She tried to stifle her annoyance, smoothing a hand over the cool leather of the ledger. Lately, her days were so filled with frivolous social activities that she had been excited at the prospect of spending a few hours engaged in a truly useful industry. Bantering with Nick seemed an additional tedium. Yet Julia could not dismiss the hurt she’d witnessed in Alec’s eyes when he’d spoken of his cousin. Perhaps here was a way she could pay back some of Alec’s generosity.
Julia tilted her head. “Alec told me you and he
were
once close.”
Nick’s smile thinned. “I am surprised he mentioned me at all.”
“You shouldn’t be.” She patted his arm. “Every family has its quarrels.”
He broke into an astonished laugh. “My God, you want Alec and me to cry friends?”
“Why not?
Neither of you has any family to speak of.” She frowned. “Though I did hear you had relatives in France.”
His face closed.
“A few.”
“Very volatile sort of people, the French. We had a French cook once. It didn’t work at all.” She leaned forward to say earnestly, “If I were you, I wouldn’t count anyone from France as family.”
Nick chuckled. “I don’t. I met them only once, and it was not a pleasant stay. They were all as mad as my mother.”
“Mad?”
“Ah, Alec didn’t tell you everything, did he?”
“He told me some money disappeared.”
Nick nodded pleasantly, as if she’d just mentioned the possibility of rain. “So it did.”
“Did you take it?”
His smile melted into silence. After a long moment, he said, “You are the first person to ever ask me that question.”
Julia frowned.
“Surely not.
Alec said you admitted to stealing it.”
“I’m sure that is how Grandfather saw it.”
“Ah—he didn’t give you a chance to speak, did he? I’ve noticed Alec has a tendency to engage in that same sort of high-handed behavior.”
“He is remarkably like Grandfather. But I cannot blame either of them. Grandfather hated my mother and feared I would be a disruptive influence on Alec. My fate was decided the instant I set foot in Bridgeton House.”
“You were only thirteen. Everyone makes mistakes.”
His hooded gaze flickered across her. “Only thirteen, and yet more debauched than any whore you have ever allowed in the doors of your Society.”
Julia almost shivered. “I think you’d like everyone to believe the worst of you. It keeps them from expecting more.”
He looked amused. “Do you always involve yourself in the lives of the people you meet, or is this an honor you bestow only on the misfits of society?”
“You are not a misfit.”
Nick stepped closer, deliberately crowding her on the narrow sidewalk. Julia stood her ground, tilting her head back to regard him sternly. “I am not afraid of you, Nicholas Montrose.”
He smiled and relented, moving back a pace. “Then you trust me?”
“No,” she confessed. “But everyone can become a better person.
Even you.”
Nick’s smile did not quite reach his eyes. “Sometimes, Julia, a wolf is just a wolf. No more and no less
.“
She nodded, shifting the book in her hands until it separated them like a wall. “Even wolves deserve a home.”
“And lost souls—don’t forget them.” He withdrew a card from his pocket and held it out. “
Which brings me to my purpose.
”
She stared at the card but made no move to take it. “What is it?”
“The address of someone in need.”
He slipped the stiff card into the pages of the ledger. “She is in desperate straits. If you do not help her, no one will.”
Suspicious of his bland expression, she asked, “What kind of assistance does this woman require?”
“Miss L’Amour is an actress, though her skills in that area are lamentable. The theatre manager has been hinting he will entertain bids for her company for a certain type of private performance. I doubt she realizes her intended fate; she is indeed an innocent.”
Julia felt a blaze of excitement. It would be the perfect experiment for the Society. “I shall contact her immediately.”
“I knew you would.
But hurry, Julia.
One man in particular is pursuing her with less than noble intentions. If someone does not interfere, he will win her.” He leaned forward and dropped his voice to an intimate level. “I know this man, Julia. Once he has her in his bed, he will quickly tire of her and toss her away like soiled linen.”
It was all Julia could do to meet his gaze. “How did you come to know this woman?”
He caught at one of the ribbons that trailed from her bonnet and pulled on it, slowly untying the large bow. “How do you think?” he asked softly.
Julia yanked the ribbon from his grasp. “
You
are the man making the improper advances.”
He bowed.
“It is not very chivalrous of you.”
“I would pay her well.”
Julia pinned him with a hard stare. “Why are you telling me this, Nick? You cannot care what happens to this actress.”
“Had I not thought it might amuse you to save yet another soul from ruin, I would not have bothered. Indeed, I would have deflowered her, used her well, and left her for the next ragged soul.” He retrieved his gloves from his pocket and pulled them on. “I still might. She is a thoroughly delectable piece.”
Her brows lowered. “You’re not given to kind gestures. You must have another motive for doing this. I don’t suppose you’d tell me if I asked.”
“No, I would not.” Nick gently disengaged one of her hands from the ledger and placed a lingering kiss on it. “I must be off. Pray give Alec my best.” He tipped his hat and sauntered off.
Several women on the street stopped to brazenly stare as he passed, but he ignored them all. Whatever Nick was about, Julia knew it boded ill—but she had never been one to turn from a challenge.
Tucking the card into her reticule, she hurried to join Johnston.
Julia sat at Alec’s large mahogany desk and opened the ledger. She carefully selected a pen and settled in for a satisfying hour of genuine labor. One page at a time, she slowly worked her way through the labyrinth of numbers, deciphered the vicar’s spidery handwriting and wrote corrected tallies in the columns. As time wore on, her neck began to ache, but she doggedly continued.
She was a quarter of the way through when she lifted the pen from correcting a total. Black ink dripped from the nib and soaked into the paper, blotting out the carefully written figure. “Confounded ledger,” she muttered, frowning at the frayed nib. “What was that?”
Startled, she dropped the pen. Ink splattered across the page in a decorative spray.
Alec’s smile hinted at devilment. Arms crossed, he leaned against the doorjamb attired in the tailored coat and knee breeches required by Almack’s.
At the sight of his clothing, Julia turned to where the ormolu clock should have been. “Is it eight already?”
“Past that.
Lady Birlington will be wondering what’s become of us.” Shoving himself from the door frame, he came to stand at her shoulder. “What has so absorbed your attention that you have forgotten the time?”
She sighed. “Vicar Ashton asked me to take a look at the records, but I’m not sure if I’m correcting them or just making them worse.”
He leaned forward, one hand resting along the back of her chair, the other placed flat on the table. His hip brushed her shoulder and the subtle aroma of sandalwood and leather encircled her.
Her stomach quavered and she leaned away. If she didn’t put some distance between them, she would become a babbling idiot. “I’m not very good at accounts, but the vicar seemed to think I could do it.” She looked at the blotted page. “He was wrong.”
Alec turned the ledger to face him, his sleeve brushing against her cheek.
“Perhaps.
Let me see what is to be done.”
With unsteady fingers, Julia tucked a few stray wisps of hair behind her ears, reminding herself that such casual contact was a commonplace occurrence, and she should accustom herself to such happenings. Yet she couldn’t resist leaning ever-so-slightly to one side until her cheek just grazed his arm. She held her breath, but he didn’t move, apparently immersed in the sea of blots and figures. Julia savored the moment, closing her eyes and absorbing his warmth.
After a moment, his stillness seemed unnatural. Julia opened her eyes and swallowed, casting a glance up at him. He stared at her, his eyes dark with some swirling emotion. “I was planning on saving our kiss for the coach ride home. But if you wish, I could deliver it now.”
Mortified, she managed to squeak, “No, thank you.”
Smiling, he watched her through half-closed eyes,
then
shifted forward to point at an entry on the page. “That should be listed in this column here.” His hard thigh pressed against her arm. As far up in her seat as she was, there was no escape from that steady, licentious pressure.
Her chest constricted. She forced her unseeing gaze to the page. “Oh. That.” Despite her determination not to succumb to the sensual lassitude spreading through her limbs, the air thickened with unspoken meaning. As if to tempt her further, he subtly increased the pressure of his muscled thigh against her arm.
A welter of desire radiated into her chest and lower limbs. Any moment now, she would toss caution to the wind and wrap both her arms about his tempting thigh and hold onto him with all her might. She closed her eyes and fought a flood of unladylike impulses until Alec muttered an imprecation and moved to the other side of the desk.
Bereft, Julia stared at the forgotten ledger. Numbers danced and swayed, blurring together until she could no more add than read.
It doesn’t mean anything to him
, she reminded herself, in as calm and orderly a fashion as a woman on the brink of indiscretion could manage.
You forced him to give up his mistress, and now all his heated impulses are collecting, pooling within him, simmering like a volcano ready to erupt
. But no matter the result, she could not regret having made such a demand. “If he had a mistress, he would never even look at you,” she muttered, forcing herself to return to the ledger one more time.
“Pardon?”
The hint of disbelief in his tone left her with no doubt he’d heard every word. Drat her impulsive tongue. Smiling brightly, she said, “Just talking to myself. I said, uhm, ‘If he had a seamstress, he would never heave a book at you.’ ”
“What?”
Clinging to her pride, she added doggedly, “It’s a child’s song I learned in Boston. I daresay you don’t know it, but it’s quite common there.”
He answered this with a skeptical lift of his brow, a hint of laughter in his gaze. “Sing it for me,” he said softly.
Julia blinked. “I can’t. It is bad luck to sing the same song twice.
Indoors.
On a Thursday.”
He chuckled. “It is even worse to lie to your husband.”
She assumed the most innocent expression she could and waited.
“Stop that.” His mock scowl was as endearing as his grin. “You are as bad a liar as you are an accountant.”
Alec returned to her side and opened a drawer and pulled out a large leatherbound book. He set it before her. “Let me show you a better way to set up your accounts, love. If you enter the income here with expenses listed so, you won’t have so many errors. As bills come in and are paid, you just move the amounts from this column to this column. That way you know at any date how much you owe and to whom.”
His ledger had nary a blotch nor blot on it. Every number beamed up at her, orderly and legible. Julia regarded the neat tally with a sinking heart. “I could never get our books to look like that. I suppose we’ll just have to hire someone.” It was disheartening how little she’d been able to contribute to the Society lately. She no longer had time to work with the women and she had thought that here, finally, was a way for her to contribute something.
Alec’s hand rested on her shoulder, his fingers brushing against the skin at her neck in a most disquieting way. “If anyone can make the Society productive, Julia, it will be you.”
The quiet confidence in his tone brought tears to her eyes. It was all she could do not to throw herself in his arms. She cleared her throat. “When did you learn to do accounts?”
After the slightest hesitation, he removed his hand. “Grandfather was determined that I possess some useful skills. He believed that any man who would trust another to watch over his funds deserved to be cheated of them.”
“Sounds like my father. He was forever telling Mother she shouldn’t trust every soul who came through the front door. She would just laugh and say Jesus didn’t dwell with the saintly, and neither should he.”
Her smile quavered and fell. At times she missed her parents more than she could bear. Slipping off her spectacles, she swiped at a stray tear with the back of her hand.
“Julia, what’s wrong?”
She sniffed and slid her spectacles back on her nose. “I was just thinking of this mess.”
“I can see where that would make you cry,” he said in a dry voice.
“Well, it does. I hate to leave things undone.”
Alec handed her his handkerchief, his gaze never wavering as she blew her nose. “Would you like me to take a look at the books? I’m not sure I could help, but I’d be willing to try. Meanwhile you can go and get dressed.”
Julia looked at him over the fold of his handkerchief. “Can you fix them?”
His mouth quirked into a lopsided smile.
“Yes, if you have the original bills.”
“I can get them from the vicar tomorrow.” She blinked down at the blotched accounts. “We need it done by Friday, though. You’ll have to work fast.”
“Yes, madam,” he replied, his meek tone belying the laughter in his eyes.
Ignoring everything but his offer of help, she nodded. “Excellent.”
Alec gave her a wry smile and pulled a chair to the desk, sitting far closer to her than necessary. “Let me see how bad they are.” He slowly turned the pages, stopping now and again to shake his head when he came across an especially blotted entry. “I’m not sure who was worse, you or the vicar.”