Beware Of Virtuous Women

And never once in that month or in the two years since had he said more than “Good morning, Miss Becket,” or “Good evening, Miss Becket,” to Eleanor.

She cocked her head toward the doorway, listening as Jack explained more of his plan. “I’m going to get even closer to Phelps, who will bring me closer to the others, close enough that I can find ways to bring them down, each one of them. But I may need that initial entrée into a wider society, as well. I discussed this with your son-in-law as we crossed the Channel tonight, and he’s agreed to give me a letter of introduction to his friend Lady Beresford. I’m now a gentleman who has spent much of his time these past years on his plantations in the West Indies, happily visiting my homeland.”

“That should be enough to gain you at least a few invitations. Chance could help you there, too, except that he and Julia plan to remain at his estate with the children until the end of summer, now that he’s left the War Office,” Ainsley said. “All right. What else? You have the look of a man who isn’t quite finished saying what he needs to say.”

“No,” Jack said, “that’s about it. The rest is just details I’ll need to handle on my own.”

“Such as?”

“I’m thinking I may need a wife.”

Eleanor clapped her hands over her mouth, hoping no one had heard her short, startled gasp. Then, once back under control, she stepped closer, anxious to hear what else Jack might say.

“Wives go a long way in making a man appear respectable. It’s not enough that I play the rich, amiable fool. I believe I need a wife, as well. Most especially a wife who listens with both ears to other men’s wives. Hiring an actress to play the part is chancy, but also worth the risk, I believe. Phelps’s wife, for one, has a tongue that runs on wheels. Ask her the right questions, and I may get answers that will help me.”

“I can see you believe this Harris Phelps to be the weakest link,” Ainsley said. “Who are the other two?”

“Sir Gilbert Eccles is one. But the fellow who most interests me is the strongest of the lot. If he’s not the head of the Red Men, then he is very close. Rawley Maddox, Earl of Chelfham.”

Before Eleanor could clap her hands to her mouth again, someone did it for her, and she was pulled back against the tall, rangy body of Odette, the one woman in the Becket household who knew every secret, the voodoo priestess who had come to England with the Beckets so many years ago.

“Ears that listen at the wrong doors hear things they should not hear,” Odette whispered to Eleanor. “Come away, child.”

“But Odette—you heard? The Earl of Chelfham.”

“I heard. You want nothing to do with this man. You decided. We all decided.”

“I know,” Eleanor whispered fiercely as she looked toward the half-open door. “But this is…this is like fate. And I only want to see. Is it so wrong to want to see?”

“You want the man, ma petite,” Odette told her, stroking Eleanor’s hair with one long-fingered hand. “He’s the temptation you don’t want to resist.”

“You mean Jack?” Eleanor sighed, realizing protest was useless. “There’s no future in lying to you, is there, Odette? You see everything.”

The woman’s face lost its smile. “Not everything, little one. Never enough. But I do know your papa won’t approve.”

Eleanor wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. “I know. But this is my decision to make, Odette, my chance. If I don’t take my chance, I’ll have the rest of my life to regret it. Years and years to sit by myself with my embroidery, my paints, my music. Sit and watch everyone else live their lives, while mine just slowly, quietly runs out, like sand slipping through an hourglass. Don’t you see? I have to do this.”

“Born a maiden, not prepared to die a maiden. Yes, I see.”

“No,” Eleanor whispered fiercely, then sighed. “Yes, yes, that, too. And why not? I’ve tried being a paragon, and it’s lonely, Odette. It’s a lonely life. I want to hold more than other people’s children. That’s a dream, only a dream. But the earl, Odette? He’s real. How can I hear what I just heard, and walk away?”

Odette looked at her for a long time, and Eleanor returned that gaze as steadily as she could, until the older woman sighed, shook her head. “I’ll be ordering more candles, I suppose. A bonfire of candles burning for you Beckets.”

Eleanor impulsively hugged the woman, neither of them comfortable with such physical displays of affection. Yet Odette put her arms around Eleanor’s shoulders and held her tightly for a moment before pushing her away, using the pad of her thumb to trace the sign of the cross on Eleanor’s forehead. When it came to asking for divine help, Odette did not limit herself to calling only on the good loa.

“Thank you, Odette,” Eleanor said, then squared her slim shoulders and walked into her papa’s study to confront the man who had been coming to Becket Hall for over two years, and had never noticed her, never noticed the quiet one in the corner.

He’d notice her now….

“A shame Morgan is married,” Jacko was saying. “She’d be perfect, you know. Right, Cap’n? Fire and spirit, that’s Morgan. Give her a set of balls and—Eleanor.” Jacko looked to Ainsley, who had already gotten to his feet.

“Eleanor? I hadn’t expected you to be up and about this late at night. Is there something you wanted before you retire?” And that, she knew, was Ainsley’s way of reprimanding her. Two quiet, polite questions, both meant to send her scurrying off, because she most certainly wasn’t welcome here, at this moment.

She could hardly hear for the sound of her blood rushing in her ears, and she seemed only able to see Jack Eastwood, who had slowly unbent his length from one of the chairs and now stood towering over her.

“I…I’ll do it,” Eleanor said, still looking up at Jack, at the lean, handsome face she saw nearly every night in her dreams. The thick, sandy hair he wore just a little too long, with sideburns that reached to the bottom of his ears. The slashes around his wide mouth, that fuller lower lip. And his eyes. So green, shaded by low brows; so intense, yet so capable of looking at her and never seeing her.

He was a very…elemental man, a singular force of nature. Just his physical appearance was so in contrast to herself. Fire to her carefully cultivated ice.

Eleanor felt sure the man was a mass of barely leashed power behind a careful facade, that he had hidden some of himself from Ainsley, which was no mean feat. There was emotion there. He simply kept his feelings deep inside, and Eleanor didn’t know if she most longed to know why he hid those emotions, or if she only wanted him to look at her, see her, feel safe to relax his careful shields with her.

So that he might melt her ice and make her feel.

“Eleanor…” Ainsley said, stepping out from behind the desk. “I’ll assume you heard us, but—”

“I said, I’ll do it,” Eleanor interrupted, still looking at Jack Eastwood, still half lost in her daydream—she, who rarely dreamed, and only about Jack. “I’ll pretend to be your wife, Mr. Eastwood. Go to London. Be your ears and eyes around the women. You can’t buy loyalty, no matter how high the price. I’m the logical choice, the only logical, safe choice.”

Jack quickly looked to Ainsley as if for help, then back to Eleanor, shaking his head. “I don’t think your father approves, Miss Becket.”

Was the woman out of her mind? Look at her. A puff of wind would blow her away. All right, so there was a hint of determination about that slightly square jaw she held so high on the long, slender stalk of her neck. God, even that mass of dark hair seemed too heavy for her finely boned head. Yet she had the look of a lady, he’d give her that. Refined. Genteel. What was the term? Oh yes, a pocket Venus. A sculptor’s masterpiece, actually, if he was in a mood to be poetical, which he damn well was not.

The large-eyed, delicately constructed Eleanor Becket reminded Jack mostly of a fawn in the woods. Huge brown eyes, vulnerable eyes. But that limp? London society could be cruel, and they’d smell the wounded fawn and destroy her in an instant.

Would she stop staring at him! Stop making him feel so large, so clumsy, so very much the bumpkin. The skin tightened around his eyes, drew his brows down, and he stared at her, tried to stare through her. Scare her off, damn her. He had enough on his plate, he didn’t need any more complications. Certainly not one in skirts.

At last she looked away, to speak to her father. “Papa? You do see the rightness of this, don’t you? No one knows me, and when the need is past, I will come back here to live in quiet retirement, as we’ve always planned. Mr. Eastwood, should he choose to stay in society, can certainly find some explanation for my disappearance. A divorce? Death?”

Eleanor abruptly shut her mouth, knowing she had gone too far. Keep in the moment, that’s what she must do, not muddy up the waters with thoughts of consequences.

“We’ll speak later,” Ainsley said, taking hold of her shoulders, to turn her toward the door.

“No, Papa,” Eleanor said in her quiet way, holding her ground. “We’ll not speak at all, not about this decision, which is mine. Mr. Eastwood? When do you wish me to be ready to leave?”

Jacko yanked at his waistband with both hands, pulling the material up and over his generous belly. “Always said there was pure Toledo steel there, Cap’n, and you know it, too. She knows what’s for. Probably the smartest of the bunch, for all she’s a female. I say let her go.”

Jack narrowed his eyes once more as he looked to Ainsley, to the grinning Jacko and, lastly, back to Miss Eleanor Becket. Smartest of the bunch? Toledo steel? He doubted that. And yet her gaze was steady on him, and he recognized determination when he saw it. “Ainsley? We could leave tomorrow afternoon. Spend a night on the road while I send someone ahead to alert my staff in Portland Square. We’d be gone a fortnight at the most.”

It took everything she had, but Eleanor did not reach out to Ainsley when he retreated behind his desk, sat down once more, looking very weary, and older than he had only a few minutes earlier. “Tomorrow will be fine, Jack.”

Jack was ready to say something else, something on the order of a promise to take very good care of the man’s daughter. But Jacko slung a beefy arm across his shoulders and gave him a mighty squeeze against his hard body, and the breath was all but knocked from him.

Jacko’s voice boomed in his ear. “We trust you, see? That’s the only reason you’re getting within ten feet of our Eleanor here. We’re all friends here, too, aren’t we? Remember that, my fine young gentleman. You saved that fool Billy, and I’m grateful. So don’t harm so much as a single hair on our Eleanor’s head, because I don’t want to have to tie your guts in a bow around your neck.”

“No, Jacko, you don’t, and neither do I want you to have to try,” Jack said when the big man released him, feeling as if he’d just been mauled by a large bear. He shook back his shoulders, bowed to Eleanor. “Miss Becket, with your kind permission?”

She inclined her head slightly, then watched as Jack brushed past her and left the study before turning to her adoptive father. Waiting.

“Rawley Maddox, lifted up to be the Earl of Chelfham,” Ainsley said at last, the long, slender fingers of his right hand closing tightly around the glass paperweight. “Of all the names the man might have said…”

“Should we tell him, Cap’n? In case he has to watch out for her?”

“No,” Eleanor said quickly. “Tell him, and he won’t let me go. I have to go.”

Ainsley nodded his agreement, then added, “We don’t know if your memories are correct, Eleanor. We can suspect, but we don’t know.”

“No, Papa, but we’ve always wondered who I am…who I was. I know what we decided, what we both felt best, that the past is in the past and won’t change, not for any of us. But I can’t look away from this chance. I just can’t. I’ve lived too long with the questions, we both have. Why that ship? Why that one particular ship?”

“And you’ll take one look at the bugger and have all our answers? Look at him, and nothing more? Not then want to go from looking, to talking?” Jacko shook his head. “Maybe we’ve all been stuck here too long, if any of us believes that….”

CHAPTER TWO

JACK EASTWOOD SLOUCHED on the velvet squabs of the Becket traveling coach, his booted feet crossed at the ankle, his arms folded over his chest, his chin on that chest, the wide-brimmed black hat he favored pulled down to shade his closed eyes.

He sat in the rear-facing seat, as it was the duty of a gentleman to make any female in his company as comfortable as possible. That, and the fact that he didn’t much care for the idea of the two of them sitting side by side, mute, staring into space.

He was tired. Weary as hell, in both mind and body. He’d spent a long week skulking about on the shores of France, buying and beating information out of his contacts there, the men he had helped make rich—that they’d all helped make rich. Greasy, sleazy bastards who’d sell out their own mother for a two-penny profit on a few inches of hand-sewn lace, Lord bless them.

He’d picked up or outright purchased several interesting bits of information about Bonaparte during his trips across the Channel with the Black Ghost Gang these past two years. Information he’d passed on anonymously to the War Office. That eased his conscience some as he continued doing what he was doing.

Because he was not about to stop, walk away. He was still no closer to the leaders of the Red Men Gang, no closer than he’d been when he’d first carefully ingratiated himself to Ainsley Becket.

He allowed himself a small smile as he remembered how he’d done it. How he’d paid a Greek sailor to deliberately fuzz the cards, then quietly pointed out to Ainsley’s man, Billy, that he was being cheated. The more-than-three-parts-drunk Billy didn’t remember that part, only the tavernwide fight that followed, and his “rescue” by his new friend. Jack’s own wounds had come courtesy of the Greek, who hadn’t appreciated not being fully informed of Jack’s plan.

But Ainsley Becket wasn’t the leader of the Red Men Gang. Jack had been so sure, but he’d been proved wrong. Worse, he’d grown to like the man, respect him. Ainsley was a reluctant smuggler, his main concern the people of Romney Marsh, those who suffered because of the low prices for wool, for all their goods, people who didn’t smuggle for profit, but to exist. The Black Ghost Gang only rode to lend protection to those they clearly considered to be their own people.

Even more laudable, the man didn’t take a bent penny for his efforts, his family’s efforts. Not that the Crown wouldn’t hang them all just as high if they found out about them.

Jack had been worried as he’d traveled back to Romney Marsh on the Respite, concerned that Ainsley and that damnable Jacko would decide to call it a day, shut down the entire operation. But they hadn’t, had even offered up Ainsley’s strange daughter to him.

And what in bloody hell he was going to do with her was beyond him. She looked, and acted, as if she not only wouldn’t, but couldn’t say boo to a goose. Lord knew she’d said no more than a few dozen words to him since they’d left Becket Hall the previous afternoon. Putting her in a position where she’d be attempting to neatly ferret information out of the wives of his suspects was almost laughable, and could prove dangerous.

He should have said no. Thank you, very generous of you, but no.

But there had been something about the look in Eleanor Becket’s huge brown eyes, a hint of both desperation and determination that had affected him in some way he didn’t want to examine.

What a mess he’d gotten himself into. Out to catch a smuggler, he’d become one, at least peripherally. Oh, hell, he couldn’t persuade himself that he was only acting as an agent, a go-between. He was a smuggler. He’d be hanged as surely as the Beckets if he was caught.

What a far cry from the soldier he’d been in Spain…until word had come about his cousin’s disappearance. His cousin’s murder, most probably, and presumably at the hands of smugglers.

“Mr. Eastwood, are you asleep?”

Jack lifted his hat slightly and looked at Eleanor Becket out of one barely opened eye. “My apologies, miss.”

Eleanor watched as he unhurriedly sat up straight, as if he truly cared to listen to what she had to say—but not all that much. “Oh, no, apologies aren’t necessary. You’ve every right to be weary. That inn was abominable. Dirty, the food inferior, and with faintly damp sheets. I should have thought to bring linens from Becket Hall. I only thought…um, that is, we’re nearing London, I suppose, and perhaps you wish to discuss how we’re to…to go on?”

“You’re right, Miss Becket,” Jack said, removing his hat, running a hand through his hair as he wondered what Miss Eleanor Becket would think about sleeping on the ground, in the mud, while being pelted by a cold, hard rain. With his rifle in his arms, at the ready. Faintly damp sheets? Hell, he hadn’t noticed. “But the thing is, I really don’t know how we’re going to…go on, as you say.”

“Really?” Eleanor blinked twice, pushed away the thought that the man surely should have had some idea of what would come next, or else he shouldn’t have embarked on the plan in the first place.

But that was the practical part of her, the part that had, according to Morgan, sealed her fate as an old maid. Still, she was who she was, and what she was, and clearly someone had to take charge.

“Very well, Mr. Eastwood,” she said, unclasping her gloved hands that had been resting in her lap these past three hours, while inwardly she’d longed to use one of them to tip that ridiculous hat off the man’s head and tell him to sit up straight and stop acting like Spencer in one of his sulks. But she’d resisted, even lowered the shades and sat in the half-dark so that the sunlight would not disturb him.

“Very well what, Miss Becket?” Jack asked, wondering if he should pretend not to notice the twin spots of color that had appeared on her cheeks. The little fawn had a temper. How interesting.

Lifting her chin slightly, Eleanor began to count on her fingers as she rattled off her thoughts with the precision of a sergeant barking orders to his troops. “Number one, Mr. Eastwood, we are married, at least to the world, which includes your staff in Portland Square. Therefore, I am Mrs. Eastwood to the staff, and Eleanor to you. And you are Jack.”

“Not darling?” Jack asked, the devil rising in him now. “I had so hoped for a love match.”

Eleanor dropped her head slightly, lowered her gaze, then looked over at Jack through remarkably long, thick black lashes. “If I might continue?”

Well, that had put him in his place, hadn’t it? “My apologies…Eleanor.”

“Accepted. This is difficult for both of us, I’m sure,” Eleanor said, longing to kick herself for being so formal, for being such…such a stick! “If you prefer the diminutive, Elly will also do.”

“Very well. But you can still feel free to call me darling, Elly.”

Eleanor clasped her hands together and pressed her knuckles against her mouth, trying to keep her lips from turning up into a smile. “Now you’re being facetious.”

“I only sought to ease the tension between us. We’ll be fine, Elly, I promise. My staff are very incurious, and that’s by design.”

“Very well. I really don’t look for any problems there, as I’ve read extensively about the proper running of a large domicile, although I much prefer my experience at Becket Hall. I will, of course, need a maid assigned to me, if I’m to go out in public without you. I also read that somewhere—that ladies do not walk about unaccompanied.”

“You plan to do a lot of walking, Elly?”

He kept calling her Elly. She’d really rather he addressed her as Eleanor, that she had not suggested the diminutive. She was not, after all, his sister. “I would like to see some of the sights, if at all possible.”

“So I’m right in assuming this is your first trip to the city. You never had a Season when you were younger?”

“Is my advanced age so obvious?”

“Well, that was putting my foot in it, wasn’t it? Then you’re younger than your sister, the countess?”

“No, you were correct. I am the oldest, already into my majority. I preferred not to have a Season.”

“Because of your—damn. I can’t seem to say anything right, can I?”

“No, Mr.—Jack. We probably should get past this, as I’m cognizant of the fact that you know little about your new wife. I am one and twenty, I never had a Season, and I suffered an injury to my leg and foot as a child that has left me with a slight limp. It pains me in prolonged stretches of inclement weather or if I overexert myself, but is otherwise simply a nuisance. I’m neither ashamed nor proud of my…condition, and would prefer you ignore it rather than concern yourself. I am, I assure you, more than capable of the mission I’ve accepted.”

“All but bullied your way into taking. Made a case for yourself against your father’s wishes, actually, but who’s quibbling?” Jack commented, once more holding back a smile. “I simply want to know why you were so willing to volunteer.”

If being a Becket qualified Eleanor for anything, it was the acquired ability to lie smoothly and without suspicion. “I have been no farther than a few miles from Becket Hall since I arrived there as a child of six, which is when I…became a part of the family. I know you are aware that only Cassandra is Papa’s natural child, and that the rest of us came to him as orphans.”

“Yes, I do know that. It’s all very intriguing, actually.”

“Not really, not if you knew Papa well. At any rate, Morgan’s delightful stories of London have intrigued me, and I finally realized I should like to travel to the metropolis. Not for a Season, I don’t delude myself into aspirations at that level, but I couldn’t pass up this opportunity. Plus,” she ended, looking at him levelly, “I am as eager to rid us of our current problem as are you. It’s my family, after all, that could be put in danger.”

“I see,” Jack said, aware that the coach was now riding along well-cobbled streets, even without raising the shade to look out the window. He moved to the front-facing seat, sat beside her. “How do you plan to approach the ladies?”

Ah, good. They had left the subject of her life behind them. As for the rest, she’d simply ignore his proximity. She was almost used to being in his company. Almost. “I don’t. I plan to sit very quietly and listen to the ladies. I’ve learned that most people rush to fill a silence.”

Jack considered this, even as he became uncomfortably aware of the silence in the coach and, damn the woman, rushed to fill it. “I begin to feel that I am the amateur here, Elly. Does Ainsley know just how well you’ve been listening as you bend over your embroidery or paints, which is all I can picture of you when I think of my previous visits to Becket Hall?”

“I’m flattered that you are able to recall me at all,” Eleanor said, her voice steady even as he actually said what she’d always felt. That she was near to invisible to him, when he had become the center of her life.

“Ouch! I believe I can almost feel the flat of your hand on my cheek for that careless insult,” Jack said, then surprised himself by lifting her gloved hand to his lips. “I can promise you that I will do my best to make up for my sins by being an extremely devoted husband.”

Eleanor gently tugged her hand free, even as she continued to look at Jack, fought to control her breathing. “I doubt that most of the ton behave as Morgan and her Ethan do. Civility will be enough.”

He’d hurt her. He’d be damned if he knew how, but he’d definitely hurt her. And, if he had any sense at all, he’d drop this subject completely and get on with the business of how he would further infiltrate the trio of men he suspected of being in league with the Red Men Gang.

Only later, once he was alone, would there be time to think about this strange, fragile-looking young woman who, as Jacko had said, seemed to be formed of finest Toledo steel.