Anna Campbell: A Rake's Midnight Kiss

“I’m glad I don’t have to add theft to your list of misdemeanors.” Cam eyed Richard without favor.

“I’ll try persuasion first.” He sipped his friend’s excellent brandy, his pleasure in recalling the vicar’s fiery daughter vying with the anger that had simmered for six months. Longer. His whole life. “Anyway, Miss Barrett had a gun.”

A surprised gust of laughter escaped Cam. “Did she, by Jove? Good for her. I wondered if you’d encounter the mysterious Miss Barrett when her father and aunt turned up to dinner without her, but it was too late to warn you that the vicarage wasn’t empty. I swear the reverend gentleman could talk the leg off an iron pot. Even if you’d caught a bullet, I had the worst of the evening.”

“I owe you.” Richard stretched his long legs across the blue and red Turkey carpet. Pleasant weariness weighted his limbs.

“You do indeed. Although I have to say Leighton Court is dashed appealing. I should have been quicker to check out Uncle Henry’s bequest after he turned up his toes last year.” Cam subsided into his chair. “So was the scholarly spinster what you imagined? Bad skin? Round shoulders? No bosom? A squint from poring over all those dusty tomes?”

A surge of purely male appreciation warmed Richard’s blood. The body he’d held had definitely sported a bosom. Quite an impressive one if he was any judge of women. Which of course he was.

“The lady is … interesting,” he said musingly, fingers stilling on Sirius’s shaggy head. The dog grumbled softly at the cessation of attention.

“If she countered your nonsense with a pistol, she certainly is. I take it you’re proceeding with this ramshackle scheme.”

Richard smiled, recalling the girl facing him down as cool as you please. Instead of a dried-up old maid, he’d encountered a glorious Amazon. Tall. Blond. Flashing silver eyes to make mincemeat of his unflattering expectations.

“Richard?” Cam prompted when the silence extended.

“Hmm?”

“Stop mooning over the damned filly. I gather she was something of a beauty. Answer me.”

“Of course I’m going on.” Richard rose and without invitation refilled his glass. He waved the decanter at Cam, but his famously abstemious friend shook his head. “I can’t see I’ve got much choice. I could go through the courts and prove Aunt Amelia had no legal right to bequeath the jewel to Miss Barrett, but chancery cases take forever and you never know how those blasted judges will rule. Miss Barrett won’t deal with my representatives, even after they said I’d give ten thousand guineas for the jewel.”

“Money clearly doesn’t move her.”

“Something will, and I’ll discover what that is. Luckily for me, her father takes in paying students. It’s a matter of infiltrating the household and keeping an eye for the main chance. Everybody has a price—I’m sure I’ll learn the female prodigy’s.”

Cam still looked unconvinced. “She’ll know what you want the minute she hears your name.”

Richard’s lips curled in a sly smile as he lounged against the mantel. “Meet Christopher Evans, rich dilettante from Shropshire.”

Cam’s voice flattened. “You mean seduction.”

For one blazing instant, the prospect of plundering Genevieve Barrett’s Viking charms dazzled Richard, until reluctantly he shook his head. “No need to sound so disapproving, old chum. I’ll soften her up with a bit of flirtation, but I won’t ruin her. I don’t mean the girl any harm, whatever dance she’s led me over the jewel’s whereabouts. I’ll give her a few weeks of masculine attention and a nice fat purse, then leave her with a smile and the jewel in my pocket.”

“A female who holds you off at gunpoint mightn’t be an easy conquest.”

Richard shrugged. “I know enough to get round an innocent country miss. She’ll be eating out of my hand in no time.”

“If tonight’s any indication, she’s more likely to bite your fingers off. You’re sounding like such a coxcomb, I’d almost like to see that.”

Richard’s laugh held an acid note. “I can act the charmer when I have to. Good God, I learned that lesson long ago. My amiable ignorance in response to insult saved me a parcel of beatings from our dear schoolfellows.”

He shuddered, recollecting the tortures their friend Jonas Merrick, also illegitimate, had undergone at Eton because he was too stiff-necked to play the game. Well, Jonas had had the last laugh last year when he’d been named Viscount Hillbrook. Richard intended to have the last laugh too, even if only to irritate the high sticklers by flashing the legendary Harmsworth jewel under their supercilious noses.

Cam looked unimpressed. “Nothing will change the circumstances of your birth.”

“Perhaps not,” he said with a bitterness that he’d reveal to nobody else. “But surely you of all men understand the need for defiance.”

The murky details of Cam’s conception had been subject to even more spiteful gossip than Richard’s. Cam’s mother, the duchess, had divided her favors between her husband and his younger brother. Nobody, including reportedly the duchess, knew which Rothermere had fathered her son. Scandal of that magnitude at the highest levels never lacked repeating.

All their lives, Richard and Cam had paid for their parents’ sins. At Eton with Jonas, they’d forged a bond based in shared adversity. Until recently, Jonas had gone his own way, but Cam and Richard’s friendship had never faltered, despite Cam being a pattern card of decorum and Richard’s flair for outraging the prudish. In a rare contemplative moment, Richard had concluded that Cam strove to live down his notorious parentage by proving himself worthy of his title.

Still, through his harum-scarum existence, Richard had reason to be grateful for this steadfast friendship. Take the case in point. Loyalty brought Cam, even if vociferously objecting, to this small Oxfordshire estate.

“Any victory will be purely symbolic,” Cam said.

“Symbols can be powerful.” He summoned a smile as he returned to his chair. “Come, Cam. Let me have one last adventure before life becomes odiously flat. This next season, I intend to become a respectable married man. High time I set up my nursery with a virgin whose unimpeachable pedigree will restore some prestige to the sadly tainted Harmsworth name.”

Cam didn’t look any happier. “Marrying a woman you love can be an adventure.”

“Love, my dear fellow?” Richard’s laugh rang with cynicism. “I plan a fashionable marriage. No mawkish attachment. All I require of a wife is an unquestionably legitimate heir.”

“You’re selling yourself short. If any man deserves a happy family life, it’s you.”

Richard shifted uncomfortably. That was the confounded problem with old chums; they saw beyond civilized boundaries to places in a man’s soul that he never wanted to visit. “Dash it, Cam, I never thought to hear you turning sentimental.”

Cam’s expression remained grave. “I can’t help envying what Jonas and Sidonie have. He’s a better man for knowing her. It makes me think love is worth seeking, whatever the risks.”

Richard wasn’t fool enough to dismiss the genuine love Jonas shared with his wife, nor the joy he’d found as father to his daughter. “Jonas is a lucky devil. But Sidonie’s one in a million. I wouldn’t wager sixpence on the chances of finding a woman to equal her.”

But as Richard lounged in Cam’s luxurious library, so different from the dilapidated room he’d invaded earlier, he couldn’t help thinking of another woman. Prickly, clever, and surprisingly appealing Genevieve Barrett with her sharp tongue, snapping gray eyes, and voluptuous body. After tonight’s escapade, he found himself anticipating the coming days with an eagerness that would have astounded him this afternoon. Luring the vicar’s daughter into surrendering the Harmsworth Jewel promised entertainment beyond compare.