The Rake's Mistress (16 page)

‘This cannot be right,’ Rebecca said hopelessly, gazing at the mountains of clothing and accessories that were piled up in all corners of the blue bedroom by the middle of the afternoon. ‘I cannot possibly need all of this! I have not ordered the half of it!’

‘No, I did,’ Rachel Newlyn said calmly. She gestured to the piles in turn. ‘You have gloves over
there, Rebecca, stockings there, various undergarments there—I shall not put you to the blush by itemising them!—nightgowns and robes, handkerchiefs and scarves, hats to choose from there—oh, and shoes, of course.’

Rebecca pressed both hands to her hot cheeks. Never had she imagined setting eyes upon such a selection of fashionable and expensive clothes, much less being able to purchase them. Yet there was no possibility of refusal on her part. Rachel had accompanied Rebecca to Bond Street, for a bewildering array of items Rebecca had not even realised she needed. In addition to all her clothes there was a selection of glass cosmetic bottles and a very beautiful set of silver-backed brushes. Her head ached with the opulence of it all.

The day dress she was wearing became her well. It was rose pink and suited her complexion perfectly. On the bed was a huge selection of gowns—walking dresses, riding habits, ballgowns, spencers, pelisses… She had no notion when she would have the opportunity to wear them all. When she had first tried on the rose-pink gown she had stared at herself in the mirror for quite five minutes, for it had utterly transformed her appearance. Her thick chestnut hair, which normally she wore tied back or pushed hastily under a lace cap, was loose about her face in a dark cloud. Her eyes were a vivid blue. It felt odd to be a dressed as a
lady of fashion, but she knew she looked pretty. She hesitated to use the word for it had not had much currency in her world, but it was true.

‘You look lovely, Rebecca,’ Rachel said warmly, watching her with amusement. ‘It is a shame that we have had to buy your gowns off the peg, but you are fortunate to have found things that fit you well.’

‘I had no idea what I was choosing,’ Rebecca admitted, still turning surreptitiously to view the gown from all angles in the mirror. ‘I was looking at colour and cut.’

‘You have a flair for it,’ Rachel agreed. ‘It must be the artist in you.’

‘It feels strange,’ Rebecca admitted. ‘I never wear clothes like this.’

‘Do you like them?’ Rachel asked, her eyes twinkling at Rebecca’s poor attempts to conceal her pleasure.

‘Oh, yes,’ Rebecca admitted with a little sigh. ‘Rather too much! It will be a pang for me to give them up when the masquerade is at an end.’

There was a knock at the door. ‘Come in!’ Rachel called, before Rebecca could say anything.

Lucas Kestrel walked in. ‘I am come to see how much longer the security of the nation must wait on the demands of fashion—’ he began, then his eyes fell on Rebecca and he stopped.

She stood somewhat self-consciously before him whilst his astounded gaze travelled over her. There was a long moment of silence.

‘Good God, Rebecca…’ Lucas said. He sounded stunned.

‘Try for something more coherent, Lucas,’ Rachel said, a spark of amusement in her eyes. ‘Does Rebecca not look fine?’

Lucas seemed to recollect himself. ‘It is extraordinary what one can achieve with good grooming,’ he said. ‘I am come to ask Miss Raleigh when she will be free to discuss our plans.’

‘We shall not be much longer,’ Rachel said. ‘Rebecca may join you in the garden shortly, as it is a fine day.’

Lucas went, with one long, backward look at Rebecca, who had gathered the nearest piece of material to her—a riding habit—and was holding it defensively at her breast, despite the fact that the pink gown was all that was demure.

‘How rude he is,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Good grooming, indeed!’

Rachel laughed. ‘He was only rude because he was shaken,’ she said shrewdly, ‘and if you can do that to Lucas, who is accounted a man of experience, I’ll warrant you will have the whole of Midwinter falling at your feet, Rebecca!’

W
hen Rebecca joined Lucas in the garden some twenty minutes later, she was wearing a warm pelisse over the pink day dress and therefore felt a great deal more prepared to face him. Her confidence lasted precisely thirty seconds—until he took her hand in his to guide her to the wooden seat that overlooked a pretty little ornamental fishpond.

‘Are you sufficiently warm out here?’ he asked. ‘We may talk inside if you prefer.’

Rebecca shook her head. At least out here in the open air she felt free. The thought of being shut away privately with Lucas was enough to make her breathing constrict.

‘It is a pleasant day and I have not been outside much of late,’ she said. ‘I am content to stay here.’

‘Very well.’ Lucas sat down beside her, crossing his long, elegant legs and giving her a sideways appraising look.

‘So we are to be cousins, Miss Raleigh,’ he said softly. ‘I rather like that, although I could ask for a closer relationship.’

‘Even this is too close,’ Rebecca said. ‘We are not kissing cousins, my lord. If you recall, you have succumbed to a
tendre
for me but I, alas, wish for none of it.’

‘Kissing cousins…’ Lucas said. The corner of his mouth lifted in a smile. ‘I rather like that idea.’

‘Pray disregard it,’ Rebecca said sharply. ‘You are supposed to be acting as though you suffer unrequited love, rather than planning a conquest.’

Lucas’s smile deepened as it rested on her face. ‘It would not be in character for me to ignore a challenge, Miss Raleigh.’

Rebecca’s pulse fluttered and was ignored. He had already told her that he would do all in his power to convince her to accept his suit. This, then, was the confirmation.

‘I believe we are intended to be discussing my aristocratic antecedents,’ she said, ‘rather than wasting our time. To which branch of your illustrious family do I belong?’

Lucas laughed. ‘You are to be a very distant cousin on the distaff side. We have so many cousins that no one will think anything of it.’

‘And the reason that I have come to visit you?’

‘We thought to stick as closely to the truth as possible,’ Lucas said. ‘The relatives with whom
you lived were recently carried off by fever and so you are on a protracted visit to us whilst Justin, as head of the family, decides what is to become of you.’

‘How very convenient,’ Rebecca said, her lips thinning. ‘Not only does it have the ring of authenticity but it would be a cruel person indeed to question me when I have been in mourning.’

‘Indeed so,’ Lucas said. ‘It also explains why you have not been in society.’

‘But not why I never had a season or made an advantageous match,’ Rebecca said. ‘I am scarcely a débutante, my lord, so what is the explanation for that? Were we too poor?’

‘No,’ Lucas said. ‘That would make Justin look ungenerous for failing to sponsor you.’ He put his head on one side. ‘I think, Miss Raleigh, that you must have been disappointed in love.’

Rebecca raised her brows. ‘That will not require a great leap of imagination, my lord,’ she said bitterly.

Their gazes clashed. ‘And I am pledged to make you forget,’ Lucas said softly, ‘which is why I dog your footsteps like a suitor.’

‘I prefer to think of you as a faithful hound,’ Rebecca said, shifting away from him along the seat. ‘Mutely devoted. Then I need not have to tolerate your conversation.’

Lucas’s smile was genuinely amused. ‘You certainly have the wit to carry this off, Miss Raleigh.’

‘Thank you. I am not entirely sure that you have the charm to do so.’

‘We shall see. I can play your devoted lover with a great deal of conviction, I assure you.’ He gave her a quizzical look. ‘There is one other thing, of course.’

Rebecca looked enquiring.

‘You will have to call me Lucas, and I will call you Rebecca. A greater formality would cause suspicion. Now I need you to tell me a little of your family history, Rebecca.’

Rebecca looked at him suspiciously. ‘Why?’

Lucas sighed. ‘Why do I always have the feeling that you are withholding something from me? Because we need to stick to the truth as closely as possible and keep matters simple. And as your cousin, I will necessarily know your history.’

Rebecca nodded reluctantly. She did not want to tell Lucas anything but she could see the point of what he was saying.

‘I was born in Somerset and lived in that county for the first eight years of my life,’ she said. ‘My father was in the army and he was killed in India. My mother went into a decline and died later the same year. Daniel—my brother—joined the navy and I was sent to live with my mother’s cousins, the Provosts. The rest you know.’

It was true, as far as it went.

‘A succinct history,’ Lucas commented. His hazel eyes were keen. ‘It must hide a multitude of experience for you, however. It is a difficult thing to lose both parents so young and be uprooted from your home.’

Rebecca felt a treacherous rush of affinity for him and crushed it down. It was not fair that Lucas understood her so well and that his sincerity could undermine her already shaky defences.

‘It was,’ she said, unconsciously twisting her hands together in her lap, ‘but I was very happy in Clerkenwell.’

There was a strained silence, then Lucas dropped his hand over her clenched ones and for a moment she did not free herself.

‘I can see no reason why we need to change your past history to suit our purposes,’ he said, ‘other than to suggest that you have been living quietly in the country until the death of your aunt. In Somerset, say, to add authenticity.’

Rebecca nodded. ‘Very well. And perhaps I could have been betrothed to a curate who felt it his mission to travel to the Indies and subsequently died of fever, leaving me inconsolable.’

Lucas’s smile deepened the lines at the corners of his eyes. It would be difficult to imagine anyone who looked less like a sickly curate, Rebecca thought.

‘Is that the sort of man who would attract your enduring love?’ he asked.

Rebecca looked at him. She felt unseasonably hot as he kept his eyes on her face.

‘I have enduring love for nothing other than my engraving,’ she said.

‘I thought so.’ Lucas nodded. ‘One cannot imagine a fever-stricken curate inspiring the sort of passion that features in your work, or indeed that we experienced last night.’

Rebecca’s eyes kindled. She had been afraid that he would raise the subject once more, and that her reactions would betray her. She snatched her hands away from his. ‘Pray make no mention of that, Lord Lucas. You are no gentleman even to think of it.’

Lucas stretched, reminding her all too vividly of the lithe body beneath the elegant clothes. ‘I fear that you cannot prevent me from doing that, Rebecca,’ he murmured. ‘Or, more accurately, you cannot prevent me from remembering every last moment of it.’

‘Then if you cannot control your own unruly thoughts, pray do not seek to provoke mine,’ Rebecca snapped. ‘I have no wish to remember.’

‘And I am pledged to remind you,’ Lucas said. ‘Such affinity as we achieved, Rebecca, happens rarely. It was the single most sweet and passionate experience of my entire life—’

‘Stop it!’ Rebecca said, the pleading note audible even to her own ears. ‘It was false pretences.’

‘It was no such thing.’ Lucas leaned forward. ‘I wanted you, Rebecca, and you wanted me, and if we are to marry—
when
we marry—I suspect that it will become even more pleasurable.’

Rebecca put her hands over her ears. She was scarlet, mortified to feel herself aroused by his words and by the heated memories of the previous night that flashed across her mind in a series of shockingly explicit pictures. How was it possible to dislike someone—to be so angry with them and feel so disillusioned—and yet long for their touch? Would she ever cure herself of the love she held for Lucas Kestrel? In the cold light of day, with the truth and its betrayals clear between them, she still loved him and it was hopeless to deny it.

She could feel her body warming, melting, the excitement growing in the pit of her stomach, and when Lucas gently touched a finger to her bottom lip she almost gasped aloud.

‘You see…’ his eyes were bright with desire ‘…you feel it too. Why deny it?’

He was leaning forward to kiss her and every instinct in Rebecca’s body urged her to meet his embrace and lose herself in that blissful, sensuous pleasure. When his lips were a bare inch from hers she finally found the strength to draw away.

‘I think not.’

She saw the admiration in Lucas’s eyes and knew also that he saw her resistance as a challenge. It seemed that to deny his advances only served to increase his determination and she could see no way past that. He smiled at her and she felt the warmth of it tingle through her entire body.

‘You are a very strong-willed woman, Rebecca Raleigh,’ he said. ‘It is one of the many things that I like about you.’

‘Whereas I sadly cannot compile a long list of things I like about you, my lord,’ Rebecca said untruthfully.

‘Not even my kisses?’

‘I can live without them.’

‘We shall have to change that,’ Lucas said, with a look that made her tremble.

Rebecca caught sight of Rachel and Cory Newlyn lurking in the window of the drawing room and studiously pretending that they were not watching them. She sighed.

‘What we have to change, my lord, is my ignorance of the Kestrel family and this business of espionage. I have much to learn and little time. Please enlighten me.’

But as Lucas complied and started to lay out the complex history of the Midwinter spies, Rebecca found that her most difficult task lay not in learning but in concentrating on the information he was imparting rather than on Lucas himself.

When Lucas came down for dinner that evening he found Rebecca already ensconced in the drawing room, dressed in a scandalously attractive gown of aquamarine crepe that seemed to hint at every curve of her figure without doing anything so vulgar as making them obvious. Making a mental note that Rachel Newlyn had done her job rather too well for his peace of mind, Lucas took a glass of wine and, rather than joining Rebecca, went across to the window alcove, the better to observe her. She was sitting with Stephen on one side of her and Rachel on the other and, for the first time since she had arrived in Grosvenor Square, she looked happy and at ease. Stephen, for his part, was clearly smitten. There was an eager light in his eyes and his ears were bright pink with excitement as he exerted himself to entertain Rebecca. Lucas was obliged to admit that Rebecca looked flatteringly pleased with his company, encouraging his conversation with exactly the right degree of friendliness without flirtation. It was very different from the wary dislike in which she held him. Lucas felt a violent surge of envy towards his younger brother, which both amazed and disconcerted him. It was not so much the fact that he had never been possessive of a woman before, for he had already established that Rebecca Raleigh could do things to him that no one else was capable of doing. What shocked him more was
that Stephen, whose innocuous admiration of Rebecca was so very innocent, should be the victim of his own indiscriminate jealousy.

‘Rachel has played Pygmalion very successfully, has she not?’ Cory Newlyn said in his ear. ‘Miss Raleigh looks every inch the ducal cousin. Not,’ Cory added thoughtfully, ‘that a great deal of work was required in the transformation. Miss Raleigh has a certain natural assurance.’

‘Yes,’ Lucas said. He had been giving some thought to Rebecca’s antecedents, based on the meagre information that she had given him and the poise she had unexpectedly shown. ‘Her father was in the army. I wonder…If he was a commissioned officer and the son of a gentleman, then there may once have been family money.’

‘She has not told you?’ Cory asked.

‘Miss Raleigh would not willingly tell me anything now,’ Lucas said, with an expressive lift of his brows.

Cory smiled broadly. ‘Ah. You have your work cut out, then.’

Lucas watched as Stephen offered Rebecca his arm into dinner and she laughingly accepted. She glanced across at him and their eyes met, the brimming laughter in hers dying away and being replaced by a chill edge. Had it only been that morning that he had arrogantly thought he did not wish for the responsibility of seeing love for him reflected
in Rebecca’s eyes? He would have given a great deal already to see that cold disdain replaced by something warmer. He thought he had not wanted her love. Now that he had her anger instead, he realised how empty it made him feel.

Dinner felt like a huge test. Rebecca had not experienced such a long and formal meal for years and was obliged to dredge up every memory of etiquette that she had ever possessed to get her through the meal without mishap. She knew that everyone was watching her; Justin and the Newlyns were assessing how well she could carry off the role of the duke’s cousin, whilst Lucas’s eyes were upon her frequently and he attended to her every need with disquieting promptitude. It put Rebecca on her mettle and she carried off the evening with the gracious authority of a duchess. Only Stephen’s shy admiration and Rachel’s friendship helped to ease the situation, and by the time that the ladies had withdrawn and tea had been taken, she was utterly exhausted. When she went up to bed she had no time to dwell on the extraordinary developments of the day, but, rather to her surprise, succumbed immediately to a deep and dreamless sleep.

Downstairs in the Duke of Kestrel’s study, Justin and Lucas were sharing a nightcap and a desultory game of chess.

‘I have not yet had chance to ask how you fared at the Archangel Club this morning,’ Lucas commented. ‘Any progress?’

Justin grimaced. ‘Very little. I had a glass of very fine port with that unpleasant fellow, Fremantle. He offered me membership of the Club, but declined to tell me the names of any other members. So we have no notion for whom Miss Raleigh’s parcel was destined.’ He frowned. ‘Miss Raleigh puzzles me, Lucas. She shows remarkable confidence for one not raised in this style of environment. And I have never yet met a woman who insisted on frugality in her dress! She is a rare enigma.’