Free Don't Bargain with the Devil by Sabrina Jeffries Page B

audience.
     
“He’s a magician, you ninny,” said another girl. “They can divine people’s thoughts.”
     
“No, we cannot,” he said dryly. “And any magician who claims otherwise is only lying to get your money. I merely have a good ear for accents. When I was young and entertaining the regiments in Spain and Portugal, I met men from all over. I trained myself to notice how their speech reflected their origins. It has proved a useful talent for a conjurer.”
     
“When lying to get people’s money, you mean?” Lucy said archly.
     
Curse the woman—she knew exactly how to try his temper. “I am neither a cardsharp nor a thief, Miss Seton.” Though he had briefly been both.
     
“Forgive me,” she said without sincerity. “I didn’t mean to imply that you were.”
     
No, she had meant to imply that he was the devil. His role as villain already began to pall. He had always considered himself honorable, even while doing things to survive that he had not been proud of. He was not the sort of man to open a pleasure garden next to a girls’ school, even one belonging to the hated English.
     
It gnawed at him that he must pretend to do so.
     
The girls let out a loud cry.
     
“What?” he asked, startled from his ill humor.
     
“You’re to hold still, which includes your expression,” Lucy reminded him. “No frowning. Or smiling, for that matter.”
     
“Ah. Beg pardon,” he bit out, resisting the impulse to point out that she’d been the one to provoke him into a frown.
     
She seemed to provoke him into many unwise things. Such as talking about Villafranca. He hadn’t meant to chatter on about the town of his birth like some old man reminiscing about his youth.
     
He had only fallen in with her questions about Spain so he could determine if she had indeed been on the road to La Coruńa with the Forty-second Regiment, as the marqués had speculated. When Diego and Gaspar had first begun to fix on her as their quarry, they had been perplexed to discover that the colonel had retired from theSeventy-third Regiment, not the Forty-second. They had finally decided that he must have purposely changed regiments to cover his tracks.
     
Until she had spoken of the retreat to La Coruńa, however, it had not occurred to him what it meant that she had been there at age four. How strong a little girl she must have been to survive deprivations that had killed sturdy members of the British army.
     
He could tell that the memories pained her. If she did prove to be the marqués ’s granddaughter, Diego might have to take a horsewhip to that colonel for having dragged her through such horrors, when she should have been at home being coddled by her true parents.
     
Leave it to the British to think themselves impervious to cold and hunger, to count on being able to take what they wanted from whoever dared to—
     
He gritted his teeth against the memories. He could not change what had happened to his family, but at least he could set to rights what the damnable British had done to her. A pity that Dońa Catalina and her husband, Don Álvaro, had both died a few years after their daughter’s abduction. But if Lucy did prove to be Dońa Lucinda, she would at least be reunited with her grandfather, who would make her the sparkling jewel of society that she deserved to be.
     
Diego started to change position, then remembered it was not allowed. This modeling was none too comfortable. His left leg had gone to sleep, and his back throbbed. He tried shifting his leg, but the girls howled a protest. Dios Santo.
     
Lucy began to look smug. No wonder she had agreed to his proposal so readily. She did like to torture him.
     
“Ladies,” she said primly, “since Seńor Montalvo grows restless, we ought to entertain him. Why don’t you tell him about our school? That is why he’s here, after all. Each one of you can say why your parents wanted to enroll you and what you like best about it.”
     
Diego groaned. Lucy had leaped into saving her