Lords of Notoriety: The Ruthless Lord Rule / The Toplofty Lord Thorpe

Mary rose and walked around the table to place a commiserating arm around the young man’s shoulders. “Ah, poor Dexter. What a beast I am for teasing you when you’re so obviously in torment. Of course Rachel and I will help you however we can. Why don’t we adjourn to the morning room and you can tell me all about your Kitty Toland. Such a pretty name, Kitty.”

“Ac-tu-ally, it’s Catherine.” Dexter informed her as they walked arm in arm down the corridor to the morning room. Once there he proceeded to tell her more—definitely more than Mary decided she ac-tu-ally cared to know—about this paragon of a female who had snared his bachelor heart.

Beside her youth, Kitty was the very worst sort of female for Dexter to have come across, for she was also a Total Innocent. The young Lothario was well and truly smitten, and had been from the moment his roving eye first encountered the shy, blond beauty from Cornwall.

“She doesn’t know anything, Mary, nothing at all. It’s like setting a baby loose in a stable full of stallions to see her surrounded by all the dandies and rakes who’d like nothing more than to ruin her. She has little fortune, you understand, and for some reason that seems to make her fair game for all the randy—er—well, never mind,” he ended hurriedly.

“That’s all right, Dex, I believe I understand,” Mary said, easing his discomfiture. “Rachel, hinting broadly of my vast dowry—compliments of Sir Henry—scotched any such ideas by some of the more pressing of my admirers early in the Season. Now I am only beset by penniless fortune hunters, but then no one can have every little wrinkle smoothed out for them, can they?”

“Jerome is trying so very hard, too,” Dexter pressed on, clearly thinking in one track and not even bothering to comment on Mary’s problem. “He’s her guardian, you know, the parents having died of some disease caught from putrid drains, or something. They’re shockingly to let, which is why Jerome’s run of luck at one of the private gaming hells was so fortuitous. Instead of then gambling or wenching—sorry, Mary—it all away, he hied himself straight to Cornwall to bring Kitty to town and launch her so that she could find herself a proper husband.” He turned to look at Mary intently. “It would be a bleeding waste to give her to some bumpkin farmer, really it would. She’s a jewel—a diamond of the first water—truly she is. I can only marvel that she likes me even a little bit.”

“I must meet this paragon,” Mary mused, almost to herself.

“Oh! How happy I am that you say so,” Dexter fairly shouted, hopping to his feet. “I’ll bring her round this afternoon so that the three of you can get acquainted. You’ll love her,” he promised, already sprinting toward the hallway, “you’ll absolutely adore her!”

Mary laid her head against the back of the chair, smiling broadly. “Absolutely, you lovesick looby.” She chuckled happily before rising to seek out Rachel and tell her of their expected visitor. “After all, why should Jennie and Lucy have all the fun?”

WHILE MARY AND RACHEL were giggling like schoolgirls over the thought of a smitten Dexter waxing poetic over a beautiful child from the wilds of Cornwall, Tristan Rule was just rising from the bed he had lain in only a few, frustrating hours. What a profitless evening his had been—chasing through the slimy gutters and over the sooty rooftops of the worst section of London in pursuit of some crafty jackanapes who had had the temerity to elude him in the end.

Had Mary been passing instructions to the man—or had the man been collecting payment in exchange for his silence? Was Mary a conspirator, or the victim of blackmail? Oh, his head ached from all the questions that were rattling around inside, none of them with easy answers. If only Sir Henry were willing to take him into his confidence. Already he had wasted precious time believing Mary to be a French spy, giving the true conspirator free rein to continue with his plans.

Now that he knew she was not involved with the plan to free Napoleon, Rule felt real relief, but discovering that Mary Lawrence didn’t exist until ten years ago had opened up an entirely new, different, kettle of fish that didn’t smell that much better than the last one. There was something particularly distasteful, even dangerous, about Mary’s past, something so volatile that Sir Henry, who had never hidden anything from Tristan before, was insisting on playing all his cards very close to his chest.

If someone besides Tristan, someone with either blackmail or treason on his mind, discovered even the little bit that Tristan had unearthed on his quick journey into Sussex, there was no end to the amount of trouble Mary Lawrence’s presence in Sir Henry’s house could mean for England.

Throwing back the tangled covers, Rule leaped to his feet and stomped over to the washstand to pour a pitcher of cold water over his tousled black locks. Rising from his punishment sputtering and shivering, shaking his head like a dog coming out of an icy stream, he rang for his man and then grabbed up his robe, tying the silken sash around his waist with a vengeance. “Damn that green-eyed minx for not trusting me!” he swore to the room at large, flinging himself into a chair, his black stare serving to unnerve his valet more than a little bit as that man entered the room, a steaming cup of coffee balanced before him on a silver tray.

“Women!” Tristan sputtered, eyeing his man as if daring him to say something, anything, in that gender’s defense.

“Indeed, m’lord.” The servant gulped, already backing toward the door. “An’ sure Oi am that we’d all be the better fer it if we could but live widout ’em.”

“I can,” Tristan gritted before taking a large gulp of the too-hot coffee. “Damn it all anyway—I will!”

CHAPTER SEVEN

ON THE THIRTIETH OF MAY the first Peace of Paris was signed in that city, giving yet another excuse to the celebration-mad populace of London to don their finery and make absolute cakes of themselves by eating, dancing and imbibing to the top of their bent and beyond.

One of the more sedate parties, a modest Venetian breakfast for no more than six hundred of the host and hostess’s closest and dearest friends, was held near Richmond Park. That this breakfast did not commence until three in the afternoon, and was not expected to wind to a close much before the wee hours of the morning, meant little. The mood of the invited guests was jovial, even jubilant, the seemingly endless supply of strong drink notwithstanding.

Mary was in attendance, accompanied by Miss Kitty Toland, whom she and Rachel had agreed to chaperon, a circumstance that meant that Dexter Rutherford was also a member of their party. Indeed, as Mary had whispered to Rachel a few moments earlier in the carriage, it would have taken one of Congreve’s rockets being strapped to his hindquarters and the fuse lit to blast Dexter away from his ladylove.

But then it was nice to have a gentleman in their party, since it was he who took charge of matters such as securing a comfortable, shady spot under a tree and then chasing after servants to secure some nourishment before they all wilted from hunger. Not that Mary would have had too much trouble convincing one of her flirts to play fetch and carry for her, but it had become so fatiguing to have to explain her association with the dangerous Tristan Rule to her apprehensive swains that she was just as glad not to have to go to the bother.

She had hoped that Rule’s absence from her side for the past four days had scotched all those rumors she knew to be flying fast and furious about the ton, but she hadn’t counted on the lack of starch her beaux had evinced when faced with the prospect of being thought to be poaching on Ruthless Rule’s preserves. “It’s like I have a sign hanging from my back that says ‘Private Property—Trespassers Beware,’” Mary had complained to Rachel more times than that weary woman wished to remember, “and I don’t know who angers me most—that dratted man or the silly fools who act as if he were some sort of furious Greek god who just might start hurling lightning bolts at them or something if they dare to cross him.”

Even more infuriating, at least to Mary’s mind, was the fact that she actually had found herself looking for the pesky man, and wondering just where he was that he had left off spending his time making her life as miserable as possible. Sir Henry had mentioned something or other that hinted of Rule being out and about the King’s business, but no amount of prompting could nudge the older man into saying a thing more. “Probably out minding mice at crosswalks or some such important task,” Mary had said, sniffing inelegantly, causing her guardian no end of amusement.

Whatever the reason for his absence, Mary was left to punish herself with the knowledge that it had left a large hole in her life—one that she would have sworn she craved more than a personal invitation to Carleton House to meet the Czar’s sister, the Grand Duchess Catherine of Oldenburg. In fact, she thought, blushing yet again as she reclined in a studied pose beneath a leafy tree, she had been thinking altogether too much about Tristan Rule—about his dark good looks, his intense black eyes, the barely leashed power hidden beneath the stark black he chose to wear, his lips, cool and firm against hers for the length of a kiss stolen in the moonlight.

And that was the worst—that she couldn’t help remembering that kiss, that deliberate insult that had seemed to amuse him as much as it still haunted her. How could she be attracted to a man who thought she was capable of destroying Sir Henry—indeed, all of England, if she truly believed his ridiculous claims! What perverse imp of nature had so constructed a woman that she could thoroughly loathe a man and at the same time search her horizons constantly just for the sight of his disdainful, condemning face?

Mary shook her head dismissingly and determinedly set out to change the flow of her thoughts, choosing to observe Kitty Toland and Dexter Rutherford as they sat yards apart on the blanket a servant had spread and stared at each other with blissfully vacant eyes. Try as she could, Mary could not see the attraction, either Kitty’s for Dexter or his for her.

Not that Kitty wasn’t a pretty girl, for she was; all pink and blond and still carrying a bit of nursery plumpness, with china-blue eyes that had a tendency to stare unwaveringly at nothing in particular in a way Mary couldn’t force herself to believe reflected any great intelligence. Besides, the girl had a lamentable habit of saying, “Oh, Gemini!” before nearly every sentence she uttered, until Rachel had run posthaste to her rooms, inspiration for yet another character for her novel taking the form of a hare-witted debutante who spoke only in exclamations.

Dexter, for his part, wasn’t exactly the sort from which storybook heroes were made. He was neither bold, nor dashing, and his conversation certainly couldn’t rival anything written by the Bard, but when it came to portraying the sillier side of being struck with one of Cupid’s tiny darts, Dex bore off the palm. Soulful sighs, yearning looks and garbled speech may not have been designed to set Mary’s heart to pitter-pattering, but they seem to have turned the trick for Dexter when it came to winning the adoration of his Kitty. It was, Mary had informed Rachel the previous evening after the two of them had spent long, trying hours watching the two lovebirds coo at each other unintelligibly, as if some kind spirit had seen two halves of the same whole and quickly arranged for the two adorable nincompoops to find each other and become one great, amorous ninny, sure to populate the next generation with yet another set of incompetents in search of mates.

“Want an apple, Miss Toland?” Dex asked just then, if only to prove Mary’s point.

“Oh, Gemini, I would like one above all things,” Kitty simpered, her blushing cheeks looking like fine, ripe apples themselves. “But, oh, Gemini, how ever could I, when it is wearing that awful peel?”

Puffing out his thin chest just as if he had been asked to slay yon dragon to prove his love, Dex then fairly scrambled toward the large picnic hamper before the hovering servant could efficiently pare away the peel on a shiny apple he had already snatched up in preparation of being asked to perform just such a service, and wrestled both knife and apple from the poor young fellow. “It would be a pleasure, an honor, to remove this offensive covering so that you should not injure those fair lips and those delicate white teeth,” Dexter vowed fervently as Mary and the dumbstruck servant desperately tried to look anywhere but at the young swain as he proceeded to mutilate the innocent fruit, putting his left thumb in imminent danger of being peeled as well.

“No accounting for tastes, is there?” Rachel offered, having approached the scene while Mary was otherwise occupied and was just then sitting herself down on the chair another servant had secured for her. “I had to discard my idea of patterning a character after the girl, though. After I had her say hello, I found she had precious little additional to add to the conversation. I didn’t realize how difficult it is to find inconsequential things to say—do you think that means I’m a blue-stocking? Perhaps that’s why I’ve been left so firmly on the shelf all these years.”

“You’re bright blue through and through, Aunt,” Mary confirmed, then added, “but your mind is not what has kept you from the altar. It’s your foolish pride that keeps you and Sir Henry from making a match of things. Isn’t it time you forgave him for a young man’s indiscretion?”

Rachel looked at her charge, her confusion easy to read in her face. “Henry’s indiscretion? Whatever are you jabbering about? It wasn’t Henry who destroyed our engagement. It was my indis—” Rachel’s voice broke off suddenly as she realized what she had been about to say.

Perhaps the sun was too warm on her head, Mary thought as she reached to retrieve the bonnet she had discarded earlier. How could she have been so mistaken? From the few slips Sir Henry had made in her presence, she felt sure that he was the one responsible for the termination of the engagement just a week before the wedding. But now Rachel was saying Sir Henry was the injured party and she the one who had done something to cause the breach. “Forgive me for being so presumptuous, especially with a woman who is supposed to be my mentor of sorts,” Mary apologized with a singular lack of contriteness, “but I do believe the time has come for you and my so-intelligent uncle to sit down together and go over the particulars of your estrangement in a bit more detail. Somebody seems to have scrambled the facts a bit, if I’m right.”

“I don’t care for a sad rehashing of long-ago sins, Mary,” Rachel replied almost regally. “I have done my penance by donning my caps and playing the loving aunt to a series of nieces and nephews as they found their way into the world and beyond the need of my care. Why, seeing Lucy safely raised and launched was more than enough atonement for a dozen sins worse than my fleeting infatuation with Lord Hether—er—Mary! Isn’t that Tristan over there, beside the buffet table?”

Rachel’s impulsive confession was enough to keep Mary’s attention riveted to her even if Mother Nature had at that moment decided to shower the assembled guests with hail the size of oranges, but nothing could keep her attentive once Tristan’s name was mentioned. “Where?” she asked, already craning her neck in the direction Rachel had named. “Oh, drat, there he is, looking booted and spurred and ready to ride, as usual.” Realizing she was looking more than a little interested in the man, she quickly busied herself retying her bonnet strings, asking Rachel in a whisper, “Is he looking this way? Does he see me? Don’t wave to him, maybe he’ll go away. How do I look? Drat this hot sun, I vow I look as wilted as yesterday’s flowers.”

Rachel could barely hide her smile as she watched Mary lost in uncharacteristic confusion, and silently congratulated herself at settling both her current charge and her troublesome nephew with so little fuss. Oh, Lucy and Jennie would doubtless take all the credit for the match, but that didn’t bother Rachel. She only wished to have everyone neatly established so that she could leave London as soon as possible. Her plan to live quietly in the city had been foolish, she saw now, but who could have foreseen Henry coming to beg a favor of her after the way she had disgraced him all those years ago? She hadn’t written a word of her novel since going to live in Henry’s house—was only using the novel as the camouflage she would need once Mary was safely married and her past buried once and for all beneath her new husband’s name—but Henry wasn’t to know that. Just as he wasn’t to know that she still loved him with every fiber of her being—for as much good that would do her when she was scribbling away in some cottage at the back of beyond.

What Rachel knew she definitely didn’t need was to have Mary sticking her inquisitive little nose into affairs that were none of her business. If she had kept her past indiscretions a secret from Lucy and Jennie—and especially from Tristan—all these years, she was not about to allow Mary to stir up all that old heartache now! Thank heavens for Tristan, Rachel rejoiced silently, marveling as she did so that she would ever have reason to thank Tristan for anything, for he would keep Mary too busy for any dangerous snooping. So thinking, Rachel decided to give the struggling romance a bit of a nudge. “Does he see us, you ask?” she answered Mary just as that young woman was about to take another covert peek herself. “Why, yes, if that marvelous smile is any indication, I do believe he has. My goodness, do I mistake my man? I almost believe Tristan to actually have a certain spring to his step as he makes his way to us.”

“He’s probably just come from turning two hapless souls over to the high executioner for speaking French in a public place. Just the sort of thing to cheer him up, I do believe,” Mary snapped, but her words held no real sting.

“Oh, Mary, you mustn’t refine too long on Tristan’s little follies,” Rachel interposed, trying to calm the waters before this meeting between the two ended in yet another useless confrontation. “He has apologized for believing you part of that French plot—besides, Henry told me just this morning that they have captured three men who supposedly were working to raise funds for a ship to sail to Elba. Why, that may explain Tristan’s absence these last days, don’t you think?” But before Mary, whose head had come up with a jerk at Rachel’s words, could answer, the older woman gave a very uncharacteristic shriek. “Oh, Lord, Tristan! No!”

Mary looked first to her companion and then, with some shock, toward the buffet table, where she had last seen Tristan, looking so dangerously handsome. But he wasn’t there. He was running full tilt to place himself in front of the runaway curricle being dragged along behind a pair of wild-eyed stallions before it could cut a path of death and destruction through the throng of assembled guests.

TRISTAN HAD RIDDEN HARD most of the night in order to get back to London, the three conspirators he had run to ground in a hedgerow tavern near Maidstone having been handed over to the trustworthy agents Sir Henry had so fortuitously supplied.

His haste was hard to explain, even to himself, considering his oft-spoken distaste for silly affairs like this Venetian breakfast, but he knew Mary was to be in attendance and that thought served as the spur that had sent him galloping along the moonlit paths that led to the city. It was juvenile really, this burning desire to report the success of his mission to Mary in person, but he could not help but harbor the hope that the arrest he had made would put him back in Mary’s good graces—if indeed he was ever there in the first place. At least she would be made to see that he had not entirely been hunting out mare’s nests when he was investigating her background. After all, there had been a plot to free Napoleon, and the arrests proved it.

Of course, there was still that little matter of her true identity—and Rule’s fear that she presented a danger to Sir Henry if there was even a trace of scandal in her past. Tristan wasn’t about to turn a blind eye to that possibility, no matter how uncomfortable he felt about his earlier, erroneous assumption that Mary Lawrence could be in the pay of some French conspirators.

No, he remained adamant in his determination to uncover whatever secret Mary and Sir Henry were so steadfastly protecting, but he had used his hours on horseback the previous night to rethink his tactics. He would pretend he had given up the investigation and concentrate on courting Mary, winning his way into her good graces. He would do this to protect national security, he had told himself then, just as he tried to tell himself again at that moment—that electrifying moment when he had looked across the expanse of green lawn and felt his heart do a strange little leap in his chest as he caught sight of her sitting beneath the shade of an old tree, looking the picture of beauty, youth and innocence.

All his weariness had disappeared in an instant, and he had felt his usually expressionless features soften involuntarily into a wide, unaffected smile as his feet had immediately began propelling him along the straightest path to her side. He couldn’t wait to tell Mary about his exploits of the previous evening—just like a small boy proudly showing off his first racing cup to his parents.

He had taken no more than a half dozen steps, and was just raising a hand to wave to his aunt, when he sensed rather than saw that something was wrong. Swinging to his right, he espied the driverless curricle careening down the lengthy incline, two heaving, foam-flecked horses galloping ahead of it in the shafts.

The peaceful scene was shattered within an instant. Where moments ago happy groups had either been strolling arm in arm over the closely clipped lawns or reclining at their ease at the base of shade-giving trees, there was now the sharp, sickening smell of panic—the sight of fashionably clad ladies and top-o’-the-trees gentlemen scurrying like colorful ants to and fro searching for cover, the sound of high-pitched screams and baritone curses.

But Tristan saw none of this, heard none of this. Immediately his senses were concentrated on the horses and the curricle that bounced behind it in imminent danger of overturning. His muscles tautened, preparing for action, and his heart began to beat more rapidly, sending his heated blood pulsing through his veins as he quickly calculated his options, weighed his alternatives.

Darting a quick glance behind him, he saw that the fleeing guests had somehow created an area of open ground that led straight to the small, ornamental pond that lay at almost a right angle to the course the horses were taking. His dark eyes narrowing, Tristan’s agile brain rapidly mapped a possible course of action to intercept the rampaging horses before they could get past him.

He ran swiftly, surely, to the spot he had chosen, sparing only a second to glance in Mary’s direction, silently praying that she and his aunt had had the good sense to position themselves behind a tree. They had—a white-faced Rachel holding on fiercely to Mary, who seemed to be struggling to be free, while Dexter stood staunchly in front of some blond creature who was just then sobbing into his coat sleeve.

Then the thunder of galloping hooves and the loud clatter of the rapidly disintegrating curricle commanded his full attention, and Tristan spread his legs slightly for balance, flexed his knees, and extended his arms in front of him, his hands open, his fingers tensed, waiting…waiting…

He could smell the hot breath of the horse nearest him, see clearly the white of one of its rolling eyes, feel the sharp flick of its mane against his hands.

Now! his brain screamed. Now!

MARY BROKE FREE of Rachel’s clinging hands and was just about to run toward Tristan when he reached out with both his strong, tanned hands—with those long, lean fingers she had told herself fitted his reputation for ruthlessness so perfectly—and grabbed two handfuls of mane, while at the same time leaping into the air, to end up landing himself neatly astride the horse’s back.