After the Scandal (27 page)

“No.”

Another immediate answer. But he threw his head back and looked up at the blazing summer sky, as if he were seeking divine guidance. Or retribution. And his voice was laced with something stronger than regret—shame. “I do know that I should regret it, Claire. I do know that if I were good—if I were a true gentleman—I should regret it. I know that. I’ve been taught better. But I don’t regret it. At all.”

She had been taught, too. She had been taught to smile and say yes. No more.

“Are you sorry that we found Maisy’s body?”

“No.”

“Then there you are.” She took another deep breath and forged on. “I don’t regret any of those things either. But I will regret it, if we stop now—if we let that man, whoever he is, get away with murdering Maisy, and go free so he can rape and murder another girl.
That
is not something I care to have on my conscience.”

And she had to make this right—for herself, as well as for Maisy Carter. Because if she and Tanner didn’t find out what had gone so very wrong at the ball, if they couldn’t know that Lord Peter Rosing was never going to be able to rape another girl again, Claire could never hold her head up in public or trust another person. If she went home now, she might never have the courage to leave her father’s house again. “I have to find out who did this, Tanner. Please understand, I
have
to.”

He was silent for a long moment, thinking with that clever, clever, encyclopedic, labyrinthine brain of his—weighing each and every one of her words, to see if they could tip his scales.

“Almost,” he said at last. “You were
almost
raped.”

So correct. Insisting on being both protective and right. She’d give him that. “Yes. Because you stopped him.”

He winced up one eye. “Ah. I’ve been lucky, Claire.”

“No. I’ve been lucky. You’ve been vigilant and skilled.” She was sure of this. “And you’re going to keep on being vigilant and skilled.” She took ahold of his hand and led him onward. “And you promised me, Tanner. You said you would do anything for me. Anything I asked you to do.”

“God’s balls.” But even his curse sounded accepting. “I did.”

“You gave me your word,” she pressed, “so you’ll just have to keep it.”

“God’s balls,” he swore again, but he was smiling now. “You sound just like my sister.”

It was as close to agreement as Claire was like to get. The warmth of relief made her expansive. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

He heaved a pent-up chuckle out of his chest. “You’re nothing like her.”

“No?”

“No.” He shook his head and rubbed his hand across his mouth, as if he could erase the feeling. “I never wanted to kiss her.”

She felt it again—that suspended moment when the rest of the earth seemed to stand still and there were only the two of them. Every hint of fatigue vanished. Every weary nerve came alive and tingling.

She turned her head and looked up at him from under her lashes. “And do you want to kiss me?”

He shook his head again, as if he would still try to deny it. But he said, “It’s
all
I want to do.”

Heat and something far more unruly blossomed deep under her skin. Something unfettered and entirely unrefined. Something daring. “Then you’d best do so.”

He didn’t kiss her immediately, there in the middle of a public thoroughfare, but clasped her hand and pulled her at a run down the pavement. The startled filly pranced along beside them, but as soon as they made the corner, and could slip into the narrow reach of White Horse Street, he looped the rein over his elbow, and reeled Claire around into the soft ivy covering the backside of the Fenmore stable block.

He took a long look at her there, at her face and eyes and lips—such a long look that she thought he might have changed his mind, and be thinking of reading her another lecture.

But what he did instead was put one hand flat against the wall over her head, and lean in, just a little. Just enough so his breath fanned across her temple. Just enough so she tilted her face up to his.

Within her chest, her heart had kicked up, keeping time with her shortened breath.

When she had kissed him in the boat, it had somehow seemed right—the natural thing to do. But he had been slow to respond, and hesitant. As if perhaps he might not want to be kissed in the middle of a busy river. Or by her. And so she had stopped. And pulled away.

But now it was he who was bending down from his great height to kiss her. He who was sneaking his hand around her waist, and pulling her near. He who was finally appeasing the near-painful ache of longing.

His lips were less tentative, less passive, though they moved over hers carefully, slowly, gauging their welcome.

She would leave him in no doubt.

She slanted her head, and took his taut bottom lip between her teeth and bit down gently, delicately, holding him captive, baiting him with the promise of more. Teasing him into complicit compliance.

But in the next moment she was almost sorry she had teased him so, for she was unprepared for the force of passion she had awakened in him. His hands cupped her chin, and he sank into her kiss with abandon, drinking in her lips, pushing her back into the verdant cushion of the ivy.

And she was lost. Lost to everything but the smooth shock of his lips and the comforting rasp of his incipient beard against her skin. Lost to the feel of his thumbs fanning across her cheek, urging her to open to him and give in to the decadent soft tangle of tongue upon tongue. Lost in the depth of the hungry ache within her that grew instead of being assuaged.

Hungry for more of the fresh-rain taste of him. More of the cedar-spice scent of him. More of the careful, decorous feel of him.

She looped her arms around his neck and held him tight, pressing herself into the comforting heat and pliant solidity of his chest while his tongue touched and caressed hers. While his lips lulled and enticed with growing heat, drugging her with sweet need.

His hands delved into her hair, cradling her nape, holding her head at just the right angle. And she followed suit, running her hands into his tousled hair, knocking his hat to the ground behind him.

But he didn’t care, and neither did she. She only cared that he was kissing her with want, and need and hunger. As if
she
were a taste he had not known he craved and was still hungry for more.

On and on they kissed, giving and taking, asking and exploring, until the filly grew bored and restive, and tugged him away with a toss of her impatient head.

He and Claire broke apart, gasping for breath, and Tanner stepped away, and swept up his hat before it could be trod under the horse’s hooves.

“That was instructive.” His voice sounded amused and baffled and surprised. “I like kissing you.” He said it as if it were a revelation, as if he had not been sure he would when he had first set his lips to hers.

How like him, to be so blunt and honest.

Joy was a heady, giddy, generous feeling bubbling through her. “Oh, I like kissing you, too.”

She was rewarded by that lovely can’t-help-himself boyish smile. “Lady Claire Jellicoe. What am I going to do with you?”

She smiled back. “You’re going to take me back to Richmond, and catch a killer.”

*   *   *

All Tanner could do was agree. And smile. It was as if having tasted her lips, his mouth wanted to do nothing else. But he had to take care of a more pressing matter first.

Like proposing marriage. Best to get to that straightaway.

“I will do that, just as I promised. And then I’m going to kiss you some more. But I need to get this filly back to the stable first.”

And all of those things were going to be bloody, damned difficult.

Because as he had so thoroughly kissed and been kissed by Lady Claire Jellicoe up against the stable wall, he had heard the unmistakable sound of a carriage being driven through the gates and into the very private grounds of Fenmore House.

The short hairs at the back of his nape stood to prickling attention, as if he were a cur dog. And he was a motley cur dog of a duke, slinking around his own back alley, watching the premises. And the more he listened, the more strongly his instinct cautioned him toward stealth.

And he had long ago learned to trust and rely upon his instinct absolutely—it had never let him down.

And the situation called for extra caution, because this time he had involved another person—Lady Claire. And if he got this wrong—this delicate and incredibly difficult navigation of human interactions—she would be the one who would suffer the most.

Wariness flooded his skin with pricking, itchy heat, and he led Claire and the filly toward the end of White Horse Street, where the Fenmore House mews gate met the lane just as it widened into Shepherd Market, with caution riding hard on his back.

He was all watchful vigilance—his palms were sticky with apprehension. And with good reason. There was an inordinate amount of bustle in the stable yard—inordinate in this case being any bustle at all, for he was not in residence.

And there ought not be a carriage with the crest of Sir Nathaniel Conant, the Beak of Bow Street, idling in the yard, nor a red-breasted Runner milling about Tanner’s gate.

His body reacted even before his brain, sending a rush of blood through his veins, and his pulse kicking hard against his chest.

He had miscalculated badly. A very different game was now afoot.

“Keep moving. Into the market.”

Claire was acute enough to obey him instantly—following him into the anonymous comfort of the milling shoppers picking through the afternoon’s produce. “What is wrong?”

Nothing he wanted to speak of in a public place. Tanner wove his dextrous way through the market stalls, winding around produce sellers with their bushels of leeks, and poulterers with their crates of fluttering guinea fowl until he reached a vantage point where he could see both the gates of Sanderson House, to the north up Chapel Street, and the mews gate of the ducal home, Fenmore House, east at the far end of the market at the top of White Horse Street.

Sanderson House was quiet, but Fenmore House was not. There were two Runners, presumably from Bow Street, idling about—one leaning against the wrought-iron gatepost, and the other milling about the yard, talking to his stablemen. Who were all—he would wager his last groat—loyal to a fault. They would say not a word, as they had little respect for the law. No doubt they were all petrified of the nick themselves—Fenmore House was rather overstaffed with what could only be described as former members of the criminal classes. Thieves, rogues, whores, and cutpurses alike.

It was an interesting life.

The coach idling in the drive looked, if not official, then magisterial in all the senses of the word he had learned at Eton and Oxford: masterly, authoritative, and commanding. They did not look like they had come to give him a commendation of any sort. They looked to bid him no good.

But Tanner was a creature of stealth and guile. And he knew a thing or two that all the magistrates in London did not.

“Stay here,” he instructed Claire. “Buy some food.” He pulled out his sueded pouch again and fished out some coins. “Something we can take with us downriver. And keep this.” He looped the leather cord around her neck. “If I’m not out again in ten minutes—take what’s inside, put it on, and go home.”

“Take what?” She reached up to feel the contents through the soft suede of the bag.

This was not the time or place, but he had run out of time. There was nothing for it. “Look. I am an idiot. Here.” He took the ring out himself, and held it up before her. “This ring. With it, we are betrothed, and you are protected. Whether I come out of there in ten minutes or not. But I will come out eventually. I will sort it out, and I will come for you. But in the meantime, you will be protected.”

He could not read the look on her face—another one of those combinations of shock and excitement and fear and, he hoped, happiness that left her pale and trembling.

“Whatever happens, I’d be much obliged if you would wear the ring, and consider us betrothed.”

As a declaration of love it lacked a certain finesse and passion, but it was the best he could do. And as he himself felt such a confusing mixture of fear and dread and excitement and hopefulness humming through his veins that he thought his heart would pound its way right out of his chest, he shoved the ring into her hand and ran.

Except that he didn’t run. He pulled his hat down low over his eyes, and proceeded to walk across the market with the unhurried, confident air of a man who knows what he’s doing.

Which was the biggest lie of them all.

But it worked, for he walked unmolested by the Runner at the gate in his blue coat and scarlet waistcoat until he was safe in the stable yard, out of sight of the robin redbreast.

“Pip,” he called to a stableboy hauling water.

“Shite.” The boy all but bit his tongue. “Ye scared me there, Yer Gr—”

“Stuff it, there’s a good lad.” Tanner spoke to the lad with a casual tone, and kept moving down the row of stalls. “Walk along with me, as if you’re going to help me with the filly. How goes it with the carriage pair?”

The boy was disconcerted by the bland, nonsensical question. “Fine, sir. Do you want me to have ’em put to harness? Or fetch a horse for you? They say they’re after you, sir.”

“Do they now? That’s fine. Fine and dandy.” Tanner edged a bit of Billingsgate Irish into his voice. That’d help the redbreasts see and hear what they expected to—an Irish groomsman fresh back from an errand. Just as he wanted them to see. “And in a bit, I’ll be after having you find Beamish for me. No, don’t look at him”—he kept his own gaze away from the second fellow who sidled into view and leaned on the side of one of the idle coaches—“just keep on with me, there’s a good lad.”

He handed Pip the lead rope, divested himself of his livery, and donned a sturdy, checked stable apron.

Pip did his damnedest to comply, but Tanner could see he was nearly bursting at his worn seams with both questions and information.

“So what do you know, then, Pip?” he asked once he judged they were beyond earshot.