Page 11 of The Passionate One (McClairen’s Isle #1)

They were rough, uncouth fellows. And they were exquisitely, hilariously, vibrantly alive. Fair Badden had never seen their like.

Other traveling performers measured Fair Badden’s high society as the self-conscious, priggish band of yawners it was and suited their talents accordingly, somberly enacting philosophical vignettes or singing plodding chorales. Not these fellows. Rude and boisterous and bawdy, they had about them a joie de vivre that was infectious. True, the big silent fellow had no more important a role than letting his smaller fellows clamber over him, but he played the part of mountain well. Another masked man circulated through the room, snatching goblets of wine from Lady Harquist’s guests’ well-manicured hands and giving back salacious ditties in a high, inane falsetto.

They were unpredictable, thrilling, and novel. Even the most consummate snob in Lady Harquist’s company could not restrain an occasional smile at their antics. They sang ribald songs with leering enthusiasm, mocked their betters with uncanny insight, and quaffed expensive wine as though it were cider dregs. They tumbled and juggled, danced and somersaulted one over the other. Their short morality plays dissolved into delicious double entendres.

Rhiannon welcomed their vibrant company with relief, taking the opportunity to escape her unwelcome preoccupation with Ash Merrick by entering wholeheartedly into their heated word games. It was early yet. Not everyone had arrived. Cornered by a lean fellow in a black silk domino, she giggled, intoxicated by this unexpected freedom from her troubled thoughts.

“Ah, pretty ladybirds!” His voice was slurred and husky, and his thick French accent was so authentic one could not help but wonder if it were real. He peered owlishly at the young ladies tittering behind Rhiannon. “A full gaggle of them and all squawking love songs!”

He swept a crumpled tricorn from his head. A tight-fitting scarf of silk covered his hair. He bent over in so low a bow that his forehead nearly brushed the floor. Just as he was about to overset himself and crash face first into the ground, he snapped upright, blinking woozily.

Part of his act, no doubt, Rhiannon thought. Because though his voice was slurred, he moved with the grace of God’s own fool, dodging the vases his fellow acrobats hurled at him, catching them midair, and sending them back. Through it all the inane smile remained plastered on his lower face. But behind the mask his dark eyes gleamed with feverish light.

“Here now, miss,” he said snatching at Rhiannon and missing her by inches. Merrily, she danced out from his reach, twirling away in a cloud of jonquil-colored brocade. A tendril of hair escaped its knot and tumbled down her neck.

“Come, dearest. My haughty, devilish, quick-footed Mab,” he crooned, reaching for her again. “You look an adventuresome wench, a curious kitten. I’ve heard it said that all ‘ladies crave to be encountered with.’ Admit it, sweetling, ’tis a fact that virgins dream of what a gypsy’s embrace might be like.”

A French gypsy who knew Shakespeare? Not likely.

Rhiannon snorted. “If I allowed your arms about me, sir,” she said through her laughter, “I’d be wondering still.”

His head swung up. A flicker of surprise appeared in his shadowed eyes.

“Oh ho! What are you saying, mon amie? That I’m not what I appear to be”—his voice lowered, became silky with innuendo—“or that you’re not?”

Why, the audacious cur! The knave! Rhiannon thought in bemusement and could not help grinning at his audacity.

“Tinsel gypsy!” she declared.

“Downy child!” he returned in his low, rough voice, grinning drunkenly.

“I’m not so easily gulled.” Rhiannon denied the charge of na?veté, placing her hands on her hips. She cocked a brow at him. “For have I not discovered you?”

She leaned forward, studying him closely, the marble smoothness of his blue-cast chin, the full sensual lips. They were unfamiliar yet …

“I know you,” she murmured, mystified.

“No, Mademoiselle.” He shook his head sadly. His dark eyes caught and held her own. “For how can you know me when I do not know myself?”

Around them the noise from the tumblers and jugglers dimmed to a hum. She was scarcely aware of her friends, moving closer.

Faithless flirt, she chastised herself hopelessly. Was it not enough that in her heart she’d betrayed Phillip with a black-haired Londoner, but now she betrayed both men to this … actor who had honed each slippery, honeyed word on a continent of twittering, blushing girls.

“Who are you?” she asked.

He shrugged. Stepped back. “Who do you want me to be? Tumbler?”

He folded at the waist and snapped suddenly backward, head over heels, landing lightly. Around them the ladies clapped. He did not acknowledge their applause; his eyes remained riveted on her.

“Minstrel?”

He withdrew a slender flute dangling from his belt and placed it to his lips. A frolicsome tune flushed from beneath his fingers. Once more the applause broke from the little group of watchers.

“Buffoon?”

He laughed, an unpleasant, helpless sound that caught at Rhiannon’s heart, propelling her forward a step. He held out his hand, backing away as if her spontaneous movement somehow threatened him.

“No! Not yet the fool. Though there’s always hope you’ll witness it yet this night. You wouldn’t want to miss it. I play that role best of all.”

“Yes!” A young lady in an elaborate wig and diamond ear bobs cried. “Play the fool for us now!”

The tumbler’s head turned toward the speaker. “Forgive me, ma chérie, but I must decline. That particular mask is threadbare, a shoddy, shopworn piece of work. Unfit for such exalted company. I’ll retire and late this evening when you lay sighing upon some worthy”—he paused and the ladies gasped—“pillow, I’ll mend it. When next we meet, I swear, I’ll be a knave.”

He stood rigidly a few seconds and then abruptly grinned. “But tonight I’ve a grander notion.”

“What’s that?” the girl asked, but he was not looking at her anymore.

His attention had returned to Rhiannon. Fascinated and charmed, she stayed though her conscience urged her to leave.

“Perhaps tonight I am … a hero? No?” He dropped to his knee and stretched a beseeching hand in Rhiannon’s direction. “Chevalier? Knight gallant?”

She smiled and would have taken his hand but he snatched it away. He plucked a silver stiletto from where it was hidden in his boot and uncoiled with lethal grace. The knife flashed deadly in his hand.

“Or perhaps mercenary? Villain? Only tell me what you’ll pay … and I’ll tell you my price.” His voice had gone flat, emptied. The tip of the blade moved in a threatening arc before the company of giggling women. It stopped at Rhiannon, held, wavered, and was abruptly snatched back.

“A rogue? Or a friend?” He flipped the stiletto into the air and caught it on its descent. Once, twice more.

He was breathing quickly now, each breath exposed by the clinging shirt, the rise and fall of his muscular chest. “A fribble? A blackguard?”

No drunkenness now marred his speech or clouded his bright eyes. He slunk closer to her, his feet sliding ahead of his taut body, his head angled away from her, approaching her like a feral dog.

“Only tell me what you desire, mon coeur,” he said. “What do you want? I’ll become it. Anything. It’s what I am. What I do. My stock-in-trade.”

His voice was hypnotic, base insinuation and bitter mockery underscoring a vast bleakness. The audience around them grew hushed. Margaret shuffled on her feet, her eyes darting nervously. The smile of another bewigged young lady remained fixed on her face like a beauty mark she’d forgotten to take off.

And then the moment was gone. The dark tumbler flung himself back and away.

“No suggestions?” he complained. “You’d leave me to my own devices? My own imaginings? Not a safe place to leave a man such as me.”

He sighed heavily. “Then I’ll be a juggler. Here, my friends, to me!”

At his call several of his fellow acrobats abandoned their pursuits. He called out again, raised his stiletto, and flung it over the heads of Lady Harquist’s guests. As one, the guests ducked and shouted in alarm. The blade whistled high above their elegant coiffures, their feathered, puffed, and swollen wigs.

A short, bandy-legged fellow perched atop the giant’s shoulders cackled gleefully and caught the dark tumbler’s missile. Magically, its twin appeared in his other hand. With a hoot, he hurled first one then the other back at Rhiannon’s would-be hero.

He caught them both and sent them chasing one another in an arc above his head. A third knife joined them, and then a fourth, as the other members of the troupe sent their blades spinning and flashing toward the black-clad figure.

Effortlessly he caught and added each to the sparkling, glittering circle of death that flew above his head, occasionally plucking one from the circle and sending it out amidst the party, only to have it returned seconds later chased by a new one. The company held their breath, clasping their gloved hands to their mouths in fascinated terror.

He made it look so easy, so effortless. But Rhiannon, standing closest to him, saw the sheen break out on his closely shaven chin and exposed throat, witnessed the intensity with which he watched the tumbling blades fall toward him, an intensity at odds with his easy banter and fluid movements.

Now, released from his attentions, the niggling impression of familiarity returned to tease her. The lean, hard acrobat’s body hidden under dusty, ill-fitting finery, the supple grace, even the choice of words, though spoken in an accent …

Her gaze flew toward the young giant standing currently unemployed and idle against the wall. His mask had gone askew. One bushy golden brow appeared in the jagged eyehole.

Phillip?

Her head snapped around. The juggler had reached above his head to catch a knife thrown a shade too high. The cuff slipped up his arm.

A thick, pale rope of scarred flesh decorated his wrist.

“Merrick?” she whispered, jerking forward.

From the corner of her eye she saw a silver gleam, then heard a thunk. She wheeled about. Behind her a stiletto vibrated in the paneled wall.

Exactly where she’d been standing.