Lady of Desire (2 page)

Tonight at Almack’s, in the hopes that it was the one place she would not dare make a scene, Robert had told her that after her recent bit of mischief at Ascot, the much-anticipated match between their two powerful families must no longer be delayed. The negotiations for her marriage settlement were almost finished, he had said, and tomorrow they would set the wedding date. She had been nothing less than shocked.

The problem with her brothers was that they were a hundred times too protective and could not take a joke where she was concerned. It had been nothing but harmless fun, that day at the horse races, she thought innocently.

Informed of her fate, however, she had instantly realized drastic action was in order. There was no reasoning with Robert when he got that holier-than-thou look in his eyes. His wrathful gaze and rumbling tone had reminded her afresh that he was not merely the starchy, lovable eldest brother whom she had cheerfully tormented throughout her childhood; he was also one of the most powerful men in England, an imperious, august personage whom even the prince regent found intimidating. So, she had slipped out of Almack’s; run all the way home; hastily packed her things; and whistled for the first hackney that came rolling down St. James’s Street around the corner from her home, the imposing Knight House on Green Park.

“Spare a penny, m’um?”

Startled out of her thoughts by a small, timid voice, she looked up from her traveling documents and instantly suffered a pang of compassion.

Before her stood the bedraggled street urchin who, earlier, had been crouching by the hearth fire. The child stared at her imploringly, his small, grimy hand held out in hopeful expectation. He looked about nine years old. His puppy-dog eyes were huge and brown, his little face smudged with dirt. His filthy clothes, little more than rags, hung off of his bony frame like a scarecrow’s. His grimy feet were bare. Her heart clenched.

Poor, miserable pup.

“Please, m’um?” The pitiful thing shivered and sent a furtive glance over his shoulder at the booking agent, as though afraid of being noticed and thrown off the premises.

“Of course, my dear,” she murmured tenderly, opening her satchel at once. She pulled out her embarrassingly fat change purse and picked out three shiny gold guineas—then a fourth. It was as much as she could spare with the long and costly journey to France ahead of her.

The boy stared, wide-eyed, at the small fortune of gleaming coins, but made no move to take it, as though he didn’t dare.

Her gaze softened at his mistrust. Clearly, the child had known little of kindness. Loosely holding her money purse in her left hand, she held out her right, offering him the coins. “Go on, take it,” she coaxed gently, “it’s all right—”

Suddenly his grubby hand shot out and snatched her money purse. He bolted off across the lobby in an instant, her coin purse clutched tightly to his chest. Her jaw dropped. For a second, she could only stand there in shock, left holding nothing but the four gold coins she had meant to give to him. Sheer outrage exploded through her veins.

“Stop, thief!”

Nobody paid her the slightest attention, and it was altogether possible that this shocked her even more than the theft.

Her eyes narrowed to blazing slashes. “Right!” she muttered under her breath. Slinging her satchel over her shoulder lest it be stolen, too, she dashed out after the little pilferer herself. A moment later, she burst out into the clammy April night and saw the boy pounding across the sprawling innyard.

“You, sirrah! Stop this instant!”

She heard a trail of triumphant laughter as the scamp flashed out of sight around the corner of the inn-yard’s enclosing wall. He was as quick as a cat, apparently accustomed to fleeing for his life. She picked up her skirts and raced after him over the dewy cobbles, but she might as well have been barefoot, for her dancing slippers were instantly soaked and torn.

Her untied bonnet fell off and went tumbling down her back. She left it where it lay and flung around the high brick wall. There was a fortune in that purse. Without it, her plans were a shambles.

She saw him racing up Drury Lane. “Come back here, you little savage!” Dodging an arriving stagecoach, she kept her gaze fixed on the child, pouring on all the speed she could rally, her satchel bumping against her side.

Insolent as brass, the pickpocket glanced over his shoulder and saw her gaining on him. Taking evasive action, he ducked into a dingy side street, but Jacinda would not be shaken, heedlessly following him deeper and deeper into a maze of dark lanes and cramped, twisting alleyways, for it was a matter of pride now. She would not be gulled and robbed blind by a mere street arab. Not after the night she was having.

Giving chase with the same stubborn determination that had earned her a reputation as a sportswoman of superior skill at riding to the hounds, she ignored each pounding jolt to her knees and hollered after him again like a fishmonger’s wife, her breath beginning to strain against her light stays. “Don’t you know you could be hanged for this, you little heathen?”

He ignored her, weaving nimbly through a series of narrow, twisting passageways into the seedy back alleys toward Covent Garden Market. Here piles of litter crawling with rats lined the cramped brick walls, but Jacinda barely noticed them, all her focus trained on her wily quarry.

Malnourished as he was, the boy soon began to tire. Urged on by imminent victory, Jacinda poured on a fresh burst of speed, her fingertips grazing him. He glanced wildly over his shoulder. Surging forward, she caught him suddenly, seizing the back of his filthy coat collar.

He let out a cry of protest as she flung him around to face her. He fought like a fish on a line, but she held his coat tightly in her grasp.

“Hand it over!” she ordered, panting heavily. Dangling from his coat collar, the little boy spun around and kicked her in the shin.

She seized his ear, her brow knitted in fury.

“Ow!”

“You are a very bad little boy. Didn’t I already give you more money than you could earn in months? ”

“I don’t care! Let go!” He held onto the purse with both grubby hands while she tried with her free hand to pry it loose.

As they struggled, more of her hair worked free of the artful arrangement her maid had taken such pains to create before the ball. “Give it back, you little savage! I am going to France, and I need my
blunt
—”

“Aargh!” He let out a cry of kittenish fury as the change purse tore open, exploding in a rain of bright coins.

They flew up into the air like gold and silver fireworks by the glint of the full moon, then clattered down in a hail around them, plunking unceremoniously into the thin, greasy layer of grime that coated the brick-laid alley. The child threw himself to the ground and began hastily collecting what he could.

“Leave it alone! That is my property!”

“Finders keep—” the boy started, but abruptly froze and looked up.

Jacinda stopped, too, puzzled by his sudden stillness. “What is it?”

“Shh!” He cocked his head, as though listening for some far-off noise. She could see the whites of his eyes, wide and staring in the darkness. His gaze scanned the impenetrable blackness behind her, his fist clutching the coins he had managed to collect. He reminded her for all the world of some little prey animal, his preternatural senses alerted to the imperceptible sound of some fierce predator’s approach.

Though the full moon still gleamed brightly overhead and cast a strip of moonlight down the alley’s middle, deep in the shadows along the walls, the blackness was almost palpable.

“I say—”

“Someone’s coming!”

Suspecting another trick, she listened a second longer, then lost patience. “I don’t hear anything—” But even as the words left her lips, a wild, barbaric howl like a war cry floated to them from over the maze of dark alleys. She drew in her breath. “Good God! What was that?”

“
Jackals
,” he breathed, then leaped to his feet and fled into the night.

She stared after him in astonishment. “Sirrah! Come back here this instant!”

He did not, of course. As silent as an alley cat, the boy had disappeared.

“Well!” Indignantly resting her hands on her waist, Jacinda glared for a second in the direction he had gone, then quickly set to work, eager to escape the lightless passage. She crouched down and began gathering up her scattered funds. Passing an uneasy glance over her surroundings, she plucked gold and silver pieces from the sooty slime, tossing both into her leather satchel. She grimaced at the repugnant job and was cursing herself for naively letting all those people in the lobby see her money, when suddenly, she heard swift, heavy footfalls pounding down the alley toward her.

She jerked her head up and stared into the darkness, the blood draining from her face. She heard hard boot heels striking the cobblestones, rough male shouts. Barbaric curses echoed off the maze of brick all around her.

“Blazes,” she whispered, shooting to her feet. The realization flooded her mind a bit belatedly that larger, more dangerous creatures prowled these back alleys than wily little pickpockets.

The voices were coming closer, bounding everywhere off the cramped walls, confusing her. She whirled around, not knowing which way to flee.

Clutching her satchel tightly, she backed toward the brick wall behind her, trying to melt into the gloom, but when she saw several man-shaped shadows charging toward her, she abandoned dignity and dove into the junk pile by the wall. Scrambling into the heap of rubble, she wedged herself into a small foxhole beneath a faded wooden placard for Trotter’s Oriental Tooth Powder, propped at a steep angle against an old broken barrel. On all fours, she turned around to face the alley, her heart in her throat. Nearby, atop a moldering half boot and a coil of rusty chain, lay an abandoned spool of thick paperboard that had once inhabited the center of a bolt of fabric. Gingerly, she pulled the spool upright and leaned it against the placard’s edge, the better to conceal herself. The sound of her frightened panting filled the cramped, close space, but she could still see into the alley through the crack between the placard and the spool.

How her arch rival, Daphne Taylor, would have laughed to see her in such a state! she thought, then held her breath as half a dozen men tore past, moonlight flashing on the knife each carried in his hand. A gunshot ripped down the alley and whizzed overhead. Ducking, she bit back a cry of alarm. More shots followed, then more footsteps sweeping down the alley toward her at a full run.

Through the small crack between the placard and the spool, she saw four big male silhouettes materializing from out of the fog, spanning the alleyway. Her eyes widened in the darkness as they came closer and she glimpsed the brutal weapons they carried—more knives, lengths of lead pipe as well, and horrible wooden clubs with nails sticking out of the ends. She dared not breathe for fear of being noticed, heard.

No wonder the boy had fled.
A gang
, she realized as gooseflesh shivered down her arms. Remembered tales and dark legends of what the London criminal gangs sometimes did to their victims filled her with terror. God help her if they found her, she thought. Desperately, she wished she were holding her favorite fowling musket in her hands, primed and loaded.

“Get into position, ye bastards; they’re right behind us!” ordered a tall, wiry man with lank brown hair. She could hear the intense agitation in his voice.

“Did you kill ‘im, O’Dell? I saw ye cut him!”

“Don’t know. Got him good, though, I can tell you. Shite!” he muttered as their pursuers flung into the alley and charged at the first group.

Before her eyes, the chase turned into a brawl. The two gangs attacked each other with a furor, screaming incoherently at each other as they fought.

They might as well have been speaking another language, for she could not comprehend a word of their coarse Cockney jargon and the criminal tongue known as the “flash language.” The shadows veiled the worst of the battle from her sight—all she could make out was fast, ferocious movement, a great swinging and slashing—but the sounds alone were awful enough.

To her dismay, rather than moving on, three more thugs rushed into the alley from the opposite direction, coming to the aid of their six embattled comrades. Now the four pursuers found themselves, in turn, sorely outnumbered. She could hear their cursing and ragged breathing as the others surrounded them on all sides.

Then, without warning, a hideous roar burst directly overhead like a thunderclap.

She looked upward with a gasp just as a tall, sinewy shadow leaped up with tigerlike agility onto the pile of moldy bricks adjacent to her hiding place. She caught a flash of wild green eyes in the darkness.

“O’Dell!”

Jacinda stared at the newly arrived man. The fight in the alleyway paused, the others exhaling ragged oaths. Moonlight haloed his tawny mane, limned his broad shoulders in silver, and glinted off the dagger he clutched in his hand like a shard from a lightning bolt.

The wiry brown-haired man who apparently answered to that name cursed and wiped the sweat off his brow. “Still not dead, you son of a bitch?”

The man in the shadows took a menacing step forward, edging into view with a cynical smirk. Jacinda’s eyes slowly widened.

Why, it was Byron’s corsair come to violent, throbbing life. The band of moonlight down the middle of the alley striped his black-clad body and slanted across his hard, chiseled face like war paint. He wore a short black coat over a loose shirt of natural linen that hung open halfway down his chest. Black trousers hugged his compact hips and long legs. As his hand curled into a fist at his side, she saw the gaudy gleam of thick gold rings on his fingers.

Jacinda stared at him, holding her breath. In a glance, she knew instinctually that, in this brick-and-mortar jungle, he was king.

Then the gang leader charged. The sharp blow of his boot heel resounded overhead as he sprang off the tooth powder placard, cracking it under his muscled weight, and leaped off the junk pile, landing in the midst of the fight. With a fist reinforced by his chunky metal rings, he dealt O’Dell a punch in the jaw that sent the man flying across the alley as though he’d been struck by a cannonball.