Wicked Temptation (Nemesis Unlimited) (2 page)

He quieted for a moment as someone passed by on the sidewalk outside. Once the pedestrian moved on, Marco continued. “Hugh’s bank accounts were emptied and all of his liquid assets—including this house—were used to repay his debts. All your finances were tied up with your late husband’s. It’s been difficult to retrieve your lost fortune because of your widowhood. Everyone you’ve spoken with, all the attorneys and advisors, have told you the same thing.” He drew a slow breath. “You’re destitute and no one can get you back your money.”

“How … how…” was all she could manage. Her head spun, and she walked backward, until she collided with the wall. It took all of her strength and lessons in etiquette to keep from sliding to the floor.

She’d tried so hard to keep all these sordid facts from being known. Hugh was the son of a baron’s youngest son, and the family name meant everything. Scandal would follow like a relentless hound if anyone learned that her husband had died insolvent, but it was Hugh and his mortification from beyond the grave that had had her work intensely to prevent these details from being made public. To all of their acquaintances, she’d said only that she’d put everything into storage, and planned on staying with her sister in the country for an indefinite time.

“You’re a reporter,” she accused.

The cursed man had the nerve to chuckle. “I’ve been called many an insult, but never that one.”

“Then how can you know any of that?” Not only the details of her financial disaster, but the color of the flowers on the wallpaper in the hotel room where Hugh had died.

“I’m here to help,” he repeated.

“I don’t see how or why,” she snapped. Fear, exhaustion, and a dozen other emotions shortened her temper.

“There’s a tea shop on Edgware Road.” He gestured toward the door. “Come with me there, and everything will be explained.”

She raised a brow. “Is this what’s become of the world, then? Penniless widows are the latest prey. And here I’d thought that white slavery was a myth to keep girls and women from leaving their homes.”

Any lingering signs of humor left his face immediately. “Slavery continues to exist. In many forms. But in this instance, Mrs. Parrish, there aren’t any plans to spirit you away to some dockside brothel or sell you to an opium lord in China.”

“What a blessed relief.” Though it was considered crude, she crossed her arms over her chest. “Unless you plan on dragging me bodily out the door, I’m not going anywhere with you,
Marco.
”

He had the audacity to give her a slow, deliberate perusal, from the hem of her bombazine gown to the top of her head. Since she was home, she didn’t have to wear her widow’s bonnet and veil, and she fought the old self-conscious urge to cover her coppery hair with the flat of her hand.

His look wasn’t salacious, however, and he didn’t seem to care that she had unfashionably red hair. All he said was, “You’d be a slight burden to carry.”

Heat crept into her cheeks. She’d lost weight over the course of Hugh’s long battle with consumption, and since returning home, she’d only been able to afford two meals a day, neither of them lavish. “And you are nothing but impudence.”

“Waiting for us at the tea shop are an associate of mine, and Miss Lucy Nelson.”

Bronwyn pushed away from the wall with a surge of anger. “If you’ve hurt Lucy—”

“Miss Nelson is as safe as a guinea in the national treasury. She was the one who sent me here.”

Confusion thickly clouded Bronwyn’s mind. “Why would my former maid contact you?”

The inscrutable man seemed to lose the smallest thread of patience. His jaw tightened. Just a little. “Because, as I’ve said twice before, I’m here to help.”

“Lucy should have come here, herself.”

“She wanted to, but the house is being watched, and I didn’t want to attract too much attention. Don’t go to the windows.”

Bronwyn stopped in the act of doing just that. “Moseby’s men?”

“The same. They’re on the alert that if you make what appears to be an attempt to retain possession of the house, they are authorized to use force.”

She swallowed hard. Dear God, what sort of man was this Moseby, that he’d use violence against a woman? “They wouldn’t.” But her voice didn’t sound especially confident.

“I know Moseby,” Marco answered, “and he most certainly would.”

Pressing a hand to her mouth, she wondered what had become of her life. It had turned bleak and squalid in a matter of months. She was a gentleman’s daughter. These kinds of things happened only in periodicals full of exciting, lurid stories. Now here she was, just like one of those women in the stories. Except this was truly happening, not a work of fiction.

Marco turned one palm up. “Come with me. Fifteen minutes of your time simply to listen. And if you don’t like what you hear, then I’ll be happy to pay for your cab fare to the boardinghouse in Barnsbury.”

Of course he’d know her intended destination. But then, he had Lucy to tell him everything. Bronwyn had
trusted
Lucy. Why would her maid—a woman she’d known for six years—betray her like this? Unless Lucy, and these Nemesis people, truly did want to help her. Why? At this point, it didn’t much matter. She’d already reached her nadir at the age of twenty-eight. Anything would be an improvement.

“My bags are in my room,” she said.

“I’ll wait while you fetch them.”

Her life truly had altered utterly when a man expected her to retrieve her own luggage. Perhaps that was for the best. She’d played by all the rules of society and good breeding, yet here she was, in an empty house, without a groat, reliant on the word of a handsome but questionable man. Clearly, those rules served no purpose, offered no safety.

Without another word, she turned and walked up the stairs. She felt Marco’s gaze on her with every step, and it filled her with a strange, unpleasant awareness.

In her former bedchamber, she collected her baggage: one valise, and her violin case. The instrument, at least, she’d been able to save, and she thanked the Lord for that. If she’d been deprived of her music, her despair would’ve known no limits.

She returned to the foyer. To her surprise, Marco actually took her valise and case. Testing the weight of the violin case, he asked, “Chanot? A Georges Chanot, I’d wager.”

She stared at him. “Lucy must’ve told you that.”

“All violins have their own particular weight and balance, depending on the maker. Easy enough to determine this was a Chanot, once I got a hold of it.” He stuck out his arm, offering it to her. “Time to go.”

“One moment.” After pulling on her cloak, she tugged on a pair of gloves, set her widow’s bonnet on her head, and pulled down the veil. The world suddenly misted over, as if loss and grief didn’t do that already without a layer of silk covering her face.

She placed her hand lightly in the crook of his arm. Despite her gloves, despite the layers of his clothing, she felt the solidity of him, and the unyielding presence of his muscles.

Heat washed through her.

She cursed herself. What in heaven did she think she was doing? How could she have any feelings of that sort, with Hugh only eight months gone, and this Marco a complete stranger? Disgust clotted in her veins. Disgust with herself.

Glancing up at him, she noticed the slightest compressing of his lips. As if he, too, felt something at her touch.

Saints strike her down for these delusions. Her life was falling down around her like a sinking ship, and she wanted, no,
needed,
to reach a shore. Any shore, no matter how rocky,

“I’m ready,” she said.

*   *   *

Marco Black kept his gaze on the street, alert for any sign of suspect movement. The men watching the house shifted from their slouch against a street lamp, but didn’t follow them. A bloody relief. He didn’t want to have to get into any discreet brawls this early in the game.

His attention wasn’t entirely fixed on his surroundings. A small sliver remained for the woman walking beside him.

It was his job—both for Nemesis and for his other work as what was euphemistically termed an intelligence advisor to the British government—to clearly and objectively assess people within moments of meeting them. He’d been able to determine within minutes that a Russian ambassador’s wife had been using her considerable beauty to gain information about the latest developments in Chitral.

Thus far, Bronwyn Parrish seemed to be exactly what the dossier they’d compiled had delineated. Her impeccable posture came from years of schooling on the Continent, which also contributed to the sheltered expression on her face. It was a pretty face, to be sure. Smooth skinned, though with a few rose-hued freckles across the bridge of her nose, her lips nearly the same color as her freckles. And eyes the silver green of sage leaves. Eyes that gleamed with a surprising intelligence.

Those eyes were hidden now behind her veil. She kept glancing around the street, gauging it. Mrs. Parrish had potential, but she was a woman born and bred to a class that had little use for females who could think for themselves. He didn’t know to what end she’d use that intelligence of hers.

He hadn’t wanted to take this job on at all. Nemesis was for the powerless, the poor, not society widows with dead spendthrift husbands. Nemesis wasn’t for the upper echelons at all—not if he had any say in it.

Entitlement was a poison, infecting a whole class. Her class. He should know.

But he’d been voted down by the other agents. Worse still, he’d been given the lead on the mission since he was the one operative with enough free time to take on the case.

Yet he was a professional in all capacities. He might not want this job, but once assigned to it, he’d do his damnedest to make sure it succeeded.

They emerged onto Bayswater Road, with the broad green expanse of Hyde Park just on the other side of the street. Beneath a watery early spring sun, nannies pushed their infant charges in expensive prams, and a few impeccably dressed women strolled along the paths. One or two gave him a second glance, but he ignored them.

He liked to break everything down into specific components, goals that needed to be met one at a time. In that way, even the most difficult mission became possible. And right now, he had to escort the Widow Parrish to the Cottage Rose Tea Shop.

He hailed a carriage, but Mrs. Parrish hesitated before stepping into it.

“Easy to see why you’re mistrustful,” he said, holding the door. “Your husband had the bad manners to die in debt, leaving you to fend for yourself when you haven’t done it before. Your finances gutted. Your home taken. And then there’s me, a bloke you’ve never met, claiming to be here to help. Why should you trust me? What’s to say that this carriage won’t speed you to the docks, or into the clutches of some procurer?”

Though he couldn’t be sure, he suspected she raised an eyebrow. “My goodness, you certainly know how to inspire faith.”

“Ask yourself this,” he continued. “Why would I go out of my way to abduct you, when it’s all too easy for women in this city to be preyed upon? Would I really show up at your home and tell you in detail things that no one else knows just to fill a bed in some whorehouse?”

She reared back a little at his candid language.
Maledizione,
he was going to have to learn to curb his vocabulary around her. He wasn’t used to being around women of her class. Women who found an innocuous word like
whorehouse
offensive, even though London had hundreds, no, thousands of them.

But she didn’t run. Instead, she tilted her head as if contemplating what he’d said.

Then she took his offered hand and stepped into the hired carriage.

Damn, that wasn’t the first time she’d caught him off guard with her courage. There might be more to the Widow Parrish than he’d initially deduced—an unpleasant thought. Something about her, something he couldn’t name or yet understand, took the careful wiring of his brain and rearranged those wires.

There was … a need in her. A desire for something other than the emptiness within.

No. People of her station weren’t like that. He had too much experience with their vapidity, their casual cruelty, to think that, aside from some superficial differences, she wasn’t just like the others. No matter her prettiness or the glint of intelligence in her eyes.

He was a man, yes, but he preferred to think of himself as a mechanism: expertly calibrated, created specifically for its task. In need of occasional lubrication. Always reliable.

He got into the cab and signaled the driver to move on. The ride to Edgware Road was made wordlessly, thank God. She didn’t press him with questions, or chatter nervously. Mrs. Parrish seemed to understand the value of silence. Though she did have a pleasant voice, musical but strong. She probably used it only to be heard above the crowd at a party, or to complain to her dressmaker.

As the streets rolled by, he glanced at her violin case. If Lucy Nelson hadn’t told him her mistress played, and played well, by all accounts, he wouldn’t have anticipated that, either. Most patrician women favored the piano. Violin required a bit more … boldness. More passion than gentlemen’s daughters cared to show.

When she’d taken his arm, he’d felt it in her—a kind of hollowness, a demand for
something.
As if looking at the world through eyes that truly saw and assessed, rather than existing in a cloud of privilege. And that awareness had drawn on him, pulling him in despite himself.

It had to be an illusion. He’d encountered enough of them in his life. Perpetrated them, too.

The carriage came to a stop, and the driver called down that they’d arrived. After grabbing her valise, Marco stepped out then handed Mrs. Parrish down to the curb. She carried her violin case herself. He watched her take in the storefront, with its inexpensive lace curtains hanging in the windows. “I cannot pay for the cab.”

“Taken care of,” he answered, handing the driver a coin. Then he opened the door to the Cottage Rose and waved her in. “I know you have questions, and they’ll all be answered.”

“In fifteen minutes,” she said.

“Good memory.” One of his most valuable assets was his memory. Pursuing a career in espionage was damned difficult if you didn’t possess an unusual ability for recollection. How else would he know the difference between a Chanot and a Cousineau violin, if he hadn’t practiced hefting different instruments in their cases? You never knew when such a skill might be needed, either.