Page 12 of Chloe and the Devil (Regency Spinsters Alliance #2)

CHAPTER TWELVE

Chloe felt as if all eyes turned in their direction when she entered the Blakeleys’ ballroom on Lucien’s arm.

They didn’t, of course, because Lucien had accompanied her to other balls in the past when her father and great-aunt were unavailable to do so. His age and social standing meant he was considered by the ton as being a suitable escort for her.

She wondered if Society would still think that if they knew what she and Lucien had been doing together in their hosts’ library just moments earlier.

It had taken several minutes for Lucien to straighten his clothing and appearance and for Chloe to use her handkerchief to wipe the excess of his release from her lips and chin. She had also returned her hair to its former fashionable style, Lucien’s fingers having gripped on to it so tightly as he cock pumped his release into her mouth that several curls had escaped their confinement completely.

He tasted delicious. Both salty and sweet, mixed with a wholly male spice. A combination Chloe believed she might become addicted to, if given the opportunity. She sincerely hoped that she would be.

In the meantime, with their previous pristine appearance restored, for proprieties’ sake, the two of them had needed to put in an appearance in the ballroom.

“There you are,” Lady Hammond scolded Chloe before bestowing a warm smile on Lucien. “How lovely to see you at one of this Season’s balls, Hellsmere.”

He released his grip on Chloe’s elbow to take one of the older lady’s gloved hands in his before bowing over it. “The pleasure is all mine, Lady Hammond.”

Chloe’s aunt gave a girlish giggle that caused Chloe to frown. Really, did the man have to make himself attractive to women of all ages?

And was she, Chloe questioned with self-disgust, feeling jealousy over a woman who was thrice her own age and twenty years Lucien’s senior? A woman, a relative of Chloe’s, to whom she knew Lucien was only being polite.

Ridiculous!

“Chloe!” A flustered Rose Appleby rushed toward her. “I was hoping to see you here this evening. Would you please accompany me to the ladies’ retiring room?” The request was made with an easily discernable glint of desperation in Rose’s eyes, the brittle smile that curved her lips not reflected in that frantically pleading gaze.

Chloe glanced across the room to where the Dowager Countess of Kingswood and her son, the Earl of Kingswood, both stood watching Rose.

“Of course I will.” The moment she linked her arm with Rose’s, she could feel how badly her friend was trembling. “We shall go now,” she assured before turning to Lucien and her aunt. “If you will both excuse us?” She gave Lucien a look of regret.

“I must take my leave, in any case.” He gave all three ladies a bow. “I have a prior engagement, I am afraid,” he explained before turning to walk across the ballroom in the direction of the door.

Chloe hurried after him, uncaring of any interest she might garner as she reached out to grasp hold of his arm.

She knew exactly what his prior engagement was. Of the danger he was putting himself in, no matter how much Lucien denied it, on her behalf. “Please promise me you will take care,” she urged softly.

“I will,” he reassured, his hand briefly covering hers. “I will let you know the outcome of the meeting as soon as I am able.”

“Thank you,” she accepted gratefully. “Lucien, I?—”

“There will be time for us to talk once this situation has been settled to the satisfaction of us both,” he assured warmly. “For now, I must leave for this meeting at the park, and you must return to your aunt and friend.”

She gave him one last longing glance before nodding. “Please, please come back to me.”

He lifted her gloved hand and kissed the back of it. “Enjoy the rest of the ball, but do not allow any of the young gentlemen to seduce you.”

“I have no interest in anyone but you, Lucien.” She repeated what she had said earlier. “I have only ever, or will ever, want you.”

He nodded his satisfaction with her answer before releasing her hand to stride from the room.

To Chloe, it felt as if he had taken all the light with him. She knew with certainty that she would not enjoy the rest of the Blakeleys’ ball now that Lucien was no longer present.

So distracted was she by his departure that she felt almost numb as she accompanied Rose to the ladies’ retiring room.

A numbness which dissipated the moment the two women entered the deserted room and Rose locked the door behind them to ensure their privacy. “What?—”

“It was me!” Rose choked. “I stole your diary, and now my brother Richard is attempting to blackmail you into paying him to have it returned to you!”

Chloe literally felt the color draining from her cheeks, and her lips felt slightly numb. “What did you say?” Her initial response was an overwhelming and heavy sense of betrayal.

Rose began to pace the room, wringing her hands as she did so. “My brother is addicted to gambling, and he owes money to half a dozen establishments and money lenders in the city. He instructed me to steal jewelry from your bedchamber on my last visit so that he might sell it and pay off some of those debts.”

Chloe was stunned. She had never— Yes, she knew Lucien had said there were still her friends in the Spinsters Alliance to be investigated. But she had never, not in a million years, thought one of those friends would be the one to have stolen the journal from her. “Why?” she managed to choke out. “What would make you do such a thing?”

Rose closed her eyes briefly before opening them again. “He threatened to beat me within an inch of my life. But I promise you, I resisted his bullying at first, despite having always had a dread of physical pain. I continued to resist through the first beating, and the second, but the third time… Do you remember that a month ago, I claimed to have the influenza and took to my bed for a week?” She released a shaky breath. “My brother had beaten me so badly the third time, I could not be seen in public.”

“Your parents…”

“Believe that Richard can do no wrong. I did try to tell my mother what he had done, but she insisted I must have fallen down the stairs and was suffering a concussion. The truth is, she has a dread of any sort of scandal being attached to our name before she can marry me off to Kingswood.” Rose shuddered. “I am afraid that the next time Richard hits me, he might actually kill me.”

Chloe remembered the incident of the other woman’s illness the previous month, of how she and the other members of the Spinster Alliance had all sent flowers and other get-well wishes to her.

But she’d had no idea, and she was sure none of their other friends did either, of how badly Rose was being treated by her brother. Whenever any of them had picked up on any underlying tension in the other woman, they had always assumed it was because Rose was so unhappy in her betrothal.

She reached out to grasp the other woman’s clenched hands. “You should have told me or one of the others. I would certainly have offered to help you.”

“And instead I stole from you.” Rose choked out a sob. “What sort of friend steals from another?” she wailed as she began to cry in earnest.

“One who is in fear for her life,” Chloe dismissed, knowing there would be plenty of time later for her to dwell on the who and why of that situation. “We all do things out of desperation that we would not normally do.” As she had by sending Lucien a letter and meeting him in the dead of night in his garden. It was not quite the same, but it could be considered equally as dangerous. “But it was not jewelry you stole from my room.”

“No, I—I meant to, but at the last moment, I heard someone outside in the hallway, and so I just took the first thing I could get my hands on. It happened to be your diary.”

Chloe grimaced. “It was not a diary.”

“No?”

“No,” she confirmed evenly.

“I did not read any of the contents.”

“Obviously.”

Rose stilled. “When I last saw Georgiana, she told me that you have admitted to being the author Charles King who has had all those stories published in the newspaper.”

“Yes.”

The other woman moistened the dryness of her lips. “Did the journal I took have one of your stories written inside?”

“Something like that,” Chloe admitted. “Your brother is demanding ten thousand pounds to maintain his silence on the subject.”

Rose’s eyes widened. “Ten thousand pounds!” She gasped before shaking her head. “He has gone quite mad.”

“Whether he has or he has not, Hellsmere is on his way to meet with him right now with the intention of confronting him, not paying him,” Chloe revealed grimly.

“No!” Rose gasped, reaching out to tightly grasp hold of Chloe’s hands. “He must not do that. My brother is a desperate man, and he has already proven he has no boundaries or limits to what he will do in his quest to attain the money he needs. I—I fear his increasingly erratic behavior is because he has also begun to indulge in opiates as a way of forgetting, however briefly, how deeply in debt he is.”

If that was the case, then Chloe feared there was no hope for him.

She had never met anyone that she knew for certain was addicted to opiates. But she recalled her father had once talked to Lucien in front of her about the poor wretches who became such a slave to that addiction they could think of no one and nothing else but the next time they took the drug. At which time, they would lose themselves to those hallucinations which, briefly, helped them to escape whatever trials, real or imagined, might be in their life.

Her father had warned that the men or women who became opiate addicts were highly dangerous.

And Lucien was on his way right now to meet with one of them!

“I must leave immediately and follow Lucien to the rendezvous so that I might warn him,” she told Rose.

“I will come with you,” the other woman insisted.

Chloe thought of arguing with her until she saw the determination in Rose’s eyes. “Very well.” She considered for a moment. “I will tell my great-aunt I am accompanying you home because you are feeling unwell. In truth, you are so pale, it could be the truth,” she dismissed. “You must tell the Dowager Countess and the Earl of Kingswood you are doing the same thing for me. We have no time to lose,” she added frantically as she pushed Rose in the direction of the ballroom.

* * *

Lucien regretted the need to leave Chloe at the Blakeleys’ ball the moment he stepped outside the house and instructed his head groom to drive him to St. James Park before he entered the carriage and closed the door behind him. He would not have left Chloe at all if it was not, hopefully, with the intention of settling the matter of returning her stolen and incriminating journal to her.

A journal in which she had sexually fantasized about him . About the two of them together.

Something which he intended, Lucien decided as he stepped down from his carriage at the entrance to the park, would literally become true at the earliest opportunity. Not just physically, but in every way possible. He could not?—

Good God, was that Richard Appleby skulking about in the undergrowth near the pavilion?

The older brother of the same young woman who had greeted Chloe so enthusiastically at the Blakeleys’ ball a short time ago and instantly asked if the two women could go off alone to the retiring room?

Was it possible she was a participant in her brother’s attempt to blackmail Chloe?

Or had she asked for the meeting because she wished to warn Chloe her brother was the person responsible for trying to blackmail her into giving him money in exchange for the journal?

Except there had been no mention of returning the journal even when the money had been paid.

A demand Lucien understood so much better now that he knew it was Richard Appleby who was doing that demanding.

He had heard rumors about the younger man, of course. Of his gambling and the huge debts he had incurred because of it. How Appleby had now turned to opiates to escape thinking about those onerous debts.

Ten thousand pounds of debts?

Lucien was not a gambling man, but he would lay odds that was exactly what was going on here.

Nor did it take too much more thought to realize that Rose Appleby must have been involved in removing the journal from Chloe’s bedchamber; she was one of only a handful of people left who’d had opportunity to carry out the deed.

“Is that you, Hellsmere?”

Lucien glowered at the younger man from beneath the brim of his top hat as he stepped from the glow of the gas lamp alight overhead and into the less illuminated park. “You will address me as Your Grace,” he bit out coldly.

The younger man gave a dismissive snort. “If you’re here for the reason I think you are, then I believe I will address you in whatever manner I so choose, Hellsmere .”

Lucien had challenged men to a fight with sword or in the ring for far less than the insult he had just received. But a single glance at Appleby’s eyes, at the way the pupils were so dilated there was almost none of the blue iris to be seen, told him the other man had already ingested some form of stimulant this evening, either alcohol or opiate, or possibly both. The younger man seemed reckless enough to have done so.

Rendering his behavior unpredictable at best and possibly dangerous at worst.

“You will return the journal to me now, and we will say no more about the matter,” he instructed.

Which was not to say he would not immediately ensure Appleby’s access to both gambling and opiates was cut off the moment he was able to arrange the matter.

“Not until I have my money,” the younger man derided.

Lucien’s eyes narrowed. “I did not bring any money.”

“Then you ain’t getting the journal, are you?” Appleby scorned.

“Now, look here?—”

“No, you look here.” The younger man produced a pistol from the waistband at the back of his pantaloons and pointed it at Lucien. “I want my money. If not, I will sell the journal to the newspapers and get some money for it that way.”

Lucien discerned that the hand holding the pistol was far from steady. No doubt another symptom of the other man having recently imbibed opiates or alcohol. “You will not?—”

“Lucien!”

“Richard!”

Lucien turned at the sound of Chloe’s voice, barely registering her presence there, accompanied by Miss Rose Appleby, before there came the reverberating sound of a pistol being fired.