Читать книгу Nicola Cornick Collection: The Last Rake In London / Notorious / Desired - Nicola Cornick, Nicola Cornick - Страница 10

He wanted her.

He wanted the Blue Parrot’s cool-as-ice owner in his arms and in his bed and Jack Kestrel was accustomed to getting the things that he wanted. It should have been impossible with her sister’s blackmail standing between them, but Jack was determined to find a way to have Miss Sally Bowes.

It had been a relief in some ways to discover that his instincts about her the previous night had been sound after all. Jack did not like being made to doubt his own judgement. But whatever the sins of Miss Connie Bowes, he was sure that her sister was as honest as she claimed to be. Sally was no blackmailer.

He watched Sally as she mounted the fine silver-and-brass staircase to the second floor. She was a tall woman and she held herself very upright, with the unconscious grace of someone who had learned deportment in her youth. Not for the first time, he wondered about her background. He had been away from London a long time, too long to know anything of the owner of the most popular club in the city. But he was determined to find out more.

Even though he knew the club servant was waiting to show him to his table, he waited and watched Sally out of sight. At the turn in the stair he saw her hesitate and look back, and he felt a powerful flash of masculine triumph that she had been aware of his scrutiny. Their eyes met for a long second and he felt the impact of that look through his whole body, then she disappeared into the shadows at the top of the stair and he became aware of the servant hesitating at his side.

‘This way, if you please, sir.’ The man said, his hostility barely concealed behind a display of immaculate deference. Jack smiled inwardly. He had sensed from the first that Sally Bowes’s employees were extremely protective of her. They knew that he constituted some sort of threat and so they did not like him. He found their loyalty to her interesting, and wondered what she had done to inspire it.

The manager was leading him from the impressively arched entrance hall down a passageway with a thick red carpet underfoot, past doors leading to all the entertainments that the Blue Parrot had to offer. All the vices, Jack thought. The Smoking Room, the Blue Bar, the Gold Salon, where, no doubt, the gambling tables would be set up under a blaze of chandeliers, as they were at Monte Carlo. There was nothing so vulgar as the cabaret at the Moulin Rouge here, no dancing girls or painted devils serving the drinks. Jack thought that Sally had probably made a sound decision in not attempting to export the raffish style of Paris to London’s Strand. The Blue Parrot had all the elegant comforts of a gentleman’s club and country house combined, but it also had an indefinable edge of glamour and excitement that made it so much more attractive than the stuffy old clubs of St James’s.

The servant was standing back to usher him through into the dining room, but then the door of the Gold Salon opened and Jack saw the glitter of the chandeliers within and the croupiers dealing the cards at the baccarat table. He paused.

‘Sir …’ there was a note of anxiety in the manager’s voice now ‘… Miss Bowes said that I was to escort you to the dining room.’

Jack smiled. He was feeling lucky tonight. ‘Do not concern yourself,’ he said. ‘I will play a few hands whilst I wait for Miss Bowes to join me.’

He took a seat at the baccarat table. A waiter materialised with some champagne. One of the smart-as-paint blonde hostesses also started to drift towards him, but Dan stopped her with a word and Jack saw her tilt her head and open her eyes wide at whatever it was the manager said to her. She drifted away again with a regretful backwards glance at Jack.

Jack took his cards, sat back in his seat and wondered how long it would take Sally Bowes to join him. Most of the women he had taken out whilst he had been in Monte Carlo, Biarritz and Paris had made him wait at least an hour for them. He had never found it worth the waiting. Brittle, fashionable, society women bored him these days; they all seemed to be cut from the same cloth, superficial copies of one another. He was not interested in affairs with society sophisticates and could not bear to find himself an innocent bride as his father demanded. He knew he was jaded. No one could tempt him.

No one interested him except Sally Bowes, with her cool hazel eyes and her understated elegance.

When he had first seen her that afternoon, he had thought she looked colourless, prim and restrained, a far cry from what he would expect from one of the Blue Parrot’s infamous hostesses. But the memory of the previous night was still in his mind and the stunningly sensuous figure Miss Sally Bowes had cut in her peach silk gown. He had enjoyed her company then and wanted to know her better. And the startled awareness he had seen just now in her eyes suggested that she was not indifferent to him either. The attraction that had flared between them so unexpectedly surprised and intrigued him. On discovering that she was actually the owner of the club, his interest in her had been piqued further. Here was a woman who must have considerable strength of character, intellect and a will to succeed, as well as a subtle appeal that was devastatingly attractive to him. She was a challenge, an enigma, cool and composed, yet revealing a fiery nature beneath. He had almost forgotten what it was to be strongly attracted to a woman, but now the hunger flooded him with shocking acuteness. He had to have her.

Women. In his youth they had been his weakness. He had been as feckless as his young cousin Bertie—worse than Bertie, if truth be told. His excesses had been extreme. And then he had fallen in love and it had been the single most destructive experience of his life, never to be repeated.

Jack shook his head to dispel the memories and took a mouthful of the cool champagne. Six months before, when he had returned to England from the continent, his father had taken him on one side and said gruffly, ‘Now that you’ve made your money and done trying to get yourself killed, boy, try to make amends for your misbehaviour by making a sensible match.’

His misbehaviour. Jack’s mouth twisted wryly at his father’s understatement. Only Lord Robert Kestrel could refer to the scandalous elopement and subsequent death of Jack’s married mistress ten years before in terms that were more fitted to a schoolboy prank.

A decade previously, when the whole scandal had occurred, it had been quite a different matter. Jack had been twenty-one and fresh down from Cambridge, full of high ideals and extravagant plans, plans that had come crashing down around him when Merle had been killed. The matter had been hushed up, of course, but in private there had been the most terrible scenes: his father in a towering rage, his mother griefstricken and appalled. It had been the disappointment that he had seen in his mother’s eyes that had been his undoing. He could probably have withstood any amount of his father’s anger because he knew he deserved it, but his mother’s silent reproach cut him to the core. He was the only son, but he had lost her regard along with his father’s respect. The last time he had seen his mother, she had been standing on the steps of Kestrel Court watching him leave his home in disgrace. She had died whilst he was abroad.

For years he had avoided the company of women entirely, burying himself first in the fight against the Boers in South Africa and later fighting with the French Foreign Legion in Morocco. The nature of the conflict had not really mattered to him; the only thing he cared about was to die in a manner that would make his father proud. But his recklessness was rewarded with life, not death, and a glorious reputation he did not want. He left the Legion and went into the aviation business with one of his former comrades and he had prospered. But even now, after ten years, it did not seem right that he should be alive and rich when Merle was cold, dead and buried. The relationships he had had since had been fleeting, superficial affairs. His heart had been in no danger and that was the way he preferred it.

And now he had met Sally Bowes and he wanted her. The idea of seducing her aroused all his most predatory instincts. He remembered what she had said about the Blue Parrot not being that sort of club. Maybe it was, maybe it was not. He did not really care. He was only interested in her. He was only interested in winning—the woman, the game, the money.

He turned his attention to the cards.

‘Matty! Matty!’ Sally reached her bedchamber on the second floor, flung open the door and hurried inside. She was out of breath. It was not because she had climbed two flights of stairs but was all to do with the fact that Jack Kestrel had been watching her as she had walked away from him. She had never been so conscious of a man’s eyes on her, had never felt so aware of a man in all her life. Plenty of men came through the door of the Blue Parrot, rich men, powerful men, charismatic men, and on occasion a man who was all of those things. None of them had affected her in the way that Jack did. None of them was as dangerous and laconic and damnably handsome and coolly charming as Jack Kestrel.

None of them had threatened to ruin her business and, with it, her life. That was what she had to try to remember about Jack Kestrel when her emotions seemed in danger of sweeping her away.

‘There you are, Matty,’ Sally said breathlessly, seeing her maid and former nurse sitting before the fire knitting placidly. ‘I need to get changed for dinner. There is a gentleman waiting for me. Please help me.’

Mrs Matson rolled up her ball of wool with what seemed agonising slowness, skewered it with her knitting needles and got creakily to her feet.

‘What’s all the fuss about?’ she demanded. ‘A gentleman waiting, you say? Let him wait!’

Sally hurried over to the wardrobe and pulled open the door. Matty had been with her family for ever, nursing all three of the Bowes girls in their youth, then acting as Sally’s personal maid when she had left home to marry. She had been with Sally through thick and thin, ruin and riches. When Sally had decided to open the Blue Parrot and had tactfully suggested that Matty might prefer to retire rather than go to live in a shockingly decadent London club, Matty had stoutly declared that she wouldn’t miss it for the world. She had bought herself a little house in Pinner, on the new Metropolitan Railway line, but she spent most of her time at the club.

‘Steady now,’ Matty said, as Sally started pulling gowns from their hangers and discarding them on the bed. ‘What’s got into you tonight?’

‘Nothing,’ Sally said. ‘Everything.’ She swung around and grabbed Matty by the hands. ‘Do you know where Connie has gone, Matty? There’s trouble. Bad trouble. She has tried to blackmail someone …’

The deep lines around Matty’s mouth deepened further as she pursed her lips. She looked as though she was sucking on lemons. ‘That girl’s bad through and through. You know she is, Miss Sally, whatever you say to the contrary. Goodness knows, I nursed her myself and she was a sweet little child, but the business with John Pettifer changed her …’ She shook her head. ‘Nothing but trouble now.’

Sally let go of her hands and started to unfasten her patterned brown blouse, her fingers slipping with haste on the buttons. She had felt very dowdy in her working clothes under the bright lights of the hall and the even brighter appraisal of Jack Kestrel’s eyes

‘Connie’s unhappy,’ she said, stepping out of the brown-panelled skirt. ‘She loved John and she has not been happy since. But it goes back before that, Matty. It goes back to when our father died. It’s all my fault.’

‘Don’t speak like that.’ Mrs Matson’s mouth turned down at the corners. ‘If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times, Miss Sally. You are not to blame for your father’s death.’

Sally did not reply. It was true that they had had this discussion many times and she knew in her head that she was not directly responsible for Sir Peter Bowes’s death, yet every day she reproached herself because she might have prevented it. She might have saved him …

‘I don’t know what to do with Connie,’ she said now. ‘I can’t reach her.’

‘You’ve tried.’ Matty bent creakily to retrieve the skirt. ‘You never stop trying. Time you thought about yourself for a change, Miss Sally, if you’ll pardon my saying so. Now, who is this gentleman you’re dining with?’

Sally sighed. ‘Mr Kestrel. He has come to retrieve the letters that Connie is apparently using to extort money from his uncle.’

Mrs Matson made a noise like an engine expelling steam. ‘Mr Jack Kestrel? The one who ran off with someone and broke his mother’s heart?’

‘Very probably,’ Sally said.

If ever a man had been born to cause a scandal over a woman, Jack Kestrel was that man.

Matty tutted loudly. ‘I remember the case being in all the papers. His mistress was married when she ran off with Mr Kestrel. Her husband went after them. She was shot and there was a terrible scandal.’

‘How dreadful,’ Sally said, shivering. She wondered what effect such a dreadful tragedy would have had on Jack Kestrel at such a young age.

‘Old aristocratic family, that one,’ Matty said. ‘Your Mr Kestrel is the last in a line that goes back hundreds of years. They say he has inherited all his rakish ancestors’ vices, and I suppose the business of his mistress proves it.’

‘Did the Kestrels have any virtues as well?’ Sally asked.

Matty had to think hard about that one. ‘A lot of them were soldiers,’ she said, ‘so they were probably very courageous. Mr Kestrel joined the army after he was banished. I hear he won medals for gallantry.’

‘Trying to get himself killed, more like.’ Sally said. ‘How do you know all these things, Matty?’

‘I know everything,’ Mrs Matson said smugly. ‘He’s a dangerous one, and no mistake, Miss Sally. You watch him. Charm the birds from the trees and the ladies into his bed, so he does.’

‘Matty!’ Sally was scandalised. The colour flooded her face. ‘He won’t charm me.’

‘Best not,’ Matty said. ‘You need a nice young man after that dreadful husband of yours, Miss Sally, not a scoundrel. Now, how about the gold Fortuny gown for tonight?’

‘No, thank you,’ Sally said, considering for a moment the tumble of evening dresses on her bed. ‘I think I need the Poiret column gown tonight, Matty, to give me courage.’

‘We’ll have to change your corset, then,’ Matty said, with disapproval. ‘Don’t like these newfangled modern contraptions, myself. They’ll be doing away with the corset altogether at this rate and then where will we be? What’s wrong with the old styles, I always say?’

‘You can’t breathe in them,’ Sally said.

‘I’ve breathed perfectly well for nigh on seventy years,’ the old nurse proclaimed. ‘Nothing wrong in a bit of tight lacing. Sit down and I’ll do your hair.’

Sally sat obediently before the big mirror and Matty started to unpin her hair and brush it out. It was long and thick, a rich chestnut colour with lustrous golden strands. Matty always grumbled that it was a crime Sally wore her hair in such severe styles so that no one could see how beautiful it was. Sally claimed that it was not her job to look beautiful, but to keep the Blue Parrot running smoothly.

‘I’ll put the matching bandeau and the diamond pins in tonight, Miss Sally,’ Matty said now. ‘No arguing, mind.’

Sally was not going to argue. Jack Kestrel was, she was sure, a connoisseur of feminine beauty and whilst she could not compete in looks with some of the Blue Parrot’s prettiest hostesses—or, indeed, with her own sister—she knew she scrubbed up quite well. The Poiret dress also added to her confidence. Long, silky, lusciously rich and expensive, it slithered over her head and skimmed her body like a straight column of bright fuchsia-pink colour.

‘Don’t look so bad, I suppose,’ Matty said grudgingly. ‘You’ve certainly got the figure for it, Miss Sally. Doubt your young man will be able to take his eyes off you.’

‘He’s here to talk about his cousin, not to court me,’ Sally said, repressing a traitorous rush of excitement at the thought of Jack Kestrel’s eyes on her. ‘His cousin Mr Basset, I mean, not the Duke of Kestrel.’

Matty puffed out her thin cheeks. ‘Mr Basset, Miss Connie’s young man?’

‘Yes,’ Sally said. ‘Do you know about that? Does Connie really like him?’

Matty looked a little grim. ‘You never know with Miss Connie, do you? Think she’s out with him tonight, though. Told me earlier that she was dining with him.’

Sally frowned as she reached for her fuchsia evening bag. Albert the doorman had said much the same thing, which made no sense if Connie was trying to extort money from Lord Basset over his son’s indiscretion. Surely she would wait for the affair to end before she tried to blackmail Bertie Basset? There was something else going on here. Sally was sure of it. Connie was up to something and Sally did not like the sound of it.

Not that she was going to discuss her doubts with Jack Kestrel. She was taking dinner with him merely to pass the time until Connie returned. Not for a moment could she forget that, nor allow herself to be distracted by Jack’s undeniable charm or the inconvenient attraction he held for her. She would be cool and composed. She would remember that he was dangerous to her on so many levels.

She glanced at her reflection in the mirror. The Poiret gown shimmered seductively over every curve. The diamonds sparkled in her hair. She drew herself up. This was business, not pleasure and she had best not forget that.

Dan met her as soon as she stepped off the bottom step and on to the marble floor of the entrance hall. She raised her brows at the look on his face.

‘Trouble?’

‘Yes.’ A frown wrinkled Dan’s broad forehead. ‘Mr Kestrel is in the Gold Salon. Said he wanted to play a few hands of baccarat.’

‘And?’ Sally kept a smile plastered on her face as a noisy group of diners passed by and paused to compliment her on the quality of the Blue Parrot’s service.

‘And now the bank is down five thousand pounds.’

‘Damnation!’ Sally felt a twinge of real alarm. A little while ago Jack Kestrel had threatened to ruin her business, but she had not thought he would do so that very night by breaking the bank at her own gaming tables.

‘There’s worse,’ Dan said in an undertone, taking her arm and hurrying her along the corridor towards the casino. ‘The King is here.’

‘What?’ For a moment Sally felt faint. ‘The King? King Edward?’

‘Himself.’ Dan nodded in gloomy agreement. ‘Playing at the same table as Mr Kestrel. And losing to him like everyone else.’

‘Hell and the devil.’ Sally’s heels clicked agitatedly on the marble floor as she quickened her pace. Damn Jack Kestrel. She thought she had contained the threat he posed, had imagined him sitting at table harmlessly drinking her champagne and here he was beating the King at baccarat and bankrupting her in the process. Matty was right. He was dangerous. She should never have let him out of her sight.

‘I wouldn’t like to say that he was cheating, now,’ Dan said, in his rich Irish brogue, ‘but …’ there was puzzlement in his blue eyes ‘… I’ve been watching him and either he is extraordinarily lucky or …’ He let the sentence hang.

Sally paused discreetly within the doorway so that she could watch Jack Kestrel at the baccarat table without being observed herself. He sprawled in his chair, a lock of dark hair falling across his forehead, his cards held in one careless hand. He had discarded his jacket and the pristine whiteness of his shirt looked stark against the darkness of his tanned skin. Seeing him there, Sally thought once again of his rakish forebears. There was something about him, something to do with his air of lazy arrogance, the perfection of his tailoring, the casual grace with which he wore it, that recalled the gamblers of a previous century, the rakes who made and lost their fortunes in the London of the Regency, a time like the present one that was full of the glitter and the lure of money and scandal.

‘Miss Bowes?’ Dan said with increased urgency, and Sally’s attention snapped back.

‘I’m thinking what best to do.’

‘Better think quickly, then,’ Dan said grimly. ‘We’re down ten thousand now.’

Sally allowed her gaze to wander over the other occupants of the baccarat table. She was not going to be hurried because what she did next could make all the difference between keeping and losing her business. It was on a knife edge. If Jack Kestrel kept playing and winning …

She knew most of the other people in the room. The King frequented the Blue Parrot regularly these days and brought his cronies with him. Despite being on a losing streak, he looked to be in a good mood. There was a full champagne flute at his elbow. The smoke from his cigar spiralled upwards, wreathing about the chandelier. He was watching the game from beneath heavy-lidded eyes and every so often he would stroke thoughtfully at his sharply trimmed beard.

‘You have the devil’s own luck, Kestrel,’ Sally heard him say now. ‘Lucky at cards, unlucky in love, eh? Which makes you rich but with no one to spend it on, what!’

The group of hangers-on laughed obligingly and Sally saw the shadow of a smile touch Jack Kestrel’s firm mouth. She doubted that he had a great deal of difficulty in finding a willing woman on whom to lavish his fortune, for he was without a doubt one of the most sinfully handsome men that she had ever seen in the Blue Parrot. Nor was she the only woman to have noticed. The King’s mistress, Mrs Alice Keppel, looking as regal as the Queen in a golden gown with diamonds sparkling on her impressive décolletage, was watching Jack with more interest than the King would surely deem strictly necessary. A blonde woman in a tight red-silk gown and with matching red lipstick had draped herself across the chair next to Jack, but he seemed unaware of her presence, for his dark eyes were narrowed on the cards and his full attention was on the play. Her foot was tapping with impatience that she did not command his interest and she flicked the ash from her cigarette with a red-tipped finger.

‘What shall I do, Miss Bowes?’ Dan was waiting for her instructions. ‘Shall I throw him out, perhaps?’

Sally laughed. It was tempting, but she was not sure that she could allow Dan to use strong tactics tonight. Not in front of the King.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Send for more champagne and caviar and smoked salmon.’

‘More!’ Dan’s brows shot upwards. ‘Lord save us, they’ve already had half a dozen bottles and they have only been here a half-hour!’

‘You sound like my old nurse,’ Sally said. ‘We’re not here to look after their health, Daniel, only to tend to their pleasure and take their money. I am going to remind Mr Kestrel that he has an appointment to take dinner with me.’

Jack looked up as Sally started to walk towards the baccarat table. The woman in red put a hand on his arm and started to speak to him, but he shook her off and her scarlet mouth turned down with disappointment. His gaze, intense and black, rested on Sally’s face. It made her feel a little breathless.

The King’s eyes lit up when he saw her approaching.

‘Hello, Sally, old thing! How are you? Ten thousand pounds poorer by my reckoning, thanks to this chap here!’ He nodded at Jack. ‘Damned inconvenient habit he has of breaking the bank. I’ve told him to stop now because this is my favourite club, what, and I want to be invited back!’

‘Thank you, your Majesty,’ Sally said, smiling.

Jack stretched, the muscle rippling beneath the white linen of his shirt. ‘Did your manager think I was cheating?’ he enquired lazily. ‘Usually they only call the owner when they are about to throw me out.’

Sally met his eyes. ‘On the contrary, Mr Kestrel, I am here because I thought that we had an appointment for dinner. If you would care to continue playing, however, that is your choice.’

Jack laughed. There was a spark of devilment in his eyes. ‘I’ll play bezique with you, Miss Bowes.’ He held her gaze. ‘All my winnings tonight against one night with you.’

The shock hit Sally hard, depriving her of breath. The wicked spark was still in Jack’s eyes, but beneath it was something hard and challenging. Despite herself, Sally felt her body stir in response to that very masculine demand.

There was a gasp of outrage around the table, followed by a moment of profound silence. The eyes of the woman in red narrowed. She looked like an angry cat about to spit. Sally felt her venom. Several of the men exchanged a look.

‘Bad form, Kestrel,’ the King said testily. ‘Miss Bowes doesn’t cover that sort of stake.’

‘I beg your pardon, your Majesty.’ Jack spoke gently. His gaze was still resting on Sally and it was dark and moody, but still with something in the depths that made her shiver. It was as though the two of them were quite alone.

‘When I see something that I want, I go after it,’ Jack said. ‘The gamble just makes the game more exciting.’ He raised one dark brow. ‘Miss Bowes?’

‘Mr Kestrel.’ Sally’s voice was quiet, but as cutting as a whip. ‘His Majesty is in the right of it. I have already told you once this evening that I am not that sort of woman and this is not that sort of club.’

‘Everything has a price, Miss Bowes,’ Jack said. The counters clicked softly as he stacked them together.

‘I am priceless,’ Sally said sweetly, and the King laughed and the tension eased. ‘Your price, on the other hand,’ she said, ‘is ten thousand pounds in winnings and dinner with me, should you choose to accept it.’

‘I’d take it, Kestrel,’ one of the other men said. ‘It’s more than the rest of us have ever been offered.’

Jack stood up and shrugged himself into his jacket. ‘I’ll accept dinner gladly,’ he said, ‘and leave the rest to chance.’

Dan had arrived with the champagne and the caviar and King Edward took Sally’s hand and kissed the back of it with heavy gallantry and said she was a pearl amongst women. She felt a huge relief—Jack’s winning streak had been halted, albeit at a high cost, and the King’s favour retained.

Jack took her elbow as they walked out of the casino together.

‘Are you angry with me?’ he asked softly. His breath stirred her hair.

‘Does it matter?’ Sally said tightly. ‘The disapproval of others strikes me as something that is supremely irrelevant to you, Mr Kestrel.’

He laughed and she saw the brilliant amusement in his eyes. ‘You read me very well,’ he said. ‘You can still win back that ten thousand pounds, you know.’

Sally flicked him a glance. ‘And you read me very badly, Mr Kestrel, if you do not think I meant what I said earlier.’ She turned to face him. For a moment they were alone in the corridor. ‘You want revenge on me for Connie’s behaviour,’ she said, ‘so you think to break the bank and ruin me. That is all that matters to you.’

‘You are mistaken.’ Jack raised his hand and the back of his fingers brushed the line of her jaw. ‘It is you I want, Sally Bowes. I wanted you from the first moment I saw you last night.’

Suddenly the corridor felt airless. Sally took a step back and felt the smooth, cool plaster of the wall against her sticky palms. She knew that the fact they were in public would make no odds to him at all. If Jack Kestrel would proposition a woman in front of the King, he would be eminently capable of kissing her in a corridor and not give a damn who saw them. She felt dizzy and hot.

‘You can’t have—’ she began, but he never gave her the chance to finish her sentence. He leaned in close and kissed her, biting down gently on her lower lip, and the aching need flashed through her and she moaned, opening her lips beneath his. He took her mouth wholly and completely and her body caught ablaze like a lightning strike. She had never experienced anything like it.

They broke apart as a couple came down the corridor and cast them a curious look. Sally turned away from the light. She had no idea what feelings and emotions were showing there, but her face felt too naked, too revealing of the turmoil inside her. Her heart was beating in hard, heavy strokes. She knew she was shaking. Jack took her chin in his hand, as he had done earlier in the office, and turned her face towards the light. He ran his thumb over her full lower lip, where he had kissed her, and the lust slammed through her body and she almost groaned aloud.

‘Sally—’ his voice was rough ‘—where can we go?’

She understood what he meant, but the thought brought the first, cold thread of sanity back to her overheated mind.

‘I can’t,’ she said. She frowned a little. It was hopeless to pretend that she did not respond to him, that she did not want him. Her behaviour had given the lie to that. She tried to be equally honest with her words.

‘You go too fast for me,’ she said. ‘I am not accustomed to feeling like this. I can’t believe we …’

She saw his tight expression ease a little.

‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘In the heat of the moment—’

‘Yes.’ Sally smoothed the pink gown down over her hips. Her movements were jerky. Her hands still shook. ‘Excuse me,’ she whispered. ‘You must excuse me, Mr Kestrel.’

He caught her wrist. ‘You promised me dinner,’ he said. A smile touched the corner of his mouth. ‘My price, remember. You cannot run out on me now.’

Sally stared at him for what felt like an age. ‘That will have to be all,’ she said.

He inclined his head. ‘Of course.’

‘And you will have to give me a few minutes.’

He nodded. ‘Certainly you cannot go into the dining room looking like that.’ A smile lit his eyes, a mixture of tenderness and satisfaction that made her heart jolt. ‘You look … ravished.’

The helpless desire swept through her again and she saw his eyes darken almost black with lust as he recognised the need in her. He reached for her again, but she wrenched herself away and hurried down the corridor to the powder room. Fortunately it was empty. She shut the door carefully behind her and stood, breathing hard, her back pressed against the panels, eyes shut.

What on earth had possessed her? What possible excuse could there be for her forgetting that Jack Kestrel was a danger to both her virtue and her livelihood, for letting him kiss her with such devastating expertise and for responding in full measure to that kiss? She must have been mad. She had not even drunk a drop of champagne. Her wits must have gone begging.

She must have wanted him as much as he wanted her.

Sally opened her eyes. Even now she could feel the imprint of Jack’s touch on her body and the impossible, melting, uncontrollable warmth that had raced through her blood when he had kissed her. She pressed one hand to her lips. She had been kissed so seldom, and never like that. When they had been engaged, Jonathan, her husband, had kissed her once or twice, a mere respectful peck on the lips that should have warned her of future difficulties if only she had had the experience to realise, but it had never been like Jack’s kiss, full of passion and desire and heated demand. That was the thing that had betrayed her. She had never felt wanted before, never felt wholly desired in a way that made her entire body tremble with sensual heat. When it had happened with Jack she had forgotten everything else in the maelstrom of her emotions.

She sank down on to the little plush red stool and stared helplessly at her reflection in the mirror. Jack had been right. She did look ravished. She wanted to be ravished, seduced. Jack had swept into her life and destroyed all her carefully erected defences in the space of two brief meetings. To experience physical love for the first time at the hands of Jack Kestrel, who could make her feel wicked and wanton and desirable … Just the thought made her burn.

With a little sigh she started to tidy her hair, adjusting the bandeau, securing the pins. She straightened her dress. She looked tidy again, the immaculate owner of the Blue Parrot, as neat and composed as ever. Except something had changed in her face. Her lips were a little swollen from Jack’s kisses and in her eyes she saw a startled awareness and a knowledge, and a wanting. Her needs, her emotions and her desires were awakened now and were clamouring for release.

She glanced at the little gold clock on the wall. A couple more hours and she would be free of Jack Kestrel’s dangerous presence. She could talk to Connie, secure the letters, send them to Jack and the business would be closed. She need never see him again. She could forget this madness that possessed her. This urge to kick aside every careful precept by which she had lived her life for so long was too frightening. She was not at all sure where it might lead her.

She struggled to re-assert her commonsense. She took several deep breaths to compose herself. A few more hours of Jack’s company … then it would be over.