Kasey Michaels - Much Ado About Rogues

“Come along? I’d rather you didn’t order me about, Jack. It only serves to make me feel rebellious, and as I’m extremely thirsty, that would only be cutting off my nose to spite my face.”

“And such a pretty nose, too. All right.” He offered her his bent arm. “An it pleases you, milady, I would suggest we adjourn to the drawing room for refreshments. Lemonade, perhaps?”

She looked him up and down, as if inspecting him for vulnerable spots she might attack. “Arrogant and condescending, and both displayed within the space of a minute. Two of your less attractive traits, Jack, as I recall. Just lead the way, all right? I want to get the taste of road dust out of my mouth.”

Signaling to the sleepy-eyed cook who’d just appeared in the kitchens that food would be welcome, Jack led the way through the mansion to the drawing room. While Tess collapsed rather inelegantly on one of the satin couches, he poured them each full glasses of wine and offered one to her. Only Tess could act so rough and ready and still be the most beautiful, feminine woman he’d ever seen.

She downed it in one go. Ah, the French, weaned on wine from the cradle. He sometimes wondered if she could drink him under the table.

“That’s better,” she said, holding out the empty glass to him to be refilled. “Now, I’ve had an idea.”

“Not tonight, Tess. Sinjon’s been in London for more than a week. One more night won’t matter. Either we’re in time, or we’re already too late. We’ve other things to discuss.”

She shifted slightly in her seat. “True, but I don’t want to discuss them.”

“And yet that’s just what we’re going to do.” Jack took up a position in front of the fireplace, one arm resting on the mantelpiece below a portrait of the Marquess of Blackthorn.

It proved a bad choice.

“That’s your father?” Tess put down her wineglass and stood up, walking closer to inspect the portrait of a younger marquess, handsome, blond, fair of skin and blue of eye, the portrait probably commissioned when he was much the same age Jack was now. “You don’t favor him. Is your mother dark?”

“No,” Jack answered shortly.

“No?” Tess looked at the portrait again, at Jack again. “Your mother’s fair, then? Like me?”

“Adelaide is nothing like you, and you’re nothing like her. If you were, that child upstairs would never have happened. We’re here to discuss Jacques, and why you kept him from me.”

He shouldn’t have bothered to attempt to divert her. Tess, presented with a puzzle, was like a dog with a bone. She clamped on, and wouldn’t let go. “Your brothers. Oliver LeBeau and Robin Goodfellow to your Don John. All named for Shakespearean characters, courtesy of your actress mother. Don John was a bastard, Jack. I’ve never much cared for Shakespeare, I’ll admit, but I did learn that. Are the other two characters also bastards?”

“No, they’re not. And my brothers prefer to be known as Beau and Puck. Just as I prefer Jack. Why didn’t you tell me? My son, Tess. My son .”

He may as well not have spoken.

“Are they also dark? Beau and Puck?”

Jack deserted the mantelpiece for the drinks table, pouring himself another glass of wine. He never should have brought her here. He could have taken her to his house in Half Moon Street, but he preferred the mansion as being safer for Jacques. “They favor their parents,” he said, and then turned to challenge Tess with his eyes. “You’re not going to stop, are you?”

“Would you?” she asked him, standing her ground. “You once told me you didn’t belong anywhere. I thought you were referring to your bastard birth. It had to be difficult, must still be difficult, to be the bastard son of a marquess. Neither fish nor fowl, as it were, I suppose, not knowing precisely where you fit, if anywhere. But we’re in your father’s mansion, and you clearly not for the first time. The marquess seems to be generous to his bastards.”

She was working it through, piece by piece, and Jack allowed it, mostly because he knew he couldn’t stop her.

“Is he similarly generous to your mother?”

“I suppose you’d have to ask her. He ordered a cottage built on the estate for her, and she stays there when she isn’t traveling with the acting troupe he’s bought her. It has a thatched roof. The cottage, that is. She enjoys playing the country maiden. There are a few sheep, and she dresses up like a shepherdess and carries a crook with a large pink bow on—Yes, I suppose she’s content.”

“You don’t like her, do you? Your mother. It’s not her fault you’re a bastard, Jack. That’s unfair.”

Jack laughed shortly. “True. Poor Adelaide. Clearly you sympathize with her, one bastard’s mother to another.”

Tess crossed the room swiftly and slapped him hard across the cheek. “Don’t call our son a bastard!”

Jack didn’t flinch. “Pardon me. I seem to have forgotten our marriage ceremony.”

She rubbed her hands together. Her palm probably stung; God knew his cheek felt as if it was on fire. “That’s not what I meant. It’s not what you said. It’s the way you said it. As if… as if it mattered.”

“It does matter, Tess. Christ, if nobody else knows that, I do. My brothers do. We were raised on the estate. In that sprawling country house. Raised to be better than we were. Given everything save the one thing we needed. Legitimacy. That’s not how it’s going to be for my son. I’ve already sent a message to Blackthorn. The banns are being read in the village church, and one way or another—if I have to carry you to the altar over my shoulder and drugged stupid—you and I will be married in four weeks’ time. That’s what we’re discussing tonight.”

Now he’d succeeded in diverting her.

“You don’t want to marry me, Jack,” she said quietly.

“You’re right. I don’t. I wanted to marry the Tess I knew. I don’t know you. The Tess I knew wouldn’t have kept my son from me.”

“You’ve grown hard, Jack. Cold. You were never like that with me. You’re not the man I remember, either.”

“Four years is a long time,” he agreed. “A lifetime, when you’re carrying what I’ve carried with me, knowing what I know.”

“René,” she said quietly.

It was time they had this out. “Yes, René, he’s a major part of it. I changed the plan, altering it to include you and include your brother. For that I am guilty, and I’ll never forgive myself for not excluding both of you, which is what I should have done. I knew he was hot to please Sinjon, hot to impress him, prove himself.”

“Not just Papa. He wanted you to be proud of him. He worshipped you.”

“Then he was a fool. But still, there should have been another way, and I should have found it. That’s my sin, Tess, and I admit to it. But there was more, and you know that now.”

“Papa risked René to get the Gypsy.”

Jack laughed ruefully. “That’s it? That’s all you think can be put at Sinjon’s door? My God, you’re still blind, aren’t you?”

Tess’s expression closed. “I’d like to be shown to my chamber now.”

“What was the plan?” Jack shouted to her departing back. “Think, Tess. What was the plan!”

Her shoulders slumped and she turned to him, tears standing in her eyes. “I was to be the stalking horse, the decoy, the distraction,” she said quietly. “I was to stand in the glow of the streetlamp outside Covent Garden, clutching the satchel supposedly holding the money to be exchanged for Bonaparte’s next battle plan. Reveal myself, draw the man’s attention, divert him, make him in turn reveal himself so that you and Papa could take him down once he’d taken possession of the satchel.”