The Secrets of a Courtesan Read Free Page B

to
    acknowledge that when he had first seen Eve in the Market Square he had felt all the old
    emotions of desire and lust and longing as strong as they had ever been and searing in their
    intensity. He had been told himself then that the memories, the hold she had had over his senses,
    would never be permitted to cloud his judgment. That resolution had lasted all of five seconds.
    He had seen her and he had wanted her with a hunger all the more acute for the years of denial.
    But his business with Eve was precisely that—business. He was here on Hawkesbury’s behalf to
    ascertain her connection to Warren Sampson and to use her, coldly, ruthlessly, to get to Sampson
    so that the man could finally be arrested. That was his goal, no more, no less.
    “I strongly suggest,” he said, “that you do as I ask.”
    For a moment Eve stared at him, those glorious lavender eyes wide and blank and he wondered if
    she had even heard him. Then an expression of fury came across her face.
    “You bastard!” she said, picking up a very fine silver hairbrush from the desk in front of her and
    throwing it at his head. “How dare you come here and threaten to take away from me everything
    that I have worked so hard for?”
    Rowarth caught the hairbrush absentmindedly in one hand before it made contact. He had always
    been good at cricket. Eve was looking absolutely furious, her piquant face flushed and her
    breathing quick and light. But it was more than anger he could see in her face. It was
    desperation. There was so much passion and rage in her voice that for a moment the principal
    emotion he felt was admiration that she was as strong as a tigress in defending the things that
    mattered to her. Memory stirred again; when she had been his mistress he had given her money
    and had been puzzled when she appeared to have spent it all on nothing. When pressed it had
    turned out that she had given it all away to feed and clothe urchins living on the streets. Rowarth
    had protested at her generosity and Eve had turned on him, saying that he was spoiled and
    privileged and could not understand—all true, of course, for how could an Eton-and Oxfordeducated duke ever understand what it was like to struggle to survive? Most dukes would not
    even care. They had argued passionately and then made love even more passionately and she had
    lain in his arms and at last confided the truth in him.
    “I did not know my parents,” she had said, her head against his shoulder, her hand resting over
    his heart, “and I was cold and hungry and afraid more times than I care to remember.” There had
    been a faraway look in her eyes, as though she were seeing far beyond the walls of her
    bedchamber. “If I can spare even one child from suffering as I did then that has to be for the
    good.”
    Rowarth had felt humbled, made to look beyond the comfort that had shielded him since his
    youth to another more painful existence. He knew that Eve had chosen to become a courtesan
    only because she had seen it as a way out of such stark poverty.
    “I was pretty,” she had once said lightly, “so I used it to escape.” But he knew those words hid a
    wealth of bitterness.
    “It is only the rich who can afford moral scruples,” she had once flashed at him when he had
    commented on the hanging of a youth for the theft of a loaf of bread and he knew that she had
    felt the same way about the choice she had made in selling herself.
    Or he had thought he had known her until she had betrayed him.
    But that was in the past and nothing to the purpose now.
    He put the silver hairbrush on the desk. He suspected it was part of a quantity of stolen goods
    that Hawkesbury had said Warren Sampson was almost certainly laundering via Eve’s
    pawnbroking business. Which brought him back to the matter in hand.
    “You are working with Warren Sampson to pass on stolen goods,” he said. “He runs a
    housebreaking gang that robs property across the county and then his accomplices bring