Nicola Cornick Collection: The Last Rake In London / Notorious / Desired. Nicola Cornick
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