The Last Chance Christmas Ball Read online

  “And be cheated.”

  “He said I’d chipped the stone. He didn’t pay me for my work or materials and I lost the bond I’d posted. The magistrate sided with him.”

  Nick said, “Paris is occupied by an English army. Gower’s an Englishman.”

  “And I am a woman and a merchant and not English. Not even French.”

  “So, of course, you lose a case at law.”

  “I do not chip stones entrusted to my care. Nobody chips a diamond. It’s ridiculous.”

  “He attacked your reputation with that lie. I’ve been waiting for something bad to happen to him. Something fiendishly subtle.”

  “That is my intent.” She put the Coeur away in its leather case. She lowered the lid of the wooden box, relocked it, and restacked it with the others in the back of the wardrobe. She closed the wardrobe doors.

  Done. The stage was set. The Coeur was ready. A lesser woman would have grinned.

  “I had pictured the two of us in wild flight to the nearest port.” Nick sounded regretful. “Wild flight usually comes into play at some point when I’m embroiled in one of your convoluted schemes. I even brought riding horses.”

  She said, “You are not embroiled and I do not scheme.”

  “You scheme, plot, connive, and machinate. You are a credit to gentle womanhood.” He strolled over to the line of glassware on the dresser at the window. “Brandy?” He held up a decanter.

  It was a challenge. He dared her to stay here with him, to take the chance Gower might come back.

  Tremors of excitement fluttered in odd corners of her body, the old anticipation of a plan ready to unroll. Nick was beside her and that was five or six twisting, shivering feelings all by itself. She felt alive in every corner of her being. She didn’t try to disentangle why.

  She should leave. She should get out of here. Get away from Nick. For his good. For hers. Hadn’t she decided that was the only way?

  She said, “Thank you.”

  He poured into two glasses. “We will drink to our not-so-much chance meeting.”

  He was shameless. Had always been. She said, “I’m furious at you.”

  But she wasn’t. She couldn’t make herself be angry.

  “You have every right to be. May I say in my own defense. . .” He tasted the brandy. “This is rather good.”

  She took a quick swallow. “Very nice.”

  “A well-chosen and expensive tipple. Let us take a moment to appreciate it. Do housemaids generally help themselves to the good brandy?”

  “More often than you’d think. We add water to the decanter so nobody notices the level falling. I’m surprised there’s a glass of drinkable brandy in England.” She clicked her glass against his. “Proscht.”

  She chose a Swiss toast to remind him—to remind herself—she was a foreigner in his world. Not English. Not upper crust. Not wife material. Not suitable in a hundred ways.

  He replied, “Cheers.”

  Nothing had changed between the two of them, had it?

  He sauntered across the room and deployed himself into the chintz armchair by the fire, his legs stretched out long. He’d stopped being a housebreaker and become a dandy of the ton, at ease, all loose limbs and carelessness. Her dangerous, deceptive Nick Lafford in his natural disguise. Her Mad Nick, who went his own way and did whatever he damn well pleased, impervious to reason. The man she’d sent away for his own good. And for hers.

  She came to him, close, warming herself with the impudence and laughter inside him. Appreciating the well-polished suavity. He was as much a work of art as anything she designed. He was one of those jewels she might hold for a while, but could never possess. It was just as well she understood this.

  Pity she couldn’t work up a proper spout of anger. That was why she hadn’t trusted herself to talk to him for three months.

  When she went searching inside herself for fury and outrage, all she found was exasperation. Nicholas could exasperate paint on a wall. Probably she sighed. “You were about to offer some weak excuse for maneuvering me into the frozen wastelands of Northumberland and interfering in my dealings with Mr. Gower.”

  “I was. I am. Just give me a minute to marshal excuses.” Meek words. He was a man of many cordial, placating, mild words. His true intentions would always be considerably harder—flint dipped in honey. “I’m madly curious about your intentions here, by the way. Silly of me to think you’d be straightforward. You’re not going to steal the Coeur, are you?”

  “Not exactly. Or anyway, not now. You’re changing the subject.”

  “How you do see through me.”

  Nick didn’t drink his brandy, just held the glass in negligent fingers, resting it on the arm of the chair. A year ago they would have been talking her plan over, refining the weak points, considering alternatives and possibilities. They would have been partners.

  Now, they weren’t.

  He might have read her mind. He murmured, “It’s been a while.”

  “Three months.” Three months since she’d put an end to whatever it was they had between them.

  “Four days short of three months, if we were counting. You never told me why.”

  “I told you.” But he hadn’t understood. Strange that he couldn’t see how impossible it was. He was the god of shrewd judgment when it came to everybody else. He had none for himself.

  “Tell me again,” he said.

  “We’ve become a scandal.”

  A dismissive gesture. “We kill scandal by getting married.”

  “You know that’s not possible.”

  “Why not? Remind me.” Nick’s gaze didn’t leave her.

  That determined attention caught at her like a strong wind. Pulled at her. It was hard to remember common sense and harsh realities when Nick was being persuasive.

  She said, “Your family—”

  “The ones I like are wildly in favor. The ones I don’t like will—” He sat up abruptly. “A complication is about to arrive.”

  She’d heard maids going about their business in the hall outside. This was different. A man’s boots came this way, heavy and impatient.

  “Gower,” she said.

  “Most likely.”

  “He doesn’t know me. Never met me.”

  “Good.”

  Nick grabbed her wrist and pulled her onto his lap. The glass of brandy disappeared from her hand and found its way to the table. He covered her mouth with his own and kissed her.

  He tasted of soap and brandy and insistence. Of memory. Of indulgence and sweet, sweet nights together with no thought of the future. She was immersed in him as if she’d been plunged into an ocean of Nicholas. I don’t want to fight him. Mindlessly, she let go and fell.

  The footsteps slowed and stopped. The handle of the door turned. Rattled. A key scraped angrily in the lock. Nick pulled up her dress to show leg and stocking as far as the garter, creating a vulgar scene. A housemaid and her lover.

  Nick whispered into her ear, “We have ten seconds. Let me kiss the hell out of you for that long.”

  She cut off his last words, grabbed into his hair and pulled him to her mouth. Kissed him deeply. It seemed longer than ten seconds, but it wasn’t long enough.

  Under half-closed lids she saw the flicker of light and dark as the door opened. Caught the impression of dark clothing and the outraged flapping of a bat sweeping in. Gower.

  Even at that last minute and past it, she didn’t let go of Nick. She held on to the kiss. She was a child unwilling to take her hand out of the candy dish.

  Gower yelled, “What the hell is going on here?”

  Time to play her role.

  She squealed and hid against Nick’s shoulder. Gower didn’t know her face and she wanted to keep it that way. “Oh, lawks. Oh, my dear lord. Oh, no.”

  “How dare you! In my own room! Get out. Get out now,” Gower snarled.

  She pushed Nick’s hand off her thigh and pulled her skirts down. Held her apron over her face and ran for the
door.

  Behind her Nick murmured, “You are so very much de trop, Gower.”

  The kitchen was the warmest room in the Abbey and full of people, not one of them silent. It was haven, sanctuary, and retreat at the moment. Exactly the sort of place she could hide from members of the aristocracy.

  Claire slid onto the bench at the big table, feeling she’d had a narrow escape.

  Grace, who carried coal and water up and down stairs and had complicated teeth, was drinking tea. She made space, whispering, “Ye are in so much trouble.”

  Betsy, kitchenmaid, on the other side of the table with the other cup of tea, murmured, “Worth it though, I bet.”

  “Hah!” Margaret, undercook, thumped a crockery bowl full of raisins in front of them. “Here. Make yeselves useful. And ye, Mistress Claire, ye can keep out of mischief for a while. Such goings on.”

  Of course Gower’s bellows had been heard. The who and where and why had raced ahead of her. One of the footmen looked smug. There were no secrets in this house.

  She scooped a handful of raisins out onto the table, took one of the sharp, battered little knives from the side of the bowl, and began the sticky job of taking out the seeds. When she was a child she’d seeded raisins in just this way in the blue-and-white tiled kitchen of her grandmother’s house in Geneva. The oak of the table there could have been sliced from the same tree as this table under her elbows.

  Tabby, also kitchenmaid, stopped lifting lids and stirring stock at the big closed stove and pushed in companionably to share the work, damp-haired and cheerful.

  “They do say it be Master Nicholas they caught you with,” Betsy said.

  “Kissing him. In the Red Bedroom.” Tabby ducked her head and lowered her voice, a careful eye on the cook at the head of the kitchen. “And mebbe up to other things. I dinna believe that, though.”

  Claire deseeded another raisin and slid it to the pile that was growing between the three of them. The kitchen smelled of cinnamon and something else. “I didn’t kiss him,” she lied. “We just talked.”

  “Oh, right. Right.” Betsy was quick to reassure. Obviously she didn’t believe a word of it.

  “He’s not one for troubling the maids, our Nicholas,” Tabby said.

  “If he did trouble ’em”—Betsy dealt with a raisin—“he’d do it in his own bedroom. Plenty of space and privacy there.”

  “He has the most beautiful manners,” Grace said.

  Tabby nodded. “Been coming here since he were a boy and never a bit of trouble out of him.”

  The cook scraped nutmeg into a bowl, using a little grater. He was old, white haired, stick thin, and French. In spite of his great dignity, he was listening.

  Nutmeg. That was the other smell in the air.

  Grace spoke up. “When I bring Mister Nicholas’s shaving water mornings, he looks right at me and smiles. Thanks me. Not like that Gower. Bug under his boot is what Gower thinks I am.”

  “Cursing and swearing like this was Donnybrook Fair.” Betsy shook her head. “Brattle and brabblement ye could hear all the way down in the parlor.”

  “Not a gentleman, Gower,” Tabby said. “Only invited because that sweet daughter of his is a relative of milady on her mother’s side.”

  “A distant relative,” Betsy sniffed.

  Tabby shrugged. “Blood’s blood. Mister Nicholas ain’t nowt closer related, not really.”

  “Difference is,” Betsy said, tapping her knife on the table for emphasis, “he’s a Lafford. Different stable he come out of. Different altogether.”

  “Even if he’s picked up careless ways from all that gadding about in foreign parts, he won’t bring ’em here, to milady’s house. But we wondered . . .”

  Silence, while they concentrated on raisins and the cook visibly leaned in the direction of the conversation. The pots on the stove lifted their lids, attentive. Even the Christmas puddings—two of them, one for the family and guests, one for the staff, brought out from the pantry and resting on the sideboard for tomorrow—were listening.

  “We wondered . . .”—Betsy looked at her sidewise—“if mebbe ye knew him, you both being from London and all.”

  More silence, filled with avid curiosity.

  People spoke of a pride of lions and a murder of crows. They should add an inquisitiveness of maids. “London’s a big city,” she temporized.

  Tabby murmured, “Oh, a great huge place, to be sure.”

  “They do say there’s houses as far as the eye can see,” Betsy agreed.

  Grace said, “Ever so large.”

  She hadn’t convinced them. She knew that because they immediately started talking about Miss Effington’s maid, who insisted on drinking cocoa in the morning as if she were a lady herself. The lack of further question and comment about Nick meant they’d made up their minds.

  They’d decided she was having a mad affair with Nick. Apparently, they approved.

  She seeded raisins and ate a few and watched the weather being changeable at the window. Right now, it was a haze of thin blowing white that sparked and dazzled in the light. But there was a clear patch coming. If her plans went well tomorrow, Christmas Day, she’d have to race about outdoors for a while. She’d have to hope the snow lifted for an hour or two.

  She took the next fifty raisins in hand and dealt with them briskly, listened to some interesting gossip about Gower’s treatment of his horses, and mentally reviewed her plans for vengeance. Then the housekeeper bustled in and sent her upstairs with a basket of seasonal greenery.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Nick didn’t hurry leaving Gower’s room. He ignored the comments that followed him down the hall and the slam of a heavy door. A fashionable of the ton doesn’t hurry and, besides, he had thinking to do.

  Claire’s plans for revenge were his second worry. Claire herself, as always, was the first. Claire was the reason he’d come here. The reason for many of the choices he’d made these last years.

  They were under the same roof. A big roof, admittedly, but it was better than knocking on her door on Bedford Street and being told blandly that mademoiselle was in her workshop and could not be disturbed. That mademoiselle was not at home. That she was not receiving visitors today.

  “Nickie.” That came from his left, from one of the doors he’d already passed in the corridor. Maybe he should have been walking faster.

  “Nickie! Over here!”

  With some reluctance he turned. The door was cracked the merest inch. An eye peered from the opening. When he stopped, a pretty blond head poked out and looked both ways along the empty hall.

  “Is Papa angry at you?”

  “Yes.” Because he was famed for his superhuman self-control, he didn’t tell her to use her ears. This was Cousin Mary, after all.

  “Why?”

  “Nothing to do with you, fortunately.” But Gower was a bastard so he added, “Stay out of his way for a while.”

  “I have to talk to you,” she whispered.

  “Downstairs. Pick a parlor, I’ll meet you there.”

  She darted out into the hall and grabbed his arm. “In here. In private.”

  Claire, the woman he wanted beyond all others, fled like a roe deer before the hounds. Cousin Mary tried to drag him into her bedchamber.

  He stood his ground. “I never enter a woman’s bedroom without immoral intent. I’m fond of you, but not that fond.”

  “We can’t talk in the hall.”

  “We are talking in the hall.” He leaned past her and pulled the door to her room firmly closed behind her. “Come downstairs, sweet, and regale me with your problems as we go. By the way, why are your pretty jewels tossed together in a box in your father’s wardrobe?”

  “He’s a swine.”

  “Well, of course he is. How is he being swinish at the moment?”

  “He stomped in and took everything out of my jewelry box and carried it off.”

  To lure Claire back, he’d involved himself with the Gowers. Not the most favori
te of his distant cousins. Somehow this meant playing knight errant to Cousin Mary. God knew she needed one. “How odd of him. Why?”

  “So I can’t take my jewels and run away.” She pressed her lips together, looking like a desperate and harassed white rabbit. “What am I going to do?”

  “I’d discuss that with Charlie if I were you. Let us seek him out and you two can consult.”

  “Papa watches me. His valet spies on me. The lady’s maid he hired for me—”

  “Spies on you. I’m sorry about that. There are crowned heads of state who gad about with more freedom.”

  “He’s probably bribed the housemaids here to watch me.”

  “Very possibly. I have a secret emissary among the maids. I can ask her if she’s been bribed.”

  Mary wrinkled her forehead and became a worried rabbit. “I could escape if you’d get engaged to me. He’d stop watching if I agreed to marry someone he approves of.”

  “I doubt he approves of me at the moment.”

  “But he does. He really does. You’re rich and you’re related to everyone important. You could be duke someday.”

  “Not unless I arrange the death of seven male heirs, three of them children. Not in the best of taste, slaughtering one’s relatives. Though, on a selective basis, I’ve been tempted.”

  Mary paid no attention. She was, he thought, a good bit smarter than she let on. She fell into step beside him, which was to say he walked slowly and she hopped at his side, looking at him instead of where she was going. He hoped Charlie had more patience with this sort of thing than he did.

  She returned to her argument. “We don’t have to be engaged long.”

  “The prospect is naturally enticing. But no.”

  “Charlie and I could elope. You could lock Papa in a dungeon to give us time. They probably have dungeons here.”

  “Not a one. When I was boy, we looked. I’m also not going to knock your father over the head or drug his brandy or set highway men on him. I am not a gothic novel.”

  She looked blank. More than usually blank. “Will you sneak into Papa’s room and steal my jewels for me?”