A Reformed Rake by Jeanne Savery Page A

Frederick managed to speak calmly. “Then, with any luck at all, we’ll eventually reach an understanding. I’ll next see you aboard the packet, Miss Cole.”
    If all goes well, they each added in the privacy of their thoughts.
    Frederick slipped through the door and disappeared. Behind him the tall grey-eyed woman, her mind confused and heart rapidly beating, lifted her fingers and touched her cheek where he had briefly stroked her skin.
    Oh no, thought Harriet. You’re not dangerous. No, not at all. Of course not!
    She glared at the closed door. That man was a danger to even so staid and proper a lady as she’d become. In which case he was still more a danger to the young woman she had in her care. Learn to understand Sir Frederick Carrington? She understood quite enough, thank you, and would, in future, avoid him to whatever degree she could manage.
    Or she would if she could rid herself of this idiotic compulsion consuming her. It was idiotic, the fact she wished to get to know his history, his thoughts and beliefs!
    Harriet stared down at the tickets clutched in her hand. She counted them, found there were enough for their entire party. Madame, of course, had given him the number.
    Whatever chaos ruled her heart, there was still their escape to plan. Harriet stalked to the connecting door, pulling the tie to her robe tighter. As she reached for the latch, she stopped. Madame, at least, would raise eyebrows that she’d received Sir Frederick while dressed thusly—not that he’d given her any choice in the matter, but Madame couldn’t know that.
    Wondering where her wits had gone, Harriet dressed quickly. Once her hair was smoothed and tightly pinned back, when her neat grey dress rustled around shod feet, and, last but not least, after she’d recreated the poise which was usually so much a part of her —then she went into the connecting room, ready to organize her troops.
    “Well, Cob, you’re looking much more cheerful.”
    “We be going home, m’lad.”
    Frederick turned toward the low window looking out over the noisy hotel yard. “Yes. You’ll be glad to return, will you not?”
    “Well now, that’s the truth and all.” Cob folded another shirt and laid it in the portmanteau, which he filled quickly and neatly. For all the valet looked an ex-bruiser, which he was, he had a deft way with packing and a gentle touch with a razor—on those occasions when Frederick didn’t insist on shaving himself.
    More than twenty years ago Robert Strong, called Cob for reasons no one but himself might know, had won Sir Frederick’s father a packet. He’d beaten his opponent to a bloody pulp in a makeshift ring well hidden from the eyes of disapproving authority, and he hadn’t come off unscathed himself.
    The old baronet had asked the young man how he might reward him. Cob, hurting badly from two cracked ribs and a ringing head, told the baronet he’d like a change of occupation.
    “And what might you be thinking would suit you, lad?” had asked Frederick’s father.
    “Well, sir, I’d ambitions to be a valet before I got talked into fighting.”
    “Valet? Valet ?” The tall dark-haired man with wide white wings of hair drifting back from his temples threw back his head and laughed. “Well, and so it shall be,” he said when he’d stopped. He’d taken Cob home, introduced him to his sixteen-year-old son and told Cob to take care of the boy.
    It was, mused Cob, one of the few good things the wicked old baronet had ever done. He and young Frederick had hit it off. And they’d been together ever since. He’d gone up to Cambridge with his charge, dragging the lad out of one sort of high jinks after another. And he’d seen the young man turn bitter after a petticoat affair when he’d just turned nineteen. Not that Sir Fred had a very high opinion of women before that contretemps, thought Cob—and with reason when one considered his willful selfish grandmother and cold, self-centered mother—but that