Kasey Michaels - The Taming of the Rake

He went.

Chelsea took a sip of the wine.

It didn’t help; she was still shaking.

MUCH TO THE CHAGRIN of his valet, Beau refused to take the time to sit and be shaved, opting for a quick wash at the basin, a brief encounter with his tooth powder and a rushed combing of his hair as Sidney helped him into a clean white shirt before handing him fresh linen and buckskins and then throwing up his hands in disgust and quitting the dressing room.

Beau was still having difficulty believing that Lady Chelsea Mills-Beckman, sister of his nemesis, was downstairs, sipping wine in his drawing room. Sans chaperone, clad in a rather startlingly red riding habit and clearly expecting him to go somewhere with her.

Lady Chelsea Mills-Beckman. Knowing things she shouldn’t know. Cheeky and impertinent as she’d been as a girl … and hinting of helping him revenge himself on her brother.

While helping herself. He shouldn’t forget that. Women with ulterior motives were the norm rather than the oddity, he’d learned, and as this woman was also intelligent, he would have to be doubly on alert.

“Well, that could be considered by the less discerning as a bit of an improvement, I suppose,” Puck said, entering the dressing room to lean one shoulder against the high chest of drawers as he visually assessed his brother. “I have reconnoitered your visitor, grilling her mercilessly for details. She informs me whatever is going on is a matter of life or death. Worse, she seems astonishingly immune to my charms, which would have me descending into a pit of despair were it not that I’m secretly delighted that she has targeted you rather than me for whatever it is she’s planning. Not that I’m not here to help.”

Beau snatched up a neck cloth and hastily tied it around his throat. “Your enthusiasm for throwing yourself down in the path to protect me nearly unmans me,” he grumbled, realizing he’d just tied a knot in the neck cloth—rather like a noose.

“You’re welcome. Disregarding female enthusiasm for melodrama, do you think she’s right? The brother is a nasty piece of work, as I recall. Are you sure you wish to become embroiled in whatever she’s prattling on about?”

“She’s in my house, Puck.”

“Our house, not to quibble about such a small point. But, as I am also here, I believe I should be apprised of whatever the devil it is I’ve somehow become embroiled in myself, if only by association. She’s ordered me to hide her horse and groom, and then to advise Sidney to pack a bag for you, as you will be leaving within the hour. Which, naturally, begs the question—where are we going?”

Beau shrugged into a hacking jacket and took one last, quick look at his reflection in the mirror above the dressing table. “ We are not going anywhere,” he told his brother. “Whatever the mess, I brought it on myself by being idiot enough to think I was a cat, toying with a mouse. I should have let it go, Puck, years ago. But, for once, it’s my idiocy, not yours. You’re not involved.”

“What? You’d leave me here to face the wrath of the brother? I think not. If I’m not to go with you, I’ll inform Gaston to pack me up and I’ll be back off to Paris. The weather is better, for one thing, and the food at least edible. I damn near cracked a tooth on that bacon our cook dared serve me. We should sack him.”

Beau turned on his brother. “You do this just to annoy me, don’t you?”

Puck pushed himself away from the dresser. “Yes, but I’ll stop now. You’re much too easy to rile, you and Jack both. Takes the joy right out of a fellow. I was listening from the terrace, you know, and heard most of what she said. You’ve really been quietly ruining the earl? I’d say that was brilliant, except that Lady Chelsea found you out, so you couldn’t be overly credited for subtlety. Comparing you to Machiavelli? Hardly. And now your pigeons seem to have come home to roost.”

“We can’t know that. Not unless the damned woman left her brother a note before she ran off. Because she did run off, Puck, that much is obvious. It’s what women do. Without a thought to anyone else perhaps not agreeing to become an actor in their small melodrama.”

“Yes, you’re right,” Puck agreed as he followed Beau down the hall to a small room he used as his private study. “She would have been better off applying to Mama. She dearly adores a melodrama. But when I left her to come to town, she was about to begin a tour of the Lake District with her troupe. I hadn’t the heart to tell her she’s getting a little long in the tooth to play Juliet, but as long as Papa finances the troupe, she has her pick of roles and no one gainsays her. Are you listening to me? What are you doing messing around in that cabinet?”

Beau turned back to his brother, the wooden case that held a pair of dueling pistols in his hands. He then opened a long wooden box kept on a sideboard and pulled out both the sword and belt he’d taken to war with him and a short, lethal-looking knife kept safe inside its sheath. “See that these are taken downstairs, if you please. I probably won’t need the sword, but I know I’ll want the knife.”

Puck frowned as the weapons were thrust at him. “Really? Would you be wanting me to hunt up a piece of field artillery as well while I’m at it? You really think the brother will come here, don’t you?”

“I was unprepared once, Puck. That won’t happen again. Now, take yourself off and do what you said you were going to do—get yourself prepared to return to Paris. This may all come to nothing, but the girl knows things she shouldn’t have guessed, and I’m going to believe her until she says something that changes my mind. Damn, what a morning—if I’d known this last night I wouldn’t have crawled so far into the bottle with you.”

“Yes, of course, blame me. It was a terrible thing, how I held your nose pinched shut and poured three bottles of wine down your gullet as we celebrated your birthday.”

“In case you’re about to add that the woman downstairs is some sort of birthday present from the gods, let me warn you—don’t.” Beau left his brother where he stood and headed downstairs to where Lady Chelsea was now pacing the Aubusson carpet, slapping her gloves against her palm.

She was, upon reflection—something, according to her, he didn’t have time for—a startlingly beautiful woman. He remembered that, as a child, she’d shown a promise of beauty, but that he’d believed she’d never hold a candle to her sister. Time had proved him wrong.

He’d seen Madelyn a time or two on his visits to London since his return from the war, driving in the park in an open carriage. The years had not been kind to her. She’d developed lines around her mouth, which seemed pinched now rather than pouting, and the nearly white-blond hair aged her rather than flattered her. She looked like what she was—a haughty, clearly unhappy woman.

He’d learned she had taken lovers over the years, sometimes without employing enough discretion, and her reputation, as well as her standing in Society, had suffered. For that, she blamed her brother, and the two of them had not spoken since their father’s death. She also probably blamed Beau, as well, for her fall began only after what he thought of now as The Incident.

But Beau had taken little satisfaction from any of Madelyn’s problems. To him, justice had been served up very neatly to Lady Madelyn for what she had done.

It was Thomas Mills-Beckman who had yet to feel justice come down on his neck. Hence the cat, toying with the mouse’s purse strings.

And now, pacing his drawing room, full of cryptic statements and offers to help him administer that justice, was this intriguing and maddening young woman, fallen into his hands either like a ripe plum or as the agent of disaster, clearly wanting to get some of her own back on her brother and eager to use Beau to help her.