France. The games themselves didn't seem to interest her so much as the men thronged around the tables. This wasn't a sedate parlor. Some men had shucked their jackets, their neckcloths undone, their waistcoats partially buttoned. They shouted and waved fistfuls of cash, jostling one another, spilling glasses of wine down their once immaculate shirtfronts and onto the floor.

England's leading lights clustered around the tables and acted like wild beasts. Daniel counted cabinet ministers, leading public figures, noblemen.

“It's
Debrett's
gone feral,” she muttered.

“Please keep an eye on your hands,” he said lowly. “In case someone tries to bite them off.”

“They look particularly carnivorous.” She nodded toward the women weaving between the tables. Dressed in semitransparent gowns that revealed nearly everything, the females in question draped themselves over the gamesters, plying them with wine and murmuring into their ears. They sat in the laps of men in chairs, toying with their hair and the buttons of their clothing.

“It's not meat they feed on,” Daniel noted. “Observe the fat gentleman in the corner with the redhead.” The woman's fingers danced all over the man, who chortled and threw money down on the hazard table.

“She's robbing him blind,” Miss Hawke breathed.

Indeed, as they spoke, the fat man's pocket watch vanished, as did the glittering brilliants adorning the front of his waistcoat.

“Someone has to notice and complain,” Miss Hawke said.

Daniel shrugged. “No one cares. Everyone in this chamber has enough timepieces and diamonds to make the losses negligible. They consider it money well spent.” As he spoke, the fat man gave the redhead a squeeze, and she laughed.

“Why not just go to a brothel?” asked Miss Hawke.

“Oh, there are rooms upstairs.” He nodded toward one chap who ambled up some stairs, his arms around a set of matching blondes.

“And you make use of those rooms?”

He shook his head. “Some men prefer red wine to white. I prefer my women of the less commercial variety.”

“My heart soars at the poetry of it all.”

Shrugging, he said, “What's sex but another form of commerce?”

“And what's a rake without his cynical detachment?” she countered.

“A vulnerable fool,” he said.

“Oh,” she said with a smile, “that's very good. I'll have to remember that for the article.”

Thankfully, she didn't pull out a notebook and start scribbling. Which meant that she had a prodigious memory. Something he both relied on and needed to guard himself against. At the least he had ensured she would never write about his family or Jonathan. Threatening her gave him no pleasure, but she was as yet an untested quantity, and a journalist, to boot. He couldn't trust her.

Nor could she trust him. There was some comfort in that.

“Come,” he said, waving toward the gaming area. “Time to join in on the fun.”

E
leanor hadn't taken half a dozen steps beside Ashford when suddenly four men appeared in their path. She recognized all of them from their frequent appearance in
The Hawk's Eye
—­especially the man who seemed to be the leader of the group. Cameron Chalton, the Viscount Marwood. The eldest son and heir to the Marquess of Allam—­Ashford's godfather. A singularly small world, this realm of the elite.

Marwood wore his black hair longer than most, and even sported dark stubble on his lean cheeks. Hard to imagine a man with a more outrageous reputation than Ashford, but Marwood seemed to excel at decadence.

“Ashford,” Marwood said with a mocking half bow. “You rotten son of a bitch.”

“Marwood,” the earl answered easily. “You filthy whoremonger.” With less affection, he addressed the three men accompanying Marwood. “Offham, Ticehurst, Welfort.”

The other gentlemen tripped over themselves, bowing and offering servile greetings. She recalled their names from sundry articles in
The
Hawk's Eye,
usually in connection with carryings-­on at the theater, or any of the countless pleasure gardens that sprang up like gaudy weeds all over London. Some of this intelligence she'd gained through her information network, and some she'd learned firsthand in her investigations through the city.

“My father came to visit you earlier,” Marwood noted.

He did?
thought Eleanor. The Marquess of Allam was a powerful man, even more so than Ashford, with a reputation for plain talk and straightforward dealing. Allam never made it into the pages of her paper because he maintained such scrupulously honorable behavior. It resulted in an exemplary life but dull reading. Wasn't that always the case?

“Enjoining me to think of marriage,” Ashford said. “The fate of the title, my responsibilities as earl, et cetera.”

A flicker of emotion crossed Marwood's face, something more than the disinterest he affected. “I'm glad he's giving his usual august, boring speeches to you rather than me.”

“We're both lost causes, you and I,” Ashford replied.

“He hasn't given up on you, though,” his friend answered. Again, that darkness crossed his face. A conversation was being held beneath the surface of this one. When she returned to the office, she'd have to look through old issues of the paper for references to Lord M—­d, piece together his mystery.

Then Marwood's gaze flicked over to Eleanor, and she felt the intensity of his dark eyes all the way to her shoes. “Who's the duckling?”

“My cousin from Lincolnshire,” Ashford said.

Eleanor pitched her voice down low. She stuck out her hand. “Ned Sinclair.”

Marwood stared at her. Then burst out laughing. His toadies joined him in his laughter. For a moment, panic iced down Eleanor's neck, and she glanced at Ashford. Did Marwood and his friends see through her disguise?

“Good God, lad.” Marwood wiped at his eyes. “Have your bollocks dropped yet?”

What is it with these toffs and their obsession with testes?

“Of course they have,” she answered gruffly.

Ashford slung his arm around her shoulder, and she fought the urge to stiffen at being pressed so close to him. “Don't quiz the boy,” he said. “Just this morning, he proudly showed me his three chest hairs.”

“There were five, not three,” Eleanor grumbled.

Her comment set off another round of guffaws, including Ashford's. Damn the bastard, he seemed to enjoy making her the butt of his friends' jests. “Ned's” pride felt the sting, and she struggled with the desire to elbow him in the ribs. Hard.

Marwood turned to one of the women sashaying by. “Jenny.”

Thankfully, Eleanor was used to visiting Maggie at the theater and seeing strange women parade around the dressing room in states of almost complete nudity. But she oughtn't act too accustomed to the sight, since “Ned” probably hadn't much experience with partially clad females. She widened her eyes and tried her best to call up a blush.

“My lord,” Jenny said with a provocative smile. She dipped into a curtsy so low that Eleanor swore she could see straight down the front of Jenny's dress, all the way to her navel.

It was an inward-­facing navel.

Marwood took Jenny's hand and gently pulled her toward Eleanor. “Young Ned here is as green as cabbage.”

Jenny swayed toward Eleanor. She ran one smooth hand down Eleanor's cheek. “Barely has a whisker on his face, poor lamb.”

“He needs experience, don't you think, love?” Marwood drawled. “Take him upstairs and break him in a little. My treat,” he added, winking at Eleanor.

“Uh . . .” True panic gripped her. What was she supposed to do? There would be some very awkward explaining—­and some bribes to pay—­if Jenny discovered that Eleanor's manly goods were as false as Jenny's hair color.

Ashford reached out and plucked Jenny's hand from Eleanor's face. “Very generous of you, Marwood. But my aunt would never forgive me if I returned her son with a case of the French pox.”

“Here now,” Jenny exclaimed. “I'm clean, I am.” She murmured under her breath, “I think.”

A sovereign appeared between Ashford's fingers, which he held up in front of Jenny. “Thank you for your time, Miss Jenny. But kindly step away from my cousin. Perhaps hie yourself to someplace on the other side of the chamber, if you'd be so courteous.”

The coin disappeared somewhere into the folds of Jenny's translucent dress—­though where it went, Eleanor had no idea. There seemed to be no hiding anything in that gown.

“Good luck at the tables, my lord,” Jenny cooed before dissolving into the crowd.

Marwood and his friends all booed at Ashford and Eleanor in disappointment. “Why must you spoil our fun?” demanded Marwood.

“Maybe I'm becoming dull in my old age,” Ashford said.

Rolling his eyes, Marwood said, “This from the man who challenged me to a race climbing the rotunda at Vauxhall.”

“It was a tie, as I recall.”

“Only just,” Marwood countered. “I would've beaten you if champagne hadn't made my boots slippery.”

Eleanor gleefully filed all of this away in the archives of her mind. These articles were going to be marvelous—­so ripe with scandal that they wouldn't be able to keep any issues of the paper in newsagents' hands. Perhaps she ought to increase her print run ahead of time, just in case. Or maybe she'd sell more papers in the future by making current issues scarce.

It was all too delicious to contemplate.

“Though I promised Ned's mother that I'd return him to Lincolnshire without the pox,” Ashford said, “I also vowed to Ned that I'd give him the full London treatment, and bankrupt him at the tables.”

“Excellent plan,” Marwood agreed. “We'll come with you.”

“One corrupting influence is enough,” Ashford said with a smile.

Instead of taking offense, Marwood nodded sagely. “Wise. There's only so much degeneracy a young lad can take in a single evening.”

“I'm game,” Eleanor objected. She could get twice the mileage from her story if not one but two rakes accompanied her this night. But Ashford sent her a quelling look, and Marwood laughed.

“Good thing the boy has you to look out for his best interests,” Marwood said. “Else you'd have to ship him back to Lincolnshire in manacles and leg irons.”

“Your approbation means the sun and moon to me,” drawled Ashford.