Chapter 6


“So he gave you the letter, did he?” Phyllida Chase faced Ainsley under the flare of distant fireworks. Ainsley had met her, as arranged, by the fountain in the center of the garden. The guests were still clumped on the west side to watch pyrotechnics that blasted over the meadow beyond.

“Lord Cameron returned it to me, yes,” Ainsley said. “You so obviously passed it to him while you knew I was looking. Why?”

Phyllida’s eyes glittered. “Because, I wanted you to know that I could hand the letters to anyone I pleased whenever I pleased if you took too long with the money. I never expected that you’d try to conduct your own bargain with him. You are to deal with me, my dear. No one else.”

“You are the thief, Mrs. Chase,” Ainsley said coolly. “I’ll deal with whoever is necessary. I’ve brought you the money, now I take the letters, as agreed.”

“You should not have tried to go behind my back, Mrs. Douglas. Because you did, the rest of the letters will cost you much more than the original price. One thousand guineas.”

Ainsley stared. “One thousand? We agreed on five hundred. It was difficult enough to persuade her to give me that much.”

“She shouldn’t have written such letters then. One thousand by the end of the week, or I sell them to a newspaper.”

Ainsley thumped her fists to her skirts. “I can’t possibly come up with a thousand guineas. Not in four days.”

“You’d better start sending telegrams then. She can afford it, for all her fussing, and it’s her own fault she was so indiscreet. One week.”

Ainsley wanted to scream. “Why on earth are you doing this? You were a lady of the bedchamber, someone she trusted. Why did you turn on her?”

“I turn on her?” Phyllida’s eyes blazed, and for the first time, Ainsley saw an emotion in Phyllida Chase other than cold calculation. “Go and ask her why she turned on me. All I wanted was a little happiness. I deserved a little happiness. She snatched it all away from me, and for that I will never forgive her. Never.”

The fury in Phyllida’s voice was genuine, anger and despair that ate deeply. Phyllida had already been gone from the queen’s service before Ainsley came into it three years ago, but she’d never learned why Phyllida had been dismissed. She’d heard whispers about Mrs. Chase—such as her notorious pursuit of younger men—but the queen had always been tight-lipped about Phyllida and forbidden gossip.

“I don’t have a thousand guineas,” Ainsley said. “I have five hundred. You would at least have that.”

“The original price is a thing of the past. Consider the second five hundred the cost of me keeping quiet about how you seduced the paper from Lord Cameron.”

Ainsley’s face heated. “I didn’t seduce it from him.”

Phyllida gave her a hard smile. “My dear Mrs. Douglas, Lord Cameron is not only a man and a spoiled aristocrat, he’s a Mackenzie. He’d not simply hand you back the letter without exacting a price for it. It scarcely matters if you haven’t yet given that price to him. You will.”

Ainsley blessed the darkness, because she knew she must be blushing all the way down to her toes. She remembered the heat of Cameron’s mouth pressing the key into hers, the equal heat of his mouth on her breasts in the woods.

Before you leave at the end of the week, we will finish it, he’d told her. Depend on that.

“I haven’t gone to his bed,” Ainsley said. “Nor will I.”

“Naïve darling, Lord Cameron doesn’t take his women in a bed. Anywhere else in the room, yes—or in the carriage, the summerhouse, or on the front lawn. Never in a bed. Quite known for it, is our Lord Cameron.”

Ainsley thoughts flashed to Cameron’s hard body pressing her into his mattress, his large hand on her wrist. He’d been ready, she’d felt through his kilt, not seeming to mind at all that they were on a bed.

But he’d released her. He could have taken what he wanted right then, could have coerced Ainsley into giving in to him. But he hadn’t.

“I won’t,” Ainsley said.

Phyllida gave her a pitying look. “The unworldly Mrs. Douglas. You are no match for Lord Cameron Mackenzie. He’ll have what he wants from you very quickly, and you’ll go to him. Cameron sees, he wants, he takes, and he is done.”

We will finish it.

Ainsley’s heart beat faster. “You seem very sanguine for the woman who is his lover.”

“I went into my affair with Lord Cameron with my eyes wide open. He has the reputation for being a most pleasurable lover, and that is what I sought, to relieve my ennui at this dreadfully dull gathering. Hart Mackenzie used to hold exotic orgies that were all the rage, but now he invites stodgy people to do stodgy things for a stodgy week in the freezing Scottish countryside. Cameron is as bored as I am, but now that he’s seen your pretty eyes, I’m certain he’s finished with me. No matter, because I am finished with him.”

Ainsley listened with growing warmth, realizing that she’d stumbled into a world she’d only glimpsed—husbands and wives seeking other partners for the novelty of it, lovers casually discarded for other lovers. In Ainsley’s world, a young miss could be ruined in the blink of an eye; in Phyllida’s, vows meant nothing, and pleasure was all.

Ainsley thought about Lord Cameron, with his fierce eyes and the passion that simmered below his surface. He tempered that passion into gentleness when he handled his horses or the frail Mrs. Yardley, protecting them at the same time he took care of them. That gentleness gave Ainsley the conviction that, even in his world of mistresses and secret lovers, Cameron Mackenzie deserved better than Phyllida Chase.

“I can give you the five hundred guineas,” Ainsley said firmly.

Phyllida flicked her fingers. “I want a thousand. She can afford it.”

Yes, but the small queen had very strong ideas on where money should be spent and how much at a time. She’d found it insulting that she’d have to pay at all.

But even the queen realized that the letters could seriously damage her reputation if it got out that she’d written such sentimentalities to Mr. Brown, never mind she’d never actually sent them to him. People were not happy with Victoria’s reclusive life as it was, and there might be cries for her abdication if they thought she stayed home only to play with her Scottish equerry.

Phyllida had set out to punish the queen, and punish her she would. So the queen had sent Ainsley—the lady she ordered to do covert jobs that might involve something sordid such as picking locks and searching bedrooms—to deal with Phyllida. To retrieve the letters without parting with a penny if Ainsley could help it.

“You are optimistic if you think she’ll give you a thousand,” Ainsley said.

Firework after firework went off over the fields, filling the sky with light. Under their light, Phyllida smiled.

“One thousand is what I want,” she said. “Raise it somehow by the end of the week, and you may have the letters back. If not . . .”

She made an empty gesture, then turned and strode down the gravel path without looking back.

“Bloody woman,” Ainsley growled.

A cold nose thrust itself into her palm, and she looked down to see McNab, a Mackenzie dog, staring up at her with sympathetic eyes. Five dogs surrounded the Mackenzies at all times. Two of them—the hound Ruby and the terrier called Fergus—belonged to Ian and Beth and lived with them when they retreated to their own house not far from here. Ben and Achilles remained at the main house, but McNab, a springer spaniel, was more or less Daniel and Cameron’s.

Ainsley sighed as she leaned to pet McNab. “How peaceful it must be to be a dog. You don’t have to worry about intrigue or letters or blackmail.”

McNab’s tail smacked her legs with happy blows. The tail drove harder as McNab turned to greet the large man who’d followed him out of the darkness.

“So, Phyllida is blackmailing you,” Cameron said.

Ainsley rapidly went through the conversation in her head, relaxing slightly when she realized that neither she nor Mrs. Chase had ever mentioned the queen by name.

“I’m afraid so.”

Cameron patted McNab’s head when the dog thrust it under Cameron’s hand. “Phyllida can be the devil. Do you want me to shake your letters out of her?”

Ainsley’s eyes widened in alarm. “Please don’t. If you frighten her, she might run to a newspaper as she threatened.”

McNab circled close behind Ainsley, which made her step forward into Cameron’s heat. Cameron didn’t move. McNab sat down against Ainsley, happy they were all together in a small circle of space.

“I can solve your problem,” Cameron said. “You know I’ll give you the thousand for the asking.”

He’d not simply hand you back the letter without exacting a price for it.

“I can raise the money,” Ainsley said. “It will be difficult, but I can do it.”

Across the garden, under the light of the Chinese lanterns, Phyllida stepped next to her husband and tucked her hand under his arm.

“She’s is a hard woman,” Cameron said.

“She’s a bloody thorn in my side.”

Cameron’s chuckle grated like broken gravel. “If you think a thousand guineas will make Phyllida go away, it won’t. She’ll hold something back or find some other way to come at you again. Blackmailers are never satisfied.” His laughter faded into bitterness.

“Aren’t they? How do you know?”

His words were empty, hollow. “When you’re the brother of a duke and your wife died in mysterious circumstances, sharks come out of the woodwork.”

“That’s a mixed metaphor.”