She liked David, and she’d continued on friendly terms with him, but he enjoyed drinking and dicing to the point of debauchery. His love of the political game was the only thing that kept him from pursuing his vices into oblivion, and Eleanor feared what would happen to him when the political game no longer held his interest.
“If you can tear yourself away, Mackenzie,” Fleming drawled, “I have Neely in my coach. I’ve done as much as I can, but I need your touch to bring him in. Shall I tell him to return at a better time?”
Eleanor watched Hart change from the wicked young man she’d been in love with to the hard, passionless politico Hart had become.
“No,” he said. “I’ll be right down.”
David took a few steps forward, face coming into the light. “Good God, that’s Eleanor.”
Hart scooped Eleanor from the railing, and she landed on her slippered feet, skirts falling decorously back into place.
“I know who I am, Mr. Fleming,” she said as she snatched up the fallen shawl.
David leaned against the wall below, brought out a silver flask, and took a drink. “Want me to beat on him for you, El? After we land Neely, of course. I need Hart for that. I’ve had a devil of a time getting him this far.”
“No need,” Eleanor said. “All is well.”
She felt David’s keen, dark stare on her all the way from the ground floor. “I love to hate him,” he said, gesturing at Hart with his flask. “And hate to love him. But I need him, and he needs me, and therefore, I will have to wait before I kill him.”
“So you’ve said,” Eleanor answered.
Eleanor did not look at Hart as she went down the stairs, but she felt his heat behind her. David put away the flask, took Eleanor’s elbow when she reached the last stairs, and guided her the rest of the way down.
“Honestly, El,” he said. “If you need protection from him, you tell me.”
Eleanor stepped off the final stair and withdrew from his grasp. “Do not bother about me, Mr. Fleming,” she said, flashing him a smile. “I am my own woman, and always have been.”“Do I not know it.” David heaved an unhappy sigh and lifted Eleanor’s hand to his lips.
Eleanor gave him another smile, withdrew, and hurried back to the ballroom with the shawl, never looking back at Hart. But she felt Hart’s gaze on her, felt the anger in his stare, and hoped he would not take out that anger on poor Mr. Fleming.
David Fleming’s coach was ostentatious, like himself. The prim Mr. Neely, a bachelor of Spartan habits, looked out of place in it. He sat upright, his hat on his rather bony knees.
“Forgive the coach,” Fleming said from the opposite seat as Mr. Neely glanced about in distaste. “My father was avaricious and flamboyant at the same time, and I inherited his fruits.”
Hart, for his part, couldn’t catch his breath. Having Eleanor warm in his arms, she looking up at him with absolute trust, had crashed into him and made everything else as nothing. If Fleming hadn’t interrupted, Hart would have taken her tonight. Perhaps there on the stairs, with the possibility of one of the guests looking up and seeing them rendering it doubly exciting.
His hardness had deflated a bit when David had called up the stairs, but thinking about Eleanor on the railing, her foot sliding up to his backside, was making it rise again.
Pay attention. We throw the net over Neely, and he brings in his dozen staunch followers, wrenching them away from Gladstone. We need him. Fleming was right to fetch me—he’s too decadent for Neely’s taste.
The reformed Hart Mackenzie, on the other hand, who rarely touched a woman these days, could win over a prudish bachelor. Nothing like a rake who’s seen the error of his ways to excite a puritan.
Neely gave David a disapproving look as David lit a cigar, leaned back, and inhaled the smoke with pleasure. David rarely bothered controlling his appetites, but Hart knew that David had a razorlike mind behind his seeming depravity.
“Mr. Fleming believes he can purchase my loyalty,” Neely said. He made a face at the smoke and coughed into a small fist.
David had nicely primed the target, Hart saw. “Mr. Fleming can be crude,” he said. “Put it down to his upbringing.”
Neely gave Fleming an unfriendly look. “What do you want?” he asked Hart.
“Your help.” Hart spread his hands, the words coming easily to his lips while his body sat back and craved Eleanor. “My reforms, Neely, will strike to the heart of matters dear to you. I hate corruption, hate looking the other way while human beings are exploited in the name of enriching the nation. I’ll stop such things, but I need your help to do it. I can’t work alone.”
Neely looked slightly mollified. Hart knew better than to appeal to him by promising gains of power or wealth—Neely was a well-off, upper-middle-class English gentleman with strong ideas about one’s place in society. He disapproved of David’s wild lifestyle and Hart’s vast estate, but he didn’t condemn the two men entirely. Not their fault. Hart was a duke, David the grandson of a peer. They belonged to the aristocratic classes and couldn’t help their excesses.
Neely also believed that the duty of the higher classes was to better the lot of the lower classes. He wanted them to remain peasants, of course, but happy and well-cared-for peasants, to show the world at large that the English, at least, still practiced noblesse oblige. Neely would never dream of drinking a pint “down at the pub” with a coal miner or hiring a Cockney pickpocket to be a valet to his brother. But he’d certainly fight for better wages, lower bread prices, and less dangerous working conditions.