doubt he was one of those gentlemen the Duprées had warned her of when she’d reached her sixteenth birthday and had shown signs of developing a womanly figure. Gentlemen who gave not a care if they disgraced an innocent, before continuing merrily on their way.
‘I am afraid that will not be possible, Monsieur la Comte—’ She broke off as the lavender-eyed Comte stepped forward to prevent her from leaving. ‘I must return to my work, monsieur,’ she insisted firmly.
Christian found that he had no wish for Lisette to return to her work. Indeed, he discovered he was not favourably inclined to this young and beautiful woman working in this tavern at all.
It was a lowly, bawdy place, where he had just observed a man thrusting his hand down the low-cut bodice of a barmaid’s gown, before popping that breast out completely so that he might fondle and suckle a rosy nipple. Where in another shadowy corner of the tavern he could see another couple, the woman’s skirts pushed up to her waist, the man’s breeches unfastened, as the two of them actually fornicated in front of all who cared to watch.
Christian, for all his previous sins, most certainly did not care to view so unpleasant a sight.
Indeed, he had begun to find the whole atmosphere of this tavern to be overly lewd and oppressive.
And this delicate woman certainly did not belong in such a place, no matter what her biological connection to the patroness might be.
He curled his fingers lightly about the slenderness of Lisette’s arm. ‘I will be waiting outside in my carriage for you to join me from midnight onwards—’
‘I cannot, monsieur.’ Her eyes had filled with alarm. ‘Tonight or any other night.’
‘I mean you no harm, Lisette.’ Christian sighed his frustration with her obvious distrust. ‘You must know that you do not belong here?’
Tears now swam in those exquisite blue eyes. ‘I have nowhere else to go, monsieur.’
Rescuing an obvious damsel in distress was not part of Christian’s mission. Indeed, his superiors in government would say it was the opposite of his purpose here. Most especially when that damsel was the niece of the woman—and quite possibly the daughter of the rabble-rouser André Rousseau?—he had come here to observe.
He released her arm reluctantly. ‘I will be waiting outside for you in my carriage from midnight anyway, just in case you should change your mind...’
‘I cannot, monsieur.’ She cast a furtive glance towards the kitchen as the door swung open and Helene Rousseau strode back into the noisy tavern, her shrewd eyes narrowing as she saw Christian and Lisette were still standing together in conversation. ‘I must go.’ Lisette stepped hastily away from him. ‘For your own sake, monsieur, I advise you do not come here again,’ she added in a whisper.
Christian considered that warning some minutes later as he sat in his carriage on the way back to his house beside the Seine, and he could come to only one conclusion.
That the lovely Lisette was frightened of her aunt...
Lisette went about the rest of her work in a daze following the Comte’s departure just minutes after their conversation came to an abrupt end.
In response to her warning, she hoped.
Although he had not appeared to be the sort of gentleman who would frighten easily.
As she was frightened.
The Comte de Saint-Cloud was perfectly correct in his concern for her well-being here, with the drunkards and bawds. Much as Helene might try to protect her.
But what else did the Comte have to offer her, besides supper and no doubt a seduction within his home; he might be wealthier and more highly born than the usual patrons of the Fleur de Lis, but he was no more to be trusted than the other men who came here, who would all willingly throw up her skirts and take her innocence, given the opportunity and the chance to escape from Helene’s sharp-eyed gaze.
The Comte might do it more gracefully, and no doubt in pleasanter surroundings, but he would still take what Lisette did not wish to give. Before walking away unconcernedly to rejoin others of his class and forgetting completely the young woman whom he had seduced. And ruined.
The fact that he had frequented such a tavern as this at all was suspect. And surely indication of his intention to find a woman he might take to bed for the night, before having one of his servants show her the door in the morning, when he had no further use for her?
Lisette knew that could be the only possible reason for such a fine and titled gentleman to so much as enter a lowly tavern such as this one.
And yet for just a few moments, a minute perhaps, something had burgeoned inside her chest—a temptation to accept his offer of joining him for a late supper—in the hope that he might offer to take her away from this lowly place, which she hated to her very soul.
* * *
‘You might as well stop mooning over the Comte,’ Helene sneered several hours later, after having thrown out the last of her drunken customers into the alleyway at the back of the tavern, before locking the door behind her. ‘He will not be returning here.’
Lisette looked at the older woman searchingly, easily noting the satisfaction in Helene’s expression. ‘How can you be so sure...?’
Hard blue eyes flashed a warning. ‘You will not question me as to my...methods, Lisette.’
Her alarm deepened. ‘I am sure Monsieur le Comte meant no harm when he spoke to me earlier.’
‘I believe it is past time you retired to your bedchamber, Lisette,’ Helene dismissed. ‘You have been most helpful this evening, but I do not think we will repeat the experience.’
‘But—’
‘Go to bed now, Lisette.’ The older woman snapped her impatience as a knock now sounded softly on the closed back door of the tavern.
Lisette bit back her next comment, that discreet knock on the door warning her that this was one of those nights when Helene was to have another of her meetings.
Clandestine meetings, with men—and women?—who either did not want to be seen frequenting the tavern or openly associating with Helene Rousseau. Or perhaps both? The Fleur de Lis and its customers were certainly not for the faint-hearted, or those members of society who should not even know such a woman as Helene Rousseau existed, let alone be calling upon her in the dark of night.
None of which helped to dispel Lisette’s concerns for the welfare of the Comte de Saint-Cloud.
She had learned these past weeks that Helene was a powerful woman in these shadowed alleyways of Paris, with a knowledge of most, if not all, of the thieves and murderers that frequented them. It would be the simplest thing in the world for the older woman to request the assistance—after silver had exchanged hands, of course—of any one of those cut-throats in her desire to ensure the Comte de Saint-Cloud did not return.
Could not return.
