Secret Admirer Read online

  Curtis had struck her.

  That was how she lost the child.

  With those bare realizations, something that had been burning steadily inside him flamed up dangerously. “Do you know what I thought the first time I saw you?” he heard himself asking.

  Her eyes were locked on his. There was insecurity and wariness. And also hope. She bit her lip and shook her head. Under his fingers on her wrist he could feel her heart racing.

  “I thought you were the most un—”

  CeCe’s blood-thinning shriek sliced through the air.

  Chapter 20

  Tuesday and Lawrence left the nursery at the speed of a cannonball leaving a cannon. They were out of the room and halfway to CeCe’s chamber when she came streaking out of it, still shrieking.

  “He’s in there, he’s in there,” she wailed, and threw herself into Tuesday’s arms. “He came in through my window, he attacked me. He is in my room!” As Tuesday tried to calm her maid, Lawrence sprinted down the corridor toward her room. CeCe had flung the door closed, but from inside issued the sound of someone crashing around. In the moment before he kicked down the door Lawrence realized that he was unarmed except for the piece of charcoal he’d been tossing around, but it was too late to care. The hinges squealed in protest and then broke, the door hit the floor with a loud bang, and Lawrence felt himself being slammed into the wall by the force of another body.

  “Relinquish your hold on me!” the other body screeched as Lawrence wrapped his arms around it. “Unhand me! Liberate me! I must resuscitate her! Dammit, let me go!”

  Grub Collins had come panting in then, and grabbed the struggling man from behind. Lawrence stepped away to look at him. He would have recognized the voice, even if the words had not given the identity away. It was the man he had met the first day, the one who had refused to open the door for him and then sent him walking into the burglar alarm.

  “You are Sir Dennis’s valet, Morse,” Lawrence said.

  “Was,” Morse corrected, fighting valiantly but in vain against Grub’s strong arms. “But that is not my occupation any longer. Now let me go or I’ll rend both your arms and all your legs.”

  “Did you hear that, Grub?” Lawrence inquired.

  “I’m willing to risk it, sir.”

  “Excellent.” To Morse: “Why should we let you go? What are you doing here if you don’t work here?”

  “CeCe,” Morse called over Lawrence’s shoulder. “CeCe, my ardent love, I shall arrive briskly.”

  “You won’t arrive at all unless you answer my questions.”

  “But she requires me!” Morse protested. “Did you hear her bellowing? Something has attacked her!”

  “I believe she thinks that was you.”

  “Why would I attack her? I love her. I yearn for her. I climbed up the bloody water spout to get into her room, didn’t I?” he griped. Then twisting his head over his shoulder he asked the man who was holding him, “What is your name?”

  “Grub Collins,” Grub answered amiably.

  “Grub, Mr. Collins, could you let me go?”

  Grub looked at Lawrence who shook his head and said, “Maybe after you explain why you came through a window rather than using more conventional means.”

  “It’s like this,” Morse confided, putting aside his astonishing vocabulary. “I’ve been trying to get CeCe to run away with me. No place for her, this house. She’s head and shoulders above all of them, that girl. She’s not a maid, she’s—” Even his advanced vocabulary failed him. “I just think she is wonderful. She’s the reason I’ve taken to improving myself, see. Going to be someone, for her. But no matter how many times I ask her to run off with me, she won’t go. Says she loves her mistress and must wait for her fiancé and won’t go away. Fine, I say, but I’m going to watch over her, make sure she is all right.”

  “Don’t you have another job?”

  “Not yet, exactly. Got to find just the right station. Won’t work for a nobody, if you see what I mean. Demeans a man of my skills.”

  “Of course. Go on.”

  “So I’m watching and I’m seeing all these new servants you brought in here, all these men servants. And I seen the way they look at her. And I worry that maybe she’s not safe with them. Last night I crawled up the water pipe and tapped on her window, but she didn’t answer. Probably couldn’t hear over the rain. And then today I watch and watch the studio windows, you know you can see them from the street, and I don’t see her once. So I decide to come up here and take a look. And then she starts running around screaming.”

  CeCe had refused to enter the studio once she heard about the attack on the bed, so Morse’s statement that he had not seen her and had therefore taken the window approach to visiting made some sense.

  “Were you out there last night? While it was raining?”

  “And for a bit of time afterwards.”

  Lawrence looked at him closely. CeCe’s window and the drain pipe were on the same side of the house as the door through which the killer had to have entered. “Did you see anyone? Anyone on the ground?”

  Morse shook his head. “Not a soul. Course some of the time I was up here. But then I spent an hour or so in those bushes,” he tilted his head toward the window where a clump could be seen, “so I suppose I would have seen someone.”

  “You sat in the bushes?”

  Morse straightened himself up as much as he could with Grub still holding him, and his accent became aristocratic. “Dreamed in the bushes. About my celestial CeCe.”

  Lawrence turned around and saw that Tuesday, having shuffled CeCe to the safety of the kitchen, was standing in the doorway. “Morse, what are you doing here?” she asked.

  Morse blushed.

  “He came to visit CeCe,” Lawrence explained, clearly skeptical.

  Tuesday’s forehead wrinkled. “Why didn’t you just come through the door?”

  “Not letting anyone in that way, are they?” Morse demanded rhetorically, then corrected himself. “Passage is impossible through that opening.”

  Tuesday was immediately sympathetic. “They have turned the place into a bit of a prison, haven’t they?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Don’t know how you stand it.”

  “Me either.” She tried hard not to look at Lawrence. “I am sorry if this upset you, Morse. You might wait a few days to come back. By then things should have settled down. Grub, I think you can release him now.”

  Grub looked to Lawrence who shook his head. “Hold him.”

  “But he is not the man we are looking for,” Tuesday pointed out.

  “How do you know?” Lawrence asked. “You yourself said our man might be using disguises.”

  “Yes, but Morse simply isn’t him. Believe me,” Tuesday said, then regretted it. Why should he? Why should anyone? She had been wrong so far. “Besides, he is not cut out to be a killer.”

  Morse did not like hearing this. “I could be if I wanted to be,” he told her acidly. “If you are saying that I do not have the courage to—”

  Lawrence eyed him closely as he struggled to prove he could be as good a killer as the next man and concluded that Tuesday was right. This was not their murderer. This was just a man pathetically in love with a housemaid.

  Still, he did not like the way she had barreled in while he was questioning Morse. Didn’t like the way she had started giving orders to his men. Didn’t like the way his self-control fled around her. This was his damn investigation, not hers, and he was going to make sure she knew it.

  “Hold him,” Lawrence said to Grub. And when she opened her mouth to protest he turned away and started down the corridor.

  The Lion thought he knew what had gone wrong the night before. His Lordship was trying to take over her Window, too. The Worthington Widow’s Window. Trying to compete. Not likely, the Lion knew.

  He understood all about what she was doing with His Lordship, and he’d left her a sign so she’d know
. To show her that he had come when she called. That way she would feel his love. Just as he felt hers growing inside him.

  Unless it had been a trap?

  Never underestimate your enemy, he reminded himself.

  It did not feel like a trap, he thought as he listened to the guards around him talk. If it were a trap, someone would have known about it, and someone would have spilled it to him. Eventually he found out everything.

  Where do we hide?

  Where we are most visible.

  Why?

  Because no one ever looks there.

  Never underestimate your enemy, but make sure he underestimates you.

  He thought he’d seen to that pretty well. Something may have gone wrong the previous night, but nothing was going to go wrong tonight.

  He moved closer, listening to the guards more intently. Tonight was his. And they had no idea.

  Lawrence’s behavior in CeCe’s room set the tone that persisted through the rest of the afternoon while they waited for news. He quietly had Morse released an hour after ordering him held, but he did not let Tuesday know. It was almost a relief to both of them to have a dispensation from having to be nice to each other. They slipped gracefully and gratefully back into the pattern of mutual—

  “Is it really necessary for you to sigh like that, Lord Pickering?”

  “I am not sighing. I am breathing. Would you rather I held my breath?”

  “Absolutely. Then you would not be able to speak.”

  “I wasn’t speaking. You were the one who started speaking.”

  “I wish you would just leave me alone. I’ve had enough of your idle prattle. It’s almost as annoying as the way you keep tossing that stick.”

  “My idle prattle? I am not the one who started picking on the way someone breathes.”

  “Picking on? Who wouldn’t mention it? You sound like a cow mooing in the fog.”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “How many cows mooing in fog have you heard, Lady Arlington?”

  “I can’t see why that, or anything, is any of your business. I wish you would please stop disturbing me. And rearranging everything.”

  “I am not rearranging. I am trying to give this place a semblance of livability.”

  “Then perhaps you should remove yourself. It was far more livable before you got here.”

  —hostility and antagonism they had established early on.

  Tuesday could not stop her mind from returning repeatedly to his words in the nursery before CeCe screamed. The first time I saw you I thought you were the most un—seemed to her to be the most provoking sentence in the world, particularly since she could not seem to stop herself from listing words that began with “un,” each one more unsavory than the next.

  She had been trying to make herself paint in an unsuccessful effort to silence her mind, when the clock in her father’s room upstairs chimed five and Lawrence addressed her for the first time in hours.

  What he said was, “It is time for you to change.”

  “Change?” She accidentally dropped her brush and followed it with an unladylike expression. “Into what? A sweet-tempered creature who does your bidding unasked?”

  “Into a formal gown. And don’t try to lie—I know you have one; I asked CeCe. We will leave in less than an hour.”

  And she thought she could trust CeCe. “Where are we going?”

  “A ball.”

  “I don’t want to go to a ball.”

  “What a pity. Unfortunately, I must attend. It is Miles—you remember Miles, came up with this terrible idea of me protecting you—it’s his betrothal ball. And since, as you pointed out yourself, where I go you go, you are going.”

  “That was different. That was about finding the killer. This is—” she interrupted herself. “How can you talk of going to a ball when we still haven’t gotten a hint about where the Secret Admirer lives?” Or even if he exists.

  “All the more reason to keep you by my side.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “I am afraid you have no choice. Since she refuses to reenter this room, CeCe is waiting for you with your clothes in her room. We leave in less than an hour. Can you find your way, or do I need to send one of my men with you?” The amusement in his voice was palpable. Amusement and triumph.

  Very well, Tuesday decided as she walked, chin up and unescorted, out of the studio. She would change. She would attend the ball with him. And she would make him very, very sorry.

  “Time for you to change,” the Lion repeated to himself happily as he moved away from Worthington Hall. Indeed it was. It was time to change. Time to slip back into his other persona, his other Wardrobe.

  Time to toy with their minds once more.

  Chapter 21

  “The total is now seven,” Tuesday informed Lawrence as he entered the coach.

  “Seven what?”

  He smelled marvelous. She breathed through her mouth. “Apologies you owe me.”

  “Really? Are they collecting interest?”

  Don’t look at him don’t look at him don’t look at him. She looked at him.

  She forgot everything she was going to say. She forgot English.

  He was wearing dark gray but not like any other man had ever worn it. It brought out the silver flecks of his eyes, the gold of his hair, the lean planes of his jaw, the rugged scent of his skin, the sheer power of his body. He looked stupendous in it. And yet she wanted to rip his clothes off.

  “Are you going to enlighten me about the seven ways I have offended you, Lady Arlington, or would you prefer a blanket apology?”

  Right. Apologies. And she was going to make him regret dragging her to this ball. “There are the two uncollected from before,” she began holding up two fingers. “Then one for embarrassing me by dragging me out of the room in front of your men, one for unfairly refusing to let me go with you to investigate what we thought was the killer’s apartment, one for unreasonably making me go to this stupid ball, one for not telling me that Curtis’s mistress came to the house.” And one for saying I am the most unremarkable woman you’ve ever seen. Or whatever you were going to say.

  “I only count five.”

  “Fine, five.”

  “How did you find out about May Dew?”

  “Who?”

  “Curtis’s mistress.”

  “CeCe told me as I was getting dressed. She said she had not wanted me to know but you convinced her I would want to. Yesterday. And then you didn’t even tell me.”

  “I forgot.”

  “Forgot? Unbelievable.”

  “Why did you want to see her anyway?”

  “To see what she was like.” What women who men desire are like. “Because she had my necklace and I want to—”

  “Actually, she doesn’t.” Lawrence pulled a box out of his doublet and held it toward her. “Thank you for reminding me.”

  Tuesday opened the box and saw, with a pounding heart, that it was, in fact, her mother’s necklace. But something was different. “What did you do to it?”

  “Had it cleaned.”

  She looked up at him with an unreadable expression. He had given Jack a future and now this. “The stones are different.”

  Lawrence glanced away. “A few of them needed to be replaced,” he said as he stared intently at the doorframes on the houses they were passing. He did not explain that he had ordered they all be replaced with real gems, that four jewelers had worked unceasingly since one of his men had awakened the owner of a dingy pawn shop two nights before and found the piece, that it had cost more than the bracelet he had sent to the queen for her birthday, or that he hoped she would use it, when he was gone from her life, to buy her furniture back.

  Because as soon as the investigation was over, he was putting as much distance between himself and Lady Tuesday Arlington as modern navigational tools would allow. The effect that seeing her sitting ac
ross from him in her dark gold satin gown that set off her eyes and made her hair look as if it had been spun by some demon somewhere to tempt men was enough to warn him against any repeat of what had happened in the gallery that day. Ever.

  She did not know it, but Tuesday need not have worried about making Lawrence regret bringing her to the ball. Watching other men look at her looking like she did was going to be one of the most painful experiences of his life.

  “Lord Pickering,” she whispered. “Lawrence.”

  He looked up, surprised to hear her say his name. Surprised, dammit, that was all.

  “Thank you.” She reached a hand up and touched the choker, which settled perfectly around her neck. “Thank you for—”

  “We have arrived,” Lawrence interrupted with a frown. “Come on.”

  He might go to Constantinople, he thought as he took her arm and did not look at her or smell her or feel her or long for her. Or maybe it would be better to go a bit farther.

  They made such a ripe pair, the Lion thought as: he watched his Lady and Lawrence Pickering descend from the coach in front of Dearbourn Hall. He knew why she was with His Lordship and he didn’t blame her. The Lion knew she was just trying to lure His Lordship on to increase the challenge for him, make her heart more Worth Winning. The lady of a great lord is a great prize.

  The crowd broke into wild cheers as she and His Lordship emerged and the Lion joined in, letting the energy, the love, the adulation course through his body as if it were meant expressly for him. It was a sign, a sign of the honor to come for him. Cheering, part of the group, he became breathless, as if they were already Worshipping him, as if, at last—

  “Beg pardon,” a large man apologized, brushing up against him hard.

  The Lion shrugged casually. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, nothing wrong, could happen to anyone, not giving a hint that the touch of the other man made him feel filthy. Smiling genially, he reached a finger under the cuff of his shirt, where his scar was, slipped out his knife, and slashed the man through the stomach.

  He was so quick, so good, that the man did not even realize what had happened. He was six feet away through the crowd when he looked down and saw blood spurting from the front of his tunic, ten feet away when he lost consciousness, fifteen feet away when he died. The Lion hoped he would slip down and be trampled into nothingness, but the crowd was so thick that he did not even fall, just stood sandwiched between them all, staring at the spectacle with eyes only slightly less perceptive than theirs. Some time soon a Woman—the Lion hoped—in a dreary shawl and a hat she yelled at her husband for sitting on, would look over and realize the man she thought—had delighted in imagining—was groping her, was a corpse. Priceless!