Chloe knew the exact moment Lord Gordon saw and recognized her as she and Benedict entered one of the main salons. His eyes widened and then narrowed on the fact they had their arms about each other, as Julius Soames had suggested they should.
Having ascertained where Lord Gordon was in the room, Chloe now kept him on the edge of her vision rather than looking at him directly.
“We need to separate now,” she told Benedict softly as she allowed her arms to drop to her sides. “It will give Lord Gordon the opportunity to approach me.”
Benedict’s jaw tightened. “I am still not happy about this. If anything should go wrong—”
“I have every confidence you will not allow that to happen,” she assured, giving a loud and false laugh as she stepped determinedly away from him, as if he had just said something highly amusing. “You—”
“Can’t say as I’ve ever seen you here before, Winter,” Lord Gordon spoke sharply. “I’ve always heard it said you preferred to give the ladies your…attentions behind the scenes rather than publicly,” he added scathingly.
Chloe flinched at his implication, drawing her bottom lip in between her teeth to stop herself from speaking as she slowly watched Benedict turn, his gaze glacial as it swept over the older man.
“Had you indeed?” The coldness of Benedict’s tone did not invite further comment on the subject.
“Yes.” Lord Gordon did not back down in the slightest, his expression challenging.
Neither did Benedict. “My interests here have previously only been of a medical nature. But Miss Brown is so delectable that for once, I found myself unable to resist.”
“Miss Brown, is it?” the older man taunted with a contemptuous sweep of his gaze over Chloe’s gaudily clad body and the rouge and pigment upon her lips.
“My, my, are you telling me there is a lady at Club Venus whom you have not bedded?” Benedict scorned. “She looks very like the maid that a week ago you claimed did not work in your household, don’t you agree?”
Lord Gordon narrowed his gaze on him. “As that maid does not exist, I would not know what she looked like.” He reached out to take a painful grasp of Chloe’s arm. “If you will excuse us, Winter.” He didn’t so much as glance at him. “You have had your time with this—Miss Brown.”
Chloe gave Benedict a glance that pleaded for not only his silence but also his restraint. She breathed a sigh of relief when, hands clenched at his sides, he heeded it. The nerve pulsing in his jaw and the vein throbbing at his temple said he found it far from easy to stand and watch as Lord Gordon dragged her along behind him to the hallway where the private rooms were situated.
“All will be well, old friend.”
Benedict’s gaze remained fixed on Chloe’s departing figure as Julius Soames stepped up to stand beside him. “There is a danger murder might be committed before this night is over, with Gordon as the victim.”
Julius placed a placating hand on his arm for several seconds. “James is with the solicitor inside the wall space, which will allow them to locate whichever room Gordon takes your Chloe to, and then they can listen in. As soon as Gordon has incriminated himself, we will see to having him arrested.”
“What if he does not do that until after he has hurt Chloe?” Benedict muttered bleakly. “And she is not my Chloe.”
“Oh, I believe she is, as you are hers,” Julius drawled. “Both of you just need to be patient for a few more minutes and then, hopefully, all this will be over.”
He scowled darkly. “It is the ‘hopefully’ part of that statement which concerns me the most.”
“It will be over, Benedict,” Julius repeated firmly. “And in the manner we wish it to be. In the meantime—”
“In the meantime, I intend to join the solicitor and James and listen in on the conversation.” Benedict strode off without giving his friend a second glance.
Chloe would be lying if she claimed not to be concerned by the anger emanating from Lord Gordon, along with the violence that might result from that anger. Especially once they were alone.
But she also had confidence in Benedict and his friends to step in and save her if it became necessary. As it might very well do if the vicious glitter in Lord Gordon’s eyes was any indication once they were alone in one of the private rooms.
Except they were not really alone. Chloe had been shown the walk space behind the wall, knew that there were peepholes too so that anyone in the space could look in as well as hear the conversation within the room. The space had originally been incorporated into the structure of the building during a much earlier century than this one, but it now served the purpose of protecting the women who chose to work here.
“Lord Winter, hm?” Lord Gordon taunted.
“Is that his name?” she mused. “He did not reveal it during our…liaison.”
Lord Gordon’s top lip curled back as his gaze swept over her with complete contempt. “If I had known of your…proclivities, I would have put you to work in a brothel myself. As it is, you not only now seem to have found your proper place in the world, but you also look like the slut that you are. Like the slut your mother was,” he added harshly. “She would open her legs for any man who smiled at her too,” he sneered.
Chloe’s hands clenched so tightly that her fingernails dug into her palms. She willed herself not to respond as she wished to and slap this man’s bloated and overindulged face. “I somehow doubt that. But the important thing,” she continued as he would have spoken, “is that she did not smile nor open her legs for you. Now I believe you said you had something you wished to talk to me about?”
That vein at his temple throbbed more noticeably. “Do not take that defiant tone with me, young lady, or I will give you cause to regret it.”
“By administering another one of your beatings for some imagined misdemeanor?”
He nodded sharply. “One such as you have not yet known. I do not appreciate you having necessitated me chasing over half the city searching for you, only to find you here, of all places.”
“You did not do this chasing personally, it would seem,” she drawled.
He huffed out an irritated breath. “I have better things to do with my time than waste it looking for ungrateful young chits who do not know when they are well off.”
“Well off!” Chloe repeated incredulously. “You kept me locked away in a room in the attic, with barely enough food to sustain me. You would beat me without provocation and then beat me again whenever you decided I had erred in some way. I could not rise from my bed for a week the last time you whipped me.”
He snorted. “You do not seem to have suffered any lasting ill effects.”
Chloe shook her head. “I do not understand why it is you seem to dislike me so much when all I have asked is that you treat me like the step-niece I am to you.”
His nostrils flared. “You are also Niamh’s daughter, born during her marriage to my stepbrother.”
She eyed him curiously. “Why do you hate them so much?”
“I hated her,” he corrected harshly. “My stepbrother was merely another besotted fool who fell under her Irish spell. You are her twin in looks.”
“If you felt this way, why did you not let my Aunt and Uncle Bayliss take custody of me two years ago?”
“I have already told you it was their choice. Not only do they hold you responsible for your parents’ deaths, but they did not want a penniless orphan living in their home and eating their food either.”
Chloe drew in a sharp breath at what she now knew to be this bitter man’s deliberate cruelty. Her aunt and uncle did not hate her, nor was she penniless. Her inheritance was something else this man had deprived her of.
“Did you always hate my mother?” she probed.
She was certain that her parents’ solicitor had already heard enough to know of the deceit practiced upon him by Lord Gordon in regard not only to her still being alive, but the cruelty with which she had been treated by her so-called guardian in the two years since.
The questions she asked now were for herself.
Lord Gordon currently appeared to be fighting an inner battle. He finally gave up as the vitriol poured from his lips. “Niamh showed herself to be an ungrateful chit when she refused my proposal of marriage,” he bit out contemptuously.
Chloe was stung into defending her mother. “She was everything that was kind and gentle.”
“She was an idiot who later fell in love with and chose to marry my younger but untitled and much poorer stepbrother.”
“Which proves my point of her not being in the least contrived or mercenary,” she maintained stubbornly.
“Do not talk back to me, girl, or I’ll make sure you regret being alive,” he warned harshly. “I warned Gerald against marrying her, but he wouldn’t have it, always maintained their love for each other was and always would be enough. Well, I might have had to wait almost twenty years, but I am certainly the one who has had the last laugh, because after they both died, I could do as I wished with their beloved and overindulged daughter.”
Chloe’s heart clenched at this reminder of how much her parents had loved her. “Such as lie to me, starve me, and whip me whenever you felt so inclined.”
“Yes, all that,” he confirmed without apology. “I found it especially gratifying when I could imagine that it was Niamh I was starving and beating.”
Chloe gave a shudder. “I cannot believe my parents would ever have left my guardianship to someone as wicked and cruel as you. Nor can I imagine my parents having left me completely destitute and so at your mercy.”
“There was no money, just the burden of you,” he sneered. “And in return for my generosity, you have behaved the ungrateful wretch.”
She gasped. “For what have I been ungrateful? Being locked up by a sadistic monster—” She broke off as Lord Gordon’s hand hit the side of her face with such force, she was almost knocked off her feet.
Chloe thought she heard a gasp from behind one of the walls, but she concentrated on staying out of Lord Gordon’s reach as she cradled her painful cheek. “You are a monster,” she repeated defiantly. “And I shall thank God every day that my mother was wise enough never to agree to marry you.”
“You ungrateful little bitch.” He glared his dislike of her. “Perhaps I should just leave you here?” He glanced at their surroundings. “It will give me great pleasure to think of the men here pushing your legs apart and taking you, again and again, night after night—” He broke off when the door behind him burst open, his eyes wide as Benedict strode purposefully across the room, an expression of thunder upon his handsome face as he grasped the older man about the throat.
He used that leverage to drag Lord Gordon back until he had him pressed up against the wall with his feet dangling several inches above the carpeted floor. He thrust his face close to Lord Gordon’s. “You may thank your step-niece for the fact that I am not currently beating you to within an inch of your life, you worthless piece of—” He broke off to draw in a long and steadying breath. “You will shortly be going to prison, where it is to be hoped that your fellow prisoners, most, if not all, having led a far less privileged life than you, will subsequently make your time there a living hell.” He allowed the older man to slide down the wall far enough he now stood on his tiptoes.
“On what charges will I be sent to prison?” the older man managed to bluster past that hold on his throat.
“A claim of unlawful guardianship and theft of that child’s inheritance after illegally declaring her dead,” another man voiced quietly.
Lord Gordon tilted his head so that he could look at the somberly dressed gentleman standing near the doorway, and next to him, Julius Soames and Jimmy. “I recognize Andover, but who might the two of you be?” He glared at them.
Jimmy straightened to his full height of just over six feet. “I am Lord James Metford.”
“Any relation to the Earl of Ipswich?”
Chloe could see Jimmy fighting an inner battle with himself before he released a determined breath. “I am the Earl of Ipswich.”
Lord Gordon snorted. “The last I heard, that title belonged to Adrian Metford.”
“The last he heard too,” Jimmy acknowledged scornfully before he glanced at Benedict. “I have decided to correct that error at the earliest opportunity.”
Benedict could see from the determined light in Jimmy’s eyes that the younger man aimed to do much more than that, and that his reason for doing so was Benedict’s sister, Beatrix.
“I will come with you,” Julius Soames offered. “In the meantime… Mr. Glover, I believe you have more to say on our present situation.”
“Glover,” Lord Gordon echoed sharply. “As in Glover, Glover, and—”
“Eccles, yes,” the solicitor confirmed. “I was the legal representative of your stepbrother and his wife, and subsequent to that, your step-niece. The step-niece you informed me, and produced a death certificate to confirm it, had died in the same accident as her parents. In view of Miss Gordon’s presence here tonight, I take it that death certificate you produced for me was counterfeit and you had procured it for illegal purposes?”
“Prove it,” the older man spat.
The solicitor stared at him coldly. “Presenting a false paper as evidence your step-niece was dead is illegal and has serious consequences. As does your unlawful imprisonment of that niece within your home. And the acquisition of her inheritance with that same false death certificate.”
Gordon’s face went white, then took on a grayish tinge, as if it had finally dawned upon him that his past and present actions could, and would, result in him serving a long prison sentence. “She is a willful and disobedient child and—”
“Chloe is not a child,” Benedict snapped. “Nor, where you are going, will she be any of your concern.”
“You— I— She—” Gordon leveled his vindictive gaze upon Chloe. “Your mother was a harlot who lured my brother into—” His words ended abruptly as Benedict, no longer able to tolerate the older man deliberately hurting Chloe, landed a punch upon the shorter man’s jaw.
His eyes rolled to the back of his head, the blow having knocked his head back against the wall behind him, before he slowly slid down to land on the floor in a crumpled and unconscious heap.