Page 21 of His Improper Lady

But when she saw Tom, all that careful reason had vanished. Something about him had lit her up inside. She’d let him know; she’d made it clear. She’d been a perfect mark. And Tom had played his part perfectly. The way he had talked to her, the way he had looked at her, the way he had moved closer, his head bending toward her.

How could she have been so mistaken? Knowing people was her specialty, for pity’s sake! It was infuriating.

In her bedroom, Desiree quickly divested herself of her clothes and pulled on the garments she had worn to enter Quick’s office. Over that, she threw on her cloak and put on her flat, flexible slippers. Going down the back steps, she slipped out into the alley behind the elegant houses.

A row of mews sat across from the houses. She walked past the one directly behind their house, where their own carriage and horses were kept, going farther down to one that had once belonged to another house. Brock had bought it from the family, who had given up keeping a town carriage, and he’d had it outfitted for Desiree and Wells.

Unlocking the door, Desiree stepped inside and closed the door after her. The interior of the former mews had been stripped and rebuilt. Where horses and carriage had once been, now there was a single large empty room. Arrangements of bars and ropes were placed around the room, and one wall was inset with various outcroppings and handholds to facilitate climbing. A ladder led to a rope stretched between two poles, and next to the tightrope were other stands where trapezes hung. In the center, a climbing rope dangled from the ceiling.

Brock had dubbed it Desiree’s and Wells’s playroom. Here, she knew, she could get rid of her anger and ease her mind; it never failed her. Taking off her cloak, she stretched, loosening her muscles, then ran through a few cartwheels and flips before beginning the more difficult tasks of climbing the wall and the rope and swinging from bar to bar.

After a while, the door opened and Wells came in. “I thought you must be here.”

Desiree smiled, pausing to give him a wave as she climbed the ladder to the tightrope. Wells stretched below her, but Desiree withdrew her attention from everything but the rope in front of her. Intently focused, attuned to nothing else, she crossed the rope and returned.

Her mind was clear and calm now, the turmoil of emotions around Tom Quick pushed aside. She stepped over to the trapeze side of the ladder and took hold of the bar. Stepping onto it, she began to swing.

She’d made no plans, had not even thought about it for the past few minutes, but now Desiree knew what she was going to do. She would find more substantial proof that her father had been a Moreland. Sid Upton might not know who Stella’s lover had been, but there could be other information in his head—small, extraneous facts that could lead her to identify the man.

“Want company?” Wells called to her. He had climbed the ladder across from her and was tugging the opposite trapeze toward him.

“Of course.” She sat down on the bar, then pulled her hands away, hanging by her knees, as her brother began his swing, synchronizing his with hers.

There was a net below them, but she knew she and Wells wouldn’t need it. She was completely focused, her mind serene. Tomorrow she would get Sid Upton’s address from Brock, and she would go see him. But right now...

Wells said her name, and at her highest peak, Desiree launched herself forward through the air, hands outstretched to clasp Wells’s arms.

Right now she would let herself fly.

CHAPTER NINE

TOM STRODE DOWN the street, seething. That woman was worse than he’d thought. Not just an employee of Falk’s—God knows, he could understand that—and not just a thief—again, he was one who could cast no stones there—but now she was after the Morelands! There was no way he was going to let her damage that family. She could take her schemes somewhere else.

Now he had a last name for her; the butler had called her Miss Malone. He could look up her birth certificate. He couldn’t be sure of the year, but he could get somewhere in the range. She was too confident, too assured to be really young, but the light of day revealed a loveliness without lines.

And good Lord, had she been lovely. He had seen her without her mask last night, but that had been in the dim light of an East End street. He had thought she was as intriguing as she had been at the casino. But today, in the light streaming in the windows, he knew he hadn’t realized the full attraction of her. Her hair was a lighter, even more luscious shade of caramel than it had appeared last night, the color of her eyes an unusual gray-green.

But it was far more than those physical characteristics that caused that traitorous blow to his chest and the sudden heating of his blood. It was the light in those large eyes, the glow to her face—even if those had been caused by anger. It was the graceful way she moved, the way she talked with her hands, her entire body expressing what she felt. It was the confidence in her face and posture, the intelligence in her eyes, the freedom in her speech.

And it was something else, some indefinable quality that was simply her that reached out and grabbed him and made it nearly impossible to look away from her. Impossible to quell that lick of desire that ran through him even in the midst of his anger.

He shouldn’t want her. He shouldn’t have been flooded with relief when Brock had called Desiree his sister, not his wife or his mistress. It was distinctly annoying that it mattered to him. It wasn’t as if he would come near this woman again, much less court her.

Tom pulled his mind away. Thoughts of Desiree Malone would get him nowhere. He needed to get started on proving her lies. The place to start was the Register Office, and it was there he directed the hack he hailed.

Estimating her age as somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, he started in the middle at the year 1865. He found no Desiree Malone there, so went down a year, then up a year. He found it in 1864.

No wonder he hadn’t known her at Falk’s. She’d been born only two years before he left. She was several years younger than he was, though Tom couldn’t have said exactly how many, not knowing the date of his own birth.

Reed had estimated him as seven or eight at the time he put Tom in the duchess’s orphanage. There was no point in looking up his own birth certificate in any year, since Quick was merely a name Falk had bestowed on him for his skills. Nevertheless, Tom had tried once, looking in several possible years, but if there was any record of his birth, there had been none of Thomas Quick.

He ran his eyes down the facts before him. Desiree Elaine Malone. May 29. There was a time written beside the date, which Tom knew from former searches meant a multiple birth, so he went further and found Wells Henry Malone. She had a twin brother. The man he had met today was named Brock, and Tom was certain he was older than Desiree, anyway. So there was another brother around, the same age as Desiree—no, five minutes younger, he saw on the certificate. Interesting, but not really useful.

The useful information would have been on the space for the father’s name, but that was left blank, the sign of an illegitimate birth. So she and her brother were some man’s by-blows, but that was no proof of who that man was. Her mother’s name was Stella Malone, and she had also been the person who reported the birth to the register office. The birth certificate had provided him with nothing—though the twin brother’s second name had given Tom a moment’s pause. Henry was the first name of the Duke of Broughton.

It seemed likely a woman could have given her illegitimate child his father’s first name since she could not take his last. But Henry was a popular name, and the idea of the duke ever straying from his Emmeline was ludicrous. It could perhaps be the other way around: Desiree had learned that the duke’s name was the same as her twin’s middle name, so she had chosen to target him because of that bit of “proof.” That seemed very convoluted. Either way, in all likelihood, the name was nothing but happenstance.

When he left the Register Office, he went to the Blue Lion public house. It had been a long time since the roll he’d had for breakfast and he was hungry, but his choice of the pub had a motive other than simply satisfying his hunger.