Dauntsey Park: The Last Rake In London. Nicola Cornick

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СКАЧАТЬ some champagne. One of the smart-as-paint blonde hostesses also started to drift towards him, but Dan stopped her with a word and Jack saw her tilt her head and open her eyes wide at whatever it was the manager said to her. She drifted away again with a regretful backwards glance at Jack.

      Jack took his cards, sat back in his seat and wondered how long it would take Sally Bowes to join him. Most of the women he had taken out whilst he had been in Monte Carlo, Biarritz and Paris had made him wait at least an hour for them. He had never found it worth the waiting. Brittle, fashionable, society women bored him these days; they all seemed to be cut from the same cloth, superficial copies of one another. He was not interested in affairs with society sophisticates and could not bear to find himself an innocent bride as his father demanded. He knew he was jaded. No one could tempt him.

       No one interested him except Sally Bowes, with her cool hazel eyes and her understated elegance.

      When he had first seen her that afternoon, he had thought she looked colourless, prim and restrained, a far cry from what he would expect from one of the Blue Parrot’s infamous hostesses. But the memory of the previous night was still in his mind and the stunningly sensuous figure Miss Sally Bowes had cut in her peach silk gown. He had enjoyed her company then and wanted to know her better. And the startled awareness he had seen just now in her eyes suggested that she was not indifferent to him either. The attraction that had flared between them so unexpectedly surprised and intrigued him. On discovering that she was actually the owner of the club, his interest in her had been piqued further. Here was a woman who must have considerable strength of character, intellect and a will to succeed, as well as a subtle appeal that was devastatingly attractive to him. She was a challenge, an enigma, cool and composed, yet revealing a fiery nature beneath. He had almost forgotten what it was to be strongly attracted to a woman, but now the hunger flooded him with shocking acuteness. He had to have her.

      Women. In his youth they had been his weakness. He had been as feckless as his young cousin Bertie—worse than Bertie, if truth be told. His excesses had been extreme. And then he had fallen in love and it had been the single most destructive experience of his life, never to be repeated.

      Jack shook his head to dispel the memories and took a mouthful of the cool champagne. Six months before, when he had returned to England from the continent, his father had taken him on one side and said gruffly, ‘Now that you’ve made your money and done trying to get yourself killed, boy, try to make amends for your misbehaviour by making a sensible match. ‘

      His misbehaviour. Jack’s mouth twisted wryly at his father’s understatement. Only Lord Robert Kestrel could refer to the scandalous elopement and subsequent death of Jack’s married mistress ten years before in terms that were more fitted to a schoolboy prank.

      A decade previously, when the whole scandal had occurred, it had been quite a different matter. Jack had been twenty-one and fresh down from Cambridge, full of high ideals and extravagant plans, plans that had come crashing down around him when Merle had been killed. The matter had been hushed up, of course, but in private there had been the most terrible scenes: his father in a towering rage, his mother griefstricken and appalled. It had been the disappointment that he had seen in his mother’s eyes that had been his undoing. He could probably have withstood any amount of his father’s anger because he knew he deserved it, but his mother’s silent reproach cut him to the core. He was the only son, but he had lost her regard along with his father’s respect. The last time he had seen his mother, she had been standing on the steps of Kestrel Court watching him leave his home in disgrace. She had died whilst he was abroad.

      For years he had avoided the company of women entirely, burying himself first in the fight against the Boers in South Africa and later fighting with the French Foreign Legion in Morocco. The nature of the conflict had not really mattered to him; the only thing he cared about was to die in a manner that would make his father proud. But his recklessness was rewarded with life, not death, and a glorious reputation he did not want. He left the Legion and went into the aviation business with one of his former comrades and he had prospered. But even now, after ten years, it did not seem right that he should be alive and rich when Merle was cold, dead and buried. The relationships he had had since had been fleeting, superficial affairs. His heart had been in no danger and that was the way he preferred it.

      And now he had met Sally Bowes and he wanted her. The idea of seducing her aroused all his most predatory instincts. He remembered what she had said about the Blue Parrot not being that sort of club. Maybe it was, maybe it was not. He did not really care. He was only interested in her. He was only interested in winning—the woman, the game, the money.

      He turned his attention to the cards.

      ‘Matty! Matty!’ Sally reached her bedchamber on the second floor, flung open the door and hurried inside. She was out of breath. It was not because she had climbed two flights of stairs but was all to do with the fact that Jack Kestrel had been watching her as she had walked away from him. She had never been so conscious of a man’s eyes on her, had never felt so aware of a man in all her life. Plenty of men came through the door of the Blue Parrot, rich men, powerful men, charismatic men, and on occasion a man who was all of those things. None of them had affected her in the way that Jack did. None of them was as dangerous and laconic and damnably handsome and coolly charming as Jack Kestrel.

      None of them had threatened to ruin her business and, with it, her life. That was what she had to try to remember about Jack Kestrel when her emotions seemed in danger of sweeping her away.

      There you are, Matty,’ Sally said breathlessly, seeing her maid and former nurse sitting before the fire knitting placidly. ‘I need to get changed for dinner. There is a gentleman waiting for me. Please help me.’

      Mrs Matson rolled up her ball of wool with what seemed agonising slowness, skewered it with her knitting needles and got creakily to her feet.

      ‘What’s all the fuss about?’ she demanded. ‘A gentleman waiting, you say? Let him wait!’

      Sally hurried over to the wardrobe and pulled open the door. Matty had been with her family for ever, nursing all three of the Bowes girls in their youth, then acting as Sally’s personal maid when she had left home to marry. She had been with Sally through thick and thin, ruin and riches. When Sally had decided to open the Blue Parrot and had tactfully suggested that Matty might prefer to retire rather than go to live in a shockingly decadent London club, Matty had stoutly declared that she wouldn’t miss it for the world. She had bought herself a little house in Pinner, on the new Metropolitan Railway line, but she spent most of her time at the club.

      ‘Steady now,’ Matty said, as Sally started pulling gowns from their hangers and discarding them on the bed. ‘What’s got into you tonight?’

      ‘Nothing,’ Sally said. ‘Everything.’ She swung around and grabbed Matty by the hands. ‘Do you know where Connie has gone, Matty? There’s trouble. Bad trouble. She has tried to blackmail someone …’

      The deep lines around Matty’s mouth deepened further as she pursed her lips. She looked as though she was sucking on lemons. ‘That girl’s bad through and through. You know she is, Miss Sally, whatever you say to the contrary. Goodness knows, I nursed her myself and she was a sweet little child, but the business with John Pettifer changed her …’ She shook her head. ‘Nothing but trouble now.’

      Sally let go of her hands and started to unfasten her patterned brown blouse, her fingers slipping with haste on the buttons. She had felt very dowdy in her working clothes under the bright lights of the hall and the even brighter appraisal of Jack Kestrel’s eyes

      ‘Connie’s unhappy,’ she said, stepping out of the brown-panelled skirt. ‘She loved John and she has not been happy since. But it goes back before СКАЧАТЬ