My Darling Gunslinger (27 page)

The Eastern Boy who’d wagered a key to the Alabaster Hotel and a piss-poor imitation of Lady Blue against the deed to the Zeppelin Ranch and Ty’s dreams for his future.

On Frederick Grenville’s command, Eustace Johnston had sent a fellow not old enough to shave to kill an innocent boy who had never wronged him.

“Westlockhart never could contain himself,” Mrs. St. Germaine drawled, her voice barely penetrating the haze of fury engulfing Ty at the sight of the two men together. “Fell overboard just as he reached his crisis.”

Ty took hold of the gloved fingers fiddling with his neck cloth and tossed them away.

“Don’t you want to know the rest of it?” she demanded with a pout that might have been pretty on another woman.

“I know the rest of it.”

The two gentlemen conferred for a moment, Grenville nodding toward Charlotte twirling around in the arms of Lord Godfrey. The music swelled and soared, a violin or cello rising above the other instruments, the sound thrumming through Ty’s blood, there to mix with the anger until he could no longer distinguish between the blood pulsing in his ears and the melody pounded out by the orchestra.

“I rather doubt it,” Mrs. St. Germaine retorted and there was something in her voice, something dirty and dark, that finally captured Ty’s full attention. “Do you know Grenville petitioned to have her locked away?”

“Locked away?” Ty barely got the words out, his jaw was clamped so tight.

“In a lunatic asylum,” she huffed out on a husky laugh. “Mad as a March hare she was when the rumors started circulating she’d pushed her husband from the boat after knotting his knickers around his knees. Then she claimed to be carrying the next earl even after her maid swore she’d had her courses. When she began telling anyone who would listen that Grenville had attempted to push her down a flight of stairs, he hadn’t any choice but to petition to have her put away.”

“Christ Almighty,” Ty breathed, rage and horror beating at him, buffeting him like a cold northern wind coming down off the Montana mountains.

Grenville had threatened Sebastian’s life, threatened Charlotte’s freedom, snatched away their security and safety and set them adrift.

For seven long years mother and child had been frightened and on the run.

“Fuck it,” Ty growled. “I reckon now’s as fortuitous a moment as any.”

Except when he looked to the shadowy corner, he found it empty, and if Charlotte was still on the dancefloor her overly-pomaded partner had twirled her out of sight.

Gossip is the currency of choice in London ballrooms.

Nanny Bettelheim

“What sort of mischief has Grenville been wreaking while I have been away?”

It took only thirteen words, the majority of them but one syllable, to get Lord Godfrey talking.

And once he began he seemed quite incapable of stopping.

Judging by the manner in which he darted wary glances Ty’s way, Charlotte supposed it was nerves that had him talking nineteen to the dozen, offering up an odd assortment of rumor, fact and supposition.

Unfortunately, Lord Godfrey’s outpouring of falderal was as difficult to follow as his dance steps, both comprised of queer starts and stumbling twists and turns.

On a more positive note, Godfrey’s graceless rendition of a waltz allowed Charlotte to visit every inch of the dancefloor and view the entire ballroom.

So it was that as the first set gave way to the second, she spied Mrs. St. Germaine clinging to Ty like a gown two sizes too small. It didn’t take a knowledge of five languages to guess what words the woman was whispering in his ear while she fiddled with his cravat, messing up the perfectly lovely knot Charlotte had labored over for five minutes to get just so.

“Sugar.” The jolt of anger she felt was swift and sharp, quickly followed by a sort of melancholy resignation. Someone was bound to share the scuttlebutt. In truth it was rather astonishing her husband hadn’t heard the tale as of yet, London gossip being what it was.

“No, it wasn’t sugar he was importing,” Godfrey said. “Leastwise I don’t think so, seeing as he returned from his travels with a Moor for a wife.”

“A Moor, my lord?”

“Do they grow sugar in — where is it the Moors live?”

“The Iberian Peninsula.” When her partner only gave her a blank look, she clarified, “Spain and Portugal.”

Godfrey plowed into the dense crowd in the center of the dancefloor, never mind there was not a parquet square to spare. “He won’t allow her to receive them, and rightly so.”

“Who won’t allow whom to receive whom, my lord?” Charlotte asked in mounting confusion.

“Grenville, Lady Sylvia and the sugar importer and his Moor wife.” Godfrey spoke slowly, if not quite precisely, as if speaking to a child or a half-wit and added a roll of the eyes designed to aggravate. “Though, now I know she’s from Spain or Portugal, I’m almost certain it wasn’t sugar that made his fortune.”

“No, I rather doubt it,” Charlotte agreed only because it appeared Godfrey was in want of a reply.

“Keeps her on a tight leash, he does,” he mused. “Not to say I wouldn’t do the same. She’s a pretty little piece for all she’s quiet as a mouse.”

“The lady seems awfully young to have been married long enough to have a child already a year old,” Charlotte replied, hoping to steer their conversation somewhere near the vicinity of informative, though she suspected she’d be lucky to reach comprehensible.

“I think there’s more than one child.” Godfrey twirled her around a fat man in a canary-yellow jacket. “Breed like rabbits, the Catholic do.”

“Lady Sylvia is Catholic? And she has more than one child?”

“I can’t say as I know which God she prays to.” Godfrey frowned as if attempting to puzzle out the theory of gravity. “Has the lady given him another child and I haven’t gotten wind of it?”

“Who, my lord?”

“Lady Sylvia. Has she given him a spare?”

It occurred to Charlotte she was destined to come away from the waltz with nothing more than bruised toes. If Lord Godfrey possessed even a modicum of knowledge as to Frederick Grenville’s recent activities or customary habits, he was either too foolish or too intelligent to share it.

And no one had ever accused Lord Godfrey of an over-abundance of intelligence.

“I can’t imagine the lady invited him tonight,” Godfrey said, apropos of nothing Charlotte made even the slightest attempt to comprehend. “Mayhap the gent just waltzed in, invitation or no.”

Unable to follow his less than subtle nod toward the line of open doors leading to the terrace, Charlotte waited until the next enthusiastic turn to look for the reprobate possessed of the nerve, not to mention the fortitude, to attend a
ton
entertainment without an engraved invitation. She found only the same motley assortment of miscreants who’d been loitering on balconies throughout Mayfair since the beginning of time.

It wasn’t until she was being spun away in a spirited circle that she saw the tall, whip-cord lean man lounging negligently against the balustrade. There was something in the seemingly casual pose, in the oddly elegant slouch of his shoulders that brought to mind banked power just waiting to be unleashed.

Hidden in the shadows, the light of the nearest torch just barely drifting over his long legs, she couldn’t make out his features, could only surmise his hair to be dark and cut shorter than was fashionable.

Twisting and turning this way and that, she attempted to get a second look before finally accepting she’d be forced to wait until the next jostling turn.

But when it came, when Godfrey spun Charlotte to the left when he ought to have spun her to the right, the man was moving, striding to the steps descending to the sprawling gardens behind the house. There was something familiar in the manner in which he moved, in his long-limbed stride, in the relaxed swing of his arms and the slight bounce to his steps.

Then he was gone, as was any hope Charlotte had of determining whether she was actually acquainted with the man or simply reminded of someone else.

But who? She worried over the niggling question, rather like one worries a sore tooth, while Godfrey launched into a tale of two feuding families and the marriage that might have reconciled them.

“Only the enmity has grown,” Godfrey concluded with a nod that nearly shifted his stiff locks. “I’ll be damned if I can quite pin down how it all began. And the gent isn’t saying.”

“Which gent?”

“Grenville.”

“The Grenvilles are embroiled in a feud with another family?”

“Do make an attempt to keep up.” A peevish Lord Godfrey was an altogether unattractive sight.

“If you would only put names to all your hes and shes and ladies and the gents I might actually be able to follow along,” she replied, meeting peevish with peevish.

“Speak of the devil and in he walks,” Godfrey murmured, and though Charlotte was beyond asking which devil, she could not help but glance over her shoulder.

The devil, indeed.

Frederick Grenville halted just inside the ballroom, Lady Sylvia sweeping past him without so much as a by your leave.

Charlotte looked to Ty, not the least surprised to see he’d already taken note of the newest arrival in Lady Endicott’s ballroom. Mrs. St. Germaine was still standing beside him, fiddling with his cravat and likely just reaching the climax of her tittle-tattle.

“I say, is that Eustace Johnston?” Godfrey’s question caught Charlotte’s attention once more and she watched as the dark-haired, mustached man made his way through crowd loitering along the dancefloor. “By God, it must be seven years since he’s been in Town.”

“Nearly eight,” Charlotte replied on a fractured breath as the devil’s trusted minion was joined by his master and the demonic duo shifted behind a flowering pear tree. Grenville’s shoulder brushed a spindly branch, delicate white petals falling to the floor like fat snowflakes.

Lord Godfrey took two gliding steps to the right, nearly collided with a debutant and her elderly partner, reversed direction to sweep diagonally across the dancefloor. Charlotte only just managed to keep up with him, her skirts tangling around her legs and nearly tripping her. The music rose, the sound of a single violin soaring above the other instruments, a resounding cadenza flavored with a frenetic rhythm that perfectly matched the beat of her heart.

As the orchestra brought the waltz to a tumultuous close and Lord Godfrey twirled her around and around with a flourish owing more to vigor than to anything even remotely approaching grace, Charlotte looked for Ty’s dark auburn hair and pewter gray eyes in the sea of faces flying by.

She found Mrs. St. Germaine, had only a moment to recognize the bright red ringlets piled atop her head and the dark, glittering eyes before she was awkwardly spun away again. When Lord Godfrey finally brought them to an abrupt stop and Charlotte, dizzy and over-heated, sought out her husband once more, she found the woman standing alone, a feline smile twisting her rouged lips into a sneer.

Charlotte knew a terrible panic, as familiar to her as the feel of Sebastian’s fingers curled around her neck, the sound of his cries and the weight of his body in her arms as they fled one temporary haven in search of another.

In that moment, with people swarming all around her in a kaleidoscope of pastel gowns and bright waistcoats, their laughter and chatter a discordant drone in her ears, Charlotte recognized the truth that had been staring her in the eye for weeks.

She could not allow Ty to kill Frederick Grenville.

Oh God, how could she have asked it, demanded it of him? She’d stood in the cozy little kitchen, Daisy’s gingham curtains closed to block out the sight of the Zeppelin Ranch, and manipulated him, used his honor and his misplaced guilt to force him to take on this terrible task. She’d known everything he wanted, every last thing he’d ever needed, was just on the other side of those red and white checked curtains.

And still she’d dragged him across land and sea to kill a man.

In her heart, Charlotte knew one more death when added to all of the others he’d meted out in his lifetime would change him. It would irrevocably alter his perception of himself and his place in the world.

“I say, my lady, are you unwell?” Lord Godfrey stooped down to peer into Charlotte’s face, a frown pulling at his lips. “You look a bit peaked.”

Charlotte drew in a ragged breath, tears blurring her vision, his worried countenance swimming before her.

“Shall I find your husband?” he asked, trepidation apparent in his wobbling voice. “I think I saw him move out to the terrace.”

Charlotte could think of only one reason Ty would have left her in the crowded ballroom while he ventured outside. And it wasn’t to promenade in the gardens.

Without a word, Charlotte turned and fled. Pushing past two gossiping matrons and shoving aside a notorious rake flirting with an unmarried lady old enough to know better, she barreled through a set of glass doors.

The balcony was packed with ladies and gentlemen intent upon escaping the stifling ballroom while the orchestra took a break from playing. Charlotte dragged her gaze over the assembled guests, desperately searching for a glimpse of Ty’s too long hair and broad shoulders even as she ran for the steps leading to the dark gardens beyond.

Lady Endicott’s gardens were laid out in typical English fashion, hip high hedgerows running along paths wide enough for a couple to walk side by side, tidy flower beds and rose bushes set at precise intervals. Stone benches and spindly wrought iron chairs sat under trees trimmed to nearly perfect circles, rather like rows of lollipops. A narrow expanse of smooth lawn spread out beyond, uninterrupted by so much as a bush.

And surrounding it all was a tall espalier of greenery, likely planted a hundred or more years previously as protection from the winds whipping across the heath. The open heathland had long since been replaced by row upon row of town homes on all sides.

The garden was empty but for a trio of elderly gentlemen strolling along the one path and a gaggle of giggling girls oo-ing and ah-ing over the ring on one of their finger’s while an older woman, likely the newly engaged girl’s mother, looked on.

Charlotte stopped at the intersection of four paths, spinning in a circle and wondering where her husband had disappeared to.

A sharp, tinny noise barely penetrated the laughter of the young ladies and the conversation drifting down from the stone terrace. The sound was out of place in the dark garden yet oddly familiar. Charlotte stilled, waiting for it to be repeated, sensing that the quiet clank was but the first note of a melody.

When the sound came again, three clinks so faint she barely caught them over the whispering of the breeze in the tall hedge, she realized she knew the melody. She had listened to it hour after hour in a garden awash in sunlight and overgrown with bougainvillea, lantana and pomegranate trees.

It was the distinctive sound of rapiers clashing. And Ty didn’t know the hilt of a sword from the point.

Charlotte hiked her gown up to her waist and ran, her right hand diving beneath her skirts to pull the derringer from the holster strapped to her thigh. As she left the stone path she lost a slipper. Barely slowing she kicked off the other and sprinted across the lawn.

Honing in on the clatter of metal on metal, she angled toward the far right corner of Lady Endicott’s garden, her heart racing and her stockinged feet slipping in the grass.

By the time she reached the hedge a knife was in her left hand, the familiar weight of the jeweled hilt clasped in her fingers. She hadn’t any memory of reaching for it, barely registered the fact it was in her hand as she met an impenetrable wall of greenery.