Parlor Games Read online

  “You idiot.” Lydia’s voice was harsh as her fists balled at her sides. “I tried to make you leave. I tried everything to just make you go away, but you wouldn’t do it.”

  “What are you talking about?” Arabella asked, a sudden urge to move away gripping her. This was her friend, yet fear curled cold fingers around her heart as Lydia babbled on.

  “Do you think I wanted to try to kill you? You gave me no choice! And then to hear you hired someone to protect you? You ruined my plans and you didn’t even tell me!”

  Arabella’s mouth dropped open and she edged away. “K-kill me? Please tell me this is a joke, Lydia. Please tell me you don’t mean what you just said.”

  She was close to the edge of the bed now, almost to the point where she would have a wide mattress separating her from her friend.

  But Lydia would have none of it. With the quickness of a race horse, she leapt toward Arabella, grabbing her injured arm and dragging her back across the bed. Arabella cried out in pain, but Lydia’s hand clamped across her mouth as she pulled her down to the floor in a heap. She hit the hardwood with enough force that the air was jarred from her lungs. Pain roared from her shoulder, but she struggled to regain control.

  “This is no jest,” Lydia hissed. “I worked hard with you to build this club to the heights it has reached, but I never received the acclaim that you did. I never got my fair share. But once you’re gone, I will.”

  Arabella’s head spun as she struggled against Lydia’s surprisingly strong grip. How could this be happening? How could her best friend have betrayed her so completely? But the answers to those questions were standing in front of her. Staring at her in the form of Lydia’s wild eyes.

  Money. Power. Arabella had received both over the years. And Lydia would be the one to run the club, receive the benefits of her hard work, if she were to leave London, become indisposed, or die. Apparently the lure of those things had overcome the woman Arabella had rescued from the life of a common lightskirt three years before.

  And now Lydia was going to take what she desired. Unless Arabella fought.

  She bit at Lydia’s choking hand over her mouth and her friend released her with a cry of pain. Arabella took the opportunity to shove her away, and Lydia stumbled toward the fireplace, her arms flailing as she tried to regain her balance.

  Arabella struggled to her feet, but light-headedness slowed her. She glanced down at her injured shoulder to realize Lydia’s violence had reopened her wound. She was bleeding. With her world spinning, she headed toward the door, but before she got three steps, Lydia’s voice stopped her.

  “Hold still or I’ll put a bullet in your head right now.”

  She turned to find Lydia on her feet with a pistol leveled at Arabella’s head.

  8

  “So let me be sure I understand you…” Bennett folded his arms. “The woman poured her soul out to you, confessed she loved you—”

  “In her sleep!” Valentine interrupted.

  Bennett wrinkled his brow. “She confessed she loved you. And you left?”

  Valentine scowled. Bennett’s summation of what had happened certainly didn’t put him in a very good light. And it didn’t take into consideration why he had gone. When Arabella confessed her past, it had lightened his heart. She’d given him her trust, told him secrets no one else knew. But—

  “You’re in love with her,” Bennett said, eyes wide. “That’s why, isn’t it?”

  And that was the rub. Valentine had realized, as Arabella was pouring her heart out to him, that he had fallen in love with her. Despite his belief that a quick connection wasn’t possible. Despite his mandate to keep women like Arabella at arm’s length and never let sex dictate his emotions.

  But then she told him she would never let a man have her heart again. That she had learned through her bitter experiences that she had to use her body against the men she cared for so that they couldn’t use it against her instead. Could things be different with him? Could she ever let go of her fears, her pains, and be with him on an equal footing, where control did not play a part?

  Last night it seemed she had, but now he wasn’t so sure.

  “You won’t answer me?” Bennett asked, pushing off the desk. “Then perhaps you’re a coward.”

  That stung. Valentine spun on his friend in shock. “You are treading in dangerous waters, my friend. Be wary of what you say.”

  Bennett looked less than impressed. “Why, so I can help you hide from yourself? You may not like to hear it, but you’ve been running since Laurel betrayed you. You wouldn’t even fight for your position. And look where your self-pity got you!”

  Valentine winced. Bennett was right. He’d been too shocked by her betrayal, too angry at himself for allowing Laurel to weave her way into his heart, to do anything. He always said he valued control…but he hadn’t been in control for a long time. He’d been paralyzed.

  “Well, I watched in silence for a long time, Valentine, but I won’t watch anymore. I can’t be a party to your throwing away any more of your future. If you love the woman, go back to her. Take a damn risk.” His friend slammed a hand down on his desk. “Make a damn move. Be the man you once were!”

  Valentine straightened his shoulders. He’d once thrived on risk. Danger. And Arabella was both those things, with a supple body and enchanting eyes to boot.

  With a smile for Bennett, he headed for the door. But before he could go, his friend stopped him.

  “I almost forgot. In my digging I found one monetary transaction I couldn’t verify in Arabella’s accounts. A large sum was given to a Lydia Bartlett.”

  Valentine froze. “Lydia?”

  “Yes.” Bennett double-checked the sheet in front of him. “Does the name mean something to you?”

  He nodded. “Arabella’s best friend. She’s involved in her business.” His intuition pricked, reminding him of the strange feeling he’d gotten when he spoke to Lydia a few nights ago. Of the coolness of her stare when she regarded Arabella. “And she could be with her right now. I must get to her.”

  Without waiting for his friend’s reply, he raced for his carriage. He could only hope his intuition was wrong.

  Though that was rarely the case.

  Arabella screwed her eyes shut. The life she led was dangerous. There had been a few times when she knew she cheated death. But this time, with Lydia’s gun pointed at her head and her friend…former friend…unwilling to talk rationally, it seemed her luck had run out.

  There was still so much she wanted to do. So much to say. And most of what she’d left undone had to do with Valentine. She’d been so busy protecting her heart and her precious control, she hadn’t let him know what he’d come to mean to her. If she died, would he realize that she had loved him? Would he care?

  “I’m sorry,” Lydia whispered as she began to depress the trigger. “I tried, but you gave me no other choice.”

  Just as Arabella expected the blinding pain of death to take her, the door to her bedroom flew open and Valentine burst inside. He hit Lydia with the full weight of his big body.

  Arabella scrambled to her feet as Lydia and Valentine rolled across the floor, fighting for the gun that was now pinned between them. She took a step forward, but before she could say or do anything, the pistol went off.

  The world slowed as Arabella screamed. Lydia was on top of Valentine, but neither moved. It was as if time froze when the bullet fired.

  Shaking off her shock, Arabella flew to the two of them. She pulled Lydia away, praying Valentine hadn’t been hurt. To her utter joy, he looked up at her, then tossed the pistol out of the way.

  She spun to face her former friend. Lydia was dead, shot through the heart with her own weapon.

  Arabella threw herself into Valentine’s arms, pressing kisses along his face as she smoothed her hands over his body to be sure he was unharmed.

  “I thought she’d killed you,” she sobbed.

  “Shh,” he soothed. “You’re bleeding.”
/>   “I don’t care,” Arabella insisted, hugging him close and not even feeling the pain of her reopened injury. “All I could think about was that I would never get to tell you how much I need you. How much I love you.”

  Valentine stiffened and Arabella’s heart sank, but she clung to him nonetheless. If he didn’t return her feelings, so be it. At least she had taken the chance of loving him.

  Slowly, he pushed her away so he could look at her. His eyes, so dark with emotion, speared her. Held her in place, unyielding in their scrutiny.

  “Do you love me, Arabella? Truly?” he whispered.

  She nodded without hesitation. “I realize I promised you I would demand nothing when this was over, but—”

  “Shhh,” he said, but his wide smile gave her a hope she had never felt before. “Listen to me.”

  With effort, she shut her mouth and waited. Praying, hoping for a dream she had let die long ago. A dream of love. Of a future with one man at her side.

  “I love you, Arabella Nichols. Despite my best attempts to pretend otherwise, I love you. But I cannot be with you unless you take another identity.”

  Her heart sank. Was he asking her to go back to being Miranda Foxworth? To return to the drab, frightening world her father had created for her?

  “What identity?” Her voice broke.

  “Mine. I’ll only settle for loving Arabella Valentine for the rest of my life. I will only settle for having you as my wife.”

  She smiled as tears filled her eyes. “And the club?”

  He shrugged. “Keep it if it gives you pleasure.” The smile turned wicked. “It certainly gave me much pleasure. It led me to you, so I have a soft spot for it.”

  “Soft?” she asked as she reached out to cup him with teasing fingers. “Not likely.”

  He sucked in his breath as he helped her to her feet and held her close. “We can explore that after I bandage your wound again.”

  “And what about after we explore that?” she whispered.

  “I will go about clearing my name. But first, marriage.” He kissed her nose. “And much, much love.”

  “Forever,” she breathed as she tilted her face up for his kiss.

  JESS MICHAELS always flips through every romance she buys in search of “the good stuff,” so it makes perfect sense that she writes erotic romance where she gets to turn up the heat on that good stuff and let it boil. She loves alpha males, long-haired cats (and short-haired ones), the last breath right before a passionate kiss, and the color purple (not the movie—though that’s excellent, too—the actual color). She also firmly believes that Cadbury Cream Eggs should be available all year round and not count against any diet.

  Jess loves to hear from readers. You can find her online at http://www.jessmichaels.com or e-mail her at [email protected].

  Parlor Games

  Leda Swann

  1

  Sarah Chesham pushed open the door to the coffee house and stumbled over the threshold. The interior smelled heavenly—of dark-roasted coffee beans and mouthwatering grilled meat—but it was dark and smoky, and her tired eyes took a few moments to adjust to the dimness of the light.

  She made her way through the gloom to the closest table and sat down at it, settling her skirts over the tops of her sturdy work boots. Elbows resting on the table and her head in her hands, she concentrated on catching her breath and calming the overrapid beating of her heart.

  A buxom young woman in an apron bustled up to her. “What can I get you, dearie?”

  Sarah raised her head. “A ha’penny cup of coffee. And a chop,” she added with reckless haste, just as the serving woman had turned to walk away.

  She counted out three pennies with careful deliberation and placed them to one side on the table. Her purse was left anxiously light, but there was no help for that. A girl, even an unemployed girl with scarcely a shilling in her pocket and no prospect of getting more, had to eat.

  Her plate, when it came, was piled high with more meat than she usually ate in a month. The smell as the chops wafted past her nose was so delicious that she almost fainted with the joy of it.

  Still, she shook her head and pointed to the three pennies on the table. “I can’t eat all that. I only wanted the tuppence ha’penny dinner.”

  The young serving woman winked broadly at her. “You look like you need feeding up. I won’t tell if you won’t.” And she set the entire plate of food down on the table in front of her.

  Sarah had been brought up to eat daintily, but she was too hungry to remember her lessons. She wasted no more time arguing in the face of such unlooked-for good fortune, but tucked into her pile of chops with gusto, barely remembering even to use her knife and fork in her haste to fill her belly.

  The serving woman pushed the door of the study closed with the toe of her boot. “There’s a girl out in the front parlor who looks a likely prospect.”

  The older woman sitting behind the desk took off her spectacles and laid them aside on the blotter. “Is she pretty?”

  The younger woman screwed up her nose at the question. “Of course she is. Pretty as a daisy, though a mite scrawny. I gave her a decent feed,” she added defiantly.

  The older woman frowned and tapped the end of her pen on the desk. “Her age?”

  “Young enough, but not too young. Nineteen, twenty, maybe. No older.”

  “Her situation?”

  “Talks like a toff, and nice manners, too. She’s been brought up good, even if she’s fallen on hard times now.”

  The older woman’s frown cleared a little and she stopped the tapping. “She was hungry, you say?”

  “Half starved.”

  There was silence as the older woman thought for a moment, her hands steepled in front of her. Finally she gave a decisive nod. “We could use a pretty new face.”

  Tom Wilde slouched in the darkest corner of the corridor, his hands in his waistcoat pockets and his top hat pulled down low to shade his face. Checking once more that the farthest reaches of the corridor were still empty, he turned his head and peered once more through the tiny peephole strategically positioned in the ornate wainscoting to the room next door.

  The knowledge of the risk he was running only added spice to his peeping. The old harridan who ran the coffeehouse knew his face too well for comfort. She would welcome the devil himself as a paying guest, but if she caught him spying on her coffee house guests? A sound cudgeling would be the very least of his punishment.

  Coffee house guests. He curled his lip in a silent sneer. Old Madame Erskine did not make her money from selling watered-down hickory coffee or shoe-leather chops as the other coffeehouses did. No, her trade was in a far more lucrative business.

  He swiveled his head a fraction to take in another aspect of the view. No hickory coffee for Madame Erskine’s guests. No, indeed. He took one hand out of his waistcoat pocket to adjust his trousers, which had suddenly shrunk several sizes. She traded in some of the most tempting morsels a man could hope to find on this side of paradise.

  Scant wonder that his quarry, the right dishonorable Member of Parliament from Stoke-on-Trent, visited her establishment so often. The merchandise was tempting enough to give the Archbishop of Canterbury an irresistible itch to pull up his cassock and have at them with all his might.

  The premier grub of Fleet Street, however, was made of sterner stuff than to turn knock-kneed at the sight of a few half-naked women. They were nothing but a distraction to his real business here—evisceration. Not the messy business with a stiletto knife, but using the infinitely cleaner and deadlier weapon of a pen. He ignored the throbbing in his trousers and mentally sharpened his quill.

  He wasn’t called the Adder of Fleet Street for nothing. A little bit more research to pad out his salacious pamphlet, a bit more dirt-digging that turned up another juicy tidbit like this one, and Sir Richard Eddington, the right dishonorable Member from Stoke-on-Trent, would be the laughingstock of all London.

  He smiled to himself in th
e darkness. His writing was not only poisonous, but also highly profitable. Salacious pamphlets were the most lucrative market in his line of business, and he was well-known for writing the best of them. All those who had something to hide, politicians and business tycoons alike, shuddered at his name.

  Sir Richard Eddington might not know it yet, but his well-deserved disgrace would keep Tom, the Adder of Fleet Street, in comfort for six months or more.

  Sarah carefully laid her knife and fork down on her plate atop the pile of chop bones and dabbed at her mouth with the napkin, slightly ashamed of her greedy haste now that her desperate hunger was appeased. Slowly she drained the lukewarm dregs of her coffee and set the cup down on the table. The last excuse she had to linger in this oasis of warmth and food was now gone, but she could not yet bear to leave.

  The kindness shown to her by the serving woman had touched her heart as well as filled her belly. Kindness had been a rare commodity in her life of late. She blinked back the tears that threatened to spill over. Self-pity was an indulgence she could not afford.

  Reluctantly she pulled her checkered woolen shawl around her shoulders and stood up, leaning on the back of her chair for support. She would be strong, and somehow she would survive. She was still too young and too full of hope that her life would one day be more than drudgery and starvation to welcome death.

  The serving woman in her clean white apron bustled up to clear away Sarah’s dishes.

  Sarah clenched her fingers tightly over the back of the chair. “Excuse me, miss, if you don’t mind me asking, but would you be needing another girl to help in the kitchens?”

  The serving woman stopped still, dirty dishes in her hands. “You’re out of work?”

  Sarah lowered her eyes to the table. “I am,” she confessed, ashamed of her need. “I was trained up as a milliner, but there’s no work for us this winter and we’ve all been laid off with no pay and can’t find no work anywheres, so I’m looking for a different sort of position.”