Chapter Three
Hyde Park
The rules for young ladies in High Society were both exhaustive and exhausting.
A young lady was not permitted to be unaccompanied in a public setting.
A young lady was not permitted to curse or speak out of turn.
A young lady was not permitted to wear trousers.
A young lady was not permitted to slide down the bannister.
The list went on, and on, and on.
Fortunately, Jack had figured out a few .
. . work arounds. Cursing only counted if you were caught.
Breeches were all but invisible under muslin.
No one ever monitored the bannister in the east wing.
And, perhaps most importantly, if she wanted to go somewhere unaccompanied she could .
. . so long as she did it before ten in the morning when Kitty typically awoke.
Whistling a merry tune—something else that a young lady was not permitted to do—she walked briskly along a winding, rarely traveled path that was partially consumed by a long, overgrown line of blooming forsythia.
Tiny brown birds darted in and out of the yellow blossoms, their beaks stuffed with a varying assortment of materials to build their nests.
Overhead in a clear blue sky with nary a cloud in sight, a hawk circled lazily while on the ground small chipmunks and red squirrels bustled to and fro.
It was lovely, quiet, and peaceful. The exact opposite of the dark, damp, gin-soaked alleys that Jack had carefully navigated as a child.
If that child, all prickly wariness and pointy objects, could see her now, would she even recognize herself?
Strolling through Hyde Park without a care, a parasol propped over her shoulder to keep the sun off her skin.
The very picture of the kind of fancy ladies she’d targeted when she was looking for a quick, easy score.
Except this fancy lady still kept a knife on her person at all times, and under her blue skirt were breeches and boots that allowed her to run as fast as any man.
She may have appeared the part of a gently bred noblewoman, but she still had one foot in her old life and one in the new. A stubborn reliance on the world that had raised her and a natural distrust of the glittering ballrooms that would have swallowed her whole if she let them.
Maybe that was why she’d stolen Byron’s flask.
She’d been wondering about it.
Questioning herself.
Her motives.
Because she did try to behave herself.
Mostly.
She didn’t want to be an eternal disappointment to the marchioness and marquess who had selflessly taken her in and never asked for a single thing in return.
For their sake, she’d worked hard to improve her speech.
She’d learned the difference between a fish fork and a salad fork.
She’d even learned how to waltz, albeit a tad clumsily.
But at the end of the day, she was still a square peg being squeezed into a round hole.
With each year that passed, her rough edges were growing smoother.
She couldn’t go back to being square. Nor would she ever be completely round.
So where did that leave her? Hovering someplace in the middle where she attended recitals in Grosvenor Square and robbed handsome men at the same time.
Not that Byron was handsome.
All right, maybe he hadn’t been terrible to look at.
And he’d smelled divine.
But that was where her interest started and ended. Because she may have been in a dress, and she may have been carrying a parasol, but she’d be damned before she let herself fall for a nabob. Even a nabob with a roguish grin and an excellent taste in whisky.
So that was why she’d taken it.
The flask.
To prove that she could.
To prove she was still Jack, even though for some inexplicable reason she’d told him that her name was Jacqueline.
Tipping the parasol back, she peered up at the sun, using its height to gauge how much time had passed since she’d slipped unnoticed from the house.
Kitty would have her head if she knew she was wandering around Hyde Park sans chaperone, but so long as she was back before the marchioness awoke, what was the harm?
Kicking a small stone out of the path, she watched as it rolled into the bushes .
. . and paused her whistling mid-tune when the downy hairs on the nape of her neck abruptly lifted.
Someone was following her. She couldn’t hear them, she couldn’t see them, but they were there.
She knew it as surely as she knew the grass was green.
She also knew it wasn’t by accident. Half overgrown and obscured by brush and bramble, this particular walking trail was all but abandoned, which was precisely why she preferred it.
Aside from the birds and the chipmunks and the occasional rabbit, she had it to herself.
A rare slice of solitude in a city of over a million people.
And now someone was trying to take it from her.
The last piece of independence she possessed.
What an unfortunate choice they’d made.
Pursing her lips, she resumed her whistling and hastened her pace. Waiting until a bend in the path presented itself, she ducked behind a wide oak and retrieved the knife hidden under her skirts, a small, but lethally sharp silver blade embedded in a wooden handle that she’d whittled herself.
Growing up in the East End, the rules had been much simpler.
Dress like a boy to avoid attention.
Steal what she needed to survive.
Stab anyone who got too close.
Her keen ears heard one footstep approaching. Two. Three. On the fourth, she attacked. Lip curled in a snarl, she launched herself at her would-be attacker with her right arm raised, the knife clenched in her fist as it sliced through the air.
He blocked her strike, his own arm deflecting the blade before his hands shot out with shocking quickness, grabbed her by the shoulders, and spun her around. He yanked her in close, pinning her body against his wide, muscular chest and effectively rendering her weapon useless.
Incensed, she drew her elbow forward and slammed it back into his side.
He grunted, but didn’t loosen his grip. Raising her heel, she kicked his shin as hard as she could.
Another grunt, but he still held onto her, and continued to hold on while she fought, twisted, and eventually slumped against his chest with a stream of curses that would have made the most seasoned sailor blush.
“Are you quite finished?” he asked mildly.
“Yes, Byron,” she bit out. “Are you going to let me go?”
“Drop your knife.”
“You can’t tell me—”
“Drop it, Jacqueline,” he said, his arms tightening like steel bands under her breasts.
Baring her teeth, she opened her fingers and the blade clattered to the ground. Striking it with the toe of her boot, she sent it skidding off the trail. “There? Are you happy?”
He restrained her an instant longer, his deep, steady breaths rising and falling against her back in a steady ebb and flow while her own heart beat wildly in comparison.
Then she felt his hands soften, and for a moment, he wasn’t holding her so much as she was letting herself be held in an embrace that was tender, sweet, and utterly unexpected.
“Jacqueline,” he murmured, his mouth almost touching the sensitive curve of her neck.
Heat gathered under her skin; a delicious burn that she felt all the way down in the pit of her belly. Her heart slowed its rapid rhythm. Her taut muscles uncoiled. Her guard slipped.
My hands, she thought dimly. What do I do with my hands?
When she was angry, she curled them into fists.
When she was furious, she curled them around a weapon.
But what did she do with them when she was drowning in desire? Hot, licking waves of it that surged on a towering crest when he grasped her hips and drew her into the concave of his loins as his mouth continued to hover a heartbeat above her nape.
“Jacqueline,” he said again, and as much as she hated her name, she loved the sound of it on his lips. Husky and feminine, like dark velvet draped over a sky filled with stars. “Jacqueline—where the bloody hell is my flask?”
The stars came crashing down, splintering into shards of broken glass as they littered the ground at her feet. She shoved away from him and this time he let her go, a light smirk settling in the lines of his lips when she whirled around with teeth bared and eyes flashing.
“You’re a feral little thing, aren’t you?
” His gaze narrowed. “Hard to believe you’re the ward of Lord Kentwood, but Mr. Briar, Captain of the Bow Street Runners, insisted the association was accurate.
Miss Jacqueline Colborne, resident of 12 Hill Street, ward of the Marquess of Kentwood . . . and common thief.”
Mr. Briar.
She knew that name.
As a recalcitrant youth, she’d had more than a few interactions with the Bow Street Runners. Mr. Briar hadn’t been the captain—yet—but it wasn’t surprising he’d been awarded the post, given how doggedly he’d pursued his quarry back then. And, it appeared, in the present as well.
“You had me investigated?” she demanded, and now she knew exactly what to do with her hands.
Her nails bit through the thin satin of her gloves as her fingers flexed inward, thumbs settling over the top of her knuckles because when you punched someone, you didn’t want to end up with a broken hand for your trouble.
Byron’s head canted slightly to the left. “Did you think I wouldn’t? Or are you so accustomed to your victims giving up their private property with no questions asked?”
“It was a flask. Not a priceless painting.” And she shouldn’t have taken it. She understood that. For all of her lesser qualities, she wasn’t the criminal Byron was accusing her of being. Not anymore, at least.
“Then you admit to stealing it.”
“I don’t admit to anything.” She lifted her chin a notch. “Do you make it a habit of sneaking up on young women in the park and accosting them?”
“Surely you’re not making me out to be the guilty party here,” he said incredulously. “You’re the thief, Jacqueline.”
Her shoulder lifted in a careless shrug. “Maybe I am and maybe I’m not. What proof do you have?”
“I don’t need proof when I know you did it.”
“You’re wasting my time.” She began to walk away and gave a feline hiss when he grabbed her by the arm. “If you don’t release me—”
“You knew what it was,” he growled in her ear. “I accused you of stealing, but I didn’t say what you stole. You did.”
Her mouth opened.
Closed.
Damn it, he was right.
She hated that he was right.
Spinning toward Byron with a thorny retort on the tip of her tongue, she swallowed it whole when she suddenly found herself flush against him, her hands splayed across the smooth fabric of his waistcoat and her countenance aligned with his.
She saw his pupils widen, ebony circles of awareness that expanded outward into pools of the deepest mahogany.
She heard his breath catch low in his throat.
Felt the whisper of his knuckles as they traced the arch of her cheekbone.
“Who are you?” he asked, his brow furrowing. “Where the devil have you been hiding?”
They were questions that Jack had been asked before, albeit never with such simmering intensity. Curiosity about her enigmatic past had always followed her around in a cloud of speculation and inquiries that Kitty and William had used their wealth and influence to either ignore or deflect.
“She is our legal ward.”
“No, she is not a blood relation.”
“Yes, she was born in England.”
“Tea?”
By keeping their responses short and non-conversational, they’d deterred all but the most eager gossipmongers over the years.
Eventually, everyone had come to view Jack as Kitty wanted her to be seen: as one of them.
No different from any other debutante. No different from a real flesh and blood daughter, had Kitty ever borne such a child.
But of course she was different. She knew it . . . and so did Byron.
Last spring, there had been a story in the paper. An interesting tale that most had skipped over as it hadn’t contained anything of fashion or social significance, but stuck inside on a rainy day with nothing else to do except practice her embroidery, Jack had read it.
The story, slipped onto a back page and likely used to take up blank space, had detailed a farmer’s experience with finding and raising an abandoned fox kit.
Having had a litter of hounds of nearly the same age, he’d simply slipped the kit in with the puppies and for a while, no one had noticed, for the fox kit was brown, and the puppies were brown, and the mother hound was tired and overwhelmed by so many mouths to feed.
But as the kit grew, its coat started to come in a sleek, shiny orange and red.
It was smaller than the puppies, but faster and with a far sharper wit.
It was also prone to getting in trouble, for even though it had been raised in a barn, it was still a thing of the wild.
The farmer went on to say that despite his best efforts, the kit had turned on him. It bit his hand, proving itself to be what it had always been: a fox. And so he proved himself to be what he had always been: a man with a rifle.
Byron wanted to know who she was, but he wouldn’t like the answers. Because at the end of the day, she was a vixen. A wild thing dressed up to look like a tame denizen of the ton, but never able to be one. Not in a way that a farmer—or a nobleman—could ever truly understand or accept.
Without answers to give, she did the only thing she could think of to erase his questions.
She kissed him.