Once Tempted (5 page)

“Yes, Spain.” Lady Finch scanned down the column. “Oh, yes, here it is. Escaped from a garrison in Spain and made it to the English lines in Portugal with the help of Spanish guerrillas.” Her ladyship shuddered. “The poor boy. How glad he must have been to see our noble colors flying from a standard.”

Mrs. Keates nodded, only too afraid to speak. For fear she’d show too much interest. For fear the sick feeling in her chest would spill out and she’d disgrace herself by tossing up her tea on the carpet.

It couldn’t be him. It just couldn’t be.

“From Lisbon, where he was much honored by Wellington, he set forth on the
Archimedes
and arrived in London this Tuesday past, sending his mother into a fit of delight. The brave lady, her fight to save his title and inheritance well known to these readers, is hosting a fête in honor of his return.” Lady Finch shook her head. “And here I have been writing to Sarah all these years to forget about that scandalous scalawag she called a son and find another distraction other than pestering the House of Lords about his estate. I do say, those Parnells are a determined lot.”

Parnell.
The only too familiar name hammered at her unwillingness to believe.

Her ladyship set the paper aside. “Well, well, the Marquis of Bradstone returned from the dead. And a hero to boot. I wonder if anyone remembers why he left. Now, there’s a story that bears repeating, more than this taradiddle about him escaping the French. That was just before you came here, Keates. I don’t suppose you’ve heard it, though if you had, you surely wouldn’t forget it.” Lady Finch waved to her maid, who had arrived to help take the lady to bed.

Mrs. Keates managed to draw a slow, even breath. “Yes, my lady, I recall the tale,” she whispered as the maid rolled Lady Finch’s chair out of the room.

Mrs. Keates, née Olivia Sutton, hadn’t just heard it. She had managed to live through it.

As she made her way to her modest bedchamber, the events of that night played through her thoughts.

After Robert had pointed her out as the young Spaniard’s murderer, her life had turned upside down. One minute he was there, accusing her of murder, and the next moment he was gone, having slipped into the crowd.

Hours later, locked in her own room and under house arrest, she still couldn’t fathom how everything had gone so wrong. Even the blood-soaked note and band of gold she still held clenched in her hand seemed unreal.

She’d looked around the darkened room and tried to find the words to voice her anguish. Yet all she could think of was what the Spaniard had told her.

Run,
he had warned.
Go as far as you can.

But to where and how
? she had wanted to cry out.

No, running wasn’t the answer. But Lord Bradstone was.

Yes, that was it, she would go to him. He would see her name cleared.

Luckily for Olivia, the locks in her mother’s house had been in ill-repair, like the rest of their family fortunes since her father’s death, so it was only too easy to pry the tumblers loose with a hairpin. Having packed all her jewelry and the pin money she’d been hoarding for her planned elopement with Robert, she’d made her escape past the sleeping guard who’d been placed in their house.

From there she’d gone to Robert’s house, where a post boy had told her of overhearing his lordship ordering his driver to take him to the docks, for a ship called the
Bon Venture.
Olivia passed the boy’s directions to the hackney driver she’d engaged and in no time found herself at the gangway of a merchantman. But it had just slipped free of its moorings, and with it all her hopes, all her dreams.

Worse still, just then she saw Robert on deck, extending his hand to a woman nearby and drawing her into his embrace.

“Come, my love, let us go below,” he was saying, his voice carrying over the water. “Now that I am well rid of that boring baggage, we have much catching up to do.” Olivia could only stare after them as they made their way out of sight. She’d staggered away from the docks, stunned and in shock, and only hours later did she find herself on the coach to Kent without any real memory of how she’d gotten there.

But as luck would have it, there she had met Lord Finch. The poor man was returning home from London without the lady’s companion his wife had sent him to fetch. Apparently the real Mrs. Keates had learned about her future employer’s unpleasant nature and begged off the position, leaving Lord Finch empty-handed.

And so Olivia had offered herself for the post, taking the lady’s name so that Lady Finch would be none the wiser.

It had seemed the only thing to do at the time.

So she’d done exactly as the dying stranger had advised.
Hide.
Hidden from her ruination, hidden from the scandal that rocked London for weeks with the publication of her letters to Lord Bradstone and the mad speculation as to the dead man’s identity.

Then her precarious position had been made easier by the sinking of the
Bon Venture.
Since Lord Bradstone had been seen in the company of a woman aboard ship, everyone assumed it was her—so the search for the murderess had been given up.

And so for seven years, Olivia Sutton had lived as Mrs. Keates, poor widow of a mythical army officer and companion to Lady Finch. Really, how could she leave? She was wanted for murder, and even if she told the truth, that she hadn’t killed that man, who would believe her, when the only other witness was also dead?

Now the question remained, how would she live with the memory of that horrendous night, knowing that the Marquis of Bradstone, the man who’d brought about her ruin and murdered that innocent man, still breathed?

She glanced over at her narrow bed, where underneath she still kept stashed the small valise in which she’d carried away her meager possessions that night. Pulling it free from its hiding place, she slid her hand into the lining until her fingers wrapped around the ancient bit of bloodstained parchment there.

Then there was his gold ring. She wore it on the silver chain her father had given her for her sixteenth birthday. The ring dangled over her heart, her personal talisman and remembrance of what that brave stranger had lost and what she owed him.

Give this to no one but Hobbe.

Hobbe.

She had thought of this mysterious man every day since, prayed for a way to find him, scoured Lady Finch’s newspapers for any hint of his existence and had found nothing. She didn’t even know if Hobbe was a man, but something told her he was.

For if the boy had trusted this Hobbe so implicitly, he must be a man of impeccable honor and integrity.

And in her mind he’d become her own personal knight in shining armor. Her hero. A man of action and decisive power. Hobbe was handsome, darkly so. Not with Bradstone’s black-hearted nature but with a rakish appeal. The kind of man who would sweep her off her feet and carry her to safety.

There were days when she believed that if Hobbe were to walk into a room, her heart would know him without a moment’s hesitation, so long had she spent dreaming of him.

Now if only she could find him, then she and Hobbe could exact their revenge for the young man’s life—together they’d make Bradstone pay.

Bradstone.
She shuddered at the very thought of him.

A hero. Being celebrated and fêted. Living with all the rewards society poured at his feet, while she remained trapped in this—her own personal prison for a crime she hadn’t committed. Her only crime had been trusting Bradstone. A man with whom she’d believed herself in love. Well, she wouldn’t make that mistake again.

She glanced out her bedroom window into the darkness of the January night and shivered.

On a cold night like this, how could she believe there was a Hobbe? For a bleak moment, she knew she’d never find him in time.

So the task fell to her shoulders. To make damn sure the Marquis of Bradstone wished he’d stayed in that French prison. She finished packing her bag and set out to complete the vow she had made all those years ago. Not the one to the dying man, the one she’d made to herself.

Revenge.

And as she passed through the dark shadows of Finch Manor, she took only one thing.

The pistol Jemmy had left for her on the highboy in the hall.

London

Lady Bradstone’s welcome-home fête for her son had the entire house in chaos.

As Robert hazarded his way through the confusion of delivery wagons out front and the battalion of servants rushing about inside, he would have liked nothing more than to turn and run in a direct line back to Portugal.

He had spent the last week chasing after Pymm’s unbelievable revelations. Yet locating Olivia Sutton proved to be as elusive as finding a decent drink in Seven Dials. Since everyone believed the girl dead, it was hard to start an investigation.

Her scandalous affair with Bradstone and her connection to the murder had left her reputation in tatters, ruined forever in the eyes of polite society. Everyone he’d questioned, albeit casually, had felt that even if she was living, she was better off dead.

Avoiding his aunt and Carlyle, who would both have a list of requirements that needed his attention, he sought refuge in the marquis’s luxurious and spacious bedchamber, where perhaps he could find some peace and quiet in which to sort out the mystery of finding the infamous Miss Sutton.

But an undisturbed corner wasn’t to be found there, for glowering in the middle of the room stood his batman, Aquiles.

“Ach,” the man said, scowling as another servant brought in more pressed clothes, “they would drown you in all this.”

Robert agreed wholeheartedly. If the dirt and stench of London wasn’t bad enough, the clothes he was expected to wear as a peer of the realm made a French prison look cozy.

Ridiculous cravats designed to choke a man. Breeches and jackets so tight he could barely move. Orders and regulations he understood, having spent most of his life in the army, but the strict rules that made up the good society of London left him as unsteady as if a cannonball had just landed at his feet.

“
Yer mother
,” Aquiles said with a short, gruff snort, “and that conceited coxcomb she hired said you should wear this one.” He held up a green ensemble that looked more befitting as funeral regalia for a toad. Grimacing, he tossed the expensive suit on the bed and turned on Robert. “
Yer mother’s
been in a regular state since you left, especially when I wouldn’t tell ’er where you went. She’s been badgering me right awful. You’re supposed to be front and center and on display when the first guests arrive. And
yer mother
also said—”

“Please stop calling her that,” Robert told him. His memories of his real mother seemed almost tarnished when she was compared to her blowsy and social-climbing sister. “When we are alone, you can drop the act.”

“Fine with me.” Aquiles shrugged. “Guess you should be thankful she isn’t yer mother. Egads, no wonder yer cousin lit out of London like he did. That woman frets more than a Lisbon whore at confession.”

Though Robert wholeheartedly agreed with Aquiles’ rather forthright assessment of his aunt, he didn’t feel quite comfortable giving the man’s statement credence. “You should have more patience with her,” he said. “She loved her son very much.”

“Then she was the only one,” Aquiles muttered, as he went about his task of setting out Robert’s shaving accessories. “Dishonorable bastard.”

Robert didn’t feel all that honorable himself impersonating his cousin and leading his aunt to believe that her only child was still alive.

“Will you look at this bit?” Aquiles was saying as he held up a long, starched and laced cravat. “Better get that fancy-boy maid of yours up here to tie this around your neck—I might slip and hang you with it.” The man laughed at his own rough humor.

“Do you mean Babbit?” Robert asked, referring to the rather flamboyant valet his aunt had hired for him.

“Bah! Rabbit would be a better name for that useless one. He couldn’t start a fire if he was up to his arse in kindling and holding a lighted torch.” Aquiles eyed once again the perfectly pressed cravat.

Robert knew his old servant was quite disdainful of the other man’s talents and place in their life. “I doubt we will be calling on Babbit for anything other than ironing and polishing.”

“Fancy that,” Aquiles said, mocking the man’s accent and manners.

Robert laughed. To Wellington’s plans for the Bradstone deception Aquiles had been a last-minute addition. He’d been a servant-cum-bodyguard in the constantly-moving Danvers household for as long as Robert could remember. And when the middle Danvers’ son had announced his intention to take a commission in the army, Aquiles had packed his bag and followed Robert.

“Not about to let him get his arse shot off,” the half-Irish, half-Spanish blackguard had been heard to mutter. And so he’d become Robert’s unofficial batman. As it turned out, Aquiles’s rather colorful past, fluency in the languages of the Peninsula, and Catholic leanings often paved a smooth course on Robert’s forays into enemy territory.

Aquiles leaned forward and asked, “Did you find anything out about her?”

“No,” Robert said. “Like Pymm said—it’s as if she vanished that night.”

“Women!” Aquiles huffed, his arms crossed over his chest, his back against the door. While his stance looked like one of indifference, Robert knew the man had one ear finely tuned to the hallway beyond, listening for anyone who might interrupt their discussion. “What will you do now?”

Robert was about to say he hadn’t the vaguest notion, when in the hallway a chattering group of maids passed by, busy with their final preparations for the fête. Both men stilled until the noisy prattle died away.

“I hate this place,” Aquiles muttered. “Too many interfering females.”

“If we could just find that one female, we’d be bound back to Wellington on the first ship, my friend,” Robert told him.

“Don’t see how that little bit o’ muslin could disappear like that and for all these years. What if she met with foul play? Given what we’ve learned about that cousin of yers, he may well have done that poor—” Aquiles’s assessment ended abruptly when suddenly the door to the room burst open, sending the man staggering forward.