Page 10 of The Duke's Stolen Heart
“If I help you, I want money,” she said carefully. “I am the best jewel thief on two continents, and the best don’t work cheap.” Antonia’s natural language was blunt and mercenary. She sat straight and unyielding in her seat.
“Done.” Havencrest’s lips twisted into a ghost of a smile. It might have made him handsome if not for the self-satisfied arrogance. Antonia read disdain in his face for matters involving coin. It was a luxury she had never had an opportunity to enjoy. She was looking forward to the experience, though, just as soon as she fleeced him out of every farthing she could get. The Duke of Havencrest would have empty pockets by the time she was done with him, Antonia vowed.
“Oh, no, we aren’t done,” she declared with false sweetness that made the span between his eyebrows pucker. “I haven’t told you how much I want.”
“Name your price.”
“A hundred thousand pounds.”
Havencrest gaped at her for a moment, then threw his head back and laughed. Damn the man for possessing the kind of rich laugh that could make a woman’s knees weak and her heart beat faster, if Antonia had been inclined to emotions of any kind. It was bad enough how the organ in her chest skipped a beat at the sound.
This man had everything. He wanted her to risk her life over a few ounces of metal and fancy rocks, when she had nothing. No family. No country. No friends that she hadn’t lied to from the first moment she said the words, “My name is Antonia Lowry.”
How dare he laugh.
“Leave me here at the corner,” she ordered. That cut off his laughter in a hurry. Good. Antonia had underestimated him twice now; she wasn’t making that mistake again. She still had one objective. To disappear. Hang this arrogant aristocrat with his pretty eyes and his obsession with a damn necklace he didn’t need.
“The next time I extend to you an invitation, whether it is to dance, or to attend the opera, or to dine privately with me, you will accept it,” Havencrest growled, and Antonia’s pulse turned thready in response. All she did was lift one eyebrow.
“Alas, I am ever disappointing people,” she sighed in a tone like sugar doused in honey, so sweet as to be unbearable. “If you expect me to maintain my residence with the Evendaws, you’d best leave me off out of sight so I can slip into the house through the stables.”
As though she had any intention of doing so. The instant the coach was out of sight, she would simply go to her hideaway and disappear into London’s underclass. How convenient for Antonia that these toffs couldn’t tell one maid apart from another. There was no valor in a hangman’s noose.
But there was Margaret’s needy friendship to think of. When Margaret found the note she’d left…Antonia sighed. She needed to get into the house and out of these clothes, right now, or risk discovery.
Havencrest tapped the roof and called to his driver to halt. The footmen must be freezing, not that she counted on a duke to mind to his servants’ physical comfort. He eyed her suspiciously as he leaned forward, his forearms on his knees. Given his height, the man dominated the space until Antonia had no room to move away and was forced to sit back against the backrest. He brushed her chin with his thumb.
“You won’t disappoint me, Antonia.”
The gentle touch did strange things to her stomach. It stole her will to protest.
He sat back with a self-satisfied smirk. “Now get out of my carriage, Miss Lowry. You reek of corpse.”
* * *
Antonia almost made it.A creak on the main stair gave her away.
“Toni?” Margaret half-whispered, half-hissed. Antonia winced at the way panic and relief commingled in those two syllables. Her friend launched herself down the stairs in a flurry of white ruffled wrapper and lawn nightdress, like a deranged ghost, but no phantom could crush Antonia’s ribs the way Margaret’s embrace did. Antonia smoothed her friend’s soft blond hair and dropped a kiss on her head without thinking.
Antonia recoiled from her instinctive affection. She was playing a role, one that could determine whether she slept in a plush, warm bed tomorrow night or shivered her way through long darkness on the cot in her bolt hole. Having slept in any number of egregiously uncomfortable bowers Antonia held a strong preference for soft beds.
“You smell,” Margaret said with a wrinkle of her small nose. “Where have you been? I found your note just a moment ago. I cannot believe you were going to leave in the dead of night like that. I was about to fetch my brother to go looking for you.”
Yes, this was going to be a monumental mess to clean up. Antonia sighed in what she hoped passed for remorse. “I changed my mind.”
“Why are you dressed as a stable hand?” Margaret asked, holding her at arms’ length. “Come. To my room, before my sister-in-law finds you. They weren’t home until after midnight so I don’t anticipate they’ll be up before ten. I’ll ring my maid for a tray and a hip bath.”
Food and hot water sounded glorious, though she winced at the thought of waking the maids at this ungodly hour. Antonia’s muscles ached as she mounted the stairs arm-in-arm with her friend. Yet tonight—this morning, rather—Antonia was too bone-weary to do more than wilt into her hostess’s care. The hip bath needed half an hour to fetch the extra water and heat it on the stove before a servant carried it to Margaret’s room. Antonia stripped the begrimed shirt and ill-fitting trousers stained with lord only knew what offal from her body and applied a cold cloth from the pitcher behind Margaret’s privacy screen to her face, washing down her body as best she could.
When she emerged, she still reeked of death. Antonia had the sense it would never leave her, this scent of bad endings.
“We ought to burn the clothes,” Margaret called from the other side of the screen. “They’re unsalvageable.”
They weren’t, if they were washed with a pinch of lye, but Antonia was too exhausted to argue. She piled them in the corner and tugged the night rail Margaret had fetched from her room. Wan January sunlight that poured in through the window. Fatigue tugged her eyelids southward. Antonia’s jaw into a deep yawn.
“Toni, why would you leave this on your pillow?” Margaret asked, her blue eyes wide with hurt. She held out a note. Antonia knew damn well what it said. Melodramatic to the end, and it was going to get her hung if she wasn’t more careful.
Lady Margaret,
