Regency: Rogues and Runaways: A Lover's Kiss / The Viscount's Kiss. Margaret Moore

inclined his head in return. “Try to be kind to Miss Bergerine, Cicero. She’s a remarkably intelligent, resilient young woman.”

      “I appreciate Miss Bergerine’s merits,” Drury replied, although perhaps not quite the same way Buggy did.

      Unless she had kissed him, too.

      “Then act like it. You can start by telling her you’re sorry,” Buggy said, leaving that parting shot to bother Drury until he could no longer concentrate on the case he would soon be defending.

      Because Buggy had a point.

      Later that afternoon, Drury walked into the small conservatory at the back of Buggy’s town house. The large windows allowed in plenty of light and a host of plants, several of which had come back to England with the young naturalist, thrived there even in winter.

      Although he’d never asked, he’d often wondered if Buggy had brought back exotic species of spiders to go with the plants. Today, however, seeing Juliette sitting on a little wrought-iron chair near some huge, palmlike monstrosity of a fern, he forgot all about Buggy’s plants and his area of expertise.

      In a gown of soft blue fabric, her thick, shining hair with a blue ribbon running through it coiled about her head, Juliette looked like a nymph or dryad sitting quietly among the vegetation—until it occurred to him, from the way she held her head in her hand, one elbow on the chair’s arm, that she also looked sad and lonely.

      As he had felt so many times, before the war and after.

      For her sake, he hoped she was right and her brother was alive. He also hoped that he could help her find him. There could never be anything lasting between them—their worlds were far too different—but he would feel finding her brother as excellent an accomplishment as saving an innocent from hanging or transportation.

      Although he’d been quiet, Juliette must have heard him. She lifted her head and regarded him with those bright, questioning brown eyes.

      He, who could so often predict what a man or woman might say in the witness box, who could read volumes in the movement of a hand or blink of an eye, had no idea what she was thinking. She was as inscrutable as he always tried to be.

      He decided to waste no time, so got directly to the point.

      “I’m sorry about the wager, Miss Bergerine, and I regret causing you any discomfort. I assure you, it will not be repeated.”

      “Lord Bromwell was very upset with you,” she said.

      Why had she mentioned Buggy? Drury still couldn’t decipher anything from her expression or her tone of voice. “Yes, I know. He came to see me in my chambers before he left for Newcastle and made that very clear.”

      “So now you apologize.”

      He couldn’t really claim that he would have apologized to her anyway. “So I have.” In for a penny, in for a pound. “I’m also sorry I wasn’t here to make the introduction. It wasn’t my intention to leave that to Buggy. I went to see a man who’s going to Calais for us. I worked with Sam Clark during the war. He’s from Cornwall, and his family have been involved with smugglers for years, so he has a lot of friends on the docks there. If anyone can find out if that really was your brother in that alley, or if he boarded a boat for England, Sam can.”

      She rose and came closer, and as she did, he wondered why he had failed to notice how graceful she was.

      “In that case, all is forgiven,” she said. “Besides, Monsieur Gerrard is a nice young man. I did not mind being introduced to him.”

      Allan Gerrard was a forward, overreaching young man, and Drury didn’t care to discuss him.

      Juliette lifted a spade-shaped leaf belonging to a plant he couldn’t identify, although Buggy surely could. Buggy, who obviously liked her a great deal.

      She ran her fingertip along the leaf’s spine, then its edges. “The men who attacked us—they still have not been found?”

      Drury tore his gaze from her lovely fingers and clasped his hands behind his back. “London is a large city, with many places to hide. Such a search can take time, even for MacDougal and his men, and the Runners, too.”

      She strolled past him, her hand brushing another plant. “So we shall have to enjoy Lord Bromwell’s hospitality a little longer.”

      “Yes.”

      She turned to face him. Women were often intimidated by him, or intrigued; rarely did they regard him as if they had something serious to discuss. “Have you ever thought, Sir Douglas, that the people who attacked us might have been hired by a woman? One of your former lovers, perhaps?”

      No, he had not, because it was ridiculous. “I highly doubt that. My lovers have all been noblewomen—married noblewomen who have already provided their husbands with an heir, and who have had other affairs. I’ve not ruined any happy homes, imposed my child in place of a true heir of the blood, or seduced innocent girls. And all the women whose beds I’ve shared have understood that ours was a temporary pairing, nothing more. I can’t think of one who would be jealous enough or foolish enough to hire ruffians to attack us.”

      Juliette continued to regard him those shrewd, unnerving brown eyes. “You sound very certain.”

      “I am.”

      “Perhaps you are right, but such women also have great pride, and a woman’s pride can be wounded just like any man’s. I can easily believe such a one could be so mad with jealousy she would want to hurt you. That she would be so angry you ended your liaison with her, she wouldn’t hesitate to do you harm, or hire a man to do so. And she would despise the woman she believes took her place in your bed.”

      “They all understand the way of the world,” he argued. “Ladies do not commission murder, and certainly not over the end of a love affair.”

      Juliette’s eyes widened with genuine surprise. “You believe that because they are rich and noble they are not capable of jealousy, or anger when an affair is ended? That they are finer, more noble creatures than men? If so, you should work for a Bond Street modiste. You would soon see that these ladies, for all their birth and finery and good manners, are capable of great spite and maliciousness. Some take huge delight in doing harm.”

      “With words, which is a far different thing from planning murder.”

      And far, far different from delivering the fatal blow oneself, as he had.

      He forced those memories back into the past where they belonged, to focus on the present and Juliette, who was shaking her head as if he were pathetically stupid.

      “A jealous or neglected or thwarted woman may be capable of anything, whether to try to win back her beloved, or to punish him. If you think otherwise, you are truly naive.”

      Nobody had ever called Sir Douglas Drury naive, and after what he’d seen of human nature in his youth and childhood, during the war and at the bench, he truly didn’t think he was, whether about women or anything else. “None of my lovers would do such a thing.”

      “Then you are to be commended for choosing wisely. Or else they didn’t love you enough to be jealous.”

      He had to laugh at that. “I know they did not, as I did not love them.”

      Juliette’s brows drew together, making a wrinkle between them, as she tilted her head and asked, “Has anybody ever loved you?”

      Her question hit him hard, and there was no way in hell he was going to answer it. She was too insolent, too prying, and it made no difference to the situation.

      “Have you ever loved anyone?” she persisted, undaunted by his scowling silence. “Have you never been jealous?”

      Up until a few days ago, he would have answered unequivocally no to both questions—until he’d been saved by an infuriating, prying, frustrating, arousing, exciting Frenchwoman with a basket of potatoes.

      Nevertheless,