“Of course,” he answered immediately. “What are you planning?”
Eva stood and stretched. She didn’t miss the way Jack’s gaze lingered on her, or the answering heat within her body.
“Last night, Jack and I watched an elegant soiree from the outside. But now it’s time for us to get a closer look. You and I,” she continued, directing her words to Jack with a grin, “are going to a ball.”
* * *
Jack stared at himself in the mirror, not certain if he liked what he saw. The fabric was covered with chalk marks and looked like something a chap might wear when performing at the music hall. Didn’t look much like a fancy suit of clothes at all. He shifted, and bit back an oath as pins dug into him.
“Careful, sir.” The tailor kneeling at his feet spoke without looking up from adjusting the hem of Jack’s trousers. “It’s best if you stay still until we’re done fitting you.”
“Don’t like staying still,” Jack muttered. To distract himself, he took stock of the small tailor’s shop in which he now stood, his gaze moving restlessly over bolts of fabric, dress mannequins, and half-completed suits. The shop smelled of wool and tea, and pale sunlight crept past the crowded front window to pool on the floor. The whirr of a sewing machine droned through the shop as another tailor made what would be some gent’s coat.
“You’ve got no choice.” Simon, bored, leaned against a counter. “The ball Gilling’s attending is tonight, and if we want your evening clothes done in time, you’d better cooperate.”
Likely, the toff had grown up having suits especially made for him, and had perfected the art of standing motionless while some tailor stuck a measuring tape right against his tackle.
Not Jack. He’d gone with Rockley to his tailor on Old Burlington Street. That place was a palace compared to this cramped little shop, all carved wood, thick carpet, and armies of tailors bowing and smiling. Once a month, Rockley would go to be fitted for new clothes, with Jack standing guard, as usual. Tailors had swarmed over Rockley, measuring, cutting, murmuring toadying nonsense, and he’d just stood there like a god accepting worship as if it were his due.
Now it was Jack’s turn to be turned this way and that, and grunted at as if he were cattle being considered for purchase and slaughter.
“Are you certain you can get his suit ready in time, Mr. Olney?” Simon asked the tailor. “We need it by no later than eight tonight.”
“It won’t be easy,” Olney answered, frowning at Jack’s trousers. “But I’ll get it done. Nemesis helped me out when those men were demanding protection money, and I owe you all a debt of thanks. Mind,” he added, giving Jack an up-and-down look, “this chap’s terrifically big. Getting evening clothes to fit him properly will be a challenge.”
Jack was about to tell Olney that the British prison system had made him this
terrifically big,
but decided that the fewer people who knew about his time at Dunmoor, the better. At least the tailor didn’t ask too many questions.
“There’s no better tailor in North London,” Simon replied. At least the smile he gave Olney looked genuine.
The tailor reddened from the praise. “Too kind, Mr. Addison-Shawe.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll just … get back to it, shall I?”
Simon waved his hand, the kind of gesture rich folk seemed born knowing how to do. Olney immediately returned to his work.
Or tried to. “Sir,” he said to Jack with a strained smile, “I can’t measure your legs properly if you hold that stance.”
Jack bristled. “This is how I always stand.” His legs were braced wide, and he balanced on the balls of his feet.
“You’re standing like a boxer.” Simon pushed away from the counter and paced around the shop. “Bring your legs closer together. Closer,” he snapped when Jack shifted slightly.
“I feel like a sodding fool,” Jack growled. Once again, he was out of his element, an ignorant outsider—and the one person he felt slightly comfortable with was all the way on the other side of town. “This whole scheme’s ridiculous.”
The haughty look on Simon’s face slowly changed, becoming almost kind. “I remember the first time I was fitted. Couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. Everyone was very cross, shouting at me not to move, telling me how to stand. My father was … displeased.” Simon’s mouth twisted. “He expected better from an Addison-Shawe.”
Jack stared at Simon for a moment. He hadn’t been expecting that. Especially not from Simon.
Frustration dimmed. “So, I stand like this?” Jack asked, changing his stance.
Simon considered his posture, then nodded. “That will suffice.” He returned to the counter and carelessly flipped through a magazine.
For a while, the only sounds in the shop came from the scattered traffic outside and the hum of the sewing machine inside. Olney continued to pin and mark what would eventually become Jack’s evening clothes.
He’d never owned a special suit for going out at night before.
“If this party we’re going to tonight is so flash,” Jack said, “does that mean Eva’s got to wear some fancy gown?”
“I suppose,” Simon answered from behind his magazine.
Jack recalled the women at the ball from the other night, in their frothy gowns, delicate as frosted cakes, and tried to picture Eva in something similar. But she seemed too hard-boiled for things like lace fans and silk flowers. He smiled to himself, imagining her striding into a ballroom, bold as brass, with a pistol tucked into her velvet sash. Maybe she’d make it a pearl-gripped pistol, for formal occasions.
“She got a man?” he asked.
Frowning, Simon lowered the magazine. “Eva’s private life is her own.”
“So,” Jack said, raising one eyebrow, “you don’t know.”
“Of course I know. As much as she tells me,” Simon added on a mutter.
“Keeps herself close.” Jack watched as the tailor continued to make adjustments on his clothing, little nips and tucks whose purpose only Olney seemed to understand.
“Trying to get her to open?” Now it was Simon’s chance to lift a brow. “I’ve news for you, Dalton: it won’t work. Eva’s the toughest woman I know. Hell, she’s the toughest
person
I know, male or female.”
“Someone hurt her,” Jack guessed. “Someone in her past.” The thought made his fists clench with the need to beat the bastard, whoever he was.
“Nothing so melodramatic. She simply…” He shrugged. “She doesn’t trust many people. That’s how she’s always been. The most unsentimental woman I’ve ever met. Won’t form intimate attachments.”
It sounded very much to Jack as though it meant Eva didn’t have a man. Which made him glad, indeed.
“You tried, though,” he said. God knew that if Jack worked side-by-side with her, day after day, he’d try to form an
intimate attachment.
Hell, he’d only known her for less than a week, and he couldn’t stop wondering about the taste of her lips, the texture of her skin. His nights had become damned restless because of her.
Just because she kept everyone at arm’s length didn’t mean she lacked desire or passion. He’d seen it, felt it. But she couldn’t keep it buried forever.
Simon straightened, tugging on his coat. “I might have. But she rightly pointed out that people who work together oughtn’t mix the personal and professional.”
Jack snorted. “Maybe it’s on account of her type not being polished toffs. Maybe she needs someone a bit more rough around the edges.” He studied himself in the mirror, in his strange piecemeal evening clothes.
“Dalton, if you were any more rough, you’d be serrated.” Simon’s reflection appeared in the mirror behind Jack. They couldn’t be more different, him and the fair-haired nob. Even the easy way Simon wore his perfectly tailored, fashionable clothes showed how unalike they were.
Jack never let himself feel ashamed or small because of his low background. He couldn’t change the particulars of his birth. Nobody picked who their mother was going to be, whether she was a genteel lady or a whore. Far as he could tell, there wasn’t much difference between either. Both were just women. Neither good nor bad.
Fathers were even more unpredictable. He didn’t know who his was, and neither had his ma. Could’ve been a navvy who dug trenches to build roads, could’ve been a lord looking for cheap pleasure far away from Mayfair’s knowing eyes. Whoever he was, he never knew that his one night with Mary Dalton eventually brought Jack into the world.
It didn’t matter. All that mattered was who Jack was now.
He’d spent the past five years wanting only one thing—to destroy Rockley. That hadn’t gone away. But a new fire burned within him, just as bright.
He desired Eva. Wanted her to want him.
Uncharted territory, this. She might not fancy him. Could give him the cold shoulder. That’d be a bad business.
He’d just have to make sure she wanted him in her bed.
Looking into his own eyes, he vowed that he would succeed in all his goals.
* * *
Jack had faced off in the ring against Iron Arm McInnis, a bruiser with a 35–0 record. He’d taken on three blokes armed with knives and broken bottles in an alley brawl. Hell, he’d confronted the possibility of death or imprisonment as he’d walked, manacled, into the courtroom.
His heart beat harder now than it ever had. He thought it would burst through his chest, right through the starched shirtfront he wore.
Pacing around the parlor in the Nemesis headquarters, he kept checking the clock on the mantel. She’d be here any moment.
He started to rake his hands through his hair.
“Don’t!” Marco yelped. “You’ll get pomade all over your gloves.”
Jack’s hands paused in midair, then he slowly lowered them. “Never going to get used to this,” he muttered. Pomade slicking his hair back, white gloves, starched collars and shirtfronts. Slick-soled shoes that gleamed like ebony mirrors. The kind of clothes worn by the upper crusters he’d see through doorways, windows. Not his own sort.
“You don’t have to get used to it,” Lazarus said, sitting beside the fire. “It’s only for tonight.”
Right. It was a disguise, meant only to get him into the ball at some gentleman’s house, where he’d find Gilling. And then, they’d proceed with the next step of their plan.
Many things could go wrong tonight. He could be barred from getting into the ball. Gilling might not be there. Or Gilling would be there and shout the house down the moment Jack made his move. The investigation against Rockley could collapse, leaving them with nothing and no means of bringing him down.
But what truly made Jack’s skin feel tight with nerves, what made his heart pound, was thinking about what Eva might do when she saw him in his new evening clothes. Would she laugh at him, say something snide about stuffing a bear into silk and wool? It oughtn’t matter what she thought. Yet it did.
Footfalls sounded on the stairs. A man’s and a woman’s. She was here. Simon had gone to fetch her, and now he was back. With her. Their muted voices came through the door.
Jack stopped his pacing and stood in the middle of the parlor. He felt big and ham-fisted, uncertain. But his chin rose and he pulled his shoulders back when the door opened and Eva appeared.
She stopped abruptly, causing Simon to nearly collide with her. When she didn’t move any further, Simon sidled around her and into the flat. But what the blond toff did after that, Jack had no idea. All he saw was Eva.
He felt as though someone had punched him in the chest. Hard. He couldn’t speak or breathe. Could only stare.
She wore a dress of shiny golden fabric, with dark blue velvet ribbons along the low neckline and trimming the ruffles of her skirts. Golden beads glittered on the front of her gown. She’d put fresh flowers in her elaborately pinned hair, roses with pale yellow petals. The dress left the slopes of her shoulders exposed, and even in the harsh gaslight, her skin gleamed like a pearl. Long white gloves came to just above her elbows, and the skin of her upper arms was just as gleaming as her neck and shoulders. Her neck was bare, but she wore a glittering pair of earrings that caught the light with each turn of her head.
It wasn’t the fanciest dress he’d ever seen—the ladies from the other night had had more ruffles and bows and beads—but, by God, he’d never seen any woman look more beautiful.
“I see”—she cleared her throat when her words came out in a rasp—“Olney managed to get your suit ready in time. He did an … excellent job.”
There wasn’t a full-length mirror in the flat, and Olney had delivered the evening clothes. Jack had caught glimpses of himself in some of the smaller glasses but he had no idea what he looked like once he’d put everything on.
Judging by the way Eva looked at him now, he looked like a juicy steak, and she was starving.
Her gaze moved over him, and he felt it as surely as if she’d taken off her gloves and run her hands up and down his body. Her appreciative look lingered on his shoulders, then traveled lower, down his chest, and lower still. She wet her lips. In response, his cock thickened, snug against the wool. He clenched his teeth to keep from groaning aloud.
If he’d felt awkward before, now manly confidence surged through him. He liked the way she stared at him. An improper look if ever there was one. And the ideas spinning through his head weren’t proper, either. They were downright indecent.
Did she have silken drawers on underneath that gown? Were they white, pale blue? Trimmed with ribbons or plain? He wanted to grab up big handfuls of her golden skirts and find out.
“What a pretty gown,” Harriet said, coming out of the kitchen. She approached Eva and tugged playfully on the narrow band of her sleeve. “What on earth are you doing with it?”
Pink crept into Eva’s cheeks. “It was an indulgence. I’ve no real need for it.”
“You do tonight.” Harriet glanced back at Jack, who still couldn’t move or get his mind to function, and winked. “If a gown could be a weapon, yours is a Gatling gun.”
Jack felt more like he’d been knocked clean off his feet by a sledgehammer.
“When are we going to see you in something like that, Harridan?” Lazarus chuckled.
“Be grateful that you won’t,” she fired back. “Because if you did, you’d expire of ecstasy on the spot.”