The Duke of Paris (Tales from the Grand Tour Book 1) Read online

“Solange,” she whispered, breaking from Marshall entirely and ducking her head out of the alcove.

  Marshall peeked out with her. They both spotted the unmistakable figure of Solange dashing into a stairwell. The rest of the cousins were nowhere in sight.

  “Do you still think she’s not suspicious?” Marshall asked in a slightly breathless voice.

  “We don’t know what she’s doing or where she’s going,” Dorothy argued, hating the idea that Marshall might be right. In her heart, she still didn’t think Solange could be the one who was blackmailing them, though.

  “There’s only one way to find that out,” Marshall said. He stepped fully out of the alcove, taking her hand and tugging her along with him. “We follow her.”

  Chapter 7

  It wasn’t until Marshall led Dorothy out of the Louvre and toward the busy Rue de Rivoli that it dawned on him they were behaving ridiculously. The wrath of Asher McGovern was certain to rain down on them as soon as they returned to the rest of the group. He was already persona non-grata with Asher after his escapades the other night, and any further wrong turns would only make things worse. He paused as they stepped out of the archway separating the Louvre complex to the street, contemplating putting an end to their mission, admitting he was behaving like a fool, and returning Dorothy to the bosom of her cousins.

  “There she is,” Dorothy gasped, gripping his arm tighter.

  She pointed off across the crowded street to the unmistakable, retreating form of Miss Solange Lafarge. The young woman moved at a quick pace, glancing this way and that furtively, as though she expected to be caught and dragged to the Place de la Concorde and marched up the scaffold to the guillotine at any moment.

  “She’s up to something,” Marshall said, shifting his grip to take Dorothy’s hands and start off in pursuit of her.

  “I hope she’s not in trouble,” Dorothy said as they ducked and dodged their way around fellow tourists, young men and women hawking silly trinkets to unaware foreigners, and dirty children who appeared innocent until they rushed passersby to pick their pockets. Mingling with them were people of every color, speaking in every tongue and with every accent known to man. The Paris street was a hodge-podge of ethnicity and excitement, which only served to make Solange’s retreat easier for her.

  “Don’t let her out of your sight,” Marshall said as they joined a crush of people waiting to cross the street.

  Dorothy stood on her tip-toes to look over the heads of the people around her. “I won’t. I don’t want her to be hurt.”

  Marshall glanced sideways at her, doubt pulling at the corner of his mouth. He admired her optimism and her good nature, but he still wasn’t certain about the young lady’s maid. He hadn’t suggested her guilt to Dorothy earlier because of her nationality or the color of her skin, but because she had been acting damn suspicious from the start. Why would someone hired as a companion hang back from the group, from the woman whose job it was for her to accompany? Why would she take the first opportunity to steal away and dash through the Paris streets, as though she knew where she was going.

  “She’s trying to hail a cab,” Dorothy gasped as they reached the end of a block and were forced to wait for the street to clear so they could cross. “If she gets one before we catch her, we’ll never know where she’s going.”

  “We can’t let that happen,” Marshall said.

  He pushed ahead when the crowd surged across the street, his gaze fixed on Solange. The woman had apparently caught the attention of a cabbie, who was working to pull his carriage to the side of the street toward her. Marshall gripped Dorothy’s hand harder and tugged her aggressively through the crowd.

  Within a few steps, he ran smack into a gentleman several inches shorter than him. The impact sent them both reeling and caused him to lose hold of Dorothy’s hand. She fought against the current of people to stay close to him and reached out to help the man Marshall had impacted. He was portly, his features unremarkable, and he wore shabby clothes with a dusty bowler hat.

  “I beg your pardon,” Marshall said politely as he set the man on his feet. “Please excuse me.”

  “Certainly, your grace,” the man said in perfect English. His smile was just a bit cocky, and he touched the brim of his bowler hat as Marshall moved on.

  Marshall grabbed Dorothy’s hand once more and practically ran to the corner of the street where Solange had been standing. She was no longer there. Instead, the carriage that had driven in to pick her up was pulling back into the busy street.

  “Damn,” Dorothy hissed, causing Marshall’s brow to shoot up. She turned to him with an indignant look. “Well, what do you expect me to say when we’ve missed our opportunity?”

  Marshall’s lips quirked into a grin. Every time he was tempted to think Dorothy was a sweet and innocent flower that he had mercilessly plucked and squashed, he was reminded otherwise. And for that reason, he couldn’t let the pursuit end there.

  “We’re not done yet,” he said, marching right out into traffic and reaching out to hail a cab.

  Immediately, a driver steered his carriage toward Marshall, far faster than anyone had pulled over to pick up Solange.

  “Can you follow that cab?” he asked, pointing to the retreating back wheels of the cab now carrying Solange.

  “Pardonnez moi?” The driver blinked at Marshall.

  Marshall sighed impatiently and glanced to Dorothy.

  Dorothy stepped forward and rattled off, “Nous devons suivre cette voiture. Il est essentiel que nous l'attrapions.”

  A look of understanding and urgency spread across the driver’s face. “Cette voiture?”

  “Oui. Nous devons nous dépêcher.”

  “Oui, madame.”

  Marshall wasn’t entirely certain of the heart of the exchange, but within moments, he was piling into the carriage, and a moment after that, the driver set off in pursuit of Solange.

  “Your French is perfect, I assume,” he said, settling himself on the seat of the rocking carriage and catching his breath as Dorothy did the same.

  “Far from perfect,” she laughed breathlessly. “Damien and I might not have had any money, but growing up, we were admitted to all of the lessons that Asher and his sisters had. The boys went off to Eton as soon as they were old enough, of course, but the girls stayed behind with French tutors, Italian tutors, German, history, mathematics—”

  “Mathematics?” Marshall’s brow flew up.

  She sent him a sideways look. “Our grandmother had distinct opinions about the importance of education for women.”

  Marshall’s grin grew as he studied her. The more he learned about the entire McGovern clan, the more he realized why they’d all had to leave England en masse. They clearly loved spending time together, but the amount of trouble they had the potential to cause was legendary. At least for the time being. And the more he watched Dorothy in action, the harder he fell for her.

  The carriage pulled them along through busy streets filled with shoppers, tourists, and Parisians of all kinds. He and Dorothy glanced out the windows as much as they could to get an idea of where they were going. It didn’t take Marshall long to wonder if following Solange and bringing Dorothy along, as strong as she was, was a good idea. They headed north along increasingly colorful streets, out of the districts where polite tourists did their sightseeing and straight into Montmartre.

  “I’m not sure this is the place for a lady,” Marshall said when the carriage drew to a stop at last and rocked a bit as the driver stepped down.

  “Why?” Dorothy asked, frowning in puzzlement and glancing out the window. The infamous red windmill of Charles Zidler’s new Moulin Rouge cabaret stood out in bold color against the drabber buildings around it. “Have you been to this place before?”

  Marshall cleared his throat and scooted to the carriage door, opening it before the driver could and stepping down to offer Dorothy a hand. “Yes,” he said, feeling himself blush but leaving it at that. He’d spent far too much of his time at the cabaret and the surrounding “businesses” since arriving in Paris, a fact that now brought him nothing but embarrassment.

  That embarrassment was, thankfully, short-lived as Dorothy stepped down from the carriage and immediately spotted Solange.

  “She’s going into the place,” she whispered, squeezing closer to Marshall, as though she could hide behind him, should Solange think to look around her and spot them.

  “Then I suppose we go in as well,” Marshall said.

  He took Dorothy’s hand and rushed toward the doorway. He’d only been there in the evening before, but it wasn’t much of a surprise for him to find the place as lively and loud in the middle of the afternoon.

  The Moulin Rouge had been in business for less than a year, but it was already a focal point of Paris’s pleasure district. As Marshall and Dorothy dashed into the main auditorium, searching for signs of Solange, they were blasted with buoyant music, swirling colors, the scent of perfume and sweat and smoke, and ribald laughter and cheers. On a stage at the front of the room, a row of women were dancing the can-can, a brand-new dance that the cabaret had invented.

  Dorothy stopped short at the sight of the women kicking up their legs, ruffled skirts in the air. “Oh my,” she gasped, pressing a hand to her chest, her eyes wide.

  “This really isn’t the sort of place a fine woman should be seen in,” Marshall said, clearing his throat as one of the women on the stage winked at him. He wasn’t certain, but he thought perhaps he knew her from one of his drunken and debauched evenings. “Maybe we should return to the Louvre.”

  “No,” Dorothy answered a little too fast and with too much excitement. “This place is wonderful.” A moment later, she blinked her wide eyes, blushed, and turned to Marshall, saying, “I mea
n, we’ve come all this way, so we must find Solange and make certain she’s safe.”

  “Make certain she isn’t selling more photographs to gossip rags, more like,” Marshall muttered under his breath, grateful there was too much noise for her to hear him.

  Solange had to be there somewhere. Marshall had seen her slip into the cabaret. And if she was there, she might spot them before they spotted her. Which prompted him to nudge Dorothy to one side, against the wall, where they could stick to the shadows and observe the cabaret’s goings on without too much danger of being seen themselves. The trouble was that more than a few other couples seemed to have similar ideas about watching without being seen. Every few feet, they stumbled across couples in intimate embraces, lips joined as though they didn’t have a care for where they were or who saw them. One particularly amorous couple in the shadiest of corners seemed to be engaged in blatant intercourse as the woman bounced on the man’s lap.

  “That’s it,” Marshall said, tugging Dorothy to a stop and pulling her back toward the door. “We’re not staying here.”

  “There she is,” Dorothy hissed, stopping his efforts to preserve whatever was left of her innocence.

  Marshall followed to where she was pointing. He spotted Solange in the back of one of the boxes at the edge of the room, opposite where he and Dorothy stood in the shadows. She was speaking to a heavily-painted older woman, and by the look of things, she appeared to hand the woman some sort of small, folded paper. The woman, in turn, twisted and scanned the other boxes before pointing to one at the back of the room. Marshall was willing to bet that Solange had just paid the woman for some sort of information. As soon as the woman left, a deep, bitter scowl pinched Solange’s features as she pressed her back against the side of her box and stared at whatever the woman had pointed out.

  Marshall turned to try to figure out what Solange was staring at simultaneously with Dorothy. The auditorium had several boxes, like any theater, for the cabaret shows. Not all of them were filled at so early an hour, but there were enough patrons to leave Marshall wondering who Solange was searching for. He entertained the idea for a moment that Solange knew he and Dorothy were following them and that she had paid to discover their whereabouts, but within seconds, he discarded that notion.

  “Who is she glaring at like that?” Dorothy asked, as quietly as she could above the din around them.

  “I was just wondering the same thing,” Marshall answered.

  He narrowed his eyes and studied the boxes. There was only one that fit into Solange’s line of sight. A pair of gentlemen sat there, looking more involved in the conversation they were having with each other—an argument or perhaps a negotiation of sorts, by the look of things—than the show of petticoats and legs on the stage below. One man was close to Marshall’s age, finely dressed, with brown hair that would have been nondescript except for the man’s undeniable attractiveness. Something itched at the back of Marshall’s mind, like he knew the man but was seeing him out of context and therefore couldn’t place him. The other man was older, with a harried look and pointed features. Marshall wished he knew for certain who either of them were. As it was, they were strangers, which made him feel useless.

  “We have to try to intercept Solange before she does anything,” Dorothy said, grasping his hand and starting forward.

  Marshall was surprised by her taking the lead, but went with her all the same. She ignored the amorous couples as they traced their steps back toward the door to the lobby, still trying to stay in the shadows. He kept his eye on Solange as they moved, and when Solange pulled away from the corner of her box and disappeared, he urged Dorothy to speed up.

  “She has to come this way,” Dorothy said when they reached the lobby. She glanced to the two staircases on either side of the gaudy space, as if unsure which one Solange would come down for a moment, then started toward the one on the left. “We can catch her before she leaves and ask what the trouble is.”

  “If she comes out this way,” Marshall said doubtfully.

  “Where else would she go?” Dorothy asked, glancing over her shoulder to him as they climbed the stairs.

  His face felt even hotter than it already was. “There are more than a few exits to the Moulin Rouge,” he admitted. “Some of them lead to back alleys, but some lead to—” he swallowed, “other parts of the building.”

  “Then we’ll go to those other parts.” They reached the top of the stairs and the beginning of the corridor that ran behind the boxes. “We have to find her and help her.”

  “Dorothy.” Marshall pulled her to a stop before she could rush off to check every box. Who knew what she’d find if she did that. She twisted to face him with a questioning look. Marshall let out a breath. “This really isn’t the place for a woman like you.”

  Dorothy pursed her lips and frowned at him. “As you’ve said, but I disagree. It’s where I am in my attempt to find out what’s wrong with a friend.”

  “Solange might not be your friend,” Marshall argued, one brow arched.

  “She is,” Dorothy insisted. “I don’t care what you think of her, I’ve gotten to know Solange since she began working for Cousin Roselyn. She isn’t capable of hurting this family, or of any criminal activity at all. She is not the one who is blackmailing us, I’m certain of it.”

  “I’m not,” Marshall said. “And I’m not afraid to tell you as much. But you saw the sorts of things that were going on downstairs. The women on the stage. They’re not merely actresses and dancers. They are for sale.”

  “And you would know this because?” She planted her hands on her hips and stared hard at him.

  Marshall let out a breath and rubbed a hand over his face. “Because up until the moment I met you, I was only in Paris to enjoy activities like the ones on offer here. I’m ashamed of that now. I cannot believe I let the darker side of my nature get the better of me.”

  “You were grieving,” she said.

  That simple statement stopped Marshall’s thoughts in their tracks. The last thing he expected was for her to understand. His heart swelled in his chest, knocking against his ribs. “Most women would be disgusted.”

  “I’m not most women,” Dorothy said with a sigh. She raised a hand to rub her forehead. “You keep saying that this isn’t the place for a woman like me, but I don’t know what kind of woman I am.” She stared earnestly at him. “I know who I’ve been told I should be. I am the granddaughter of a duke. I have expectations on my shoulders. I know what I am physically capable of being as a woman at the low end of a notorious family, with hardly two shillings to rub together. I know that I am devoted to my brother and would do anything to keep him safe. But beyond that….” She shrugged, glancing around at the garish decorations and dim lanterns that coaxed shadows from the corners around them. “Who knows who I would have been if one or two elements of my life were missing? I might be dancing on that stage right now. I certainly succumbed to your charms quickly enough.” She abruptly looked down, sweetly embarrassed. “Though I suspect that was motivated by something entirely different.”

  “You are not like the women here,” Marshall insisted, surging into her. He slipped his arms around her, holding her close. “You are not a whore simply because you feel something. And you are not worthless because your father left you with nothing. You are bold and brave and vibrant. You care about your friends more than most women in your position would. And you make me feel as though redemption is possible, as though a few, petty mistakes are not the ruination of my life. You are wonderful.”

  He couldn’t contain himself for a second longer. With the full force of passion born in the core of his heart, he kissed her, molding his lips against hers for a moment before parting them and sliding his tongue against hers. He pressed his hand into her back, wanting to be as close to her as possible. And she kissed him in return, sighing deep in her throat and slipping her arms around him. It was every wonderful thing he ever could have dreamed of, all the acceptance he had craved for his entire life. His heart felt—

  “Hey! Qu'est-ce que tu fais?”

  Marshall jumped as though someone had splashed him with ice water. The heavily-painted woman who had taken money from Solange marched down the hall toward them, shaking her head in irritation.