had nightmares about that terrible day ever since. She assumed Mr. Blackthorn had, as well.
But the years had made him a man. Going to war had made him a man. What had happened that fateful day in Portland Place had made him a man. Then, he had amused her. Now, just looking at him made her stomach rather queasy. He was so large, so very male. Not a silly boy anymore at all.
Perhaps she had acted rashly, coming here. No, she definitely had acted rashly, considering only her own plight while blithely believing he would grab at her idea with both hands, knowing immediately that she was helping him, as well.
But there was nothing else for it. She had done what she’d done. She was here, an unmarried woman in a bachelor household, and probably observed by at least two or three astonished members of the ton as she’d stood at the door and banged on the knocker. Oh, and her groom and horse were still just outside, on the street.
She couldn’t have been more open in her approach if she had ridden into Grosvenor Square shouting and ringing a bell.
Now she had to make Mr. Blackthorn—or Oliver, as she’d always thought of him—understand that there was no going back, for either of them. She may be frightened, suddenly unsure of herself—such a rare occurrence in her experience that she wasn’t quite sure how to handle it—but she would not allow him to see her fear.
“You look as if you’ve been dragged through a hedgerow backward,” she told him as she stood in the middle of the sumptuously furnished drawing room, pulling off her kid gloves, praying he wouldn’t notice that her hands were shaking. “And you smell none too fresh. Is this your usual state? Because if it is, my mind won’t change, but you will definitely have to.”
He reached for a jacket that was hanging over the back of a chair and then seemed to think better of it, remaining in front of her clad only in his buckskins and shirtsleeves. “Much as it pains me to disagree with you, Lady Chelsea, I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do. Bastardy has its benefits as well as its drawbacks.”
She rolled her eyes, suddenly more comfortable. He might not appear vulnerable, but clearly he still carried the burden of his birth around with him; it must be a great weight he would choose to put down if he had the chance. “Are you still going on about that? You are, aren’t you. That’s why you’ve been slowly ruining my brother.”
Beau frowned just as if he didn’t understand her, which made her angry. She knew he wasn’t stupid.
“Don’t try to deny it, Mr. Blackthorn. You’ve sent person after person to insinuate himself with Thomas this past year, guide him down all the wrong paths, divesting him of our family’s fortune just as if you had been personally dipping your hand into his pockets. Granted, my brother is an idiot, but I, sir, I am not.”
“Nor are you much of a lady, traveling about London without your maid, and barging uninvited into a bachelor establishment,” Beau said, walking over to one of the couches positioned beneath an immense chandelier that, if it fell, could figuratively flatten a small village. “Then again, I am not a gentleman, and I am curious. Stand, sit, it makes me no nevermind, but I’ve had a miserable night and now it appears that the morning will be no better, so I am going to sit.”
Chelsea looked at the bane of her existence, who was also her only possibility of rescue, and considered what she saw. He was blond, even more so wherever the sun hit his thick crop of rather mussed hair, so she hadn’t at first noticed that he had at least a one-day growth of beard on his tanned cheeks. He looked rather dashing that way, not that she would tarry long on the path to that sort of thought. He also looked—as did this entire area of the large room, for that matter—as if the previous night had been passed in drinking heavily and sleeping little.
Good. He probably had a crushing headache. That would make him more vulnerable.
“Yes, do that, sit down before you fall down, and allow me to continue. In this past year, which happens to coincide with Thomas reentering Society after our year of mourning that also gained him the title, and paired with your return to London now that the war is finally over, we have been visited upon by a verifiable plague of financial ill-fortune, one to rival the atrocities of the Seven Plagues of Egypt.”
Beau held up one hand, stopping her for a few moments, and then let it drop into his lap. “All right. I’ve run that mouthful past my brain a second time, and I think I’ve got it now. Your brother, the war, my return after an absence of seven years—and something about plagues. Are locusts involved? I really don’t care for bugs. But never mind my sensibilities, which it is already obvious you do not. You may continue.”
“I fully intend to. You know the locusts to which I refer. Mr. Jonathan Milwick and his marvelous invention that, with only a small input of my brother’s money, could revolutionize the manufacture of snuff. The so-charming Italian, Fanini, I believe, whose discovery of diamonds in southern Wales would make Thomas rich as Golden Ball.”
Beau closed his eyes and rubbed at his temples. “I have no idea what you’re prattling on about.”
“Still, I will continue to prattle. The ten thousand pounds Thomas was convinced would triple in three weeks’ time in the Exchange, thanks to the advice of one Henrick Glutton, who would share his largesse with Thomas once his ship, filled with grapes to be made into fabulously expensive wine, arrived up the Thames. I went with Thomas to the wharf when the ship arrived. Have you ever smelled rotten grapes, Mr. Blackthorn?”
“Glutten,” he said rather miserably.
“Ah! So you admit it!”
“I admit nothing. But nobody can possibly be named Glutton. I was merely suggesting an alternative. Excuse me a moment, I just remembered something I need.” Then he reached down beside him to pick up a bottle that had somehow come to be sitting on the priceless carpet, and took several long swallows straight from it, as if he were some low, mannerless creature in a tavern. He then held on to the bottle with both hands and looked up at her, smiling in a way that made her long to box his ears. “You were saying?”
“I was saying—well, I hadn’t said it yet, but I was going to—I don’t blame you for any of it. Thomas deserves all that you’ve done, and more. But with this last, you’ve overstepped the mark, because now you’ve involved me in your revenge, and that I will not allow. Still, I am here to help you.”
The bottle stopped halfway to his mouth. At last she seemed to have his full attention. “I’m sorry, I don’t follow. You’re going to help me? Help me what, madam?”
Chelsea held her tongue until Wadsworth had marched in, deposited a silver tray holding two glasses and a decanter of wine on the table and marched out again.
“I haven’t made a friend there, have I?” she commented, watching the man go. And then she shrugged, dismissing the thought, and finally seated herself on the facing couch and accepted the glass of wine Beau handed her. “You know that my brother became horribly ill only a few weeks after our father died. It was believed he’d soon join Papa in the mausoleum at Brean.”
“I’d heard rumors to that effect, yes,” Beau said carefully, shunning the decanter to take another long drink from the bottle. “Am I to be accused of that, as well? The illness, perhaps even your father’s demise? Clearly I have powers I have not yet recognized in myself.”
“Papa succumbed to a chest ailment after being caught in the rain while out hunting, so I doubt his death could be laid at your door. It was Madelyn’s
