An Early Morning Visit
Lord Longstaffe had completed the lessons Gideon had promised.
It wasn’t perfect, of course—he’d wanted someone to assist him for a reason after all—but Longstaffe had assured Gideon that the ladies had learned enough to strike, twist free, and seize the few crucial seconds escape required.
The members of the Vigilance Society were not trained pugilists, nor did Gideon harbor any illusions that three afternoons could make them so. But they knew where a man was vulnerable now. And that alone made them better prepared than most.
Which left Gideon free to attend to other matters.
Within a day, he had engaged two investigators. Mr. Zebediah Daniels was tasked with tracing Groby’s past and the origins of his claim. Harry “the Hound” Dickerson was given a broader charge: follow whatever trail Groby had left behind him and discover where it led.
Men like Groby did not pass through remote villages without leaving marks somewhere.
A bribed curate. A conveniently amended register. A witness whose memory improved when presented with coin.
If Groby’s claim had been manufactured, Gideon meant to discover how.
As for Beatrice, word was getting about that she had been rather too successful at making herself a nuisance to the wrong men.
Men did not always forgive that.
Blackwell and Longstaffe had both agreed to keep an eye upon her at the assemblies, musicales, and garden parties where their paths naturally crossed. Nothing obvious. Nothing that would draw comment. Nothing that would offend her pride if she noticed.
Only enough to ensure that no gentleman nursing a wounded vanity had the chance to find her alone.
Beatrice Beckman knew how to escape, and with any other woman, the knowledge might have satisfied him.
He knew better, though. In so far as his favorite blue-eyed minx was concerned, such newfound skills merely improved her odds.
She was the only woman he knew who would recognize danger, take its measure, and then step toward it anyway.
And damn him, he admired her for it.
Admired it enough that the thought of her needing those skills at all nearly drove him mad.
Still.
It was the best arrangement Gideon could devise without placing himself constantly at her side.
Blackwell and Longstaffe could watch the ballrooms.
Gideon would put his attention where it belonged: on the man whose reappearance had introduced a threat none of them could ignore.
Groby.
His movements, his acquaintances, his habits—Gideon would trace them himself.
It was more efficient, he told himself.
More discreet.
And if tracking Groby gave him something useful to think about besides Beatrice Beckman—her mouth, her eyes, the feel of her waist beneath his hand—
Well. That was hardly a disadvantage.
So Gideon prepared to follow him.
Not openly. Not as Lord Hawkins, the man known in half the better drawing rooms in London.
But he left off the top hat and proper attire.
Even in his nondescript coat, however, he was under no illusion he’d be rendered invisible.
If Groby or anyone else looked closely enough, he would be recognized eventually.
It wasn’t a disguise, precisely, but an effort to become less worth remembering.
It was enough.
Unfortunately, for all his efforts, he was learning very little—only that Groby’s habits were almost insultingly ordinary.
Extravagant, certainly. Careless with money. He lingered over meals, drank freely, visited tailors, shops, and once, a gunsmith. Aside from one visit to his lauded solicitor, there was nothing in his movements that suggested conspiracy.
By night, Groby was less respectable, but no more openly incriminating.
Gaming rooms. Taverns. Clubs where he was tolerated rather than welcomed. Always spending. Always losing. Always behaving like a man with pockets deep enough that it didn’t matter—or like one who expected them to be soon.
For five days and nights, Gideon watched.
He could not point to one suspicious act. No secret meeting. No furtive exchange. No letter passed in a darkened doorway.
But a pattern emerged all the same.
Groby spent money like a man who believed a fortune was coming to him. Not hoped. Believed.
Only once did anything give him pause, and even that had nothing to do with Lovington’s title.
Across the crush of a gaming room, through the smoke and noise and shifting bodies, Gideon thought he saw Hatherleigh.
The prominent forehead. The absurdly high shirt points. The pear-shaped silhouette.
Then the man turned, slipped through a side door, and was gone before Gideon could cross the room.
Perhaps it had not been him.
It was easy enough to mistake a face in a place like that.
Furthermore, Hatherleigh had been ordered out of London after the incident with Beatrice. If he had returned, it was at considerable risk to his… health.
By the sixth morning, after watching Groby stagger back to his lodgings in the pale hours before dawn, Gideon was prepared to hand the duty back to one of his men.
He had uncovered not a single act of treachery. No secret meeting, no suspicious correspondence, no exchange that could be named and condemned.
But Groby’s spending told its own story.
Whatever evidence Groby possessed, he trusted it. Completely.
By the time Gideon turned onto his own street, the first pale light had begun to touch the windows. Somewhere nearby, birds had started their infernal singing. A milk cart rattled faintly at the far end of the square, but most of the houses still slept behind drawn curtains.
He crossed toward his townhouse, already thinking of a bath, a shave, and several uninterrupted hours of sleep.
Then, as he mounted the steps, he caught a whiff of himself.
Whisky soured the wool of his coat where some fool had spilled it on him hours earlier. Smoke clung to his cravat, and beneath that lingered the stale discomfort of too many crowded rooms, too much noise, and far too little sleep.
He had just reached for the door when—
“Gideon!”
He stilled.
For one exhausted second, he thought he had imagined it.
Following a man for five days and nights gave one far too much time to think, and Gideon had spent an inexcusable portion of those hours thinking of Beatrice Beckman.
Not merely her mouth, though that was bad enough.
But the little curls that escaped at her temples whenever she exerted herself. The precise furrow that appeared between her brows when she was concentrating. The flash of triumph in her eyes when, during the lessons, she had twisted free of his hold and sent him to the floor.
And that pale dusting of freckles just above her décolletage, invitingly visible when she lifted her chin.
A gentleman ought not to have noticed them.
Gideon had noticed every one.
“Gideon.” The voice came again, closer this time.
He turned.
Fatigue, it seemed, had finally driven him into a full-blown hallucination.
But then she came closer, striding along the pavement as though it were a perfectly reasonable hour to be out in London alone.
Not a hallucination.
Beatrice was here.
At this ungodly hour.
Every scrap of fatigue burned clean away.
“What the devil are you doing wandering Mayfair at this hour?” he asked more harshly than he intended. He was too tired. Too frustrated. And his heart sure as hell shouldn't have leapt the way it had just then.
Gideon dragged a hand through his hair.
Slowing to a stop before him, a little out of breath, Beatrice was looking a little sheepish now that she’d reached him.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.
Gideon looked at her properly then—the shadows beneath her eyes, wrinkled gown, the careless tilt of her hat…
And a tightness around her mouth that made him want to reach out and—
No.
“Why couldn’t you sleep?” he asked.
She glanced away. “I… I just…”
At first, his mind went to nightmares.
He knew too well how old terrors could find a person in sleep. Harrowgate had taught him that certain memories did not remain politely in the past. They waited until darkness. Until silence. Until one was defenseless enough to dream.
There had been nights when he had avoided sleep rather than risk waking with old fear in his throat.
The thought of Beatrice doing the same made his blood go cold.
But then another possibility struck him.
Something more immediate.
Had someone slipped past Blackwell and Longstaffe somehow? Frightened her? Had one of those thwarted gentlemen confronted her, intent upon revenge?
He looked over her shoulder, scanning the empty pavement, the corners, the iron railings, the shadowed line of sleeping houses.
Nothing.
No one.
Still, his heart was racing.
“Beatrice.”
“I just couldn’t sleep.” Her mouth pressed together. “My thoughts would not settle. They just got… louder. The longer I stayed in bed, the worse it became. So I just got up, and… I walked.”
Gideon went still.
He had been looking for a threat. Some danger he could close his hand around.
Instead, there was only Beatrice.
Sheepish but safe.
The sight of her should not have grounded him. And yet, for the first time since he had walked away from that last lesson, the world set itself back into place after days of being wrong.
“You walked,” he said.
“Yes.” She looked away. “I needed to move.”
For a moment, she studied the toe of her half boot. Then she lifted her gaze, not quite meeting his.
“I did not come looking for you.”
“Of course you didn’t.” Gideon held her gaze. “And yet, you are here.”
A lovely hint of rose touched her cheeks. “Yes.”
Then she drew a breath, small but visible. She hugged her arms in front of her. “Did I… Have I done something to make you angry with me?”
Angry with her? God, no.
“Of course not. Why would you think that?” But even as he asked her, he knew.
He’d handed the lessons over to Longstaffe. His visits to Beckman House with contrived reasons had halted.
And she had noticed.
Of course she had noticed.
Her chin lifted a fraction. “You agreed that the lessons were important. We made plans. And then, on the first day of the lessons, you were… cold… Different. And after that, you simply vanished.”
He had no answer that would not sound cowardly.
“Why, Gideon?” Her mouth tightened. “What did I do?”
“Nothing.” He said it at once.
She did not look convinced.
He exhaled, then glanced toward the quiet street, searching for a better answer than the truth.
He couldn’t find one.
“On Bond Street…” he said at last, carefully. “Outside the shop…”
Her expression shifted.
“I forgot myself,” he said. Gideon forced himself to continue before she could speak. “Not completely. But enough.”
Enough to stop pretending I don’t want you. The answer rose too quickly. Too dangerously.
“Enough to know I needed to be more careful.”
Her gaze searched his. “Careful of me?”
“No.” His voice roughened. “For you.”
He dragged a hand over his jaw. He needed sleep. A cold bath. Anything but her standing before him in the thin morning light, looking tired and wounded and far too lovely.
“Dash is my closest friend.”
“I am aware of that.”
“Then you understand why I cannot behave as though…” He stopped.
“As though what?”
Gideon looked away again. “As though I nearly kissed you in the middle of Bond Street.”
The words hung in the cool morning air.
Down the street, a door closed. The faint rattle of cart wheels carried through the square. London was waking.
Gideon should have stepped back.
Instead, he looked at her mouth.
“But you didn’t,” she said softly. “You didn’t kiss me.”
His jaw tightened. “No.”
“And then you decided that was the end of it.”
“Beatrice—”
“You do not get to do that,” she said. “You do not get to put me against a wall, look at my mouth as though you mean to ruin me, and then vanish—leaving me to wonder whether I imagined the whole thing.”
His breath left him slowly. “I did not mean to hurt you.”
“No,” she said. “You just meant to avoid me.”
He could not deny it.
“And perhaps you had your reasons, Gideon. But you made the decision alone.” Her eyes flashed. “That is what you do not get to do,” she said, quieter now. “Not with something that happened between us.”
Between us.
The words hit like a slap.
Because she was right.
And Beatrice? She did not blush. She did not retreat. Only watched him with that unnerving courage of hers, as though she had had quite enough of his waffling and simply wanted to speak the truth. “Would that have been such a terrible thing?” she asked. “Kissing me?”
“No.” He answered automatically.
Her lashes flickered. “Then… why?”
And suddenly, looking into eyes the color of bluebells, so close he could smell the sweetness of her skin, all the arguments he’d decided on… deserted him.
“I don’t know,” he said.
The street narrowed around them.
“What does that mean?” she pressed.
It meant…
Gideon closed the distance between them and pulled her into his arms.
He should not. He knew it even as he did it.
“It means,” he said, his voice low, “Something’s changed.”
Her hands were on his coat. “What changed?”
“This.”
The kiss should have been brief. A mistake committed and ended in the same breath. But she pressed against him, sweet and strong, and every reasonable thought he possessed went out of his head.
His hand splayed over her back. Hers tightened at his lapel.
She made a small sound against his mouth, and that sound… it undid him.
He deepened the kiss.
There on his doorstep for anyone to see, Gideon kissed her as though every rule he had ever lived by had already been broken.