The envelope felt remarkably fat for a reference. Sitting at the window that overlooked the garden, Alastair squeezed it, tested its weight. It must enclose five sheets at the least.
Jones hovered in the doorway, stiff and quivering in his black tails. “It was all in order, Your Grace.”
“I’m sure it was.” He glanced up. Jones looked far plumper than he recalled. Perhaps that was where the five pounds of truffles had gone.
He smiled to himself. After his housekeeper had fled yesterday—if he’d not guessed her a virgin beforehand, he certainly knew her to be one now—he’d stood in front of the mirror for a minute, looking at himself.
The haircut was truly awful. But it was also undoubtedly an improvement—one that she’d fought very hard to win.
Why? He could not understand it. Nothing about her made sense. She was too young, and far too uppity, and . . . natively sensual, though she did not know it. For weeks now he’d felt her lingering glances. Only yesterday had he realized the cause for them. His housekeeper found him attractive.
Women had always admired his looks. What a strange thing to recall—and to be startled by, in remembering. Once he had known how to charm a woman. But this man, the man he was now, barely remembered his own flesh. It was a thing to ignore or to punish . . . until the moment when his housekeeper’s hands had begun to wander across his shoulders.
She had cupped his arms, stroking lightly, as a blind woman might feel a shape in order to envision it. She’d appalled herself, of course.
“If you b-but read the reference,” Jones stammered—he’d been quite abashed, explaining how he’d come to promote a maid to the lofty role of housekeeper—“you will understand, I hope, why I felt so bold as to hire her. Her Ladyship speaks quite highly of Mrs. Johnson’s abilities.”
“Yes.” Alastair stared at the envelope. Read it. That had been the point of summoning Jones, after all. Mrs. Johnson’s educated manner, her peculiar effronteries, her inexplicable determination to rehabilitate him, her touch . . . well. All of it combined had finally awakened his curiosity.
He opened the flap, conscious of a brief burst of dread.
Margaret had written so many letters. The moment he’d thought he’d collected all of them, more had trickled in. Others probably still waited in cubbyholes across town, destined one day to undo him. Letters had come to represent a great evil to him. How could they not?
But as he unfolded this reference, its neat script set him at ease. And a vision flashed though his brain, of his many piles of unopened correspondence. How absurd it suddenly seemed—that because Margaret had abused several sheaves of innocent paper, he’d become unable to look upon any others.
“Ripton,” he said as he read. The viscount’s wife had written this reference; she claimed to have employed Mrs. Johnson for some time. “When did he wed?” Alastair did not know the viscount; the man had taken his seat in the Lords and never returned. He was more devoted to business—no doubt by necessity; his family was full of wastrels and troublemakers, who must cost him a pretty penny.
“Recently, Your Grace. Very recently, I should think.”
And yet the viscountess spoke of her housemaid with the glowing familiarity of a long acquaintance. “So with whom did Mrs. Johnson serve, before Lady Ripton’s marriage? Who are the viscountess’s family?”
The floor squeaked as Jones shifted his weight. “Ah . . . it slips my mind, Your Grace. I will need to consult Debrett’s for that information.”
While Miss Johnson certainly is knowledgeable and skilled in her application of waxes and polishes, I think her potential sorely underused by such a position . . .
This was no ordinary reference, but a hagiography. Olivia Johnson was dedicated, selfless, and possessed of any number of unlikely skills: Shorthand. Typing. Mathematics. She was a past master of etiquette, an excellent hand at planning dinner parties (with a particular talent for the design of floral centerpieces), and an irreproachable manager of complex correspondence.
He snorted. Perhaps his housekeeper was older than she looked. Or perhaps hypnotism also numbered among her talents, and the viscountess had written this letter in an obedient daze.
“Jones, tell me—” Alastair glanced up and found his butler beaming at him. “What is it?”
“Oh—” Jones straightened his face. “Nothing, Your Grace.” But then the smile twitched at his lips again.
“You’re smirking.” Startled pleasure wisped through him. It seemed his ability to read faces had returned wholesale. “Speak your mind.”
“Forgive me, Your Grace. Only . . . it’s so marvelous to see you taking an interest.” Jones bowed low. “Pardon me; the remark was inappropriate. I most humbly beg your forgiveness, I can’t imagine what came over me—”
Alastair lifted a hand. “No need.” No need to pretend, or to dance around the subject: for the last few months, he had not been . . . present.
And now Jones looked like a cat in the cream, for he imagined . . . what? That the old routine had resumed? That now he would be butler again to England’s brightest hope?
Ignorance, they said, was bliss. It was what came afterward—the shattering revelations—that wounded so mortally. He would let Jones wallow in ignorance for a little while longer.
He rose. Jones made a stumbling retreat, all the way into the sitting room.
For God’s sake. His housekeeper was right: his entire staff seemed shocked whenever he moved, as though they imagined him incapable of it.
“Where is Mrs. Johnson now?” This reference had cleared up nothing. She seemed to him all the more baffling in light of it.
“Downstairs, I believe.” Jones was wringing his wrists. “In the study. Sorting through your . . . correspondence? She assured me that she had your permission.”
Downstairs.
He smiled blackly. Very well. He was not a child. He could send for her, yes. But let the servants see that he could not only rise from a chair, he could also—O holy miracle—descend a staircase.
He strode through the sitting room. The door opened into the hallway without argument. Indeed, it swung open so easily that for a moment he hesitated, stupidly surprised.
The butler’s slightly labored breathing announced how closely he followed. Only Jones’s presence behind him forced Alastair out.
The hallway smelled of wax and flowers, like a church before a funeral. He refused to draw it too deeply into his lungs.
Familiar furnishings lined the path. A lacquer vase full of roses. The bust of his great-grandfather. Oil paintings of past battles, distant victories of empire. An easy walk. A short trip. Downstairs, so simple.
The thick carpet absorbed his footsteps. Why did this seem so difficult? He had chosen to stay in his rooms; he had not been trapped there. Why was his chest constricting? He reached out to touch the bank of windows overlooking the street, and the chill of the glass startled him, yanked him to a stop.
These windows had been warm when Margaret died. For months after her passing, he had paced their length. At night, they had glared like blank eyes, blinded by the darkness outside. Anyone might have stood concealed in that darkness, watching him.
And what might that onlooker see, but a fool whose bliss had been borne of ignorance? His achievements had been flukes, happy accidents. His defeats had been deliberate, engineered by his wife.
How cleverly she had schemed against him. She should have been the politician. He’d often told her so, by way of praise for her advice. Now he knew so, by way of her skill at betrayals.
After a time, he had started to avoid windows. His world had contracted to his private chambers, because there he need not worry what face he showed the world. The one he had worn before her death was a lie. The one he had discovered afterward was unbearable, grotesque, too much like his father’s: fit only for hiding away.
He took a deep breath and made himself walk onward. The banister came into his hand, a solid length of mahogany, guiding him down the stairs. There must be a third face for him yet to try. He could not go back to the lie he’d once been.
He stepped into the vestibule, not looking at the double doors to the street, turning away from them for the archway into the east wing. But he felt those doors like an itch between his shoulder blades: a warning, or a temptation, or an axe beginning to fall.
He passed the formal salon where so many receptions had been held. Where he had greeted guests, and conducted negotiations in corners, and felt so damned important. So righteous and purposeful.
This house should be burned. What was it but a testament to falsehood? It held an entire history of how much he had cared, how cleverly he had laid his plans, how devoutly he had believed in a cause wider and nobler than himself.
How fitting that it smelled like a funeral.
The study door loomed. He grasped the doorknob like an anchor, and only once he stepped inside, closing the door in Jones’s face, did he exhale.
His housekeeper did not notice his entrance. Humming to herself, she stood atop a short ladder, browsing through shelves of old estate records.
Her inattention suited him. He leaned against the door and waited for his pulse to calm.
Mrs. Johnson. The spectacles, the severe chignon, the drab wool skirt and plain white blouse belonged to a governess, a schoolmistress, a spinster aunt. But her youth, her self-possession, her flame-red hair, and her wandering hands did not.
What was she humming? Not the usual music hall ditty. Surely it was not . . . Beethoven? Since when did domestics, former maids, visit the symphony?
“L’ho trovato,” she cried, and with an air of triumph, plucked a book off the shelf.
His housekeeper spoke Italian.
She tucked the book beneath her arm and lifted her skirts to clear her descent. Very trim ankles, had his Italian-speaking housekeeper. One slim boot felt for a lower rung. Her stockings, he saw, were lace.
Lady Ripton must have paid her very well for a maid.
What was she doing, prowling through his estate records?
He wrestled with a sudden suspicion. She spoke in accents too refined for her position. She did not have the demeanor of one trained for service. She wore lace stockings. She talked to herself in Italian. She was far, far too young.
What of it? Did he imagine her a spy? For whom? He gritted his teeth. His doctors—those he had bothered to see, before he’d turned the rest away—had cautioned that paranoia was the sign of an unwell mind.
He cleared his throat. Alerted, she gasped and twisted to gawp at him. “Your Grace! Here!”
So even she had imagined him incapable. Why that should gall him, he could not say. Who was she, but a servant? He felt a dangerous smile form on his lips. “Here,” he said. “Yes. Does that not suit you?” Why would she need his ledgers in order to sort through his correspondence?
Her spectacles slipped down her nose. Those eyes alone might have riled a man’s suspicion. He did not care how blind she was. Those eyes were weapons, and she did not strike him as a woman to waste such resources.
No. Even to his own mind, these thoughts sounded ludicrous.
“What are you doing with my records?” he asked.
“I th-thought—” She still looked wide-eyed. “Your steward from Abiston. He wrote with a question about the crop yield from a seedling in use at another estate. I thought I might make notes to guide your reply.”
That was not the reasoning of a maid, nor a housekeeper, either. “I read Lady Ripton’s reference,” he said. “Very interesting stuff. She holds you in peculiar esteem.”
Did trepidation briefly shadow her face? “Her Ladyship is too kind.”
“I thought so as well.”
She clutched the ladder and did not reply.
When had she ever been at a loss for words? Perhaps he could not trust his instincts. But that did not mean he needed to ignore them. “Which raises the question,” he said. “Why did you decide to leave her service?”
“Oh, I . . .” She put her foot on the next rung and made an awkward hop; the ledger slipped from her arm and went tumbling onto the carpet.
She’d dropped it deliberately.
No, she hadn’t. You mustn’t indulge these fancies, Dr. Houseman had chided him. Your mind is unbalanced by grief; it cannot be trusted.
His brother had put it more bluntly: You’ve run mad.
But it was not a fancy that his housekeeper spoke Italian, hummed Beethoven, and had left a comfortable position in a bid to mop and dust his floors.
She was making a swift descent of the ladder now. L’ho trovato, she had said: I’ve found it. What precisely had she been looking for? He started toward her, determined to get his hands on the book before she could look through it.
She glanced over her shoulder, saw him coming, and lost her footing. With a cry, she stumbled off the ladder.
Let her fall. But his body disobeyed, lunging forward to catch her. A grunt burst from him; he staggered backward. Mrs. Johnson was not light.
Much to the good fortune of his pride, he caught his balance—and then a shock prickled over his skin, for he registered the feel of her. Young, yes: she had the curves of a woman in her prime. A scent enfolded him, rose water mixed with soap, and beneath that, the warm note of her skin. Glowing, soft, freckled.
She made a sound like the squeak of a mouse. He told his arms to release her. Slowly, they obeyed. He took a single step back, and now his brain and body truly parted ways, for he was devouring her with his eyes, and a certain long-dead part of his body was stirring, and he cursed its resurrection.
How long had it been since he had thought of, imagined, wanted a woman? Not his wife, not a nightmare, not a black bottomless sin that spread across his memory, his history, like a blot of ink, but a woman.
A woman’s body. A woman’s movements. The rapid pulse in the base of this woman’s long, pale throat, the flick of her lashes as she stole a glance at him, the bend of her long waist, of her wrist, as she gathered up the fallen ledger. The curve of her breast as she clutched the dusty book against it.
The shape of her lips as she spoke, their color, the hue of pale roses, the color of her scent, her skin petal soft:
“I am mortified,” said those lips. “I’m so terribly clumsy.”
And her voice, soft and smooth, like the slide of silk sheets across skin—how long since such graces had been apparent to him? He had not touched a woman since his wife. He had never touched a woman before her; he would not be his father, no. But in those bachelor days, ah, how difficult virtue had been.
His heart was knocking in a loud, painful rhythm, his belly tight with animal need. He turned away from her, bewildered and furious with himself, lest she catch a glimpse of this adolescent disgrace, his cock as stiff as a cricket bat.
He dragged in a breath, and all he tasted was her: the scent of her, the warmth. His bloody housekeeper.
Who was not as she seemed.
He wheeled back on her and instantly regretted it, for she was staring at him, and had not yet recalled the need to fix her damnable spectacles. Cornflower-blue eyes met his, then shied away. A frisson seemed to pass between them, a moment of unwanted understanding: they were not only master and servant. They were also a man and a woman, alone together behind closed doors, with the feel of each other still burning on their skin.
He strode to his desk, dropping into the seat, putting a bulwark of oak between them. Blindly he groped for—a pen, yes, that would do.
His blotter was covered in paper. Tallies and figures. He blinked. A pile of opened correspondence sat next to the inkwell.
Focusing, he discovered a list, names and dates beside neatly inked notes. She was constantly delivering these lists to his rooms. But now, for the first time, he read one.
Lord Swansea, September 14, re: Illuminating Company, would be honored if you would join the board of trustees.
Mr. Patrick Fitzgerald, September 14, re: signs of blight at Abiston—seed issue? Consult other estates using same supply?
Lord Michael de Grey, September 15, re: wedding: date set for Christ Church in Piccadilly on 30th instant.
He had promised to attend. But he hadn’t.
Lady Sarah Winthrop, September 16, re: Harry: no word from him in three months, request you press ambassador to mount a search.
He grimaced. For the sake of the family, he certainly hoped that Michael and Elizabeth’s union proved fruitful; Harry Winthrop, the heir apparent, was good for nothing but rascality, vagabondage, and opera gossip.
“I am almost caught up.” Mrs. Johnson crept up with uncharacteristic timidity. “I believe I will finish by tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” he said flatly. Ten, twelve months’ worth of mail, and she would manage to read through it, summarize it, and finish it within a handful of weeks.
He flicked aside the topmost page with one nail. In tidy columns, she had transcribed the sum and total of the life he had ended, abandoned, departed: all the wheedling for favors, the solemn petitions, the ingratiating overtures.
Mr. Stephen Potmore, September 4, re: your health, concerned inquiry, kind regards.
He cleared his throat. “Yes, you’re expedient, are you not? Lady Ripton, I believe, mentioned that skill—an expert manager of correspondence, she called you.” He glanced up, found her hovering, her gaze downcast.
At least she had not helped herself to a seat. That was something. “Sit down,” he said.
Their eyes met as she sat. He did not look away, though she did.
Ah, but there was no blush like a redhead’s. He fancied he could see the very capillaries dilating beneath her skin.
He took hold of himself. Attraction between master and servant went against all codes of decency. But sometimes, inevitably, it did happen. How one handled it marked one’s status as an honorable gentleman. His late father, for instance, had been the classic lecher: forever groping this one, leering at that one, no matter the woman, no matter the witnesses—his children, his guests, his own wife.
In honesty, Alastair had not minded it so much for the betrayal it signified to his mother—for Elise de Grey had been no saint, no matter what her younger son still claimed. As a boy, Alastair had seen her emerging from other men’s rooms, late at night, when no one should be roaming.
No, what had bothered him was how well his father fit the caricature of a gross, oversexed aristocrat. The late Duke of Marwick had talked a great deal of high-minded business about noblesse oblige. But in practice, he’d been a sketch from Punch, a dirty joke for schoolboys. His divorce, the vile details of his affairs and his wife’s accusations, had occupied front-page headlines for months.
Alastair could remember the pride he’d once felt in having overcome that sordid legacy. How self-righteously satisfied he had been with his own virtues.
Yet behold this list of letters left unanswered. Questions from his stewards. Overtures from old allies. Proposals from men with whom he’d done business to great reward. All of them, neglected. And even now, reminded of his responsibilities, Alastair was not thinking of rent rolls, of tenants and crops and politics, of duties and how best to atone for his neglect of them.
For that matter, he wasn’t even thinking of his late wife and the men with whom she’d betrayed him.
Put that way, how refreshing: he was thinking of his subsiding erection. And his housekeeper.
He looked at her. Really looked at her, in this space that echoed with memories of a life that had nothing to do with him now. The ever-present rage seemed, for a moment, to recede, making way for an interest that no servant should elicit—not from an honorable man.
But where had honor gotten him? Moreover—the strange thought riveted him—what had it denied him in the past?
It was not a gentleman’s business to stare at a domestic. His precious honor would have blinded him to the shape of this woman’s mouth, wide and more mobile than she probably liked. And he was very close now, he suddenly realized, to memorizing the arrangements of her freckles. Her left cheek bore seven beauty marks (could freckles be beauty marks? He suddenly thought so) arranged like the stars of Pleiades. Her right cheek showed the constellation of Cassiopeia, minus the southernmost star.
A gentleman would have castigated himself for noticing these details. England’s bright hope would have called the freckles blemishes, for he’d believed perfection to be the image of his wife—whose skin had borne not a single mole, and whose dark, foxish beauty must (so he’d believed) set the bar for all women, just as he, with his accomplishments, set the bar for all men.
Only now did he see that freckles were not blemishes, they were lures. And though so many of his old pleasures were dead, he understood, suddenly, that new ones would arise—such as this one: to be fascinated by a servant, whom his old self never would have noticed.
She shifted a little in her chair. His silence unnerved her, but this minute adjustment would be her only admission of it. Another realization: a servant’s self-possession could rival his own.
It could surpass it, in fact.
Give me the gun, she had said coolly, unafraid and unflinching.
“Who are you, Mrs. Johnson?” He found, suddenly, that it was not suspicion that drove him, but amazed curiosity. “What brought you here?”
She sat straight, blinking like an owl. “I . . . don’t understand, Your Grace.”
“Lady Ripton seems to have employed you in any number of capacities, some of them quite distinguished. Yet you left her service to apply for a position as a maid. Why?”
She hesitated. “Why . . . a chance to work for you, Your Grace. For the Duke of Marwick.”
“Liar.”
Her mouth tightened. “If you will abuse me—”
“You’ll what? It isn’t as if I haven’t abused you before.” He shrugged and pushed aside her neatly penned notes. “Very well, let’s pretend it was my reputation that brought you here. All those glorious tales of noble doings, all the encomiums in the papers.” God knew the journalists had adored him. “What kept you on? When I threw that bottle, why did you not turn heel and flee to Lady Ripton? Don’t tell me she wouldn’t have welcomed you back. That reference might as well have been an ode.”
She fidgeted in her chair. “It was . . . not entirely my wish to leave her. But I fear one of her acquaintances took an unseemly interest in me.”
He thought on that. “A gentleman?”
She grimaced. “If you must apply the term so loosely, Your Grace, I will be forced to agree with you.”
He caught his smile before it could spread. Her peculiar fixation on diction was better suited to a governess than a domestic.
That notion made him wonder. “You seem remarkably accomplished for one so young.”
She eyed him warily. Her spectacles were an atrocity against nature. They warped the shape of her eyes and made her look cramped and sour. “Thank you, Your Grace.”
A man who had only seen her without those glasses might never have recognized her as she looked now. And if he did, he might be congratulated for restraining himself from removing them from her face. They were abominable.
He cleared his throat. “Italian, for instance, is not among the usual maidservant’s qualifications, I think.”
Her freckles grew livid against her white skin. “I don’t . . .”
She didn’t understand how he knew about the Italian. He felt a sudden, purely malicious enjoyment. How pleasant it was to have her on the run for once. “You talk to yourself. And to ledgers. Quite sloppy, signora.”
“Oh.” Blinking rapidly, she looked into her lap, teeth worrying her lower lip.
He supposed countless women bit their lips when nervous, but he could not recall ever having noticed it before. Most women, of course, were not blessed with such a long lower lip, the shade of a blush rose. Perhaps that was why. Her mouth demanded attention.
“Well, Mrs. Johnson?” She’d best give him a damned answer, and leave off with her lip.
When she looked up, reluctance stamped every line of her face. “I suppose . . . I was not raised to service, Your Grace. Many of my oddities are owed to my upbringing.”
Now they were getting somewhere. She might as easily have said that she’d been born in Italy, but this carried a ring of truth. “And how is that?”
“My family was . . . modestly comfortable, I should say.”
“Define that for me.” Hearing himself, he felt amused. Now he was encouraging her craze for precision.
She shifted in her seat. “I was educated, of course.”
“At a particular school?”
She shook her head. “I had tutors.”
“Ah.” That sounded somewhat more than modestly comfortable. “And what else?”
She frowned a little. “Of my education, do you mean? The usual program: history, rhetoric, mathematics in the morning. Drawing and piano in the afternoon.” She gave a fleeting smile. “The occasional game of chess.”
“Properly educated, then.”
She smiled again, wanly. “Obviously, my position is not what it once was.”
He looked her over, impressed with this, the first real divulgence she’d made. He had suspected it, hadn’t he? Her accent, her bearing, her mannerisms all seemed odd for a domestic.
His instincts weren’t so rotten, after all.
“What happened?” he asked. “How did you end up in service?”
She shrugged. “Nothing so uncommon. I was . . .” She took a deep breath. “Orphaned. And provisions had not been made. So I was forced to make do.”
He frowned. “Make do? Do you mean, support yourself?”
Her smile was faint and humorless. “As you see.”
What he saw was a girl not much older than twenty, who was telling, elliptically, a story of how she had been cast from bourgeois comfort into utter want. For surely only the direst of needs could drive a pampered child, provided with tutors and pianos, to apply for positions in service.
Indeed, such stories did not generally end with the hapless orphan managing to make do in any regard. The only accounts he could recall were moralistic parables, in which the sheltered miss encountered some predatory young buck who turned her into a kept woman. Times were changing, of course, but the world still offered few opportunities to a gently bred girl forced to work.
He let some of his skepticism show. “What of your extended family? They had no care for you?”
“My family was never so large.”
“But surely there was someone.” He himself had not enjoyed the warm embrace of a large family—but even he’d had his brother, Michael.
She met his eyes and let the silence sit between them for a long moment. “No,” she said at last. “There was not.”
He felt somehow stung by that reply. What an absurd reaction! Yet for a moment, it felt as though he were the callow youth, and she, his superior in experience.
It unnerved him. He took a brisker tone. “How old were you, then, when you first struck out on your own?”
She answered readily enough. “Eighteen, Your Grace. Nearly.”
Nearly? “Seventeen then, you mean.”
She looked briefly bewildered at his tone. His anger was showing. He did not understand, any more than she, why he should be angry. But he was. “Yes,” she said slowly, “I suppose so.”
Seventeen. “And yet you had no connections—no family connections—to service? How then did you find your first position?”
“There is such a thing as a servant’s registry, Your Grace.” There was a dry joke hidden in her voice, no doubt at his expense. “One pays a small fee to discover the households where applications are wanted.”
“Yes, of course.” Naturally he knew of such things. “But how did you make the decision that service was the thing for you?”
She shrugged. “Anybody, they say, can wield a rag.”
She was being deliberately obtuse. Many young women would have sought alternatives to scrubbing floors. “You have an education. You might have been a companion or a governess.”
Now her amusement faded, leaving only cynicism in her face. “At eighteen, Your Grace? By those who sought companions, I was more judged in need of accompaniment. And as for being a governess . . . I doubt many wives would have liked that.”
No, he supposed not. The last sort of governess a housewife looked for was the dewy young lady. But he was startled by her forthrightness, and she saw it. “Forgive me,” she said, and then frowned down at her own hands, looking genuinely embarrassed. “I have shocked you.”
He checked his snort. “That’s rather a strong word for it.” And then he inwardly sighed. It seemed her quibbles with diction were catching. “Surprised, however—yes. One doesn’t often find would-be maids of your background. The Italian and piano, and whatnot.”
Her small, pleased smile was somehow charming. And then, quite suddenly, it . . . wasn’t. Though it had not altered a fraction, he could not look on it.
He stared over her shoulder. He had forgotten that there were all manner of tragedies in the world. Hers was not the greatest—but neither was his. Was there any cliché more tired than the cuckold?
The realization might have carried a bittersweet relief—for a commonplace tragedy was also a tragedy that might pass. And yet instead he felt stung, for he saw suddenly the difference between him and this girl: confronted with unimaginable loss, she had rebounded with ambition, whereas he, a man ten years her senior, had . . . how had she put it? Retired from the field.
She had put it more gently than he deserved. What in God’s name must she think of him?
He felt himself turning red. Odd sensation. Why the hell did it matter what a servant thought? He turned his attention to shuffling the notes she had made. Gladstone had written: he wanted Alastair’s help in ousting Salisbury, retaking the government. God’s blood—he’d written thrice. The man would not give up.
Damn right he wouldn’t. Alastair had won two elections for him. Provided Margaret’s letters were never made public, he would certainly be remembered for that.
But what of it? He no longer gave two bloody figs for his legacy. Naturally, some lingering vestige of his old self refused to believe this. But he had no use for it: his old life was dead. Done, damn it.
He laid down the papers. His housekeeper was sitting rigidly, braced for further interrogation. But he had the general outline of her secret now. She had been raised to hope for better, and she could not forget it. That explained a great deal about her.
He made himself say it: “You do yourself credit.” The words burned his throat, for he knew he could not speak them to himself. “You have cause to be proud.”
For some reason, she went white again. “Thank you.”
“And now I will give you a piece of advice.” He made himself smile. “Write to Lady Ripton. Tell her you require a place to stay while you seek a new position.”
A line appeared between her brows. “Are you sacking me again?”
“No. I’m doing you a favor, in fact.” He rose, and she hastily followed suit.
As he walked around the desk, he kept his eyes on her face, for there always seemed to be something new to see in it. And it gratified him to a baffling degree when he spotted the precise moment she realized he was walking toward her. Another man would have missed the fractional widening of her eyes. But not he. He saw what others would miss. He saw her.
Nobody, however, would have missed the quick hop she took away from him. “Must I always exit in this manner?” she said on an awkward, breathless laugh. “Chased out by—”
He looped his arm around her waist, and she gasped. With his free hand, he caught her chin and tipped it up.
How had he ever imagined that a petite frame was the key to feminine appeal? Miniatures might be compassed in a single glance. But such an abundance of perfection, long limbs and generous hips, nearly six feet of woman, made for an endless expanse of skin. Such a woman would demand hours to properly peruse. To taste. To penetrate.
“You should find a new position,” he said, “in the house of some honorable gentleman. I am not one.”
He brought his mouth down onto hers.