Nicola Cornick Collection: The Last Rake In London / Notorious / Desired

‘Drown your sorrows in a glass of Tokay, old man,’ Stephen Harrington said in his ear as the ladies rose to leave the men to their drink. ‘Must say, you have got it bad. You’ve been watching Miss Bowes all through dinner. Never thought to see you brought so low!’

‘Holt annoys me,’ Jack said, through his teeth, watching as Gregory Holt took Sally’s hand and placed a kiss on the back of it in a gesture of laughing gallantry. ‘He has a damned nerve to do that to my fiancée!’

‘Oh, Greg’s harmless,’ Stephen said calmly. ‘He’s only doing it to spite you, old fellow, and because he has always held a candle for Miss Bowes. He was a protégé of her father, you know, and I understand he wanted Miss Bowes to run away with him when matters became particularly grim between herself and her late husband. Not,’ he added hastily, seeing Jack’s glare, ‘that she gave him the least encouragement.’

‘She didn’t tell me,’ Jack said. He could feel the shreds of his control slipping. So Gregory Holt was an old flame of Sally’s. Their situation was uncannily close to his elopement with Merle all those years ago. Except that Sally had had the good sense not to run away and provoke the desperate kind of situation that he and Merle had found themselves in. He took a deep breath. At least he knew they could not have been lovers, though probably not for want of trying on Holt’s part. He wanted to go straight over and confront the man about it but bearing in mind that Greg was some distant cousin of Stephen, they had known each other for years, and it was bad form to cause an affray at a country house party, that was probably not a good idea. What the hell was the matter with him? he wondered. Where had his self-control gone? He’d been a friend of Greg Holt since their schooldays and never had the slightest inclination to ram the other man’s teeth down his throat before now.

‘Well,’ Stephen said, giving him a sympathetic smile, ‘I understood from Charley that—strictly on the quiet—there is some doubt over whether Miss Bowes really is your fiancée, old man, so perhaps she did not see the need to tell you. Seems to me,’ he added, ‘that you could do with sorting out your romantic life properly, Jack, before you explode with frustration. Always thought you had a reputation for conquest, but you seem to be making a dashed mull of everything at the moment.’

‘Thank you,’ Jack said ruefully, reflecting that Stephen had hit the nail on the head. Before he had met Sally Bowes he had had no problem controlling his frustrations or ordering his romantic life successfully.

He looked up as Greg Holt put his hand on his shoulder. ‘A word, Kestrel?’

The smile faded from Jack’s eyes as he took in the other man’s demeanour. Greg had always struck him as being the most easy-going of fellows, rather like Stephen himself, but now there was no good humour in his eyes. Holt looked as though he was itching to take Jack by the throat and throttle the life out of him.

‘With the licence of an old friend,’ Greg said, his mouth a thin line, ‘I have warned Miss Bowes against marrying you, Kestrel. You would make the devil of a husband.’

Jack was already half out of his seat when Stephen grabbed his arm to restrain him.

‘Easy,’ Stephen muttered, and Jack allowed himself to relax infinitesimally.

‘It’s none of his damned business,’ he said, through gritted teeth.

Holt inclined his head ironically. ‘Miss Bowes is unprotected. It is my business when I stand in the place of a brother to her.’

‘Brother!’ Jack exploded with disbelief.

‘Just so,’ Greg said. ‘I hope for your sake that you will be an exemplary fiancé, Kestrel, because I would hate to ruin our long friendship by putting a bullet through you.’

And with a curt bow he walked away.

Jack let out the breath that he realised he had been holding for the whole encounter.

‘Damn it, he was in earnest,’ Stephen said, staring after Holt, his glass of Tokay suspended halfway to his lips.

‘In deadly earnest,’ Jack agreed. He realised that Gregory Holt must have been in love with Sally for a very long time. He wondered why she had turned him down. Holt was rich, titled, the perfect catch for a good-time girl on the make. Even if she had run off with him and had to weather the scandal of divorce, they could have been married by now.

Jack was accustomed in business to weighing evidence, making quick decisions, trusting his own judgement. He looked at Gregory Holt’s ramrod-straight back and furious demeanour and wondered what it was about Sally Bowes that seemed to command the loyalty of all the people whose lives she touched. It did not square with the evidence that he had uncovered about her. Perhaps it was time to confront her.

‘Come on,’ he said, knocking back the rest of his Tokay in one gulp, ‘it’s time to join the ladies. I want to talk to Sally.’

‘Wait a moment, old chap!’ Stephen protested. ‘It’s only ten minutes since dinner! They won’t want to see you yet. And that’s no way to treat my best wine—’

But it was too late. Jack had gone.

‘So, my dear,’ Lady Ottoline said to Sally, patting the seat beside her, ‘come and sit with me.’ She gestured to the deck of cards on the table. ‘Do you play?’

‘A little,’ Sally said, thinking ruefully of the gaming tables at the Blue Parrot. She wondered how Dan was getting on in her absence. She trusted him completely, but with the opening of the Crimson Salon a mere few days away she was extremely nervous.

‘Then perhaps we may have a game of bezique later,’ Lady Ottoline said. ‘But first I want to talk about you—and about Jack. He tells me that you met at the Wallace Collection.’

‘Indeed we did,’ Sally said, wondering how much truth and how many lies Jack had mixed together to describe their relationship.

‘Well, at least you must be a cultured gel,’ Lady Ottoline said. ‘Buffy, the current Duke, is an utter philistine, but Jack has the making of a good custodian of the Kestrel collection as long as his cousin don’t sell it off before Jack inherits.’

‘The Duke has no children of his own?’ Sally said.

‘No.’ Lady Ottoline gave her a sharp look. ‘Buffy don’t like the girls. Robert, Jack’s father, is heir to the dukedom of Kestrel and Jack after him.’

‘I see,’ Sally said, thinking that Jack Kestrel really was a great catch for any woman prepared to put up with his vile temper and inability to love her.

‘I hope,’ Lady Ottoline said disagreeably, ‘that you are not going to pretend you did not know you had caught the heir to a dukedom?’

‘I do not really care,’ Sally said, with extreme frankness. ‘When I choose to wed, Lady Ottoline, it is the man that matters to me, not his title or his money.’

Lady Ottoline’s plucked brows shot up towards her diamond headdress. ‘Well, upon my word!’

‘Having been married once before,’ Sally continued, ‘I have to be extremely careful in my next choice.’ Suddenly she felt reckless. If she could shock Lady Ottoline into repudiating her, it would serve Jack right for his machinations. ‘I do not wish to make as ghastly a mistake second time around as I did the first time,’ she said. ‘So the selection of a new husband is of paramount importance to me. He must have integrity and wit and be faithful, honourable and never, ever bore me. That is all I ask.’

There was a long silence. Sally selected a bonbon from the dish on the table in front of her and popped it into her mouth, before daring to steal a look under her lashes at Lady Ottoline. Her ladyship was regarding her with a very shrewd expression in her dark eyes.

‘I see,’ Lady Ottoline said. She frowned slightly. ‘Your name is familiar to me, Miss Bowes. Now, why would that be?’

Sally glanced at Jack across the room. He and Stephen had rejoined the ladies a scandalously short ten minutes after dinner was finished, having certainly not had time to consume a leisurely glass of port or luxuriate in a cigar, but when he had shown every sign of wanting to speak with her, Lady Ottoline had told him curtly to take himself off.

‘I wish to talk to your fiancée, Jack,’ she had said imperiously. ‘You may speak to her later.’

And so Jack had been obliged to make small talk with the other guests, but Sally was very conscious of his gaze resting on her from time to time, dark and serious but without the edge of anger that she had become accustomed to seeing there since their terrible confrontation that morning.

‘Miss Bowes?’ Lady Ottoline’s tone was sharp, but with a betraying edge of indulgence. ‘It is all very well to stare at one’s own fiancé, but I would like an answer as well, if you please.’

‘I beg your pardon, my lady,’ Sally said, hastily dragging her gaze away from Jack. ‘Perhaps you recognise my name because you have heard that I own the Blue Parrot, which is a nightclub on the Strand in London?’

There was another silence whilst she waited for Lady Ottoline to explode with shock. Surely, this time, she had overstepped the mark. No respectable great-aunt could contemplate such an alliance for her nephew. But Lady Ottoline was made of sterner stuff. She pursed her lips and shook her head. There was a steely light in her eye now as though she had realised just what Sally was about and was determined to thwart her.

‘No, that wasn’t it,’ she said. Her dark eyes brightened. ‘Do you, though? How marvellous to own a nightclub! You must tell me all about it, Miss Bowes. I do admire a gel with a bit of spirit, having been one myself.’

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ Sally said, realising she had underestimated the opposition. ‘I am sure that you were.’

‘You were married to Jonathan Hayward, were you not?’ Lady Ottoline said abruptly. ‘He was a dreadful cad, a total rotter. My late brother always said that it made him feel quite nauseous to think of him.’

Sally laughed. She was starting to like Lady Ottoline rather a lot. ‘Thank you, my lady. He had much the same effect on me.’

‘We have much in common,’ Lady Ottoline said drily. ‘I suppose Jack thought I’d cut up rough if I knew all about your history?’ Her eyes gleamed with suppressed amusement. ‘Silly boy, just because I never married he must think I am as cosseted as a baby!’

‘I imagine he might have been a little wary of telling you,’ Sally said, smiling. She was enjoying this conversation a lot now. ‘After all, owning a nightclub is scarcely respectable, and nor is potential divorce.’

‘Well, who cares a fig about that?’ Lady Ottoline demanded. ‘Sometimes it is more fun to be scandalous. I remember my mama telling me that being respectable all the time was a dashed dull deal. She worked as a spy for the British government, you know, and eloped with her husband. She was quite a woman.’