Proof by Seduction (Carhart #1)

Ned waved his hand at his cousin. “Well, go ahead, Blakely. Ask her something.”


Lord Blakely leaned back in his chair. Up until this moment, he had not spoken a single word; his eyes had traveled about the room, though. “You want me to ask her something?” He spoke slowly, drawing out each syllable with precision. “I consult logic, not old charlatans.”

Ned and Jenny spoke atop each other. “She’s no charlatan!” protested Ned.

But Jenny’s hands had flown to her hips for another reason entirely. “Thirty,” she protested, “is not old!”

Ned turned to her, his eyebrow lifting. A devastating silence cloaked the room. It was a measure of her own agitation that she’d forsaken Madame Esmerelda’s character already. Instead, she’d spoken as a woman.

And the marquess noticed. That tawny gaze flicked from her kerchiefed head down to the garish skirts obscuring her waist. His vision bored through every one of her layers. The appraisal was thoroughly masculine. A sudden tremulous awareness tickled Jenny’s palms.

And then he looked away. A queer quirk of his lips; the smallest exhalation, and like that, he dismissed her.

Jenny was no lady, no social match for Lord Blakely. She was not the sort who would inspire him to tip his hat if he passed her on the street. She should have been accustomed to such cursory dismissals. But beneath her skirts, she felt suddenly brittle, like a pile of dried-up potato parings, ready to blow away with one strong gust of wind. Her fingernails bit crescent moons into her hands.

Madame Esmerelda wouldn’t care about this man’s interest. Madame Esmerelda never let herself get angry. And so Jenny swallowed the lump in her throat and smiled mysteriously. “I am also not a charlatan.”

Lord Blakely raised an eyebrow. “That remains to be proven. As I have no desire to seek answers for myself, I believe Ned will question you.”

“I already have!” Ned gestured widely. “About everything. About life and death.”

Lord Blakely rolled his eyes. No doubt he’d taken Ned’s dramatic protest as youthful exaggeration. But Jenny knew it for the simple truth it was. Two years earlier, Ned had wandered into this room and asked the question that had changed both their lives: “Is there any reason I shouldn’t kill myself?”

At the time, Jenny had wanted to disclaim all responsibility. Her first impulse had been to distance herself from the boy, to say she wasn’t really able to see the future. But the question was not one a nineteen-year-old posed to a stranger because he was considering his options rationally. She’d known, even then, that the young man had asked because he was at his wits’ end.

So she’d lied. She told him she saw happiness in his future, that he had every reason to live. He’d believed her. And as time passed, he’d gradually moved past despair. Today, he stood in front of her almost confident.

It should have counted as a triumph of some kind, a good deed chalked up to Jenny’s account. But on that first day, she hadn’t just taken his despair. She’d taken his money, too. And since then, she and Ned had been bound together in this tangle of coin and deceit.

“Life and death?” Lord Blakely fingered the cheap fabric that loosely draped her chairs. “Then there should be no problem with my more prosaic proposal. I’m sure you are aware Ned must marry. Madame—Esmerelda, is it?—why don’t you tell me the name of the woman he should choose.”

Ned stiffened, and a chill went down Jenny’s spine. Advice hidden behind spiritual maundering was one thing. But she knew that Ned had resisted wedlock, and for good reasons. She had no intention of trapping him.

“The spirits have not chosen to reveal such details,” she responded smoothly.

The marquess pulled an end of lead pencil from his pocket and licked it. He bent over a notebook and scribbled a notation. “Can’t predict future with particularity.” He squinted at her. “This will be a damned short test of your abilities if you can do no better.”

Jenny’s fingers twitched in irritation. “I can say,” she said slowly, “in the cosmic sense of things, he will meet her soon.”

“There!” crowed Ned in triumph. “There’s your specifics.”

“Hmm.” Lord Blakely frowned over the words he’d transcribed. “The ‘cosmic sense’ being something along the lines of, the cosmos is ageless? No matter which girl Ned meets, I suppose you would say he met her ‘soon.’ Come, Ned. Isn’t she supposed to have arcane knowledge?”

Jenny pinched her lips together and turned away, her skirts swishing about her ankles. Blakely’s eyes followed her; but when she cast a glance at him over her shoulder, he looked away. “Of course, it is possible to give more specifics. In ancient days, soothsayers predicted the future by studying the entrails of small animals, such as pigeons or squirrels. I have been trained in those methods.”