Never a Gentleman (36 page)

Giving Grace’s hand one last squeeze, Kate retrieved her tea. “So a man from the Home Office says that Diccan is a traitor,
and Braxton, who I suspect runs with Drake’s Rakes, says that Diccan might be a Lion. Bea’s right, of course. It’s all bollocks.
Oh, there are mysteries to Diccan. But it’s absurd to think he’d be a traitor.” Reaching for a seed cake, she shook her head.
“For the record, his uncle’s estate is in the condition it’s in because he was a notorious pinchpurse. He left Diccan swimming
in lard. But you never thought to ask Diccan, did you?”

“Why?” Grace said, at least this one thing in her life certain. “It wouldn’t have changed my opinion of him. The question
is, is this all connected with the incident in Canterbury?”

Kate let loose an abrupt laugh. “Grace, only you would call scandal and a forced marriage an ‘incident.’ But, yes. I imagine
it might be. The question is, why? Who benefits from his ruin, and how?”

“Ten paces,” Bea suggested, while she was picking seeds from her cake.

Kate nodded absently. “Yes, he undoubtedly has enemies
from those duels, but this is not simple revenge. It is more Byzantine. More… pernicious. There are certainly easier ways
of blackening a man’s name than arranging to have his wife watch him tup his mistress.”

For a moment, Kate’s expression lost focus and she picked up another cake. Bea must have seen something. “Impolite girl,”
she warned with a smack to Kate’s hand.

Kate’s grin was impish. “My curiosity is my besetting sin. But you can’t tell me you didn’t think just for a moment how much
you’d love a peep through that window yourself, you naughty wench.”

Bea’s chuckle was telling. Grace, who had not succumbed to blushes for a long while, blushed. She could only hope Kate thought
it was because of her own speech. Grace simply could not discuss something that intimate, even with her friends. Especially
since she still didn’t completely understand what had happened herself.

“I think it’s the Lions,” she said, desperate to turn the conversation. “I think Diccan is more important than we know. He
was in such a hurry to get to London after our marriage. Could it not be that he carried information from Europe that someone
wanted to see discredited?”

“Like the information Jack Gracechurch brought back?” Kate asked, brows pursed. “If that is the case, why not simply kill
him? It’s certainly what they tried to do to Jack.”

Grace’s stomach clenched; it was a thought she’d tried to avoid. “I’m not certain they still won’t try. They certainly haven’t
ruined him. Diccan is received everywhere, and I refuse to betray him.”

Kate nodded absently. “And you say you’ve already sent a note to Olivia about this.”

“I thought that if anyone could find out what’s going on,
it would be she. After all, she’s worked the hardest to get Jack’s memory back. Jack can hardly tell
her
she has no right to the information.”

“He can certainly try and
protect
her from it. Heaven knows it is men’s favorite pastimes. Keeping women in the dark for their own good.”

Bea sighed. “Nannies.”

“Indeed,” Kate said with a pat to Bea’s hand. “Amazing, isn’t it? It’s as if they think we’ve suddenly forgotten what it took
to uncover the Lions in the first place. Well, we’ll just keep trying.”

“Any ideas?” Grace asked. “I seem to have struck out.”

“Orange blossoms,” Bea said distinctly.

Kate grinned. “Grace is already married, dear.”

But Bea shook her head. “Sussex.”

“You think we should wait until we get to Sussex for the wedding?” Kate sipped her tea, nodding slowly. “You might have a
point. Jack Gracechurch is a charter member of Drake’s Rakes, which means that Marcus Drake will probably be at the wedding
as well. Certainly Diccan will. Maybe if we get all of them together, we can find a way to force them to share information.”

Grace didn’t want to wait. She felt unsettled and fretful, nagged by the feeling that she was missing something. She acquiesced,
though, and over the next few days, she returned to society with Kate and Bea, only to feel more smothered than ever before.
Everywhere she went she faced renewed whispers and sly glances, and seemed to always be biting her tongue.

Still not able to voice her suspicion about her own condition, she lived on bread and soup and ignored her maid’s raised eyebrows
when Grace lost enough weight to require
taking in her gowns. The only comfort Grace had was being able to hire Kate’s maid Lizzy as her new abigail, also letting
the staff know that Lizzy’s baby girl was to be accepted as well. Oddly enough, Mr. Pitt took to guarding the baby like a
dog, which enchanted everyone.

The one thing Grace refused to do was allow Schroeder back, even after receiving an edict from Diccan by mail. She wrote him
back:
You must be on premises to discuss my staff. Enjoy the races.

The next day she asked Kit Braxton to investigate her watchers, only to have him tell her that they were government agents
sent to protect her. She nodded, but the answer didn’t reassure her. Something about the story didn’t ring true. The watchers
seemed too… casual, too surreptitious. And then, on her third day in London, she thought she found her answer. She was riding
in the park and pretending she wasn’t in London, when she saw her Uncle Dawes.

“Where’s that prime filly of yours?” he demanded, side whiskers bristling as he pulled his great gray warhorse to a shuddering
halt.

“In the country, where she can run,” Grace said, pulling up alongside on a perfectly acceptable black gelding of Kate’s named
Barney.

She’d known she would have to face her uncle. She just wished she could have waited a while longer.

“Need to go somewhere to talk,” the general barked, casting a suspicious glance at the moon-faced George, who was placidly
following Grace on a lumbering bay.

“George is the soul of discretion,” she said, rather than tell her uncle that Kate’s groom had the intelligence of a child.

The general wasted one more glare on George before turning back to her. “Well, girl?”

“I’m sorry, Uncle Dawes,” she said, truly sorry she must disappoint him. “I will not betray my husband.”

For a moment, she feared for his health. He turned beet red, so agitated that his mount skipped back a bit. “After what you
saw?”

She felt even more sad. “How could you take me there?” she asked quietly, the pain still sharp. “How could you make me watch
that?”

He blustered a bit, and his face grew redder. “It was for your own good,” he barked. “Need to know what he is.”

“I know what he is, Uncle Dawes. He is by no means perfect. But neither is he a traitor.”

The general leaned over and grabbed her arm, his expression truly distressed. “Don’t you realize that you put yourself in
danger? He must be stopped, girl.”

She lifted her free hand and patted his. “But not by me.”

He just kept shaking his head, his gaze unfocused, his forehead creased. Grace felt so sorry that she had to disappoint him.
She knew he would never understand. To his mind, she had failed him.

“You don’t know what you’ve done,” he said, as if to himself. “You simply don’t know.”

“Does that man really work for the Home Secretary?” she asked, getting his attention. “Mr. Carver?”

The old man yanked his hands back. “Now you accuse
me
of lying?”

“No, I’m warning you that all might not be as it seems.” And looking at his dear, familiar face, so tight with anxiety, she
made the decision to tell him about the British Lions. Uncle Dawes would be just the type of man they might fool, and she
couldn’t bear seeing him hurt. “Are
you perfectly certain Mr. Carver is who he says he is?” she asked at the end.

For a moment he frightened her, his eyes going flat. “Are you certain your husband is? Have you ever wondered where he gets
his money? His father disowned him ten years ago, you know.”

“Yes. I heard. I also know that his uncle wasn’t as strapped as everyone thought.”

“That’s what he wants you to think.”

She sighed and reached out to him again, laying her hand on his arm. “Uncle Dawes, I know you care for me. Please, for me,
be careful. I think these men are ruthless.”

He offered no answering gesture of affection. Before she could even beg his pardon, he wheeled his horse around and thundered
off down the path, leaving her with a heavy heart. She was about to set off again, when she suddenly realized that Mr. Carver
had been following her uncle.

“He worries for you,” the man said, pulling up alongside on a hack.

Grace had to calm her horse, who didn’t like his proximity any more than Grace did. “I’ll tell you the same thing I said to
him, Mr. Carver,” she said, wishing the man would move a bit farther away. “I won’t help.”

He sat still for a long moment, seeming to assess her. Then, as if making up his mind, he smiled. “You will, you know,” he
said, making her feel even less easy. He looked smug, as if her surrender were a foregone conclusion. Pulling out a small
case, he handed her a card. “Contact me here.”

Grace glanced at the card to see his name and an address in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. “Why not Whitehall, Mr. Carver?”

“I told you,” he said, still, oddly, smiling. “There is a leak. I trust no one.”

She nodded. “You’re wrong, you know. It isn’t Diccan.”

He looked off toward the trees, as if his words weren’t important. “It is,” he said. “Be on your guard, Mrs. Hilliard. You
don’t know as much as you think.”

With a tip of his hat, he too set off, leaving Grace behind with an unsettled mind and an unremarkable calling card in her
hand. She perused it again. Something about it unsettled her.

“Miss Grace?” George spoke up behind her. “Who’s he?”

Grace looked up to see George’s normally placid features screwed up in thought. “A man who works for the government, George.”

His attention on Carver’s departing back, he shook his head. “Don’t think I like him.”

Grace looked the same way and slowly nodded. “Neither do I, George. Neither do I.” She put the card away, though, not wanting
to lose it. Not ’til she figured out what about it bothered her.

She was followed home by another of those interchangeable watchers, which failed to make her feel a bit more safe.

“Make sure the house is locked up tonight,” she told Roberts as she headed up to bed that evening. “I don’t need any more
surprises right now.”

She did get a surprise, and it was an intruder. Just not one she ever could have anticipated.

She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep when she heard something. It wasn’t much, a whisper, as if the air had been disturbed.
It was enough. Suddenly she was awake, her heart thundering in her ears. There was someone in the room with her.

Trying to stay as quiet as possible, she reached beneath
her pillow and opened her mouth to scream. The scream died in her throat. Her seeking hand came up empty. Her gun was gone.

Suddenly a hand was over her mouth and a body was on top of hers. Her heart all but exploded in her chest. She bit down hard
on the hand. He held on tighter. She bucked. He pressed closer. She thought her lungs would burst with terror. And then, from
one heartbeat to the next, she knew that the danger was far worse than she feared. She recognized that body.

She’d already given up the fight when she heard a too-familiar voice in her ear. “Grace,” it murmured, sounding amused. “There
seems to be a monkey in my bed.”

W
here is my gun?” she asked when he lifted his hand away to stroke her shoulder.

She should shove him off of her. She should kick him where he’d never forget it. She arched her throat, baring it. He kissed
her just below her ear, sending chills down her neck.

“I didn’t want you to mistake me for a rogue.”

“I didn’t hear you being invited.”

He leaned over her again so she could barely see the outline of his face in the shadows. She could feel the heat shimmer off
his body, though. It seemed to sap her anger, like a debilitating drug.

“You really mind that I’m here?” he asked, his hands already moving down her arms.

“Yes,” she managed, wondering where the outrage had gone in her voice. “I do. Just what are you doing here?”

He leaned his forehead against hers. “There was a small argument that needed settling.”

The very scent of him wrapped around her like smoke,
pulling her inexorably toward him. She thought her throat would close with mingled fury and arousal. “What argument?” she
managed, lying perfectly still, as if that could protect her.

“The one about whether I want you or not.”

He reached for her hand and pressed it against his groin. Grace gasped. He was hard and hot and throbbing. She itched to dive
in beneath those buttons and wrap her hand around him. To hold on and never let go. She ached for the taste of him, slick
and salty against her tongue.

“What does this prove, Diccan?” she asked, struggling to hold on to her sense, even as she forgot to remove her hand.

She couldn’t simply succumb to him again. She would be putting herself back on her own path to ruin. But it was so hard to
stay strong when she felt how hard he was. When she realized that what she heard in his voice was urgency, need. Sweet Lord,
he was all but trembling, as if he hadn’t had a woman in years, even though she knew better.

“I want to be in you, Grace,” he growled into her ear, lifting his hand to pull away the covers. “I want to feel your body
melt around me. I want to hear you laugh again.”

She tried to pull away from him. She really did. But he had her caught hard against him, and he wasn’t letting her up. And
somehow she forgot what it was she was fighting.

“Just how many women do you need to rut with in a day?” she demanded, knowing her voice sounded unforgivably weak.

“I only
want
to make love with you.” He lifted his head again; she could see heat and humor and something else, something she didn’t have
the courage to hope for. “We could, of course, pass the hours discussing my sartorial
brilliance, although I have just destroyed the
trone d’amour
Biddle worked so hard on. We could talk about your new charity for returning soldiers. I love talking to you, Grace. I love
to see you laugh. But I am in sore need of seeing you laugh in pure, giddy pleasure. Please…”