Glancing at her, he saw a frown take over her fine features.
“That . . . isn’t all that easy to explain.”
The intersection of Chichester and Claverton streets was still some yards away. “We have a few minutes, at least.”
After a moment, she exhaled. “If you must know, we were orphaned very young. The three of us—our older sister, Roderick, and I—were brought up by two aunts, our mother’s elder sisters. In light of our background, we must, understandably, always behave with the utmost respectability, but”—she gestured—“young boys will be boys, so it fell to my sister and me to . . . shield Roderick.”
“So you’ve been protecting him for what? Twenty years?”
“More than that. Hence it’s become an ingrained habit.” They turned the corner and she added, “One I’m clearly going to have to break.”
He wished her luck with that; long-standing protective habits weren’t easy to mute, let alone eradicate.
They were nearing the house he knew was Roderick’s. As they approached the mouth of the alley that ran alongside the gardens, she slowed. “I prefer to use the garden gate.”
She diverted down the alley. Without comment, he followed.
The garden gate lay midway down the property. Miranda halted before it, lifted the latch, pushed the solid wooden gate open, then paused and looked at Roscoe. “Thank you for your escort.”
In the faint light, she saw his lips twist cynically. “Even if it was, in your eyes, unnecessary?”
She regarded him, then said, “It was the gentlemanly thing to do.” She dipped her head. “Good night.”
“Good night, Miss Clifford.”
Turning, she stepped through the gate—and tripped on the low stone step.
Steely fingers gripped her elbow.
Sensation—unnerving and intense—shot up her arm.
He held her up, steadied her.
Straightening, she gulped in a breath, struggled to steady her senses. Her heart was thudding. A second passed, then she forced herself to look at him, now much closer, a superbly masculine rock by her side—suddenly so much more real, and infinitely more dangerous.
“Thank you. Again.” She forced the words out, grateful that her voice sounded passably even.
He looked down at her, dark eyes searching her face, then, his own expression impassive, utterly unreadable, he released his grip on her elbow . . . slowly, as if, finger by finger, he had to force himself to let go.
Then he stepped back into the alley, briefly—almost curtly—nodded. “Good night, Miss Clifford.”
She managed to draw a freer breath. Nodded back as she reached for the gate. “Thank you . . . Roscoe—and good night.”
She shut the solid panel, stood staring at it as her thudding pulse slowed.
As the unprecedented wave of sensation slowly ebbed.
Hauling in a long breath, she lifted her head, turned, and walked toward the house.
Roscoe stood for a full minute inwardly frowning at the closed garden gate, then swung away and continued down the alley, taking the shortcut back to his house.
Miss Clifford—he didn’t know her first name, but it would be in his file on Roderick if he cared to look—was . . . different from the usual, run-of-the-mill lady.
Different in exactly what way he wasn’t sure. Sinking his hands into his pockets, he pondered the point as he strolled unhurriedly home.
Admittedly, she was older than the usual ton miss; he didn’t know her age, but she was older than Roderick, he judged by at least five years. Twenty-eight years old seemed about right, and would in part account for her strength—the sort of inner strength a man of his experience recognized instantly. Yet despite that strength, she’d seemed . . . off-balance, uncertain.
Not quite sure of herself in a rather strange way.
That moment when courtesy of the garden step and her trip he’d touched her flared in his mind. It had been a long time since he’d felt such a jolt of sensual awareness, if he ever had; it had been amazingly intense. That she’d felt it, too, wasn’t in question; he’d seen the truth in her wide eyes, her parted lips, had heard it in her suddenly shallower breathing.
Regardless, any thought of further exploring the possibilities suggested by that moment of stark attraction was, he judged, doomed. Unless he missed his guess, Miss Clifford had shut the gate, and in so doing had shut him permanently out of her life.
“In light of our background, we must, understandably, always behave with the utmost respectability.”
Contrary to her expectation, he didn’t understand why she thought that, but if she was rigidly wedded to respectability, then the very last man she would be interested in developing any degree of acquaintance with was London’s gambling king.
He walked on for several minutes, then, lips twisting cynically, he looked ahead and increased his pace. The reality of his life lay waiting.
Miranda dallied in the cool of the gardens until her violently jarred senses had settled back into their customary quiescent, if not somnolent, state. She’d never felt such a spark—had never before felt alive in such a way. She didn’t want to think what that meant. From the first her instincts had warned that Roscoe was dangerous; clearly they hadn’t been wrong. She was beyond sure she didn’t need such a distraction in her life—anywhere near her respectable life.
Finally setting the episode aside as a never-to-be-repeated experience, she crossed to the side terrace and entered the house through the morning room French doors. The morning room was largely her domain; going to the escritoire, she set her reticule on the desk, then swung her cape off her shoulders and draped it over the back of the chair.
Her thoughts circled back to Roderick’s project and the work of the Philanthropy Guild. Crossing to the door, she opened it; through the dense shadows of the downstairs hall she walked to the stairs and started climbing.
A pale-robed figure loomed out of the shadows on the landing.
Miranda very nearly squeaked. Swallowing her shock—it seemed to be a night for shocks of all kinds—her hand at her throat, she fought to catch her breath. “Aunt—you frightened me.”
“Indeed, miss—and you frighten me.” Gladys glared at her, then gestured with her cane. “Where have you been, heh? Coming inside at such an hour—how many times have you heard me say—”
“I was merely walking in the gardens. Roderick had gone out—you know I can’t sleep until he gets home, so I was wasting time until he did.”
Gladys humphed. “He came in a good half hour ago—he’s probably already snoring.”
“Yes, I know—I got distracted.” By London’s gambling king.
“You need to be more careful, my girl.” Gladys ponderously turned and started to heave her considerable bulk back up the stairs. “Never forget you can’t afford even a whisper of improper behavior.”
Following, Miranda let her aunt’s well-rehearsed admonitions flow over her; she’d heard the litany so many times the words were engraved on her soul.
Gladys halted at the top of the stairs, forcing Miranda to halt lower down. Turning her head, Gladys bent a sharp look down at Miranda and delivered her invariable culminating exhortation. “You don’t want to end like your mother and your sister, do you?”
Stifling a sigh, Miranda dutifully replied, “No, Aunt. I don’t.”
Gladys humphed again, then waddled on to her room. “Roderick’s a wealthy gentleman—society won’t bat an eye over him coming in late. But you, girl—just one false step and your reputation will be shredded. Never forget—respectability is all.”
On that ringing note, Gladys stomped through the open door to her room and shut it.
Suddenly feeling claustrophobic, Miranda dragged in a breath, let it out on a sigh, then continued down the corridor, and into her room at its end.
Closing the door, she paused, all but palpably feeling the restraints of her aunt’s doctrine of inviolate respectability cinching around her.
Weig
hing her down. Hemming her in.
Trapping her. Smothering her.
While she’d been focused on saving Roderick, through her interaction with Roscoe and the walk back to the house, that feeling of being smothered, of being restricted and restrained—of being, as the Bard had put it, “cabined, cribbed, confined”—had weakened, eased.
Grimacing, she walked to her dressing table and started getting ready for bed. Tonight had been a momentary escape. A fleeting few hours in a different world, one that operated under different license.
But this was her real life, where she had to guard against putting so much as a toe wrong, where if she was ever to have a life of her own she had to, at all times and in all ways, adhere without the slightest deviation to propriety’s dictates.
Courtesy of those few hours of freedom, the returning weight of society’s expectations felt heavier than ever, a millstone around her neck. One that, according to her aunts, she especially could never escape.
Not if she expected to have more of a life than her ill-fated mother and sister.
Gown and chemise doffed, her nightgown donned, she lifted the covers and slid into bed. Turning on her side, she gazed at the window—at the moonlit night outside.
“Sometimes, I wonder.” Her voice was so low she barely heard the words. “They might have died, but at least for a few years they were happy.”
After a moment, she settled her cheek on the pillow, closed her eyes, and sank into slumber within her prescribed world—the one in which respectability ruled.
Chapter Two
Miranda next came face-to-face with her aunt over the breakfast table the following morning.
Iron-gray hair scraped back in a tight bun, her heavy figure concealed beneath multiple layers of fluttering draperies, already engaged with reading her correspondence, Gladys merely hmmed when Miranda greeted her.
Sitting and thanking Hughes, their butler, for the fresh pot of tea he set before her, Miranda busied herself with pouring a cup, then helped herself to toast, waiting for Gladys to make some reference to their midnight meeting on the stairs, but as the minutes ticked past in blessed silence it seemed Gladys’s correspondents had succeed in diverting her mind. Grateful for the reprieve, Miranda did nothing to draw her aunt’s attention.
As usual, Roderick had already broken his fast and gone out riding. She crunched, sipped, and pondered the revelations of the evening, in particular Roscoe’s assertion that her brother had grown to be a steady young man, and the implication that Roderick therefore no longer needed her protection.
“Well, miss!”
She glanced at Gladys. Pince-nez perched on the end of her long nose, her aunt was holding a letter almost at arm’s length as she perused it.
“It seems that Mr. Wraxby still has you in his sights. He writes that he’ll be visiting town next week and will look to call on us.” Lowering the letter, Gladys focused sharp brown eyes on Miranda. “So you still have a chance there. Mr. Wraxby is everything and more Corrine and I might have hoped for you.”
Corrine had been Gladys’s elder sister; spinsters both, and bitterly resentful of what they’d termed their younger sister Georgiana’s irresponsible love-match, the pair had nevertheless assumed responsibility for Georgiana’s three children when Georgiana and her regrettable husband, Frederick Clifford, a well-educated mill owner’s son, had perished in a boating accident twenty-three years ago.
If anything, Corrine had been even more adamant than Gladys that Georgiana’s children had to consistently and devoutly worship at the altar of respectability in order to minimize the taint of that most deplorable of stigmas, Trade. The daughters of Sir Augustus Cuthbert, Baronet, as minor gentry, and determined to cling to every vestige of social advantage that station might confer, Corrine and Gladys had never allowed their wards to forget that they forever remained just one small step away from social ostracism.
When they’d all resided in the country, at Oakgrove Manor in Cheshire—the house and estate Roderick had inherited from Frederick, purchased with the despised fortune Frederick had inherited from his mill owner father—Miranda hadn’t found the social restrictions imposed by their aunts either remarkable or onerous. Having lived under her aunts’ thumbs from the age of six, their view of the world had been all she’d known.
But the years had passed, and on Corrine’s death two years ago, with Miranda still unwed and with suitors thin on the ground, Gladys had agreed that they—Roderick and Miranda with Gladys as chaperon—should spend a few years in London, assessing the marital opportunities there, for Roderick as well as Miranda.
Roderick had bought the Claverton Street house, and a year ago they’d moved to Pimlico, only on the fringes of the expanding metropolis, but the quieter area had found favor with Gladys.
Miranda wondered if anyone had ever mentioned to her aunt that the neighborhood was also the home of London’s most notorious gambling lord. . . .
“Miranda! Pay attention!”
She blinked, dispelling the image of a chiseled face with dark eyes and a sardonic expression. “I’m sorry, Aunt. Wraxby, you said?”
“Indeed.” Gladys’s eyes were hard chips of cloudy onyx. “You’d do well to reflect on the fact that after so foolishly rejecting the Honorable Mr. Jeffers, you’ve never had another offer. If you ever want a household of your own, you’d do well to keep your mind on the task of landing Mr. Wraxby. Put yourself out to be everything he’s looking for in a wife, and the signs are that he might well offer for you.”
“Indeed, Aunt.” Miranda looked down at her plate. “I daresay you’re right.”
Jeffers. Despite the passage of time, the name still shook her. Depressed her. The memory opened a deep well of bruised emotions, of lasting, lingering, deadening self-doubt.
Lionel Jeffers had been a Cheshire gentleman, rather older than the usual suitor, but that had only made his attentiveness toward her twenty-year-old self seem more special. She’d been swept off her feet, and had for a short time lived in hope that she would find the sort of happiness her mother and sister had aspired to, until a kind matron had told her the truth. Jeffers wasn’t interested in her, only in her fortune.
Bad enough, but when, shattered and dismayed, she’d told her aunts, they’d blinked at her uncomprehendingly. They’d known the basis of Jeffers’s interest, and of the existence of his long-standing and very expensive mistress, all along.
Recollection of the railings and recriminations that had followed her rejection of Jeffers still held the power to make her shudder.
Roscoe would be about the same age Jeffers had been . . . but she wasn’t twenty anymore.
Hauling her mind from the distraction—from the face and the body that had, last night, invaded her dreams—she forced her mind to the here and now. “Next week . . . I’ll make sure the house will be presentable, and I’ll warn Cook that we’ll be entertaining and wish to show our best.”
“Do that,” Gladys forcefully replied. She ran critical eyes over Miranda. “At least now it’s cooler, your gowns have long sleeves. Wraxby seemed taken aback when he last visited and your summer gowns showed too much skin. I’m quite sure that was one of the aspects that made him hesitate. Make sure this time that you give him no reason to question your respectability.”
“Yes, Aunt.” Miranda pushed back from the table and rose. “I must speak with Mrs. Flannery.”
Gladys dismissed her with a wave.
Heading to the morning room for her daily meeting with the housekeeper, Miranda bludgeoned her brain into providing an image of Wraxby—a forty-something-year-old widower who lived in Suffolk, and who had spotted her in Bond Street and subsequently sought her out. She studied her mental picture of that stultifyingly reserved gentleman . . .
She’d known Wraxby for nearly a year, Roscoe for just one evening.
Yet Wraxby had never appeared in her dreams.
“Gelman is waiting downstairs and, as requested, he’s brought Jennifer Edger with him.”
>
Seated in the admiral’s chair behind the massive desk in his study, Roscoe glanced up from the ledger he was perusing—the monthly accounts from the Pall Mall Club, which Gelman managed for him—and arched a cynical brow at Jordan Draper.
Brown-haired, brown-eyed, garbed in a brown suit deliberately designed to make him appear innocuous, Jordan, returning from checking downstairs, crossed to the desk and took his customary seat on Roscoe’s right.
“And how are they getting along?” Roscoe inquired. “Any hints of acrimony? Of Jenny wanting to slit Gelman’s throat, or vice versa?”
Jordan grinned. “Actually, no. Your lecture last month appears to have borne fruit.”
Roscoe snorted. “We’ll see.” He returned his gaze to the columns of figures. After a moment, admitted, “Regardless of whether they kill each other or not, the club’s doing well.”
“Yes.” Jordan leaned forward, pointing to a series of subtotals and explaining his projections for the coming months.
Roscoe listened and learned; he might have the world’s best head for figuring odds, but he remained eternally grateful that Jordan had, years ago, consented to leave his father’s country-based practice and throw his lot in with him. Over the last twelve years, while he’d grown and developed his now massive empire of clubs, dens, and hells, Jordan had stood, quiet and self-effacing, by his side—and made sure every last farthing was accounted for.
Even now, while he thought in multiples of thousands of pounds, Jordan was likely to chase a shilling.
In the matter of building his gambling empire, and in the even more difficult and ongoing challenge of managing what was in essence a massive enterprise built of myriad small units, they’d become a near invincible team. There was no one he trusted more than Jordan Draper.
After studying the accounts for another five minutes, he sat back. “Let’s have them up.” He looked at the footman standing beside the distant door. “Fetch Mr. Gelman and Miss Edger, Tomkins.”
The footman—rather larger and distinctly heavier than the general run of fashionable footmen—nodded and left on his errand.