The Mistress. Сьюзен Виггс

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СКАЧАТЬ he didn’t want to think about past mistakes now. Regrets were always so inconvenient.

      Instead, he thought about Kate some more. God, that hair, those lips. The swiftest route to her dowry would be to seduce her so she’d be forced to marry him. He found himself wishing for the luxury of time with a woman like that. Time to coax laughter and sighs from her, time to learn what her favorite color was and what she liked to eat for breakfast. Under the circumstances, however, he had to act fast. He considered the holy card in his pocket and wondered if it would provide some clue so he could find her again.

      Lord de Vere and his entourage exited the Hotel Royale. Their inbred, aristocratic faces were pale and pinched. Lord Kim’s bewigged attendants sniffed the air like hounds on the scent. Dylan decided a bit of ingratiation was in order.

      He flung back the edge of his cloak and tipped his new hat. “My lord,” he said, mimicking the courtly manners he had observed while gambling aboard a French steamship one year. “I thought you were a guest at the hotel.”

      “Ah, Kennedy. So I was. We deemed it prudent to ficher le camp, what with this fire and the winds so unpredictable.”

      “So where will you be ficher-ing to?” Dylan asked, trying his best not to mock the mincing attitude. But he couldn’t help himself. The English lord was a two-legged joke.

      “Mr. Cornelius King was kind enough to offer his summer house on the north shore.”

      “Indeed.” Dylan winked. “And did he offer anything else? His eldest daughter, perhaps?” Everyone knew the weak-chinned Englishman was in the States to find a rich wife. An admirable pursuit, thought Dylan. Though they’d never speak of it, they had something in common.

      Lord Kim worked his mouth, fishlike, in soundless outrage. He sputtered, then found his voice. “I’m sure I don’t have the slightest interest in the young lady.”

      Clearly the man had no sense of humor. Dylan laughed to show he meant no offense. “Then it’s a pity about your plan to marry money,” he quipped.

      Again the codfish look from the Englishman.

      “Well, the fortune generally comes with a woman attached,” Dylan concluded.

      De Vere’s face froze. Then, while his attendants braced themselves for a flood of fury, he surprised them all by flinging back his head and braying with laughter. “You are a caution, sir. I should not like you at all, yet I find that I do. Ah, here is the coach.” A boxy coach and four came around from the livery. The team was spirited, probably jumpy from the heavy, smoky smell of the air and the occasional flying spark.

      “Join us, Mr. Kennedy?” Lord Kim offered.

      It was on the tip of Dylan’s tongue to accept. Then the oddest thing happened. The courthouse alarm bell, a couple of blocks distant, drowned out his “Yes, thank you.”

      “Eh? Sorry, dear chap, I didn’t hear what you said,” the Englishman prompted.

      “I said,” Dylan heard a stranger’s voice intone, “I had best stay in the city and lend a hand fighting the fire.”

      “We’ll leave the heroics to you Yanks,” said the Englishman. “They say fools rush in…” Laughing at his own wit, he entered the coach.

      As he watched the big, roomy vehicle roll away up Clark Street, Dylan gritted his teeth and cursed. What kind of fool stayed in the city, after all? What was he thinking? Within an hour he could be at some millionaire’s country place in Lake View, sipping sherry and making up stories about his Harvard days.

      The courthouse alarm sounded again. Dylan ducked his head into the wind, held his tall hat in place and started walking. People milled about in the streets. No one seemed unduly alarmed, and neither was Dylan. Fires had been a nightly event of late because the weather was so unseasonably dry. He decided to make an early night of it, then begin his hunt for the delectable Miss Kate in the morning.

      Though no one in Chicago knew it, his pied-à-terre was actually a pied-à-l’eau—a broken-down cabin boat moored under the Rush Street Bridge. He had found the leaky, listing vessel moldering in the river, and had claimed squatter’s rights. It was cramped, smelly and depressing, but he endured the conditions because he knew they were only temporary. He just had to figure out a new angle and he’d be back in the game.

      Things grew more chaotic as he headed toward the lake. Crowds surged along the Van Buren Street rail line, fleeing from the West Division. Dylan hurried, his long strides putting ten city blocks behind him as he made for the bridge that spanned the mouth of the river near Lake Michigan.

      On the sloping bank under the bridge, he stood still for a few moments, reluctant to seek shelter in the miserable boat. The wind held the shrieking promise of a tornado, somewhere out on the prairie beyond the stockyards. Horses in the roadway shied as their drivers laid into them with whips.

      Dylan tried to decide whether or not he was afraid, and realized with no surprise that he was not. Things like firestorms and waterfalls didn’t scare him. Never had, which was probably why he had done a brisk business performing daredevil acts. He had a knack for learning tricks and a flare for the dramatic. His first stunt had taken place right in the train station where his mother had abandoned him.

      With nothing left to lose, he had climbed to a steel girder in the terminal. He had no thought but that he wanted to be up high, like a bird, where nothing could touch him. He still remembered the faces of the onlookers. No one dared move or look away. Their riveted expressions of awe and dread had given him a keen sense of power. So long as they watched, he held them in the palm of his hand. Their attention went wherever he commanded it. With a heady feeling of complete control, he could make them gasp, cause their hearts to pound, force them to weep or sweat with worry for him. When he leaped down and stood unscathed on the platform, coins had showered him and he knew he was made for this life.

      Not long afterward, he had apprenticed himself to a saloon owner in the bowery where he had performed stunts of increasing complexity. He quickly graduated to confidence games, tricking people out of their money by convincing them that a painted brick was solid gold, or that his Colombian parrot could tell the future, or that he was a direct descendant of an Egyptian king. In his lonely search for a place in the world, he had donned every persona except his own. He didn’t even know who he was anymore, and didn’t much care.

      Hoping he’d left a bottle of spirits in the boat, he decided to seek shelter instead of standing around watching the chaos. The wind whipped viciously at the opera cloak he had helped himself to, temporarily covering his face with the expensive fabric. At the same moment, someone—a very large someone—jostled him, and he found himself shoved back against a timber bridge support.

      “You move pretty fast for a dead man,” growled a deep, unpleasant voice.

      The cloak was pulled out of his face. “Nice threads, Dylan,” said the voice, rich with sarcasm. “But you weren’t wearing it the last time I saw you. Seems I recall you were wearing ten thousand dollars in bank notes strapped around you.”

      Damn it. He was hoping to avoid this. What a fiasco. He thought his daredevil escape over the falls meant he’d seen the last of Costello. Within hours of fleeing Niagara Falls, he had donned a new identity and hopped a train, knowing his former partner was likely to track him down in due time. As smart as Dylan and even less scrupulous, Costello had a special gift for getting what he was after.

      “Vince,” СКАЧАТЬ