The Passionate One (12 page)

As if he had read
his mind, Merrick suddenly spoke to him. “Your darlin’ bride-to-be is at
tonight’s festivities, is she not?”

“Yes.”

“And any number of
other rich young wenches,” John Fortnum added. “Now that Phillip here is going
all connubial, me dad’s all in a lather for me to marry. Perhaps I should take
advantage of this evening’s sport to look over the prospects, unbeknownst to
the prospects, of course. Just because Watt can sustain a penniless bride does
not mean I can.”

Merrick
slew about in his saddle, peering at Phillip. “Just how is that, Watt?
How came you to offer for the penniless, if lovely, Miss Russell?”

“Phillip here is
proof of an old man’s passion,” Fortnum supplied before Phillip could speak.
“And his father does therefore love him dearly. If it would keep Phillip in
Fair Badden, his father would let him marry a tavern wench.

“A rich wife might
want a London house. A well-connected wife might have family to visit on long
extended trips away. Miss Russell has no reason to leave Fair Badden, nor any
desire to do so.”

Sober Phillip might
have taken exception to such revelations, but he wasn’t sober. He was
deliciously drunk and surrounded by his bosom friends and on his way to a fine
piece of sport. What and why would he keep anything private from these men?

“True,” Phillip
confessed. “But that’s not the only reason. Rhiannon’s clever enough to spend
the rest of her life being grateful to me for making her my wife.” He grinned.
“What other woman would have that sense?”

Chapter Ten

They were rough,
uncouth fellows. And they were exquisitely, hilariously, vibrantly alive. Fair
Badden had never seen their like.

Other traveling
performers measured Fair Badden’s high society as the self-conscious, priggish
band of yawners it was and suited their talents accordingly, somberly enacting
philosophical vignettes or singing plodding chorales. Not these fellows. Rude
and boisterous and bawdy, they had about them a joie de vivre that was
infectious. True, the big silent fellow had no more important a role than
letting his smaller fellows clamber over him, but he played the part of
mountain well. Another masked man circulated through the room, snatching
goblets of wine from Lady Harquist’s guests’ well-manicured hands and giving
back salacious ditties in a high, inane falsetto.

They were
unpredictable, thrilling, and novel. Even the most consummate snob in Lady Harquist’s
company could not restrain an occasional smile at their antics. They sang
ribald songs with leering enthusiasm, mocked their betters with uncanny
insight, and quaffed expensive wine as though it were cider dregs. They tumbled
and juggled, danced and somersaulted one over the other. Their short morality
plays dissolved into delicious double entendres.

Rhiannon welcomed
their vibrant company with relief, taking the opportunity to escape her
unwelcome preoccupation with Ash Merrick by entering wholeheartedly into their
heated word games. It was early yet. Not everyone had arrived. Cornered by a
lean fellow in a black silk domino, she giggled, intoxicated by this unexpected
freedom from her troubled thoughts.

“Ah, pretty
ladybirds!” His voice was slurred and husky, and his thick French accent was so
authentic one could not help but wonder if it were real. He peered owlishly at
the young ladies tittering behind Rhiannon. “A full gaggle of them and all
squawking love songs!”

He swept a crumpled
tricorn from his head. A tight-fitting scarf of silk covered his hair. He bent
over in so low a bow that his forehead nearly brushed the floor. Just as he was
about to overset himself and crash face first into the ground, he snapped
upright, blinking woozily.

Part
of his act, no doubt, Rhiannon thought. Because though his voice was slurred,
he moved
with the grace of God’s own fool, dodging the
vases his fellow acrobats hurled at him, catching them midair, and sending them
back. Through it all the inane smile remained plastered on his lower face. But
behind the mask his dark eyes gleamed with feverish light.

“Here now, miss,”
he said snatching at Rhiannon and missing her by inches. Merrily, she danced
out from his reach, twirling away in a cloud of jonquil-colored brocade. A
tendril of hair escaped its knot and tumbled down her neck.

“Come, dearest. My
haughty, devilish, quick-footed Mab,” he crooned, reaching for her again. “You
look an adventuresome wench, a curious kitten. I’ve heard it said that all
‘ladies crave to be encountered with.’ Admit it, sweetling, ’tis a fact that
virgins dream of what a gypsy’s embrace might be like.”

A French gypsy
who knew Shakespeare? Not likely.

Rhiannon snorted.
“If I allowed your arms about me, sir,” she said through her laughter, “I’d be
wondering still.”

His head swung up.
A flicker of surprise appeared in his shadowed eyes.

“Oh ho! What are
you saying,
mon amie
?
That I’m not what I appear to be”—his voice lowered, became silky with
innuendo—“or that
you’re
not?”

Why, the audacious cur!
The knave! Rhiannon thought in bemusement and could not help grinning at his
audacity.

“Tinsel gypsy!” she
declared.

“Downy child!” he
returned in his low, rough voice, grinning drunkenly.

“I’m not so easily
gulled.” Rhiannon denied the charge of naïveté, placing her hands on her hips.
She cocked a brow at him. “For have I not discovered
you
?”

She leaned forward,
studying him closely, the marble smoothness of his blue-cast chin, the full
sensual lips. They were unfamiliar yet...

“I know you,” she
murmured, mystified.

“No, Mademoiselle.”
He shook his head sadly. His dark eyes caught and held her own. “For how can
you know me when I do not know myself?”

Around them the
noise from the tumblers and jugglers dimmed to a hum. She was scarcely aware of
her friends, moving closer.

Faithless flirt,
she chastised herself hopelessly. Was it not enough that in her heart she’d
betrayed Phillip with a black-haired Londoner, but now she betrayed both men to
this...
actor
who had honed each slippery, honeyed word on a continent
of twittering, blushing girls.

“Who
are
you?” she asked.

He shrugged.
Stepped back. “Who do you want me to be? Tumbler?”

He folded at the
waist and snapped suddenly backward, head over heels, landing lightly. Around
them the ladies clapped. He did not acknowledge their applause; his eyes
remained riveted on her.

“Minstrel?”

He withdrew a
slender flute dangling from his belt and placed it to his lips. A frolicsome
tune flushed from beneath his fingers. Once more the applause broke from the
little group of watchers.

“Buffoon?”

He laughed, an
unpleasant, helpless sound that caught at Rhiannon’s heart, propelling her
forward a step. He held out his hand, backing away as if her spontaneous
movement somehow threatened him.

“No! Not yet the
fool. Though there’s always hope you’ll witness it yet this night. You wouldn’t
want to miss it. I play that role best of all.”

“Yes!” A young lady
in an elaborate wig and diamond ear bobs cried. “Play the fool for us now!”

The tumbler’s head
turned toward the speaker. “Forgive me,
ma chérie,
but I must decline.
That particular mask is threadbare, a shoddy, shopworn piece of work. Unfit for
such exalted company. I’ll retire and late this evening when you lay sighing
upon some worthy”—he paused and the ladies gasped—“pillow, I’ll mend it. When
next we meet, I swear, I’ll be a knave.”

He stood rigidly a
few seconds and then abruptly grinned. “But tonight I’ve a grander notion.”

“What’s that?” the
girl asked, but he was not looking at her anymore.

His attention had
returned to Rhiannon. Fascinated and charmed, she stayed though her conscience
urged her to leave.

“Perhaps tonight I
am... a hero? No?” He dropped to his knee and stretched a beseeching hand in
Rhiannon’s direction. “Chevalier? Knight gallant?”

She smiled and
would have taken his hand but he snatched it away. He plucked a silver stiletto
from where it was hidden in his boot and uncoiled with lethal grace. The knife
flashed deadly in his hand.

“Or perhaps
mercenary? Villain? Only tell me what you’ll pay... and I’ll tell you my
price.” His voice had gone flat, emptied. The tip of the blade moved in a
threatening arc before the company of giggling women. It stopped at Rhiannon,
held, wavered, and was abruptly snatched back.

“A rogue? Or a
friend?” He flipped the stiletto into the air and caught it on its descent.
Once, twice more.

He was breathing
quickly now, each breath exposed by the clinging shirt, the rise and fall of
his muscular chest. “A fribble? A blackguard?”

No drunkenness now
marred his speech or clouded his bright eyes. He slunk closer to her, his feet
sliding ahead of his taut body, his head angled away from her, approaching her
like a feral dog.

“Only tell me what
you
desire,
mon coeur
,”
he said. “What do you want? I’ll become it. Anything. It’s what I am. What
I do. My stock-in-trade.”

His voice was
hypnotic, base insinuation and bitter mockery underscoring a vast bleakness.
The audience around them grew hushed. Margaret shuffled on her feet, her eyes
darting nervously. The smile of another bewigged young lady remained fixed on
her face like a beauty mark she’d forgotten to take off.

And then the moment
was gone. The dark tumbler flung himself back and away.

“No suggestions?”
he complained. “You’d leave me to my own devices? My own imaginings? Not a safe
place to leave a man such as me.”

He sighed heavily.
“Then I’ll be a juggler.
Here,
my friends, to me!”

At his call several
of his fellow acrobats abandoned their pursuits. He called out again, raised
his stiletto, and flung it over the heads of Lady Harquist’s guests. As one,
the guests ducked and shouted in alarm. The blade whistled high above their
elegant coiffures, their feathered, puffed, and swollen wigs.

A short,
bandy-legged fellow perched atop the giant’s shoulders cackled gleefully and
caught the dark tumbler’s missile. Magically, its twin appeared in his other
hand. With a hoot, he hurled first one then the other back at Rhiannon’s
would-be hero.

He caught them both
and sent them chasing one another in an arc above his head. A third knife
joined them, and then a fourth, as the other members of the troupe sent their
blades spinning and flashing toward the black-clad figure.

Effortlessly he
caught and added each to the sparkling, glittering circle of death that flew
above his head, occasionally plucking one from the circle and sending it out
amidst the party, only to have it returned seconds later chased by a new one.
The company held their breath, clasping their gloved hands to their mouths in
fascinated terror.

He made it look so
easy, so effortless. But Rhiannon, standing closest to him, saw the sheen break
out on his closely shaven chin and exposed throat, witnessed the intensity with
which he watched the tumbling blades fall toward him, an intensity at odds with
his easy banter and fluid movements.

Now, released from
his attentions, the niggling impression of familiarity returned to tease her.
The lean, hard acrobat’s body hidden under dusty, ill-fitting finery, the
supple grace, even the choice of words, though spoken in an accent...

Her gaze flew toward
the young giant standing currently unemployed and idle against the wall. His
mask had gone askew. One bushy golden brow appeared in the jagged eyehole.

Phillip
?

Her head snapped
around. The juggler had reached above his head to catch a knife thrown a shade
too high. The cuff slipped up his arm.

A thick, pale rope
of scarred flesh decorated his wrist.

“Merrick?” she
whispered, jerking forward.

From the corner of
her eye she saw a silver gleam, then heard a thunk. She wheeled about. Behind
her a stiletto vibrated in the paneled wall.

Exactly where she’d
been standing.

Chapter Eleven

Rhiannon stared at
the still quivering blade. Some hand had grown sloppy with drink, she thought
breathlessly. Had she not moved...

Ash tore off his
silk mask, looking beyond her, his gaze hunting through the assembled crowd. A
gasp followed his revelation and was pursued by the rumbling of a hundred
voices.

“It’s that Merrick fellow!”

“Merrick? The
fellow staying at the Fraisers’?”