In the guardroom, Marwick had faced the jail keeper like a predator encountering a new species of food. His smile should have exposed fang. But once outside the prison, he seemed to withdraw into himself. He handed her silently into the carriage and then settled in a brooding silence on the opposite bench.
Olivia kept her eyes on the window, for she barely knew how to look at him. For four days she had nursed her anger toward him. But the moment he had stepped into her cell, her hard work had been undone. He had rescued her. How could she recover her resentment? She had wondered before what it would be like to have him as a friend. Now she knew it meant freedom—quite literally. The Duke of Marwick could pull a prisoner out of Newgate as easily as some other man might bully a beggar into ceding the sidewalk.
She gazed at the bustle of afternoon traffic. How odd that sunlight still shone. She felt as though she’d lived through a century or more of terror since walking into St. James this morning. She touched her cheek and found it hot and tender.
“Here.” He moved onto her bench, took hold of her chin, and angled it toward the window. The intimacy, the presumption, made her go still.
She could not quite forget how he had touched her in his bedroom. If he tried that again, gratitude be damned—she would punch him.
But after a moment, he released her and sat back. “Yes, quite nasty,” he said calmly. “Was it a baton?”
“Only a fist.” Only. She shuddered.
He remained on her bench, studying her. He was too broad shouldered, his legs too long, to share the space comfortably. His thigh pressed against hers; his knee came into her soiled skirts. She should mind it. For every inch she ceded him, he no doubt intended to take a mile.
But she rather liked the feel of his body against hers. It was not desire; she was too exhausted for that. But he was tall, strong, powerful; he would make a very good shield. A bodyguard . . . She caught her thoughts from wandering. He was no knight. But he’d rescued her from prison, so for the time being, she’d let him crowd her as much as he liked.
The carriage leaned into a turn. She glanced out and discovered the receding shape of Swan & Edgar’s. This was not the way back to his house. “Where are we going?”
“You’ll soon find out. They said you pulled my pistol on them. True?”
“Of course not.” She hadn’t known the police could be so vicious. She had been waiting for Bertram outside the bird-keeper’s cottage in St. James Park. The older policeman had walked up to her and struck her across the face. “They didn’t say a word. They didn’t even ask my name. They’d been watching me, staring for a bit, and I’d felt . . .” She laughed unsteadily. “Safer knowing they were there. And then, all at once . . .”
“Bertram must have given them some incentive.”
He believed her now? She felt a great relief come over her, weakening, like a plunge into a hot bath. “Yes, I think you’re right.” What sweetness to finally have someone who understood, if not the whole of it, then enough to see the blackest implications. Finally, she was not alone in glimpsing them.
But when she turned to him, his expression ended her relief. There was no sympathy in his face. No revelation, no understanding. He watched her the way a cat might watch a mouse hole: narrowly, with dark plans.
“What am I to do with you?” he said quietly.
She swallowed. “You might thank me. Were it not for me, you’d probably still be sitting in your bedroom.”
His mouth flattened. “How you do go on about that. But your entire campaign was designed to facilitate your theft. Is that not so?”
“It did . . . begin for that reason.”
He gave her a faint, mocking smile. “And then? Did my chivalry win you over?”
What could she say that he would believe—or that she would wish to admit? Against all reason, I grew to . . . care for you.
He would laugh his head off. Or worse, take it for another lie, and shove her from the coach.
“You stole from me,” he continued, his gaze level and unblinking. “Lied to me, defrauded me, pried through my possessions, which you then used to blackmail a peer of the realm. Would you not say this puts me in a difficult position?”
A strange prickling started behind her eyes. Goodness, was she going to cry? How mortifying. She put a hand over her face, hoping he would think it was simply the pain in her cheek that troubled her. “If you hand me over to him now . . .”
He made a contemptuous noise. “If I’d wished to do that, I’d have spared my shoes the prison mold. Tell me: why did you blackmail him?”
She dropped her hand. Let him look at her. Let him see she spoke the truth. “I wanted him to leave me alone. He has harassed me, hunted me, for seven years now. Once he hired—he hired an entire team of private investigators.” They had nearly caught her, too. She’d been three years into her first position, with the banker’s widow in Brighton. That had been the first time she’d fled in the night.
“Why? What does he want of you?”
“I have no idea! His obsession has never made sense. If I knew, I promise, I would tell you.”
“Then tell me this.” He settled back, bracing one elbow against the back of the seat, making himself comfortable. “Who is he to you?”
She bit her lip. They were drawing near the heart of a secret she had never spoken to anyone. “You must understand, the last time his man caught up with me, he . . . tried to choke me to death.”
His face darkened. “But you escaped.”
“Yes. I was lucky; I knew nobody here. I’d just arrived in London.” She had waited four days for Bertram to come to Kent for her mother’s funeral. Finally there had been no choice but to go forward without him. All during her mother’s long illness, she’d planned ahead: found the typing school, written for admission. Bertram had forbidden it, but she did not care. She was not her mother. Her life would not be shaped by his whims. The funeral concluded, she’d gone from the churchyard directly to the railway station.
On her arrival in London, Moore had been waiting on the platform. His Lordship wishes me to see you safely settled. And then, that ride to the hotel, which had transpired not to be a hotel at all . . .
“He tossed me out of the coach and left me for dead,” she said. “Seven years ago, now. That was the beginning of it.”
Marwick studied her, his vivid eyes unreadable. “And you truly have no idea why he pursues you.”
“No.”
“I told you not to lie.”
She shrank back against the window. “I don’t . . .”
“He’s your father. A small detail you’ve omitted.”
Her breath stopped. He knew?
“The resemblance is clear,” he said. “Once I looked for it.”
God help her. She pressed her forehead to the glass and closed her eyes. “I would rather resemble the devil. Perhaps they’re one and the same.”
“Tell me. What is your real name?”
“Holladay.” She whispered it. “It was my mother’s name.”
“The mother from East Kent.”
It surprised her that he remembered. She nodded.
“Olivia Holladay, whose mother hails from East Kent.”
He sounded as though he didn’t believe her. “Yes!”
“Are you certain?” His voice was cruel. “Are there any other names you’d care to share with me?”
She tried for an equally cutting tone, one that would slice through the knot in her throat. “I hadn’t imagined you the kind that enjoys kicking a dog when it’s down. How easy.”
For a moment, he did not speak. And then he said, “Look at me.”
On a deep breath, she opened her eyes. A single tear spilled. He reached out, grim faced, to wipe it away with his thumb. “You will be honest with me.” His voice carried no inflection. “You’re no dog. You’re hardly beaten.”
His words, in some twisted way, were almost kind. But his touch was not. He stroked her cheek again, roughly, brutally, as though that tear had been an offense against him. “We have a common enemy,” he said. “You were right about that. And I do mean to destroy him.” He paused, his thumb digging like iron into the top of her unbruised cheek. “But please note: I have not yet decided what to do with you.”
He watched himself touch her. It seemed impossible that her skin was so soft when the mettle beneath it was steel. The disjuncture angered him. It seemed proof that deception was at her very core, bred into her, as much a part of her as her eyes or her hair.
Why did she weep now? It seemed baffling, infuriating, that she wept here, in his coach, though she hadn’t in the prison. As though he were the villain.
He let go of her. The coach was slowing as they pulled into Brook Street. He kept a flat here—once used by his brother, now empty. It was well suited to his purposes.
She sat quietly beside him. If she still wept, she did it soundlessly. He would not look at her to check. She had a swollen cheek; that was all. It would heal.
“So you hate me now,” she said quietly. “How convenient for you. As though everything I did for you no longer counts, because I deceived you.”
He clenched his teeth. He had cause for hate. In his old life, he would never have forgiven her for her crime; his pride alone would have forbidden it.
But it was not pride that galled him now. It was her temerity. Her idiocy staggered him. Who was she? A lone woman. No family to protect her, to save her when she slipped. She was profoundly alone. And yet, despite the great risk to herself, the lack of any net to catch her, she had acted. What if he were another man? Any other man. A man whose pride had not been shattered so violently by his late wife that he no longer cared to guard it. If he were any other man, she would still be in Newgate. How much she had dared, with so very little by way of defense. That was what galled him.
“Fair or not,” he said flatly, “your fate is in my hands now. For as you saw today, you are powerless. And I am not.” Compared to her, his power was limitless. Did she not see that? How had she dared to go against him?
“That must be pleasant.” Her voice was bitter.
The coach stopped. “Come.” He opened the door and stepped out. She could find her own way onto the pavement.
But when she stumbled on the step, he cursed and took her by the forearms, lifting her safely to the ground.
She did not thank him, which was wise of her. The feel of her burned his palms. She should not feel so soft. She should feel like iron. He remembered the expression she had shown him in the garden, her face as he’d walked toward her . . .
He released her. “Follow me,” he bit out. He didn’t want to look at her.
Marwick led her through a discreet door set into a brick building not two hundred yards from Claridge’s Hotel. Wasn’t that where his wife had died? Olivia vaguely remembered Elizabeth mentioning it, having heard it from Lord Michael.
At the top of a narrow, creaking staircase, she stood aside so the duke could unlock a door. It opened into a simple bachelor’s apartment, two rooms sparsely furnished. The front room, which was larger, held a slim bed, one chair, a desk. The dressing table was covered in a thin film of dust. Nobody had lived here in some time.
Of course, Marwick probably had keys to any number of rooms across town. He owned a good portion of the city; she had seen the rental incomes in his ledgers.
“Sit,” he said.
Since he stood in front of the single chair, she took the bed. Her head pounded. Crying had not helped. Why had she cried? She wanted to kick herself. She was not weak.
His boots thumped hollowly against the floorboards as he walked to the window and latched the shutters. The room grew abruptly darker.
“Oh, look,” she said tiredly. “You’re returning to old form.”
“Fewer jokes would serve you better.” His boots thumped as he returned to sit across from her. “So tell me. In my place, how would you deal with this betrayal?”
Perhaps he meant to kill her.
No. She did not believe that. But the idea triggered an icy thought: perhaps he was reverting. He had been betrayed before, and it had made him deranged, for a time. Now, in his view, history was repeating itself. What cause had she to hope for mercy?
He had not saved her, after all. He had simply reserved her punishment for himself.
Bile burned her throat. She pressed her hand over her mouth, suddenly fearful that she would be sick.
“There’s a chamber pot by your foot,” he said. “Take care with your aim.”
She lunged for it. The violence of her illness left her weak and clammy. A washbasin stood in the nearby corner; she rinsed out her mouth and then sat back on the bed, breathing hard.
He came forward, his features clarifying. When he reached for her face she jerked her head away, but he would not brook refusal. He gripped her jaw, pulling it around. They stared at each other.
“Did you strike your head somehow?” He sounded bored. “Your pupils look even enough to me.”
She was glad for his hostility. It was simpler this way. If the past did not matter—if he meant to forget all of it—then she could forget, too. She needn’t feel any guilt for what she’d done. “I’m fine,” she said. “Let go of me.”
His hand dropped. He stood staring down at her. “I am going to give you a very simple choice.”
“How good to know I’ll have one.”
“Oh, you’ve already had choices. You could have chosen to stay in Newgate, for instance. Those documents were forgeries. You would have been called to trial for creating them.”
She blinked. “What? Forgeries? You forged them?”
His smile was thin as he took his seat again. “Bertram did—in collusion with my late wife. When, if, I ever used them, I was to be made a public fool.”
She pondered this for a moment. “So then I saved you from that as well.”
He leaned forward onto his elbows, nostrils flaring. “You paint a very rosy picture of yourself, don’t you?”
“And you paint a very black one.”
His eyes narrowed. “No matter. You will take the blame for them. You’ll be tried for fraud, forgery, and extortion. And I doubt the courts will treat you as kindly as they would have done me. That is one choice for you.”
He was trying to terrify her, and doing a very good job of it. She reminded herself desperately that his threats had always outstripped his actions. “And the other choice?”
“Obedience.” The word cracked like a whip. “Bertram has an interest in you. That makes you valuable to me.”
She exhaled. “You know that’s no choice at all.”
He crossed his legs and drummed his fingers atop his thigh. “Where is your fine grasp of precision, Miss Holladay? It is a choice. It simply isn’t one you like.”
He was punishing her. It was, from one view, only what she deserved; from another, he was even being generous. He could have left her to rot in Newgate.
But these were both views from his eyes. She was done trying to see his perspective. “What do you mean by obedience?” she asked. “What will you require of me?”
His smile mocked her. “Whatever the circumstances demand.”
She hesitated. “The circumstances of your revenge against Bertram, you mean.”
He followed her meaning. He took a very thorough, insulting survey of her body, head to toe. “What a deviant it would make me,” he said, “to demand that from you. Why, one might be forced to conclude that I had a particular taste for treacherous women.” He gave her a half smile. “It is possible.”
She gritted her teeth. On one thing, they would be clear. “I am nothing like your wife. I did not fool you for my pleasure. It had nothing to do with you, don’t you see that? Or are you too pigheaded and vain?”
“So you continue to protest. Very well.” He reached into his jacket and extracted a pocket watch that he laid beside him. “You have five minutes to tell your story. If I am satisfied, we will discuss the specific nature of my offer. And if I am not . . .” He made a soft click of his tongue, a preemptive chide. “The authorities don’t know the half of what you’ve done. In addition to forgery and extortion, there is also the matter of your theft from me.”
She stared at him. He had not managed to intimidate her when she’d been his servant. Why permit him to do so now? Her pride demanded better of her. “Not only that, Your Grace. You mustn’t forget my theft from your brother’s wife. I was her secretary—did you know that? All those letters, I stole from her. Indeed, in the interest of good relations, you should give her a chance to convict me, too. And perhaps Lady Ripton?” She would make sure he never blamed Amanda. “For I forged a reference from her. Yes, why not contact her as well?”
His pause suggested surprise. She took a ridiculous pleasure in it.
But then, with a shrug, he said, “Good. A piece of honesty; you are learning. Well, do begin your tale, Miss Holladay. The clock ticks.”
And he settled back, lacing his hands over his belly, looking for all the world like a very skeptical critic prepared for a second-rate show.
Five minutes to tell him everything. The challenge focused her—and revealed to her, with miserable clarity, how neatly her entire life might fit into a cliché: the cliché of the bastard child.
“Bertram met my mother when she was very young,” she began. “She was only sixteen when I was born. He installed her in a village called Allen’s End—that is where he kept her. Us, I mean. He has property very near there, but the cottage was rented from a local family.”
He remained silent, watching her. The light slipping through the shutters laid bars of shadow across his face, through which his eyes glittered.
He was not going to encourage her. Very well. “He and my mother were very happy when I was young.” She hesitated. “I was, too, I suppose.” The village lay on a tributary of the River Medway. With an apple tree to climb, a garden in which to hide, and the entire countryside to explore, Allen’s End had seemed a paradise to her. It had been her mother who felt the village’s scorn most keenly.
“He loved her,” she said. “He did, in those early years. And he must have been kind to me, for I have . . . dim memories, very dim, of calling him Papa. Being dandled on his knee.” She felt her mouth twist out of her control.
“What changed?” He spoke softly; she barely heard him. She did not like to think of Allen’s End anymore. The villagers had been kind to her as a child, but as Olivia had matured, they had begun to treat her with the same contempt they showed Mama. Like mother, like daughter.
How curious then to realize that her imaginary village, the place she would belong, looked so much like the place she had been desperate to leave.
She frowned into her lap. “What changed? He married, of course. That American woman.”
“The heiress to the Baring fortune.”
She nodded. “I remember his first visit, afterward. I knew something important had happened, for he brought me a present—not books or a new dress, nothing so ordinary, but a doll, a porcelain doll from Paris, the most splendid doll you could imagine. She had real hair, the very same shade as mine . . .”
She had always loathed the color of her hair. Some of the village children had called her Ginger-girl, which they had not meant as a compliment. But when she’d been little, Bertram had called her hair beautiful. The rarest and loveliest shade.
She shook her head. Bah. “The doll wore a miniature replica of a Worth gown, made by Worth himself. I can’t imagine how much it cost.” She shrugged. “I played with it for a few days. I adored it. And then I built up my courage and smashed it.”
Her wistful expression did something strange to Alastair’s chest. It contrasted so shockingly to the hardened courage she’d been attempting to embody before. “You smashed it?”
Her smile was thin. “I was only seven, but I knew a bribe when I saw one.”
He had an unwilling vision of her, freckled, knobby-kneed, her thin face terribly serious as she laid the doll she loved into the dirt and lifted a rock. “You must have had cause, then.”
“Well. By that time . . .” She sighed. He watched her closely. A concussion would make her sleepy. He waited, willing her not to yawn.
When she drew herself up again, he relaxed. Curtly she said, “She must have seen the notice of his marriage in the newspapers. From the very moment he arrived, as soon as he’d given me the doll, they began to quarrel. He left again to the train station that same night—I was so confused; he always stayed for a week at the least, and I’d been . . .” She grimaced. “Looking forward to it. But he was gone; and the next morning, Mama took me and left, too.”
“Because he had married someone else.”
She shook her head. “It makes no sense, I know. He stood to inherit a barony. She was a farmer’s daughter. He couldn’t marry her.”
But there was something brittle and bleak in her words that he did not like. “Love has made mésalliances for greater men than he.”
She hesitated, head tilting. “Did you love your wife, then?”
He took a long breath. “You must have a death wish. Is that it? How amusing.”
Their eyes locked. In the dim light, her skin looked so flawless that the effect was uncanny. She seemed made of porcelain, not flesh; too delicate, too breakable, the smattering of freckles only for verisimilitude. She must look very much like the doll she had smashed.
The notion made him strangely uneasy. He wondered if she had seen the resemblance. If she had felt, for a moment, as if she were smashing herself.
No child should have recognized a gift for a bribe. But he knew how wise children could become—his own parents had taught him such lessons, too.
“I think you did love her,” she said softly. “I think you would have answered the question very cuttingly, if you felt comfortable with your reply.”
Her audacity should not be able to surprise him any longer. But he still did not understand how she did this: how she shifted the balance of power between them so suddenly that he felt compelled to reply, to prove himself, to be accountable to her.
He had learned how to shift it back, though. He rose, crossed to the bed. As he sat down beside her, she froze.
“Too late for caution, Miss Holladay.” He reached out, slipped his hand beneath the heavy weight of her hair. It was coming down in pieces, as soft as he’d remembered; siren’s hair, the color of fire. He gathered up these locks into a mass so thick that his fist barely proved sufficient. He tugged very lightly, tilting her head back just a fraction. “This is how lambs are slaughtered,” he said. “Did you know that?”
Her eyes found his, wide, her lashes fluttering. He was terrifying her. Good. He needed to know he was still capable of it.
“You’d make a poor butcher,” she managed.
Brave to the end. He lost the stomach, all at once, for bullying her.
He loosened his hold, allowing her to relax into a more natural posture. “Why do you care if I loved her?” he asked. “Never say, Olivia, that you have developed an interest in me?” He stroked his thumb down the rim of her ear, hearing with satisfaction the shudder of her breath. “Something beyond your larcenous aims? Surely your mother’s example taught you not to aim so high.”
She jerked away, removing herself from his reach. “You do cruelty very well. Is that why your wife loathed you?”
He marveled at her. “You truly don’t know when you’re beaten, do you?”
“Am I?” She shrugged. “I haven’t yet finished my story.”
“But your five minutes are up.”
He heard her breath catch. And then she closed her eyes and bowed her head. “Fine,” she said quietly. “Do what you will.”
The bare patch of her nape riveted him. Such a vulnerable, tender spot. “What I will,” he mused. He tracked his knuckle down her throat, then traced back up to her chin. Gently, he nudged her face toward his.
She blushed, but did not open her eyes. “I feel nothing.”
“I see your face,” he murmured. “I see the lie.”
Her brow tightened. “You see nothing.”
“I see it all.” He slid his hand down her arm, feeling for the slim bones of her wrist. Her fingers curled within his, a reflex; her fingers hid from him in the cup of her palm.
He pried them out one by one, gently, for fingers were easily broken, and hers were too elegant to abuse. How curious: he’d imagined, a thousand times, what he might have done to Margaret had he uncovered her betrayals while she was alive. But never in any of those black fantasies had he imagined wanting to touch her like this.
This woman was not Margaret. The betrayal was not the same.
The revelation broke over him as gently as a breeze.
He lifted his hand to cup her skull. So strange to be able to compass it so easily. Odd, wrong, that all her vivacity, the force and passion of her, should be contained in such a small, neatly shaped head.
How much of his anger—for he was still angry, yes, only it existed, side by side, with fascination—how much of it was for her, and how much for himself? The things he saw in her now, even now—resolve; tenacity; determination; dignity . . .
If those things were true . . . if he separated them from her betrayal . . . how could he not covet them?
“So your mother loved Bertram,” he said. “And you believe I loved my wife. Does this mean you imagine us to be equal fools?”
A line appeared between her brows. “Mama wasn’t foolish. She was only . . .”
“Confused,” he said.
Her eyes opened. They stared at each other. Some sticky web seemed to settle around them, enclosing them in a lush, weighted silence. Here was confusion in its purest form: finding oneself magnetically attracted to one’s poison.
He smoothed her hair away from her brow. Her pupils still looked even. She was his responsibility now. Whatever happened to her, it would be his doing. “Do you still feel sick?”
She gave a small shake of her head.
“Excellent.” He leaned forward. Put his lips against her mouth.
She took a sharp breath. But she did not lean back.
He kissed her lightly, and then shifted so his cheek pressed against hers. He would be the author of her fate—not random chance; not an accident; not Bertram, or any other man. Softly he spoke into her ear, as his fingers felt down her spine. “When your mother left him. Where did she take you then?”
“Shepwich,” she whispered. “Where her . . . family lived.” He could feel how her muscles tried to tighten beneath his touch; how, with gentle pressure here, and a small rub there, he could make them unwind, and force her to check her sigh.
“What happened in Shepwich?” He rubbed his cheek against hers like a cat. Let her feel the scratch.
“It was . . .” She sounded breathless now. “Not a happy reunion.”
“Ah. They wouldn’t receive you?”
“They tossed us out.”
A sad tale, but hardly unusual. He took her lobe between his teeth, nibbled lightly. He licked it, and tasted the salt of her skin. “And so what did she do then?”
“We—went back—to Allen’s End. Must you touch me like that?”
He paused, his hand now at the base of her spine, his fingertips just brushing the swell of her buttocks. “How do you want me to touch you?”
He felt her swallow. But she did not speak.
“Do you want me to touch you?” he said.
A shudder ran through her. “I wish . . .”
“I don’t care what you wish,” he said. “I only care what you want.”
Her chest rose and fell on a deep breath. And then, very slowly, she lowered her face into the crook of his shoulder. “I wish I did not want,” she said very softly.
A savage triumph flooded him. He tightened his grip on her lower back to channel it. “And then. What happened then? After you returned to Allen’s End?”
“Nothing.” Her lips brushed against his throat as she spoke, and all his senses concentrated and collected around that single point. “But things were never quite right between them again. He visited much more . . . rarely. And when he came, they would spend their evenings in cold silence. I couldn’t understand . . .”
He closed his eyes, breathing her. “Why she went back to him?”
“No. She had no choice in that, really. I couldn’t—I still don’t—understand why he came back. Why he continued to visit, year after year. He was so . . . resentful. As though he had no choice in it.”
Her words were growing sluggish. He caressed her spine, long, soothing strokes. “Perhaps she had some compulsion over him. If we could learn what that was, it might prove useful.”
“I don’t know what . . .” She hesitated. “In fact, there is one thing—something she wrote, the last entry in her diary: The truth is hidden at home. But I never knew what it meant.”
He did not immediately reply. For as they sat here in silence, her weight against him, a strange feeling was swelling in him.
So he was not his father, after all. He battled wicked thoughts, dark urges; he would press himself on this woman very soon. But he was not his father. His father had never wanted any woman in particular. And Alastair only wanted this one. This was possessiveness he felt.
“We must go to Allen’s End,” he said. “Find out what your mother meant.”
But she did not answer. And when he eased away to look into her face, he realized she had fallen asleep, her head in the crook of his shoulder.
Olivia woke to darkness. Groggy, she listened for the chatter of the servants in the gallery, but heard instead the muted rumble of traffic, as though from a high street. Where was she?
The prison. She bolted upright. Marwick had rescued her! Where had he gone?
She spotted a dim line of light beneath the closed door that led to the back room. She stared at it, trying to collect her wits. She had not slept so deeply in months, it seemed.
The last thing she remembered was sitting with her face pressed into his skin. Had she fallen asleep like that? And he had not woken her . . .
A bittersweet longing flooded her. She braced herself against it with a long breath, and caught the reek of the mold in the prison.
The jug on the washbasin still held some water. She rose and silently picked her way to it. The water was not too cold. She wet a cloth and cleaned her face. But what of the grime beneath her sleeves, and under her petticoats? Bits of prison, reeking, still coated her skin.
Disgusted, she hauled up her skirts and swabbed clean her calves and knees. But it was not enough.
She glanced over her shoulder. No sound came from the next room. The light under the door did not flicker.
Quickly, she unbuttoned her bodice. During her time as an unhappy lodger in Mrs. Primm’s arctic boardinghouse, she had developed a talent for washing quickly. Her stays were fashioned for a working woman, and unfastened from the front. She placed them beside the basin and mopped her chest and arms.
Her back throbbed. She remembered falling onto it after the policeman had struck her. How long ago that seemed now. Weeks, months.
A particular spot troubled her, just below her shoulder blade. She twisted but could not quite reach it. Sweating from terror: she had not known such a thing was possible until those long hours alone in her cell—
A hand closed over hers. “Let me.”
She froze. Her stays sat discarded by the basin. She was naked from the waist up.
Where was the panic? Was she simply too tired for it? Or was it that this moment felt, somehow, inevitable?
He had threatened her. Yet she had fallen asleep in his arms, and he had laid her down to rest. How deeply she had slept. It was one thing to sleep alone, and another to sleep in the presence of a man whom she knew would allow nothing to happen to her—except for what he willed.
Perhaps she was the deranged one here. For she felt safer with him than she ever had on her own.
She opened her hand. He caught the cloth before it fell.
His first strokes startled her. There was nothing seductive in them. He cleaned her skin with firm, expedient movements, as though he were a nurse tending a patient, or a servant wiping a vase. When he found the sore spot beneath her shoulder blade, she made some stifled noise, and he paused.
“Hold on to the washstand,” he said.
“Why?”
The next moment she had her answer: his thumb found the spot and began to dig, rotate, massage.
Her head flopped forward. She bit back a groan. Under the pressure of his hands, her muscles unraveled, growing limp, pliant. “Why are you doing this?” she whispered.
“There is a Chinese proverb,” he said at length. “ ‘Save a man’s life, and you are responsible for him.’ ”
“So you feel responsible.”
He turned his kneading knuckles into her shoulders. “No more than you do for me.”
She felt a fleeting thrill. There was the admission she’d been pressing for. She’d had a role in his recovery. “I passed your test, then.”
Another pause. “I’m not sure the test was for you.”
His hands eased across her shoulders, skated down her arms, and closed in a warm, solid grip just above her elbows. His knuckles brushed so close to the sides of her breasts. They stood silently, breathing together, the water in the basin casting a ghostly reflection of their silhouettes. He loomed behind her, but she felt no fear. She felt . . . protected.
“Shall I let you dress?” He sounded meditative, as though thinking aloud, the question put to himself rather than her.
In the library, he had tried to prove to her that he was not a good man. She sensed his indecision now. The battle within him.
Perhaps she did not need him to be good. “Do you mean to help me with Bertram? I don’t mean murder,” she said. “He has children.” She tried never to think of them. She had let herself look up their names once in Debrett’s, and had regretted it ever after. “But do you mean to help me with him?”
In the pause before his reply, she heard the rumble of traffic on Brook Street, the jingle of tack. What time was it? She felt adrift in this strange, fraught darkness, pinned between the washbasin and his body, large and hard behind her. She did not want him to move away.
“It seems so,” he said.
She turned to face him. Here, in the shadowed corner, she could not make out his features clearly. But she faced the light coming through the shutters, and by his indrawn breath, she gathered that he could see something of her: her bare breasts; her squared shoulders; enough, at least, to make him gasp.
“You’re beautiful.” He sounded angry.
Had he sounded ardent, she never would have believed him. But his anger, she believed. She reached out and found his cheek, stroked her thumb along the corner of his mouth. His jaw hardened. He would never admit as much, but she recognized power when she possessed it—as she did now over him.
The revelation spread like an intoxicant through her. It fizzed in her blood. He was angry because he wanted her. Because he could not hurt her. Because he meant to help her, after all.
Why had he rescued her? Why had he not arranged to hand her back to the police? He knew her story now. She gave him no special advantage over Bertram. “I think you failed your test,” she whispered.
His hand came over hers, gripping her palm, pinning it against his rough cheek. “Don’t be so sure. You don’t know me, Olivia.”
“Don’t I?” Who but she could be said to know him, now? And what she had seen of him, what she knew of him—everything that nobody else did—was what he loathed. She understood him. Like Mama, he judged himself more harshly than anyone else ever would.
But she had never been able to abide dark moods—not in Mama, and not in him. She leaned forward and found his lips with hers.
A breath tore from him, hot against her mouth. He stood very still as she pressed her mouth against his. Tension radiated from his clenched muscles. His hands found her waist. Flexed there twice.
And then he dragged her into him, into a kiss so hot and deep that it felt like the resumption of something, rather than its beginning.
I agree with the radicals; I place no stock in virginity. She’d once said that to her friends at the typing school, taking private amusement in their shock. After all, it’s very easy to resist men, isn’t it? But managing to pick the right one—that is truly worthy of praise.
Nobody would judge this man the right one. He was fashioned after Byron’s own model: mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
But she knew him as no one else did. He was not the man he’d once been; he was the man that only she knew. And when he took her face between his palms and tilted back her head and pressed his tongue deeper into her mouth, questions of wisdom became irrelevant. She kissed him back, eager, ravenous.
In the library he had taught her about pleasure: how it was at once shared but also private, greedy, provoked by him but involving places known only to herself. She felt it again now, low in her belly, hot flutters that collected into a delicious weight, a hot pulse stirring between her legs. She put her hands over his where he gripped her face and felt the strength in them. She heard the soft sound he made, near to a sigh.
He had made that noise because of her. She smiled into his mouth.
He grabbed her wrists and bowed his head to kiss each one, like a vassal paying tribute. She watched him do so and felt, for a dizzying moment, taller than him, a presence larger and grander than her flesh could contain. By his own account, he had seen her, recognized her, as brave, intelligent, resourceful. And he wanted her, against his will. Yes, let him bow his head; let him admit to being conquered.
And then he flicked his tongue across her palm and she was pulled back into herself, abruptly a slip of a girl enfolded by his larger body, cradled against his hard chest, gripped by his muscled arms, this man who had swept her out of Newgate. And this, too, exhilarated her. She wanted his protection. She wanted all of him.
He walked her toward the bed. The mattress hit her thighs and she clutched his waist for balance, but he was prepared for this. Cradling her skull, he lowered her onto the mattress, then came over her, taking her in a long, hot, languorous kiss as he laid himself atop her inch by inch, the planes of his body sparking small shocks along her breasts, her belly, her thighs which he nudged apart and laid himself between. The heat of his abdomen, where his pulse beat strongly. The weight of his upper chest. He laid himself against her with leisurely, masterful care, as a master artisan might bring together the two pieces of a diptych.
He put his mouth to her brow and breathed against her for a ragged moment. “You want this,” he said hoarsely.
She opened her eyes. She knew how to listen to him; she could hear the question in his words. Braced on one arm, he hung over her, his face tense, urgent. She reached up to touch his cheek.
How sober was Alastair de Grey, the Duke of Marwick! How shadowed, how complex and inscrutable—like an uncut gemstone that, in odd lights, suddenly revealed itself clear and sparkling. The light was his hidden kindness, the goodness he tried so hard now to deny. But it flashed through his face as he beheld her. His expression softened.
“Do you want this?” he asked.
Olivia knew there was not, after all, anything so virtuous in decency. Certainly it would not give her greater courage. And according to him, she already had enough.
She stroked his cheek, which prickled from stubble. Vickers was an awful valet. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I do.”
He loosed a breath, then leaned down to take her lobe between his teeth, flicking it with his tongue as his hand roamed her body, butterfly touches that set off small tremors at her waist, the side of her breast, her throat. The pads of his fingertips brushed up her jaw. He outlined the slope of her cheek like a blind man reading braille.
Her own hands grew curious. She slid them over the angles of his shoulder blades to the small of his back. The rise of his buttocks was tight, ungiving. She turned her nails into it.
He made a sharp sound—between a groan and a gasp. He broke free of the kiss and laid his head into her throat, so his hair brushed against her chin. His ragged breathing heated her collarbone. “There’s a moment,” he said. “A moment . . .”
She slid her fingers through his hair, holding him there. In the distance, some cheap clock struck the midnight hour with tinny, hollow bangs. “A moment for what?”
He raised his head. “I loathed the spectacles,” he said, very low. His thumb traced her brow once. “They did hide you.”
She turned her face to kiss his wrist. An hour ago, a month ago, a year ago, he had been untouchable. And now, in the space of minutes, he was suddenly hers to touch as she liked. Who said life did not hold miracles?
His hand slid under the small of her back, nudging her up. “Come.”
She sat with his help, let him draw her to her feet. Robbed of support, her breasts felt heavy and loose. His lips parted as he looked at her. He ran his thumb across her right nipple, and a sound slipped from her.
He kissed her flat on the mouth. His hands slid down her body; he caught her skirts and lifted the dress off her, then untied her petticoats and lifted her out of them.
“My God.” He stepped back, gazing at her. “You were hiding more than your eyes . . .”
The wondering note in his voice made her flush. She sat back on the bed, and he nudged her all the way down. When he came over her again, the angle turned him into a featureless silhouette, like a figure from a dream.
Her dream-lover had hot, wandering fingers. They cupped her breasts, tested their weight. His thumb outlined her nipple, causing her to shudder; pleasure yawned open inside her, demanding she part her legs, push herself up toward him, so she might know once more what she had experienced in the library.
But he had other intentions. He lowered his head; his lips closed around her nipple, a shocking sensation. She heard the sound of his suckling, and it made her hotter yet. The softness of his lips, the wet heat—she gasped—of his tongue, the momentary edge of his teeth as he tested her liking for that . . .
What leapt through her was a pulsing, urgent demand; she grabbed his head, pulling it harder against her.
“I would spend a thousand years here.” His voice was rough. “Would you have me?”
“Yes.” Here was what she had forgotten to say, what she had needed to say all along: “Yes, yes, yes.”
But it became a lie the moment he began to suckle her again, for she realized that this would not satisfy her; a wildness was running through her now, spreading her hunger across a dozen different places, all throbbing, all in need of his attention. Her mouth, which needed his tongue, and the place deep in her belly, which was heavy and full, the place between her legs that felt too empty, throbbing with need. She groped him blindly, like a mountaineer in the dark, looking for the places that would progress this journey. She massaged the muscled bulk of his upper arms, pressed roughly down his flanks—
He sat up and shrugged out of his jacket. Off came his waistcoat; his suspenders, his shirt. She had seen his bare chest before, but now she could reach out and press her palm against the rippling planes of his belly, and feel them contract as he drew a sharp breath. He caught her hand, bit her fingers lightly, sucked them deep into his mouth; his eyes found hers, and the flick of his tongue, the grip of his lips, felt like a wicked promise. He licked down her palm and bit her inner wrist. “Patience,” he said, and only then did she realize that she had said Please.
His trousers came off next. She was so much bolder than she’d guessed; she sat up to help, and their hands stumbled over each other. He laughed, and his clear exhilaration struck her as sweet and marvelous, and she laughed, too.
He was beautiful. His legs were long and lean, his calves tightly knit, his thighs shelved with muscle. She ran a wondering hand up the length of his quadriceps, feeling the hair, so much coarser than her own. Her hands paused at his hipbones, beneath which a notched indent angled down on either side to frame that part of him that would shortly concern her most. He had given it a name, in the library.
Holding her breath, she laid her hand over his cock.
He hissed, and then—when she tried to draw away—caught her hand and held it there. He showed her how to stroke him, this length that felt impossibly hard. Yet the skin was so soft.
As she explored him, he reached between their bodies to find the spot—precision; she had read of the term—her clitoris, pressing and rubbing in a way that concentrated, suddenly and fiercely, all the vagrant pulses of desire into a single aching demand. The part of him that she gripped suddenly felt like an answer. She understood now.
He came over her then, and positioned himself, pushing into her with one finger, and then another. She arched beneath him, and then his fingers were replaced by a larger, harder pressure, for a brief moment painful, and then filling her completely.
Stunned, she lay beneath him, looking up at him in the darkness, uncertain of what to do.
He put his forehead to hers and began to move.
It was, from that first thrust, more than she had imagined. For it was not simply the smell of him, the weight of him, his grip as he held her in place, the strength of his hips, which ravished her.
It was everything intangible that had allured her before—the intensity of his looks, his uncannily sharp perceptions, his cleverness, intellect, and power. When he thrust too deeply, and she winced, he noticed it; he began to move more shallowly. When the angle of his hips struck a strange, queer spot that made her whimper, he heard it, and repeated the move, until her fingers began to scrabble across his back, and animal noises came from her throat. His intangible qualities became the talents with which he made love to her. Even his cruelty ravished her: she felt it in the demand his body made of hers, this steady, incessant, thrusting possession.
She felt herself balanced on a strange, wild, intoxicated laugh: And you think I do not know you? She was enveloped by him—possessed in a way only she would understand. And he knew her; she was seen and known by him. This ravishment was a joint production, she and he together.
She surrendered to it. He was whispering words to her, his cheek pressed to her temple, and the words were hot and vulgar, and what they were doing was hot and vulgar, and so was she. She felt wild with his assault, and voracious, desperate for it never to end. For with each sharp movement of his hips he was striking some place deep inside her that swelled and twisted and tightened. It was stronger, more frightening, more wonderful even than what had happened in the library. He was going to break something in her and the shattering would be worth how it destroyed her, for this mounting desperation had to be satisfied; it must be—
For a desperate minute she lingered on this awful, wondrous edge, hearing noises from her own mouth that she did not recognize, that he drank as though they were ambrosia and he starving; and then he began to whisper to her, an instruction she could not follow: “Come,” he said. “Take it. Come, Olivia.”
The convulsion seized her: her greediness made incarnate, inner muscles gripping him, demanding more, more—and then . . . at last . . . releasing her from the frenzy, leaving her limp, boneless, replete.
He groaned, long and low, and then gathered her to him. She kissed his shoulder, salty from sweat. He murmured something. “Sweetness,” he said. He stroked her cheek as they lay together, in the darkness of the room.
The clock chimed half past twelve in tinny tones.
He wanted to say something. But the words eluded him. His voice would shake if he spoke. He would say something he later would regret.
He stroked her arm, hoping she might read into his touch whatever a woman might need to know, to hear, in such a moment, after such a . . .
Such an event? That was not the word for it. He could think of no word for what had just passed between them. Sexual congress was clinical; it described only the mechanisms of body parts. But what had just occurred seemed to involve his soul. He felt lighter. He felt unburdened of something.
He put his face into her nape. The smooth length of her back pressed against his chest; she adjusted her hips, the soft flesh of her buttocks easing away from him a little. He resisted the urge to pull her hips back into his. He breathed deeply, and the scent of her stirred him—a stirring that against all odds promised to build. He would be ready for her again very soon.
He angled his face so her hair brushed along his forehead. He imagined it was her hand, smoothing his brow.
A man who had been married should know his bodily capacities. But he could not compare this with that. This woman with Margaret. The two women, the two experiences, were so profoundly unalike that they did not seem even to belong in the same category. What other explanation could there be for why he should feel so awkward now, so profoundly naked, in a way that transcended by far the bareness of his body?
He was not sure he liked it. He should be done with uncertainty. God above, was there not a time, finally, when a man was done with surprises?
But this surprise was . . . sweet. It was sweeter than he had the will to name.
He looped his arm around her waist, then held his breath as her hand tentatively covered his own.
Whom did she think she grasped in the darkness? That man whom the newspapers had heralded? Or the man who had gripped a pistol and spoken of murder? But the hand she now held belonged to another man entirely: one who felt, all at once, like a green boy.
Perhaps this confusion was renewal. He was relearning himself. And here, in this bed, his first lesson in this new life was so extraordinary and unexpected that better did not describe it.
She rolled to face him. He could not resist the urge to stroke her hair from her brow, for she would not do it to him, and the longing, strangely, was as well satisfied this way, with him doing it for her.
Her eyes were dark pools, her face a blur. “I had never . . . done that,” she said.
“I know.”
Her breath whispered out, a hot rush across his chest. “I should have asked beforehand.” She spoke so softly that he could barely make out the words. “It is . . . important to me . . . not to be with child. Not like this.”
He understood. From her halting words this afternoon, he knew that she had cause not to wish bastardy on another soul. “I did not spill inside you. Do you understand what that means?”
Her head jerked—a clumsy nod. “That I’m safe. Yes?”
And as simply as that, compassion twisted through his heart.
What was he doing, taking her to bed? This brave, unlikely girl who did not know when she was beaten . . .
He eased off, putting space between them—no wider than a finger’s width, but too wide for his body’s liking, for his greedy cock, which already had stiffened again. “You’re safe,” he said quietly. “On the morrow, we go to Allen’s End.”
She turned into his arms, then. Her head settled in the crook of his shoulder. He held still, unnerved. Her weight on him felt like the physical manifestation of guilt. And then, as she sighed and nestled more deeply into him, it began to feel like something else entirely, much more dangerous.
She lay with trust against him. She fit perfectly beneath his arm.
This meant nothing, he wanted to warn her. This was for my own pleasure. I have promised you nothing. I am no man to make promises, anymore.
But he could feel from the limpness of her body that she had fallen asleep again, and these words seemed no way to wake her.