Darling Jack

“Mr. Hazard,” she said again, this time a little more breathlessly than before, and then she simply stood there, mute. What the devil did one say to a man with two women on his lap?

Suddenly the conductor was standing at her shoulder. “Well, I see you’ve found him. This little lady has been looking for you, Jack.”

“And I’ve been looking for you,” Hazard said to the conductor, ignoring Anna as he stood abruptly and the females went tumbling to the floor. “These women are pickpockets, Dooley.” He bent and slid a lithe, long-fingered hand into a green bodice, coming up with an elaborately engraved pocket watch. “This is mine. There’s more, if you’d care to search them. After that, I expect you’ll want to turn them over to the local constable.”

The women were struggling up from the floor now. “Bastard,” the green one hissed at Jack, while the blue one gave out a blistering string of curses meant for anyone and everyone within hearing distance.

“Here, now.” The conductor grabbed the women by their arms and hauled them to their feet. “You two have met your match with the Pinkertons, I’d say. With Mad Jack and his partner here.”

Jack lifted an eyebrow. “Partner?”

The conductor blinked, then glanced from Jack to Anna and back again. “That’s what she told me. She said she was your partner.”

“More like my life partner, wouldn’t you say, darling?” Jack purred as his arm reached out and reeled the unsuspecting Anna in. He grinned down at her—it was the same grin that only moments earlier had stolen her breath away—then angled his head toward the conductor. “She’s my wife, Dooley. Although the knot’s only been tied for…what, darling? Fifteen or sixteen hours?” He lowered his voice and closed one eye in a slow wink. “Haven’t yet had an opportunity to make her truly mine, Dooley, if you take my meaning.”

Anna caught it, and blushed. So did the woman in the green dress, who didn’t blush at all, but rather shook her fist at Jack and bellowed, “Yeah, and here’s hoping you never do, buddy! Her or anybody else, ever again.”

“That will be enough out of you, ladies.” The conductor tugged the two pickpockets toward the door. “Thanks, Jack,” he called. “And my best wishes. To you and the little missus.”

A moment passed—or crawled, it seemed to Anna—during which she cleaned her spectacles and stared at the floor while trying to recover enough breath and enough sense to speak coherently.

“Mrs. Matlin?”

His voice seemed to drift down and curl around her like warm woodsmoke. Anna didn’t dare look up. Her face was on fire as she stood in the crook of Johnathan Hazard’s arm, her hip quite plastered against his and the heat from his body seeping into her own. She couldn’t breathe, and she feared it had nothing to do with the stagnant air in the smoking car. It was him. How in blazes was she going to work with this man if she went to pieces each time she looked at him? Glue yourself together, girl.

“Yes?” she managed to squeak, putting her glasses back on and raising her eyes as far as the middle button on his perfectly pressed white shirt.

“How do you do?” he said softly. His faint accent greeted her ears like elegant music. “I’m Jack Hazard.”

“Yes. Yes, I know.”

He chuckled now, a rich bass rumbling deep in his throat. “How can you be so certain, Mrs. Mathn, unless you look at me?” Warm, gentle fingertips found her chin then, and coaxed it upward. “There. Now that’s better.”

His eyes took her in then—fairly consumed her before coming to rest on her mouth. He made a tiny clucking sound with his tongue. What that meant, Anna didn’t know. Nor could she fathom the meaning of his huskily breathed “Well, now.”

She did know what “All aboard” meant, though, and when the cry suddenly sounded, Anna stiffened and stepped back.

“I ought to be returning to my seat.”

“I’ll come with you.”

Oh, don’t. Anna was thinking that if she could just get away from him for a moment or two, she would be able to pull herself together. But as she cast about in her brain for an excuse to go alone, Johnathan Hazard’s warm hand folded over her elbow and he moved determinedly toward the door, and then, a moment later, those long, lithe fingers of his were fitting themselves to her rib cage as he lifted her down to the platform.

He held her then, just a fraction of a second too long, but long enough for Anna to recall how good it felt to be touched, to be in a man’s possessive grasp. It had been years. Since Billy had left her, the most Anna had done was shaken hands. And now she was shaken to the very marrow of her bones.

She was hardly aware that she was being propelled along the platform now, her feet somehow managing two steps for each of Hazard’s strides. Ahead, the big locomotive was building up a towering pillar of steam. On her right, the coaches were trembling and grinding at their couplings. Anna quickened her steps.

Nearly rushing now, she wasn’t sure whether her haste was to get on board the departing train or to escape this unsettling, disconcerting man. Both perhaps.

“Where the devil are you going?” Hazard stopped, bringing her to halt.

“To my seat.” Her words came out in a mortifying little wail.

“Up there?” He angled his head toward the second-class coach in which she had been riding earlier. The train gave a lurch as the wheels began turning. The couplings squealed, and the cars inched forward along the platform. Hazard’s grip tightened on her arm.

“Yes! Of course!” Anna shrieked over the long blast of the whistle.

“I think not, Mrs. Mathn.” He swung her around then, as if she were no more than a yarn doll, and propelled her toward the door she had just rushed past.

“But…but this is…this is first class, Mr. Hazard,” she stammered

“Indeed it is, Mrs. Mathn,” he said as he lifted her up onto the moving train, then followed her in one long and graceful leap. “Indeed it is.”

Anna immediately appreciated the additional padding in the seats in the first-class coach, though she wasn’t one who required such luxury, and she meant to let her partner know that as soon as she found her voice.

Johnathan Hazard had deposited her in the luxurious chair, then settled in quietly beside her while Anna occupied herself in arranging and rearranging her skirts and experimenting with her handbag in various locations on her lap. Anything not to look at him. She adjusted the seams on her gloves. They wavered in a film of tears.

You shouldn’t have come. You aren’t up to this. When Mr. Pinkerton singled you out, you should have run like the wind in the opposite direction. You aren’t special, Anna Matlin. You ’re just a silly fool.

“Comfortable?” That voice skimmed over her flesh like breeze-blown silk.

Anna glanced at Hazard’s kneecap, not daring to look higher. “Quite.” No. I want to go home.

A moment passed, and then that zephyr of a voice caressed her senses again. “Look at me, Mrs. Matlin.”

She thought she might die if she did, or at the very least explode or self-combust, but Anna forced herself to raise her eyes to his. And then something quite inexplicable happened. It was as if she were seeing him for the very first time.

The eyes into which she was gazing were the same mixture of blue and gray she recalled, but rather than metallic, the hue was closer to that of a November sky on a day that wants to rain. Faint shadows lodged beneath his dark lower lashes, like remnants of nightmares and too little sleep. The creases at the corners were more plentiful, and far deeper, than she had realized.

The mouth that she had forever pictured in a dazzling grin seemed different now. Its natural bent, Anna noticed suddenly was downward, and its foremost expression seemed to be one of sadness rather than mirth. And the complexion she had always thought so dark and dashing was merely the result of whiskers, beneath which his skin was actually quite pale and somehow tender. Scarred, too, she saw quite clearly now, perhaps by hands that trembled when he shaved.

Johnathan Hazard was a human being! He wasn’t a god, after all!

The notion struck her like a physical blow, a whack between the shoulder blades that put all her systems back into proper working order. The rough beating of her heart smoothed out. The pinch in her vocal cords let go, and her lungs expanded, filling with sweet air.

Johnathan Hazard was mortal! How incredible that she had never noticed that before!

“You look…” she whispered, barely aware that her thoughts had moved to her lips, “weary.” Worn out, she might have said. Used up.

And then, as suddenly as she had glimpsed it, that vulnerability disappeared. It was as if she had never witnessed it at all, and once more Anna found herself gazing at Adonis, at the handsome Hazard mask.

“I am, Mrs. Matlin,” he said as he snapped open the watch he had recovered from the pickpocket. “It’s seven or eight hours to Alton, and I intend to sleep for the major part of them.”

Anna blinked. He was going to sleep? Now? “But Mr. Pinkerton said you would inform me of the particulars in this case.”

By now he was already settled deep in his seat, with his long legs stretched out, his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes closed. He opened one to a mere slit as he said, “You’ll know everything you need to know.”

“When will that be, Mr. Hazard?”

“When you need to know it, Mrs. Matlin.”

“But…”

“Good night.”

Anna bit down on her lower lip. She was tempted to tell Johnathan Hazard that she wasn’t accustomed to being so curtly dismissed, but the truth was that she was accustomed to it. To being dismissed, if not outright ignored.

Funny, she thought as she turned her gaze toward the window. It had never bothered her before.

Chapter Four

That evening, in Alton, on the high green bluffs above the Mississippi River, Jack Hazard was doing his damnedest to ignore the mouse. Just as he had been ever since that moment in the smoking car, when he’d lifted her face for a casual inspection and felt an immediate and far-from-casual response. His body had tightened like a bowstring.

That hadn’t happened in months. Not since he’d quit drinking. His manhood, it seemed, greatly resented the loss of significant amounts of fuel. Either that, or his dissipations during the previous year had taken a final and rather fatal turn. It hadn’t mattered to him much. It still didn’t, although he had to admit the sensation had come with as much relief as sheer astonishment. And worry. He didn’t want or need this kind of distraction. Not now.

The most astonishing part of it was that it had been Mrs. Matlin—Mrs. Matlin!—who made him hard as a shaft of granite, when, for all her wily and well-practiced endeavors, Ada Campbell had failed. So had the two cool-handed pickpockets earlier on the train.

Jack was at a loss to understand it. All he had done was look at her there in the smoking car. At the blond curls that had escaped her neat chignon and ringed her head like a wild halo. At the flush of color on her cheeks. At her silly spectacles and then—dear Lord!—at her shockingly sensual mouth.

It must have been her mouth, he thought now as he sat safely alone in the dining room of the Riverton Hotel, and warned himself to avoid staring at her lush lips, the mere thought of which was once again having a significant effect upon his body. He shifted in his chair, glancing toward the door that opened onto the lobby. Where the devil was she? He had told her he’d wait for her downstairs while she freshened up. He glared at his watch. That had been nearly an hour ago.

The woman obviously wasn’t accustomed to traveling, Jack thought with some irritation. Earlier, upon disembarking, he had left her with two quarters meant as a tip for the porter, and when he returned from securing them a carriage, Mrs. Matlin had handed him one of the coins.

“What’s that?” he had asked, thoroughly confused.

“Half the gratuity,” she had answered in that small, breathy voice of hers. “I helped with our baggage, Mr. Hazard. I’m sure Mr. Pinkerton will greatly appreciate our keeping an eye on expenses.”

“Bloody hell!”

The mouse had flinched when he bellowed, but he hadn’t been able to contain it. Spending—flagrantly, outrageously, blindly—was part of his damn plan. It was absolutely necessary. And now it seemed he’d picked a bloody accountant—worse, a skinflint—to help him accomplish it.

God Almighty, he hoped the woman wasn’t upstairs pouting. She hadn’t said two words on the carriage ride from the depot to the hotel, and hardly more than that once they’d been shown to their room. Then she’d seemed undisguisedly relieved when he announced he’d wait downstairs. Which he’d been doing now for fifty-eight minutes.

He cast a murderous glance at the water goblet before him, and his fists clenched under the tablecloth. Sweet Lord in heaven, how he needed a drink.

“You need to get downstairs,” Anna urged her own reflection as she stood before the dresser, brushing her hair for the third—and last, she swore!—time. Not only was she famished, but she was also desperate to hear the details of this assignment.

In the mirror, the bed loomed up behind her with its two plump pillows. And though she kept looking—kept hoping, actually—the furniture refused to change, as did the mathematics. Two pillows. One bed.

She heard Mr. Pinkerton’s voice again. “Mr. Hazard needs a wife.” It wasn’t that she had misunderstood him. Rather, it seemed that in ail the excitement about the assignment, Anna hadn’t quite thought through all the ramifications of Mr. Pinkerton’s words.

As soon as they entered this hotel room, however, those ramifications had been obvious. Two pillows. One bed. She had felt the blood draining from her face. She was still a little pale, she thought, leaning closer to the mirror and examining her cheeks. Perhaps if she brushed her hair more vigorously it would bring some blood up to her scalp.

“Mr. Hazard needs a wife.” That was what the man had told her. He hadn’t said partner, although that was what Anna had deemed it. And she’d been so excited by the prospect of working with the legendary, glorious and godlike agent

Now, though, after that brief glimpse of his humanity this morning, Anna realized all too well that Johnathan Hazard was a man. He was flesh and blood and all that those two qualities implied.

She swallowed hard. What in the world was she going to do? She had been so grateful when Hazard offered to wait downstairs, because she had needed time to think. But that had been an hour ago, and thinking about her situation hadn’t improved it. It was tune to take action.

It was also time for supper, her rumbling stomach reminded her. Anna exchanged her hairbrush for her handbag, then gave the bed a last glance before walking out of the room and descending the stairs to the lobby.

Though a small hotel in a small town, the Riverton seemed intent upon rivaling New York or Boston in brocades and crystal and glinting brass. It was quite elegant. Probably the finest hotel Anna would ever see, she thought, so she tried to take in each detail.

There was a uniformed gentleman near the front desk who bowed when she approached. “Allow me to show you to the dining room, Mrs. Hazard.”

Anna nearly looked over her shoulder to see to whom he was speaking before she remembered that she was Mrs Hazard. Oh, Lord.

“I’ll find it myself if you’ll just point the way,” she told him, amazed and rather embarrassed by the attentions of this stranger.

He pointed a white-gloved hand toward a dining room that was far more elegant than any Anna had ever seen. She lingered a moment in the arched doorway, relieved to see that Johnathan Hazard sat alone in the room, and that his back was toward her, allowing her a little time to compose herself before confronting such a glamorous man in a setting that, while intimidating to her, seemed his natural habitat.

She drew in a wavering breath, found it laced with the fragrance from numerous bowls of roses on the candlelit tables, and steeled herself once more to demand to know the particulars of their assignment. Especially, and most critically, one particular room upstairs and one particular bed.

“Mr. Hazard. The particulars. I insist.”

At the sound of that small but determined voice, Jack nearly shot out of his chair. He was not one used to being taken unawares, and now the mouse had crept up behind him and shocked the devil out of him. He wondered vaguely if liquor and opium had combined to strip his senses permanently. Then he decided it was merely the invisible, wraithlike qualities of the mouse. Allan should have made use of her years ago. The woman could come and go like smoke.

He seated her, and beckoned to the waiter who had been casting him anxious glances from the kitchen door for the past fifteen minutes. The fellow fairly flew across the room now, a plate in each hand.

Mrs. Matlin lifted her chin the moment he arrived. “I’d like something simple, but substantial, if you please,” she said. “A chop would be fine.”

The waiter cleared his throat and sent a wide-eyed signal of distress to Jack.

“I’ve taken the liberty of ordering for you, dear,” A chop, for God’s sake. He nodded to the waiter, who slid the plates onto the table and then quickly retreated.

“Oh, my,” the mouse breathed as she gazed down at half a dozen succulent oysters, bedded in their shells upon shaved ice, and garnished with wedges of lemon and sprigs of parsley.

Good Lord, had the woman never seen an oyster, he wondered? She looked as if someone had just presented her with a dead cat for her supper. She nudged her silly spectacles up her nose and compressed her lips into a thin white line, contemplating the mollusks.

Of course, Jack thought suddenly, he wasn’t all that sorry to see that lush mouth pinch into something less desirable and distracting.

“Enjoy,” he told her coolly, proceeding to do just that with his own supper.

For a mouse, Jack thought as the meal progressed, her face had an infinite variety of expressions. First there was the near horror at the oysters, which she chewed doggedly after great deliberation over the trio of forks to the left of her plate. Then there was the consternation at the cream of celery soup, and the little twitch of delight when she picked up the soupspoon without hesitation. Next came what appeared to be relief at the sight of the trout and its accompaniment of spring potatoes. The woman was obviously hungry, and concerned, through the first two courses, that that was all the supper she was going to get.

The salad seemed to confuse her, and when the beef Wellington steamed her glasses, she began to look horror-stricken once again. The creme caramel pushed her over the edge.

“This is too much,” she said.

Jack put on his most benign smile as he signaled the waiter for coffee. “Excess is part of the plan, Mrs. Matlin It’s one of the particulars.” Having uttered the magic word, he watched her lean forward. Her eyes widened behind their perpetual windows of glass.

He kept her in suspense while the waiter poured their coffee. By the time Jack had gone through the ntual of lighting his cigar, she was nearly on the edge of her seat.

He aimed a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “What do you know about the Baroness Von Drosten?”

Anna smiled, more to herself than at her companion. Well, at last! She’d felt like a fool all during supper, maintaining a grim silence while trying to contend with slippery lemon wedges, fish bones, and a whole drawer’s worth of utensils. She might not be an experienced supper companion, she thought now, but she’d been an attentive file clerk for the past six years, and she knew more than a little about the infamous baroness.

“Chloe Von Drosten,” she said with some authority, “is believed to be a jewel thief.”

“She is a damn jewel thief,” Hazard shot back.

“Ah, but no one has proven that yet. Even you, Mr. Hazard, were unsuccessful last year in your attempt to recover Mrs. Herrington Sloan’s missing emerald necklace.”

“It isn’t missing,” he said flatly. “I know exactly where it is.”

Anna shook her head. That couldn’t be right. If the necklace had been found, the case would have been closed and she would have moved the file to the Inactive drawer. She knew for a fact that she hadn’t transferred the file. “The case is still active, Mr. Hazard,” she insisted. “No one has recovered that necklace.”

His fingers tightened on the handle of his cup. “No one ever will.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I didn’t say the necklace had been recovered, Mrs. Mathn. I said I know where it is. And I also know why it will never be recovered now.” His gaze drifted to Anna’s full cup. “Would you care for a brandy with your coffee?”

He was lifting a hand to signal the waiter when Anna snapped, “No. I’d care for an explanation. I know what’s in the files at the Pinkerton Agency. Mrs. Sloan’s necklace is still missing. How can you claim to know its whereabouts?”

“Chloe told me.”

Anna laughed. “Well, she may have confessed and disclosed its location, Mr. Hazard, but the necklace is still missing.”

“Technically,” he said very coolly, “it isn’t even missing. The fact is, Mrs. Matlin, it’s being worn by the queen of England.” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “And worn quite frequently, as I understand.”

Now Anna gave her glasses a little nudge up the bridge of her nose, as if that would help her see the situation more clearly. The man had lost her somewhere. If…

“She got away with it, you see.”

Anna blinked. “Victoria?”

“Chloe. She presented the necklace to Her Majesty, not merely as a gift from herself, but as a token of esteem from the American government.” His mouth twisted in a wry smile, and then he added, “Victoria was quite touched, I hear.”

“But…” Suddenly Anna understood how something could be at once lost and found. She pictured the square-cut emeralds circling the little queen’s neck. Her royal neck! “No one would dare demand them back,” she breathed.

Hazard’s smile twisted tighter. “Exactly.” He leaned forward now, and when he spoke again, his voice was low and harsh. “Rather brilliant of the baroness, wouldn’t you say? She earned not only the queen’s favor, but her own guarantee of innocence, as well. Victoria cannot be wearing a stolen necklace, therefore there was no crime.”

“More diabolical than brilliant,” Anna muttered. She was thinking of her orderly files now, and she felt some irritation that one would be erroneously placed. Forever. When crimes were solved, the files moved from Active to Inactive. It was a part of her job that she enjoyed. Moving those files gave her a sense of participating in justice, somehow. But now…

Now she became doubly irritated as she realized that Johnathan Hazard had just spent a good ten or fifteen minutes talking about a past assignment, rather than their current one. Her voice was uncharacteristically brittle when she asked him, “Just what does the baroness have to do with anything?”

“Everything.”

The word was simple enough, yet it had come from Hazard’s lips like a curse. For a second, his face seemed less like an Apollo’s than that of an avenging angel. Then, as quickly as it had appeared, the fury vanished. His smile turned affable. One dark eyebrow arched. “What do you know about horse racing, Mrs. Matlin?”

“Other than recognizing a horse when I see one, and knowing what a race is, Mr. Hazard, absolutely nothing,” she snapped. “Does this have anything to do with our assignment?”

He didn’t answer, but picked up his cup and drained it of coffee. Then he signaled the waiter for more. Anna’s cup was still full. If she had even a drop of it, she thought, she’d be awake until dawn, lying in bed, staring at the—Suddenly she pictured that bed again, and her gaze flicked to the man across the table.