Chapter Eleven
“HELL AND DAMNATION! I’ll be late!”
Mickey leaped from the bed, promptly tripping over boots he’d hastily abandoned the night before on his way to join Valentin under the counterpane. With all the dignity of a sack of potatoes, he tumbled to the rug.
His lover guffawed. “Have your strings been cut, London? Have I been seduced by a marionette?”
“I have an imminent rendezvous with two delightful ladies and Rollo Duchamps-Avery. I promised I wouldn’t be tardy.”
Mickey hadn’t meant to stay, but after making love at midnight and then again at two and four, his eyelids had got the better of him, and he’d crashed where he was, splayed across Valentin like an extra layer of blanket.
“Ladies?” Valentin’s eyebrows rose a fraction.
“Merely making up the numbers, I assure you.” Mickey hopped into his trousers. “Why? Would you be jealous?”
“I would be driven insane by it.” Yawning, Valentin stretched his long arms high above him, then made a pillow of them. “It would consume me, day and night.”
A warm hug of joy crept over Mickey, even as a little voice in his head reminded him that Valentin was slippery. “More poetic rot,” he grumbled, half-heartedly.
“Truth, actually.” Valentin yawned again. “And one day, you’ll believe me. You are so lovely; I selfishly want you all to myself.”
“You have me for five more days.”
“Yes.” Valentin’s face fell, and when he spoke again, it was in a much more sober tone. “And then I shall be obliged to make my escape to France.”
“I thought you adored your homeland.”
“I do.” He sighed. “It’s not the leaving of England that grieves me. This”—Valentin waved a lazy hand between the two of them—“was an unexpected complication. The darned thing is, I shall miss you, London, when it’s over. Terribly.”
Mickey concentrated on his shirt buttons as an increasingly familiar wave of guilt washed through him.
The Frenchman had whispered poetic nonsense all night, and for all his protestations, Mickey had grown to believe Valentin meant at least half of the rubbish dressed up in flowery prose.
Which meant one of them was being truthful about the extent of their unexpected complication, even if he wasn’t prepared to confess his intention to steal the jewels.
Whereas Mickey was being untruthful about both.
Was it fair to let Valentin, a man showering him with affection and praise, jeopardise his freedom by attempting to steal something that wouldn’t be there?
How could Mickey warn him away without explaining his own role in Ashington’s Eight?
“Perhaps you should pack me in a trunk and take me with you.” Mickey rubbed his hip, where a bruise would blossom later. “To France.”
“Nothing would give me more pleasure. But your precious Tommy Squire would hardly know where to turn.” Valentin’s tone was light, though his dark eyes watched Mickey with care. “He’d send out a warrant for my arrest and have you dragged back home.”
“That’s true.” Mickey smoothed down his waistcoat. “I do believe he can’t function these days unless I’m within ten yards. And he certainly believes I wouldn’t dare travel abroad without him.”
“Could you though?” Valentin queried sharply. “Make a go of things somewhere else on your own?”
Mickey shrugged. His answer was irrelevant; he’d be joined to Tommy until one or other of them handed in their dinner pail. “In my dreams, perhaps.”
“Here.” Valentin beckoned him over as Mickey wrestled with his sleeve buttons. “Allow me.”
“So you can steal them again?” teased Mickey, holding his arm out.
“So I can dally with them and keep you here a little longer.” Valentin’s lush lips pursed as he focused on threading the button through the fiddly hole. “I would beg you to travel to France with me, just so you know.” He spoke quietly, not looking at Mickey. “If I thought you would say yes.”
A field of lavender flashed through Mickey’s head, or at least how he pictured one in his dreams. A small farmhouse lay in the distance, puffing smoke from two chimneys.
He shook his head to clear it and took a slow breath, steadying himself.
He had Rollo to meet in less than a half hour, and then Tommy required his presence at a meeting with a brandy importer.
“My life is here.” Mickey offered up his other arm.
“You of all people—the man who calls me London—know that. The rhythm of this town and my life as Tommy Squire’s right-hand man matches the rhythm of my heartbeat.
For all that I wished I’d been born a different man—a high-born man of learning and adventure—it knows no other. ”
Mickey could have tagged on a few of the other odd things bubbling inside him, odd things he’d never said to anyone else nor even thought of.
Things that spoke of a romantic attachment.
He could tell all that to Valentin, but he’d make a cake of himself, so he said naught.
Valentin would go back to France and leave a gaping hole behind him. And that would be that.
For some reason, the Frenchman had trouble with the second button. With his lips a now a thin line, he blinked rapidly as if clearing grit from his eyes and tried again.
“Tricky, aren’t they?” Mickey commiserated. “A devil when one is in a hurry and alone.”
Valentin simply nodded. When he finally spoke, a thin thread of steel wove through the softness. “Yes. Go and meet your friends. I’d hate for you to keep them waiting.” He hesitated, mossy eyes beseeching. “But come back tonight, London. Our time together is slipping away too fast. Come back.”
*
MICKEY DIDN’T MIND accompanying Rollo on the trip out with Miss Amelia.
He didn’t especially mind strolling through Hyde Park, though it always tended to feel like an utter waste of time that could be better spent in gainful employ.
Such as riding out to the racecourse stands to check the blacklegs weren’t fiddling the books or doing an inventory of the port stocks at the club.
Or, now that New Year’s Eve marched ever closer, wrapped in the arms of Valentin.
He found himself fretting a little. His lover’s mien had been most peculiar as Mickey departed.
Even without Valentin’s impending return to France crowding his thoughts, Mickey rarely managed to relax into these pointless meanders.
Frustration niggled at him, the kind that built and spilled over into the smallest of moments—the polite raising of one’s hat at every other passing gentleman, and how he felt obliged to make a series of inane, optimistic pleasantries regarding the brightness of the weather with Miss Amelia and her obligatory companion, when all four of them knew it was cold as balls.
Rollo, however, masquerading as his twin, seemed to delight in promenading.
The ladies did too, making Mickey feel even more of a contradiction to the genteelness surrounding him.
What gnawed at him, ever since he’d met Valentin, was a quiet dawning that, as Valentin had pointed out, he didn’t quite fit, for all that Tommy had groomed him for the role. Maybe he was never meant to.
Strangely, Mickey hadn’t experienced any of those sorts of feelings, not for a single moment, when equally idle an hour earlier, lying in bed with Valentin.
Pack me in a trunk and take me with you.
Mickey scoffed at his own stupidity. As if he ever could.
As if he’d be brave enough. As if Valentin really wanted him there.
For sure, his lover bubbled over with compliments—he couldn’t help himself; he was French.
Rossingley claimed poetic rot ran through their bloodstream.
And Tommy did need him. Valentin and Mickey had both been right about that.
“Do you ever tire of it, Rollo? You know, the same people, the same parties. The same old game?”
The ladies dawdled behind to gather posies of early snowdrops. Another pointless exercise, they’d last barely a day and a night in a vase of water.
Rollo hummed as he thought. “Perhaps in a few years’ time, I might.
But not yet; there’s too much larking to be had.
And, of course, I have Fitz. When I tire of him, I shall be tired of life.
” He gave Mickey a prod. “You should try falling in love, Mickey. It does wonders for one’s soul.
” He prodded him again. “And one’s ballocks. ”
Love? On that subject, Mickey’s thoughts were hopelessly entangled.
That emotion was far too elusive to encompass what he felt in Valentin’s presence.
And not nearly how Willoughby described it, nor how Tommy and Ashington demonstrated it.
Was it not mere admiration he felt for the Frenchman?
The ordinary sort men feel for worldly gentlemen of stature and great handsomeness?
Surely that was all it was—a preference, an inclination towards beauty, no more complicated than the preference he had for baccarat over faro or pork sausages over bacon.
But then, there was the way Valentin’s laugh sounded, bubbling over with sinful promise.
That couldn’t be explained so easily. Nor how Mickey’s belly dropped away at the amused crinkling of his eyes.
Nor how his body craved the other’s touch.
But it wasn’t love. There was something about Valentin that was simply different from any other man Mickey had known. A foreignness. That was all.
“Don’t you ever feel the urge to travel, Rollo?”
“I do! And Fitz has promised to take me on a grand tour in the spring.” He rattled off an encyclopaedia of European towns and cities, finishing with Rome.
“I hear it is a fine spot for men such as ourselves,” Mickey commented, then added boldly, “Beauregard knowledgeably informed me.”