Much Ado About Rogues by Kasey Michaels Page A

along. You want praise from the man, Tess? I’ll tell you something he told me. You should have been born the son.”
    Tess smiled ruefully. “How very like him. Every compliment has a hook on the end, one that digs straight into the flesh. Praise for me, at the expense of my brother. We were in a competition, weren’t we? One of my father’s deliberate making. The winner gets to collect for him. I think I’m going to be sick.” But then she rallied, as another question struck her. “Did you…did you steal with him?”
    Tess knew what he’d done before coming to the manor house. How he’d played at cards, played at highwayman, played at most anything, running wild and angry, always searching for something, never knowing what that something was. Never knowing if he was running toward something, or away from himself. The bastard who belonged nowhere.
    Sinjon must have thought the gods had personally delivered Jack Blackthorn to him.
    Jack shook his head. “He said I wasn’t quite ready, and that robbing a few coaches for a lark wasn’t the same as what he needed from me. He said I’d never experienced joy of the sort I’d know when the prize was much more than some silly matron’s gaudy diamond necklace. The prize was one thing, and worth any danger, but the joy of the acquisition itself, knowing what you had in your hand was now yours and yours alone, was worth more than anything else. But first I had to learn a few rudimentary things about antiquities, gain an appreciation for them so that I’d treat them with the care they deserved as I was…acquiring them.”
    He’d told her most of it now, but there was more. “I thought I’d found a home, Tess, a real purpose in government service. Sinjon had saved me from myself, and you’d given me a reason to believe I didn’t have to be alone. Once he’d told me his secret, I knew my duty was to turn Sinjon over to the Crown. Yet how could I do that, knowing it would destroy you and René? Selfishly, I put off making my decision until we’d completed the Whitechapel mission. I shouldn’t have waited, and I’ll never forgive myself for that.”
    “Whitechapel. Where René died. And I sent you away anyway. But you never reported Papa to the Crown. Why?”
    “Sinjon was already seventy or more, or at least that’s the most he would admit to—definitely past climbing through windows or outrunning any pursuit. Without me, or someone like me, his collecting days were over. He’d lost. He’d lost his youth, his son and, when I walked away, his last chance at revenge. Because of you, I promised him I wouldn’t turn him over to the Crown, but that if he went back to his old ways I wouldn’t be held to that promise. And if he tried to recruit you, I’d know, and I’d kill him. He knew I meant what I said.”
    “And he believed you,” Tess said quietly. “I would have.”
    “He was a broken man when I left, Tess. I’d like to think the errors of his ways, and what those errors had cost him, had finally come home to him. Instead, the need for revenge must have been eating at him ever since.”
    Tess shook her head. “Revenge? You mean on France, for what happened to my mother. But that was all so long ago.”
    And here it was, the moment he’d been dreading more than any of the others. He’d never wanted her to know this particular truth.
    “No, Tess. What I’m speaking of now has nothing to do with France or the war or any attempt to restore the monarchy. I doubt it ever was really about any of that, not for Sinjon. It was always about enlarging his collection. And remember this—he was already more than fifty years old when he came to England. I wasn’t the first pupil he trained to do his bidding. There was another, before me. An exceedingly apt and eager pupil, and quite ambitious. They worked together for years. Until the student, who saw profit where Sinjon saw beauty, eventually betrayed the mentor, striking out on his own, hiring out his