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AFTER THE
KISS:
The Notorious Gentlemen
by
Suzanne Enoch
Chapter One
excerpt
release date: June 24, 2008
It was moments
like this that Sullivan Waring was struck by what a difference a year
had made in his life. Whatever the circumstances that had brought him to
this point, being shot in the shoulder a year ago now seemed to have
been the best of it.
Sullivan tied the black half-mask across his eyes and sank into the
shadows at the base of the house, squatting between the white wall and a
low stand of thorny shrubs. He knew how the clocks and calendars of the
London aristocracy ran, and so he’d waited until well past midnight to
come calling. Tonight was about revenge. And it had the added benefit of
being dangerous.
The last light went out upstairs, but he remained motionless for another
ten minutes. He had time, and the more soundly the residents slept, the
better for him. Finally, as Mayfair’s scattered church bells chimed
three times in ragged unison, he stirred.
The information Lord Bramwell Johns had given him was inevitably
reliable, though he had to question the motives of a man who sold out
his own kind for no better reason than boredom. Still, he and Bram owed
their lives to one another many times over, and he trusted the Duke of
Levonzy’s son. Bram had never betrayed him. He couldn’t say the same for
his own so-called father, the Marquis of Dunston.
Of course the marquis probably had his own complaints lately. With a
grim smile Sullivan stood. Tomorrow Dunston would find he had even more
about which to be privately ashamed, and that was the point of the
evening. Sullivan hefted the shoeing hammer in his right hand and jammed
the narrower end between the window frame and its sill beside him. With
one hard wrench the two separated. He dropped the hammer onto the ground
and shoved the window open far enough for him to slip inside.
He’d passed by the Mayfair, London home of the Marquis of Darshear at
least once a week both before his sojourn to the Peninsula and in the
year since his return. As he made his way silently around the tasteful
furniture of the morning room, he smiled again. He’d been inside Lord
Darshear’s house, now, but he doubted he would ever enter through the
front door. Nor would he ever care to. He didn’t approve of the
marquis’s taste in friends. One friend in particular.
It was one thing to be a bastard, he reflected, and quite another to be
treated like one, and by his own sire. Well, he could dole out as good
as he got. Better, even. And the best part of his nocturnal sojourn was
that while no one else knew what was going on, the Marquis of Dunston
did. He was fairly certain Dunston’s pretty, legitimate progeny did, as
well, or he would hope the marquis had been forced into confessing it to
his son by now. And there wasn’t a bloody thing Dunston or the precious
Viscount Tilden could do about it. Well, they could read the local
newspapers and be alarmed at what they’d unleashed on their unsuspecting
peers, but nothing more than that.
Sullivan tucked an ugly porcelain dove figurine into one of his
voluminous pockets and made his way to the door that opened from the
sitting room into the main foyer. There he paused again, listening.
Nothing stirred, but then Bram had informed him that the Chalsey family
had spent the evening at the Garring soiree. Even the servants would be
fast asleep by now.
Crossing through the foyer, he turned down the main hallway which would
open onto the breakfast room, with probably an office or another sitting
room and then the kitchen beyond. He didn’t need to go that far. Just
opposite the open breakfast room doorway, he found what he’d come for.
“There you are,” he murmured, his heart beating faster as he ran a
finger along the gold leaf frame. An original Francesca W. Perris
painting, done back just after she’d married William Perris and left
behind her maiden name of Waring. Back when she’d raised him in a small
house just outside of London, back when she’d promised him that even
though his father might not be able to acknowledge him legally, he still
had a heritage – hers.
Except that Francesca Waring Perris had died at about the same time he’d
been wounded in Spain, though he hadn’t learned that news until weeks
later. And then Sullivan had returned home a handful of months ago to
find that while he’d been good enough to fight for Britain as an
officer, in the eyes of the law he had no standing at all. Not when
George Sullivan, the Marquis of Dunston, claimed that all of Francesca
Perris’s property belonged to him. She had, after all, been his tenant
for the past thirty years.
Sullivan clenched his fist, then shook his hands loose again. Memories,
revenge fantasies, could all wait. At the moment he was in the home of
someone who’d probably never met his mother, but who had bought or
accepted one of her paintings from Dunston’s hand. He didn’t care
whether it had been a purchase or a gift. All he cared was that by
sunrise it would be his again. His heritage, his inheritance. His. And
Dunston would hear about this latest theft and pray that no one else
made the connection.
He grabbed a second small painting from some other obscure artist off
the wall for good measure, then stripped off the lace table runner from
the hall table and wrapped both paintings in it. A small crystal bowl
and the silver salver from the same table went into his pockets as well.
Then he tucked the paintings under his arm and turned back toward the
front of the house. And stopped dead.
A woman stood between him and the morning room. At first he thought he’d
fallen asleep outside the house and was dreaming – her long blonde hair,
blue-tipped by moonlight, fell around her shoulders like water. Her
slender, still figure was silhouetted in the dim light from the front
window, her white night rail shimmering and nearly transparent. She
might as well have been nude.
If he’d been dreaming, though, she would have been naked. Half expecting
her to melt away into the moonlight, Sullivan remained motionless. In
the thick shadows beneath the stairs he had to be nearly invisible. If
she hadn’t seen him, then–
“What are you doing in my house?” she asked. Her voice shook; she was
mortal after all.
If he said the wrong thing or moved too abruptly, she would scream. And
then he would have a fight on his hands. While he didn’t mind that, it
might prevent him from leaving with the painting – and that was his
major goal. Except that she still looked...ethereal in the darkness, and
he couldn’t shake the sensation that he was caught in a luminous waking
dream. “I’m here for a kiss,” he said.
She looked from his masked face to the bundle beneath his arm. “Then you
have very bad eyesight, because that is not a kiss.”
Grudgingly, even occupied with figuring a way to leave with both his
skin and the painting, he had to admit that she had her wits about her.
Even in the dark, alone, and faced with a masked stranger. “Perhaps I’ll
have both, then.”
“You’ll have neither. Put that back and leave, and I shan’t call for
assistance.”
He took a slow step toward her. “You shouldn’t warn me of your
intentions,” he returned, keeping his voice low and not certain why he
bothered to banter with her when he could have been past her and back
outside by now. “I could be on you before you draw another breath.”
Her step backward matched his second one forward. “Now who’s warning
whom?” she asked. “Get out.”
“Very well.” He gestured for her to move aside, quelling the baser part
of him that wanted her to remove that flimsy, useless night rail from
her body and run his hands across her soft skin.
“Without the paintings.”
“No.”
“They aren’t yours. Put them back.”
One of them was his, but Sullivan wasn’t about to say that aloud. “No.
Be glad I’m willing to leave without the kiss, and step aside.”
Actually, the idea of kissing her was beginning to seem less mad than it
had at first. Perhaps it was the moonlight, or the late hour, or the
buried excitement he always felt at being somewhere in secret, of doing
something that a year ago he would never even have contemplated, or the
fact that he’d never seen a mouth as tempting as hers.
“Then I’m sorry. I gave you a chance.” She drew a breath.
Moving fast, Sullivan closed the distance between them. Grabbing her
shoulder with his free hand, he yanked her up against him, then leaned
down and covered her mouth with his.
She tasted like surprise and warm chocolate. He’d expected the surprise,
counted on it to stop her from yelling. But the shiver running down his
spine at the touch of her soft lips to his, stunned him. So did the way
her hands rose to touch his face in return. Sullivan broke away,
offering her a jaunty grin and trying to hide the way he was abruptly
out of breath. “I seem to have gotten everything I came for after all,”
he murmured, and brushed past her to unlatch and open the front door.
Outside he collected his hammer and then hurried down the street to
where his horse waited. Closing the paintings into the flat leather
pouch he’d brought for the purpose, he swung into the saddle. “Let’s go,
Achilles,” he said, and the big black stallion broke into a trot.
After ten thefts, he’d become an expert in anticipating just about
anything. That was the first time, though, that he’d stolen a kiss.
Belatedly he reached up to remove his mask. It was gone.
His blood froze. That kiss – that blasted kiss – had distracted him more
than he’d realized. And now someone had seen his face. “Damnation.”
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