Page 14 of The Soldier's Scoundrel
“You go to your sister’s house and your club and bloody Almack’s. Sometimes the theater.”
Jack had, admittedly, been disappointed. The idea of Rivington blushing as he slipped into some den of iniquity had been frankly thrilling. And Jack wasn’t above seeking out whatever random sources of titillation came his way these days. “We ought to leave these fellows alone so their friends can come back and haul them away home.”
But Rivington didn’t budge. “You think they’ll be all right?” He was standing over one of the thieves.
Jack prodded at one of the men with his boot. “This one’s more drunk than anything else. He’s best left to sleep it off.” He moved to the other man, examining him, resisting the old urge to check for gold teeth “This bastard will have a nasty bump in the morning, but I can’t see what we’re to do about it.” He wanted to go home, not play nurse to a pair of thieves.
“I shouldn’t have been quite so forceful.”
Did this man feel guilty about having defended himself from attackers? “No, you should have let them kill you.” Jack tapped his chin in a parody of thoughtfulness. “That would be the gentlemanly way to comport oneself, I’m certain. They’ll take back your voucher to Almack’s now, no way around it.”
Rivington made a dismissive sound. “Still. I don’t know.” But he walked away from the fallen men nonetheless.
Jack followed him out of the alley. Rivington’s step was faltering, and when a gaslight illuminated his face, Jack could see traces of blood. The man had to be in agony. If climbing a flight of stairs left him ragged with pain, what must he be feeling now? And he was worried about the thieves? Jack would never understand gentlemen.
“You’re a mess,” Jack said. “Blood and God knows what else. My rooms are only a few blocks away. Come with me and get yourself tidied up, that way you don’t set your servants to gossiping.” And rest your blasted leg, he wanted to say, but felt that wouldn’t go over well.
Rivington let out a crack of laughter. “Too right.” He shook his head. “Can’t scandalize the servants.” He leaned against the brick wall and fell silent. Jack could see enough of the other man’s face to know he wasn’t smiling anymore. “Who hired you to follow me, then? I’d say it had to be my father, but now I’m doubting it—he wouldn’t give a damn who knew I was in a fistfight.”
Jack regarded the man carefully. It would take a hell of a lot more than blood and bruises to make Rivington anything less than handsome, and when he laughed it proved a fair sight, indeed. “I already told you I don’t have gentlemen as clients, and that includes your father. Nobody hired me to follow you. I was following the Wraxhalls and saw you come out.” This was partly true: he had been following the Wraxhalls, but when he saw Rivington, he sort of allowed himself to become distracted.
Rivington stared down at Jack, plainly disbelieving him. But when their eyes met, Rivington did not look away and neither did Jack. “Thank you for getting me out of that jam,” he said after a moment.
“Bollocks. You had the situation well in hand.” Jack reached into his pocket, pulled out a handkerchief, and set about rubbing a spot of blood off the other man’s cheek. Rivington seemed to soften under Jack’s touch, melting against the wall as he submitted to Jack’s ministrations. Jack returned the cloth to his pocket and now touched Rivington’s jaw with his bare hand. There was the faintest hint of coarseness. Rivington’s valet hadn’t shaved him quite close enough. Jack nearly said so aloud, before deciding that criticizing a man’s valet had no part in a seduction.
At this point he wasn’t even trying to tell himself that all this touching and sighing and staring was anything other than a seduction. Even Rivington had to know. There he was, eyes closed in obvious pleasure, inches away from a man whose finger he had licked only a few days earlier. This was not a subtle situation.
But then Rivington’s eyes shot open. “I’ll tell you what I’ve learned about the Wraxhalls, if you like,” he blurted out. Without waiting for an answer, he went on. “She has hardly any friends, none of them intimate. Fashionable people openly sneer at her because of her low birth, but her manners really aren’t terrible at all. Her husband drinks.” The words were coming out in a rush, as if he wanted to unload all this information before he could think better of it. “I don’t think it’s a good marriage. Not that I’m an expert on marriage, far from it. But they don’t look at one another.”
Jack only stared.
Rivington’s cheeks went red. “You know, the way married couples look at one another, where you can tell they can’t wait to be alone and laugh and gossip and do the other things that married people do.”
The other things that married people do? If Jack hadn’t seen Rivington in the orangery he might have thought him a total innocent.
Jack kept on staring. If Rivington wanted to see what a man looked like when thinking of what married people do, Jack would go right ahead and show him. But first there was something he had to set straight as a matter of pride. “I already know all of that.” What did this man take him for? “I knew most of those things before Mrs. Wraxhall even left my office, and now I know a great deal more besides. If you’re sniffing around after the Wraxhalls because you think you’ll learn something useful, then you can bloody well stop.” Another explanation suggested itself to Jack. “And if you’re telling me this as some sort of quid pro quo for having saved you tonight, then you can piss right off.”
Now Jack was angry, his fingers clenched into fists, as if he weren’t accustomed to being paid in information, or used to a little bloodshed in a night’s work, for that matter.
“No!” Rivington looked flummoxed, and a little offended. “I told you because I wanted to do you a kindness after rescuing me, not as a payment.”
Jack decided not to argue to the point. From a man so high-minded as Rivington, any insinuation that Jack traded in secrets and sometimes blood would have been an insult, and Jack wasn’t able to stomach an insult from this man.
“What exactly is it that you think I do for a living, Mr. Rivington, if not find out information and then put it to use? The last thing in the world that I need is somebody fumbling along and making people suspicious.”
As he spoke, he inched closer to Rivington, who was still leaning against the wall.
“I’m unclear as to what it is you do for a living, Mr. Turner.” Rivington’s voice was only as loud as it needed to be for Jack to hear a few inches away, transforming the statement from an accusation to something more intimate.
It was pride and a little arrogance that made Jack say what came next. He was good at what he did and wanted to prove it to this handsome, interfering, aristocratic bastard. “Then allow me to demonstrate. Here’s what I know about you, sir. You have no debts, neither to money lenders nor your friends. You have no scandals in your past. You have no mistress nor do you frequent whorehouses. Everything about you is, as you said, drearily boring.” He paused, let his voice drop. “And therefore highly disappointing.”
He was standing too close now, crowding the taller man’s body. But Rivington didn’t protest, didn’t even flinch. His body almost seemed to be yielding, and if Jack hadn’t seen him fighting in that alley he might not have known how much raw strength lay underneath those elegant evening clothes—power that the man was deliberately not using to distance himself from Jack.
“You’ve recently spent a great deal of money on clothing.” Really, Jack could have fed an orphanage full of children with that sum of money, not that he was in the practice of doing anything so noble. “That either means you’re very interested in being fashionable—but the fact that you muss your hair up by rubbing your hands through it suggests that you are not—or it means your old clothes didn’t fit anymore.”
Jack was cheating—he had seen Rivington wearing a coat that might have fit a man two stone heavier than he was now. He ran one finger down the length of Rivington’s sleeve. “You’re very thin,” Jack continued. “I think you’ve been ill.” He paused with his finger on the cuff of Rivington’s sleeve and the man stood perfectly still, as if he had been shackled.
“Not ill.” Rivington’s voice was scarcely audible. “I have no appetite. Haven’t had since my injury.”
