Nicola Cornick Collection Page 3

  Sally bit her lip, trying to ignore his insinuation. ‘My apologies, Mr Kestrel,’ she said. ‘It seems you will have to wait a while to speak with my sister—unless you are party to the places where your cousin would take a lady to dine.’

  ‘I am quite happy to wait,’ Jack drawled. He looked at her. ‘As long as you are sure your sister will come home tonight, Miss Bowes.’

  Sally flushed at this thinly veiled slur on Connie’s virtue. She saw Dan take a step forward, his face flushed with anger, and Jack Kestrel square his shoulders as though preparing for a fight. She waved her manager back. She did not want a brawl, especially one that for once she was not sure that Dan would win. Jack Kestrel looked as though he might be a useful man in a fight. And, in truth, she could not be certain that Connie would come home. There had been times when her sister had been out all night, but after the first, terrible scene when Connie had screamed at her that she was not their mother, Sally had tried not to interfere. Her heart ached that she did not seem able to reach Connie, who went her own wayward path.

  ‘Then perhaps,’ Sally said, ‘you would like to take dinner whilst you wait, Mr Kestrel? On the house, of course.’

  Jack smiled a challenge. ‘I will gladly take dinner if you will join me, Miss Bowes.’

  Sally was shocked. If he had asked her the previous night, then she would not have been surprised, but now she could not imagine why Jack would want her company. Then she realised, with an odd little jolt of disappointment, that it was probably because he wanted to keep an eye on her and make sure that she did not slip away to warn Connie of what was going on. He did not trust her.

  And she did not feel like indulging him.

  ‘I do not dine with the guests, Mr Kestrel,’ she said coldly.

  Jack held her gaze. ‘Humour me,’ he said.

  The air between them fizzed with confrontation. Sally hesitated. She never dined with the customers at the Blue Parrot in order that there should be no misunderstandings about her role at the club. It was the job of the hostesses to mix with the patrons and to entertain them. The owner might mingle with her guests, but she preserved a distance from them. But if Jack Kestrel did not get what he wanted, she knew he could cause a great deal of trouble for her, and one dinner seemed a small price to pay whilst they waited for Connie to return. Then, she hoped against hope, she would be able to deal with this matter and remove the unexpected and wholly unwelcome threat to her business that Jack Kestrel posed.

  ‘Very well,’ she said reluctantly. ‘But you will need to give me time to change my gown.’

  Jack bowed. ‘I am happy to wait for you.’

  Sally saw Alfred’s brows shoot up towards his hairline. The staff had never seen her break her own rules before.

  ‘Dan,’ she said, ‘please show Mr Kestrel to my table in the blue dining room.’ She paused, her gaze sweeping over Jack. He might not be in evening dress, but she could not deny that he looked pretty good. Many men would kill for a physique like Jack Kestrel’s and the elegance of his tailoring could not be faulted. ‘We have a dress code, Mr Kestrel,’ she said, ‘but I suppose we can waive it on this occasion. Dan, make sure that Mr Kestrel has anything he asks for.’

  Jack inclined his head. ‘Thank you, Miss Bowes.’

  ‘My pleasure.’ Sally met his eyes and felt something pass between them, something hot and strong and heady as a draught of the finest champagne. She felt a little dizzy. Then Jack smiled and the breathless feeling inside her intensified. Damn and damn. She did not want to be reminded of the previous night and the fact that he possessed that fabled Kestrel charm. She had never felt quite like this before. She was never remotely attracted to any of the clients at the Blue Parrot. And why it had to happen now, with Jack Kestrel of all people, whose reputation was dangerous and intimidating and whose word could ruin her business, was not only deeply disturbing but also absolutely impossible.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, masking her awareness of him with the cool composure she had cultivated for her role of a woman of business. ‘I shall not keep you waiting long.’

  And she turned and hurried away from him before she gave away too much of her feelings.

  Chapter Two

  He wanted her.

  He wanted the Blue Parrot’s cool-as-ice owner in his arms and in his bed and Jack Kestrel was accustomed to getting the things that he wanted. It should have been impossible with her sister’s blackmail standing between them, but Jack was determined to find a way to have Miss Sally Bowes.

  It had been a relief in some ways to discover that his instincts about her the previous night had been sound after all. Jack did not like being made to doubt his own judgement. But whatever the sins of Miss Connie Bowes, he was sure that her sister was as honest as she claimed to be. Sally was no blackmailer.

  He watched Sally as she mounted the fine silver-and-brass staircase to the second floor. She was a tall woman and she held herself very upright, with the unconscious grace of someone who had learned deportment in her youth. Not for the first time, he wondered about her background. He had been away from London a long time, too long to know anything of the owner of the most popular club in the city. But he was determined to find out more.

  Even though he knew the club servant was waiting to show him to his table, he waited and watched Sally out of sight. At the turn in the stair he saw her hesitate and look back, and he felt a powerful flash of masculine triumph that she had been aware of his scrutiny. Their eyes met for a long second and he felt the impact of that look through his whole body, then she disappeared into the shadows at the top of the stair and he became aware of the servant hesitating at his side.

  ‘This way, if you please, sir.’ The man said, his hostility barely concealed behind a display of immaculate deference. Jack smiled inwardly. He had sensed from the first that Sally Bowes’s employees were extremely protective of her. They knew that he constituted some sort of threat and so they did not like him. He found their loyalty to her interesting, and wondered what she had done to inspire it.

  The manager was leading him from the impressively arched entrance hall down a passageway with a thick red carpet underfoot, past doors leading to all the entertainments that the Blue Parrot had to offer. All the vices, Jack thought. The Smoking Room, the Blue Bar, the Gold Salon, where, no doubt, the gambling tables would be set up under a blaze of chandeliers, as they were at Monte Carlo. There was nothing so vulgar as the cabaret at the Moulin Rouge here, no dancing girls or painted devils serving the drinks. Jack thought that Sally had probably made a sound decision in not attempting to export the raffish style of Paris to London’s Strand. The Blue Parrot had all the elegant comforts of a gentleman’s club and country house combined, but it also had an indefinable edge of glamour and excitement that made it so much more attractive than the stuffy old clubs of St James’s.

  The servant was standing back to usher him through into the dining room, but then the door of the Gold Salon opened and Jack saw the glitter of the chandeliers within and the croupiers dealing the cards at the baccarat table. He paused.

  ‘Sir …’ there was a note of anxiety in the manager’s voice now ‘… Miss Bowes said that I was to escort you to the dining room.’

  Jack smiled. He was feeling lucky tonight. ‘Do not concern yourself,’ he said. ‘I will play a few hands whilst I wait for Miss Bowes to join me.’

  He took a seat at the baccarat table. A waiter materialised with some champagne. One of the smart-as-paint blonde hostesses also started to drift towards him, but Dan stopped her with a word and Jack saw her tilt her head and open her eyes wide at whatever it was the manager said to her. She drifted away again with a regretful backwards glance at Jack.

  Jack took his cards, sat back in his seat and wondered how long it would take Sally Bowes to join him. Most of the women he had taken out whilst he had been in Monte Carlo, Biarritz and Paris had made him wait at least an hour for them. He had never found it worth the waiting. Brittle, fashionable, society women
bored him these days; they all seemed to be cut from the same cloth, superficial copies of one another. He was not interested in affairs with society sophisticates and could not bear to find himself an innocent bride as his father demanded. He knew he was jaded. No one could tempt him.

  No one interested him except Sally Bowes, with her cool hazel eyes and her understated elegance.

  When he had first seen her that afternoon, he had thought she looked colourless, prim and restrained, a far cry from what he would expect from one of the Blue Parrot’s infamous hostesses. But the memory of the previous night was still in his mind and the stunningly sensuous figure Miss Sally Bowes had cut in her peach silk gown. He had enjoyed her company then and wanted to know her better. And the startled awareness he had seen just now in her eyes suggested that she was not indifferent to him either. The attraction that had flared between them so unexpectedly surprised and intrigued him. On discovering that she was actually the owner of the club, his interest in her had been piqued further. Here was a woman who must have considerable strength of character, intellect and a will to succeed, as well as a subtle appeal that was devastatingly attractive to him. She was a challenge, an enigma, cool and composed, yet revealing a fiery nature beneath. He had almost forgotten what it was to be strongly attracted to a woman, but now the hunger flooded him with shocking acuteness. He had to have her.

  Women. In his youth they had been his weakness. He had been as feckless as his young cousin Bertie—worse than Bertie, if truth be told. His excesses had been extreme. And then he had fallen in love and it had been the single most destructive experience of his life, never to be repeated.

  Jack shook his head to dispel the memories and took a mouthful of the cool champagne. Six months before, when he had returned to England from the continent, his father had taken him on one side and said gruffly, ‘Now that you’ve made your money and done trying to get yourself killed, boy, try to make amends for your misbehaviour by making a sensible match.’

  His misbehaviour. Jack’s mouth twisted wryly at his father’s understatement. Only Lord Robert Kestrel could refer to the scandalous elopement and subsequent death of Jack’s married mistress ten years before in terms that were more fitted to a schoolboy prank.

  A decade previously, when the whole scandal had occurred, it had been quite a different matter. Jack had been twenty-one and fresh down from Cambridge, full of high ideals and extravagant plans, plans that had come crashing down around him when Merle had been killed. The matter had been hushed up, of course, but in private there had been the most terrible scenes: his father in a towering rage, his mother griefstricken and appalled. It had been the disappointment that he had seen in his mother’s eyes that had been his undoing. He could probably have withstood any amount of his father’s anger because he knew he deserved it, but his mother’s silent reproach cut him to the core. He was the only son, but he had lost her regard along with his father’s respect. The last time he had seen his mother, she had been standing on the steps of Kestrel Court watching him leave his home in disgrace. She had died whilst he was abroad.

  For years he had avoided the company of women entirely, burying himself first in the fight against the Boers in South Africa and later fighting with the French Foreign Legion in Morocco. The nature of the conflict had not really mattered to him; the only thing he cared about was to die in a manner that would make his father proud. But his recklessness was rewarded with life, not death, and a glorious reputation he did not want. He left the Legion and went into the aviation business with one of his former comrades and he had prospered. But even now, after ten years, it did not seem right that he should be alive and rich when Merle was cold, dead and buried. The relationships he had had since had been fleeting, superficial affairs. His heart had been in no danger and that was the way he preferred it.

  And now he had met Sally Bowes and he wanted her. The idea of seducing her aroused all his most predatory instincts. He remembered what she had said about the Blue Parrot not being that sort of club. Maybe it was, maybe it was not. He did not really care. He was only interested in her. He was only interested in winning—the woman, the game, the money.

  He turned his attention to the cards.

  ‘Matty! Matty!’ Sally reached her bedchamber on the second floor, flung open the door and hurried inside. She was out of breath. It was not because she had climbed two flights of stairs but was all to do with the fact that Jack Kestrel had been watching her as she had walked away from him. She had never been so conscious of a man’s eyes on her, had never felt so aware of a man in all her life. Plenty of men came through the door of the Blue Parrot, rich men, powerful men, charismatic men, and on occasion a man who was all of those things. None of them had affected her in the way that Jack did. None of them was as dangerous and laconic and damnably handsome and coolly charming as Jack Kestrel.

  None of them had threatened to ruin her business and, with it, her life. That was what she had to try to remember about Jack Kestrel when her emotions seemed in danger of sweeping her away.

  ‘There you are, Matty,’ Sally said breathlessly, seeing her maid and former nurse sitting before the fire knitting placidly. ‘I need to get changed for dinner. There is a gentleman waiting for me. Please help me.’

  Mrs Matson rolled up her ball of wool with what seemed agonising slowness, skewered it with her knitting needles and got creakily to her feet.

  ‘What’s all the fuss about?’ she demanded. ‘A gentleman waiting, you say? Let him wait!’

  Sally hurried over to the wardrobe and pulled open the door. Matty had been with her family for ever, nursing all three of the Bowes girls in their youth, then acting as Sally’s personal maid when she had left home to marry. She had been with Sally through thick and thin, ruin and riches. When Sally had decided to open the Blue Parrot and had tactfully suggested that Matty might prefer to retire rather than go to live in a shockingly decadent London club, Matty had stoutly declared that she wouldn’t miss it for the world. She had bought herself a little house in Pinner, on the new Metropolitan Railway line, but she spent most of her time at the club.

  ‘Steady now,’ Matty said, as Sally started pulling gowns from their hangers and discarding them on the bed. ‘What’s got into you tonight?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Sally said. ‘Everything.’ She swung around and grabbed Matty by the hands. ‘Do you know where Connie has gone, Matty? There’s trouble. Bad trouble. She has tried to blackmail someone …’

  The deep lines around Matty’s mouth deepened further as she pursed her lips. She looked as though she was sucking on lemons. ‘That girl’s bad through and through. You know she is, Miss Sally, whatever you say to the contrary. Goodness knows, I nursed her myself and she was a sweet little child, but the business with John Pettifer changed her …’ She shook her head. ‘Nothing but trouble now.’

  Sally let go of her hands and started to unfasten her patterned brown blouse, her fingers slipping with haste on the buttons. She had felt very dowdy in her working clothes under the bright lights of the hall and the even brighter appraisal of Jack Kestrel’s eyes

  ‘Connie’s unhappy,’ she said, stepping out of the brown-panelled skirt. ‘She loved John and she has not been happy since. But it goes back before that, Matty. It goes back to when our father died. It’s all my fault.’

  ‘Don’t speak like that.’ Mrs Matson’s mouth turned down at the corners. ‘If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times, Miss Sally. You are not to blame for your father’s death.’

  Sally did not reply. It was true that they had had this discussion many times and she knew in her head that she was not directly responsible for Sir Peter Bowes’s death, yet every day she reproached herself because she might have prevented it. She might have saved him …

  ‘I don’t know what to do with Connie,’ she said now. ‘I can’t reach her.’

  ‘You’ve tried.’ Matty bent creakily to retrieve the skirt. ‘You never stop trying. Time you thought about yourself for a c
hange, Miss Sally, if you’ll pardon my saying so. Now, who is this gentleman you’re dining with?’

  Sally sighed. ‘Mr Kestrel. He has come to retrieve the letters that Connie is apparently using to extort money from his uncle.’

  Mrs Matson made a noise like an engine expelling steam. ‘Mr Jack Kestrel? The one who ran off with someone and broke his mother’s heart?’

  ‘Very probably,’ Sally said.

  If ever a man had been born to cause a scandal over a woman, Jack Kestrel was that man.

  Matty tutted loudly. ‘I remember the case being in all the papers. His mistress was married when she ran off with Mr Kestrel. Her husband went after them. She was shot and there was a terrible scandal.’

  ‘How dreadful,’ Sally said, shivering. She wondered what effect such a dreadful tragedy would have had on Jack Kestrel at such a young age.

  ‘Old aristocratic family, that one,’ Matty said. ‘Your Mr Kestrel is the last in a line that goes back hundreds of years. They say he has inherited all his rakish ancestors’ vices, and I suppose the business of his mistress proves it.’

  ‘Did the Kestrels have any virtues as well?’ Sally asked.

  Matty had to think hard about that one. ‘A lot of them were soldiers,’ she said, ‘so they were probably very courageous. Mr Kestrel joined the army after he was banished. I hear he won medals for gallantry.’

  ‘Trying to get himself killed, more like.’ Sally said. ‘How do you know all these things, Matty?’

  ‘I know everything,’ Mrs Matson said smugly. ‘He’s a dangerous one, and no mistake, Miss Sally. You watch him. Charm the birds from the trees and the ladies into his bed, so he does.’

  ‘Matty!’ Sally was scandalised. The colour flooded her face. ‘He won’t charm me.’

  ‘Best not,’ Matty said. ‘You need a nice young man after that dreadful husband of yours, Miss Sally, not a scoundrel. Now, how about the gold Fortuny gown for tonight?’