festooned with a tangle of bare wet wisteria branches down which they slithered. They were off and running before the first of the Bow Street men, wheezing and swearing, had emerged onto the Black Hart’s mossy roof.
An early morning crowd of market women and milkmaids, piemen and butchers’ boys filled the narrow lanes. Rounding the corner onto Great Leicester Street, Tom and Sebastian slowed to a walk, heading toward Charing Cross.
“Where we goin’ now?” asked Tom, skipping a little to keep up with Sebastian’s long-legged stride.
Sebastian hesitated, then drew from his pocket the folded note he’d written to Melanie’s sister that morning. “I have a message I’d like you to deliver to a lady. Cecilia Wainwright, in Berkeley Square.” Reaching for his purse, Sebastian counted out a handful of coins. “Here’s a shilling for the letter, and a week’s wages, besides.” There was no way to guarantee that the boy would actually deliver the message, of course. It was a chance Sebastian was going to have to take.
Tom’s unsmiling gaze dropped to the money in Sebastian’s hand, then lifted. He made no move to take the coins. “You givin’ me the heave-ho?”
Sebastian met the boy’s dark, inscrutable gaze. “I don’t think you understand. Continued association with me could very well get you hanged.”
“Naw,” said Tom with a negligent sniff. “Transported, more like. I’m scrawny enough I could let on I’m only nine and they’d believe me. They don’t send little ’uns to the nubbing cheat.” His face darkened as if clouded by a sudden, unpleasant memory. “Leastways, not usually.”
“You’ve a fancy to visit Botany Bay, do you?”
Tom shrugged. “It’s where they sent me mum.”
It was probably the complete lack of emotion in the boy’s voice that got to Sebastian more then anything else. He blew out a long, slow breath. It was an ugly practice, this business of transporting mothers and leaving their children behind to starve on the streets of London. Sebastian held out the money. “Take it.”
For an instant longer, the boy wavered, his jaw held tight. Then he took the coins and slipped the letter inside his shirt. “Where you off to?”
“There’s someone I need to see.”
Tom nodded and turned without another word, his feet dragging, his head bowed. But at the corner he paused, his head lifting as he swung back around. “What’s ’er name, then? This lady what yer so all fired anxious to meet?”
Sebastian huffed a low, startled laugh. “What makes you think it’s a lady?”
Tom grinned. “I saw it in yer face. She must be a rare looker.” He paused, his head tilting sideways. “So what’s ’er name?”
Sebastian hesitated, then shrugged. “Kat. Her name is Kat.”
“Kat? That’s no name fer a lady.”
“I never said she was a lady.”
Chapter 13
At some point during the night he’d shoved down the fine linen of her bedcovers in a fit of restlessness. Kat Boleyn propped herself up on her elbow and let her gaze travel over the broad, naked back and tight buttocks of the man beside her. He’d be a handsome man, if it weren’t for that hint of weakness about the chin. They weren’t usually so young, the men she took to her bed.
Kat rested her cheek on one palm. She’d been playing the part of this man’s mistress for four months now. At first she’d found his youthful ardor and the presents he showered upon her mildly diverting. But he was beginning to bore her. And with the Prince soon to be made Regent, staunch Tories such as Stoneleigh wouldn’t be of much use any longer. She was considering setting her sights on Samuel Whitbread, widely expected to be given an important portfolio once the passage of the Regency Bill allowed the Prince to form a new Whig government.
Yawning softly, Kat slid from Stoneleigh’s side. At least the older ones rarely stayed the night. She didn’t like it when they stayed. Now she’d have to play the part of the lover again when he awoke—at least until she could get him out of the house. Morning performances were not her best.
She slipped her bare arms into a silk wrapper and cast another glance at the tousled blond head on her pillow. She supposed he thought he had the right, since he paid the rent on the house. What he didn’t know was that the agent to whom he sent the rent money every month actually worked for Kat. In the past five years, she’d managed to buy up the mortgage not only on this house, but on three other such properties. Men were such fools. Especially the ones with proud old family names, and old money.
Quietly letting herself out the bedroom, she padded down the stairs. The drawing room was dim, the fire on the hearth unlit, the peach-colored satin drapes still drawn at the windows. The upper housemaid, Gwen, had obviously expected her mistress to sleep until noon or later. Kat went to throw open the heavy drapes and heard a voice from out of the past say, “You’re awake early.”
She spun about, one hand flying up, ridiculously, to clutch together the gaping neck of her wrap. As if her naked body hadn’t once been as familiar to this man as his was to her. As if he hadn’t touched every inch of her with his lips, and his tongue, and his incredibly gentle, clever hands.
Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, stood beside the empty hearth, one shoulder propped against the mantel, a boot heel hooked over the cold grate. He’d taken off his greatcoat and thrown it onto the back of a nearby chair. In the misty light of another dreary winter morning, he looked unkempt and dissolute and dangerous. A day’s growth of beard shadowed his cheeks, and he had a nasty gash across one side of his forehead.
She’d seen him, of course, in the ten or so months since he’d been back in England—seen him in the crowd at the theater and, once, in New Bond Street. But always from a distance. They’d both been careful to keep a distance between them.
“How did you get in?”
He pushed away from the mantel and came at her, the lines bracketing his unsmiling lips deepening, although not with amusement. Cynical lines that hadn’t been there before. “You don’t ask why I’m here.”
Once, he’d been her heart, her soul, her reason for living. Once, she’d have given up anything for him. Anything. But that was six years ago, and she was as different from that love-obsessed young girl as she was from the laughing child who’d once climbed an oak tree on the edge of a sun-filled Irish green.
He stopped before her, close enough that she could see the shadow of his day’s growth of beard and the exhaustion that pulled his features taut. Close, but not too close. Still it seemed there was to be a distance kept between them.
“Do you need money?” she asked. “Or simply an introduction to a trustworthy band of smugglers who aren’t particular about the identity of the passengers they carry across the Channel?”
He shook his head. “Do you really think I would run?”
No, he wouldn’t run. She might not know all that had happened to this man during those brutal years he was away. But she still knew this about him.
He appeared to have slept in his clothes. His cravat was gone, and what looked like dried blood stained the white cuffs of his shirt. “You look terrible,” she said.
The Sebastian she’d known, once, would have laughed at that. He didn’t. His gaze sought hers, captured it. “Tell me about Rachel York.”
His eyes were as frighteningly animalistic as she had remembered. She swung away to settle down beside the cold hearth and set to work lighting a fire. She told herself it was natural that he had come here, to ask about Rachel. She and Rachel had been starring together in the Covent Garden production of
“According to word on the streets, Rachel’s maid is saying she went to St. Matthew’s last night to meet you.” Kat glanced back at him. “Did she?”
He shook his head.
