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Elliot felt the breath he had knocked out of her caress his cheek before he quickly covered her mouth with his hand. ‘Don’t be afraid, I mean you no harm, I promise.’
Delicate eyebrows lifted in disbelief. Heavy lids over eyes which were—what colour? Brown? He could not tell in this light. Fair brows. Her hands flailed at his sides. Her body was soft, yielding. He was lying on top of her—quite improperly, he supposed. At the same moment he realised that it was also quite delightful. She seemed to be wearing nothing but a shift beneath her cloak. He could feel the rise and fall of her breasts against his chest. Her mouth was warm against his palm. For a second or two he lay there, caught up in the unexpected pleasure of her physical proximity before several things occurred to him at once.
She was most likely the Countess of Kinsail.
She would definitely raise the alarm as soon as she possibly could.
If he was caught he would go to the gallows.
He had to leave. Now!
In one swift movement Elliot rolled on to his feet, pulling the distracting female with him. Still with one hand covering her mouth, he put his other around her waist. A slim waist. And she was tall, too, for a lady. The Earl was a fortunate man, damn him. ‘If I take my hand away, do you promise not to scream?’ he asked, keeping his voice low.
A lift of those expressive brows and an indignant look which could mean no or it could mean yes.
Elliot decided to take the risk. ‘Did I hurt you? I wasn’t expecting you to be there—as you can imagine,’ he said.
‘That makes two of us.’
Her voice was husky—but then it would be, for he’d just knocked the wind out of her. She had an unusual face, an interesting face, which was much better than beautiful. A full mouth with rather a cynical twist to it. No tears nor any sign of hysterics, and her expression was rather haughty, with a surprising trace of amusement.
Elliot felt the answering tug of his own smile. ‘Delightful as it was—for me, at least—I did not intend to use you to soften my landing.’
‘I am happy to have been of value.’ Deborah looked at him through dazed eyes. ‘What on earth were you doing?’ she asked, realising as she did so that it was an amazingly foolish question.
But he didn’t look like a common housebreaker—not that she knew what housebreakers looked like! She should surely be screaming out for help. Of a certain she should be afraid, for she held his fate in her hands and he must know it, yet she felt none of those things. She felt—a dreadful, shocking realisation, but true—she felt intrigued. And unsettled. The weight of him on top of her. The solid-packed muscle of his extremely male body. The touch of his hand on her mouth.
‘What were you doing, halfway up the wall of the Manor?’
Elliot grinned. ‘Exactly what you suspect I was doing, I’m afraid, Lady Kinsail.’
Now was definitely the time to cry for help, yet Deborah did not. ‘You know me?’
‘I know of you.’
‘Oh.’ Conscious of her curl papers and her nightshift, she struggled to pull her mantle back around her. ‘I didn’t dress for—I did not expect to meet anyone,’ she said, feeling herself flushing, trusting to the gloom that it would go undetected.
‘Nor did I.’
The housebreaker chuckled. A low, husky growl of a laugh, distinctively male, it sent shivers over Deborah’s skin. He had a striking face, strong-featured, with heavy brows, deep grooves running down the side of his mouth, and eyes which looked as if they had witnessed too much. A fierce face with a discernible undercurrent of danger. Yet those eyes suggested compassion and even more improbably, given the circumstances, integrity. A memorable face, indeed, and an extremely attractive one. She met his gaze and for a few seconds the air seemed to still between them. A connection, a frisson, something she could not name, sparked.
‘I’m sorry to have alarmed you,’ he said finally, ‘but if you must blame anyone for my presence here you must blame your husband.’
Deborah began to wonder if perhaps she was dreaming. ‘But Jeremy—my husband—is …’
‘A m ‘But Jeremy—my husband—with a twisted smile. ‘I must thank you for not calling out. I am in your debt.’ He knew he should not, but he could not resist. ‘Let me demonstrate my gratitude.’ When he pulled her to him she did not resist. The touch of her lips on his was warm, sweet and all too fleeting. He released her extremely reluctantly. ‘I must go,’ he said roughly. ‘And you, madam, must do as you see fit.’
‘Wait a minute. I don’t even know what your name is.’
The housebreaker laughed again. ‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.’
He was already fleeing across the lawn. Staring after him in utter bemusement, Deborah remained stock still, watching the shadowy figure melt into the darkness. The stable clock chimed the hour. Above her, she could hear the sharper chimes of another clock. Looking up, she saw the window of the long drawing room was wide open. The French clock—it must be that she could hear. She touched her fingers to her mouth where the housebreaker had kissed her. Kissed her! A common thief!
No. Housebreaker he might be, but he was most certainly not common. His voice was that of an educated man. He had an air about him of someone used to command. The greatcoat which enveloped him was of fine wool. And, now she thought about it, his boots were of an excellent cut and highly polished. He smelled of clean linen and fresh air and only very slightly of sweat and leather and horse. She supposed he must have tied his steed up somewhere close by. She listened intently, but could hear nothing save the rustle of the breeze as it tugged at the bare branches of the trees.
She should wake the Earl. At the very least she should alert the servants. Deborah frowned. Whatever the man had stolen must have been concealed about his person, for he’d carried no sackfull of loot. Papers, perhaps? Despite the arduous task of setting Jeremy’s estates to rights—a task which his cousin never ceased to complain about—Lord Kinsail continued to play an active role in the government. Was the housebreaker a spy? That certainly made more sense, though the war was so long over there was surely no need for such subterfuge. And he had neither looked nor sounded like a traitor.
Deborah’s laugh, quickly stifled, had an unwelcome note of hysteria in it. She had no more idea of what a spy should look like than a housebreaker.
None of it made sense. It occurred to her rather belatedly that the thing which Lord Kinsail would consider made least sense of all was her own presence in the grounds, in her night clothes, at four in the morning. He’d want to know why she’d made no attempt to raise the alarm immediately—what could she say when she didn’t know the answer to that question herself? It wasn’t as if the thief had threatened her. She hadn’t felt scared, exactly, more … what?
The thought of having to suffer Jacob’s inquisition made up her mind. She would not give him any more reason to treat her with disdain. In fact, Deborah decided, making her way hurriedly to the side door, the time had come to break free from Lord Kinsail and this blighted place. Small consolation—very small—but her failure to provide Jeremy with an heir had one advantage. She had no real obligation to maintain close ties with his family. Lord Kinsail might grudge her every penny of the miserly widow’s portion which he doled out irregularly, and only after several reminders, but she doubted he could ultimately refuse to pay it. In any case, she was determined to find a way to survive without it. This would be her last visit to Kinsail Manor and damn the consequences!
Feeling decidedly better, Deborah fastened the door carefully behind her and fled up the stairs to her chamber on the third floor. Whatever it was the bold housebreaker had taken would be discovered in the morning. He was already gone, and her rousing the household now would not bring him back.
She yawned heavily as she discarded her mantle and unlaced her muddy boots, pushing them to the back of the cupboard out of sight of the inquisitive maid. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she made a face. Despite her hair curlers, that look on the housebreaker’s face just before he kissed her had been unmistakable. Not that she was by any stretch of the imagination an expert, but she was sure, none the less. He had wanted her.
Heat washed over her. What would it be like to submit to someone like that? Deborah pulled the bedclothes up around her, too beguiled by this thought to notice the cold. Desire. She wrapped her arms around herself, closed her eyes and recalled the velvet touch of his lips on hers. Beneath her palms her nipples budded. Behind her lids wanting flared the colour of crimson. Desire. Sharpened by its very illicitness. Desire of the dark, venal kind which roused Bella Donna, the heroine of the novels which were currently scandalising the ton, to shocking heights of passion. Desire such as she had never shared.
Desire. Deborah slipped down into the welcoming dark embrace of the bed, her hands slipping and sliding down over the cotton of her nightdress. And down. Closing her eyes tighter, she abandoned herself to the imagined caresses of a virile and skilled lover.
She awoke much later in the morning than usual, dragging herself up from the depths of slumber to the hue and cry of a household in a state of pandemonium. Slipping into a thick kerseymere gown, for Kinsail Manor, owing to a combination of its age and its current incumbent’s frugality, was an uncomfortably draughty place, Deborah sat at her mirror to take out her curl papers. Her straitened circumstances meant she could not afford the luxury of a personal maid, and, though Lady Kinsail had begged her to make use of her own dear Dorcas, Her Ladyship’s ‘own dear Dorcas’ was in fact an exceedingly dour creature, who believed a widow’s hair should be confined under a cap and kept there with a battalion of hairpins—the sharper the better.
Since she had perforce been attending to her own toilette for most of her adult life, Deborah made short work of gathering her long flaxen tresses high on her head and arranging her curls in a cluster over one shoulder. Her gown she had fashioned herself, too, in plain blue, with not a trace of the French work, furbelows and frills so beloved of Ackerman’s Repository.
She had resented her blacks when Jeremy died, resented the way they defined her as his relic, but it had taken her a full six months after the designated year of mourning to cast them off all the same, for she had come to appreciate the anonymity they granted her. It was then she had discovered that she lacked any identity at all to fill the gap. Like the anonymous gowns of blues and browns and greys she now wore, neither fashionable nor utterly dowdy, she felt herself indeterminate, somewhat undefined. Like an abandoned canvas, half painted.
An urgent rap at the door interrupted this chastening thought. ‘Please, Your Ladyship, but His Lordship asks you to join him in the long drawing room urgently.’ The housemaid, still clad in the brown sack apron she wore to lay the morning fires, was fairly bursting with the important news she had to impart. ‘We’ve all to assemble there,’ she informed Deborah as she trotted along the narrow corridor which connected the oldest—and dampest and coldest—wing of Kinsail Manor with the main body of the house, built by Jeremy’s great-grandfather. ‘The master wants to know if anyone heard or saw him.’
‘Heard who?’ Deborah asked, knowing full well that the girl could only mean the housebreaker.
She should have woken Jacob, she knew she should have, but she could not find it in her to regret this oversight. If she was honest, there was a bit of her—a tiny, malicious, nothing-to-be-proud-of bit of her—which was actually quite glad. Or, if not glad, at least indifferent. Jacob had taken everything from her that Jeremy had not already extorted. Whatever precious thing had been stolen, she could not care a jot. What was more, she decided on the spur of the moment, she was going to continue to keep her mouth firmly shut. She would not admit to wandering the grounds. She would not provoke one of his sermons. She would not!
‘I’m sorry—what were you saying?’ Deborah realised the maid had been talking to her while her thoughts had been occupied elsewhere. They were outside the drawing room now. The door stood wide open, revealing the gathered ranks of Lord Kinsail’s household. At the head of the room, under his own portrait, stood the man himself.
‘Best to go in, My Lady,’ the maid whispered. ‘We’re last to arrive.’ She scuttled over to join the rest of the maidservants, who were clustered like a nervy flock of sheep around the housekeeper. Mrs Chambers, a relic from Deborah’s days as chatelaine, cast her a disapproving look.
Inured to such treatment, Deborah made her way to the top of the room to join the Earl. The frame of the portrait swung open on its hinge to reveal the safe. Her lips twisted into a bitter smile. Jeremy had shown it to her when they were first married, though in those days it had been concealed behind a portrait of his father.
‘Empty coffers,’ Jeremy had said to her. ‘Though not for much longer—thanks to you, my darling wife.’
The revelation that the terms of her inheritance would force him to wait several years for her to attain her majority and gain the larger part of her fortune had not been the beginning of his change in attitude towards her, but after that he’d ceased to pretend.
She should never have married him. But there was no time for her to become entangled in that morass yet again. Lady Kinsail, even more palely loitering than ever, was seated on a gilt chair almost as frail as herself. Deborah went to her side.
‘Cousin Margaret,’ she said, squeezing Her Ladyship’s cold hand between her own. Though she persistently refused to grant Lord Kinsail the appellation of cousin, she had conceded it to his wife. They were not related, but it rescued them from the hideous social quagmire of having two Countesses of Kinsail in the one household. ‘What, pray, has occurred?’
‘Oh, Cousin Deborah, such a dreadful thing.’ Lady Kinsail’s voice was, like her appearance, wraith-like. ‘A common housebreaker—’
‘No common housebreaker,’ her lord interrupted. Under normal circumstances Lord Kinsail’s complexion and his temper had a tendency towards the choleric. This morning he resembled an over-ripe tomato. ‘I don’t know what time you call this, Cousin,’ he fumed.
‘A quarter after nine, if the clock is to be trusted,’ Deborah replied, making a point of arranging her own chair by his wife and shaking out her skirts as she sat down.
‘Of course it’s to be trusted. It’s Louis Quatorze! Say what you like about the French, but they know how to turn out a timepiece,’ Lord Kinsail said testily. ‘I have it upon good authority that that clock was originally made for the Duc d’Orleans himself.’
‘A pity, then,’ Deborah said tightly, ‘that such an heirloom is no longer in his family. I abhor things being taken from their rightful owners.’
Lord Kinsail was pompous, parsimonious, and so puffed-up with his own conceit that it was a constant surprise to Deborah that he did not explode with a loud pop. But he was no fool.
He narrowed his eyes. ‘If you had served my cousin better as a wife, then the estates which you allowed him to bring to ruin upon that ill-fated marriage of yours would not now be my responsibility, but your son’s. If you had served my cousin better as a wife, Cousin Deborah, I have no doubt that he would not have felt the need to seek consolation in the gaming houses of St James’s, thus ensuring that his successor had hardly a pair of brass farthings to rub together.’
Deborah flinched, annoyed at having exposed herself for, cruel as the remarks were, there was a deep-rooted part of her, quite resistant to all her attempts to eradicate it, which believed them to be true. She had made Jeremy about as bad a wife as it was possible to make. Which did not, however, mean that she had to accept Jacob’s condemnation—she was more than capable of condemning herself. And she was damned if she was going to apologise for her remark about the clock!
‘Don’t let me hold you back any further, Jacob,’ she said with a prim smile.
Lord Kinsail glowered, making a point of turning his back on her and clearing his throat noisily before addressing the staff. ‘As you know by now, we have suffered a break-in at Kinsail Manor,’ he said. ‘A most valuable item has been taken from this safe. A safe which, I might add, has one of the most complex of new locks. This was no ordinary robbery. The brazen rogue, a menace to polite society and a plague upon those better off than himself, was no ordinary thief.’
With a flourish, His Lordship produced an object and waved it theatrically in front of his audience. There was a gasp of surprise. Several of the male servants muttered under their breath with relief, for now there could be no question of blame attaching itself to them.
At first Deborah failed to understand the import of the item. A feather. But it was a most distinctive feather—long with a blue-and-green eye. A peacock feather. The man who had dropped from the sky on top of her last night must have been the notorious Peacock!
Good grief! She had encountered the Peacock—or, more accurately, the Peacock had encountered her! Deborah listened with half an ear to Jacob’s diatribe against the man’s crimes, barely able to assimilate the fact. She watched without surprise as in turn every one of the servants denied hearing or seeing anything out of the ordinary, just as the servants in every one of the Peacock’s other scenes of crime had done. No one had ever disturbed him in the act. No one had ever caught so much as a fleeting glance of him leaving. Private investigators, Bow Street Runners—all were completely flummoxed by him. He came and went like a cat in the night. For nigh on two years now, the Peacock had eluded all attempts to capture him. No lock was too complex for the man, no house too secure.
With the room finally empty of staff, Lord Kinsail turned his attentions back to Deborah. ‘And you?’ he demanded. ‘Did you see anything of the rogue?’
She felt herself flushing. Though God knew she’d had opportunity aplenty, she had never grown accustomed to prevarication. ‘Why would I have seen anything?’
‘I know all about your midnight rambles,’ Lord Kinsail said, making her start. ‘Aye, and well might you look guilty. I am not the fool you take me for, Cousin Deborah.’ He permitted himself a small smile before continuing. ‘My head groom has seen you wandering about the park like a ghost.’
‘I have never taken you for a fool, Jacob,’ Deborah replied, ‘merely as unfeeling. I take the air at night because I have difficulty sleeping in this house.’
‘Conscience keeps you awake, no doubt.’
‘Memories.’
‘Spectres, more like,’ Lord Kinsail replied darkly. ‘You have not answered my question.’
Deborah bit her lip. She ought to tell him, but she simply could not bring herself to. All her pent-up resentment at his quite unjustified and utterly biased opinion of her, combined with her anger at herself for lacking the willpower to enlighten his ignorance, served to engender a gust of rebelliousness. ‘I saw nothing at all.’
‘You are positive?’
‘Quite. You have not said what was stolen, Jacob.’
‘An item of considerable value.’
Alerted by his decidedly cagey look, Deborah raised an enquiring brow. ‘Why so close-mouthed? Was it government papers? Goodness, Jacob,’ she said in mock horror, ‘don’t tell me you have you lost some important state secret?’
‘The item stolen was of a personal nature. A recent acquisition. I do not care to elaborate,’ Lord Kinsail blustered.
‘You will have to disclose it to the Bow Street Runners.’
‘I intend to have the matter investigated privately. I have no desire at all to have the Kinsail name splashed across the scandal sheets.’
Deborah was intrigued. Jacob was looking acutely uncomfortable. A glance at Margaret told her that Her Ladyship was as much in the dark as she was. She was tempted—extremely tempted—to probe, but her instinct for caution kept her silent. That and the fact that she doubted she would be able to sustain her lie if interrogated further.
The sensible thing to do would be to make good her escape while Jacob was distracted, and Deborah had learned that doing the sensible thing was most often the best.
Getting to her feet, she addressed herself to Lady Kinsail. ‘Such a shocking thing to have happened, Cousin Margaret, you must be quite overset and wishing to take to your bed. In the circumstances, I could not bear to be a further burden to you. I think it best that I curtail my visit. I will leave this morning, as soon as it can be arranged.’
‘Oh, but Cousin Deborah, there is no need—’
Lord Kinsail interrupted his wife. ‘I trust you are not expecting me to foot the bill if you decide to travel post?’
‘I shall go on the afternoon stage,’ Deborah replied coldly. ‘If you can but extend your generosity to providing me with transport to the coaching inn …’
‘Cousin Deborah, really, there is no need …’ Lady Kinsail said, sounding just a little desperate.
‘If that is what Cousin Deborah wants, my dear, then we shall not dissuade her. I shall order the gig.’ Lord Kinsail tugged the bell. ‘In one hour. I trust you will not keep my horses waiting?’
‘I shall make my farewells now to ensure that I do not,’ Deborah replied, trying to hide her relief. ‘Cousin Margaret.’ She pressed Her Ladyship’s hand. ‘Jacob.’ She dropped the most marginal of curtsies. ‘I wish you luck with recovering your property. Thank you for your hospitality. I must make haste now if I am to complete my packing in time. Goodbye.’
‘Until next year,’ Lady Kinsail said faintly.
Deborah paused on the brink of gainsaying her, but once again caution intervened. If there was one thing the Earl loathed more than having his cousin’s widow as a house guest, she suspected it would be having his cousin’s widow turn down his hospitality.
‘So much can happen in a year,’ she said enigmatically, and left, closing the door of the long drawing room behind her for what was, she fervently hoped, the very last time.
Chapter Two
London, three weeks later
Elliot stifled a yawn and fished in his waistcoat pocket for his watch. Five minutes off two in the morning and his friend Cunningham was showing no inclination to leave. The atmosphere in the gambling salon of Brooks’s was one of intense concentration disturbed only by the chink of coin, the glug of a decanter emptying, the snap of cards and soft murmurings as the stakes were raised. The gamblers were much too hardened to betray anything so crass as emotion as the stack of guineas and promissory notes shifted across the baize from one punter to another.
Some of the cardplayers wore hats to shield their faces. Others tucked the ruffles of their shirt sleeves up under leather cuffs. Elliot, who had been used to gambling with his life for far higher stakes, could not help finding the whole scene slightly risible. He had placed a few desultory bets at faro earlier, more for form’s sake than anything, but the last hour and a half had been spent as a spectator.
Restlessly pacing the long room, with its ornately corniced concave ceiling from which a heavy chandelier hung, the candles in it guttering, he called to mind the many similar reception rooms across Europe he had visited. Cards were not the game which had attracted him to such places. In the midst of war, cards were a means for his men to while away the long hours between battles. Civilians didn’t understand the boredom of war any more than they understood its visceral thrill. He had no idea why Cunningham could ever have thought he would be amused by a night such as the one they had just spent. Carousing and gambling left Elliot cold. No doubt when Cunningham rose from the tables he would be expecting to indulge in that third most gentlemanly pursuit, whoring—another pastime which held no interest for Elliot. He was a gentleman now, perforce, but he was, first and foremost his own man, and always had been—even in the confines of his uniform. Elliot had had enough.