Praise for USA TODAY bestselling author

KASEY

MICHAELS

‘Kasey Michaels aims for the heart and never misses.’

—New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts

‘The historical elements…imbue the novel with powerful realism that will keep readers coming back.’

—Publishers Weekly on A Midsummer Night’s Sin

‘A poignant and highly satisfying read…filled with simmering sensuality, subtle touches of repartee, a hero out for revenge and a heroine ripe for adventure. You’ll enjoy the ride.’

—RT Book Reviews on How to Tame a Lady

‘Michaels’s new Regency miniseries is a joy… You will laugh and even shed a tear over this touching romance.’

—RT Book Reviews on How to Tempt a Duke

‘Michaels has done it again… Witty dialogue peppers a plot full of delectable details exposing the foibles and follies of the age.’

—Publishers Weekly, starred review, on The Butler Did It

“Michaels can write everything from a light-hearted romp to a far more serious-themed romance. [She] has outdone herself…’

—RT Book Reviews on A Gentleman By Any Other Name (Top Pick)

‘[A] hilarious spoof of society wedding rituals wrapped around a sensual romance filled with crackling dialogue reminiscent of The Philadelphia Story.’ —Publishers Weekly on Everything’s Coming Up Rosie

Dear Reader,

It’s always a bit sad for me when I have to say goodbye to beloved characters. But having been the one to set the Blackthorn brothers on their journeys in the first place, it was wonderful to watch them as they found their way to their destinations.

You see, with the Blackthorn brothers, as with any book I write, my ‘people’ take over. They go where I never planned to send them, do things that surprise and even shock me, and say things that make me laugh and cry.

Jack Blackthorn and his Tess, for instance, kept me up nights worrying about them. These are two people who could very easily have become victims, were it not for their strong characters, their determination and the love they share… even when they’re butting heads.

In all three books, The Taming of the Rake (Beau’s book), A Midsummer Night’s Sin (Puck’s book) and Much Ado About Rogues, there are a lot of outside struggles, dangers to be met and defeated, problems to be solved. But the real stories between the covers are Beau and Puck and Jack, and the sort of men they are… the kind of men they become. And, most definitely, the women who dare to love them.

Happy reading!

Kasey Michaels

Much Ado About
Rogues

Kasey

Michaels

THE BLACKTHORN BROTHERS

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Marcia Evanick,

one of the best friends a person could have,

a marvellous writer and truly the bravest lady I know.

I love you, Marci!

Speak low if you speak love.

—William Shakespeare Much Ado About Nothing

PROLOGUE

DICKIE CARSTAIRS, pudgy of body and pleasantly vacant-eyed, stood a little too close to the yellow circle of lamplight across the street from the Duck and Wattle to remain undetected. That was Dickie’s job, to be detected, and he performed this office with such brilliance that government clerk Miles Duncan was not only confident but smiling as he nipped out the back door of the inn whilst Dickie was so obviously watching the front.

The smile faded quickly as a firm hand clapped down on his shoulder even as a sharp tug on the satchel he carried relieved him of its burden. “Good evening, Mr. Duncan. Going somewhere? Mind if we join you?”

Miles Duncan did mind, but not for long, all his earthly cares forgotten as he slipped almost gracefully into the fetid puddle that had once been the contents of several chamber pots recently dumped from an upstairs window. Poor Miles Duncan, another victim of the violent crime rampant in certain quarters of London.

Will Browning calmly retrieved his knife from Duncan’s mortal remains and wiped the blade on the deceased’s coat. He then slid the weapon into the cuff of his boot before relieving the dead man of his purse and inferior garnet stickpin, to lend credence to the crime of robbery. “Jack? Mind if we join you? What a strange choice of words. Not where he just went if you don’t mind, thank you.”

Don John Blackthorn, best known as Black Jack, was already undoing the flap of the satchel, to assure himself the pilfered papers the prime minister had commissioned them to retrieve were inside. “Very well, Will. Next time you talk, and I’ll wield the sticker.”

“Ha! Isn’t it just like you to want the fun for yourself.”

Jack ignored the remark, knowing Will Browning employed his knife and sword without conscience or compunction. It was probably a good thing he’d found government service; otherwise, he’d have been hanged by now.

They were an odd trio of rogues. Dickie, third son of an earl, was socially inept, regarded as pleasant enough but rather dim, yet one of the bravest men Jack had ever met. Not just anyone would constantly set himself up as the most visible and vulnerable target. Dickie’s was the public face that made it possible for the rest to work.

Will was the weapon. Handsome, wealthy, smooth, an impeccably dressed darling of the ton, and always ready with a pleasant word and a smile. His sense of right and wrong, however, was his own, and quite singular. There was a certain civilized madness about Will. If you knew you weren’t quite a friend, you never wished to be his enemy.

And then there was Jack, the brains and nominal leader of the trio. Jack, who’d never quite felt at home anywhere. Bastard son of the Marquess of Blackthorn, he hadn’t felt at home on the estate, with his brothers, or with the world in general. He was different, and he’d recognized that difference early in life. He had a fire deep inside him, a need that he couldn’t articulate, let alone grasp. That had made him a wild, impulsive youth, and he’d learned life’s lessons the hard way.

Finding work as one of the government’s most trusted covert agents had fed the fire, for a time. Now he was growing tired of always being on the outside of life, the observer, never a real participant. Once, he’d thought he’d found the answer, a way to the unnameable acceptance he’d always been seeking, the one place where he knew he would fit. But then he’d lost his way, his purpose in living, and knew he could never get it back. Get her back. What he did now was merely exist from mission to mission.

“It’s all there?” Will asked as Dickie joined them, both of them leaning in to see the contents Jack quickly began returning to the satchel.

“I wasn’t made privy to an inventory, but there’s enough here that Lord Liverpool should be satisfied,” Jack answered noncommittally. “And more diligent about whom he trusts with the Crown’s business in future. In any event, we’ll be well recompensed for tonight’s work, and that’s what matters—correct, gentlemen?” He hesitated for a moment, and then pulled one of the pages back out of the packet when he saw a name he recognized. “Damn.”

“Shouldn’t be reading that, Jack,” Dickie pointed out. “We know too much, we could end up like our friend here, and I don’t much care for the neighborhood.”

“He’s not listening, Dickie,” Will pointed out. “You’re scowling more than usual, Jack. Is there a problem?”

Jack was still reading. “You could say that. It would seem the Marquis de Fontaine has gone missing.”

“Really? Haven’t heard that name in a while. Your mercenary mentor in the dark arts during the war, wasn’t he? And then there was that business with you and his daughter. Tess, correct? You never said, but I’m assuming that ended badly.”

“He doesn’t talk about it, no,” Dickie told Will quietly when Jack didn’t answer, but only replaced the page and closed the satchel.

“Still, the war’s over, more’s the pity, or else we’d still be hunting adversaries more worthy of our time than overly ambitious clerks, and de Fontaine has been pensioned off, or whatever we do with mercenaries we no longer need. So what does Liverpool care if the fellow’s taken a flit?”

Dickie carefully stepped over the late, overly ambitious Miles Duncan as Jack led the way out of the alley. “Old secrets or new, they’re probably all the same to Liverpool, yes, Jack?”

“Governments never want to give up their secrets,” Jack answered shortly. The mention of Tess, coming out of the blue along with seeing her father’s name, had set off a cascade of memories he’d rather stay dammed up behind the stone wall he’d built for them in his brain.

“So what are they going to do about the missing marquis, Jack?” Will asked as they climbed into the unmarked coach waiting at the end of the alley.

“Find him,” Jack said at last. “Liverpool’s memorandum to his secretary concerns my next small project for the Crown. It has been decided that, since I know him best, I’m to be asked to find Sinjon.”

“Liverpool wants to know what he might be up to since they set him out to pasture? That seems reasonable enough,” Will said, settling back against the squabs.

“Yes, reasonable enough. Find him. Question him,” Jack said, twisting the gold-and-onyx ring on his right index finger as the image of Tess’s sad, beautiful face seemed to float in front of him inside the dark coach. “And then, for the good of king and country, eliminate him.”

CHAPTER ONE

LADY THESSALY FONTENEAU sat perched on the window seat, her slim frame and riot of tumbling blond curls outlined by the sun shining through the windowpanes behind her.

Her long legs, encased in high, dark brown leather boots and tan buckskins, were bent at the knee, her heels pressed against a low stool shaped like a camel saddle. She was leaning slightly forward, her arms akimbo, her palms pressed against her thighs, her face in shadow. The white, full-sleeved lawn shirt she wore had been sewn for a larger frame, and rather billowed around her above the waistband, the deep V of the neck exposing the soft swell of breasts beneath the worn brown leather vest.

Just above her breasts hung the oval gold locket suspended from a thin golden chain. A pair of painted images were inside, one old, one newer, both painted by the marquis himself. The locket had hung from a black velvet ribbon until her father had pointed out that one should never wear a weapon in aid of the enemy: a thin chain will break, but a tightly knotted ribbon makes for a tolerable garrote.

She possessed the sort of classic beauty artists wept to paint. Aristocratic, finely boned. Gallic to the marrow. Yet with an air of sensuality about her, in those high cheekbones, that slim, straight nose, the wide, tempting mouth, those darkly lashed hazel eyes.

Those eyes, awash now with tears she refused to let fall.

“Where, Papa?” she breathed, surveying the shambles that was once the Marquis de Fontaine’s neat study, now searched to within an inch of destroying it completely. Her anger, her frustration, her growing fear, it was all there in the aftermath of her latest search, evidence as damning to her as would be a bloody knife in her hand as she stood over a body. “There has to be something. You would have left me something.”

Tess had instituted her search of the modest manor house a week ago, the day after her father’s disappearance. She’d been slow, neat, methodical, as she’d been taught to be.

She’d begun with the servants, who either knew nothing or said nothing. You never knew with servants, where their loyalty truly stood, if anywhere. Her papa had never employed any of the staff for long, as familiarity invited a relaxation of one’s guard; a paper carelessly left on the wrong side of a locked drawer, an unguarded word spoken at the table, with a servant still in the room. Always assume you are among enemies, he’d advised. It’s safer than relaxing with those you think friends.

It had been a trusted servant who had betrayed her father all those long years ago, he’d told her, and the marquis’s beloved Marie Louise who had paid the terrible price for her husband’s indiscretion.

No, the servants knew nothing, save for the one who had immediately reported the marquis’s absence to London. She’d known about that within days, having gone to the village to beg to be allowed more credit at the grocers until the end of the quarter, only to return home with a woefully inept government tail wagging behind her.

There had been no reason to dismiss the servants now, or to bother ferreting out the one who had tattled to Liverpool. Whomever she’d hire, one of them would be there expressly to spy on her. Save for Emilie, who had come with them when they’d escaped Paris all those years ago. Thank God for Emilie.

And no reason to hide the fact that she didn’t know where her father had gone, or why he’d left, or if he’d ever be coming back. Indeed, it was imperative that she let everyone see her lack of knowledge as to what her father might be planning or doing at this very moment. Her safety depended on her ignorance. That’s why she’d found no note, was given no warning. He’d been protecting her.

“But he would have left me something, something to assure me he’s all right,” Tess said aloud, pushing away the stool in a renewed burst of energy and getting to her feet. “I’m just not seeing it, that’s all.”

Pulling a key from her vest pocket, she approached the special cabinet the marquis had ordered built into the room, and inserted it in the lock. She pulled the glass doors open to reveal shelving holding various artifacts her father had bought or traded for over the past two decades. His treasures, he called them, some of them Roman, some Greek, most Egyptian. Bits of stone, chipped clay bowls, a small carved idol of some long-forgotten god, an ancient pipe with a broken stem. The prized possessions of a man who had traded in his love of things ancient and turned his mind, his talents, to revenge, a man at last left with nothing save these ancient, inferior relics of what had been. And a reminder of all this small family could afford, when the Marquis de Fontaine had once claimed one of the premier collections of ancient relics in all of France.

Tess hadn’t touched any of these prized possessions during her earlier searches, but they were all that was left. Her last chance.

One by one, she lifted the items from the shelves. She looked at them from every angle before depositing each piece on the desktop, her frustration building until it took everything within her not to throw the very last item, the broken pipe, into the fireplace.

Because there’d been nothing. Nothing. She put her palms on the bottom shelf and leaned her head against the edge of another, her position one of abject defeat.

“Second shelf, the left end of it. Lift it… there’s a button there. Push it, and then close the doors and step back.”

Tess couldn’t breathe. Every muscle in her body had turned to stone; heavy, immovable. Her mouth went dry, her heart stopped, then started again, each beat hurting. Hurting so bad. It was a voice she hadn’t heard in nearly four years but would never forget, could never forget. She heard it nightly, in her dreams. I love you, Tess. God help me, I love you. Let me love you…

“You?” she asked, not moving. “They sent you? That’s almost funny, Jack. The student, sent to find the master. And you came, you agreed, knowing what could be at the end of the day for the two of you.” She turned around slowly, placing her hands on the edge of the sturdy shelf behind her, knowing that otherwise she might slip to her knees, sobbing. “You, of all people.”

He remained where he stood, which was yards too close for her not to have heard him, sensed him, smelled him. Jésus doux, he still stole her breath away, just by looking at her. She knew every inch of him, had touched and tasted him, taken him in, given herself to him, even as he gave to her. A dark passion, too intense, too urgent and much too fleeting. The fire that blazed, but couldn’t be sustained.

Her dark lover. Dark of hair, dark of soul and mind and heart. Even his green eyes were dark, intense beneath those black winged brows, and unreadable. He might have been chiseled from warm stone by a master of the art, his leanly muscled body perfection itself, and life breathed into that beautiful, sometimes cruel mouth by a goddess bent on mischief once he’d been placed on the earth with all the lesser mortals.

That sensual mouth opened now; Tess was mesmerized by his lips as they curled into a brief, almost amused smile. “Fetching outfit, Tess. I doubt those buckskins flattered their original owner half so well.”

Tess snapped back to the moment, and took advantage of Jack’s remark to throw out a barb of her own. “I wouldn’t have noticed. They belonged to René.”

At the mention of her brother’s name, the winglike brows lowered, the stare became unnervingly intense. “So now you’ve made yourself over into the son? You’d do anything to please him, wouldn’t you? Have you ever succeeded?”

“Not as well as you did, no.” Another barb that hit home. Those that didn’t know him, hadn’t all but been inside his skin, wouldn’t notice. But she did. She’d hurt him. Good. They could both hurt.

Jack took a step forward. “I’m here to help, Tess, not go back over covered ground. Your brother’s dead. You and I never were what we thought we were, nor had what we thought we had. That’s the past. You don’t know where Sinjon is, do you? He’s left you here alone, to face me.”

“He couldn’t have known that you’d be the one to—” But then she stopped, shook her head. “No, he would have known that. I’m the fool who didn’t realize you’d be the one. Nobody knows him better.”

“But not well enough, apparently. I’d ask if you really don’t know where he’s gone, what he’s up to, but it’s obvious you don’t. What were you looking for?”

Tess shoved her splayed fingers through her hair, curling her hands into fists at the back of her head, not caring that she was probably only making a tangled mess worse. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “How could he have done this to me, Jack? To… to leave me with nothing?”

“I’m here,” he said, putting out his hand, but it was only to motion her aside so that he could approach the cabinet built into the wall. “He knew I’d come. He knew I’d be the one. That makes him either a genius or a fool, doesn’t it? Let’s see what he’s up to, shall we?”

He reached into the cabinet, running a hand beneath the second shelf, lifting the left end of it slightly. She heard a slight click, and then Jack stood clear, closed the cabinet doors.

As they watched, the cabinet seemed to come toward them and then began to pivot until it stood sideways, allowing them access to whatever lay beyond the opening.

Jack lit a brace of candles as Tess could only stand there, staring.

“I never… He never told me about this. He told you, but not me. Not his daughter.”

“We’re keeping score now?” Jack asked as he stepped through the opening and then turned to extend his hand, this time clearly intending that she take it.

She shook her head. “I’m fine on my own.”

Jack ran his gaze up and down her breeches-clad body. “Yes. Any fool could see that. Hug yourself close to you, Tess. Don’t let anybody in.”

“How dare you! It wasn’t me who—”

But he was gone, seemingly disappearing below her line of sight, taking the candlelight with him. Stairs. There was a flight of stairs behind the cabinet. Tess looked toward the opened door to the hallway, knowing if she left the study, Jack would want to know why she hadn’t followed him. She’d have to trust Emilie. Emilie would have learned by now that Jack had come to the manor house. She’d know what had to be done. Please, God, just this one time, toss the dice in my favor.

Tess quickly lit a candle and followed Jack down, into the depths.

WHEN HE’D GONE away, she’d still been more girl than woman.

No more.

Jack hadn’t known what to expect when he saw her again, either from her, or from himself. Seeing her had turned out to be both better and worse than he’d imagined.

The hurt was still in her eyes, undoubtedly made more raw by her father’s disappearance and his refusal to include her in his plans. This was an old pain for Tess. She’d told Jack she understood: Sinjon Fonteneau was not a demonstrative man, making him uncomfortable with any displays of emotion. He loved his daughter, yes, he did, but praise did not flow easily from his mouth. She understood, but understanding and acceptance are often strangers to each other, and Tess clearly was still trying to please her father, make him admit out loud that he was proud of her.

She was wearing René’s breeches. Because she felt less constricted dressed that way while destroying rooms in her search? Or just because that’s what she now wore? What the hell had gone on here these past four years?

With the familiarity of his former acquaintance with the underground room easing his way, Jack dipped the brace of candles again and again, lighting a dozen squat candles, illuminating the cool, dank-smelling room.

“Damn,” he bit out as he turned in a full circle, seeing what was there, taking note of what was gone.

He heard the click of Tess’s boots on the stone steps and quickly rid his face of all expression as she joined him in the center of the room.

“I’d often wondered where he kept…” she said, but then her voice trailed off. “Did René know?”

Jack nodded, not wanting to discuss the fact that Tess’s twin had been privy to this sanctum of sanctums, but she was not. Not then, not since René’s death. “He kept everything,” he said, still taking his mental inventory. “The disguises, the pots of paint and powder, the wigs.” He walked over to pick up the crude wooden crutch leaning against one of the tables. “I remember when he used this. He’d even tied up his leg beneath his greatcoat to lend more credence to his role of crippled veteran. The French lieutenant actually pushed a sou into his hand before Sinjon slashed his throat. And all of it accomplished while balanced on one leg. I’d argued against the disguise, pointed out that a one-legged man was vulnerable. I should have known better.”

“He only killed when necessary,” Tess said firmly, her belief in her father’s motives unshaken. “He only does what is necessary. Ever.”

Jack replaced the crutch and turned to her. “Yes, of course, the sainted Marquis de Fontaine. And what is so necessary for him now, Tess? The war’s over, he’s been rewarded for his service to the Crown, cut loose, left to live out his life in peace and security. That’s all he wanted, wasn’t it, all he ever said he wanted for all of you?”

“Both of us,” she corrected, wandering over to the large desk and opening the center drawer. “He never really wanted René to be like him.”

“All right, Tess, let’s do this now, get it over with,” Jack said, walking over to slam the drawer shut. “Your brother was young, foolish. And wrong. Sinjon never favored me over his own son. René had nothing to prove that night. Nothing.”

Her eyes flashed in the candlelight. “He had everything to prove. To our father—to you. He worshipped you. He wanted nothing more than to be like you. The so-brave and clever Jack. See, René, how Jack does it. Observe and learn, René, Jack will show you how it is done. Jack, so fearless as he enters the wasp’s nest. Jack, who is steel to the core, with the mind of a devil and the skills of an army. Watch him, even if you can never hope to equal him. He is one in a lifetime. Fearless.”

“Christ,” Jack bit out, putting the width of the desk between them. “Because I didn’t care. Because I had nothing to lose but my life.” Until you, he added silently.

“But it wasn’t your life that was lost, was it, Jack?”

“And do you think you’re the only one who grieves his loss? René was my friend.”

“No, he was never your friend. You have no friends, you make sure of that. I knew him better than anyone. René was meant for books and beauty, never destined to bleed out his life’s blood in that Whitechapel alley.” Tess pounded her clenched fist against her chest. “Me, Jack. I should have been there.”

“To die in his place?” Jack asked her, his voice hard, cold.

“None of you would have been in that alley if you’d allowed the original plan as my father and I drew it up, damn it, and you know it! René would never have been in any danger. We all knew he was too eager to please you and Papa, too eager to remember his lack of skill if the opportunity to… to…”

“To show off for us presented itself? Are you finally ready to admit that, Tess? Is Sinjon? Or am I still to take all the blame?”

“You convinced Papa to change the plan, to keep me out of it.”

Jack felt the fabric of his composure split. He’d never wanted Tess involved in any of their missions; that had been Sinjon’s choice to use his own children, Sinjon’s mistake. “Because I loved you!” he all but shouted, his words echoing back to him from the stone walls. “Because I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you.” He pulled himself back together, not without effort, then ended quietly, “And lost you anyway…”

Tess said nothing, the silence lasting nearly to the breaking point, turning the physical space between them into a yawning chasm that stretched across the lost years.

“Wherever he is, he’s well armed,” Jack said at last, looking toward the glass-fronted cabinet usually filled with weapons both deadly and unique. Tools of the trade. The cabinet had been the first thing his eyes had gone to when he’d entered the room, for he knew it would tell the tale. A man didn’t carry a dozen weapons into the woods with him if all he meant to do was blow out his own brains. Clearly it was destruction of some kind Sinjon had in mind when he’d done his flit, but not self-destruction.

He heard the drawer slide open once more. “There’s this,” Tess said, apparently just as eager as he was to put their recent confrontation behind them. “The Gypsy hasn’t been active in England for several years, not since… since René. Why would he have kept this?”

Jack returned to the desk to pick up the calling card Tess had placed there.

“Cheap theatrics,” he said coldly, looking at the card made of rich black stock and embossed with a golden eye with a bloodred pupil at its center. He passed it back to Tess. “I never agreed with Sinjon on that.”

“Papa says the government believes the man is Romany, and the eye symbol is that of the querret, the seeker. That’s why he was given that name. The seeker. As if he follows some higher purpose in what he does.”

Jack shook his head. As the son of an actress, he believed he could recognize a flair for the melodramatic when he saw one. “He seeks lining his pockets, and always has. Working for the French, working for anyone who will pay him, and filling the rest of his time working for himself. Whoever he is or once was, now he’s a thief and a murderer, and leaving these cards behind is his way of tipping his cap at those bent on stopping him. He’s an actor playing a part, and we who pursue him are his audience. Each time he places that card on another body, on the cushion where some treasure had been resting moments earlier, he’s taking his bow. We’d actually begun to believe him dead. But we found one of these cards a month or more ago, left behind after several very good pieces were removed from the Royal British Museum.”

Tess looked at him for long moments. “So he’s back. And you’re hunting him, aren’t you? Because of René. Because… because of everything.” Then her eyes went wide. “You… you don’t think…?”

“I don’t know, Tess. He’d have to be mad to try to find him on his own. Has he spoken of the Gypsy often?”

She sat down on the chair behind her, her long fingers tightly clasping and unclasping around the ends of the chair arms. She was nervous, a highly strung filly ready to bolt at any moment. Why? She should be searching the room, eager to see what was there. Was it him? Was it that difficult to be in the same room with him?

“Never. Not since René died. It was all over then, just as you said. The war, the assignments, the reason for the fight. Mama was still dead, and all the revenges he’d exacted for twenty years hadn’t changed that. He was given a small pension and told his services were no longer required. He still taught me things, although obviously he never trusted me, not if I wasn’t allowed to see this room.” She looked up at him. “But you know that. He’s never been quite the same since René died. Since you left. Suddenly old, and defeated.”

“I had no reason to stay, you’d made that plain enough. And it’s clear nothing’s changed there, either.”

“Not for you, certainly. You’re still working for the Crown, still doing their bidding. Which brings us back to why you’re here. You’ve as good as said Papa summoned you by disappearing. I think I know what the Crown would ask you to do once you found him. But what does Papa want from you?”

“When I find him, I’ll be sure to ask,” Jack said shortly, suddenly needing to be out of this room, out in the fresh air, away from Tess and her incisive questions.

“I won’t help you, you know. I’m not a fool. I know I can’t stop you. But I won’t help you.” She got to her feet. “In other words, Jack—for us, it ends here. I’ve seen your party trick with the cabinet and I thank you for it. But now I’m telling you to leave. You’re not welcome beneath this roof.”

He looked at her as she stood there. Magnificent. Frightened, but hiding it so well, the way she’d always done. He wanted her so badly he ached with it.

When she made to sweep past him, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her around, chest to chest with him in the flickering candlelight, her wrist still in his possession, their bent arms pressed between them. She raised her chin, stared at him in defiance, didn’t flinch, didn’t fight him, didn’t blink.

He needed her to blink.

“I know about this room, Tess. If you think there’s only one way in here, you’re not as intelligent as I gave you credit for being. I know every secret in this house, which clearly you don’t. If I want to be here, I’ll be here, with or without your permission. I will go where I want, when I want. Take what I want.”

He captured her mouth, grinding her tight against him by cupping the back of her head, holding her still as he plunged his tongue between her lips, pressed his leg between her thighs. Four years of longing, of needing, of pent-up frustration combined in that kiss, stripped him of his hard-won ability to mask his every emotion.

Her free hand snaked up his arm to his shoulder, clasping it firmly, lovingly, her fingertips lightly pressing against him. For a moment, she gave. For that moment, she let him in. For a moment, they were fire again.

And then the moment was over. She dug her fingers into him, pushing down hard on his shoulder with her hand as her knee came up swiftly, taking him and his arousal unawares. His knees buckled, his hold on her relaxed, and she was gone, leaving him to bend over where he stood, his hands on his thighs, forcing himself not to black out, or throw up.

“I taught her that,” Black Jack Blackthorn managed at last, speaking to the uncaring stone walls. And then, unbelievably, he smiled. “God, was I even alive these past four years?”

He looked at the far wall and then walked toward it, his hand out to push on one certain stone. It was time he saw what else Sinjon might be up to, what else might be missing.

CHAPTER TWO

TESS DIDN’T GO where she most longed to go, because Jack might follow her. She couldn’t risk that. Not that she was safe anywhere.

He’d said there was more than one way into her father’s secret room. But even if she managed to find the other entrance somewhere in the cellars or a third on the other side of the manor walls and block them, it would do her no good.

Jack was right. He knew the house better than she did, she who had grown up here. He knew her father better than she did.

The way he’d kissed her, perhaps he even knew her better than she did. Because she’d been a heartbeat away from surrender, from tearing at his clothes, biting him, urging him to press her down on the desktop as she wrapped her legs high around his hips, let him fill up all the empty places inside her as she took, and took, and took…

She heard Jack’s boot heels on the stone steps and quickly exited the study for the hallway, but only to press her back against the outside wall, taking herself out of sight but not earshot. If he was going to search the room now, she couldn’t stop him. But that didn’t mean she’d go off to tend to her knitting, or whatever it was she might be doing if she’d been born in a different time, to different parents, had grown to womanhood in a different, less dangerous world.

But, although Jack didn’t immediately exit the study, she heard nothing during the long minutes she stood guard. If he was searching the room, he was doing it with a stealth she could admire, if not at this moment.

Maddening! What was he doing in there? Were there more secret places her father had hidden from her? She wanted to peer around the doorjamb and see what Jack was up to. Desperately. But that would be as good as admitting her father hadn’t trusted her with his closest-held secrets, and that she needed Jack’s help. Damn him. Damn both of them.

“Boo!”

Tess nearly jumped out of her skin as Jack’s head and shoulders appeared around the doorjamb. “You’re not amusing,” she managed, trying to catch her breath.

“And you shouldn’t wear that lovely scent if you’re attempting to stay hidden,” he told her, walking into the hallway. “See that a room is made ready for me. My usual chamber… unless you want me to share yours? I’m fairly certain I could be talked round to that, if you ask prettily.”

“Go to blazes, you bastard,” she called out to his departing back, deliberately inflicting hurt where she knew it would cause the most pain.

His confident stride didn’t falter, and then he was gone.

Tess walked back into her father’s study and collapsed into his desk chair, dropping her head to her hands.

What was she going to do? She’d tried for a week—a full week!—to discover a single clue to her father’s whereabouts, cudgeled her brain attempting to remember conversations she’d had with him, hoping to recall something he’d said that might lead her to understand why he had gone, where he had gone and what he planned to do when he got there.

And nothing. If it hadn’t been that some of his clothing was missing from his clothespress, she could have thought he’d walked out into the trees and become lost, or was lying somewhere with a broken ankle, or worse. He’d been taking more and more long walks as of late, disappearing for entire afternoons. As it was, she’d spent half a day telling herself he had gone into the village and lost track of time, and half the night searching the nearby countryside before it had occurred to her that he’d simply gone. Left. Without a word to her. And without leaving behind enough of the ready to last them until the end of the quarter and the receipt of his pension.

He knew I’d come.

Jack was right. Her father had to know he was still being watched, the Crown never quite trusting the Frenchman, even though he had proven invaluable to them time and time again. He had to know that if he took a flit, the Crown would soon know of it. He had to know that the obvious choice to be assigned the job of finding their lost mercenary would be the man who knew him best.

But to expose her like this? How could her father do something so cruel? He knew how she felt about Jack, about everything else. Didn’t he, too, put most of the blame for René’s death at Jack’s door?

“Papa trained him. He knows what Jack can do. He needs him for something, but he’s too proud to ask for help. That has to be it. He’s trusting Jack to find him and then help him. What does it matter about his own flesh and blood, when the mission is all? At the end of the day, we’re all his pawns, and always have been. Nobody has mattered to Papa, not really, not since Mama. When will I ever accept that?” Tess exploded as she opened and slammed shut desk drawers for at least the tenth time, somehow still hoping she would see something she had missed in the last nine searches.

Instead, in the center drawer, she encountered an empty space where she’d seen something every other time she’d searched. She pushed back the chair, looked down at the floor, in case her last angry foray into the drawers had ended with her throwing something down… but no, there was nothing there.

She looked at the empty space again. What was it? What was missing? She squeezed her eyes shut, forced herself to breathe slowly, concentrate. In her mind’s eye she saw the contents of the drawer. The daily receipts book. A small knife to trim pens. Sealing wax. The funeral ring made up after René’s death, the one Papa couldn’t wear these past months because his fingers were becoming increasingly crippled by old age and hard use.

The newspaper. That was it, a folded copy of the London Times. It was gone. Why would Jack have taken it, a newspaper more than a month out of date?

A month?

I last saw one of these cards a month or more ago, left behind after several very good pieces were removed from the Royal British Museum.

That was it. That had to be it! The newspaper had carried a report of the theft. She hadn’t read the article. The Gypsy had been responsible for the theft? Yes, that’s what Jack had said. He must have regretted saying it, and wanted any reminder of his slip removed before she could see the newspaper and remember.

His mistake. She had made a shambles of most of the room’s contents during this last search, causing him to believe she was sloppy and inept. The amateur he insisted upon seeing her as, if only to ease his conscience. But, even in her ever-increasing frustration, she’d been very careful to record everything in her memory, what it was, where it was, as she’d been trained to do.

Had a black calling card with the imprint of a golden eye with a red center been mentioned in the article? It must have been; otherwise, why would her father have saved it?

She heard footsteps and quickly closed the drawer.

“Lady Thessaly? You are requested upstairs.”

Tess smiled at her old nurse, easily falling into French along with her, as the woman may have reluctantly learned enough English in two decades of living on this damp island to get along, but she thought the language vile and “without music,” and avoided it whenever she could. “Yes, thank you, Emilie, I imagine I am.”

“But no more with the breeches the marquis so foolishly allows when you go riding on that devil’s spawn you favor. Master Jack has no need of such a show of immodesty.”

“It’s far too late for any modesty when it comes to Master Jack, Emilie,” Tess pointed out as she got to her feet, suddenly feeling as old as time, decades beyond her five and twenty years. “If you could have Arnette order up the tub for an hour from now and lay out my white watered silk gown, as I do believe Master Jack will be joining me for dinner.”

“The white, my lady? You haven’t worn that one in years. It will need to be freshened.” Emilie’s careworn face assembled itself into a knowing smile. “Ah, now I remember. As do you, as will he. It will be done as you say.”

“Yes, thank you, Emilie.” Tess sat back down after the servant left, the memory of the last time she’d worn that gown washing over her.

Look at you. So beautiful. Light to my dark, blessed day to my lonely night. I love you, Tess. God help me, I love you. Let me love you…

Tess closed her eyes, hugging her arms close about her. She could feel Jack’s hot, hungry gaze reaching out to her across the empty years, began to blossom again at the memory of his touch as he’d instigated increasingly bold forays that had sent flames of awakening desire licking along her every nerve. She could still savor the terror and thrill inside her as the white silk gown had whispered down her body to puddle at her feet before he’d lifted her, carried her to the bed, joined her on the cool satin coverlet.

What had followed had been an initiation of the senses, a tutorial of such precise, intimate detail that there could no longer be any question as to why God had formed her the way she was, Jack how he was, and for what purpose they’d been brought together.

He’d taught her all her own secrets, and then encouraged her to explore his. They’d touched, tasted. He’d taken her to the brink, again and again, with his mouth, with his clever hands probing her, taking her hand and introducing her to the pleasures of her body, teaching her what she liked so she could tell him, so he could follow her movements with his own.

Together, they discovered just the right rhythms to turn her limbs to water, to coax soft whispers and whimpers from her throat, to make her so ready for him she never noticed the pain that came and went in an instant, to be replaced with a fullness that had her grinding her hips against him, begging him to finish it, to let her fly free of this glorious torment.

She put a hand to her breast now, felt her rapid heartbeat. Allowed her other hand to drift down to the juncture of her thighs, to press her fingers against the ache growing there, the longing that threatened to destroy her. Release, that sweet, sweet explosion. She needed it, craved it, knew how to find temporary respite in the dark of a lonely night when the memories and the hunger became too much. But never how to truly satisfy it. Not across the long years, not now. Only Jack could do that.

But she needed more than that temporary release; she needed parts of Jack he’d never given her, and never would. She needed to be first to somebody. Before Crown, before duty, before revenge or hate or the thrill of the fight. She needed a man who wouldn’t walk away, even when she ordered him to go.

So not again, never again. They’d destroyed each other once, and once had been more than enough. She was a woman now, with responsibilities and no room in her life for what might have been. She knew that when it came to Jack she had few weapons in her arsenal. But that gown should serve her as well as any suit of armor. Jack would remember, as she remembered, and he wasn’t the sort to knowingly make the same mistake twice.

Disgusted with her temporary weakness, she stood up and quit the room. She had much to arrange before Jack returned.

JACK SETTLED INTO the chair in the private room of the Castle Inn, nodding his greetings to Will and Dickie as the latter filled a glass with wine from a decanter and pushed it across the tabletop to him.

“Learn anything today?” Will asked, using the point of his dagger to skewer a small bit of cheese and pop it into his mouth.

“Yes. There are times your table manners can be execrable.” Jack took a sip of wine. He wanted first to hear what they’d managed to unearth while he was at the manor house. “Dickie?”

“I agree, and we didn’t just learn that today,” Dickie Carstairs said, grinning at Will. “Oh, you want to know what we’ve managed to ferret out, don’t you? Very well. Your mentor departed this benighted village eight days ago on the public coach heading north. He carried with him a fairly large trunk, purchased just that morning, and a rather cumbersome cloth bag he declined to place in the boot but actually put down the blunt for its own seat, so that he could keep it with him inside the coach. Although he is well-known here, the bumpkins I spoke with didn’t know they were seeing the marquis board the coach.”

“How so?” Jack asked, if only to keep Dickie talking. He already recognized where this story was leading. After all, hadn’t a part of his training been to pass unnoticed under the eyes of the villagers who had been seeing him almost daily for a year?

“Oh, that. Yes, well, it would seem that the passenger they saw was described as looking much like a member of the clergy. One of those queer, foreign autem bawlers, you know? Wearing skirts, and with a rope of beads with a whacking great cross hanging at the end of it tied around his waist, a hat as flat and big as a platter pushed down over the cowl on his head. Kept trying to trace his blessings on everybody who came close, so the good citizens rather kept their gazes down as they steered around him, trying to avoid gaining his attention. A costume, of course.”

“And a good one if you’re walking where you would otherwise be recognized,” Jack said, nodding. The monk disguise had been among those missing from the collection in the hidden room. There were others. “Go on.”

Jack contemplated his wineglass as Dickie went on to explain that the stranger had taken a private room at this very inn two weeks earlier, appearing and disappearing with no regularity, probably going out and about, saving souls. But always generous with his tips as he asked that his privacy be maintained so that he wasn’t disturbed while at his prayers. He may have slept in his bed, he may not have, no one was certain. Overall, he was quiet and no trouble, coming in and out, always carrying something with him, the same cloth bag already mentioned.

“He was slowly bringing what he needed from the manor, both in the bag and beneath his monk’s robes,” Dickie concluded, stating the obvious. “He couldn’t be seen leaving the place with a traveling trunk, he couldn’t make anyone at the manor suspicious. So he did it piecemeal, and in secret. And no one suspected. Clever.”

Will stabbed another bit of cheese. “Clever enough to disembark at the very next village and hire a wagon for his luggage, then head out again, this time going west. And, before Dickie drags the business out too far, an old lady driving a farm wagon entered the next village, only to ride away in the southbound Royal Mail coach, her traveling trunk on the roof, a large cloth bag beside her. He had to pay for an extra seat again, which is why he was remembered. He’s for London, Jack. He’s in London.”

“May as well be on the far side of the moon, for all we’ll be able to ferret him out in town. He could be anywhere. Anybody.” Dickie raised his wineglass. “And clearly up to mischief. Liverpool isn’t going to like it when we tell him we’ve lost him.”

“We haven’t lost him,” Jack corrected. “We simply haven’t found him yet. We already knew a man like Sinjon wouldn’t make our job easy for us. Tess says she knows nothing. And, from the way he sneaked out of the manor piece by piece, I tend to believe her.”

Will got to his feet, the dagger having already disappeared into his boot. “All right then, we’re for London. I wasn’t much enamored with the idea of passing the night in this benighted spot, not with the delights of the Season and a dozen invitations awaiting us in Mayfair. Except for you, Jack. A thousand apologies.”

“All of which are accepted,” Jack said, also getting to his feet. “Bastards aren’t often invited into Society. I won’t be riding with you, however. We’ll meet in Half Moon Street in two days’ time. Watch for the usual signal that shows I’m in residence.”

“Some people just have the knocker put back on the door, you know,” Dickie pointed out. “All this business about opening drapes, closing drapes. A man could get confused.”

“He don’t advertise his whereabouts the way you do, not our Black Jack,” Will said, giving the pudgy Dickie a slight shove in the direction of the hallway. “You’re going to take another run at the daughter, Jack? Going to bed her for the good of the Crown, or just for the bleeding hell of it? Either way, good on you.”

“Sorry, Jack,” Dickie apologized for Will. “He’s pretty enough, but more than his table manners are execrable. Come on, Will, before Jack bloodies that too-inquisitive nose of yours.”

Jack had already discounted both of Will’s sly comments. He’d learned to ignore a lot of things over the course of his eight and twenty years, or he would have been forced to spend half of that life just knocking people down. As it was, by the time he’d reached his majority he’d gotten himself into trouble often enough to eventually bring him to the attention of the Marquis de Fontaine, who’d shown him an alternative outlet for both his quick mind and his aggressive nature… which had probably saved Jack’s life.

“I don’t have to tell you to begin at the Bull and Mouth. Sinjon’s major problem is his lack of funds, which meant he had to bring his tools with him, not purchase them at his destination. Adding to his problems, his other weakness is physical, not mental. Someone at the Bull and Mouth helped him with that trunk—he clearly couldn’t move it across London on his own. He’s left us a trail, gentlemen, one I’m sure he’s already eradicated, employing the same piecemeal tactics in London to shift his belongings sans trunk. He’s well and truly gone to ground by now. But start with the trunk. Find that, and we’re back in the hunt.”

“Fair enough, Jack. And if we find him while you’re still playing about with the dau—” Will quickly corrected himself “—while you’re still searching for clues here? Do we approach, or wait for you? I rather fancy having the man sitting in your drawing room with a lovely big bow tied around his neck when you arrive. Lady Sefton’s ball is this Friday, you know, and with one thing and another, I’ve damned well missed half the parties already. Liverpool and his missing marquis be damned, I say. We’d been promised some respite after our last brilliant success.”

Jack was used to Will’s grumbles, knowing the man loved a fight more than anything. It was the hunt that fatigued him, the necessary ins and outs of intrigue, especially when, at the end of the day, there’d be no fight. Just an old man, captured and put back out to pasture, or easily dispatched to hell. Where was the fun in that?

“Just find him, gentlemen, or at least a trace of him, and you can safely leave the rest to me,” Jack said, walking with them to the inn yard, and waiting with them after they’d called for their mounts. “After all, the ladies must be pining for both of you.”

“Only Will,” Dickie said, sighing. “Not much use for a pudgy, penniless peer, I’m afraid.”

“Just stay close by me, Dickie, my friend. I’ll toss you my castoffs,” Will joked.

The banter continued until the horses were saddled and brought out, and Jack remained where he was until the two men had mounted them and turned toward the roadway.

He’d been impatient for them to be on their way, although he hadn’t let them see that. They’d been a true quartet of rogues for the past four years, now sadly a trio of rogues, with Jack as their acknowledged leader. That had been fine, at the beginning. Will had been content to let Jack do most of the thinking as, to hear Will tell it, thinking fatigued him. But lately he’d sensed a growing disenchantment with the arrangement in Will, and a burgeoning need for violence, a void left by the cessation of hostilities in France.

With Henry dead, Jack, too, was growing more restless. The Baron Henry Sutton had been the closest thing to a true friend Jack had allowed, and his death had left a void he wasn’t eager to fill. With Henry, Jack was never the bastard son of the Marquess of Blackthorn; he’d simply been a man, the equal of any other man. Dickie was affable enough, but not the sort you sat with until the dawn, speaking of everything from literature, to religion, to the never-ending search to understand how they had come to be here, in this place, in this time and for what purpose.

Henry had known things about Jack’s years with Sinjon, with Tess, that no other man had known. Jack missed that companionship, that quiet understanding, even as he’d been amazed to lately discover there were bonds between his brothers Beau and Puck he’d never suspected, indeed, had always gone out of his way to discourage.

And now Sinjon. And Tess. Both of them, without warning, come back into his life. The mentor. The lover.

Jack felt unbalanced, unsure. He was beginning to question what he’d made of his life, and wonder about the future. He’d never before thought of the future. Only the now. He’d never cared. That’s what had made him so good at his job.

But he had cared, with Beau. He’d cared, with Puck. After promising himself that his mistake with Tess had taught him never to mix his feelings with his mission, he’d let his brothers in, and he’d nearly lost one of them. He had lost Henry.

It was time for this to be over. All of it. He wasn’t suited to the job anymore. Dickie enjoyed the thrill nearly as much as he needed the money the Crown offered for his services. Will relished testing his skills—the sharp, swift justice of the knife—maybe too much. But to Jack, with the war over, he increasingly saw his small band of rogues as nothing more than hired killers, meant to rid the Crown of potential embarrassments. Embarrassments like Sinjon, who knew entirely too much for Liverpool or any highly placed government official to sleep easily at night while the man was on the move.

Yes. Jack wanted out, as had Henry. They’d discussed the subject many times, and each time concluded that once you belong to the Crown, as they did, there was no such thing as simply walking away. Sinjon had proved that, as well. He’d been all but a prisoner on his small estate, his every move monitored and reported. Only an old man, broken in spirit and no longer of any use to them, but still a marquis, a fellow peer, so they hadn’t killed him. There’d be no such reticence in eliminating a bastard son barely anyone knew and only a few might mourn if he attempted to cut free.

And Jack felt reasonably certain he knew the tool the Crown would employ for the job, should that time come. He took one last look toward the now empty road, and headed back into the inn for another glass of wine and time alone, to think.

CHAPTER THREE

TESS PACED THE drawing room, twisting the wineglass between her fingers. He was late. Jack was never late. He was doing this deliberately, delaying his arrival, drawing her nerves taut, making it clear to her that he had the advantage over her in every way.

Which he did. More than he could possibly know.

She’d never forgotten him, saw his face every day; he was always with her.

When he’d gone, she’d believed it would be forever. Black Jack Blackthorn didn’t grovel, didn’t bend. Would never beg. She’d handed him back his ring, the one she’d worn on a thin ribbon around her neck, hidden away from her father’s eyes until this one last assignment was over, and exchanged it with the locket closed over the miniatures of her mother and brother. She’d replaced one lost dream with two lost souls.

He’d been wearing the ring today; she’d seen it on the index finger of his right hand. Heavy gold, with a large, flat onyx stone engraved with a B. For Blackthorn. For bastard. He’d said he had never known which, as the gift had been from his mother. But, although she’d encouraged him to enlarge on that strange statement, he had instead diverted her with his kisses, and he’d never mentioned his mother again. There hadn’t been time. There had been their argument when he’d told her of the change in tactics that would put her in the background, away from any possible danger. There had been the mission.

And after that, there had been nothing left but the funeral.

And goodbye.

If only there was some way to go back, to change the past. But there wasn’t, and that meant the future couldn’t be changed, either. There was only the now, the mission—finding her father before he did something else that couldn’t be changed, fixed, mended. And this time, she wouldn’t be left behind, to wait, to worry… to mourn.

How she missed René. They’d shared their mother’s womb, they’d shared their lives, always together, living in one another’s pockets, clinging to each other through their papa’s frequent absences, vying for his attention when he was in residence.

Though Emilie spoke only French, their papa insisted his children speak only English in his presence. They were confined to the manor grounds, their only companionship each other and Rupert, their English tutor, who brought home his lessons with a birch rod. He’d most often wielded it on René, until the day Tess had jumped onto the man’s back and nearly bitten off his ear before he could shake her loose.

She’d been ten at the time. When her father heard of the incident it had been the very first time he’d ever complimented her.

But then he’d scolded René in that quietly destroying way he had, for having submitted to the rod so that his sister had been forced to defend him, taking all of the joy out of Tess’s victory. He’d then employed another tutor who was twice the disciplinarian as Rupert, and Tess’s education was turned over to a succession of English governesses.

Rupert’s replacement was discharged the day René had twisted the man’s rod-wielding arm behind his back and run him headfirst into the solid oak door of the schoolroom. He’d been fifteen, and it had taken all of those five long years for him to find the courage his sister had displayed at ten—which their father had been quick to point out.

There was no winning with the marquis. Fail him, and face his quiet disapproval that was ten times worse than any possible beating. Do something right, and hear nothing, or wait for the flaw to be pointed out to you as the stinging hook at the end of the faint praise.

Yet all Tess and René wanted out of life was to please the man. René pretended an interest in the lessons their father began with him after the tutor was sent packing, but it was Tess who showed the most aptitude when René would share what he’d learned with her. Her twin would rather read poetry; Tess would rather hold a book on military tactics up to a mirror, to practice reading backward. René enjoyed playing the flute; Tess practiced for hours with the slim tools René loaned her, until she could easily open every locked door in the manor house. After every hour spent at lessons with his father, René would spend two with Tess, teaching her everything he’d learned until she’d not only mastered each lesson, but outshone her teacher.

The marquis finally found her out the day René accidentally pinked her as they practiced with the foils and the button had come off the tip of his weapon without either of them noticing.

That was the second time the marquis had looked at her with something close to approval in his eyes, as he’d tied his handkerchief around her forearm and ordered her to borrow a shirt and breeches from René and report to him in the gardens. Then he’d tossed her back her weapon and grabbed one for himself.

She’d excelled; she knew it, even if her father never acknowledged any new skill she mastered over the next years. But she’d lost a part of her brother to her success, and to their shared strong desire to please the marquis. René never complained, never said anything, but Tess knew.

He tried, so very hard, but he had not been born to experience the thrill of clearing a five-barred fence, or find the center of the target with a thrown knife. And there was nothing of stealth about him, either in action or in his mind. He was his mother’s son, kind and gentle. She was her father’s daughter, quick of mind, fascinated by intrigue and all that went with it.

But it was more than a simple love of the game, or even striving to please their father. René could never know it, but Tess felt it her responsibility to protect him, just as she had done years before with Rupert. More and more, she took his place on the marquis’s more minor missions, even being included in the planning of those missions that included all three of them, invariably casting René in a minor role, safely in the background.

Until Jack. His inclusion had changed everything. The marquis at last had the perfect pupil—talented, and male. Tess had hated him for his intrusion into their lives. She’d watched in disgust as he mastered in months what it had taken her years to learn, and then gone on to do as she had done with René: outpace the teacher with his ingenuity and skills. She’d envied the trust the marquis placed in him, suffered in silence as René seemed to turn their successor into some sort of hero to be admired, emulated.

She’d fought Jack for well over a year, until her fascination with this singular man overcame her resentment at being usurped in her father’s affection. She’d then begun to watch him, not with jealousy any longer, but with growing interest in Jack, the man. So darkly mysterious, so compellingly handsome, his rare smiles doing strange, delicious things to her insides. And, increasingly, he’d been watching her. For months more, they’d danced around each other, both of them knowing there was something unsettled between them, a growing hunger that sooner or later had to be fed.

And dear God, how they had feasted…

Tess took another sip of wine, hoping it would somehow settle her. The afternoon had dragged on seemingly forever, and over the hours she’d changed her mind about the white silk gown. Punishing Jack, punishing herself, made no sense. She stood in front of the glass over the side table and inspected her reflection as it was directed back to her in the candlelight.

Her gown was simplicity itself, even modest, save for the fact that the pale, unadorned orchid silk rather cunningly outlined her breasts and rib cage and slid smoothly over her buttocks when she walked, making it clear she wore no undergarments. Even the modest cap sleeves were fashioned of all but transparent veiling. She was more covered than she was in most of her gowns, and yet she might as well be naked to the discerning eye.

Jack had a discerning eye.

A triple strand of crystals hugged her neck, and she wore her blond hair loose, floating down over her shoulders. He had always liked burying his head in her hair, or fisting its length tightly as he tipped her head back, to nibble at the base of her throat. And lower.

She was making it easy for him, all but offering him a written invitation.

She couldn’t push Jack away and at the same time convince him that he needed her with him when he set off to find her father. No, what she needed even more than finding her father was to get Jack moving, get him gone, get the two of them as far away from the manor as possible, as quickly as possible.

She had her priorities straight now, and fighting Jack couldn’t figure into the mix, not when it was so important her father was found, that she was with Jack when her father was found. She couldn’t know how much her lover had changed in four years, if he would actually execute his old mentor on orders from the Crown.

What had shocked her most when she’d realized it was that she didn’t know what she would do if he tried. She no longer knew how she felt about her father.

Tess only knew that Jack couldn’t be left to his own devices. Where he went, she would go, or she would follow. He had to know that as well, so it only made sense that they travel together.

She’d make it worth his while. He wanted her; that was one thing that hadn’t changed in four years. She’d give him what he wanted tonight, and he’d give her what she wanted tomorrow when they rode away from the manor house.

The meagerness of his government pension had long ago caused the marquis to forgo the costly services of a butler, and since Jack never knocked, and moved with the stealth of a cat intent on bringing down a rabbit, she did her best not to flinch when he suddenly appeared in the room.

She’d expected his usual, impeccable London tailoring, but he had not bothered with the formality of town clothes. No, tonight Jack was the dark and dangerous pirate she’d seen many times before, all in black, his shirt collarless and discreetly ruffled, full-sleeved and open at the neck, his breeches showing the narrowness of waist and hip, the smooth muscles of his long, straight legs.

“Planning on breaking into the squire’s house tonight to recover Crown secrets, Jack?” she asked, indicating his attire with a sweep of her arm. “Or perhaps relieving some travelers of their prized belongings out on the highway as you were doing when Papa first found you, just to keep your skills sharp?”

He approached her without a word, walking in a full circle around her before coming to a halt, their bodies only inches apart. She could feel her nipples begin to harden under his hot gaze, pushing against the thin fabric of her gown. He didn’t touch her, but she could already feel his hands on her. “And you, Tess? You also look ready for a nocturnal ride. Are we dispensing with dinner?”

She longed to slap his handsome, grinning face. But she couldn’t blame him for attempting to get some of his own back after the way she’d treated him when he’d kissed her. She reached out boldly, cupped his sex. “Ah, yes, I suppose we are. You know the way.”

She watched as his eyes darkened and then let her hand drift across his lower belly and hip as she walked past him, heading for the stairs, her mouth dry, her heart pounding. He’d never forgive her if he found out what she was up to… but he’d never find out. It was imperative he leave here and never return. And when she cut him, dismissed him a second time after they found her father, faced him down and told him she’d been using him, he never would return. Jack was more proud than he would allow anyone to know. When this was over, they would be over, done. Again.

That’s the way it would happen. That was the way it had to happen. She wasn’t going to lose anyone else to Black Jack Blackthorn. Only herself.

Tess left the door to her bedchamber open behind her and went to stand in the middle of the room, waiting for Jack to come to her, take what he wanted.

What she wanted. She couldn’t lie to herself. Not as her breathing had already turned ragged, as her body tingled with the anticipation of his touch. He’d made her this way, showing her delights she’d never dreamed of, taking her places she’d never gone since, and longed to visit again.

She drew her breath in sharply as the door to her chambers slammed shut.

He came up behind her, took hold of her shoulders, and roughly whirled her about to face him. “You think I’ve grown stupid, Tess? That I’m some raw youth, to be happily blinded by lust? Come with me, lie with me, fall under my spell, do my bidding. Is that all we had between us, all that you remember of me? Jesus, woman, or are you that desperate?”

Tess raised her chin in defiance. “I thought you made it abundantly clear this afternoon what you wanted from me. And consider it a trade, Jack, not capitulation for either of us. I give you what you want, and you give me what I want.”

He dropped his hands to his sides. “And what do you want, Tess? What do you consider worth the trade?”

“I go with you,” she said, searching his eyes for his reaction. “I can help.”

“Help? Why do I doubt that, Tess? I haven’t forgotten that you were Sinjon’s tolerably efficient trained monkey. It’s your father I’m hunting, and I don’t intend to spend half of my time watching my own back, not even for the pleasure of putting you on yours.”

She ignored his deliberate crudity. “You wouldn’t kill him, not even on orders from your masters.”

“Wouldn’t I? Are you sure? Good, then stay here, and I’ll bring him to you.”

Tess backed away from him and walked over to lean against the side of the tester bed. She’d try another argument. “Let’s do this with gloves off, Jack, all right? I remember what was printed in the newspaper you took with you this afternoon. He’s after the Gypsy, and so are you. But you two aren’t the only ones with a score to settle with that monster. He killed my brother.”

Jack’s eyes went dark. “Really? I thought you and Sinjon had hung René’s death around my neck. Am I now absolved? How you ease my mind. Goodbye, Tess. Thank you for your kind offer, and curse you for your lies.”

She took a single step toward him. If he was on the road before she could follow, she might never be able to find him, or her father. She needed him gone, yes, but not alone. “That’s it, Jack, leave. It’s the one thing you’re good at!”

He’d already turned for the door, but her words stopped him, even as they backed her up against the bed, because she instantly knew she’d gone too far.

“I left, Tess, because you made it clear there was nothing for me here any longer. I left because you pushed me away. I left because you expected me to go.”

“I expected—? What do you mean by that?”

He was standing in front of her once again, effectively holding her in place without touching her. “You never thought there was a future for us, did you, Tess? That’s why you insisted we not tell Sinjon or René about us. I would leave you at some point, find a fault somewhere, become disappointed with you in some way. When René died you finally had your excuse to send me away, before I left on my own. You, and maybe your father as well, although God knows he had his own reasons. I couldn’t be allowed to stay because I’d failed, hadn’t I? Failed in our best chance to capture the Gypsy, failed to protect René. It fell on me, all of it, and I had to go. Admit it, Tess, if only to yourself.”

“That… that’s not true. I loved you.”

“And I loved you,” Jack said, his voice calmer now, almost gentle. “But it wasn’t my love you needed then, was it? You were still trying to win Sinjon’s approval, still needing him to be proud of you. Until you could gain his love, you weren’t really ready to accept mine, believe in mine. And that hasn’t changed, has it, Tess? Still hoping for that pat on the head, a word of praise, some acknowledgment of your achievements. But he didn’t trust you with his secrets, even after René died. He didn’t trust you with this damn mission he’s taken on. You were good, but never quite good enough. That’s how you see it, isn’t it?”

Tess didn’t answer him. She didn’t need to say a word in order to agree with him.

He tipped up her chin. “Look at me, Tess. Look at me. Sinjon’s a hard man, there’s no denying that. Demanding, difficult to please, impossible to fully understand. I know you and René suffered for that. But you’re a grown woman now. How long are you going to punish yourself for his failings? Because that’s what they are, his failings. Not yours.”

“He left me nothing, Jack,” Tess said quietly. “Knowing what he knows, he left us with nothing. How could he do that?”

“I told you, Tess. He knew I’d come.”

“You don’t understand…” she said, and then let her voice trail off. She’d left it too late, years too late. And she’d done what she’d done because her father had said it was for the best, and she’d been too devastated to think clearly. “Take me with you, Jack. Don’t leave me behind again. I have to see him, I have to talk to him, I have to know why.”

He looked at her for a long time, and then nodded. “Maybe it’s time you learned who Sinjon Fonteneau really is. Let’s go downstairs. There’s something I need to show you.”

Tess nearly threw her arms around him, but held back in time. “Thank you, Jack.”

“Don’t thank me, Tess. You’re not going to like it. I’m about to turn your shining knight into a rogue.”

JACK LED THE way back downstairs to Sinjon’s study. He’d shown Tess the hidden room, but had not disclosed all of its secrets to her.

He handed Tess the brace of candles and opened the glass doors of the cabinet holding the few pitiful ancient relics the marquis kept on display; the collection of a man who couldn’t afford to indulge his love the way he had years ago, in France. Or so it would seem to the world. The Marquis de Fontaine had never shown his real face to the world.

Jack had heard the story only a few weeks before René died. He’d found Sinjon in his study after midnight one night, sloppily drunk and embarrassingly maudlin on what he said was the twentieth anniversary of the death of his wife. He’d been both intrigued and flattered when the man motioned him to a chair and began to speak—and, in the end, he was appalled.

He doubted Tess and René had ever been privy to what had really happened, who their father was and had been, why their mother had died, what had brought them to England, what drove Sinjon to offer his services to the Crown against France.

The Marquis de Fontaine was a man of varied background and myriad talents. He’d prided himself on his knowledge of Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities; indeed, he’d devoted the first nearly fifty years of his life to amassing his collection, traveling the continent in order to add to it. Until he’d met his Marie Louise. He’d been amazed at the birth of the twins, slightly bemused as to what the fuss was all about, but they seemed to please Marie Louise, and he was free to go back to what he called his studies.

And his other pursuits.

Then came 1797, and suddenly Sinjon, whose facile use of a loyalty that seemed to bend with the prevailing wind had miraculously kept him safe in Lyon, was faced with the possible loss of his way of life. The worst of the Terror might be behind them, but the Revolutionary Army was becoming too powerful, thanks to the success of General Louis Hoche and some upstart Corsican named Bonaparte. Of the three, the Directorie, Hoche and Bonaparte, he feared the Corsican most, recognizing a lean and hungry ambition when he encountered it. Sinjon began working in secret with other Royalists to bring back the Ancien Régime and all the privileges of rank that went with it before it was too late for any of them.

But it had already been too late. He should have seen the signs, made a decision as to what was most important to him, and taken his wife and children to safety. Instead, he and his band of compatriots goaded and pushed the Directorie at every turn. Employing a plan devised by Sinjon, they nearly succeeded in an attempt to assassinate several of its leaders.

And that, to Sinjon, had been his single biggest mistake. The Directorie retaliated with all the might still at its disposal, hunting down and disseminating their opposition. While Sinjon and his men hid in cellars, not knowing what was happening, his adored Marie Louise had become one of the casualties of his folly.

He’d cried then, great blubbering drunken sobs. Jack sat silent, as there were no words that could comfort the man, heal his guilt and his loss. At that moment, no matter what Sinjon asked of him, Jack would do it. Because he was looking at a beaten old man who had lost everything; his wife, his country, his fortune. Here in England he lived in genteel poverty in a run-down manor house, employed by the Crown but never quite trusted.

Genteel poverty. Forced to plot and often kill, not only to exact justice for all he’d lost and rid the world of that upstart Bonaparte, but also to save a prime minister from scandal, find a way to disgrace those whose voices in Parliament didn’t agree with the Crown, employ his skills to clean up the many messes those in power made with regularity. He’d no choice.

Except that he did. He’d always had a choice. The man had been grieving? How much? Drowning his guilt and sorrows? Really? Jack knew he’d never know exactly where Sinjon’s clever mix of truth and fiction had merged that night, but only the reality of what he had seen. He had been the man’s audience, drawn in, made sympathetic to a supposedly sad and disillusioned wreck of a man. What had come next, his introduction to the second secret room, to the marquis’s secret life, would forever color his opinion of his mentor.

Now he would show Tess her real father, the damning part of the man that could readily be seen. A dose of truth couldn’t hurt her any more than the fiction she’d built up around the man, the fiction Sinjon had so cleverly encouraged.

“Give me the candles, Tess, and follow me,” Jack said, and then led the way down the steps and across the room to the stone he’d located earlier.

“There’s more to see?” Tess asked as he pushed on the stone and it pivoted easily.

Jack held the brace of candles at shoulder level as the cabinet holding Sinjon’s inspired arsenal slid aside. “Look at what’s there, Tess, and at what isn’t. As one important piece is missing.”

He stood back and allowed her to walk into the small chamber lined with shelves from floor to low ceiling on three sides. The only furniture in the room was a single chair placed directly in its center; where Sinjon would sit to admire his genius.

“To your left, the Greek. To your right, the Roman. Straight ahead, and most interesting of all for what isn’t there, the Egyptian. Your father’s treasures. Or should I say, your competition. What Sinjon loves most in this world. What he risked his family for, lost his wife for, sacrificed his children’s childhoods for, I suppose some may think. I know I do.”

Tess turned in a slow circle, the candlelight casting strange shadows on the rows and rows of artifacts, shining back to her from Roman shields and breastplates, dancing along gem-encrusted bowls, illuminating ancient busts, helmets, bracelets, necklaces… and reflected in the tears in her eyes.

Selling only a few small pieces would have provided more than enough to pay the village shopkeepers, repair the manor house, educate his son at the best schools in England, purchase a mansion in Mayfair, launch his daughter into Society.

If Sinjon could part with any of his treasures. If selling them on the open market wouldn’t mean the end of him.

“I don’t… I can’t… How, Jack? Why?”

“Let’s go back upstairs,” Jack said, taking the brace of candles from her and leading the way, holding on to her hand as they went. Her suddenly very cold hand.

He poured her a glass of wine and took it to her as she sat with exaggerated erectness on the leather couch, staring at nothing. She shook her head slightly in refusal so he downed it himself, and then positioned himself at the front of the desk, resting against its edge.

Jack would have spared her this if he could, but she’d made it impossible. Sinjon had made it impossible. The man she so admired, so longed to please, her so wonderful, perfect and heroic father. He wondered how long it would take her to understand the implications of what she’d just seen.

It didn’t take half as long as he’d thought. She’d always been very bright.

“He’s a thief, isn’t he?” she said finally. “My father is a thief.”

“I made that mistake myself, and was quickly corrected. He sees himself more as a private collector. A thief, you see, steals for profit. Sinjon was always most discerning, taking only the best and keeping it for his own private enjoyment. Your competition, Tess, the true loves of his life.”

Tess bent her head and began rubbing hard at her temples. “God. Oh, sweet Jesus…”

Jack pushed himself away from the desk and sat down beside her, taking her hands in his and lowering them to her lap, not letting them go. “It was easy in France,” he told her. “He had his title to protect him. Nobody suspected that the treasures he brought home with him from his travels were anything but the purchases of a wealthy man. He could display many of them openly, keeping only the most easily recognizable safely hidden away, where he could appreciate them. He was admired, sought after to speak about antiquities. An acknowledged expert, the so-fascinating Marquis de Fontaine. Nobody knew, Tess, not even your mother. That’s what he was trying to protect when he sided with the other Royalists. His way of life. His treasures. In the end, the new French government got most of them, so he came here, and started over.”

“Started over…” she repeated softly. “But… but he was working with the Crown.”

“What better excuse to travel where he wanted, make use of secret channels of transportation, have access to ships, to the plans of the mansions of the wealthy, museums… palaces. There was a war going on, treasures were disappearing everywhere, for many reasons. Some say Bonaparte brought half of Egypt back to France with him. I think Sinjon hated him most for that, and that the Emperor had the treasures and he didn’t. But your father also did his job, Tess, and very well, to give the man the credit due him. And then, when the mission was complete, he’d reward himself by adding to his collection. But Sinjon isn’t a young man anymore. He could still choose the prize, formulate the plans, but it soon became apparent to him that he needed someone else to execute them.”

Tess had been breathing rapidly, but now she took a deep, openmouthed breath that was nearly a gasp. She was attempting to get herself under control. “René?” she asked at last. “Did he…?”

“I don’t think he knew, no. In any case, he hadn’t proved as talented as Sinjon had hoped. You, however, exceeded his expectations, and he’d every intention of introducing you to that room down there. Until I came along. You want praise from the man, Tess? I’ll tell you something he told me. You should have been born the son.”

Tess smiled ruefully. “How very like him. Every compliment has a hook on the end, one that digs straight into the flesh. Praise for me, at the expense of my brother. We were in a competition, weren’t we? One of my father’s deliberate making. The winner gets to collect for him. I think I’m going to be sick.” But then she rallied, as another question struck her. “Did you… did you steal with him?”

Tess knew what he’d done before coming to the manor house. How he’d played at cards, played at highwayman, played at most anything, running wild and angry, always searching for something, never knowing what that something was. Never knowing if he was running toward something, or away from himself. The bastard who belonged nowhere.

Sinjon must have thought the gods had personally delivered Jack Blackthorn to him.

Jack shook his head. “He said I wasn’t quite ready, and that robbing a few coaches for a lark wasn’t the same as what he needed from me. He said I’d never experienced joy of the sort I’d know when the prize was much more than some silly matron’s gaudy diamond necklace. The prize was one thing, and worth any danger, but the joy of the acquisition itself, knowing what you had in your hand was now yours and yours alone, was worth more than anything else. But first I had to learn a few rudimentary things about antiquities, gain an appreciation for them so that I’d treat them with the care they deserved as I was… acquiring them.”

He’d told her most of it now, but there was more. “I thought I’d found a home, Tess, a real purpose in government service. Sinjon had saved me from myself, and you’d given me a reason to believe I didn’t have to be alone. Once he’d told me his secret, I knew my duty was to turn Sinjon over to the Crown. Yet how could I do that, knowing it would destroy you and René? Selfishly, I put off making my decision until we’d completed the Whitechapel mission. I shouldn’t have waited, and I’ll never forgive myself for that.”

“Whitechapel. Where René died. And I sent you away anyway. But you never reported Papa to the Crown. Why?”

“Sinjon was already seventy or more, or at least that’s the most he would admit to—definitely past climbing through windows or outrunning any pursuit. Without me, or someone like me, his collecting days were over. He’d lost. He’d lost his youth, his son and, when I walked away, his last chance at revenge. Because of you, I promised him I wouldn’t turn him over to the Crown, but that if he went back to his old ways I wouldn’t be held to that promise. And if he tried to recruit you, I’d know, and I’d kill him. He knew I meant what I said.”

“And he believed you,” Tess said quietly. “I would have.”

“He was a broken man when I left, Tess. I’d like to think the errors of his ways, and what those errors had cost him, had finally come home to him. Instead, the need for revenge must have been eating at him ever since.”

Tess shook her head. “Revenge? You mean on France, for what happened to my mother. But that was all so long ago.”

And here it was, the moment he’d been dreading more than any of the others. He’d never wanted her to know this particular truth.

“No, Tess. What I’m speaking of now has nothing to do with France or the war or any attempt to restore the monarchy. I doubt it ever was really about any of that, not for Sinjon. It was always about enlarging his collection. And remember this—he was already more than fifty years old when he came to England. I wasn’t the first pupil he trained to do his bidding. There was another, before me. An exceedingly apt and eager pupil, and quite ambitious. They worked together for years. Until the student, who saw profit where Sinjon saw beauty, eventually betrayed the mentor, striking out on his own, hiring out his unique talents for most any venture, any government, and taking his own rewards. You don’t know him, Tess, although you may have seen him here years ago. But you have seen his calling card. I’ve been hunting him for four years, ever since Sinjon told me exactly who he is.”

Her eyes were wide and shocked when she turned toward him on the couch. “The Gypsy. That’s who you mean, don’t you? The Gypsy. The man who murdered René. Papa trained him? And now he’s gone after him…”

CHAPTER FOUR

TESS SPENT THE next few hours alternately crying and cursing, pacing her bedchamber in her old nightrail and dressing gown, flinging herself into the chair in front of the fire, collapsing to her knees in the center of the room, wrapping her arms tight around herself, rocking in her grief and pain.

Jack had told her all of it. She’d pushed him until she’d heard it all.

A lie. Her father’s life was a lie; everything she’d thought about him, believed about him, was a lie. Her life was a lie. René’s death had been for a lie, and her mother’s, as well. For greed. For things.

She and René had always thought they weren’t worthy, weren’t good enough, had not been smart or clever or, yes, lovable enough. That somehow they had failed their wonderfully heroic father, had been a source of grave disappointment to him. But that hadn’t been it at all.

Things. People meant nothing to him. They were only the tools he needed to get him things. Her mother may have been the exception, but even she hadn’t been able to divert him from his first love, his true delight. Things, locked up underground in a cold stone room. Things, the hunt for them, the taking of them, the knowledge that now they were his, seen only by him, touched only by him.

She and her brother had thought their father a hero, dedicated to the service of his adopted country, doing his best to help rid France of the hated Bonaparte and set the monarchy back on the throne. They’d wanted only to help him, make him proud of them.

While he’d seen them as two more tools. Inferior tools at that.

And for this man, this unnatural man, she had turned her back on her one true chance of happiness? She’d cut Jack out of her life so effectively that even if he still believed he loved her, he could never forgive what she’d done.

What she’d done because the Marquis de Fontaine had told her it would be best for everyone if Jack never knew. That had been his punishment.

Now it was hers.

“Tess?”

She was sitting on the hearth rug, staring into the dying fire, and didn’t turn her head at the sound of his voice.

“I’m all right, Jack,” she said quietly.

He sat down beside her, wrapped his arms around his bent knees. Was that to keep himself from touching her? Could he still want her, after all he’d told her? “It’s all right if you aren’t, you know. None of what you’ve heard tonight could have been easy to hear. If there had been another way…”

“No, I’m glad you told me. I only wish I’d known years ago, when René was alive. We could have gone, left him to his collection. After all, we were never really necessary to him, were we? And our mother? Do you think she knew, Jack? Did she die knowing how unimportant she’d been to his happiness?”

“He may have lived long enough now to regret how he’s lived his life. All he’s lost. I know you’ve already considered this. Sinjon trained the man in the skills he then eventually employed to kill René. An old man, no longer seen as being useful to anyone, put out to pasture as it were, while the evil he spawned thrives? A man like that has a lot of time to think, to look back across the years, and try to make at least one thing right.”

“You think he’s somehow repented or some such ridiculousness? You want me to forgive him, is that it? You think I’m that generous?” Tess asked, still looking into the fire. “I can’t do that.”

“No, I suppose you can’t, at least not just yet. Sinjon has to know that, too. But you’re his legacy, Tess, all he has left. Everyone else is gone. Those things he spent his life collecting mean nothing compared to a child’s love, how he’ll be remembered when he’s dead.”

Tess turned to look at him at last, knowing something Jack didn’t know. “Do you really believe that? That he cares how—how I remember him?”

“The closer to death, the more a person realizes the need to be remembered, even mourned. He’d have to know that once I’d heard of his death that room downstairs would have to be emptied, his collection returned to the rightful owners, or at least turned over to the Crown. I lied to you this afternoon. There’s only one way into the cellar rooms. You were going to know the truth about him one day, one way or another. And one thing more, Tess. Sinjon has unfinished business.”

“The Gypsy,” she said her hands tightening into white-knuckled fists.

“Have you read Frankenstein, Tess?” When she shook her head he explained. “You should, it’s quite the talk of London right now, nearly the equal to the attention Byron received for his Don Juan.”

“Jack, I don’t see what a book has to do with—”

He held up his hand. “No, let me finish. Frankenstein is rather a cautionary tale. In attempting to create perfection, Dr. Frankenstein instead managed to breathe life into a monster. The Gypsy is your father’s creation and, right now, his legacy. I think he’s decided it’s his duty to destroy the monster. No, let me correct that. He plans to lead me to the Gypsy, so I can destroy the monster for him while he watches. While you watch.”

A single tear escaped Tess’s eyes. “Everything he does has a hook in it somewhere, doesn’t it?”

She leaned her head against his shoulder. He put his arm around her. It felt like coming home. The feeling wouldn’t last. It couldn’t. There were things that could be explained, forgiven. What she’d done to Jack wasn’t one of them. She’d chosen her father over him, believed her father’s version of what had happened that night in Whitechapel rather than his, sent him away even before he could offer his own version of that last night. Yet, if only that had been the end of it there might still be a way to mend what she’d broken. But there had been more, so much more. Impossible to forgive.

“I want you, Tess,” Jack said quietly. “I know we can’t have what we had before—what we thought we had before. But what we did have was good while we had it, wasn’t it? I can help you make the world go away, at least for tonight. I know what you need, because I need it, too.”

Release. He was offering her release. That was all, no more than that. Anything else they’d thought they’d had never really existed. If it had been real, the past four years wouldn’t have been spent apart.

He stood up, reached down his hand to her. Dare she take what he offered? If her life had been empty before, how could she bear it when he left again? But it wasn’t forever that he was offering her. Only tonight. Was one night not nearly enough… or too much?

She hesitated.

He was Black Jack Blackthorn. A proud, complex man. He wouldn’t offer twice.

She looked up into his dark, handsome face and put her hand in his.

SHE WASN’T AS he remembered her. He’d initiated a girl four years ago, but a woman filled his arms tonight. Her body still slim, but more lush, the sweep of her hips somehow more welcoming. Her breasts heavier, even her nipples not those of a girl, but a more dusky pink than he remembered, and even more receptive to his touch, quick to pucker, to stiffen with her desire.

He took her first with his hand, pushing into her as she ground against him, calling out her pleasure as he found her center and exploited it with his stroking, pinching fingers. He bent over her, urging her on, watching her face as the tension rapidly built to a fever pitch, drawing her body taut as a bowstring before the pleasure washed over her, wave after wave, until there was nothing but sweet, boneless release.

Only then did he kiss her, only then did she wrap her arms around him, returning his kiss, burrowing into him, skin to skin, heartbeat to heartbeat. Only then did he dare to love her as he wanted; slowly, with infinite care, learning her again even though he’d never truly forgotten.

There had been other women since her. Four years was a long time, and he’d had needs. But that’s all they had been. Never Tess, never what he’d found with Tess. Never this need to know, this never-ending journey of discovery that made each time feel like the first time. Her soft sighs. Her low cries of pleasure. The way she touched him, knew him, stirred him. How his heart could feel close to bursting when he knew he’d pleased her, how his pleasure intensified because he had pleasured her. The way she breathed his name just as he took her over the top… took him with her.

He kissed every soft, fragrant inch of her, soothing her, rousing her, taking her mind away from everything but the pleasure he was giving her, taking from her. Long strokes along her rib cage, trailing over the flare of her hips. Dipping between her thighs, raising her up to him, opening her, capturing her essence.

Only then did he move to cover her, bracing his upper body on his arms, watching her face as he slowly sank inside her. She slid her arms and legs up and around his back and held on tight, her chest rising and falling rapidly as she looked up at him, her eyes gone dark in just the way he remembered. Now, those eyes signaled to him. Yours, Jack. All yours. Take me now. Take everything I have as you give me all you have. Now.

He knew her rhythms, as she knew his. He knew that everything else had served to build to the next few moments, this most intimate melding of mind and body.

He began to move. Watching her, as she watched him. While inside his head, a part of him was chanting I love you, I love you, I love, love, love…

She slept in his arms as he watched the dawn beyond the windowpanes, reliving the past few hours. His silent words haunting him, keeping him from sleep.

He’d thought it was love all those years ago, believed it was love. Her smile, the way she had of biting on her full bottom lip when pondering a problem, her scent, which had never failed to move him. The way just thinking about her had made the world around him seem new and clean and hopeful. The way she looked at him, which made him believe he was a better man.

Their months together had been the best of times.

He hadn’t known anything was missing, that they’d lacked some certain elemental piece that would hold them together in the worst of times.

Jack had been alone all of his life, even as a child, never feeling that he belonged, that he fit anywhere. The bastard, yet somehow more the bastard than his brothers, different from his brothers. But he’d never known what it meant to be really alone until Tess was lost to him.

Now she was in his arms again, and he would have savored the completeness of it if not for the realization that the feeling could only be fleeting, that the dawn had come, the glory of the night was over and nothing had really changed. Nothing could change until and unless Sinjon was found, until and unless Tess found some sort of needed peace in her feelings about her father.

As his mother’s bastard son, Jack could understand that need for understanding better than Tess could know. But now was not the time to travel that well-worn ground again. His mother was a complex woman, in her way perhaps even more complex than Sinjon, and her motives doubly obscure. Like Tess, all he could do was learn to live the life he’d been given, play the cards he’d been dealt.

Careful not to wake her, Jack slipped from the tester bed and pulled on his clothing, his shirttail untucked, carrying his shoes with him as he slipped out of the room, his mind already engaged in the next step—his and Tess’s removal to London.

With any luck, Will and Dickie had picked up the man’s trail, making the mission easier. But Jack didn’t put much faith in luck.

Leaning against the wall, he pulled on his shoes, deciding he’d first visit Sinjon’s secret room. The man had taken much with him, but there was still much Jack might find useful.

The sounds of delighted laughter and running footsteps had him turning around in time to see the small, dark-haired child emerge on the second-floor landing just ahead of Emilie, the old woman’s face flushed from the exertion of racing down the narrow stairs.

“Jacques! Vous coquin, reviens ici! Jacques, viens à moi cet instant. Jacques—Oh, Jésus, Mary et Joseph, c’est toi!”

The boy stopped in his headlong flight to look up at the tall man standing in the middle of the hallway, blocking his way.

“Maman?” he inquired, his huge green eyes wide in his cherubic face. His curls were thick and black as night, his cheeks flushed from the excitement of his escape from his nurse. And then his face lit in a smile and he was off again, his sturdy legs taking him past Jack. “Maman!”

Jack turned to see Tess drop to her knees on the carpet as the boy ran into her open arms. She held the child tightly against her, her hand cradling the back of his head against her as she looked up at Jack, her eyes pleading with him for—God, who knew what she was thinking?

“Jack,” she began, his name a plea for understanding, he supposed. He didn’t wait around to find out. With one last disbelieving look at the child, he whirled about and bounded down the stairs, through the foyer, all but wresting the door from its hinges and leaving it swinging open as he blindly made his way down to the gravel drive.

He didn’t know where he was going. Just away. He had to get away. Where she couldn’t follow, where she couldn’t find him, couldn’t see what she’d done to him.

His son. He had a son. Goddamn her—he had a son!

CHAPTER FIVE

TESS RUSHED THROUGH her toilette as Jacques chattered and danced about the bedchamber all unawares. Emilie stood by wringing her hands, blaming herself for turning her back on the boy when he was so determined to visit his Maman’s bedchamber as he was accustomed to doing each morning.

The appearance of the tall man hadn’t made any impression on the child, except to remind him to ask Tess yet again for the whereabouts of his beloved grand-père.

Grand-père. Jacques was the light of her father’s life, and had been since the day he’d been born. The man who had mostly ignored his own motherless children while they were in the nursery was now this stranger who would stand at Jacques’s bedside, watching him sleep. His smiles were all for Jacques, and he’d bring him treats, bounce him on his knee and tell him silly stories when he thought no one else could hear.

It was Jacques who felt the hugs, received the kisses. Jacques who could so easily slip his hand into his grandfather’s and go on adventures in the gardens. Jacques who had somehow, at last, been more important than things.

Jack had been right, and he’d been wrong. Jacques was to be the keeper of her father’s legacy, the one he wished to guard, the one who must remember him with love, mourn him. He would live or die the hero, as the man who had at last put a stop to the Gypsy. Not for René, not for her, but for Jacques. And for himself… with Sinjon Fonteneau, there was always a hook.

“It’s all right, Emilie,” Tess assured the woman yet again, even as she struggled to do up the front-closing buttons of her morning gown with trembling fingers. “And probably for the best. We were wrong to hide Jacques from him. We’ve been wrong about too many things, and for far too long.”

The nurse only sniffled into her handkerchief.

“Come along, my love,” Tess said then, holding out her hand to her son. “Running is for outside, in the sunshine.”

“Jacques’s ball?” the boy asked eagerly as they made their way downstairs, bravely jumping down the last two steps and turning for the kitchens and the box near the door to the gardens, the one holding his prized striped ball.

Tess followed, waving away the muffin Cook held out to her, knowing she was too nervous to be hungry. Her world had turned upside down yesterday, and inside out this morning. Life would never be the same. This morning ritual might never be the same. But, for now, for Jacques, she would pretend nothing had changed.

“The path, Jacques,” she called after him as he eagerly ran for the expanse of lawn beyond the kitchen garden. “Parsley is for eating, not for stomping, remember?”

He turned and grinned at her, the picture of his father when Jack was warm from bed and in a mood to tease her, and kept running, throwing the ball ahead of him and then racing to catch up to it. He repeated the action a half dozen more times, until the ball rolled to a stop in front of a pair of shiny black Hessians.

Tess believed she could actually feel her heart stop.

Jack bent to pick up the ball and, still crouching down, handed it to his son. Jacques hesitated, but then reached out and put his hand on the ball, even while Jack still held it. For a moment, the two were a frozen tableau set out expressly to squeeze Tess’s heart, green eyes looking into green, dark heads close together.

“Merci, monsieur,” Jacques said, and then performed his much-practiced bow and added, “Thank you, sir,” just as he’d been taught.

She watched as Jack raised his other hand as if to touch his son’s cheek. But then the moment was gone and Jacques was off again, throwing the ball ahead of him and then chasing after it.

Jack stood up once more and approached Tess.

“Jack, I can—No, that’s not true. I can’t explain. I can’t even ask for your forgiveness.”

“No, you can’t,” he said shortly, his eyes on Jacques. “The boy should have a dog. That’s what thrown balls are for. There are plenty at Blackthorn, but we can get him his own. A puppy. Nothing too large to start with, or it will just knock him down.”

A dog? He was talking to her about dogs? “What?” she asked him, so nervous she was sure she must have misunderstood.

“Never mind,” he told her, still looking at Jacques. “I’ll see to it. Emilie is packing his things now and I’ve ordered the horses put to the coach. They leave in an hour, and should arrive at Blackthorn tomorrow afternoon.”

Tess shot a panicked look at her son. “You can’t do that. You can’t take him. He’s my son.”

At last he looked at her, but only for a moment before he returned to watching his son, following the boy’s every move hungrily, greedily. “You and I are for London this morning, correct?”

She hid her surprise that he was still agreeing to take her. Warily, she nodded.

“Leaving my son here, with only Emilie to watch over him. That’s not possible.”

“Why not?” Tess was fighting to keep from running to Jacques and scooping him up in her arms.

“Sinjon showed me his treasure room. We can’t be sure he did the same with the Gypsy, but the man knows of the collection. The sight of those treasures makes for a fairly impressive argument to fall in with his plans.”

“No. I don’t understand.” How could she think? Jack was taking her son from her. All she had, all she’d ever had.

“Haven’t you yet wondered why the Gypsy has never attempted to relieve your father of his treasures? He knows they’re here. He helped acquire many of them. And with only one old man standing between him and a fortune? Yet he’s never tried. Now why do you suppose that is, Tess?”

She watched as Jacques held the ball straight out in front of him with both hands and turned around and around in circles until he fell, giggling, to the grass. How strange. The sun still shone, a child still laughed. And yet her world was crumbling around her. She had to concentrate. Jack still spoke matter-of-factly, a man of no emotion. She’d always marveled at the way his mind worked. So coolly analytical. He’d figured something out in his head, and he had a plan. A plan that included removing Jacques from the manor house. Not from her, please God, but the house itself. “I… I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t. But they worked together for well over a decade, remember. There may have been some bond between student and pupil, some honor among thieves. Either that, or the Gypsy promised to never come after the collection while Sinjon still lived, and in return, Sinjon promised to never come after the Gypsy. Only the two of them know how or why they came to the arrangement, and why they abide by it.”

“Papa always has a reason with a hook in it,” Tess agreed, wondering where Jack’s deductions had led him. “There’s a hook somewhere that’s kept the Gypsy away.”

“True enough. There could be many reasons. Of the two possibilities I’ve been able to come up with so far, I think the latter makes more sense. There is no honor among thieves. But your father didn’t like the terms anymore, not once he’d found me, once he felt sure I’d fall in with his plans to begin enlarging his collection again. So he tried to eliminate the Gypsy in Whitechapel. For that error in judgment, he paid with his son’s life.”

“Oh, God,” Tess said quietly.

“I don’t think God enters anywhere into this particular equation. Your father’s monster left his card on René’s chest. Sinjon somehow acknowledged the punishment, and they went back to their original agreement. Except that after a four-year absence, the Gypsy’s calling cards are back in England, announcing his return, and your father’s gone after him again. If he fails this time, the Gypsy might decide to come after the collection now, or to teach Sinjon another lesson. Either way, my son is not to be involved, because he’s not going to be here. He goes to Blackthorn today.”

“Our son, and his name is Jacques.” Tess felt her hands drawing up into fists. “Besides, this is all simply assumption on your part. Everything you’ve said since you came here has been conjecture, assumption. Everything you’ve told me could be a lie. Everything!”

She was like a drowning seaman clasping at bits of floating straw, and she knew it. But he was using what he knew to take her son from her.

“You’re right, Tess. Everything I said could be a lie. Or I could be wrong, straight down the line, and your father’s a damn saint and is simply having himself a lark in London for no apparent reason.” He looked to Jacques once more. “But are you willing to risk our son’s life on that? I’m not.”

“Then he goes to London, with us.” As Tess heard her own words she marveled at what she’d just admitted. Her father was a thief. Her father, if he failed, could be risking the life of his grandson. And her life… but she couldn’t be sure her father had considered her. Had she sunk that far, did she now think so little of her own father? Yes. God help her, yes. She had one objective now, one concern, and that was for Jacques. She’d risk everything, dare anything, to keep him safe, even if at the end of the day that meant losing him to Jack. Her father had sent Jack to them, hadn’t he, simply by disappearing…

Jacques took that moment to approach Jack with the ball held out between his hands. “Frow?”

It was fate. It was the hand of God. It was the dice, just this once, being thrown in her favor. Did it matter what it was, as long as Jack was now looking down at his son with his heart in his eyes?

“Throw, Jacques, not frow. Please throw the ball with me. Veuillez jeter la boule avec moi.” She would risk everything, dare anything. “Please throw the ball with me, Papa.”

OF COURSE THE reports to the Crown had contained no mention of a child. The child wasn’t important, but only the man. Those assigned to watch Sinjon over the years had not been chosen from the top ranks of those employed by the Crown. They would have seen no reason to mention that a child was now in residence at the manor house.

But that didn’t mean he shouldn’t have known. He should have hired his own watchers. He should have made periodic checks of his own over the past four years.

Except that he hadn’t been able to trust himself to see Tess again. He might have been inflamed by the impossible thought that she may have changed her mind, may welcome him back. He may have made a fool of himself again, ripped the scabs off a deep, slowly healing wound.

So he’d settled for the reports.

Coward. He’d been a coward. Selfishly protecting himself, falling into his old ways, as he’d done after his mother’s cruel admission. Run away, run away. You’re not wanted here. You don’t belong.

Jack rode ahead of the coach, leaving the Crown’s assigned watcher to tag along behind, not that the man would be much good if he hadn’t the independent judgment to report that there was a child at the manor house, or to inform his superiors that the marquis was acting strangely, disappearing for hours at a time over the past month.

He shouldn’t be doing this. Jacques should be on his way to Blackthorn, and Tess along with him. But, he’d told himself, Beau might be off on one of his inspections of the marquess’s other holdings, and God only knew what Puck was up to now that he’d an estate of his own. The last letter he’d received from his younger brother had been full of ecstatic exclamations about the calf he’d personally helped bring into the world. He’d named the thing Black Jack, he’d written, because it was both black and stubborn.

That left the marquess, and possibly Adelaide, if she had deigned to visit the estate. His mother would probably be appalled at the thought she’d been made a grandmother, and it wouldn’t do for the marquess to begin making grandiose plans for yet another bastard child.

Therefore, rationally, it was probably better that Jacques accompany his parents to London.

It was amazing how a man could rationalize selfishness until it suited his purpose. Papa. Jacques had called him Papa…

Jack eased back on the reins and allowed the coach to pull forward, and then paced his horse so that he was now riding just beside the door. He leaned down a bit to look inside. Emilie was dozing on the back-facing seat while Tess held Jacques close beside her, reading to him from some rather worn-looking book.

His heart squeezed at the sight, but even more so when Jacques spotted him and pushed away from his mother to press his palms against the side glass, smiling broadly as he mouthed something Jack couldn’t hear.

He motioned for Tess to lower the window but she shook her head.

“Now,” he mouthed silently, challenging her with his eyes. If he wanted to know what his son was saying, he’d damn well know, and she’d damn well not try to stop him. He held the cards, and she knew it. She also knew he wouldn’t be all that reluctant to play them. She’d kept his son from him for nearly four years, and that was a debt that wouldn’t be paid so easily.

Tess lowered the window while holding tightly to the squirming Jacques. “I was attempting to get him to sleep, you know,” she said accusingly. “Clearly you’ve never traveled with a young child for long hours inside a poorly sprung coach. He’s already been sick, twice. Not that it seems to bother him.”

“Horse! Horse!” Jacques was shouting overtop his mother’s complaints.

Jack looked at Tess. She did look a bit… disheveled. Beautiful, but perhaps a little worn about the edges four hours into their ride to London, her bonnet lying partially crushed on the seat, a few locks of blond hair escaping their pins. His son was obviously a handful.

Jack smiled at the thought. His son. Of course he’d be a handful!

He called out to the coachman to stop the coach, and then leaned down and depressed the latch to the door. “Hand him up to me,” he said to Tess. “What he needs is some fresh air.”

Tess looked ready to object, but then a slow smile curved her mouth. Some might have called it an evil smile. “Of course. But I warn you, he doesn’t smell all that fresh, not since the last time he was sick. How long until we’re in London?”

“No more than another hour. I’ll keep him with me until we’re actually in the city. Then I want him inside with you, and the curtains drawn. Agreed?”

“Oh, yes. Happily agreed,” Tess said, handing Jacques up to Jack. “Jacques, essayez ne pas cracher sur Papa’s bottes.”

Try not to spit on Papa’s boots? “Very amusing, Tess. Why don’t you take a hint from Emilie, and try to nap. You look as if you could use some rest. But then, you didn’t get much sleep last night, did you?”

Insults exchanged, Jack lifted Jacques and placed him in front of him on the saddle. Tess pulled the door shut with decided force, signaling the coachman to proceed.

It was like old days come back again. The teasing, the sparring, and quite often, the competition. Except with the child now between them. And so much more.

With his left arm wrapped securely about his son’s middle, Jack leaned down to kiss the child’s soft curls, not yet used to the swift fierce feelings just being near his son engendered in him. Mine. What a curious thing to think. Mine.

He’d had no future. Now he did. He’d had no hope. Yet now he was hopeful. There were no happy endings. But maybe there could be.

All that lay between him and Tess now was the past, in the forms of Sinjon and the Gypsy… and René. But was it him that she couldn’t forgive for what happened to René, or herself?

Jacques was now holding tight to the stallion’s mane and bouncing up and down in front of Jack. “Horse! Horse! Plus rapidement! Faster! Faster!”

“Oh, really? Faster is it? I should have known this couldn’t be your first time in the saddle, not with Tess for your maman. Very well, mon enfant, faster!”

CHAPTER SIX

“GOOD EVENING, sir,” the Grosvenor Square butler said as he personally held open the rear door that led in from the mews, just as if Jack had been expected. The man was unflappable, even if he’d had to run down three flights of stairs when alerted that Mr. Blackthorn had arrived at the stables behind the Blackthorn mansion.

“Good evening, Wadsworth,” Jack responded, and then passed him the soundly sleeping Jacques. “Any harm comes to this child and I’ll have your liver for lunch while you watch. Understood?” he added in the same pleasant tone.

“I would expect no less, sir. Good evening, miss,” he then said as Tess walked into the warm kitchens, looking about her as if to get her bearings.

“Lady Thessaly Fonteneau, Wadsworth. See that her belongings are taken upstairs.”

Wadsworth, soldier turned butler, had never quite mastered the intricacies of proper butlering. However, thanks to Masters Beau and Puck, he did have fairly recent experience in these matters to bring to the subject the disposition of milady’s portmanteaus. He wasn’t blind, after all, and Mr. Blackthorn couldn’t deny this dark-haired child any more than Wadsworth could stop the sun from rising come morning. “Yes, Mr. Blackthorn, it will be just as you wish.”

Jack almost thought he’d detected a wink from the man, but discounted it as Emilie swept into the kitchens with a rapid stream of authoritative French, relieved Wadsworth of his burden and demanded to be shown the nursery.

Tess put out a hand as if to stop the butler and nursemaid as they took her son away from her, but dropped her arm to her side at Jack’s slight shake of his head.

“I’ve been told the Blackthorn butler once knocked down ten of Bonaparte’s elite private guard just by blowing on them. I imagine there was more to it than that, but I’d trust him with my son, and you should do the same. Come along. We’ll go to the drawing room and the wine decanter I’m sure is already there, waiting for us.”

“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.”

“Thank you,” Jack said, his voice dripping venom. “You, not René. Out in the open, not in a Whitechapel alleyway. With only Sinjon knowing that the mission was not what we thought it was, with only Sinjon knowing we weren’t going up against some inferior French traitor, but drawing out the Gypsy, the monster he’d taught every trick he ever knew.”

Tess wet her lips as she nodded. “He would have known, yes. Papa’s used the same ploy before.”

Jack gave a quick thought to Dickie Carstairs. “And I’ve used it since, to great effect, I admit that. Making it easy for the Gypsy to recognize it and form a counter-plan of his own,” he told her, approaching her slowly so that possibly she wouldn’t bolt, run away from the truth. He spoke quietly now. “So why not put one of my children—it didn’t matter which one—out there as a decoy, and then I’d wait for the Gypsy to ignore the obvious ploy. I’d wait for him to come out of the shadows just where he knew I’d be hiding, ready to strike. Except that didn’t happen, did it? Sinjon wasn’t even looking in René’s direction when the monster cut him down.”

Tess was standing with her arms tightly wrapped around her middle, rocking back and forth as tears rolled down her cheeks. She hadn’t been there, she hadn’t seen it, the quick savagery.

But Jack had been watching. He’d been in place, ready to move, when a blur of black, hooded cloak moved across the alleyway, barely hesitating in front of René before disappearing through a narrow door previously unnoticed by anyone. René hadn’t even hit the cobblestones before the door had closed, the hooded figure gone.

Jack had run to the boy, not even remembering how he had leapt over the barrels that had concealed his position, arriving long seconds before Sinjon, who promptly knelt down, his ear close to his son’s mouth. René grabbed his father’s arm, said something Jack couldn’t make out, and then his hand fell away. He was dead, the knife in his chest to the hilt, a strange black calling card with a golden eye at its center half-tucked into his waistcoat pocket.

The Gypsy had come to that alley not to sell French secrets to the Crown, as Jack had been told, but expressly to kill. But not to kill Sinjon. René’s murder was a warning. Tess’s death would have delivered that same warning had she been the one standing in the alley.

“He thought I’d—he thought René would be safely out of it.”

“Which is where you both should have been, damn it. This wasn’t for Crown and country, Tess. This was private, one man against the other. And for what, Tess? For that damn collection.”

“You should have told me then—the secret room, the collection, all of it. You shouldn’t have let me blame you. Papa said—”

“I know what he told you. That I froze. That I didn’t move fast enough. I was closer, I should have been able to stop it. My most important mission, and I’d botched it. And I had, Tess. I should have put a stop to it all before we ever went into that alley.”

“You didn’t know then that our quarry was the Gypsy.” She put her hand on his arm. “René’s dead. We can’t either of us change that. I wish you had told me. I wish I could believe I’d have been ready to listen. Everything would have been so… different.”

Jack slipped his arms around her, pulling her close against his chest. “This time he dies, Tess. I promise you that.”

She stepped back to look at him, to watch his reaction to her next words, he was sure. “And this time I’ll be there to see him die.”

All right. Now it was his turn to look at her, watch her. “And Sinjon? What about him?”

“I don’t know, Jack. I just don’t know.”

TESS THANKED THE maid who’d helped her into her nightrail and dismissed her, already looking longingly at the turned-down bed across the large chamber. She’d been upstairs to see that Jacques was sound asleep, tucked up in a cot shaped like a swan, of all things, and that Emilie was snoring loudly in the next room, the door open between them.

Only a little more than a single day and night, and everything in Tess’s life had changed. For the first time in her life she knew what it meant to not know if one was on her head or her heels.

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