Page 40 of An Extraordinary Lord

“What else do you want from him, hmm?” Mischievousness danced across Madame’s face as she brushed out her hair. “Make a wish, and we’ll do our best to make it come true.”

“I want nothing else from him except the payment he’s promised,” she answered carefully.

“Good. You’ll suffer less grief that way.”

Taking her eyes away from Veronica’s reflection in the mirror, Madame set down the brush, stood, and walked back to the tea tray. “I like you, Miss Chase, so I will give you the best advice I can.”

“Which is?”

“Do not set your heart on that man.” Madame contemplated Merritt the same way she did the tea tray apparently—as if he were simply another part of a buffet to sample. “He is a gentleman in every way, and it’s the true gentlemen who are capable of wounding the deepest because they never lead you astray, never lie to you, never take advantage. Yet they also never give their hearts. Oh, they’ll give their attentions, their money—their bodies eagerly, certainly. But their hearts they always keep to themselves.”

“Then it’s a good thing I don’t want his heart,” Veronica countered, not daring to let herself consider if she were lying to herself.

Ignoring that, Madame selected a hard cinnamon biscuit and murmured, “I know from firsthand experience the impossibility of wanting a man who is out of reach.” She studied the biscuit in her fingers. “People see what they want to. A woman in fine satin must be special, a woman in worsted wool is not…but the exact same woman, in fact, when all that’s changed is the packaging. They assume the person you are on the outside must match the one on the inside.” She glanced around the room, as if taking in not just this suite of rooms but the entire brothel around her, the long years she’d spent building up her business, and how far she’d come from whatever hell she’d once crawled through to arrive here. “When the two might be nothing alike.”

Madame snapped off a bite of the hard biscuit between her teeth.

“Merritt Rivers is a barrister above reproach,” she continued, “a man who should have been recognized as a war hero but wasn’t, yet not for lack of trying. A friend to dukes, earls, and all kinds of important, upstanding men, the likes of which would never darken my door. While you…” She tossed away the rest of the unwanted biscuit and flicked the crumbs from her fingers. “You come from a den of thieves.”

No. Veronica might have ended up there, but that wasnotwhere she came from. She could take pride in that part of her past at least.

“So leave the snake alone, or you might just get bit,” Madame warned gravely. “And not at all in a pleasurable way.”

Eleven

Merritt opened the heavy walnut door to the second floor law chambers he shared with his father near Lincoln’s Inn and stopped in the doorway. He blinked.

“Well,” he muttered as he stepped into the room, “that’s something you don’t see every day.”

Slowly, he approached the full-sized tailor’s wickerwork mannequin standing in front of his desk.Good God.

The form was dressed in a new set of barrister’s robes. Not just any robes either, he recognized immediately as his gaze swept over the mannequin. A black silk gown that fell to just below the knees with its flap collar and long, closed sleeves, a black bar jacket with its long tails and turned-back cuffs marked by three buttons…and to finish it off, a set of new breeches, silk stockings, and the most frilly jabot he’d ever seen in his life—all of it capped by a snow-white horsehair wig with curls hanging at the sides and down the back.Thisregalia was special, denoting rank as surely as a duke’s four ermine stripes.

These were the robes of a King’s Counsel.

A note card was pinned onto the mannequin’s faceless head where its nose should have been. His father’s elegant handwriting informed him that word had arrived last night, that his father wanted to be the first to congratulate—

Tossing the note onto his desk, Merritt collapsed into his chair.

“Christ,” he muttered, “I’ve been made a silk.”

He stared at the regalia. His father must have paid a small fortune to have that made—far more than the ball gown Madame Barnaud was making for Veronica. After all,thisgown was from Ede & Ravenscroft, the most exclusive tailors of regalia in England. They numbered among their clientele nearly every peer of the realm, every barrister and judge, most men in Parliament, and an occasional archbishop.

Of course, in his pride, his father would have ordered the best. Had done so months ago, apparently, to have the whole thing waiting here like this.

Sadly, this would only be the start. As the list of names of those barristers selected as King’s Counsel hit the chambers at all the Inns of Court, it would be as if a royal wedding had been announced—the popping of champagne, parties one after another, the ceremony itself at Westminster when the next Parliament convened…

Merritt wanted no part of it.

When he’d first begun to study law, becoming a KC had been his dream—to take the silks, to follow in his father’s footsteps as a barrister and eventually as a judge. The long nights of study, countless days in the Old Bailey, and hours spent poring over court records had seemed worth it at the time, all of it laying the foundation for the life he’d wanted.

But then everything changed, and that old life simply wasn’t enough. Frustration burned in his chest. What good was prosecuting criminals and applying justice after the fact, after innocents were hurt or killed?

His gaze drifted to the framed watercolor hanging on the wall between the two windows, between his desk and his father’s. A landscape of the sea at Brighton on some forgotten summer afternoon…whitish haze lying over the gray-blue water until it was almost impossible to tell where the sea ended and the sky began, a stretch of pebbly beach in tans and browns across the bottom of the canvas. Far from exciting. Ordinary. Done by an amateur artist who had braved the wind, the relentless sunshine, and the bite of salt air to capture that moment in time. Done by Joanna.

He stared at that painting and was borne back into the past to that night when another riot had terrorized the city. To the night when Joanna had been killed.

No matter how tightly he squeezed shut his eyes, he couldn’t stop the images from swimming behind them… A mob of rioters swarming through the midnight streets near Covent Garden, coaches trapped in the melee, their carriage surrounded by a group of men and women who rocked it violently back and forth while the driver did everything he could to keep the team from trampling into the crowd. The fear on Joanna’s face, the scream that tore from her when the carriage door ripped open and they were dragged outside into the street. The sickening helplessness that bubbled up even now like bitter acid on his tongue that he could do nothing to stop them.