The Last Hellion (Scoundrels 4)

He didn’t look up from his work but took his time, arranging the coals just so with the poker, applying the bellows to set the tidy stack aglow.

He did it with the smooth competence of one who’d been doing it for ages, though this was lowly work, beneath a footman’s dignity, let alone that of a peer of the realm.

Lydia’s gaze strayed over his broad shoulders, down over the strong back that tapered to lean waist and hips.

She felt a surge of longing. She beat it down.

“Or perhaps you call it a privilege,” she continued, “to be obliged to live within an exceedingly narrow set of rules dictating what I may and may not say, do, or think?”

He rose finally and turned to her, his expression infuriatingly calm. “You might consider Miss Price, for whose precious trinkets you risked your life,” he said. “As Duchess of Ainswood, you could dower her, which would allow her to wed to her liking.”

Lydia opened her mouth to point out the fallacy of assuming that Miss Price needed to be wed any more than Miss Grenville did. But her conscience sprang up and shrieked, How do you know? And Lydia found herself staring speechlessly at Ainswood while her mind churned.

What if Tamsin did fancy Trent? His funds were very limited, everyone knew. If they wed, they’d have nothing to live on. But no, Tamsin wasn’t interested in him in that way, Lydia argued with her conscience. He was odd, and the girl was no more than curious, as she was about everything and everyone.

Then what of Tamsin’s future? her conscience asked gloomily. If you contract a fatal disease or have a fatal accident, what becomes of her?

“You write constantly about London’s unfortunates,” Ainswood went on, while she was still wrestling with the problem of Tamsin. “About injustice, generally. I daresay it hasn’t occurred to you that the Duchess of Ainswood could, if she chose, wield considerable political influence. You’d have the opportunity to browbeat any number of members of Parliament into passing Peel’s bill for a Metropolitan Police Force, for instance.”

He wandered to the bookshelf and studied her Annual Register collection. “Then there’s the issue of child labor. That’s one of your pet causes, isn’t it? Along with public hygiene and the appalling conditions of the back-slums. And prison conditions. ‘Breeding places of vice and disease,’ you’ve called them.”

Lydia remembered Sarah in her shabby, patched pinafores, playing in the stinking alleys, and the children she played with, many worse off than she.

Lydia remembered the Marshalsea: the stench, the dirt, the diseases that spread unchecked through the squalor…the disease that had spread to her sister and killed her.

Her throat tightened.

“Education,” his deep voice went on, like a scourge, flaying her. “Medicine.” He turned toward her. “Did you know that Trent’s cousin, the Earl of Rawnsley’s young bride, is building a modern hospital in Dartmoor?”*

Schooling…which Lydia had hungered for, and the books she’d craved. What would have become of her education, if not for Quith? Thanks to him, she’d had an education and discovered a means of making her way in the world independently. She was strong and determined, though. What of those who weren’t? And what of the weak and sickly, needing medicine, doctors, hospitals?

“You could do something,” Ainswood said, “instead of simply writing about what is wrong.”

If he’d spent years studying maps of her sore spots he couldn’t have targeted them more accurately or shot his verbal darts with more devastating impact.

Lydia didn’t know when or how he’d studied her. All she knew was that, at that moment, she felt like the most selfish woman in all the world, rejecting the power and wealth to do good, merely to preserve her personal freedom.

There had to be a flaw somewhere in this terrible logic of his, she told herself. There was an answer she could give him, surely, a proper setdown. Because he could not be entirely right and she entirely wrong. She knew the answer—the escape route—was there, somewhere in her agitated brain. She could almost—

The thump at the door sent the elusive wisps in her mind scattering. The second thump knocked them away altogether. Lydia glared at the door, silently reviewing every oath she knew.

“Kitchen,” she said in firm, carrying tones. “Back to the kitchen, Susan.”

Outside the door, the dog began to whimper.

“I collect Susan wants her mama,” Ainswood said. He went to the door.

“You’d better not,” Lydia said as he grasped the handle.

“I’m not afraid of a dog,” he said. He opened the door. Susan pushed past him as though he didn’t exist, and trotted to Lydia.

She sniffed Lydia’s hand, then licked it. “You don’t have to make nice,” Lydia said, striving for patience. “It isn’t your fault he upset you.”

“Did I upset you, Susan?”

Lydia’s gaze swung back to him.

Ainswood was watching the dog, his brow furrowed, his wicked mouth turned down. “You’re much too big a creature to be cooped up in a little kitchen of a little house. No wonder you’re so high-strung.”

“She is not high-strung!” Lydia snapped. “Everyone knows that mastiffs—”

“At Longlands, she’d have acres and acres to run and play in. And other mastiffs to play with. Would you like that, Susan?” he asked, his voice gentling. He crouched down. “Wouldn’t you like to have a lot of playmates, and acres and acres to explore with them?” He gave a low, musical whistle.

Susan’s ears pricked up, but she refused to turn.

“Su-san,” he crooned. “Su-u-san.”

Susan circled her mistress, then paused, her gaze settling on him. “Gr-rr-rr,” she said.

Lydia knew that growl. It wasn’t in the least threatening. It was Susan’s sulky growl.

Don’t you dare, Lydia commanded silently. Don’t you succumb to him, too.

“Come, Susan.” He patted his knee. “Don’t you want to come and bite my face off? Your mama wishes you would. Su-u-u-san.”

“Grrr-rr-rrr,” said Susan.

But she was only playing hard to get, the wicked creature. After a moment, she started meandering toward him, feigning interest in a corner of the desk first, then studying a corner of the rug. She took her time, but she went to him.

Lydia watched her in utter disgust.

“I thought you had taste, Susan,” she muttered.

The dog looked back, briefly, at Lydia, then started sniffing at His Grace. He remained crouched, his expression ostensibly sober while Susan sniffed his face, his ears, his neck, his mangled clothes, and—of course—his crotch.

Lydia’s neck burned, and the heat spread upward and downward. Susan was bound to be intrigued because her mistress’s scent must be all over him, as his was all over Lydia. Ainswood obviously realized this. The amusement in his eyes when his glance caught Lydia’s told her so.

She was already heated. That green glint of humor merely ignited a temper already smoldering.

“I should like to know why, suddenly, you’re concerned with unfortunates, including my sadly abused dog,” she said tartly. “Since when have you become Saint Ainswood?”

He scratched behind Susan’s ears. Susan grumbled and looked away, but she bore it well enough.

“I merely pointed out a few matters you couldn’t be bothered to think about,” he said innocently.

Lydia came ’round the desk and strode to the fireplace. “You’ve been playing on my sympathies as though they were harp strings. You—”

“What do you expect me to do?” he cut in. “Play fair? With a woman who makes up her own rules as she goes along?”

“I expect you to take no for an answer!”

He rose. “I should like to know what you’re afraid of.”

“Afraid?” Her voice climbed. “Afraid? Of you?”

“The only reason I can think of for your rejecting an opportunity to run the world as you see fit is fear that you can’t manage the man offering the opp

ortunity.”

“You can think of only one reason because your mind is too narrow to fit any other in.” She took up the poker and stabbed at the coals. “Ever since I admitted I was a virgin you’ve developed a virulent case of chivalry. First you decided to nobly forsake me.” She straightened and shoved the poker back onto its rack. “Now you’ve decided to save me from ruin—which would be mildly amusing if you were not so curst obstinate and underhand about it.”

“You find my behavior mildly amusing?” he asked. “What do you think is my reaction when I hear Miss Queen of Playactors, Miss Fraud of the Century, accuse me of being ‘underhand’?”