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Dev’s mouth turned down slightly at the corners. “I don’t know. She doesn’t talk to me anymore. I think she’s sad.”
“Sad?” Alex was startled. Somewhere in the recesses of his body the guilt kicked him again. James and Francesca Devlin were his only close relatives now and he had barely seen them in the past couple of years. When their mother, his father’s sister, had died, he had salved his conscience by buying Devlin his commission and finding Francesca a home with a distant aunt to chaperone her, and had promptly departed overseas. He was not a rich man; he had only his navy salary and a small income from his Scottish estates, but he took his responsibilities seriously, materially at least. Emotionally it was a different matter. He wanted no dependents, no obligations. Such relationships were a burden. They held him back, chafing like wet rope against the skin. Always he wanted to get out of London, back to sea, to find some new quest and some new adventure, to escape.
Balvenie needs an heir …
There were some responsibilities that could never be escaped. Again Alex shrugged his shoulders to sough off the unwanted responsibility. Devlin was right, but he could not contemplate remarriage. It would be another burden, another unconscionable tie.
“Is there something Chessie needs?” he asked. “You should have told me if she required more money—”
“She doesn’t,” Dev said, giving him a very straight look. “You are more than generous to her, Alex.” He frowned. “It is company Chessie needs,” he said. “Aunt Constance isn’t much fun as a companion for a girl in her teens. Oh, she’s a very good sort of woman,” he added swiftly as Alex raised his brows, “but a bit too good, if you know what I mean. She spends half her time at prayer meetings, which is all very worthy but not very exciting for Chessie. And the poor girl wants a come-out ball next year, but I doubt Aunt Constance will agree to that. No doubt she would deem it too frivolous—” He broke off, fidgeting with his dish of chocolate, playing with the spoon. “Listen, Alex—” He looked up suddenly. “I need your help.”
Alex waited. Dev, he realized, was nervous.
“It’s to do with money,” Dev said suddenly. His frown deepened. “Well, sort of to do with money, if you take my meaning.”
“Not at all,” Alex said. “What happened to the proceeds from the diamond chandelier?”
“Spent long ago.” Dev looked defiant. “The thing is, I’ve sold out of the navy, Alex, and bought a share in a ship with Owen Purchase. Or at least I am trying to raise the funds to do so. We plan an expedition to Mexico.”
Alex swore. Owen Purchase had been a colleague of his at the Battle of Trafalgar, one of the Americans who had fought with them against the French. Purchase was an inspired sea captain, almost a legend, and he had always been a hero to Dev.
“Why Mexico?” Alex asked succinctly.
“Gold.” Dev matched his terseness.
“Poppycock.”
Dev laughed. “You don’t believe in tales of lost treasure?”
“No. And neither should you, and Purchase definitely shouldn’t.” Alex ran a hand through his hair. Would his cousin never grow up? He could not believe that Dev had thrown his commission away for a wild-goose chase. “For God’s sake, Dev,” he said with more edge than he had intended, “must you always be playing these mad, dangerous games?”
“It’s better than freezing my arse off in some snowbound wilderness searching for a trade route that isn’t there,” Dev said, his candor taking Alex completely by surprise. “The Admiralty are using you, Alex. They pay you some pittance to risk your life in the noble cause of empire and just because you feel guilty over Amelia’s death you let them send you to one godforsaken place after another—” He broke off as Alex made an involuntary movement of fury and raised his hands in a gesture of peace. “My apologies. I overstepped the mark.”
“Damn right you did.” Alex growled. He clamped down on his anger. He did not discuss Amelia’s death with anybody. There were no exceptions. And Dev’s blistering comments were too painful, too near the bone. Amelia had died five years previously and ever since then Alex had deliberately taken postings that had been as extreme, as reckless and as dangerous as he could find. He wanted nothing else. Even sitting here now with Dev he could feel the urge to escape, the desire to turn his back on all these tedious responsibilities and family burdens. It jarred him into guilt even as he wanted simply to take ship and set sail for wherever the wind blew him. But for now he was trapped in London anyway, hog-tied by the Admiralty whilst they decided what to do with him.
“One of these days,” he said, venting some of his frustrations by glaring at his cousin, “someone is going to put a bullet through you, Devlin, and it might well be me.”
Dev relaxed. “I don’t doubt it,” he said cheerfully. “Now, about the favor I’m asking …”
“You have a damned nerve.”
“Always, but.” Dev cocked a brow. “It’s easy and it won’t cost you a penny of your own money and after all, you owe it to me as the big brother I never had.”
Alex sighed. Even as he could feel himself softening toward his cousin he wondered how Dev managed to get round him so easily. But then, Dev could charm anything that moved.
“Your logic is faulty,” he snapped, “but do go ahead.”
“I need you to attend Mrs. Cummings’s rout this evening in Grosvenor Square,” Dev said.
Alex looked at him. “You’re joking.”
“I am not.”
“Then you do not know me very well even after twenty-three years,” Alex said. “I detest balls, routs, breakfasts and parties of all kinds.”
“You will love this one,” Dev said, grinning. “It is in your honor.”
“What?” Alex gave his young relative a withering look. “Now you have taken leave of your senses.”
“And you are turning into a curmudgeon,” Dev said. “You need to get out more and enjoy yourself. What did you have planned for tonight-an evening alone, reading a book in your hotel?”
That, Alex thought, was dangerously close to the mark and did make him sound like a superannuated older relative rather than a cousin with only nine years seniority.
“Nothing wrong in that,” he said.
Dev laughed. “But a rout will be much more fun. And Mr. Cummings is frightfully rich and I need to persuade him to sponsor my voyage to Mexico. So I thought …”
“I see,” Alex said, seeing exactly where this was going.
“Both Mr. and Mrs. Cummings are desperately keen on explorers,” Dev said in a rush, suddenly sounding very young. “They think you are most dashing. So when they discovered that I was your cousin, well. They promised to help me if I could persuade you to attend the rout …”
Alex rolled his eyes. “Devlin,” he said warningly.
“I know,” Dev said, “but I thought you would be attending anyway, since Lady Joanna Ware will be there and she is your mistress—”
“What?” Alex brought his coffee cup down with a crack that made the table shudder.
“It’s the on dit,” Dev said. “I heard it from Lady O’Hara just before we met up. You’re the talk of the town.”
“Ah,” Alex said. “Yes.” By his calculations it had been all of an hour since John Hagan had left Half Moon Street. Evidently the man had lost no time in spreading the scandal of Lady Joanna Ware’s supposed liaison. Perhaps it served to smooth over his rejection to broadcast that Joanna Ware had another lover. Contempt for Hagan seared him.
“I admire your taste,” Dev was saying. He gave Alex a frank look. “I’d always heard Lady Joanna was cold as the grave-would have tried my luck if I’d thought otherwise.”
“You can give that idea up, infant,” Alex said very dryly. The sensation of masculine possession that gripped him when he thought about Joanna Ware was sharp and shocking. He realized that he had reacted entirely on instinct. It was an alien sensation. “And don’t speak disrespectfully of Lady Joanna either,” he added, wondering as he did so why on earth he felt the need to defend her.
Dev raised his brows. “Very vehement, Alex.”
“And she is not my mistress,” Alex finished testily.
“Then why the bad temper?” Dev grinned. “Or are you frustrated because she is not your mistress?”
“Enough,” Alex snapped.
Dev shrugged elegantly. “But you will be there tonight?” He did not quite manage to erase the note of pleading from his voice.
“You should have asked Purchase,” Alex said grimly. “He likes that sort of thing.”
“Purchase is dining with the Prince Regent,” Dev said. “An invitation which I understand you declined, Alex.”
“I hate all the celebrity nonsense.”
Dev laughed. “But this is different. This is for me.”
Alex thought about it. He did not approve of Dev’s decision to turn in his commission, but the damage was done now. He could try to dissuade his cousin from his harebrained Mexican scheme, but he doubted he would be successful; Dev had his own share of the family obstinacy. And Alex knew he ran the risk of looking a complete hypocrite if he played the role of heavy-handed older brother. It was true that he had pursued his own adventures with the approval and support of the King’s Royal Navy, but what real difference was there between a man seeking adventure under his country’s flag and one setting out to prove himself in a different way? Dev was motivated by courage and a quest for adventure and independence. And he was not running away from the ghosts of the past, a charge that Alex had to plead guilty to, in part at least.
Alex tapped his fingers impatiently on the table edge. As he had told Dev, he detested social events with a deep and abiding hatred. Yet if he attended the rout he could assuage a little of the guilt he felt over neglecting his family by helping Devlin.
And he would see Lady Joanna Ware again.
For a moment he felt as green as he had done as a teenager at Eton, hoping to catch sight of the housemaster’s daughter. The desire to see Joanna was very strong even as he acknowledged it was the single most foolish thing that he could do. If he wanted a woman he should buy a courtesan for a night, or two nights or however many nights it took to slake his lust. That would be straightforward, uncomplicated. Desiring David Ware’s tempting widow was neither of those things. The difficulty was that it was Joanna Ware he wanted, not some Covent Garden light skirt. He doubted that bedding a Cyprian would even take the edge off his hunger, for he did not want a whore. He could pretend that this lust was no more than the natural consequence of being away from female company for months on end, but if he told himself that he would know that he was a liar.
Joanna Ware. She was temptation incarnate. She was infuriating. She was forbidden to him. He disliked her.
He would go to the rout and see if she had the temerity to dismiss him as her lover to his face, in full public view.
He remembered that when David Ware had slipped the lawyer’s letter into his hand on his deathbed there had been a most peculiar, triumphant smile on Ware’s face and he had whispered:
“Joanna likes surprises, damn her.” Alex doubted that Lady Joanna would be very pleased with this particular surprise. She had not expected to see him again. She disliked him equally as much as he disliked her.
Devlin was still waiting for his reply.
“Very well,” he said slowly. “Yes, I will be there.”
Chapter 2
“WHAT IS LORD GRANT LIKE?” Mrs. Lottie Cummings, ton hostess extraordinaire, scandalous matron and one of Lady Joanna Ware’s dearest friends, ignored the guests piling into her reception rooms in favor of quizzing her friend on the shocking news of her affaire. “You know I have only ever heard tell of him, Jo darling, and have not even seen a portrait.”
“Well,” Joanna said, “he is tall.”
“So is my aunt Dorothea.” Lottie gave an impatient wiggle. “Dearest, you are going to have to do better than that.”
He is not really my lover … Why on earth had she let this go on for as long as it had? Why not simply say: “We are not lovers. It is all a hum …”
Joanna was not sure. Anger at Alex’s high-handed behavior, and what she acknowledged was a rather childish pettiness because he disapproved of her and disliked her, had made her want to punish him. It was a foolish game of tit for tat and unworthy of her. The trouble was that if she denied the liaison now it would cause almost as much of a sensation as the original announcement. Such were the rather superficial obsessions of society. And a deeper, more disturbing truth was that she actually liked the idea of Alex Grant as her lover, liked it all too well as she imagined what it might be like to take him to her bed, to feel his hands on her body, to give herself to him with all the abandoned desire she had never actually felt for a man before. She had loved David passionately when they had wed, but the intensity of her infatuation had never been matched by physical desire. When David had touched her she had felt vaguely anticipatory, as though something more exciting should be happening. Unfortunately it never did. And then the relationship had turned so hideously sour that she had never wanted David to touch her ever again.
In recent years-in most years, actually-her marriage bed had resembled the snowy wastes of the Arctic, pristine, empty and untouched, and having lost her illusions about David Ware, that was exactly how she had wanted it. She had been horribly lonely through the years of her marriage, a wife and yet no true wife, but even when David had died she had not trusted any man sufficiently to allow him close. And Alex Grant could not be that man. He was not for her. David had poisoned him against her, she was sure, and most importantly he was cut from the same cloth as David, an adventurer, an explorer, a man who would forsake his home and his family, and walk out into the unknown, leaving everything that should have been most precious and valuable to him behind.
“Well?” Lottie prompted impatiently.
“He is dark,” Jo said.
Lottie sighed. “Again, my aunt Dorothea can give him a run for his money on that.” She threw up her hands. “Darling … you know I lead such a boring life! A little more vicarious excitement, if you please.”
“That’s the best I can do, Lottie,” Joanna said. “Lord Grant and I are not really lovers. The gossip is not true.”
Lottie was looking at her pityingly. “Jo, darling, you don’t have to explain or excuse yourself to me. Nobody blames you for taking a lover! Why, it is an age since David died. And I hear that lovely Lord Grant is very, very luscious. Is it true—” Lottie’s dark eyes sparkled suddenly “—that he has the most fearsome scars on his chest from wrestling a polar bear?”
“I have no notion,” Joanna said. “Why would anyone want to wrestle a bear? It sounds highly dangerous.” She remembered the slight limp that characterized Alex’s gait. She had a vague memory that David had mentioned that Alex had been badly injured on some expedition some years before. Unlike her late husband, however, he did not seem inclined to make capital out of it.
“Lottie,” she repeated, “you aren’t listening to me. Lord Grant and I are no more than acquaintances and pray don’t talk like this-you are shocking Merryn.” She looked at her younger sister, who had been sitting quietly by whilst Lottie chattered. Merryn was as restrained as Lottie was loud, her serenity an antidote to Mrs. Cummings’s staggeringly indiscreet personality. Merryn had the habit of silence, a habit she had fostered throughout their uncle’s long and difficult last illness. It was bad luck for the youngest, unmarried daughter, Joanna thought, that convention dictated that nursing duties always fell to them. Sometimes she felt just a little guilty at having left Merryn to cope with their uncle alone. She had escaped the stultifying atmosphere of the vicarage years before and had never returned. As far as she knew, neither had their middle sister, Tess. Merryn was the one who had borne the brunt of the Reverend Dixon’s choleric nature.
“Don’t mind me,” Merryn said, her pansy-blue eyes lighting with amusement. “Oh, and I think that the polar bear story was an invention, Lottie.”
Lottie was pouting. “Well, if Jo has not seen Lord Grant’s chest, we cannot know for sure, can we? Do you make love in the dark, Jo darling? You are even more prim and proper than I had imagined!”
“I am exceptionally straitlaced,” Joanna agreed truthfully. “Lottie, I know I may seem flighty, but it is all show and no substance.”
Lottie opened her dark eyes very wide. “Oh, I know that, darling! All the gentlemen say you have a heart of ice! So clever of you to be so beautiful and heartless and unobtainable, for it keeps them panting after you!”
“I don’t do it to encourage them,” Joanna said a little uncomfortably, for Lottie’s words held an undercurrent of envy as well as being close to the truth. “It is simply that I do not trust men very much.”
“Oh, well, darling—” Lottie planted a consoling hand on her arm “—neither do I, but what is that to the purpose? I seduce them and cast them aside and that keeps me happy.”
Joanna wondered if it was true. She knew the conquest bit was-Lottie’s discreet affaires were well-known in ton circles, but whether her infidelities made her happy or not, Joanna had never been able to tell. They both lived in a world of mirrors where artifice and superficiality were highly prized and depth and sincerity mocked to scorn. Lottie never ever broached serious subjects with her and after ten years in the ton Joanna never confided in anyone either, having discovered early on that secrets were not respected. What was meant for private discussion quickly became the on dit.
“Well, if you wish to set your cap for Lord Grant, pray do not worry about cutting me out,” she said now. “I am not having an affaire with him.” She sighed. “And I cannot believe that you invited him this evening, Lottie, nor laid on this rather extravagant display in his honor.”
When she had arrived at Lottie’s rout and discovered that Alex Grant was promised for the evening, she had been appalled and incredulous. That Alex, with his apparent contempt for the adulation of society, should be such a hypocrite as to accept this ball in his honor had disappointed Joanna in some obscure way, reinforcing as it did that he was just another self-aggrandizing adventurer after all. And there could be no mistake. Lottie had said he had sent a message to confirm his attendance and as a result the dining room was decorated with huge ice sculptures, one of which was a life-size model of a man wielding an icy sword in one hand and the British flag in the other, clearly meant to represent Alex himself as he conquered yet another swath of virgin territory. There were also drapes of white satin sheathing the staircase to imitate a frozen waterfall and green and red lanterns hung from the ballroom ceiling to emulate the northern lights. The highlight of the entire display was a rather moth-eaten stuffed polar bear standing in the corner of the entrance hall and glaring balefully at all the guests as they arrived. It was all gloriously vulgar, but somehow it worked because Lottie had such brazen style.
“Is it not marvelous?” Lottie beamed. “I excel myself.”
“You certainly do,” Joanna murmured.
“And you are dressed the part, too,” Lottie added, casting an approving glance over Joanna’s white satin evening gown and diamonds. “How inspired! I adore you in the color, Jo darling! The other ladies will all be dressing as debutantes now you have set the fashion!”
“I do not think,” Merryn said unexpectedly, “that all this show will be quite to Lord Grant’s taste, Lottie. He is reputed to be somewhat reserved.”
“Nonsense.” Lottie beamed. “He will adore it.”
“Well, if he does not I am sure he will be too polite to say so,” Merryn said. “I hear he is the very epitome of chivalry.”
“You seem to know a great deal about him,” Joanna teased gently as her sister blushed. “Who can have been singing Lord Grant’s praises to you?”
“No one,” Merryn said, blushing harder. “I have been reading of his exploits, that is all. Mr. Gable has been writing about him in the Courier. He is quite the returning hero. Apparently he turned down an invitation to dine from the Prince Regent, which only made people more determined to secure his attendance at their events. He is the toast of all the clubs.”
Joanna had shuddered at the word hero. “I cannot see what there is to celebrate in a failed attempt to find the Northern Pole. As I understand it, David and Lord Grant set out to discover a northeast trade route via the Pole, failed to do so, became trapped in the ice, David died and Lord Grant sailed home.” She raised her hands heavenward in a gesture of exasperation. “Hardly a cause for celebration. Or am I missing some essential fact here?”
Lottie tapped her wrist disapprovingly with her fan. “Do not be so harsh, Joanna darling. It is all about excitement and danger and the adventure of exploration! Lord Grant is the very essence of the noble hero, silent, solitary and fiendishly attractive, just like David.”
“David,” Joanna said dryly, “was hardly silent and solitary.”
Lottie fidgeted, avoiding her eyes. “I suppose David was rather more forthcoming—”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Joanna said even more dryly.
Lottie grabbed a glass of champagne and drained it in one gulp. “Jo darling, you know I am sorry that I let him seduce me, but he was such a hero that it seemed impolite to refuse!” She fixed Joanna with her big, dark eyes. “And it was not as though you cared!”
“No,” Joanna said, turning her face away, “I did not care whom David seduced.”
