Hope Tarr - [Men of the Roxbury House 02] Read online

Home at present was a dingy suite of rooms atop a Jewish bakery in Whitechapel, not the best of neighborhoods, but the rent was cheap and the food was free so long as you didn’t mind a steady diet of bread and cake. She’d struck up a friendship with the baker’s wife, who let her have whatever hadn’t sold by closing.

  She shook her head, not wanting him to see how meanly she lived. “I can manage.”

  Beyond her pride, she remembered how he suffered from a recurrent nightmare about tenement houses, and empty stew pots, and a baby’s cradle surrounded by flames. At Roxbury House, his screams sometimes had traveled all the way to the girls’ dormitory at the opposite side of the building. She suspected he avoided setting foot in the East End as a means for holding that particular inner demon at bay, and she didn’t want to be the cause for forcing him to face it now.

  “I suppose you’ll be wanting this back.” She handed him his evening jacket.

  Taking it from her, he reached into the inside breast pocket and pulled out a stack of his business cards. Handing her one of the cream-colored squares, he said, “Send word when you’ve given your notice.”

  He hesitated at the door. All that ale and champagne must be resident in his bloodstream still, for he found himself turning back and reaching out to lift a lock of her hair. The cinnamon thread curled about his forefinger felt warm and impossibly silky. As though sparked to life, it seemed to dance with light— myriad hues of russet and gold compounded to form that single color—red.

  But no, it wasn’t her hair that was dancing but his hand. His hand, he noted in some distress, was trembling. “You c-changed it.”

  He shoved the offending hand inside his coat pocket, wishing the stammer might be as easily dispatched. Though it had barely troubled him earlier in the evening, now that the alcohol was wearing off, it had returned, more pronounced than ever.

  She shrugged, sending the robe sliding farther off her shoulder. “Mousy blond is hardly the color for the stage.”

  He recalled the color as more a cross between wheat and honey, fresh and wholesome, not mousy at all, though he didn’t care to correct her.

  “You changed yours, too.” She reached up her slender hand and picked a feather out of his hair. Brushing it off, she added, “You wear it shorter now.”

  Oh, that. The blue-black curls used to brush the tops of his shoulders, an unruly mop his grandfather’s valet had tamed with a pair of sewing shears and a liberal dressing of macassar oil. Afterward Gavin had stared at his reflection in the cheval dressing glass. Feeling like a shorn sheep on fair day, he’d scarcely recognized himself. Was that when it had begun, when he’d first begun to lose his true self, to disappear?

  Her face took on a faraway look. “I remember it brushing your shoulder, the blue-black of a crow’s wing and so silky soft I couldn’t get enough of threading my fingers through it. In fact, I recall one time you let me brush and braid it though you swore to throttle me if I so much as breathed a word to Harry or Rourke.”

  I would have let you do anything, absolutely anything. I’d let you do anything to me now. Even back in the day when touching one another had been cloaked in childish innocence, her soft kneading fingers had felt so very good on his scalp.

  She reached out her hand to him again and he tensed, wondering where and how she might touch him. “So, Mr. Carmichael, do we have a deal or not?”

  Gavin let out the breath he’d been holding back, relieved and disappointed in equal measure. How crass she sounded, how so unlike the sweet, dear girl of his memory. Like him, had that girl also been made to disappear?

  Enfolding her slender pink palm in his, he gave the warm flesh the slightest squeeze. “Yes, Miss Lake.” Under no circumstances would he address her by her stage name, not now and not ever. “We have a deal.”

  The dressing room door closed behind Gavin, and Daisy sank down onto the footstool, feeling as if every jot of energy she possessed had been siphoned from her, leaving behind an empty shell, a soulless vacuum.

  Had she really just agreed to move in with him? Sleeping with a man was one thing, living under his roof and rule quite another. She hadn’t even given Sid her notice and already she felt like a caged canary. No matter how much gilding was on the cage—and Gavin’s promise of a generous allowance (a stipend, he’d called it) and free room and board certainly presented a glittering picture—what he was offering her was a cage all the same.

  The one-month caveat was her saving grace. Nearly anything might be gotten through if one knew the endpoint in advance, and in this case she wasn’t worried about him reneging. Likewise, when he assured her she could come and go as she pleased, she’d believed him. His heavy handedness in carrying her offstage earlier that night seemed out of keeping with his character, which despite the new self-possession and manly confidence didn’t seem to have changed in fifteen years. She admitted she’d brought on his brashness herself, goading him far beyond any normal man’s endurance. He didn’t strike her as the sort of man who would lord his status and power over her as another might. Certainly sharing his bed would be no hardship.

  If anything, she was afraid she might like it entirely too much.

  Once upon a time, Gavin had been her best friend, her confidant, her hero, but that time was long ago and far away. Though he might wear a matured version of that boy’s face, the aristocratic man who’d stood before her with censor undercutting his every perfectly enunciated syllable wasn’t the same sweet, accepting boy any more than she was the same starry-eyed adoring girl with whom he’d frolicked in the barns and meadows at Roxbury House.

  I could never forget you, Daisy, not in a million years. And no matter how long it takes or how hard it is, someday, somehow I’ll see we’re together again.

  Through thick and thin, indeed! She’d been nine years-old when she’d last seen him that day in the orphanage attic, and she’d believed every word out of his mouth. Once his hoity-toity St. John relations reclaimed him, he’d cut her out of his life as thoroughly as a surgeon might cut out a cancer. He’d never so much as written her a letter or answered one of the many she sent. En route to Dover, she’d exerted the full power of her child’s will to persuade the Lakes to stop off in London so she might find him and say goodbye. Eager to win her over, they agreed, if only to placate her.

  Even for a nine-year-old seeing a big city for the very first time, locating the St. John residence hadn’t been all that hard. The grandfather was a nob, she’d seen that straightaway, and nobs tended to congregate in the city’s fashionable West End. By process of elimination, she’d traced Gavin’s grandfather to Park Lane. Afterward, it was merely a matter of cajoling her new adoptive parents into chatting up gardeners and sundry household help in order to obtain the exact direction. When she ventured her first trembling knock upon the main door, it was answered by the plum-in-the-mouth butler who informed them “Master Gavin” wasn’t “at home” but rather away at school.

  Tears blurring her eyes, she’d scrawled her Paris direction on a scrap of paper and left it to be given to him. Once in France, she posted several more letters, this time to him at school, but he never answered with so much as a line. After the second year with still no reply, she’d stopped waiting, stopped hoping altogether. For years now, she planned just what she would say to him, exactly what words she would use, were they ever to meet again. But standing face-to-face with him in the close confines of her dressing room, she hadn’t been able to recall a single carefully crafted retort.

  When she first realized who he was, the shock had nearly dropped her to her knees.

  She was too practical by nature to believe in miracles and too jaded by experience to believe that happenstance could ever work in her favor. She hadn’t really expected to meet him again and certainly not in a song and supper club in a seedy section of Covent Garden.

  In spite of her stage paint and changed hair color, Gavin had seemed to recognize her from the first. But then even as a boy, he had a canny knack for seeing through façades
to a person’s very soul, hers especially. She never had been able to pull the wool over his eyes as she had with Harry or Rourke or their teachers.

  At Roxbury House, he’d been her friend, her confidant, and surrogate brother. There had never been anything romantic between them. And yet seeing him again had affected her and in a far from sibling sort of way. If she was honest with herself, and that wasn’t always the case, she would admit that he’d been the object of her secret fantasies for years now.

  She remembered a tall, long-boned boy with the beginnings of broad shoulders, the flesh stretched taut over a fencepost-thin frame. A boy with big, gentle hands and a poet’s soul to whom she’d been able to take all her troubles and share all her dreams. The gangly adolescent of her memory had grown into a wholly splendid specimen of man. The subdued suit was the perfect foil for his stark masculine beauty, his broad shoulders owing nothing to a tailor’s padding, and the worsted wool of his trousers expertly cut to cinch across narrow hips and taut buttocks. When he’d swept her into his arms and carried her offstage, he handled her as though she weighed little more than the feather boa. In the midst of fighting him, she’d felt how solidly muscled he was, how lean but powerfully built. She considered again how easily he’d subdued her and a sigh slipped from her parted lips.

  From the moment she’d seen him sitting so straight-backed and proper at his front row table, she’d wanted to walk up to him and unbutton his suit coat one shiny brass button at a time, slowly slide it off those breathtakingly broad shoulders, and then start to work on the buttons fronting the crisp, white shirt beneath.

  And now all at once he was back in her life, ready and willing to help her achieve her greatest ambition, her heart’s desire. He was offering to help her become a serious actress, an opportunity straight out of her dreams, and the answer to a prayer she’d almost given up on ever realizing. She’d be a fool to walk away, wouldn’t she? When she accepted the current contract, she hadn’t realized The Palace was in the heart of the Covent Garden theater district. To be so close to the theater, the true theater, and yet so very far removed from it in all the ways that counted was heart-rending.

  Of course, she wasn’t a fool, at least not entirely. Though Gavin had been her childhood confidante and protector, her big brother in every way but blood, he was a grown man now. She hadn’t missed the telltale tenting of his trousers when she caressed him onstage or how standing inside the dressing room door he seemed to keep finding excuses to touch her. No, the sweet, soulful boy of her memory was a grown man and if her years in France had taught her anything, it was that men were all cut from the same cloth.

  She fully expected they’d be sleeping together within the week.

  Gavin found Rourke and Harry waiting for him at one of the few tables left standing, an empty whiskey bottle and three shot glasses littering the stained tablecloth. Other than an old African man sweeping the broken glass from the floor, they were the only ones left in the club.

  “You waited.” Feet crunching on broken bottle glass, Gavin approached. “I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d left.”

  Harry looked up from dabbing a spirit-soaked cloth on his split knuckles and shot him a wink. “Through thick and thin, mind?”

  So, he wasn’t the only one of them to remember their old oath. Gavin dragged over a chair and sat down.

  Straddling the back of a now three-legged chair, Rourke’s bloodied lips broke into a grin. “Christ, Gav, you took long enough. I hope she was worth it.”

  “Well worth it.” Dividing his gaze between his two friends, Gavin announced, “I’ve found her.”

  Rourke turned to Harry and rolled his eyes. “One rut with a showgirl and now he fancies himself in love.”

  Harry shook his head. “If that’s the case, we have to take you out more often—on second thought, maybe not.” He cast a rueful look downward to his black and blue knuckles, no doubt wondering how he was going to explain them, along with his bruised cheek and torn shirt, to his bride.

  Gavin shook his head. “It’s not what you’re thinking. We spent the time talking.”

  Rourke jerked his head to Gavin and scowled. “What a bloody waste.”

  “She’s Daisy, our Daisy.” Reading their worried looks, he hastened to reassure them. “It’s not what you’re thinking. I’m not drunk, at least not much, and I’m not delusional, either. Delilah du Lac is Daisy, or rather the stage name she’s taken for herself.”

  His two friends looked flabbergasted, but unlike him they hadn’t had the past hour to get used to the idea. “Are you serious?” Hadrian finally asked.

  “Are you sure?” Rourke added.

  Gavin nodded on both counts. “Quite.”

  Ever the skeptic of their group, Rourke asked, “In that case, do you mind my asking where the devil she’s been keeping herself all this time?”

  “Until a fortnight ago, she was living in France with the couple who adopted her. She’s come to London to try to make it as an actress—a serious actress. I promised to use whatever influence I have to get her an audition for As You Like It at Drury Lane, but first I have to find a way out of the contract she signed. Like as not there’s some legal loophole waiting to be uncovered, but I suspect this is one of those situations when out and out bribery will prove more expeditious than the law.”

  She’d insisted on staying to smooth things over with Sid, as she called it, though the club owner didn’t strike Gavin as the sort who was inclined to see reason. Money, or rather bribery, would be his bottom line. He cast his gaze about the room, mentally assessing the damage. At least a quarter of the table and chairs had been reduced to kindling and most of the floor-length mirrors survived as empty frames.

  He turned to Rourke, the businessman among them. “What is your reckoning of what replacing this rubbish will cost?”

  Harry and Rourke exchanged smiling looks. Harry spoke up and said, “I wouldn’t worry about it, if I were you.”

  Gavin shook his head. He’d given Daisy his word and, by God, he meant to keep it. “I promised to pay for the damage; otherwise the club manager will as good as own her.”

  Despite the seriousness of the situation, Rourke looked amused. “Dinna fash, I know for a fact no reckoning will be required.”

  “Are you saying the club manager has decided to forgive the debt?” Having overheard Daisy’s charged back-and-forth with the club owner, the slimy Sid hadn’t struck him as the forgiving sort.

  “Indeed he has,” Harry confirmed.

  He and Rourke exchanged glances and then burst into laughter. Wondering if they might be drunker than they let on, Gavin asked, “What is so funny?”

  Swiping the back of his busted hand over watery eyes, Harry shook his head. “Rourke just bought the place a few minutes ago, lock, stock, and barrel.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “I had rather have a fool to make me merry

  than experience to make me sad …”

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Rosalind,

  As You Like It

  Two days later, Gavin sat with Rourke and Hadrian in what until a few days before had served as his study, his formerly feral cat, Mia, stretched out on the arm of his chair. Reaching over to stroke her soft black and white fur, he kept one eye on the wall clock as he listened to his two friends recount the full story of how Rourke had come to be in possession of The Palace.

  After leaving Daisy’s dressing room door, a furious Sid had stomped to the front of the house, intent on having his bullies drag Gavin’s two troublemaking friends out into the alley for a proper beating. Rourke’s offer to purchase The Palace outright had forestalled the violence. At first, Sid assumed the Scot was either drunk or bluffing or a bit of both, but when Rourke produced a money clip of 100-pound notes to stand as his surety, along with his business card and signed marker for the balance, which would arrive by bank draft at the week’s end, Sid changed his tune. Instead of ordering up a beating, he ordered the contents of the bar be brought out to seal the d
eal.

  “If I can buy a castle in the Highlands, then why not buy a palace in London to go with it?” Rourke asked with a grin. It was an open joke among them that the Scot accumulated property as other men accumulated lint and pocket change.

  At present, Gavin’s flat was all the property he cared to manage. With the help of his two friends, he’d spent the previous day converting his study into a miniature theatrical school. He’d even gone so far as to box up all but the most necessary of his legal texts and law school tomes to make room on the bookshelves for the dramaturgical library he hastily amassed—comedies and dramas by European masters Shakespeare and Ibsen, Wilde and Pinero, Chekhov and Zola. No Gilbert and Sullivan, though. Musical theater struck him as scarcely a step above the vulgar dance hall burlesques he’d suffered through the other night. Daisy was quite simply too fine to be locked into performing that sort of rubbish, he saw that clearly. Her rehabilitation from dance hall chanteuse to serious actress hinged on making quite certain she saw it, too.

  Sipping a glass of whiskey, Rourke shook his auburn head. “Delilah du Lac and our wee Daisy one and the same woman—I can scarcely credit it.”

  Gavin pulled on his cuffs and stared ahead to the study door. Daisy was due any time and the prospect of seeing her again had him feeling absurdly nervous. She’d solidly refused to let him have any hand in helping her move, swearing she had but little with her. He couldn’t say she’d been rude, not exactly, but she had been firm, making it clear she meant to settle her affairs with her promoter without his help. It occurred to him to wonder if such a strident display of independence might be masking some secret something or rather someone, she might be hiding from him, but for the time being he resolved to set aside that maddening thought. Even if it were the case and another man was involved, he had no claim upon her—at least not any he might yet enforce.

  “Delilah du Lac was a dance hall persona only, a fiction,” Gavin replied more strongly than he intended. “Now that Daisy will be pursuing a theatrical career, she’ll either use her given name or we’ll come up with a more suitable stage name.”