Proof by Seduction (Carhart #1)

That someone, Gareth thought, was going to be him. Responsibility again. Responsibility and, he realized, fault. He’d been a cold, unfeeling brute to Ned. Now, perhaps, he had a chance to patch matters up.

“I’m sorry,” Ned said. “I knew it was up to me. And I—I just couldn’t do it. She told me to rely on myself,” Ned continued. “I did. And so it has to come out right. Doesn’t it?”

“She?” A cold chill collected in Gareth’s lungs. “Ned,” he said slowly, “I need you to do something for me. I need you to tell me as best you can exactly what Madame Esmerelda told you to do.”

IT HAD BEEN MORE THAN AN HOUR, and Lord Blakely had not yet returned.

Unable to sleep, unable even to rest, Jenny paced up and down the front room. At first, every noise she heard set her heart fluttering in anticipation. The leisurely beat of shoe leather against cobblestones started her pulse racing. She rushed to the windows—and then turned away in disappointment as an elderly ragman tramped by in the gloom. The warm spring night brought many such disappointments—noises that could have heralded his return. The passage of high-stepping horses. The slap of reins against hindquarters the next street over. London streets teemed with activity, even at this late hour. If one expected company, every last sound brought hope.

None of the activity she heard signified the return of Lord Blakely.

Jenny gradually let go of her arousal. Eventually, she slumped into the disheartening territory of outright discouragement. It was foolish, she chided herself, to engage in preposterous mental games, to come up with reasons without knowing what kept him away. But she could not help but play with possibilities.

Jenny was well aware she was hardly a diamond of the first water. She wasn’t a diamond of any sort of water. When Lord Blakely had left her, he’d been physically excited. But he could easily have found a willing widow, one closer to his class and station, to tempt him. Why, then, would he bother to return?

And now that Ned agreed Jenny was a fraud, perhaps Lord Blakely had no reason to continue his campaign of seduction. Perhaps this was his revenge—this half state of desperate physical desire he’d left her in. Perhaps he was, at this very moment, imagining her shaking her fists in frustration. No doubt he was chuckling evilly, wherever he was.

Now she really knew she was letting her imagination run away with her. It was not in Lord Blakely’s character to behave in such a fashion. He didn’t chuckle.

Once unleashed, though, her imagination veered wildly afield. He could have been struck by a stampeding horse. Or perhaps he’d been abducted by rival ornithologists, intent on torturing him in order to steal his data on macaws.

All lies. Lies and ridiculous stories Jenny invented to avoid thinking about the one possibility that lurked kraken-like beneath the spinning maelstrom of her thoughts.

Lord Blakely had gone to meet Ned. When she’d last seen the boy, she’d told him not to trust her. With Ned cut loose, what reason would Lord Blakely have to return?

She’d been abandoned. Again.

She didn’t even remember the first time it had happened. After all, she’d lived the entirety of her life in its aftermath.

Jenny assumed she had parents. Not only was it a matter of biological necessity, but someone had paid the bills at the Elland School in Bristol. They’d paid for fourteen years, from the time of Jenny’s arrival through to her departure at eighteen. Even before then, Jenny dimly remembered a stocky farmwife employed to look after her.

That unknown someone had paid for her upkeep and arranged for her education, the transactions run anonymously through purchased annuities and a string of whey-faced solicitors. Nobody answered the letters Jenny sent, and she’d penned them from the first moment she’d been able to scratch tentative words.

Jenny’s parents had been nothing more than a set of bank bills, perfunctorily issued at quarterly intervals. At the age of eighteen, she’d been told the annuity providing for her care would be extinguished soon and so she’d best think about finding employment. Whatever emotional connection she’d had with those bank drafts had been severed.

Jenny sighed and smiled wryly. After thirty years, she ought to have been reconciled to that feeling of abandonment. She’d never known anything else in her life. If Lord Blakely had disappeared from her life, he would only be leaving just like everyone else before him.