Sophia James - Mistress at Midnight

But she was not finished. Taking his hand, she turned it palm upwards, tracing the lines with her first finger. Stephen felt like snatching it back, away from the things that she might or might not see.

‘You have a high falsetto singing voice, seldom touch strong drink and never bet at the New Year races at Newmarket.’

Her voice held a note of humour, and relief bloomed. ‘So very exact. You ought to have a stall outside the Leadenhall.’

‘It’s a gift, sir,’ she returned, her head tipping to one side as though measuring all that he was. Like a naturalist might watch an insect before sticking it through with a pin. There was something in her stillness that was unnerving and he tried his hardest to discern the rest of her features.

‘Do you have a name?’ Suddenly he wanted to know just who she was and where she came from. Coincidences were seldom as they seemed. His job had at least taught him that.

‘Aurelia, my lord,’ she offered, a new tone in his given title, a tone he understood too well. She gave no surname.

‘You know who I am, then?’

‘I have heard of you from many different people.’

‘And the gossip of strangers is so very truthful.’

‘It is my experience that beneath the embellishment, tittle-tattle always holds a measure of truth. It is said that you spend a lot of time away from England and its society?’

‘I am easily bored.’

‘Oh, I doubt that entirely.’

‘And easily disappointed.’

‘An explanation that may account for your presence here at Taylor’s Gap.’

He breathed out hard, the possibility of blackmail creeping in unbidden.

She faced him directly, now, and lifted her veil. Freckles across the bridge of a fine nose were the first things he registered. Then he saw that one eye was blue and the other dark brown. A mismatched angel!

‘It was an accident. A bleed. I fell from a horse as a child and hit my head hard.’ This explanation was given in the tone of one who might have often said it.

She was so pale the blood in her veins could be seen through the skin at her temple. Like the wings of a butterfly, barely there. He wanted to lean forwards and touch such delicacy, but he did not because something in her eyes stopped him. He knew this familiar look of supplication, his many estates holding the promise of a largesse that was tantalising.

But not from her. The disappointment of it pierced hard even as she began to speak.

‘I would ask a favour of you, Lord Hawkhurst.’

There. It was said, and in the circumstances he would have to be generous. It wasn’t everyone who had seen the demons in him so clearly.

‘Indeed.’

‘I have a sister, Leonora Beauchamp, who is both young and beautiful and I want her to marry a man who would care for her well.’

As her words settled, fury solidified. ‘I am not in the market for a wife, madam, no matter what you might like to say of this encounter.’

Her voice shook as she continued to speak. ‘It isn’t marriage I petition. I merely want you to invite Leonora to the ball I know you to be giving next week at your town house. I shall accompany her to ensure you know who it is to make some fuss of. A dance should do it, or two, if you will. After that I promise to never darken your pathway again.’

The anger in him abated slightly. ‘To where should I send the invitations?’

‘Braeburn House in Upper Brook Street. Any delivery boy would know of it.’

‘How old is your sister?’

‘Eighteen.’

‘And you?’

She did not answer and his heart felt heavy as he looked down at her. ‘So you are Aurelia Beauchamp?’

The shake of her head surprised him. ‘Nay, that is Leonora’s surname, but if you could see it in yourself to welcome my sister despite any…misgivings, I would be most appreciative.’ Removing one glove, she delved into her pocket and brought out a pendant fashioned with a single diamond in white gold. ‘I do not ask you to do this for nothing, Lord Hawkhurst, but if you say yes to the bargain between us I do expect you to hold up your end of it, without excuse. Could you promise me that?’

Interest began to creep under wrath, the flush on her face as becoming as any he had ever seen on a woman. She was a beauty! Beneath the fabric of her other hand he saw a ring, bold against the sheen of superfine.

Was she married? If she was his woman, he would have not let her roam the countryside so unprotected.

He smiled at such thoughts. Unprotected? Lord, was he finally growing a conscience? Thirty-one years old and all of them hard edged. The ends of his fingers curled against his thighs and he made himself breathe in, the souls of those he had sent to the afterlife calling close.

For Queen and for country or for the dubious needs of men left in charge of a foreign policy decades out of tune. Aye, England had not thanked him at all and he did not wish it to. But sometimes in a quiet corner of the world such as this one, and in the company of a woman who was as beautiful as she was beguiling, he wished for…something else.

He could not name it. It was too removed from the roads that he had followed, at first in wanderlust and excitement and now out of habit and ennui.

Murder, even in the circumstances of national security, sounded wrong. His father would have told him that, and his mother, too, had she lived. But they were long gone and the only family member left to give some guidance was Alfred; his uncle’s scrambled mind still lurked in the remnants of the second Peninsular Campaign under Wellington, reality lost in the scarred remains of his left temple.

Stephen would have sworn had he been alone, but the sunset crept over her upturned face, painting untarnished skin the blush pink of dusk. The very sight of her took his breath away. Like an angel offering redemption to a sinner, her fragile stillness warming a heart long since encased in ice.

‘Keep the pendant, madam, for I should wish another payment altogether, here in the open air and far from any community.’ The beat of his rising want hummed beneath the banter. Part of him knew he should not voice a request that was as inappropriate as it was banal, but the larger part of him ignored such a warning. He was a man who had lived for years in the land of shadows and ill repute and it had rubbed off on him, he supposed. Aye, he almost welcomed the distance scandal had brought, though sometimes, like now, a crack appeared, small and fragile, and a worm of longing for the good life that he might have lived wriggled through. He should turn and walk away, protecting the little decency still left inside him.

But he didn’t.

Instead he said that which had been building from the first moment of meeting her. ‘All I want as payment is a kiss, given freely and without anger.’

She waved such a notion away, the diamond clutched awkwardly in her hand. ‘You do not understand, my lord, it is my sister whom I need you to introduce into polite society. It is not a liaison for myself that I seek here… .’

‘Then I refuse your terms.’

She was silent and still, long slender fingers worrying the dark folds of her skirt, and further away the birds gathered for a last chorus before slumber.

‘Only a kiss, you say?’ Whispered. Unbelieving.

The deep blush of blood bloomed under paleness.

He would know her name soon enough and then he would despise her as everybody else did, and too late to change it. But a chance for Leonora to be in the top echelons of London’s Society was not to be dallied with.

One chance.

Fate had a way of occasionally throwing a lifeline and who was she to refuse? Even had he asked for more she could not have said no. For Leonora and for the twins. The stakes had risen as their circumstances had declined and with Papa…She shook her head. She would not think of him.