Notorious

“A moment,” Dev said, and his voice was very soft amidst the hubbub of the ballroom, the tinkle of the music and the clamor of voices, soft but with an edge of steel. “This time you don’t walk away from me until I am ready, Susanna. This time you stay at my pleasure.”

CHAPTER THREE

DEV LOOKED AT HIS FORMER wife’s exquisite, defiant face and felt his temper soar dangerously again. She was damnably beautiful and his body reacted to the temptation she presented even as his mind dismissed her as the most conniving, duplicitous little harlot that had ever lived. He wanted to kiss her; to take that wide, sensuous mouth with his own, to bite down on the full lower lip and slide his tongue into her mouth and taste her again with all the explosive passion they had known before. He wanted to prove her indifference to him to be a sham. He wanted to strip the silver gown from her pale limbs and plunder her body ruthlessly until she was utterly quiescent in his arms.

It was hell being a reformed rake. He had given up other women when he had become betrothed to Emma but Dev knew that he was not really reformed at all. He might as well admit it. This dangerous attraction he had to Susanna was proof enough. Given half a chance, a quarter of a chance, he would like to ravish Susanna, to take her with merciless abandon and revel in the experience. Never had chastity seemed so unappealing an option. Never had his betrothal seemed so dull and colorless in contrast to the appeal of his treacherous former wife.

He could feel Susanna’s pulse hammering beneath his fingers. The silk of her glove gave her no protection from him. He knew that she wanted him as much as he wanted her.

And yet he was also ready to strangle her. Disloyal, deceitful Susanna Burney, who had seemed so radiantly innocent, had taken him royally for a fool. He had thought that he had seduced and wed a naive young girl. Instead she had been using him to gain a little worldly experience.

Dev exerted absolute self-discipline to keep himself under control. He felt a raw edge of anger as cutting as a blade. A moment before, when he had challenged Susanna about her family’s duplicity, he had felt a fleeting uncertainty. He had seen the shock in her eyes and thought that she must have been in ignorance of their vile pretence. Her mocking words had swiftly put paid to that idea. Instead of being a victim she had been at the heart of the plan to deceive him.

He looked at her. She was watching him and despite that fierce attraction that locked them together there was also a derisive glint in her green eyes. He wondered how it was possible to be so mistaken in a woman. The Susanna Burney he had known at eighteen had seemed so shy and sweet. It was difficult to see how she could have changed into this brazen creature. On the other hand he had to accept that it was almost ten years ago, he had been eighteen years old and perhaps not such a man of the world as he had liked to imagine. Doubtless he had been the one who was naive. His judgment had certainly been spectacularly flawed when it came to his adoring bride.

“There was no need to wed me if all you wanted was to be rid of your virginity,” he said grimly. “You should have told me. I would have been happy to oblige you—without the benefit of clergy.”

Their eyes tangled. He saw the sensual heat flare again in hers, turning them a darker green, bright as emeralds. In a split second he was transported from the bustling ballroom to the intimate darkness of their marriage bed. They had had one night only, one night of sweet desire and passion richer and deeper than his most vivid dreams. She had been the first and only woman he had loved. That sense of intimacy had been more frightening than the reckless pleasure he had found in her arms. That emotion had been strong and profound enough to bind him to her forever. Then she had run out on him the next day and ripped everything apart.

Now she stood looking at him with cool disdain, the desire banished from her eyes.

“You misunderstand,” she said. “Marriage was a necessity. I had no wish to be a whore.”

Dev looked her over with studied contempt. “In your case I am struggling to tell the difference,” he said.

Susanna’s eyes narrowed to an inimical gleam. “Then let me explain it to you,” she said. Dev watched her slender, gloved fingers trace a pattern on the windowpane. “It was so tediously dreary in my uncle’s house,” she said, “and we were poor and I did not care for it. I knew I was pretty and clever enough to seduce a rich man into marriage but I needed experience as well as beauty. No one was going to look twice at me buried away in that village, the dull schoolmaster’s little niece.” She moved slightly and the diamond necklace at her throat sparkled, rich and malevolent. “I was afraid that I would be stuck there forever, expiring with the boredom of it all.” Her hand moved to caress the glittering stones at her neck. “So I contrived a plan. To wed you, learn what I needed from you and then move on to better things.” Her gaze came up to meet his.

“You were no one, Devlin,” she said gently. “You had no money and precious few prospects. But I could see that you could be useful to me.” Her eyes were bright and hard. “I wanted to be young and beautiful and intriguing enough to lure a very rich man into marriage. It was not good enough to be a courtesan. I had to be respectable enough to catch a husband—” her luscious mouth turned up in a little, private smile “—but improper enough to know how to please him in bed.” She turned away from him so that all he could see was her reflection in the glass of the window and that lingering smile.

“I flatter myself that I was rather good,” she said. “I posed as a widow. I had many suitors.”

Dev could believe it. She was beautiful enough to tempt a saint and there was a knowing air to her, a sensual allure that was provocative enough to make any man want to please as well as possess her. Of course she would set her sights much higher than merely being a courtesan. That would have been a course from which she could never have regained respectability. Instead, as a beautiful widow she would have drawn suitors like moths to the flame. They would have begged for her notice. Only he knew the venal heart beneath her lovely facade.

“So you killed me off as well as yourself,” he said coldly. “How very tidy of you.”

“Oh, I never mentioned your name,” Susanna said. “No one ever asked about my first husband. I suppose that if they had I could have admitted to the annulment and painted our marriage as a youthful indiscretion.” She raised her brows as though inviting his congratulations. “Yes, it was a neat plan, was it not?”

“I’m still having trouble with the difference between a courtesan and a woman who buys herself a rich husband with her body,” Dev said.

Susanna shrugged, apparently indifferent to his disapproval. “You are too particular. We all use the advantages we are given.”

She had been given plenty, Dev thought grimly. That angel’s face, that lissome, lovely body—and a grasping nature that cared nothing for the pain she inflicted on others. It was a pity he had not been able to see past the obvious when they had first met but he had been a youth confronted by a beautiful girl. He had not been thinking with his head but with a different and far more basic part of his anatomy.

He felt cold at the sheer calculating callousness of Susanna’s plan. She had been an adventuress from the first. She had wed him, learned from him the arts she needed to please a man in bed and then left him to pursue bigger, richer prey. Armed with her annulment she would indeed be free to remarry. He could see how much the combination of her youth, beauty, wit, experience and the tiniest hint of a mysterious past might appeal to a wealthy older man. Hell, it was obvious that Fitz was already in thrall to her. Even he could barely look at her without wanting to plunder every inch of that exquisite, perfidious body, and he knew what a lying, conniving strumpet she was.

“You mistake if you think that you are not a whore,” he said. “You have whored yourself out for money whether it is by marriage or not.”

The candlelight shimmered on some expression in Susanna’s eyes that was, for one tiny second, utterly at odds with her brazen words. But then it was gone and all that was left was contempt.

“You should know, Devlin,” she said. “Are you not doing precisely the same thing, catching an heiress with your good looks and charm?” Her perfect brows arched. “If I am a whore, what does that make you?”

Dev took a furious step toward her—and stopped when he saw the triumph in her eyes. She was glad she had been able to goad him into near-indiscretion. He drew in a deep breath.

“You are also mistaken if you think you learned all there is to pleasure a man in one night at my hands,” he ground out. “But should you wish to extend your experience I am, of course, at your disposal.”

“As you were nine years ago.” She smiled, not one whit discomposed, as cool as spring water. “I thank you but there is no need. I have addressed the deficiencies in my education in the past few years.”

Dev was sure that she had. There had been her remarriage to Carew, who had presumably been an affluent baronet. Perhaps there had been other lovers as well, or even previous marriages. And now she truly was a rich widow and he suspected she was hunting another trophy. A marquis, perhaps …

He had been played. He had been used—comprehensively, ruthlessly. Susanna had seen him as a mere stepping-stone to better things. He, the fortune hunter, should appreciate her strategy. He did not.

Suddenly he could see Chessie’s hopes for the future vanishing like mist in the sun. He could see just how vulnerable both he and his sister were with no more than foothold in the ton. One false step, one piece of bad luck, could send them tumbling back into the void of poverty and despair that had been their childhood on the streets of Dublin. Dev had experienced both unimaginable wealth and abject poverty several times; as the son of a compulsive gambler he had known the extremes of rich and poor before he was barely out of short trousers. That fear, that knowledge, had driven him ever since. He could not permit Susanna to steal Chessie’s future or ruin his own plans. He would have to keep her close, watch her every move.

Susanna inclined her head to him with mock civility. “Good evening, Sir James,” she said. “I wish you good luck with your fortune hunting.”

“Do you?” Dev said, politely incredulous.

She smiled. “About as much as you wish me luck with mine.”

Dev watched her walk away, her figure a silver flame in the sinuous dress, the diamonds sparkling in her hair and the heels of her silver embroidered slippers tapping on the floor.

Keep her close … In some ways it would be no hardship. In others it would be the most dangerous thing that he could do.

SUSANNA WAS STILL SHAKING as she climbed into the carriage. She did not expect Dev to come after her again—she had made very sure that he would not—but the antagonism of their encounter still beat through her blood with primitive force. It was impossible to believe that once upon a time she and Dev had made love with such exquisite tenderness. Now there was nothing left.

She remembered Dev’s bitter condemnation of her, the disgust in his eyes, and she felt shot through with regret. There had been no other way to drive him away from her. She could not afford for anyone to uncover the truth about her past, not now when so much was at stake. This was her last job. With the money the Duke and Duchess of Alton would be paying her for separating Fitz from Chessie she would at last have sufficient funds to settle her debts, return to Scotland and provide a home for her twin wards, Rory and Rose, the children of her best friend. The three of them needed to be together, to be a family once again as they had been in the beginning. Susanna’s heart ached with a sudden fierce pang that made her breath catch in her throat. She hated this life, hated playing a role, hated the deception and hated most of all the fact that there was no one who knew, no one she could confide in. She was on her own. She always had been, from the moment her aunt and uncle had thrown her out, pregnant, destitute, seventeen years old.

She touched the diamond necklace at her throat. They were borrowed plumes, like the carriage and the house in Curzon Street, the beautiful gown and the silver slippers. Nothing was real. She was a counterfeit lady, a Cinderella whose carefully constructed world might vanish in a puff of smoke if anyone found out the truth. She touched the dress gently, almost reverentially. When she had been selling such gowns for a living, her head spinning with tiredness from the long hours working in poor light, her fingers sore from the needle and cut by the thread, she had dreamed of wearing such a beautiful creation and being the belle of the ball. Tonight she had been that fairy-tale princess, yet beneath the layers of silk and lace she was still little Susanna Burney, a fraud who feared discovery.

Once again Dev’s face rose in her mind’s eye, hard, unyielding, his expression full of scorn. He was the one of whom she had to beware. If Dev had suspected for a moment that she had been thrown out onto the street, disowned, disinherited, abandoned, he would start to ask all the difficult questions she wanted to avoid. He would uncover her past and ruin the future that was so close within her grasp.

Susanna leaned her head back against the cushions of the seat and closed her eyes. If only … If only she had not run off to marry Dev secretly in the first and last impulsive action of her life. If only she had not had the idea of going to Lord Grant, Dev’s cousin, the next morning, to confess and ask for his support for them. If only she had not run back to the perceived security of her aunt and uncle’s house and had tried to pretend nothing had happened. If only she had not been pregnant with Dev’s child … One disastrous decision had set in train a course of events that had led to the poorhouse and to places in her own mind that were so full of despair that she never wanted to go there again. The tiny body of her child wrapped in its pitiful shroud, the words of the priest, the gray dawn mist creeping over the Edinburgh graveyard …

With a gasp of pain Susanna buried her face in her hands, then she let them fall and stared into the darkness, her eyes dry. She must never think of that again. Never. The dark clouds hovered like beating wings. She pushed them away, closing her eyes, breathing deeply, until she felt the panic subside and the calm seep back into her mind. She had lost her own daughter but she had Rory and Rose to care for and she clung to them with the fierceness of a tigress. She had given her word to their mother, there in the bitter dark chill of the poorhouse, in the cold hours before Flora’s death, and sometimes it seemed that the gift of the twins was both penitence and blessing to her. She had lost Maura but she could make amends now and she would never, ever let Rory and Rose down, which was why it was imperative that Dev must never learn the truth and scupper her plans.

Sighing, she kicked off her pretty silver evening slippers and flexed her toes. Her feet ached. Cinderella’s slippers were all very well but they were not comfortable. Her headache, which had originally been an excuse to escape Frederick Walters’s importunities, was a reality now. All she wanted was to be home.

The carriage passed a group of young bucks noisily drinking and carousing in the street. Hot summer nights reminded Susanna of Edinburgh in the days when she had dragged herself out of the poorhouse to work as a tavern wench and ballad singer. She had such a checkered past, she thought, with a rueful smile. The tavern, the gown shop … It had been through good looks and sheer luck that she had fallen into her extraordinary work as a heartbreaker, paid by parents to ruin the unsuitable matches of their rich and titled offspring.

Susanna rubbed her temples where the diamond clasp was pulling her hair. The night had started so well. The Duke and Duchess of Alton had introduced her to Fitz and he had seemed intrigued by her and definitely more than a little interested in taking their acquaintance further. She had sparkled, flirted, playing the mysterious widow to perfection. She and Fitz had waltzed together and she had allowed him to hold her a little closer than convention dictated. Everything had been going smoothly. She had even started to plan the next step—another meeting with Fitz, one that would appear to happen quite by chance but would in fact be the result of the Duke and Duchess paying their son’s valet some extortionate amount to disclose the details of his master’s diary. That was how she was always one step ahead of the game; before she even met her victim—or her assignment as she preferred to think of him—she would know every last thing about him, his likes and dislikes, the places he frequented, his interests, his weaknesses. The weaknesses were especially useful, whether they were for women, gambling, drink or all of the above in combination. It was her tried and tested method. Size up the man, learn everything there was to know about him, flatter his opinions and mix in a touch of seduction. No one had been able to resist.

That was the way that the acquaintance should have gone with Fitzwilliam Alton. A chance encounter in the Park, an invitation to ride with him, the promise of a dance at the next ball, a little dalliance, until Fitz was dazzled, hers to command. If necessary she would go as far as a betrothal, before breaking it off with all due regret a month or so later. That was the way she had intended it, before James Devlin had appeared and threatened all her plans.

She thought of Dev, his blue eyes full of anger and loathing as he watched her.

A shiver racked her. She was sure that he had already worked out that she was intent on spoiling his sister’s plans to catch Fitz. He would assume that she wanted Fitz for herself, of course; it was most unlikely he would uncover the true nature of her work as a matchbreaker, for this was the first time she had come to London or worked in such exalted social circles. It was a risk, but she should be safe from exposure. Whether she was safe from Dev revealing the truth of their previous relationship was another matter but she guessed that he had no wish for his winsome heiress to know the truth. Lady Emma Brooke had not seemed a particularly pliable fiancée and she was surely the one with the money.

Which brought her back to the annulment. Guilt squirmed in her stomach again. She knew that she should have formally ended her marriage a long time ago. Once the Duke and Duchess’s commission was complete and she and Rory and Rose were safe, she would pay for the annulment and leave Dev free to wed Emma. He would never know.