Desired. Nicola Cornick
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Her awareness of him was as sharp as a whetted blade. It disturbed her.
He was still watching her. Assessing. Unsmiling. Evidently he had recognised her too, for he gave her another immaculate bow.
“Good evening, Lady Darent,” he said. “What an original way to exit a brothel.”
“Lord Rothbury,” Tess said coolly. “Thank you—I never follow the crowd.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Mrs. Tong gesturing wildly at her. The bawd seemed to be trying to indicate that this—this—was the man responsible for the raid on the brothel, the man she had been talking about as lacking the wherewithal to sow any oats, wild or otherwise. Rothbury had certainly kept that quiet from his friends, Tess thought, but then no doubt he would. She sensed he was a proud man and it was unlikely he would wish to speak of his incapacity, or for it to become common knowledge. It was not the sort of piece of information one simply dropped into polite conversation.
She tried not to stare at his pantaloons. She had far more pressing matters on her mind other than whether Rothbury was capable of continuing his family line. Such as the fact that she was in a state of déshabillée and Rothbury was still holding her shoes in the one hand and her reticule in the other, with the incriminating papers only a rustle away. She was within an inch of being unmasked as well as undressed.
“You might wish to put your gown back on,” Rothbury said. “It’s optional—” an ironic smile tilted his lips “—but both of us might be more comfortable.”
His narrowed gaze had started at her bare toes and was now travelling upwards with unhurried thoroughness, considering the nimbus of red-and-gold hair that fanned about her bare shoulders and finally coming to rest on her face. His green eyes, as cool as a shower of ice, met her blue ones and there was an expression in them that made the breath catch in her chest.
Tess gave a shiver and grabbed the slippery lavender silk and made the best job she could of wriggling back into it. The night air was cold and nipped at her skin and she was grateful when Rothbury wrapped the soft fur-lined cloak about her, its luxurious folds blocking out the autumn chill. But her feet were still bare. She had had no time to put on stockings and now her toes were very cold.
“If I might have my slippers, Lord Rothbury,” she said. “I doubt they are your size.”
She looked down at his feet, handsome in gleaming Hessians that shone in the faint flicker of light from the only street lamp left burning. She found she was trying to remember the scurrilous gossip she had heard about the correlation between the size of a man’s feet and the size of his cock. Was it that men with big feet were well endowed in other regions of their anatomy as well, or that small men had disproportionately large cocks? Lady Farr was having an affair with her jockey, who was extremely short. And Napoleon Bonaparte was also a short man but rumoured to be a prodigious lover…. And why was she thinking about sex when she tried never to think about it at all, and why was she thinking about it now, at this most inappropriate moment when she should be concentrating on nothing more than escape? And in conjunction with Rothbury, whose own proportions had, presumably, been utterly ruined by a mortar shell or bullet.
To her surprise Rothbury went down on one knee and presented the shoe to her with a grin that was pure wickedness, his teeth a flash of white in a face tanned by a climate somewhat more tropical than London in winter. He slid one slipper onto her foot, his palm warm for a moment against the arch of her instep, and she felt a strange and disconcerting flicker of response deep within her.
“Thank you,” she said, forcing the tiny slippers onto her feet where they pinched like malicious crabs. “Just like Prince Charming.”
“I missed the bit of the fairy tale where Cinderella visited the brothel,” Rothbury said. He straightened up. “What were you doing there, Lady Darent?” His tone was still as courteous as before but that courtesy cloaked an edge of steel. Tess’s instinct for self-preservation snapped another warning. Rothbury was the government’s man here, the man sent to hunt her down. She was tiptoeing across a tightrope. One false step and she would fall. The only advantage she had was that he did not know the identity of the person he was hunting.
He was still holding her reticule. Behind him, Tess could see a posse of dragoons rounding up a few ragged protesters. There had been a riot that night and the street was littered with rubble and broken spars of wood. The gas lamps were smashed and someone had overturned a carriage. One of the shutters on the Temple of Venus hung off its hinge. Torn newspapers flapped in the wind. It was quiet now. Once the soldiers arrived the mob had faded away as quickly as they had come, and only the faint smell of burning hung on the cold tide of London air.
Tess shrugged, bringing her gaze back to Rothbury’s impassive face.
“Why does anyone visit a brothel, Lord Rothbury?” she said lightly. “If you have an imagination, now would be the time to use it.” She arched an ironic brow. “I assume you are questioning me on some authority and not simply because you are impertinently curious about my sex life?”
Rothbury shifted. “I am here on the authority of the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth,” he said. “There was an illegal political meeting at The Feathers Inn tonight. Do you know anything about it?”
Tess’s heart bumped erratically. “Do I look like the sort of woman who would know anything about politics, Lord Rothbury?” she said. “I have absolutely no interest in it at all.”
She saw Rothbury’s teeth gleam as he smiled. “Indeed,” he said. “Then you will have equally little interest in the fact that I am hunting for a number of dangerous criminals including the radical caricaturist known as Jupiter.”
Fear breathed gooseflesh along Tess’s skin. She was no dangerous criminal. She was a philanthropist and all she wanted was reform. All she had ever worked for was to alleviate the appalling poverty and misery of the poor. But the Home Secretary did not see it that way. He saw the reformers as a threat to public order and a danger that he was set on obliterating forever.
She swallowed the sawdust in her throat. Not by a flicker of an eyelash could she betray any knowledge of the reformers’ cause, still less that she was intimately involved with it. But under the perceptive gaze of this man she felt her defences stripped naked.
Pretend. Playact. You have done it before….
“You are hunting criminals in a brothel?” she said, affecting boredom. “What a singular way to combine business with pleasure, my lord. Have you found any?”
“Not yet,” Rothbury said. The tone of his voice sent another warning shiver down her spine. She looked at the reticule with its incriminating papers still sitting snugly in the palm of his hand. If he opened that and saw the cartoons …
“You mentioned Lord Sidmouth,” she said. “I do not recall him. Would I have met him at a ball or a party, perhaps?”
“I doubt it,” Rothbury said. “Lord Sidmouth is not a man much given to parties.”
Tess shrugged, as though the conversation was now thoroughly boring her. She glanced towards the door of the brothel, standing open now with light shimmering across the cobbles of Covent Garden Square. “Well, Lord Rothbury,” she said. “Delightful as it is to stand out here in the cold chatting to you, I really am quite exhausted. Worn out, in fact, by my excesses tonight. And I am sure that you have work to do.” She smothered a delicate little yawn, improving on the point. “So if you will hand my reticule over and excuse me, I shall take a carriage home.”
Rothbury weighed the little bag in one palm and Tess’s breath caught in her throat. She knew that at all costs she had to keep her expression blank. If she grabbed the reticule off him or made it clear in any way that she was protective of the contents, Rothbury would look inside and she would be clapped up in the Tower of London as a political prisoner faster than one could say seditious cartoon.
“What do you have in here?” Rothbury said.
“The contents