A Rogue of One's Own

“It’s charming, I suppose,” she said.

“Charming? It’s Pierre Charmaine’s finest handiwork.”

She raised her eyes to his. “Who is he?”

“Monsieur Pierre was a former officer of the French Foreign Legion. For reasons he never disclosed, he found himself in London a few years ago and now charges outrageous prices in a secret tattoo parlor in Mulberry Walk. I suspect a woman was behind his fall from grace.”

“Aren’t we always,” she said dryly. “Why does the woman have four arms?”

“Because she is inspired by Lord Shiva.”

“Right. And who would he be?”

The arms quivered when Tristan chuckled. “Shiva is one of the three principle deities of Hinduism, also called Mahadeva. He is the Lord of Divine Energy, creator of the universe, the god of transformation and destruction. He holds more roles and names, depending on which sect of Hinduism you study. It is complex. He is often depicted with blue skin, four arms, and a snake around his neck.”

“A god of destruction.” She was bewildered. “But naturally, you then go and ink a woman onto your skin.”

He gave her a grave look. “I’ll have you know that when I stayed in General Foster’s house, I had conversations with the Pujari, the temple priest, after which I considered it wise not to tattoo all powerful deities onto my thoroughly debauched English body.”

More rules and principles. And his debauched body had now thoroughly debauched hers. If she continued to blush so fiercely, her face would soon stay permanently pink.

“Mulberry Walk?” she said. “I was expecting a tale involving a sailor, a drunken wager, and a back street in Kabul.”

He shook his head. “When I left Asia, my scars were still healing.”

It took a moment before different pieces of information, collected and stored over recent months, linked together. He had been shot when saving his captain.

She peered more closely at the inking. The small podium beneath the dancer’s pointy-toed right foot was not as smoothly executed. The texture of the skin was puckered, and the purple tinge wasn’t ink. It was the color of scar tissue.

“How . . . awfully whimsical,” she blurted.

“Isn’t it just,” he crooned.

She didn’t think. She leaned in and pressed her lips to it.

It startled him as much as it startled her. When she glanced up, his features were oddly frozen.

He recovered quickly enough. “I suppose congratulations are in order,” he said lightly, and, when she was silent with confusion, he dipped his head. “To the majority ownership of London Print.”

She blinked. “Of course. Yes.”

She pulled the blanket more tightly around her shoulders. From the corner of her eye, she spotted her robe, stretched out limply at the foot end of their makeshift bed. Next to it was the small wooden box.

She looked away. “I have to speak to the Investment Consortium before I can transfer the sum in full,” she said. “It may take a few days.”

“There is no hurry.”

Discussing the transaction was the first thing since their coupling to make her feel like a trollop. He must have known it would have this effect. A rather distancing effect.

Hoofbeats sounded outside her window, and the fine hairs on her arms rose with a sudden bout of nerves. “My housekeeper will return soon,” she said. “I gave her leave for the night, but she could be back any moment now.”

Tristan was already sliding his shirtsleeves over his head, and she turned her head to give him privacy when he rose to reach his trousers.

She did steal a glance when his back was turned. The shirt was long enough to cover his backside. After touching it last night, she would have quite liked to know what it looked like.

“I shall pay the price you paid for the shares, rather than what they are worth now,” she said.

He paused in the process of adjusting his braces. The look he gave her back over his shoulder was unreadable. “You drive a hard bargain, my lady. More fool me for not insisting on a contract beforehand.”

She crossed her arms, and he turned to her fully.

“I jest,” he said. “Considering that you have been shortchanged, it’s perfectly acceptable.”

“Shortchanged?”

He shrugged into his waistcoat. “You experienced the agony of bliss just once, didn’t you.”

The agony of bliss. The white heat wave that had overtaken her during their second joining.

“It was all new to me,” she said.

His eyes softened. “It was not a reproach. Not in the slightest.”

Her smile was a little evil. “But it would make for a most unflattering rumor, wouldn’t it. Ballentine, infamous seducer, fails to satisfy.”

His gaze narrowed. “Possibly.”

He tipped up his chin and tied his cravat with the careless fluidity that came only with years of practice, a purely masculine gesture; surprising, too, since he had a valet, and it made her pulse flutter a little faster. He must have sensed it, for he slid a wholly indecent gaze over her rumpled appearance and said: “You could, of course, allow me to redeem myself.”

Her heart gave an appallingly eager little pounce. Another night with him?

There was pause as reason grappled with older, baser instincts.

“I suppose I could,” she finally said, not quite meeting his eyes. “I give my housekeeper leave every Friday night.”

Another pause.

“Friday is tomorrow,” he said, sounding casual.

“Correct.”

“How convenient.”

A sinking feeling took hold as she watched him pick up his cane and his topcoat. He would leave now, and she’d be here, alone with the enormity of what she had done. And with what she was about to do again.

He put on his hat and was fully transformed back into nobleman, albeit a rumpled one. The look he gave her went straight through the blanket she was still clutching like a damsel.

“The same time, the same place?” he asked.

She could only nod.

A wink, a bow, and he was gone. A moment later, she heard the kitchen door fall shut, the old windows rattling in their pane.

* * *

Normally when sexual stupor faded, a sense of well-honed detachment returned. Today, it didn’t. He was waiting, but the feeling did not come, and by the time he had walked twenty minutes and reached Banbury Road, he was shaken. He had finally bedded the woman he had had an eye on half his life and walked away from it feeling shaken. His head swam, from the summery air or a daze wholly unrelated to the weather, and it took several attempts to hail a hackney.

In the dark heat of the cab, the night returned with full force. Lucie naked. Lucie flushed. Lucie flat on her back, gazing up at him with nervous anticipation. Every image seared onto his mind in brilliant colors, as though they had been his first taste of an erotic education.

His head dropped back against the battered upholstery, sweat sliding down his back. He never stayed until morning. He’d learned early that it created expectations, which created complications. He had not only stayed, no, he had asked her for an encore and he had to laugh at his foolishness. He had expected to bed exactly one virgin in his life—his wife, a faceless woman in a nebulous future. The carriage walls were decidedly too close.

Lucie’s hands on him, with the feral curiosity of a kitten. He could see now that she had very much chosen him to dispose of her virtue, to use her ungallant turn of phrase, and he was at a loss as to how he had earned such trust. The urge to fling the precious, breakable thing away rolled through his body in waves. A deeper, darker part of him wanted to stash it at the very back of a cave and guard it possessively until kingdom come.

Another issue forced itself to the surface of his mind: if he wished to be a man of his word, he had a problem. Because she would insist on her bloody shares, and then she would go and do something harebrained and progressive with the periodicals, and, in consequence, hurt London Print and thus, his bank balance.

He was calmer by the time he arrived at the front door of his lodgings on Logic Lane. Naturally, it would require a second encounter to satisfy more than a dozen years of endured slights and boyhood fancies. And of course he would find a way of keeping his source of income intact.

“Good morning, Avi.”

“Milord.” His valet unconvincingly pretended not to see him wearing yesterday’s hopelessly crinkled attire.

“I’m in need of a bath. A hot one, if you please.”

“Certainly, milord.” Avi was following him up the stairs. “I placed the train tickets and the bouquet for her ladyship onto your desk, as milord requested.”

He had no idea what his valet was talking about, until he remembered that he had promised his mother the gossip from the house party. He was traveling to Ashdown. Today. The real reason for a visit being, of course, that he had to assess her suitability for a sea voyage and decide how to best abduct her from the house.

“Bloody hell,” he muttered, and then: “Stop making disapproving faces behind my back, Avi—you knew when you accepted this position that I was going to spend my days philandering and cursing.”

“Yes, milord.”

“It won’t change, mark me, it won’t.”

“Of course not, milord.”