The Secrets of a Courtesan. Nicola Cornick
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with that sort of business, madam.”
Eve smiled. She was accustomed to Joan’s sharp tongue and knew it hid a protective heart. Joan had been turned off for refusing Sir Montague Fortune’s advances and she had some hair-raising tales to tell of the goings-on at Fortune’s Hall. She also had no very good opinion of men.
“Don’t fret,” Eve said. “I am done with it.”
Ignoring Joan’s snort of disbelief she ushered her visitor behind the counter and through the doorway into the room at the back. The pawnbroker’s shop occupied two downstairs rooms in the stone-built terrace. Eve used one as the shop front and the other, a much larger room, as a combined office and a store for all the goods people brought in to pawn. Upstairs there was a tiny bedchamber and some even tinier living quarters. She and Joan clung to their financial independence by their fingertips. The premises were hardly sumptuous but the shop did at least provide an independent living and it had been a lifesaving opportunity for Eve when she had run from London—and from Rowarth—leaving everything behind, broken by a miscarriage, reeling from the news that she would never bear another child. She had left behind the beautiful little town house that Rowarth had given her in Birdcage Walk, where he had spent all his nights and most of his days with her, the clothes and the jewels, and had climbed on the first stagecoach from the Blue Boar Inn in High Holborn. She had told the driver she would go as far as her money could take her and had ended up in Fortune’s Folly, working as an assistant until she had accumulated sufficient savings to buy the shop, working her fingers to the bone, working, always working, as she tried to forget…
She pushed the memories away. Rowarth was standing in her office and looking around him with a lively interest. He looked elegant and polished, the epitome of wealth and privilege, utterly out of place in these shabby surroundings. Never had the differences between them felt so stark.
“So,” she said, a little ungraciously, “I can give you two minutes, Rowarth, no more. Whatever your business is with me, I do not want to discuss it.”
His gaze came back to rest on her, dark, brooding, and she repressed a little shiver.
“You will give me as long as I require,” he said. He straightened. “My business with you is this. I am here on behalf of the Home Secretary. You are under suspicion of criminal activity. If you do not help us we will ruin you. We will expose your true identity and we will take from you everything that you possess.” He smiled at her. “Now,” he said gently, “will you talk to me?”
Chapter 2
She looked the same as she had done five years before. Alasdair Rowarth looked at his former mistress and amended his view slightly; she looked almost exactly the same except that there were shadows haunting those glorious lavender blue eyes now, suggesting a sadness that went soul deep. He did not feel any pity to see them; she had left him, walked out on him for another man, so whatever sorrow she had brought on herself was surely richly deserved.
The bitterness and resentment twisted within him and he ruthlessly subdued it. She was nothing to him now. He was here to prove it. But he remembered that it was Eve’s clear and candid gaze that had first enslaved him from the moment he had stepped into the ballroom at Albermarle Street, persuaded against his better judgment by his friend Miles Vickery to attend the Cyprian’s Ball. He had been bored and restless that evening, he remembered, searching as he always was for something elusive, something he could not even name, grasping after that mysterious entity that would fulfill him and provide a desperately needed balance to the lonely duty that was his life. Rowarth had come into his dukedom young; so many people depended upon him, it seemed that his days were never any more than a round of obligation and responsibility. He had searched for someone to share that weight of duty with him, looked for a wife at Almacks and in the long round of the London Season, and had been bored rigid by the witless pattern card debutantes he had met.
And then he had attended the Cyprian’s Ball and there she had been, Eva Night, bright, dazzling, so very alive, and in some way strangely untouchable even as she was effectively selling her virginity to the highest bidder. He had been entranced. He was rich enough—so he had bought her. And yet from the first he had thought that there was more to the transaction than that. It had not been solely his money for her body. She had given him life and light and warmth, wrapping him around with her generosity of spirit, her very presence lightening the load of the responsibilities he carried. In return he had shared everything with her. Not simply his money but his concerns and his cares, his deepest, darkest fears and his hopes for the future. Even though he was a mature man of one and thirty he had fallen for her like a love-struck youth. He had wanted to marry her. It had been perfect. Or so he had thought until she had left him, run away, denting his pride, making him an utter laughingstock—the foolish duke who had wanted to marry his venal mistress—and breaking a heart that until he had met her he had cynically believed could never be touched.
He had been a fool. That much was clear. The thing that angered him most was that he had loved her and believed his feelings were returned when in fact she had merely been using him for money and advancement. He had been wealthy enough but nowhere near as rich as some of the peers who sought Eve’s favor now that she was the toast of the demimonde. It had been madness to think that he could hold her if another man offered more. When he had been a mere ten years old he had seen his mother do precisely the same thing, betray his father, running off abroad to be with her wealthy lover. There had been the most appalling crim con divorce case that had dragged through the House of Lords and made his father look like a naive, impotent fool. And Rowarth, who savagely told himself that he should have known better, had almost made the same mistake as his luckless father. He knew he should be grateful that he had not committed the ultimate folly of marrying Eve as he had wanted to.
After Eve’s defection he had gone abroad for several years—he had business concerns in India that had occupied him most successfully until the pleas of his estate managers had brought him back to England to face those responsibilities he had neglected. He had believed that he had put aside thoughts of Eva Night until he had come back to London and found himself searching for her face in a crowd or listening for news of her. He had learned that no one had heard of her since she had run away from him. It had been the on dit at the time but Eve was now long gone, her star extinguished, the brief time when they had been the glittering couple of the demimonde all but forgotten. Rowarth had tried to forget it, too, but every so often the memory of Eve would stab him like a wound that had not completely healed.
Then Lord Hawkesbury’s letter had arrived out of the blue, asking for his help. Yes, he would go to Yorkshire and confront his beautiful, treacherous former mistress. Yes, he would ascertain if she were a member of a dangerous criminal fraternity, as Hawkesbury’s intelligence suggested. And in doing so he would prove once and for all that he was free of the hold she had once exerted over him.
Criminal she might be. Beautifully, wantonly seductive she most certainly was. Eve’s face still had the vivid animation that Rowarth remembered: her creamy complexion was still dusted with amber freckles, her hair was still a fiery red, and the quick, expressive movements of her body were as ridiculously, dangerously appealing to him as ever. Not even her fearsomely respectable worsted gown and dark blue spencer could hide the lush curves of a figure he had known intimately and already ached to explore again in exquisite detail, unable to subdue the desires of his body even while he deplored her and the hold she still had over him.
He had not expected to want her.
He had thought those feelings dead and gone. They should have been—they should have been annihilated, destroyed by her betrayal. He was furious that they were not. Yet he was forced to acknowledge that when he had first seen Eve in the Market Square he had felt all the old emotions of desire and lust and longing as strong as they had ever been and searing in their intensity. He had been told himself then that the memories, the hold she had had over his senses, would never be permitted to cloud his judgment. That resolution had lasted all of five seconds. He had seen her and he had wanted her with a hunger all the more acute for the years of denial.
But his business with Eve was precisely that—business. He was here on Hawkesbury’s behalf to ascertain her connection to