Never Lie to a Lady Read online

  He lifted his head, his wild, hot gaze holding hers.

  “I ought to slap you senseless.” Xanthia’s voice trembled.

  The wildfire died. “Have at it, my dear,” he said. “If it will make you feel better about being a woman—and having a woman’s needs.”

  Incensed, she drew back her arm, but Gareth’s eyes dared her. Chilled her. Somehow, she found the presence of mind to lower her hand and set her palm flat on the back of her chair instead, so that he would not see how it trembled.

  “Get out, Gareth,” she said, refusing to look at him. “I have grown weary of this. Draw yourself next quarter’s pay, and go. You are sacked.”

  “You cannot sack me, Xanthia,” he said as he turned and walked stiffly away. “Not without a two-thirds vote of your directors. And that would be you, me, and Rothewell. Do you want to solicit his vote, my dear? Do you want to tell him why? And do you want to tell him what we’ve been to one another?”

  “I begin to think it might be worth it,” she snapped, addressing his back. “Sometimes, Gareth, I despise you.”

  It was his turn to stare blindly out the window. “No, you don’t,” he said, setting one hand on his hip. “I almost wish, Xanthia, that you did, for it would be easier. But good God, sometimes I despise myself enough for the both of us.”

  She was utterly shaking inside now. Dear heaven, she had played this badly! She really did not want to lose Gareth, either as a friend or as an employee. It was a horrid, horrid balancing act she played.

  “I have to go,” she said, shoving her chair abruptly to her desk. The argument was over for now, and they both knew that neither had won.

  “Go where?” he said, almost as if nothing had happened. “Captain Stretton and the purser will be coming ashore with the manifest and cashbox.”

  “Lady Sharpe is expecting me,” said Xanthia, piling her files together untidily.

  “Very well.” Lloyd went to the door. “I’ll deal with Stretton. Shall I call your carriage?”

  “I shall take a skiff from Hermitage Stairs,” she said abruptly. “It will be quicker. The rain has let up, and the tide is coming in.”

  Lloyd turned from the door, frowning. “In London, you are a lady, Xanthia,” he said. “Overlooking the fact that ladies do not work, they certainly do not hail watermen unaccompanied.”

  “And what would you have me do, Gareth?” she snapped. “Loll about in Mayfair tatting sofa cushions and leave you to run Neville Shipping?”

  Lloyd drew back as if she had slapped him. “That was beneath you, Xanthia,” he said. “And I did not deserve it.”

  “I am sorry.” Xanthia returned to the window, crossing her arms over her chest, as if she were cold again. “You are right, of course. My remark was uncalled for.”

  He followed her, and turned her roughly by the shoulders. “You do not have to live like this, Xanthia,” he said. “Here, in England, you can be what you really are—a lady by birth.”

  “As opposed to what?” she retorted. “The impoverished ward of Bridgetown’s most disgusting wastrel?”

  Even Gareth knew better than to bring up the topic of her uncle, the vile man who had reluctantly taken in Xanthia and her brothers. “You are the sister of Baron Rothewell,” he gritted. “Cousin by marriage to the Earl of Sharpe. The blood niece of that grand dragon, Lady Bledsoe. Why can’t you give this up, Xanthia? Why can’t you be what you were destined to be?”

  “Because, Gareth, I can never forget what I was.” Her voice was low and hard now. “Nothing but my uncle’s unwanted refuse. This company made me. By the grace of God, my brother gave me a chance—and now Neville Shipping defines me in a way a man could never understand. I will never, ever give it up, Gareth—not for any reason on God’s earth—and if you think otherwise, you’ll have a long, miserable wait ahead of you.”

  His eyes held hers for a long, expectant moment, then, with an awkward jerk, he drew open the door. “I am not waiting for anything,” he said. “I was done with the waiting years ago. I shall send Bakely down for your skiff.” And then he was gone.

  Angry and shaken, Xanthia gathered the papers she would need for the evening, stuffed them into her leather bag, and hastily threw on her cloak. When she went downstairs, into the clerks’ domain, Gareth had vanished. She tucked her portfolio under one arm, bid the staff a good evening, and went out into the late-day bustle along Wapping High Street.

  The rhythmic clank! clank! clank! which rang from the cooperage echoed off the towering walls of the buildings and warehouses lining both sides of the street. The sour scent of fermenting hops from the brewery upriver filled her nostrils. And overlying all of it was the sharp stench of low tide.

  A cart rumbled by, laden with wooden slats, destined for the cooperage, no doubt. Xanthia let it pass, then turned down the narrow, cobbled lane which led to Hermitage Stairs. Gareth Lloyd awaited her at the top, and below, the skiff he had summoned bobbed against the slapping current. It looked to be new and sturdy, and the waterman bore his brass license badge proudly on his coat sleeve.

  Clearly, Gareth meant to accompany her. “It is late,” he said, his voice emotionless. “I’ve sent Bakely down to the dock. He’ll send a lighter out when the Belle Weather drops anchor and tell Stretton to report tomorrow.”

  For an instant, she considered refusing his company. But Xanthia was nothing if not practical. It would look far better to arrive in Westminster in the company of a gentleman—or a man who certainly looked the part—rather than to arrive alone, and she did have Pamela to think about. So she placed her hand in Gareth’s, as she had done perhaps a thousand times before. “You really needn’t do this, you know.”

  “I know,” he said, and took her carefully down the stairs.

  They settled themselves into the boat, and the waterman pushed away from the stairs, stroking his oars deeply and powerfully into the roiling murk.

  Xanthia tried to focus on the riverbank and not on the man who sat beside her. She loved this view of London. This was not the stiff, elegant world of Mayfair and Belgravia, but the living, breathing world of commerce, dominated by the vast East India warehouses, and the tall construction cranes of the new St. Katharine’s Docks. In the pool, massive merchantmen and sleek clippers rocked on the turning tide, their towering masts now stripped bare. Lighters hastened to and fro to off-load precious cargo from the larger vessels, then see it safely ashore. And if man were dwarfed by this great, teeming world, a woman was…well, blatantly out of place. Gareth was not wrong on that score.

  Oh, Xanthia felt as if she belonged—but the occasional sidelong stare told her that she still did not blend in. Of course there were women in the docklands. But they were shopkeepers, seamstresses, and merchants’ wives, or the ubiquitous prostitutes who frequented every inch of every port on God’s green earth. They were a part of life from which the ladies of Mayfair would undoubtedly have recoiled. Xanthia was well accustomed to them. Gareth was wrong. She was not a lady, she thought, craning her neck in search of the Belle Weather. Not really. And that did not trouble her as much as it perhaps should have done.

  She was very troubled, however, when she arrived in Hanover Street to be told that Lady Sharpe was still abed. Instructions had been left to show Xanthia to her ladyship’s chamber, and a footman took her up at once.

  Xanthia went in to see that Pamela was not precisely in bed, but on a long, velvet divan and wrapped in a woolen shawl. Her daughter Louisa sat rigidly in a chair beside her. Lady Louisa’s dainty blond ringlets seemed to have lost a bit of their bounce, and the girl’s eyes and nose were swollen to a pathetic shade of pink.

  “Heavens, Pamela!” said Xanthia, stripping off her gloves as she came into the room. “And Louisa—? What on earth has happened?”

  At that, Louisa burst into tears, sprang from her chair, and rushed toward the still-open door.

  “Oh, my,” said Xanthia, watching the girl’s flounced skirts vanish.

  Pamela looked up with a wry smile, a
nd patted the empty chair. “Pay her no mind, Zee,” said her cousin. “The child is seventeen. Everything is a melodrama when one is that age.”

  Xanthia tossed her gloves aside and sank into the chair. “Pamela, what is going on?” she demanded, taking her cousin’s hand. “This house seems perfectly topsy-turvy today. The servants are jumpy as cats—and you, in your dressing gown at teatime! You are unwell. I can see it in your eyes.”

  The wry smile returned. “I am just a little weak, my dear,” said Pamela, squeezing her fingers. “But it shan’t last. Now, listen, Zee. I am going to tell you the most amazing thing! Sharpe is quite simply beside himself.”

  Xanthia’s eyes widened. “What? Tell me, for I’m worried sick.”

  Pamela set a hand on her somewhat ample belly. “Xanthia, I am with child.”

  Xanthia gasped. “Dear heaven! Are you…are you quite sure?”

  With a weak smile, Pamela nodded. “Oh, Xanthia, can you believe it? I am so excited—and so very frightened, too.”

  Xanthia was a little frightened herself. Pamela was but a few years shy of forty, and after two decades of marriage and at least half a dozen pregnancies, she had carried but two children to term. Daughters. Lovely girls, but daughters all the same.

  “Oh, Zee, do say you are happy for me!” exclaimed Pamela. “Oh, do not think what you are thinking, my dear, and think only of this wonderful chance which I have been given. A chance to give Sharpe his heir. Oh, my life would be quite perfectly complete!”

  Xanthia smiled deeply and leaned over the divan to kiss her cousin’s cheek. “I am ecstatic,” she said. “I could not be more pleased. I cannot wait to tell Kieran. He will be so happy for you, Pamela. But my dear, you must be so very careful. You know that, do you not?”

  “I do know,” she said grimly. “The midwives and doctors have already been here this morning to poke and prod me, and to confirm what I was afraid even to hope. And now, I’m not to be allowed to do anything—scarcely even go downstairs!—for the next six months. I shall go quite mad, of course. But it will be worth it if I can but give Sharpe a son.”

  Suddenly, the vision of Louisa’s red nose and eyes returned to Xanthia. “Oh, dear!” she said. “Poor Louisa!”

  Pamela’s eyes began to flood. “Frightful timing, is it not?” she said. “This is her come-out, Zee! This is her season! We’ve spent a small fortune dressing her, and she has taken quite nicely. And now I’m to be stuck abed until Michaelmas!”

  “What is she to do, Pamela?” asked Xanthia. “There is her father, of course…but that is not quite the thing, is it?”

  “She must have a chaperone,” Pamela insisted. “Of course, there is always Christine. She is Sharpe’s sister, after all. But she is thought to be—well, a little outré, is she not? I cannot think her a proper companion for a girl of Louisa’s tender years.”

  “No, I think not,” muttered Xanthia.

  The truth was, Christine Ambrose was an amoral cat—one who from time to time had sunk her claws into Kieran. But Kieran knew the woman for what she was, and used her about as well as she used him. Sometimes Xanthia thought that perhaps they deserved one another. But Christine chaperoning Louisa? No, it would not do. Slowly, it dawned on her that Pamela’s hand was holding hers in a near death grip. She looked down to see an unmistakable pleading in her cousin’s eyes.

  “Oh, Xanthia, my dear, may I count on you?”

  Xanthia barely suppressed a gasp. “Count on me?” she echoed. “To…to do what, pray?”

  “To see Louisa through the rest of her season.”

  “To…to take her about to balls and assemblies and such, do you mean?” said Xanthia hollowly. “Oh, Pamela. I do not think…no, I am not versed in such…I could not possibly…” But the desperation in Pamela’s eyes was perfectly heart-wrenching.

  Pamela sat up a little on the divan. “I shall arrange invitations to all the best houses in town,” she wheedled. “And Almack’s every Wednesday, of course.”

  Xanthia made a slight sound of exasperation. “Do not be silly, Pamela,” she said. “We haven’t a subscription and likely cannot get one.”

  Pamela laughed. “Oh, Rothewell will be admitted instantly, dear child,” she said. “His title ensures it. And I shall put it about that you are to be Louisa’s chaperone and made as welcome as I would be. After all, I am not without influence in Town, my dear. And—and why, perhaps you will have fun, too! Oh, my dear, do say you will do it.”

  Xanthia hesitated. Dear heaven! Her hope of never seeing Mr. Nash again was on the verge of collapse. “But I am an unmarried woman,” she protested. “That really is not ideal. Is it?”

  “But you are a mature woman,” said Pamela firmly. “It must be you or Christine. It must be family, and Mamma cannot do it. Besides, she and Louisa always quarrel. All you will need is Kieran’s escort, or Sharpe’s. There will almost always be a cardroom to pacify them.”

  Xanthia let out her breath on a sigh. Kieran would not like this any better than she, but he had an uncharacteristic fondness for Cousin Pamela. “Of course we shall be happy to help, Pamela,” she answered. “But there are a few things, my dear, which you ought to consider.”

  Pamela’s pale eyebrows lifted. “Yes? Of what sort?”

  Xanthia dared not tell her about the intriguing Mr. Nash. “Well, you know that I am greatly involved with Neville Shipping,” she said instead.

  “Oh, yes, dear,” she said. “You so often speak of it.”

  “But what you may not realize is that I—well, I spend a good deal of time there. Literally. At the business.”

  Pamela seemed to consider it. “Well, you do own a third of it,” she mused. “One must look after one’s interests, I daresay.”

  “Actually, I own twenty-five percent,” she said. “Kieran has twenty-five, and Martinique the twenty-five she inherited when Luke died. Gareth Lloyd, our business agent, now owns the remaining twenty-five percent.”

  “Does he indeed?” said Pamela. “I was not aware.”

  “Well, that is neither here nor there,” Xanthia continued. “The truth is, I more or less manage Neville Shipping.”

  Pamela nodded cheerfully. “Yes, you once suggested something of that sort.”

  Xanthia took her cousin’s hand again and vowed to make her listen. “Pamela, I go into the East End in a carriage to work every day,” she said, her voice firm. “I sit in an office surrounded by men, in a grimy little house in an especially grimy street in Wapping—which is filled with some of the most disreputable people imaginable—and I dearly love it. People stare at me, Pamela. One day a man near the London docks spat at me. Most of them do not think I belong—and no one amongst the ton is apt to disagree with that assessment.”

  “Oh. Oh, I see.” Pamela was blinking owlishly. “Is it…is it rather like having a shop, would you say? Mrs. Reynolds once had a shop, you know. But now she is Lady Warding.”

  “Yes, but I never shall be Lady Warding, or anything like it,” Xanthia gently pressed. “I shall always be Miss Neville who has the utter lack of breeding to keep a job—and to do men’s work. For that is what they shall say, Pam, if the word gets out. And it will sound worse, I fear, than being a mere shopkeeper.”

  Pamela pursed her lips, and shook her head. “You have a right, Xanthia, to look after yourself,” she insisted. “If Kieran supports your doing that, then it is no one else’s business.”

  “No, it is not,” Xanthia agreed with asperity. “But if it gets out—which it will—then the gossips shall make it their business.”

  Pamela relaxed against the chaise and patted Xanthia’s hand. “Oh, if it gets out, you will merely be thought an eccentric,” she answered. “Indeed, my dear, with your charm and your dash, you might make it quite the rage. Perhaps it will become fashionable to have one’s own company? I should choose hats, myself. How does one make them, do you suppose? In any case, I am not worried on Louisa’s behalf.”

  Xanthia smiled faintly. Employment really was a fo
reign concept to her cousin, who had been raised every inch a lady. “Very well, then,” she murmured. “You have been warned.”

  “So I have, and now that that is all settled, I want you to put your hand here,” said Pamela, placing Xanthia’s palm atop her belly. “Say hello to your new cousin, the future Earl of Sharpe.”

  Xanthia’s smile deepened. “Am I to feel anything?” she asked, curious. “Will he…will he move? Or kick my hand?”

  Pamela laughed. “Oh, Xanthia, you can be shockingly innocent,” she said. “No, he shan’t do a thing for weeks and weeks. But he is in there, all the same. Shall I tell you when he starts to move about? Would you like to feel him kick?”

  Xanthia felt suddenly shy, and, to her shock, more than a little envious. “I would, yes,” she admitted. “It is such a wonderful, unfathomable thing to me.”

  Pamela’s face took on a serious expression. “You must have children of your own soon, Xanthia,” she said quietly. “Time marches on. You are what? Seven-and-twenty now?”

  Xanthia gave an embarrassed laugh. “Oh, Pamela, I shall be thirty in a few months’ time,” she said. “And there is one serious flaw in your plan, my dear. One ought not have children without a husband.”

  Pamela’s expression brightened. “Well, you are about to enter the marriage mart!” she answered. “Louisa is determined to look about quite carefully for just the right sort of gentleman. I would suggest, my dear girl, that you do the same.”

  Xanthia shook her head. “I do not mean to marry, Pamela.”

  “Well, why on earth not?” demanded her cousin. “It is the most natural thing in the world.”

  Xanthia looked away and chose her words carefully. “Gentlemen wish their brides to be…well, younger and more naive,” she answered. “Besides, there is Neville Shipping to worry about. If I marry, it becomes my husband’s. Even if it did not, no husband would permit me to work as I do.”

  “Oh, heavens, let Kieran take care of Neville Shipping!” said Pamela impatiently. “What else has he to do? He has sold his plantations, and he has leased out all of his estates. Honestly, Xanthia, if he cannot find something to occupy his time, Sharpe says he is going to drink and whore himself into an early grave.”