he said casually. “I will be out to see Mrs. Carstairs directly.”
Heighton nodded and went out, and Tom paused for a moment before getting to his feet, walking across to the decanter, pouring a glass of the vile sherry and drinking it down in one mouthful. He followed it with a second one.
So Garrick Farne was asking questions, about Merryn, about him. That was at best inconvenient and at worst could prove fatal. Tom returned to his desk, drumming his fingers on the pile of paper that reposed there while he tried to think clearly. If Farne discovered his connection to the Dukedom then everything would go spectacularly wrong. That was the reason he had been hiding behind Merryn from the start, using her, feeding her the information about her brother’s death that he had known would set her off on this blind quest for justice. She did not know the full extent of his interest, of course, and he could never tell her. Equally he could not permit Garrick Farne to discover Merryn’s purpose. The whole matter was delicate, poised on a knife edge. And there was a Dukedom at stake.
Tom ran his hand through his hair. He had already warned Merryn to be discreet and careful. She had thought it was because he was concerned for her safety. In fact it had been pure self-preservation. Unfortunately Merryn was easy to manipulate but difficult to control thereafter, because when she became inspired by a cause it tended to arouse such passionate fervor in her that everything else—caution, discretion, prudence—went by the board. Tom had seen it happen before when she had taken on cases where there had been a miscarriage of justice. In this particular case her personal feelings were involved and so the effect was twenty times the greater. She was proving more difficult to manage than he had anticipated, and he would have to think of a way to rein her in before Farne caught up with her and she ruined everything. If the worse came to the worst, he thought, he would simply have to cut her loose and use her as a decoy to draw attention away from him. He nodded. The idea had some appeal.
He went out into the waiting room. Mrs. Carstairs was sitting patiently, her fingers locked tightly together, a mixture of hope and fear in her eyes as she looked up at him. Tom sighed. On his desk was a fat file detailing her husband’s spiraling debts and the mess he had got himself into trying to pay them off by borrowing from some deeply unpleasant moneylenders. Tom did not care much for his clients’ pain. He had seen and done it all—thwarted eloping lovers, exposed bigamists, found lost heirs, even destroyed inconvenient evidence if the price was right. He had no sentiment left in him. It amused him that Merryn worked for him because she thought she was working for justice. In some ways, Tom thought, Merryn Fenner was extremely naive. But she had also been extremely useful to him. It would be a shame to lose her.
Now he turned his most compassionate manufactured smile on his latest client. Mrs. Carstairs was paying him enough money. The least he could do was give her his undivided attention and some apparent sympathy.
“Mrs. Carstairs,” he said, “I am very sorry. You must prepare yourself for bad news …”
CHAPTER SIX
GARRICK DID NOT have an invitation to Joanna Grant’s ball that evening. He would hardly have expected it. It would take more than one hundred thousand pounds and the handing back of the ancestral Fenner lands to make him welcome in Tavistock Street. But since he wanted to see Merryn again he had no choice other than to arrive uninvited. He left it very late, when all the guests had arrived and the footman on the door was wilting at his post, and then he simply walked in. No one stopped him. No one appeared to notice him at all in the crush.
Garrick went straight to the ballroom, where he saw Merryn almost immediately. She was dancing with a young sprig of fashion, dancing very badly moreover, and with the expression of one who was having a tooth pulled or perhaps whose slippers were pinching. Her partner looked grim and bored. Garrick could not help but smile. Most young ladies at least made a pretense of enjoyment when they were with the opposite sex. Merryn clearly saw no need to do so.
He took a calculated bet that she would soon tire of the ball, helped himself to a bottle of champagne and two glasses from an obliging footman and slipped out of the ballroom and up the stairs. He was aware that he was abusing Lord and Lady Grant’s hospitality quite shamefully since not only had he not been invited, he certainly had not been given the freedom of the house. But he needed to discover how much Merryn knew. He needed to stop her quest for justice. And this was the quickest way.
The first bedchamber he came to quite clearly belonged to Joanna Grant and was lush with exotic drapery and scented with perfume. It had a connecting door standing open to her husband’s dressing room. The second chamber was less easy to apportion to a member of the family and for a moment Garrick wondered if it was Merryn’s. There was a set of very beautiful and very explicit pencil drawings spilling from a folder on the dressing table—nudes in various stages of debauchery with gods, satyrs and nymphs. The drawings were good—and extremely erotic. One of the nymphs, small, lush, curved, looked a little like Merryn. She was lying on a bench, her hair spread, her drapes sliding from her rounded limbs, a small cherub bending to kiss her breast. Garrick felt his evening dress tightening in various strategic places as he contemplated the picture. His breath strangled in his throat.
Concentrate.
This was not the time to be imagining Lady Merryn Fenner stripped of her clothes and lying small yet voluptuous, naked, perfect, among the tangled sheets of his bed. Despite that it was, Garrick admitted to himself, the image that had haunted him since the moment he had met her. Then he had not known her identity; he had known nothing but the blazing attraction that had drawn him to her. Now, even though he knew she hated him, even though he knew all the barriers that stood between them, the attraction was no less.
This was not Merryn’s room, though. There were no books. Garrick closed the door softly behind him and wondered briefly if the rumors of Tess Darent driving all her ancient husbands to death with her incessant sexual demands were in fact true. He, accustomed to being the target of slander, had thought it nothing but idle gossip. Now he was not so sure.
The third room he entered was most definitely Merryn’s. It was plain and tidy, almost austere. There were no exotic furnishings here: a bed with a simple white cover, a wardrobe, a table with a pile of books. French love poetry, in the French language, of course, jostled with Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. There was an illustrated set of fairy stories and St. Augustine’s Confessions. And on the top, a bound book that looked suspiciously like a diary. Garrick picked it up, settled himself in an armchair, opened the book and started to read.
Ten minutes later he heard the patter of footsteps on the carpet outside and the turn of the doorknob, and then Merryn ran into the room. Because she was not expecting him to be there Garrick saw her in a totally unguarded moment. She wrenched the rose-colored bandeau from her head and cast it aside, kicking off her slippers at the same time. Her movements were jerky and exasperated, almost angry. She put both hands up to cover her face, digging her fingers into her intricately arranged golden curls, scattering the pins that restrained them. She made a sound of relief and release that was so heartfelt Garrick felt a stir of sympathy. She dropped her hands and put her head back so that her hair tumbled over her shoulders and down her back like a silver river. Her eyes were closed and her eyelashes—very fair and not artificially darkened—were spiky against the curve of her cheek. The line of her neck was pure and tempting. Garrick found that he wanted to grab her and bury his face against that silken skin, dropping his mouth to the vulnerable hollow of her throat, inhaling her scent, burying himself in her. She looked lush, sweet and very seductive.
He must have made some involuntary movement because her eyes snapped open and she saw him. Her gaze widened with shock and she took a breath.
“Don’t scream,” Garrick said. “It would not do your reputation any good.” He laid the book
