All Through the Night (5 page)

“That chestnut mare I bought at Tattersall’s last week not spirited enough for you?” he asked.

“I ... I was just—”

“No, Malcolm,” Anne interjected soothingly, accepting the cup of punch he’d fetched. “Sophia was just favorably comparing the chestnut with one she’d ridden out of Lord Frost’s stables last year.”

North would beat Sophia purple if he suspected the unruly streak in her character, especially if it threatened his plans for her brilliant alliance. As much as Anne disliked the person Sophia had become, she would not willingly let her be abused by her father.

Satisfied, North nodded and retreated behind Anne’s chair. On any occasion he’d little enough to say to either Sophia or herself. The only marvel tonight was he’d actually spent time in their company. The faro table must not have been set up yet.

They sat in such an uncomfortable pose for some minutes until Sophia dropped her head behind her fan. “He’s coming over here!” she hissed urgently. “With Lord Strand!”

With a dull feeling of unreality Anne fixed a neutral smile on her face and faced the approaching men.

Lord Strand took the front position, his spectacular guinea-gold good looks marred by a heavy flavor of dissipation. Behind, with that military exactitude that made mock of all the dandies’ posturings, strode Colonel Seward.

There was nothing dissipated about him but something both far more grave and far more subtle. He moved with the stiff grace of someone bearing a wound so old that he accommodated the pain without conscious effort. The shadows under his eyes and the pallor of his skin bespoke sleeplessness; the scar breaking his brow, the crippled hand and broken nose testified to innumerable confrontations—and the cost of as many victories.

Strand stopped directly before Sophia and made his leg. Colonel Seward waited at his side. This close Anne could see the color of his eyes. They were the cool gray of ashes from a long-dead fire.

Terrible things.

“Mr. North, may I present Colonel Henry John Seward?” Giles drawled.

“Seward, eh? Delighted, sir. Heard of you. Prinny speaks highly of you.”

“Honored, sir.” His voice was the same as she remembered, smoke smooth, hot as embers.

Anne glanced at Sophia. Excitement related itself in the tilt of her neatly coiffed head, the glitter in her eyes, the slight opening of her lips. Without doubt Anne must woo Sophia from her infatuation. Seward would eat her alive with his gentle manners and ruthless eyes.

“Anne, m’dear, Colonel Seward,” her uncle introduced them. “Sir, my niece, Mrs. Anne Wilder.”

She swallowed, willing herself to act. She turned her head up, half expecting Seward to seize her wrist and drag her bodily from the ballroom. “How very pleased I am to make your acquaintance, Colonel Seward.”

At her utterance of those few syllables, Colonel Seward’s head snapped up from making a low, formal bow. His eyes narrowed on her.

She was caught.

Jack carried Anne Wilder’s gloved hand to his mouth and brushed his lips lightly over it.

“How very pleased I am to make your acquaintance, Colonel Seward,” she said, and shivered. He could feel the alarm vibrating through her. Alerted, he looked up and found himself caught in her gaze.

She held him with a regard nearly masculine in its directness. Seasoned. Knowing. A touch of valiance. A portion of pain and much resignation. Hardly the eyes of a procuress, as Strand had suggested. Jack had procured much himself; he knew the look.

Rather, she gazed at him like a woman who sold her body might look at her buyer: with fatalism, submission, and a certain damning anticipation. It was an expression that said “Do it and be done.” And it aroused him.

“Madam, I am honored,” Jack said, taking a steadying breath. She, too, he noted, took a careful breath.

Small wonder Strand had sounded smitten. Individuality marked Anne’s face with absolutes: wide cheekbones, square jaw, dark and unfashionably straight brows. Her nose was both bold and elegant, her eyes—a striking, night-devouring indigo—deep-set, the lids delicately stained with mauve. Her mouth alone was a subtle creation, tender and soft.

It disturbed him that a woman in widow’s weeds should draw such a sexual response from him. But she was just a touch disheveled—a dark tress escaped from her cap, a wrinkle marred her glove—and a picture of her rising blowsy and sated from his bed crystallized in his imagination. He glanced away and heard her exhale with undeniable relief. He damned himself for being so obvious. The thief had done this to him, heated him, readied him for lust.

“Mrs. Wilder is acting as Sophia’s companion this season,” North said, recalling Jack from his preoccupation.

“How kind of you, Mrs. Wilder,” he murmured.

“And this is my daughter, Colonel. Miss Sophia North.”

Sophia tilted her small face, regarding him with supreme feminine confidence.

“Miss North, your servant.”

“La!” the beauty said, snapping her fan open and dimpling. “I already retain servants aplenty, sir. Perhaps I can find another function you might serve?”

His smile feigned admiration. As sallies went it wasn’t bad, but the determined brilliance with which she delivered the line suggested it had been used before.

“You’re a friend of Prinny’s?” the girl asked.

“I have a long-standing acquaintance with the prince regent.”

“Oh.” Her lips formed a plump and perfect circle.

She truly was an exquisite little creation, showy and kittenish, and she engendered in him not a whit of the confounding hunger awakened by his thief in her black silk mask and boy’s breeches or the stab of lust awakened by a tousled-looking widow still clinging to half mourning.

He smiled ruefully. Had he grown so perverse that he needed a fetish to awaken his lust?

“Prinny rather dotes on my Sophie here,” North said proudly.

“And does he dote on you, too, Mrs. Wilder?” Jack asked.

His query caught her off guard, though only someone observing closely would have seen the slight start of her hand, the tungsten brilliance flare in her dark eyes before she ironed her face smooth.

“As a fond monarch dotes on any of his subjects.”

“Well, his interest in Sophia is hardly of a magisterial bent.” North snorted.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Strand drawled. “Mrs. Fitzhubert claimed His Majesty’s interest was every inch regal. And that his doting was daunting.”

Malcolm North snickered and Sophia colored with scandalized pleasure. Jack glanced at Mrs. Wilder. She remained unperturbed, reminding him that before her marriage she’d run with loose company and was, as such, well acquainted with such heated quips. She was a woman with a history. Something he, too, owned in abundance.

“La!” Sophia laughed. “You are wicked, Lord Strand!”

“So they say, Miss North.” Strand cast a sly glance in the widow’s direction. “What a tolerant sort of doyenne you’ve found, North. You aren’t being negligent in guarding this delightful young woman from my sort, are you, Mrs. Wilder?”

Anne lifted one brow. “A small child could identify accurately the warmth and wit in
this
conversation, sir. I’ll save my warnings for subtler dangers.”

Jack watched her with heightened appreciation.

“Ouch!” Strand said, his outward amusement belied by his eyes. “Did you hear that, Seward? She called me obvious.”

“So she did.”

“And I think she called me childish, too!”

“I believe so, yes.”

“Anne!” North’s face reflected his concern with such cheek. Small matter that she’d been impertinent to a man who’d been tainting his treasured daughter’s young—and presumably virgin—ears.

Mrs. Wilder apparently appreciated the irony, too, but she killed the smile touching her mouth before it was fully born. Wit and subtlety. Discrimination born of experience. A woman who—if Strand was correct— had forfeited a hoyden’s pleasures for a cherished husband’s devotion. Yes, the widow was definitely interesting. But was she his thief?

“And you, Colonel Seward,” Sophia said, recalling Jack’s attention, “are you wicked, too?”

“Worse than wicked,” Strand cut in before Jack could reply. “Nefarious. Have you never heard of ‘Devil Jack’?”

Sophia nodded eagerly. Anne Wilder’s brows dipped fractionally as if she scoured her memory.

She’d not heard his epithet before? Then she hadn’t been listening. Whispers followed him into every drawing room, every opera house and gaming hell.

“
I
have,” Sophia said, eyeing him coyly. “Is your reputation deserved, Colonel?”

He studied her a moment. He could easily see Sophia in the role of thief: her eyes avid with excitement, her little body tense with anticipation, her boldness its own reward.

“Well?” she demanded archly.

“How can I answer that,. Miss North, when I know neither the author of that sobriquet nor the allegations that prompted it?”

“Ah,” Sophia said with relish. “But you admit culpability.”

“I admit only that if the neighbor’s gardener named me Devil Jack, why yes, I do deserve the name, for I certainly denuded his orchard. When I was twelve.”

Anne laughed—an abbreviated surprised sound. Sophia pouted.

“Fa!” she said. “You tease, sir. A gentleman would give fair accounting of his character.”

He tilted his head. “Can you not, Miss North, in your generosity, ask what I aspire to deserve rather than what I merit?”

“And what is that?”

Surprised, Jack turned his head at Anne Wilder’s hushed query.

Sophia cut in before he could answer. “La! Worthy ambitions are not nearly so interesting as unworthy histories.”

“Too true,” Strand concurred sagely. “But Seward here is as tight-lipped as a clam where his past is concerned. He’s devilishly proper.”

“ ‘The prince of darkness is a gentleman . . .’ ” Anne murmured, her extraordinary eyes lowered to her hands.

“What are you saying now, Annie?” Sophia asked irritably.

“Forgive my interruption. I just recalled a line from Shakespeare.”

Annie?
thought Jack.
Annie,
who read Shelley and who had, unless he’d lost his wits entirely, just called him a gentleman. How perplexingly imaginative of her.

“Won’t anyone tell me about the colonel?” Sophia begged.

“I’m afraid that to hear the devil’s resume you’ll have to ask his biographer,” Strand answered.

“And that would be . . . ?” Sophia asked.

“Why, myself, dear child. By your leave, sir, may I partner your daughter in this dance? I have no doubts the chaperone will approve. It’s a country set. Like myself, obvious and uncomplicated.”

At North’s nod, Strand secured Sophia’s hand and whisked her onto the dance floor as a pair of gentlemen paused to speak to North. Jack ignored them, being absorbed by the spectacle Sophia North produced.

She tossed her curls, flashed brilliant smiles at her partners, and arched her brows in a manner both coquettish and worldly. A canny enough lass, Jack thought, though through the months during which he’d pursued his thief he’d conjectured for his adversary a real intelligence, not merely this vulpine shrewdness.

It was a few minutes before he realized he was no longer watching Sophia but instead studying Anne Wilder. She was so different from her charge, like the memory of a disturbing dream. She looked to be made of smoke, burned from within, a delicate vessel whose very core had been singed.

It would be hard indeed to reconcile Anne’s frail-looking form with the lithe athlete who’d bounded from a second-floor window. Furthermore, Anne Wilder simply didn’t have the Wraith’s fevered hubris.

There was no anticipation in her gaze as she watched the dancers, no yearning. Everything about her bespoke exhausted passion. He could not imagine her offering him first her body and then violence. He should be so gifted. Anne appealed to him in more ways than he wanted to consider.

He was lost in such uncharacteristic musing when North cleared his throat.

“Annie, m’dear,” North said. “These kind fellows have requested my company for a short while.” He nodded at the men by his side. “Would you please— That is, when Sophie returns would you— Will you—”

“Yes, Malcolm,” she answered.

“You’ll join us in a friendly bit of cards, Colonel?” North asked.

“Perhaps later, thank you. For now I’ll stay and enjoy Mrs. Wilder’s company.”

“Please, do not keep yourself from an enjoyable pastime on my behalf, sir,” Anne said quickly. “I assure you I am quite content to watch.”

“You wouldn’t chase me away, Mrs. Wilder, when I can think of no better way to indulge myself than by staying?”

“That’s decent of you, Seward,” North said in relief.

Embarrassment flickered across Anne Wilder’s face.

“I assure you, I merely follow my inclination,” Jack said, irritated with North’s lack of sensitivity.

“Of course you do,” North said. “So I thank your inclination.” He laughed at his
bon mot.
“Won’t be above an hour, Annie,” he said, and promptly dove into the crush in pursuit of his departing companions.

“You needn’t think yourself promised for the nonce, Colonel,” Anne said, her gaze averted. “Time with ‘the fellows’ has a way of extending itself, and I am sure you have other people you must greet.”

“If you mean to warn me against monopolizing your time, Mrs. Wilder,” he said, “I assure you I have no intention of inviting unwelcome attention upon yourself. I know full well the tolerance practiced in regard to my presence here.”

His words won a look of surprised speculation from her. She did not demur and for this he was grateful. Instead she said, “I have been the recipient of such tolerance myself and I assure you, I do not practice it. I meant what I said, Colonel.”

“Are you always so honest, Mrs. Wilder?”

“Within my means, sir,” she replied after a faint pause.

“Then, if I might be allowed a few more minutes of your company, I would count it a great favor.”

She lifted her face and the golden light of the nearby candles edged one high cheek with gilt.

“If that is your wish, Colonel,” she said, then fell silent, leaving him to assess her expression. He’d made his way by studying the subtle signs by which people revealed and concealed themselves. Surely one small widow could be no great challenge to his art. But she was. A great challenge.

Thus engaged he did not see Lord Vedder until he was almost to them.

“Mrs. Wilder.” Lord Vedder bowed, ignoring Jack completely. “Once more we meet! What is this, the fourth time this week? And you are here with your enchanting young cousin. How delightful to witness the past paragon present the new one. But tell me, will Miss North be able to keep up this breakneck pace of activities? Will you?”

Jack opened his mouth to give the insolent cur a dressing down, but Anne preempted him.

“How kind you are to concern yourself with us, Lord Vedder,” Anne said calmly. “Yes, I fear Sophia is determined that no fete shall be spared her critique, no festivities suffer the lack of her praise, and no person shall be able to call her exclusive for the lack of her acquaintance.”

“You are determined to disapprove of us,” Lord Vedder said with a little fashionable sneer.

“Not I, sir. I critiqued, praised, and was available myself, as I’m sure you recall. Or so some men thought.”

Vedder’s heavy lids drooped over his eyes and in his silence and sudden rigidity Jack read the brief hard history of a young man, smitten and sure of his welcome, sent packing when he presumed his favors were as irresistible as his title. No, Mrs. Wilder had never been a saint. She’d been rarer, a woman sure of her value.

“Indeed, you are correct,” Vedder said, sniffing and looking beyond Anne to the dance floor. “However shall we contrive to impress Miss North? Please, as one who has never been impressed, give us some direction. She already appears to
know
everyone.”

“Oh, no, sir. There are at least two people here she’s only just met.”