Scoundrel for Hire (Velvet Lies, Book 1) (10 page)

As agile as any swashbuckler on a ship's rigging, he swung onto the limb. Pausing, he saluted her. Then he pivoted, swung to a lower branch, and plunged into the huddled shadows of the night.

Silver gulped a ragged breath.

She listened for his landing, her ears straining above the thunder of her pulse. When she heard nothing, not even his retreating footsteps, she crept closer to the railing and peered over the edge. A glint of gold caught her eye. It had been her first glimpse of him; now it was her last, before he vanished so completely into the darkness that she wondered if he hadn't hung a dark curtain below to make his exit more dramatic.

Her other thought, that he was an angel with a slipping halo, was too preposterous to believe—at least, in the literal sense.

She gazed down at her tingling fingertips, still warm and slightly tremulous from his touch. A dreamy smile curved her lips.

Celestia Cooper didn't stand a chance against that man.

Then a more disturbing notion struck.

Did any woman?

Chapter 4

Rafe was pleased with his night's work.

He'd avoided arrest, put off Fred, and won an audience in an heiress's boudoir. True, Silver had surprised him when she'd rejected his advances and hired him to warm another woman's bed, but he was confident they'd be sharing the same pillow by month's end.

If she had been a sweet young thing, with high ideals and a heart as pure as gold, one of his few remaining scruples might have balked at her seduction.

But Silver was the female equivalent of his own rotten core, so he didn't see any reason to deny himself the pleasure of wooing her. It wasn't as if she were headed for heaven, and his tainted soul stood in her way. Oh, no. When God had passed out the road maps to hell, Silver had been allowed to plot her own course. He was the one who'd been denied a choice in the matter.

He grimaced, the old bitterness lancing his chest.

Once upon a time, he'd been so desperate for love that he'd let hope worm its way into his heart. He thought back to his first romantic role, young Claudio in
Much Ado About Nothing.
Although he'd only been sixteen, he'd been stunned by the number of sighing, swooning females who'd crowded backstage. Regardless of his bastardy, they'd offered him their favors, and in his naiveté, he'd thought they loved
him.

Only after they'd grown bored with Raphael Jones had he come to understand that women were infatuated with
romance
—the heroism of Hotspur, the poetry of Lysander, the tragedy of Romeo. Thus, he'd learned to answer late-night invitations with a bouquet of roses and Shakespeare's best love sonnets.

Such would be his approach with Silver. She was no angel, and he was no saint. But Silver, being female, would want to believe she was virtuous. She'd want to feel desirable and experience the grand romantic gesture: to be swept off her feet.

Rafe wasn't opposed to the idea; after all, he was a dramatist. Pirate, poet, prophet, prince—whatever she wanted, he could play the part. And if Silver preferred to pretend her lover was a real-life nobleman rather than some fictional character, then so be it. Imposters were his specialty.

He hadn't played himself in years.

The thought made him wince. Shaking himself, he chose to forget it. He saw no sense in dwelling on the injustices of his life. Long, hard experience had taught him to concentrate on the present. The past was too painful, and the future—an eternal captaincy in Satan's army—was too bleak. Only in the moment could he ever hope to find relief. And if Rafe didn't use that precious moment to examine his feelings too closely, he could convince himself he was happy. After all, the moon was full, the wind was alpine fresh, and the mountain laurels smelled like summer wine. He had an heiress in his back pocket, and the promise of wealth to sweeten his dreams. For now, these were enough.

Whistling as he strolled, Rafe passed through Leadville's business district, with its respectable, cobbled streets and glowing gaslights. He set his sights on the dusty, moonlit alley where his own lodgings lay. Unlike the opulence of Silver's Grand Hotel suite, his room was cramped and shabby, a virtual closet above a noisy gambling hall. He hadn't had much choice in accommodations, though, not with threadbare pockets and a traveling companion like Tavy—

Damn. Tavy.
He'd left her with Fiona.

Sighing, he turned in midstride only to collide with an elegantly dressed man who was hurrying—slinking, actually—out of the alley leading to the Tabor Opera House.

"Damnation," the man muttered as his top hat tumbled into the gutter.

"My middle name," Rafe countered dryly, thinking to make amends by retrieving the hat.

But the man shoved him aside. "Clod," he snapped, wading through the refuse himself. His accent was unmistakably eastern.

"As you say," Rafe murmured, noting the scar that arched above the tenderfoot's left temple.

Brushing off the brim, the easterner tossed him a malevolent look, jammed on his hat, and hurried in the direction of the Grand Hotel. Rafe shook his head. With that scarlet-lined cape flapping out behind him, the easterner could have been Tabor's own phantom of the opera—except, of course, his leading-man good looks hadn't been marred badly enough for
that
role. Too bad about the scar, Rafe mused. Fiona's stage makeup could have fixed him up in a heartbeat...

Damn.
He made a face, thoughts of Fiona reminding him of his mission. The last thing he wanted to do was face his foster parents again. Fiona was bound to wheedle, and Fred would undoubtedly ask questions. The less those two old hucksters knew about Silver's scheme, the better. Rafe couldn't very well extort a lifetime worth of savings from the Nicholses if he had to split his take with Fred and Fiona.

No, he'd have to come up with some kind of reasonable explanation to throw them off his trail. The question was, what?

Rafe was still searching for an answer when he rounded the corner of the magnificent brick edifice that shopkeeper Horace Tabor had built after he'd grubstaked enough miners to earn his fortune. Rafe hardly glanced twice at the opera house, though. Instead, he wound his way through the debris of its rear alley until he came to what was left of a fire-ravaged livery. Fred's Piccadilly Players had parked their wagons here in a semicircle, Injun-fighting style, around the wreckage.

An inexplicable pang of homesickness seized him when he glimpsed the same lantern that had drawn him out of the snow, fifteen years earlier, to Fred's door. He didn't want to be bound to his former employers, yet he didn't know how not to be. Despite all of Fred's bullying and Fiona's manipulation, the Brits had been better parents to him than Jedidiah Jones.

Scheduled for a six-week engagement, the theater troupe had turned the blackened lot into a miniature neighborhood. Rafe ducked a clothesline, smiled crookedly at a pair of patched bloomers, skirted a water barrel, and paused wistfully before a rocking horse before he finally climbed the wagon's step and beat his fist on the foot-long likeness of Fred's nose.

The door cracked, and the master prevaricator himself appeared.

"Well, ho! If it isn't the conquering hero," the Brit boomed in a voice that, Rafe was certain, rattled the windows in each of the six other wagons. "Fee, my sweet, you'll never guess who's come to call." He tossed this sally over his shoulder, even louder this time, before turning to squint once more at Rafe through his ever-present fog of smoke. "What a rare treat, to see you after midnight—and after Miss Silver's gone abed too. You must have missed the company of us regular folk. Either that, or your high-falutin' heiress threw you out on your ear."

Rafe endeavored not to glare.

"You're awake late," he parried in his best offhand manner. "I didn't interrupt anything between you and Fiona, did I?"

"Bloody hell. I can't remember the last time me and Fee were doing something we could get interrupted at. She's a sick woman, lad. A bloke can't go around demanding conjugal rights from a sick woman—unless, of course, he doesn't mind losing a favorite piece of his anatomy."

Rafe winced inwardly. Only sixty seconds after he'd arrived, and Fred was already heaping the guilt on uncomfortably thick. "Words to live by I'm sure. And how is Fiona?" he asked dutifully.

"Hacking her lungs out." Fred seemed to remember his cigar and abruptly extinguished it against the door. "'Course," he added sheepishly, "I'm sure she feels a whole lot better knowing you've come to keep her company."

As if to corroborate this statement, a shriek ripped from the rear of the wagon, followed closely by a noise that sounded like a shoe striking the wall. Fred started, turning, and Rafe could finally see beyond his bulk. An enormous cloud of facial powder was rising behind the red-and-white checkered curtain that dissected the cluttered wagon and hid Fiona from his view.

"Fred!" she shouted ominously.

He cleared his throat. "Fee, honey, good news," he called in placating tones. "You've got a visitor. It's Rafe."

"Rafe?" Her angry vibrato immediately steadied, lowering in pitch to a martyr-like groan. "God has answered a dying woman's prayers. Come in, my boy, come in."

Rafe bolstered himself against another breaker of guilt and, pushing past Fred, parted the curtain. Through the settling dust, he spied Fiona on a narrow cot, her nightcap askew and her cheeks pasty white against the backdrop of yellowed linens. She managed to look weak and pitiful, despite the fact that only moments earlier she'd been yelling at the top of her lungs and hurling shoes.

Then he noticed many of her vases were overturned on the floor. Spilled water and petals mixed with clumps of red, green, and blue stage makeup, toppled containers, and the broken pieces of glass from the hapless powder jar. Beneath her window, an auburn braid had been happily chewed, while on top of Fred's trunk, a second, straw-colored hairpiece had been trampled by tiny, rouge-stained paws.

Tavy had been busy.

Narrowing his focus, Rafe tracked his pet's webbed prints—in all their various colors—around her circular path of destruction. After a moment, he spied a trail that cut straight across the wagon, making a bee-line for Fiona's bed. He knelt and raised the quilt.

There, trembling in the back of her cage, was his four-month-old otter pup.

With her tail tucked between her legs, her ears squeezed shut, and her snout pressed contritely to her forepaws, Tavy looked the very picture of misery. Rafe suspected that things had been pretty bad between Fiona and Tavy if his pet had voluntarily placed herself behind bars.

"Come here, Tavy," he crooned, stretching out his hand.

The otter baby gave a chirp of relief. Scrambling past her prison's open door, she threw herself at his feet and wrapped her length around his ankle. He could feel her body quivering through his boot leather.

Fred chuckled. "Well now, you see? Fee and Tavy are getting along much better than they were this morning, aren't you, Fee?"

Fiona muttered something about "stinkin' rodents." Tavy blinked big wounded eyes at Rafe as if to say, "Grandma's being mean to me."

"I'm sorry she was such a bother," Rafe said, prying his pet's paws free so he could lift her into his arms. "Otters are supposed to be tidy, like cats."

"Well, they're not," Fiona grumbled, giving Tavy a look that, if she'd had nine lives, would instantly have snuffed out five or six.

"Aw, the little tyke's just curious," Fred said magnanimously, patting Tavy's head. "Once she starts learning tricks, she'll be too busy keeping the kiddies entertained to ransack any wagons. Why, I figure she could work for peanuts, kind of like one of those circus monkeys—"

"Otters don't eat peanuts," Rafe said pleasantly, disguising his irritation, "and the only trick Tavy is going to learn is how to swim. We've got a one-way ticket to the high country, where there'll be plenty of otters to help me teach her how. In fact, we're leaving Leadville in the morning. Say good-night, Tavy."

Fred snorted. "You expect me to believe you'd rather teach some orphaned otter how to survive in the wild than hump the richest, unattached female in the state? Hell, lad, what's the matter with you? You can lie better than that. I taught you how."

Rafe flashed a well-rehearsed grin. "Who says I didn't already satisfy Miss Nichols?"