A Rogue's Proposal (3 page)

He was wearing an elegant morning coat of a blue that matched his eyes; his long thighs, gripping the saddle skirts, were encased in tight buckskin. Ivory shirt, ivory cravat and gleaming Hessians completed the picture. He looked what he was—the very epitome of a London rake.

Flick kept her gaze fixed on his face and wished, very much, that she were taller. The closer he came, the smaller she felt—the more childlike. She was no longer a child, but she’d known him since she had been. It was hard to feel assured. With her cap shading her face, her muffler over her nose and chin, she couldn’t imagine how he might see her—as a girl still with pigtails, or as the young lady who’d trenchantly avoided him. She’d been both, but she was neither now. What she was now was on a crusade. A crusade in which she could use his help. If he consented to give it.

Lips firming beneath her muffler, she tilted her chin and met his hard stare.

Demon’s memories churned as he walked his horse into the copse’s shadow. She’d called him “Demon”—only someone who knew him would do that. Images from the past jumbled and tumbled, glimpses through the years of a child, a girl, who would without a blush call him Demon. Of a girl who could ride—oh, yes, she’d always ridden, but when had she become a maestro?—of a girl he had long ago pegged as having that quality Carruthers described as “good bottom”—that open-hearted courage that bordered on the reckless, but wasn’t.

When he stopped his horse, nose to tail with The Flynn, he had her well and truly placed. Not Flick. Felicity.

Eyes like slits, he held her trapped; reaching out, he tugged the concealing muffler from her face.

And found himself looking down at a Botticelli angel.

Found himself drowning in limpid blue eyes paler than his own. Found his gaze irresistibly drawn to lips perfectly formed and tinged the most delicate rose pink he’d ever seen.

He was sinking. Fast. And he wasn’t resisting.

Sucking in a breath, he drew back, inwardly shocked at how far under he’d gone. Shaking free of the lingering spell, he scowled at its source. “What the damn hell do you think you’re about?”

S
he tilted her chin—a delicate, pointy little chin. Set as it was, it looked decidedly stubborn.

“I’m masquerading as a stable lad, in your stables, so—”

“What a
damn fool
lark! What the
devil
—”

“It’s
not
a lark!” Her blue eyes flashed; her expression turned belligerent. “I’m doing it for the General!”

“The General?” General Sir Gordon Caxton was Demon’s neighbor and mentor, and Felicity’s—Flick’s—guardian. Demon scowled. “You’re not going to tell me the General knows about this?”

“Of course not!”

The Flynn shifted; tight-lipped, Demon waited while Flick quieted the big bay.

Her gaze flickered over him, irritated and considering in equal measure, then steadied on his face.

“It’s all because of Dillon.”

“Dillon?” Dillon was the General’s son. Flick and Dillon were of similar age. Demon’s most recent memories of Dillon were of a dark-haired youth, swaggering about the General’s house, Hillgate End, giving himself airs and undeserved graces.

“Dillon’s in trouble.”

Demon got the distinct impression she only just avoided adding “again.”

“He became involved—inadvertently—with a race-fixing racket.”

“
What?
” He bit off the word, then had to settle his mount. The words “race-fixing” sent a chill down his spine.

Flick frowned at him. “That’s when jockeys are paid to ease back on a horse, or cause a disruption, or—”

He glared at her. “I
know
what race-fixing entails. That doesn’t explain what
you’re
doing mixed up in it.”

“I’m
not
!” Indignation colored her cheeks.

“
What
are you doing masquerading as a lad, then?”

Her soft blue eyes flashed. “If you’d
stop
interrupting, I’d be able to tell you!”

Demon reined in his temper, set his jaw, and pointedly waited. After a moment’s fraught silence, blue eyes locked with blue, Flick nodded and put her pert nose in the air.

“Dillon was approached some weeks ago by a man and asked to take a message to a jockey about the first race of the season. He didn’t see any reason he shouldn’t, so he agreed. I suspect he thought it would be a lark—or that it made him more involved with the racing—but he agreed to carry the message to the jockey, then didn’t. Couldn’t. He got a chill and Mrs. Fogarty and I insisted he stay in bed—we took away his clothes, so he had to. Of course, he didn’t say
why
he kept trying to struggle up. Not then.”

She drew breath. “So the message didn’t get passed on. It was an instruction to fix the race, so the race, therefore, wasn’t fixed. It now seems that the man who approached Dillon was working for some sort of syndicate—a group of some description—and because the race wasn’t fixed and they didn’t know it, they lost a lot of money.”

“Men came looking for Dillon—rough men. Luckily, Jacobs and Mrs. Fogarty didn’t like their style—they said Dillon was away. So now he’s in hiding and fears for his life.”

Demon exhaled and sat back in his saddle. From what he knew of the unsavory types involved in race-fixing, Dillon had good cause to worry. He studied Flick. “Where’s he hiding?”

She straightened, and fixed him with a very direct look. “I can’t tell you—not unless you’re willing to help us.”

Demon returned her gaze with one even more severe, and distinctly more aggravated. “Of
course
I’m going to help you!” What did she think he was? Beneath his breath, he swore. “How’s the General going to take it if his only son is charged with race-fixing?”

Flick’s expression immediately eased; Demon knew he couldn’t have said anything more convincing—not to her. More devoted than a daughter, she was intensely protective of the ageing General. She thought the world of him, as did he. She actually nodded approvingly.

“Precisely. And that, I’m afraid, is one of the things we especially fear, because the man who hired Dillon definitely knew he was the General’s son.”

Demon inwardly grimaced. The General was the preeminent authority on English and Irish Thoroughbreds and revered throughout the racing industry. The syndicate had planned well. “So where’s Dillon hiding?”

Flick considered him, one last measuring glance. “In the tumbledown cottage on the far corner of your land.”

“
My
land?”

“It was safer than anywhere on the Caxton estate.”

He couldn’t argue—the Caxton estate comprised just the house and its surrounding park. The General had a fortune invested in the Funds and needed no farms to distract him. He’d sold off his acres years ago—Demon had bought some of the land himself. He shot a glance at Flick, sitting comfortably astride The Flynn. “My horses, my cottage—what else have you been making free with?”

She blushed slightly but didn’t reply. Demon couldn’t help but notice how fine her skin was, unblemished ivory silk now tinged a delicate rose. She was a painter’s dream; she would have had Botticelli slavering. The idea brought to mind the painter’s diaphanously clad angels; in a blink of his mental eye, he had Flick similarly clothed. And the tantalizing question of how that ivory skin, which he’d wager would extend all over her, would look when flushed with passion formed in the forefront of his brain.

Abruptly, he refocused. Good God—what was he thinking? Flick was the General’s ward, and not much more than a child. How old was she? He frowned at her. “None of what you’ve said explains what
you’re
doing here, dressed like that, working my latest champion.”

“I’m hoping to identify the man who contacted Dillon. Dillon only met him at night—he never saw him well enough to recognize or describe. Now Dillon’s not available to act as his messenger, the man will have to contact someone else, someone who can easily speak to the race jockeys.”

“So you’re hanging around my stables morning and afternoon, hoping this man approaches
you
?” Aghast, he stared at her.

“Not
me
. One of the others—the older lads who know all the race jockeys. I’m there to keep watch and overhear anything I can.”

He continued to stare at her while considering all the holes in her story. Clearly, he’d have to fill them in one by one. “How the hell did you persuade Carruthers to hire you? Or doesn’t he know?”

“Of
course
he doesn’t know. No one does. But it wasn’t difficult to get hired. I heard Ickley had disappeared—Dillon was told Ickley had agreed to act as messenger for this season, but changed his mind at the last. That’s why they approached Dillon. So I knew Carruthers was shorthanded.”

Demon’s lips thinned. Flick continued. “So I dressed appropriately”—with a sweeping gesture, she indicated her garb—“and went to see Carruthers. Everyone in Newmarket knows Carruthers can’t see well close to, so I didn’t think I’d have any difficulty. All I had to do was ride for him and he’d take me on.”

Demon swallowed a snort. “What about the others—the other lads, the jockeys? They’re not all half-blind.”

The look Flick bent on him was the epitome of feminine condescension. “Have you ever stood in a working stable and watched how often the men—lads or trainers—look at each other? The horses, yes, but they never do more than glance at the humans working alongside. The others see me all the time, but they never look.
You’re
the only one who looked.”

Accusation colored her tone. Demon swallowed his retort that he’d have to have been dead not to look. He also resisted the urge to inform her she should be grateful he had; just the thought of what she’d blithely got herself into, squaring up to expose a race-fixing syndicate, chilled him.

Race-fixing syndicates were dangerous, controlled by men to whom the lives of others meant little. The lives of people like Ickley. Demon made a mental note to find out what had happened to Ickley. The idea that Flick had set herself up as Ickley’s replacement was enough to turn his hair grey. Gazing at her face, on her openly determined expression, it was on the tip of his tongue to terminate her employment immediately.

Recollection of how her chin had set earlier made him hold the words back. Pretty little chin, delicately tapered. And too stubborn by half.

There was a great deal he did not yet know, a great deal he didn’t as yet understand.

The horses were cooling, the sun slowly sinking. His mount shifted, coat flickering. Demon drew breath. “Let’s get back, then I’ll go and see Dillon.”

Flick nodded, urging The Flynn into a walk. “I’ll come, too. Well, I have to. That’s where I change clothes and switch horses.”

“Horses?”

She threw him a wary glance. “I couldn’t turn up for work riding Jessamy—
that
they’d certainly notice.”

Jessamy, Demon recalled, was a dainty mare with exceptional bloodlines; the General had bought her last year. Apparently for Flick. He glanced at her. “So? . . .”

She drew breath and looked ahead. “So I borrow the old cob you let run on your back paddock. I don’t ride him above a canter, if that. I’m very careful of him.”

She looked up. He trapped her gaze. “Anything else you’ve borrowed?”

Big blue eyes blinked wide. “I don’t think so.”

“All right. We’ll ride these two back, then you climb on the cob and head off. I’ll leave in my curricle. I’ll drive home, then ride out and join you. I’ll meet you by the split oak on the road to Lidgate.”

She nodded. “Very well. But we’ll need to hurry now. Come on.” She leaned forward, effortlessly shifting The Flynn from walk, to trot, to canter.

And left him staring after her. With a curse, he dug in his heels and set out in her wake.

He reached the split oak before her.

By the time she appeared, trotting the old cob, long past his prime, down the middle of the road, Demon had decided that, whatever transpired with Dillon, he would ensure that one point was made clear.

He
was in charge from now on. She’d asked for his help; she would get it, but on his terms.

From now on, he’d lead and
she
could follow.

As she neared, her gaze slid from him to his mount, a raking grey hunter who went by the revealing name of Ivan the Terrible. He was a proud and princely beast with a foul, dangerous, potentially lethal temper. As the cob drew closer, Ivan rolled one eye and stamped.

The cob was too old to pay the slightest attention. Flick’s brows, however, rose; her gaze passed knowledgeably over Ivan’s more positive points as she reined in. “I
know
I haven’t seen him before.”

Demon made no reply. He waited—and waited—until she finished examining his horse and lifted her gaze to his face. Then he smiled. “I bought him late last year.” Flick’s eyes, suddenly riveted on his face, widened slightly. She mouthed an “Oh,” and looked away.