Chapter 6
A WEEK LATER
Viveca stood before the front door of Blaze Jagger’s Tichborne Street townhouse, her hand closed around the knocker.
She hesitated just before allowing brass to hit wood.
Was this a good idea?
Probably not.
She could accept that, for it was an idea formed from a vein that differed essentially from good or bad.
It was an irresistible idea.
And she’d never met with much success in resisting the irresistible.
She tapped the knocker, and ten seconds later, the door was swinging on its hinges. But it wasn’t Blaze Jagger standing before her, then stepping aside to allow her entry.
It was his butler.
“If you will follow me.”
Her first impression upon entering the townhouse was its surprising sparsity of décor and furnishings.
And the décor and furnishings on display were decidedly odd pieces.
Take the pendulum clock in the receiving hall.
It was gilded from its bottommost feet to its topmost arch and painted in the Italianate style of the last century, giving it the appearance of a refugee of the Ancien Régime.
The clock had almost certainly belonged to King Louis XIV once upon a time.
Yet this room held no table where one could set a house key or a bench where one could sit and remove one’s shoes.
Of course, in aristocratic households the receiving hall didn’t contain such furnishings, but this wasn’t the house of an aristocrat.
This was the house of Blaze Jagger.
Further, she couldn’t help observing the butler himself as she followed him into the drawing room.
He was an exceptionally stern man with the sort of upright bearing that suggested he had a rod stuck up his…
Well, upright would do. Anyway, she could only assume he’d fallen out with previous aristocratic employers to now be in service to Jagger.
Or…another possibility existed—and the one more likely.
Jagger would have used one of his many mountains of gold to poach this exceedingly upright butler from some great household.
Either way, this butler was very like the gilded pendulum clock—functional, but also completely extravagant and somewhat out of place.
The drawing room proved to be in keeping with the rest of the townhouse—spare, yet audacious.
In the center of the room sat an impressive lemon-yellow watered silk settee with two matching chairs, but no table between them.
Rather than sit, she crossed the distance to the hearth, where a low fire was burning, for which she was grateful.
The weather hadn’t yet given itself entirely over to summer.
“I’ll inform Mr. Jagger of your arrival,” said the butler.
“Thank you.”
He gave a proper bow from the waist and promptly left the room.
It didn’t escape her notice that he hadn’t asked for either her name or business. Likely, he knew not to ask those questions of his employer’s visitors, particularly ladies who arrived at ten o’clock at night.
Finally, it occurred to Viveca what the décor of this townhouse lacked—refinement.
But it was more than that, too. These furnishings in all their audacity and evident expense reflected how Mr. Jagger thought aristocrats lived.
And apparently, he thought they all lived like the king himself.
Movement at the door caught the edge of her eye. “A woman of her word, I see,” followed a masculine East End voice.
Blaze Jagger swaggered into the room—or prowled. She couldn’t decide. Could a man both swagger and prowl at the same time? If anyone could thread that needle, it was this man.
The smile in his voice was mirrored by the one turning up the corners of his mouth.
“I am,” she returned.
He looked different tonight.
Well, Blaze Jagger was always fully himself, but somehow tonight…not.
Her brain caught up to the observation.
It was his attire.
She’d never seen him dressed so without ostentation. The clothes were fine, there was no doubting the quality of cloth and tailoring. But the coat and trousers were black, and his waistcoat was a lighter shade of charcoal and his cravat was snow white.
One might call it sober attire, but also…elegant.
That was it.
Blaze Jagger was dressed elegantly.
And really, his long, lean, strong form took rather nicely to elegance.
Long, lean, strong.
A knowledge she had of that form beneath those layers of elegant superfine.
Because of the embrace born of a moment’s impulse.
In the moment, it had been an exuberant expression of joy—innocent.
Then that moment had turned into a different moment, and innocence had transformed into knowledge.
Long, lean, strong.
An unexpected knowledge, to be sure—and not unwelcome, she found upon reflection.
Over this last week, in fact, she’d done a fair amount of reflecting upon the long, lean, strong form of Blaze Jagger.
He propped an elbow on the opposite end of the hearth. “When we’re out and about tonight, we’ll want to be keeping our profile low.”
“Will we?” She hadn’t thought about such a necessity.
“You’re the sister of the Duke of Acaster, and I’m Blaze Jagger.” He shrugged. “Your adventures into my quite a life would be snuffed out right quick if your family got wind of what you’re getting up to on Wednesday nights.”
She accepted his logic and nodded.
His head cocked. “Won’t your folk wonder where you’re off to in the night?”
“My folk won’t know. I haven’t lived with Gabriel or Tessa in two years, and Saskia is in bed and reading by nine o’clock.”
“You know your servants talk, right?”
“They think us a family of eccentrics. They won’t say anything to anyone beyond each other.”
He snorted. “Got it all figured out, don’t you?”
“Ninety percent, I’d venture. One must allow a little cushion for the possibility of the unforeseen.”
A sudden chuckle erupted from his chest. “You’re a chancer like the rest of us, aren’t you, Lady Viveca.”
Something warmed inside her.
She might rather like being a chancer like the rest of us.
It put her in league with Blaze Jagger—and she might rather like that, too.
“Where are we going after the lesson, anyway?” she asked.
“Don’t you like surprises?”
“I do.”
A knowing light glittered in those thickly lashed gray eyes. “I thought you might.”
A feeling struck through her—a pair of feelings, in fact. One of trepidation, the other of anticipation. She swallowed. “Shall we start the lesson?”
He nodded and pushed off the hearth, moving to the other side of the room. There stood an elegant table—Chippendale, if she had her furnituremaker correct—with two chairs facing each other. Upon the exquisite inlaid surface lay the primer she’d given him and a pencil.
They lowered into the chairs and faced one another. Before the moment could stretch into awkwardness, he opened the book to the alphabet. He cleared his throat, opened his mouth, and began to sing to the tune of Baa Baa Black Sheep, “A…B…C…D…” his index finger moving along the letters as he went.
Viveca felt a smile pull at her mouth, which she immediately suppressed. A grown man singing the alphabet was enough to make anyone smile. But that wasn’t why she wanted to smile. It was his utter earnestness as he sang. He’d worked on this. It was charming—and it was impressive.
No, she wouldn’t smile and make him feel small. Instead, she nodded along and felt an altogether different feeling rise. Respect. It took strength and confidence for a man such as Blaze Jagger to willingly put himself in such a vulnerable position.
When he finished, she allowed a modest smile and said, “You’ve been hard at work.”
“The song was a good idea.”
“I can’t claim it as mine, but I’m glad it helped.”
He turned the page to the inside of the cover and dragged his finger across his name. “Blaze Jag-ger,” he said, just as she’d taught him.
“You know, Mr. Jagger—”
“Blaze,” he cut in. “Just call me Blaze, and I reckon I should keep calling you Lady Viveca.”
“Why is that?”
“Natural order of things.”
Every cell in her body instantly rebelled against the very notion. “What natural order is that?” she asked with no small amount of fire. Everyone who knew her knew she could get like this. But it wasn’t in her to control it when her blood got up over the silly and regressive rules of the haut ton.
“Come on, now,” he said, amusement in his eyes. “You know the order, Lady Viveca.”
Was he purposely provoking her?
Likely.
But it was working.
“The order of me on top of you?” she shot back.
His mouth twitched.
Her mouth went dry.
When she put it like that, it sounded…naughty.
“Only if you ask nicely.”
She gasped.
Heat flared through her.
“I…I…you…” she stammered. “You shall call me Viveca, and that is all there is to it.”
He spread his hands wide. “Whatever suits your pleasure.”
Was that another double entendre? She rather thought it was. It was there in the sparkle in his eyes that matched the sparkle in his left ear.
“Well, Blaze,” she began, “as I was saying—” Why did her voice sound like this? Like parched desert? “You seem to be well on your way to reading.”
“You think?”
“At the Derby, I noticed something.”
“That so?”
“Your man of business read the betting slips to you.”
“What of it?”
“Aren’t you cautious of being cheated?”
The smile he gave her, his mouth curving, but his eyes deadly serious, was that of a panther. “And tell me, who’s the fool that’s going to cheat Blaze Jagger?”
Viveca caught a glint in his eye and, of a sudden, glimpsed what the rest of the world saw when they beheld Blaze Jagger—a dangerous man.
“Besides,” he continued, “I know numbers.”
“The symbols?”
“And how to add and subtract them,” he said. “Me granddad was able to impart that much to me, at least.”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t sit still for nothin’, but I did always like numbers and the way they add up together all nice and fat when you accumulate enough of them.”
“No surprise there, given your line of occupation,” she said. That got a hearty laugh from him. “But tell me, at the Derby, were you able to recognize the letters on the slips this time?”
He nodded.
“You’re very close to being able to read.” She reached across the table to flip the pages of the primer to a lesson, but was quickly annoyed. “This won’t do,” she said, coming to an abrupt stand.
His dark eyebrows winged together. “It won’t?” He was watching her with no small measure of wariness.
With sudden decision, Viveca grabbed her chair and lugged it around the table, placing it beside his, then lowered into it. She wouldn’t think of the man beside her as Blaze Jagger—long, lean, strong—but rather as her pupil. “There, that’s better.”
She flipped the primer to the back and used the pencil to create a grid of small squares on the blank interior of the back cover. She wrote s in the top left square, then the word sun below it. And proceeded likewise for every consonant and vowel sound she could think of.
She pressed the tip of the pencil into the first square. “What letters are in this word?”
“S…u…n.”
“Sun,” she pronounced. “S makes the sss sound. U makes the uh sound. And n makes the nnn sound.”
“Sun,” he repeated, but reading the word as he spoke it. “Like the son of a father?” he asked. “Or the sun in the sky?”
“In this case,” she said, “like the sun in the sky. The words are actually spelled differently.”
His brow lifted. “But they sound the same?”
“Erm, yes. The sun in the sky is s-u-n, and a father’s son is s-o-n. English has many words like this.”
“How is anyone supposed to be able to learn how to read this language?”
“One gets the knack for the rules, you’ll see.”
“I never was one for rules.”
“If you’ll pardon the observation, I’d gathered as much.” She and all London, she wouldn’t say.
His gray gaze narrowed ever so slightly, drawing attention to the dense fringe of lashes around his eyes. “Do you know what I like to do with a rule?” he asked, low.
“What is that?” she asked. Where had her voice gone?
It was only now she remembered how close they were to each other.
“Bend it over my knee.”
The breath caught in her lungs. “Well,” she said on a swallow, “then you should appreciate English, because it never met a rule it, erm, didn’t bend over its knee and spank.”
Spank.
What a word to utter in the context of any conversation, but perhaps this conversation in particular.
Had air ever gone so still? Had air ever been as aware of itself and how few inches there were of it between herself and the man to whom she’d uttered that word?
She found herself looking at his mouth, waiting for his response.
When she’d kissed him at the Derby, it had been on the cheek. How would it feel to kiss his mouth? His mouth looked as if it would be rather good at kissing.
But the room’s next movement came not from his mouth, but from him snapping the primer shut.
Viveca felt suddenly out of balance and just caught herself.
She’d been leaning forward.
Had she been about to test her theory and kiss him on the mouth?
What a bad idea that would’ve been.
Her mind knew this.
But her body was possessed of a different sort of knowledge.
Or a lack thereof, as the case was.
Her body wanted knowledge of his mouth.
Could the terms of their deal be amended to accommodate the acquisition of such knowledge?
She opened her mouth—to say what, she never could be certain later—when he shot to his feet. “That’s enough for tonight’s lesson.”
“But,” she began, “you need to associate the sounds with all the letters and pairings.”
“I’ll figure it out.” He left the room before returning a few flummoxed seconds later holding a hooded cape and a mask. “You’ll be needing these for Vauxhall Gardens.”
“I will?” she asked, accepting the garments.
“To protect your honor, of course.”
One could’ve used a knife to cut through the irony in the air.
And it occurred to her that any man concerned with protecting her honor might not be disposed to amending their deal to accommodate a kiss.
Criminy.
But this was Blaze Jagger, known rogue.
He was protecting her honor?
What a world gone topsy turvy.
“Wait,” she said, hoping she’d heard him wrong. “Did you say Vauxhall Gardens?”