The Bride Behind the Curtain (7 page)

“
Non!
” He shook his hand to shake her head gently. “You are about to say you see that I think you good enough for a dalliance but not good enough for a marriage,
n'est-ce pas
?”

“And you're about to say it's that I'm
too
good for you,” Adele shot back.

“That's not it,” he said. “At least, not exactly.” He paused, trying to muster his words. He ran his thumb across her cheek. “Adele, you said I am a gazetted fortune hunter.
Bon.
It is so, and you are not the only one who knows it. That means no one will trust my feelings, nor my intentions. Not your brother, not your sister, and certainly not those who people the world in which we both must move.” He ran his hand across her hair, dragged his fingers down her neck, around her throat. She closed her eyes so she could fully feel the heated trails his touch left against her skin.

“If you are with me, the world will laugh at you,” he whispered. “They will say how quickly and easily James Beauclaire conquered the plain and disregarded Lady Adele.” Her eyes flew open at this. She opened her mouth to argue, but he laid two fingers across her lips. “Men will shake their heads with pity at me and wink when they suggest they should have known you'd drop your fortune into the hands of the first plausible rogue who whispered in your ear.”

Adele swallowed. How could he say such bitter things while he touched her so sweetly? “We could try not to care,” she murmured.

“That would not work, and we both know that.” James stepped away, letting his arms fall loose at his sides. He was breathing like he'd just run a grueling race.

“We could elope.”

James smiled, just a little, and ran one shaking hand through his hair. His hair curled slightly when it was disordered, as it was now, and it lent him a wonderful boyish air. “If we eloped, I fear you would have to bury me, or your brother, because the duel would mean the end of one of us.”

Adele bit her lip. “Marcus wouldn't . . . No, he would.” She swallowed again. There had to be a way. There had to. She had just found him, just begun to explore this heat and this delight that bloomed when she touched him. She would not give it up so soon or so easily.

But there was a way, and it had been handed to her by Helene Fitzgerald and Madelene Valmeyer. Adele pressed both hands against her mouth to keep in the whoop of laughter. As it was, James was startled enough to take a step forward.

“What if . . . what if we change?” Adele said.

James frowned. “You mean, what if you were seen to reform me? I cannot reform. My . . . There are too many demands on my purse.”

“Debts?” asked Adele softly. She knew all about those.

“My family,” he answered. “My...It is...deeply complicated.” Before Adele could ask any further, James hurried on. “It is not, I promise, anything dishonorable, but, I do need the monies I bring in from gaming, and I have no other means by which I can raise such sums.” He dropped onto the sofa beside the hearth. It was the same spot from which Adele had listened to Helene's scheme.

“What about the markets?” Adele sat down beside him. “Or ships?”

He shrugged. He also took up her hand and kissed it. “Those are all gambles, Adele.”

“But they are respectable gambles.” She ran her hand up his sleeve, enjoying the shape of his arm underneath. She touched his wrist and turned his hand over to run her fingers across the complex web of lines across his palm.

“Perhaps,” he murmured. “But I don't understand the gambles of ships and markets.”

She kissed his warm palm. He'd done it to her; it seemed reasonable to return the favor. “I suppose you were born knowing how to play whist and piquet?”

“Almost.” He spoke so softly and so seriously, she had to look up. “If I tried a speculator's life, I might very well fail, and if I did, I would lose a great deal more than money. A failed reformation will do no one any good.”

“Yes, but . . . but what if I changed as well?”

“How?”

She swallowed. One of them had moved closer. She was sure his thigh had not pressed up against hers a moment ago. “What if I became a success? If I was a social success, like Patience, people might believe that you could, you know, actually be . . .”

“Intrigued?” He touched her cheek. “Enchanted?” He put a finger under her chin so he could lift her mouth. “Captivated?”

He kissed her, slowly this time, his mouth moving languidly across hers. Her body was melting into warm honey, and she never wanted it to end. He had one hand around her waist and drew the other down her shoulder, down to her breast. Lightning shot through her at this gentle, intimate touch, and Adele gasped.

“Yes. Oh yes.”

“But how would you work this change, my dear?” He kissed the corner of her mouth, her jaw, her throat. “I know your worth, but others . . .”

She must think clearly. She must rise above this glorious muddle that filled her so she could speak, even briefly. “There is a way.”

“Tell me.” He was stroking her sides, her thighs. He held his mouth close as his lips brushed hers as he spoke. “Give me hope. Let me know you are not beyond my reach.”

“Do I feel beyond your reach?” She kissed him again. She let her hands slide across his hard thighs in their tight breeches, up to his square hips, and around to feel the intriguing curve of his tight buttocks. He groaned against her mouth, and she felt a stab of elation. “But I can't tell you everything. I'd have to break a confidence.”

He drew back far enough to meet her gaze. “I would not have you do anything that might endanger your reputation.”

“Aside from being here with you, you mean?” She kissed his cheek, and his throat above his collar. The stubble of cheek and chin were strangely enticing to her mouth.

James chuckled, the sound that made her breath hitch and her heart tip. “Yes, aside from that.”

“It won't,” she said. “Unless I fail. But at least we'd fail together.” She took his hand. It was so broad and so strong, and it was killing her to do nothing but hold his hand when what she wanted was to press the whole of herself against him.

James sighed and laced his fingers tightly through hers. “You are trusting me a great deal, and I have given you little reason to do so. I can do no less than trust you.”

“Then you'll do it? You'll become an investor?”

“I will try,” he agreed. “But what is the matter?”

Adele's mind was working furiously. Anything she had to say must be said now. There was no knowing when they'd have a moment like this again. They were already dancing with disaster. Marcus might return at any moment.

“I don't want to say this.” She took a deep breath. She was holding his hand in both of hers. She was dizzy with need and the effort of holding herself even this far apart from him. His hand felt like the only still and solid point in the world. “Once you do leave, we won't be able to see each other again. Not for a while, at least.”

“Why not?”

“Because if our names become linked, then the plan I've agreed to falls apart. And if we, if I change myself and it's known the two of us are . . . together, people will say . . . people will say that you are behind the change, you are advising me, shaping me. Then they won't believe my change is real any more than they'd believe your feelings are real.”

“I begin to hate people,” muttered James.

“Oh, so do I.” Adele ran her fingers along his jaw. Now that she'd begun, she could not seem to stop touching him.

He grasped her hand and kissed her fingers. “How long do we wait,
ma chère
? How long before we know if this plan of yours will work?”

Forever. I'd wait forever.
She almost laughed at herself. She said forever, but her mouth, her hands were not prepared to wait another second. “I should know by the end of the little season if there's even a chance of success.” The “little season” began in February, when society at large left the country to return to London. It ended after Easter week, which marked not only the start of Parliament, but the beginning of the season proper. “That's three months.”

“
Bon.
” He nodded. “The little season becomes our calendar. It is perhaps not much time for a respectable investment to show success, but enough time for word to get about that the rogue has begun to change.”

“Three months, then.”

“Three months,
ma chère
, and then it is forever, or it is never.”

“It will be forever,” she murmured. “I will make it so.”

The great problem with a resolve to immediately embark on a process of publicly visible reformation was that there seemed to be so many hurdles to be got over before a man could even find that straight and narrow road.

First there was the genuine physical problem of the snow, which was followed by a spell of deeper than usual cold. The house party dragged on for a five solid days before the roads cleared enough for horses and carriages to venture forth.

During that time, James did his best to make himself scarce. He did not want some careless look or word to betray Adele, or him. There were, though, inevitably times when they must come face-to-face. James might take his breakfast on a tray in his room, and he might decide to forgo luncheons, but he must join the rest of the house for supper. What he ate at those painful meals he was never to remember. He was too busy making charming conversation with whoever his hostess asked him to lead in and trying to keep his eyes from straying to the end of the table where Adele sat, usually with the oldest gentlemen among the party.

Patience, however, proved surprisingly easy to avoid. She clearly was ready to believe he was playing aloof to intrigue her and was ready to return the favor. When they spoke, it was little more than sparring. Every one of her friends took this for sophisticated flirtation, and Patience basked in the witty innuendo they lavished upon her. This kept her contented, and from making additional discomfort for Adele, or so James hoped.

Octavius Pursewell proved more difficult to put off. Trapped in a country house for an additional five days, the cardsharp could imagine no other way to spend his time than taking as much money off his fellow prisoners as possible. By the end of the third day, the only one willing to sit down with him was Valmeyer, but even Pursewell had his limits as to how long he'd play on promissory notes alone. Coming across Valmeyer hectoring his stepsister for “just five pounds more, blast you, Maddie . . .” James suddenly found his vow of reformation that much easier to bear.

It was the nights that were the worst. At night, James lay awake and listened to the wind outside, and thought about Adele. She was a bare few yards away, as the crow flew. The wing where he and the rest of the bachelors had been lodged was at right angles to the family wing, and he could see her window from his. Not that her careful maid ever left the drapes open, damn her. But he'd caught the movement of Adele's shadow on the panes, and once, he saw her face as she gazed across the snowy yard below.

Those tiny glimpses fired his imagination. In the long dark hours that followed, James undressed Adele in his mind, slowly, lovingly. He ran his hands across her sweet curves. He savored the taste of her mouth, and more. He imagined kissing and sucking on her soft, generous breasts until she sighed and knotted her fingers in his hair. He imagined parting her with his fingers and stroking her. Did she know that pleasure? Was she, in her bed, behind those curtains, thinking of him? Did she touch herself and whisper his name to the darkness, tossing and turning in her lonesome bed until sweet relief flooded her?

These were times when James sought the only release available, quickly, roughly, and found it almost worse than nothing.

But it was not only restless desire that robbed him of his sleep. All the things he had not yet told Adele gnawed at his heart and his conscience. He would tell her the whole story about his father and his family and their uncertain circumstances as soon as he had a chance. She should be able to embark on their strange voyage with her eyes open. She should know about Papa and his endless attempts to recover their property in France.

It is shameful that a father should have to ask so much from his son . . .

Then pride would rebel. If he were honest, fear also raised its ugly head. If Adele knew the extent of his difficulties, her resolve might waver. It was one thing to love a dashing and careless rogue. It was quite another to love a man with dependent and faltering relations, not to mention all their expenses.

Well, let it be, he counseled himself. There would be time enough to tell her if—no,
when
they both completed their transformations. Besides, should disaster strike, should he fail her . . . it would be easier for her to let him go, perhaps, if she believed he acted out of some base flaw in his character. If she believed the failing was born of duty, she might not be able to let go when the time came.

Which it would not. It must not.

James's only cold consolation during those long days was that when he did encounter Adele, she was not alone. Invariably, Lady Helene and Miss Valmeyer were with her. Miss Sewell frequently joined the group, a fact that seemed to please Mrs. Kearsely no end.

“I'm not one of those snobs, you know,” Mrs. Kearsely told James during one of the “impromptu” musicales she had arranged to help the time pass, especially after Pursewell had soured the men on cards. “I think it a very good thing if a house and a family have a reputation for consorting with certain literary and artistic persons. As long as it's done in good company, of course.”

Of course.

It was good to see her with friends, and, if he were to admit the truth, only female friends.

All in all, James was only too glad to escape to London, even though it meant leaving Adele behind with no more than a tender glance.

Once in town, however, his troubles began all over again. Avoiding Pursewell's card games at Windford Park had left him short of what he reckoned on bringing home when he'd accepted Mrs. Kearsely's invitation. Once he'd sent his father what he could, and turned over just enough to Marie to cover the housekeeping, there wasn't nearly enough left with which to begin a new life as a serious investor. So, it was back to the gambling hells and the meager pickings there. The little season was dragging through its slow beginning, and the best gaming rooms were mostly empty.

Distance from Adele did not make the nights any shorter, or any easier, nor did they decrease the fever heat of his dreams.

It took James the rest of January to amass a decent stake. February blew down the streets, cold and gray, bringing coaches loaded with servants back from the country to open the houses for their masters' return. On the nights he had to travel to the clubs, James found himself taking the longer route past Windford's London house, near Grosvenor Square. He liked to see the lamp lit and the windows shining with firelight. It reminded him Adele would soon be there. He would see her, and he would be able to show her how he'd progressed.

But now that he had money enough to begin, James faced a new quandary. How was he to find someone who could help him learn the rules of this new game? The dishonesty of the brokers and stockjobbers was legendary, almost as bad as that of the army of private bankers who daily flooded the city in a great black-backed tide.

It was this question that brought him to Benedict's chilly studio. Benedict rented the attic of a house in Lincoln's Inn Fields. One entire wall of the space was taken up by windows and balcony doors. This meant that no matter how good the blaze in the stove, the temperature in winter was arctic. Not that the cold seemed to bother Benedict, who was in his shirtsleeves when James came in.

“Hello, Benedict,
mon frère.
I find I am in need of a favor.”

Benedict turned around from covering the easel he'd been working at. “What can I do?”

James dropped onto the one worn chair that was not covered in sketchbooks or journals. “I need the name of a stockbroker. An honest one.”

Benedict snorted and concentrated on wiping down his brushes with a turpentine-soaked rag. “When did I become an idle investor?”

“Never, but you are an honest man, and you know others.”

“You'd do better asking Windford.”

“
Peut-être
, but circumstances would make that awkward.”

That made Benedict pause and give James a hard look. “Is Lady Adele perhaps at the root of these circumstances?”

“Was that a painting of Madelene Valmeyer you were so carefully covering over there? It looked quite good.”

Benedict bridled at this, but took the hint and veered off, at least a little. “Windford won't like it.”

“Which is why I must be careful, and the broker must be an honest man. I have limited time, and funds, to waste.”

“All right. I think I know who you need. I'll write to him for you.”

Benedict was as good as his word, not that James expected any less. Now, here he sat in this noisy coffeehouse on Sweeting Street, across the table from a ponderous, very sober man, in a coat of good black cloth, who was giving him the coldest glare he'd ever received outside a respectable ballroom.

“Your reputation precedes you, monsieur,” said the broker, a Mr. McNeil, who had a bristling red mustache, overgrown sideburns, and a bald scalp that flushed as he spoke.

James smiled in self-deprecation and sipped his bad coffee. “I was afraid it might.”

“No matter what people say, the stock market is not a place for gamblers.” McNeil stabbed the table hard enough to rattle the cups. “It is for patient, sober men. Thinking men of steady nerve and character. Those dilettantes who wish to get rich quickly can just as quickly find themselves in the poorhouse.”

James nodded coolly at McNeil's implied slights. “Be assured, Mister McNeil, I intend to be in this game for the long term.”

“Then you wish me to recommend some safe fund?”

“Unfortunately, sir, I need more than can be offered by the funds and their safe three percent returns. I must take some risk, but it must be the good risk, and more importantly, I must begin to learn the ways of the market.”

McNeil lowered his shaggy brows. “Why?”

“You spoke of the market as belonging to thinking men, Mister McNeil. I suggest to you, sir, no one thinks more than the dedicated gambling man. He makes it a point to know who he plays with, their habits and their characters. He must understand the game, the measurement of odds and chance, and all the ways they can be manipulated. A man who sits down with strangers, at a game he has not taken sufficient time to understand, well, he is what they call the ‘flat' and,
bien sûr
, he will have a flat's reward.”

“Mmmph.” McNeil tugged at his side-whiskers and considered this. “Well. You're not what I expected, Monsieur Beauclaire. And, as it happens, I've had word about you from a particular quarter.”

“Monsieur Pelham has been most kind.”

“It was not Mister Pelham, but quite another person. Someone whose intelligence and character I deeply respect.” Mr. McNeil lifted his coffee cup and gulped down its contents like another man might down a glass of whiskey. “I hope your day is free, Monsieur Beauclaire. If you truly mean to learn this game, you have a great deal of work ahead of you.”

So it was that James turned from a creature haunting the long winter nights to stalking the streets of the city during the cold, gray days. He spent mornings in the libraries reading the papers. He spent afternoons in the coffeehouses, sometimes listening to McNeil and his cronies, sometimes just listening to the gossip around him. He bought oceans of coffee and brandy for men who were ready to talk. It was all surprisingly comfortable. The charm he'd cultivated for the gaming tables served him equally well here in the daylight. So did his facility for numbers, and for accumulating gossip. He gave McNeil his orders, he took his advice, and, as February waned, his little store of capital began to grow.

His change of habit, though, did not go unnoticed. Those nights he did go out to the clubs, old friends chafed him about his absence, speculating loudly about some woman he must have squirreled away. But they were not the only ones to notice the change. One evening as James came in from a meeting with McNeil, he found his sister, Marie, sitting in the parlor of their small, rented house, staring at the fire.

She did not look up as he came in to kiss her cheek. She did snort.

“May I know, my dear sister, what I have done?” James asked. Their parents had always insisted they speak French in the home, and they both fell reflexively into the language when they were alone together.

“How am I to know? My brother, he does not seem to care to tell me what he does all day.”

He drew the room's other chair up to the fire. “I did not want to worry you, Marie.”

“Well, I am worried. I am terrified. You change all your habits, and I should be glad, I suppose, for what sister can delight in her brother being always the gamester, but suddenly there is no money, and Mother's nurse threatened me just now with leaving, and . . .”

“She what?” James took his sister's hand. “I'm sorry, Marie. I will speak to her, and I will pay her.”

Marie looked up at him, and he was taken aback by the glitter of tears and anger in her eyes. “What are you doing, James? You have some secret, and you frighten me.”

He smiled and squeezed her hand reassuringly. “I did not want to tell you before I knew if I could make it work. I'm turning investor, Marie.”

“You're
what
?” she cried.

“Shh! Marie. Business is not such a bad thing. I make new friends, respectable men, not wastrels. I have shares in a mine now, and a warehouse that is importing silks and tea. My accounts grow. It is slower, true, but it is more reliable than gambling.”

“And business must be managed, constantly attended to. What will happen to it all when Papa at last writes for you to join him in Paris?”

“Marie,” James hesitated. “Have you ever thought that our father may ultimately fail?”

It was not something they ever spoke of, not even between themselves. It was hard for him to speak of it now. Marie had always been so relentlessly cheerful, especially in front of Mama. He braced himself for her to fly into rage at his lack of faith.

But Marie just hung her head.