Much Ado About Rogues (9 page)

Only a little more than a single day and night, and everything in Tess’s life had changed. For the first time in her life she knew what it meant to not know if one was on her head or her heels.

She’d felt so good downstairs, wrapped in Jack’s strong arms. It was a feeling she had to fight, because it could only lead to weakness when she could least afford to be weak.

He wanted the Tess he’d known four years ago, and she couldn’t be that person again. She didn’t believe she wanted to be that person again. Too young. Too trusting. All unknowing.

She’d adored her father. Worshipped him unreasonably, considering the life they’d led, a life of lies. It was one thing to think she had been young, vulnerable, easily manipulated by a master of manipulation. But that was not a real excuse. Unlike René, she’d questioned, she’d wondered. But she’d never taken that one real step, that of going to the marquis and putting her questions directly to him.

Instead, she had done as her father told her.
Let him go, Thessaly. He isn’t worthy of you. Because of him, René is dead. René wasn’t ready. I should have listened to you. We must both live with that pain, but we should not also have to look in that man’s face every day. It’s over, all of it. From now on, it will be just the two of us, the way it should have been all along.

Oh, he was good, her father. He’d known just what to say, just how to handle her. Complete with the hook:
just the two of us, the way it should have been all along.

And then there was Jacques, and her father had become this benevolent stranger who doted on his grandson.
Jack must never know. Jack would take the child. My son, your brother, lost to us. We cannot lose the child. Think with your head, Thessaly. You know he’d take the child.

And yet now her father had gone after the Gypsy again and he’d done it knowing that Jack would be the one who came to the manor house, Jack would be the one sent to find him…and find Jacques.

Why?
Why?

“Oh, God. Oh, my God,” she breathed as realization hit her. She had to find Jack. She had to tell him what she’d figured out.

She looked down at her comfortable old dressing gown and then shrugged. What did it matter how she was dressed? He’d seen her in every way she could be seen, touched her in every way she could be touched. Maidenly modesty was for maidens, not the mothers of their lovers’ sons.

She was halfway to the door to the corridor when it opened and Jack stepped inside, stopped, and raised one expressive eyebrow in her direction.

“My, my. Wadsworth must have misunderstood,” he said, advancing into the room. “This is my chamber when I’m in residence. However, you’re certainly welcome, although that gown is nearly as good as a chastity belt. Still, I think we’ll manage a way around it.”

“For a man who says he all but detests me, you certainly seem hot to…to…”

“Rip off that gown, throw you down on that bed and bury myself between your legs, pounding into you until you scream my name as I take you over the edge? Is that what you were trying to say?”

She longed to slap him. She felt a ridiculous urge to burst into tears. In those few words, he’d taken what they had shared and turned it all wrong, base and self-serving. “Yes, I think that’s it. Although the phrase
randy goat
probably belonged in there somewhere. Last night was a mistake, Jack. Mine. But I don’t make the same mistake twice.”

“How do you know? You could already be carrying my child. Again.”

“I really could hate you. I think I do.” Nearly as much as she hated herself for the need curling low in her belly at the image Jack’s suggestive words had placed in her head, the ache his last words had started in her heart.

But she was French. She was practical. Continued trips to the bed with Jack were not practical.

“I know what my father’s planning to do,” she said, ignoring his last statement.

“Really?” Jack slipped off his neck cloth and tossed it in the general direction of a nearby chair before beginning to strip off his jacket.

“Yes, really. He is going to sacrifice himself so that you can kill the Gypsy.”

Jack hesitated in the act of shrugging out of his jacket. “Interesting. How?”

“He’s going to be the stalking horse. Like René. He’s setting himself up to die, Jack, so the Gypsy exposes himself, and you do the rest. He doesn’t plan to live through the experience. Again, like René. After all, somebody has to pay for the mistake that cost my brother his life. In his heart he must blame himself. Not you.”

“Now why do I doubt that?” Jack said, tossing the jacket after the neck cloth.

“You haven’t seen Papa these last years. Jacques was his only happiness. He’s old, Jack. Tired. And…and defeated. You said the collection is all that matters to him, and I think you were right. Then. But not now. Jacques… I don’t know. Jacques changed something in him. He was soft with your son, nearly unrecognizable even to me.”

“Always defending him, aren’t you? Even when it’s clear he’s indefensible. Dear, kindly old Sinjon, bouncing his grandson on his knee. That’s rather like trying to imagine the devil handing out Gunther Ice’s in Hell.”

His comparison stung, and Tess did her best not to flinch. Jack was entitled to his opinion, but only as long as he remained open to hers. “I agree the man’s no saint, even now. But it was your idea that he and the Gypsy had some understanding about the collection—and why do we keep calling it that? Papa’s ill-gotten goods, his booty, his obsession, that’s what those things really are.”

Jack held up his hand to silence her. “Don’t allow yourself to be distracted,” he warned her. “What you’re saying is that Sinjon’s old, probably going to die soon, and he couldn’t let that happen before he eliminated the Gypsy, who would surely then turn up to claim the collection. We’re already in agreement there, Tess. That’s why Jacques is here, remember?”

“Yes, but it’s more than that. He’s
leading
us to the Gypsy. Papa’s not the pursuer. He’s the goat staked in the clearing, tied there to draw the wolf. You’re the executioner, the one who will kill the wolf as he stands over the goat’s body. He’s setting himself up to
die,
Jack. To save our son.”

Jack sat down on top of his jacket and neck cloth and raised one booted foot to her, signaling that he needed her assistance. Making it clear without words just who he believed was in charge here, and who was not.

“So now he’s part tethered goat, part sacrificial lamb. And then you and I, and our son, will have the collection, all the untold wealth that collection can bring us. We’ll leave this damp island Sinjon has always hated, sail off to America or somewhere, and live out our lives. Always cognizant, of course, of the fact that his noble sacrifice made it all possible, his past forgiven, his name honored for generations. You really expect me to believe that, Tess?”

“Probably not, no, not when you say it that way,” she admitted, hiking up her dressing gown so that she could straddle Jack’s leg and begin edging off his boot. “I only want you to think about the possibility, and how we could stop him from doing anything that stupid. Put your other foot on me, and push.”

He did as she said, placing his booted foot against her buttocks. “If you insist. But Sinjon isn’t going to simply stand there and let the Gypsy put a knife in his heart. Sacrifice is not in his nature.” He pushed his foot against her, hard.

Tess nearly staggered when his foot slid free of the boot, but she managed to stay upright. “Use the jack for the other one,” she told him, refusing to rub at her rump where his boot heel had been moments before. “We’re compromising, I’m not capitulating. Papa would need bait, to draw the Gypsy in. You said I should look for what was missing from the collection, remember? What did he take?”

She watched as he made use of the jack in the corner, hoping the leather of his boot would be irreparably marred. Sometimes one had to be content with the small pleasures in life.

“He called it the Mask of Isis,” Jack said as he joined her once more in the middle of the room, seeming to
fill
the room with just his presence. “She supposedly was some Egyptian goddess.”

“I know who she was. She gave birth to both the heaven and the earth—and is allegedly responsible for several other things I can’t remember.” His shirt was gone now, and if she was going to tell him to leave she should say it now, and mean it. Since she wouldn’t mean it, she satisfied herself with a ridiculously obvious question. “So then it’s quite valuable?”

“Things fashioned of solid gold usually are, yes,” Jack said, and she suddenly realized he was unbuttoning her dressing gown. “It’s a face-size mask, not a bust, although I doubt it was made to actually be worn. Too heavy for that, by half. Her facial features were painted on the gold, although the paint is fairly worn off, but Sinjon assured me it was Isis depicted there. Something about a headdress in the form of a crown, or some hieroglyphic that stands for the word
crown?
I don’t know, Tess. He let me hold it, probably hoping I’d feel what he did, the glory of possession. I just felt its weight, and knew it was worth a king’s ransom. Maybe that’s what he’d hoped I’d feel, since he planned on making me his thief.”

She loved this. Joining with him, mind to mind, as they worked out a problem, a scenario, and agreed on a solution. There was an excitement in the process, yes, almost a sexual excitement, and the two of them had more than once made love while at the same time planning out the details of his and Sinjon’s latest assignment from the Crown. They were so alike, she and Jack. They neither of them cared for simple things, easy answers. They went for results yes, but the real pleasure came from the twist, the unexpected, never doing the obvious.

She still kept his only present to her, an eight-sided rosewood box made up from dozens of smoothly interlocking pieces. It had taken her days to solve the puzzle and be rewarded with the small golden locket hidden in its center. A locket surely meant to carry their miniatures, but that now carried those of her mother and brother.

She’d loved the locket. She adored the rosewood box.

“Then that’s clearly the bait he plans to use now, as he did with you. The Golden Mask of Isis.”

“I thought you wanted to tell me things I hadn’t already thought out on my own. Perhaps we’re done talking.” He slipped his hands inside the dressing gown to cup her breasts through the thin fabric of her nightrail, began stroking her taut nipples with the pads of his thumbs.

She took a deep breath. “That’s…distracting.”

“Really? I’d hoped for more than simple distraction. I like your breasts like this, Tess. Fuller, heavier. Did you suckle him? Did you put my son to your breast?”

“Emilie was rather past the duties of wet nurse,” she said, closing her eyes as Jack’s touch, Jack’s words, performed their sweet seduction.

He began lightly pinching her nipples between thumb and forefinger. “Was he greedy? Like his father? Did you ever hold him to your breast, and think of me?”

She could barely breathe, couldn’t swallow. “Emilie…she said that was natural. That…that I might…might
feel
things. That the suckling was meant to stir my womb, tighten it after…after the birth. But it wasn’t like when you— Jack. Oh, Jack, don’t…don’t do this…”

But he was doing it. He had bent his dark head to her after exposing her breast and now he was sealed against her, hot and wet and drawing her nipple into his mouth even as his fingers continued to play and pinch her other breast through her nightrail.

But playing fair was for other people, not for them. If he saw an advantage, he took it. If she saw an opening, she exploited it. That’s just the way they both were made, just as they’d seemed fashioned to fit together like the puzzle pieces of that rosewood box, until it would take a very discerning eye to see the seams where they might be split open, separated.

Her father had seen where the pieces were joined and taken them apart like the master he was.

Now, he had put them back together.

Why?

Jack didn’t believe her thought that Sinjon Fonteneau was setting himself up as some sacrifice in order to protect and assure Jacques’s future, or even as some twisted penance for putting René in danger for his own ends.

Maybe she didn’t believe it herself. Maybe she still needed to see her father as good, a hero, a man to be admired, emulated. Not a man who would take his candles and sit in the middle of a damp room, admiring his collection, risking everything for things he found more important than his own family.

Maybe it was simply time she gave in…surrendered her will to Jack’s. Believed what he believed. If just for tonight.

She arched her neck, pushing her upper body forward, her mind swimming with disjointed thoughts, her blood singing in her veins as Jack took and took from her.

Here there was complete agreement. When he touched her there were no questions, only answers. No regrets could stand between them when they wanted, when they needed so badly. When all there was in the world was the two of them, the two halves of that single most perfect whole in the entire world.

She ground her lower body against his arousal. “I want you,” she told him. “Take me.” It was a demand, a plea, a whisper, a shout to the heavens, all in one. “Take me now, Jack.”