She suddenly felt small. Small and vulnerable, and naked to his dark gaze. She stood so she would at least be free to move. To run, if necessary, although she doubted he was dangerous in that way.
Unfortunately, he stood too. She wrapped the shawl around her like armor and tried to appear formidable. What a muddle she had made of this.
“As I explained, Mr. Albrighton, I hold to my mother’s standards regarding a man’s birth and wealth.”
He strolled around her, too at ease for her taste, far too tall for comfort. She kept turning to keep him in view. He ended up not far from her, near a wall. He casually rested his shoulder against it and assumed a very relaxed stance.
“If you seek to achieve a similar fame and success, you said. You just spoke of a less illustrious road in that profession. Or did I misunderstand?”
Was he teasing her? Calling her bluff? She suspected so, but could not be sure. Partly she could not tell because he flustered her badly now, standing this closely, his gaze very warm and familiar and almost beckoning her to intimate confidences. Mr. Albrighton was far too self-possessed to leer when broaching such a topic. She rather wished he would leer, though. She could put him in his place, then.
She tried to assume a certain hauteur, the way her mother could when called upon.
“No matter what road I choose, and what profession, you would still be unsuitable. Dallying will gain you nothing,” she said.
“I do not agree. Dallying here, now, for a mere five minutes, has already gained me something.”
“I do not see what it could be, besides my vexation with you.”
“Do you not?” He smiled so subtly she wondered if she imagined it. He pushed off from the wall. She held her ground with difficulty and masked the way fear caused her breath to shorten. No, not fear. Excitement.
“It has gained me evidence that dallying more might gain me more, no matter how suitable or unsuitable I may be.” He reached over suddenly, and laid two fingers on her lips. She almost jumped out of her skin. She felt her lips pulsing under the contact. “You are not so sophisticated that your reactions do not show, Miss Pennifold, and I see more than vexation. There may be gentlemen who would not speculate on the possibilities present in this chamber tonight, but I am not that virtuous.”
That special tension tightened even more with his words. He had just bluntly acknowledged that which she thought it better to ignore. Their gazes met across his outstretched arm for too long. She feared he was correct, and that she was not sophisticated enough to hide the way she stirred inside.
His hand fell. He smiled, to himself this time. “I will leave you now. I will bolt the garden door before I go up. Sleep well, Miss Pennifold.”
Chapter Three
C
elia’s suspicion that someone had searched Alessandra’s other property was not good news for Jonathan. Nor was her announcement that she intended to live in this house, no matter how much he had enjoyed last night’s little contest with her. He was still assessing how both revelations would affect his plans when he rose from bed the next day.
He
had
entered that house on Orchard Street, before coming back to this one. He had seen the tidiness to which Celia referred. If Celia was correct, and the other house had already been searched before either of them examined it, there might be a rival for the information that Edward sought. That rival might have less benign intentions than ensuring Alessandra’s past remained in the past. Any fool hoping to blackmail her patrons might risk illegal entry to find evidence of their names.
Or—and he did not want to think it, but he had to consider the possibility—there could have indeed been traitorous acts, and the man involved needed to be sure that Alessandra had left no evidence that pointed to him.
Jonathan thought of the lovely blond woman sleeping down below. Desperate men did desperate things. If Celia should chance upon an intruder looking for hidden evidence, or if someone concluded she knew too much about her mother’s doings, she could be in danger. Just as well that he would be living here, then. She may not want his protection, but she might need it for a while anyway.
There was a different possible reason for another’s interest in Alessandra’s papers. It could have been someone hoping to ensure Jonathan himself would not find evidence that set him on a path of revenge regarding those events in Cornwall five years ago. It went without saying he would follow that evidence wherever it led if he came upon it.
His mind darkened as it always did whenever he remembered that disaster and its deadly outcome. Today it was worse because vivid images from that night had come to him in a waking dream, provoked no doubt by Edward’s mention of it in the carriage. That betrayal had missed its mark, and instead caused the death of an innocent lad to whom he had paid a few shillings to guide his path along an unfamiliar section of coast.
He had killed enough in his life. He had seen others die too, some of them comrades. Yet nothing had prepared him for carrying that boy home to his mother, and seeing a grief so profound that it did not even care about blame.
Someone still needed to answer for that night. He really didn’t give a damn if he found a list of Alessandra’s lovers, or if someone else did and published it. He had agreed to this little mission for himself, and for the odd chance that he would finally be able to settle an old score.
As for Celia, this was another property that required a thorough search, but he could hardly do it in front of her nose. Last night he had given most of the chambers up here in the attic a quick inspection, but one had been locked. Now he could not break through the door across the passageway without Celia guessing just who had forced his way in.
No water waited outside his chamber door when he opened it. He thought it unlikely that his landlady would see to the linens either. Celia would make no efforts to accommodate his presence in her house, no matter what possibilities had been silently humming in the library last night. He judged that not only her desire to inconvenience him was at work.
He did not know where she had spent the years after she left her mother, but nothing about her suggested she had gone into service. The possibility existed that Celia did not know anything about housekeeping.
Left to do for himself, he went down the servant stairs. No sounds came to his ears as he passed the second level where she had her own chamber, nor as he descended farther. Only as he emerged from the stairwell did he see her, sitting in that bright back chamber with a sketchbook on her lap, concentrating hard on the windows and space and the drawing she made.
She wore a primrose-hued dress. Along with her hair and fair skin, she brightened the chamber like a beam of sunshine. She had appeared beautiful in the light of the fire last night, but now the sight of her made his breath catch.
She would be wasted as the abbess of a brothel. He believed that her insinuations about that last night had only been another attempt to encourage him to leave, but he could not know for sure.
She startled when he greeted her. Her blue eyes raked him from head to toe but she did not react to his dishabille. Since it wasn’t his fault he had not shaved and wore little more than shirt and trousers, that was only fair. Yet he could not block the memory of a golden girl in her mother’s other home, and imagine the lessons that Alessandra must have been imparting that year. Hiding any sense of fluster when a man looked like this was probably one of them.
“I came for some water to wash.” The excuse sounded stupid to his own ears. The fact would be obvious enough when he returned with a bucket from the garden.
“Were you expecting me to bring it up to you?” Her tone implied honest curiosity.
“Of course not. You are not a servant.”
“No, I am not. Certainly not yours.”
“Linens, however, are customary when a single chamber is let.” He had thought to put off this demand, but her resentful tone goaded him a bit. “I said that I required little housekeeping, but I do need bedsheets.”
She just looked at him, then returned to her drawing. He went to the well and drew the water. Cold water. He carried it back, debating whether to suffer its chill or lose the time to wait for it to warm near his fireplace.
“Will you be going out today?” Her question found him at the bottom of the stairs.
“That is likely. In an hour, for a while.”
“Good.” She did not look up from the drawing.
Her distracted, dismissive “good” provoked the devil in him. He set down the bucket and strolled into the chamber until he could look over her shoulder at the drawing.
It showed the chamber itself, in good perspective, with a system of shelves near the windows and low trays on the floor.
“You inherited your mother’s talent,” he said, while his gaze shifted to the intricate way she had dressed her golden hair. The angle of her head allowed tiny, errant wisps to show, like little feathers splayed against the nape of her elegant neck. He stood close enough to smell her lavender scent, and to move those tiny hairs when he exhaled.
Her pencil stopped on the page. She looked up at him, quickly enough that she noticed his eyes were no longer on the drawing, but on her.
Her color rose, but not too much. She glanced in his eyes for an instant. That quick, penetrating look acknowledged what he had been doing, and why, and displayed no shock or dismay. And so, as with last night, he did not try to hide his appreciation and interest the way he normally would.
Speculations about the possibilities began spinning in his mind. Pleasant ones. Erotic ones. Too complicated, though. She was beautiful and desirable, and the interest was mutual—that was certain—despite her feigned indifference. But whether she followed her mother’s path, or indeed started a brothel, or just lived in virtuous isolation, she was not for him.
She returned her attention to her drawing, as if she had reached the same conclusion. “You knew her well, if you know she had a talent with art. I only realized it myself the last few months I lived with her back then.”
“One only has to see one drawing to know if there is talent.”
“And you only saw one of hers? Or did you see more?”
He hesitated. He was long practiced in revealing as little as possible about most things, especially if they mattered to someone else and touched on his missions. Even casual comments could come back to haunt one and lead to problems.
“She would draw and paint when she came here,” he said. “So I saw a few more than one over time.”
“Are they here? These drawings?”
“I expect so.”
She gazed around the chamber, and toward the rooms invisible to her beyond and above. “Perhaps I will see them too, when I have time to investigate the contents of this house. First I must see to other things, however. Like this chamber.”
He almost asked what she intended for the chamber, and all those shelves. Instead he returned to his bucket, and mounted the steps.
Investigate
. It had been an odd word for her to use. Whatever her reason for that kind of examination, it would be wise for him to make sure he investigated first.
B
oot steps sounded in the stairwell, getting fainter as Mr. Albrighton carried his water to his chamber.
She had hoped that upon realizing she would do nothing to make him comfortable, he would take himself off to someplace where at least basic service would be provided. Instead he had not appeared to mind doing for himself this morning, and had continued to show more interest in her than was proper. He had also deliberately engaged her in conversation, as if to prove he could.
She suspected that if she were too obvious in her efforts to encourage his removal, he might deliberately stay. He might decide it was a contest that he of course had to win.
She probably had achieved nothing by being rude this morning, and perhaps had only goaded him on in his plan to dally. A little more subtlety might be in order.
She did not like being rude and, she suspected, she had not even been very good at it. She certainly had not held the pose once he entered this sitting room. But then it was hard to act like a person hardly existed when that person made one’s blood race when he stood right next to you, and his mere breath sent delicious shivers down your back.
She pictured him up there, waiting for that cold water to heat in a small attic chamber. How long had he been using that room while in London this time? Not long, she guessed, if he did not even have linens for his bed and washing.
She set aside her sketch and went up to her own chamber. She pulled cloths out of the wicker linen chest and made a stack of sheets and towels. She needed to protect whatever mattress was up there, after all. Nor did she want him dripping water all over the floor. Giving him linens was not actually accommodating his presence in this house, or acting like his servant. If she made him live like a prisoner, that chamber would eventually be as fetid as a prison cell.
She did not actually tiptoe up the front stairs to the attic, but she tried to make no noise. She would leave the linens outside the door and be gone before he knew they were there.
The attic had a long passageway. Three doors gave off one side, and two off the other. Three of the doors were open. She listened for any sounds coming across those three thresholds.
Nothing. Treading softly, she aimed for the other end of the passage, where two closed doors faced each other. As she passed the open chambers, she glanced in. All were furnished with simple beds and wardrobes. If she were of a mind to have more tenants, there was space enough for them.
She approached the top of the back stairs. As she did, she realized that one of those doors was not totally closed after all. A thin beam of light fell into the passage, indicating it was ajar. Cold air flowed out of the chamber too. No noise, however. No movements.