10
VICTOR FORCED HIMSELF to roll off of Isa, since his weight must be crushing her. But he wished he could linger forever with her beneath him, and he felt bereft the second he was on his back staring up at the canopy. What insanity had made him think that bedding her would purge the obsessive need for her from his soul?
It had only made it worse. He could still smell the violet water in her hair, feel the softness of her against him.
He wanted her again. And again, and again, until he could be sure this was real. That she was truly his once more. That he could trust her with his life. His future.
Still breathing heavily, he glanced over to see her lying there flushed and beautiful and seemingly content. The top of her chemise was pulled down nearly to her belly and the bottom pulled up nearly to her mons. He hardened just to see her looking so luscious, with the candlelight turning her exposed breasts golden and highlighting the tops of her thighs before disappearing into the dark shadows between them. It made him want to reach over and unveil the umber curls just hidden beneath the bunched-up fabric.
But before he could act on the impulse, she straightened her clothing to cover herself more. When she rolled to face him, his breath caught in his throat. For the barest moment, she looked at him exactly the way she’d done when they were first married—as if he were the knight come to save her.
Then the look faded, and he choked back a curse. He hadn’t saved her, after all. He’d barely saved himself. And now all those chickens were coming home to roost . . . and leave droppings all over her life.
Yet when she spoke, it was about his life. “You have so many scars.” Running her hand over his chest, she fingered a healed gash along his collarbone. “As I recall, this was done with a bayonet during the war, right?”
“Yes.” One that had narrowly missed his heart. He swallowed convulsively. “I can’t believe you remember that.”
Her hand continued to skim his chest. “You’d be surprised what I remember. These whorls of hair. This tiny mole near your underarm.” She flashed him a shy smile. “The way you kiss.”
That brief glimpse of the old Isa made him kiss her again . . . and cup her breast and nuzzle her neck as she ran her hands over him. He was just wondering if it was too soon to seduce her once more, when she drew back with a frown.
Her fingers had found two scars along his ribs. “These are new.” Her brow furrowed as she touched a small round patch of skin on his other shoulder. “And this. It looks like that other one you have on your back, where you were shot with a musket at Waterloo.”
With a sigh, he threw himself against the pillow. Clearly she was done with seduction for now. “That’s because this one was made by a musket ball, too.”
Her gaze filled with a stark concern that made his throat tighten. “How? Why? There haven’t been any wars for you to serve in. What have you been doing all these years, that got you shot?”
“Looking for you,” he said truthfully.
She eyed him askance. “On the wrong end of a musket?”
Covering her hand with his, he brought it to his lips to kiss. “I had to make a living, so I hired out my services. Sometimes the work was dangerous.”
“How dangerous?” she whispered.
He shrugged. “I got shot a time or two. Gained a knife wound here and there. All in a day’s work.”
She pressed a kiss to the scar on his shoulder, her eyes troubled. “Who were you fighting?”
“Why does it matter? It’s in the past.”
“Is it?” She glanced around the room. “You’re clearly a close enough intimate of a duke to be given his finest guest suite. You must have done something to earn his friendship.”
“Trust me, it’s not his finest.” The servants had wanted to give him the best one, and he’d refused. It made him . . . uncomfortable. Sometimes he felt like an impostor when people tried to toady up to him. He might be a duke’s cousin, but he felt like a criminal’s son. “There’s a much finer one down the hall.”
“That’s not the point,” she said tersely. “How do you know a duke? Why did you come here?”
He hesitated, on the verge of telling her about the Duke’s Men and his newfound relations, about being hired by Lochlaw’s mother. But he couldn’t bring himself to trust her that much yet. There were still holes in her story, and before he unveiled all his secrets, he needed to know more.
“Tell me why you came here,” he countered. “Once you realized I wasn’t joining you in Paris, why didn’t you return to Amsterdam to look for me? Or Antwerp, if you thought that was where I’d gone?”
“If?” She drew back from him with a wounded look. “You still don’t believe me.”
“That’s not . . .” He jerked the sheet up to his waist and turned to face her, some of his decadelong resentment rising in him again. “I’m just trying to understand how you could throw away our marriage on the word of your family. Why you didn’t even attempt to look—”
“How was I supposed to manage that? I had no money unless I used the ‘spoils’ of the theft, as you called them, which I refused to do. And my family wouldn’t have given me the money to go looking for you, anyway. They kept saying I was better off without you.”
He tensed. “And you believed them.”
She shifted onto her back with a haunted expression. “I didn’t know what to believe. You were always so reticent, and I can see now that Jacoba played on that. She pointed out that you never talked about your family, that I barely knew you. All of that was true.”
One day he was going to make sure Jacoba Hendrix paid for every deceitful word she’d spoken to her sister.
“And I wasn’t even sure where you were,” Isa went on. “Was I supposed to roam the Continent like a penniless nomad, searching for my husband? Or did you expect me to find some post where I could earn my living, in hopes that I might stumble across you one day?”
“Of course not,” he clipped out, conceding the point. “Finding work is easier for a man than for a woman, anyway.”
She stared at him. “Not to mention that I thought you were running from the authorities, just as we were. My family had convinced me that you were as culpable as they, so I couldn’t return to the scene of the crime without risking being caught and made to admit what I believed was your part in the theft.”
“Or yours or your family’s,” he said acidly.
She tensed. “Yes. Once it was done, I wasn’t keen on being hanged for it. Like you, I did what I had to in order to save myself. But apparently my doing so is some kind of crime.” She sat up as if to leave the bed, and he rose to catch her by the arm.
“Lieveke,” he said in a low voice, “I’m not accusing you.”
“Aren’t you?” Her lovely brown eyes darkened with sorrow. “You think I should have tried harder, should have looked for you, should have roamed the Continent searching for the man I thought had betrayed and abandoned me—”
“No,” he cut in, reminded yet again that she’d been made to believe a lie. He still had difficulty remembering that her family had been as callous with her as with him.
Drawing her resistant body into his arms, he pulled her back down on the bed. When she lay rigid beside him, he stifled an oath. He was handling this very clumsily. But he had never expected that she’d thought him the villain of the piece all this time.
Propping his head on his hand, he stared down at her jutting chin and mutinous expression. “I see why you couldn’t look for me. Why you felt compelled to go off on your own.” He laid his hand on her belly. “But to run off to Scotland? It never occurred to me to search beyond the Continent, because I would never have thought you’d travel so far from your home.”
She met his gaze imploringly. “I had to get away from them, don’t you see? They wanted me to create more fakes so they could pass them off as real, to make money. I couldn’t . . . I wouldn’t . . .”
“Ah,” he said, beginning to understand. “They wanted to turn you into a criminal, too.” She’d really meant it when she’d said she’d been trying to escape her family. “So where are they now?”
“Still in Paris, I hope.” She relaxed slightly against him. “I haven’t seen them since I took my chance to get away from them.”
He caught his breath. He could write to Vidocq in Paris and have the man find them there, then keep an eye on them until Victor could get there. “I suppose they’re using false names.”
She nodded. “They did so from the moment they booked passage on the ship in Amsterdam. And they took other measures to change their appearance—Gerhart grew a beard and Jacoba and I cut our hair.”
Which explained why neither he nor anyone else had been able to track them after they left their lodgings.
“Gerhart had some friend who’d been a spy for the French in the war and knew how to create false papers,” she added. “That’s how I learned that such things could be obtained for a price.”
“So the name you used to come here isn’t the one you used to leave Amsterdam and enter France.”
“Of course not. I didn’t want Gerhart and Jacoba to find me, remember? It took a bit of doing, but I was able to discover someone in Paris to create false papers for me, as Gerhart’s friend had done for them.”
Nothing showed how much she distrusted her family more than the fact that she’d gone to such lengths to evade them. Then again, perhaps she’d simply been worried that her family would be caught eventually, so she’d changed her name to make sure she wasn’t.
But in that case, she wouldn’t have chosen his mother’s name. So far, her version of events was much more plausible than any of the conjectures he’d made. Which meant that the villains of this piece were definitely Gerhart and Jacoba.
He forced a nonchalant expression to his face. “So what names did they take?” he said casually.
Apparently that didn’t work, for her gaze shot to his. “Why?” When he didn’t answer right away, the color drained from her face. “Victor, what do you intend to do?”
He played dumb. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh, yes, you do. Now that you’re certain my family and I were behind the thefts—”
“Not you,” he broke in.
“I made the parure,” she corrected him. “The authorities will consider me culpable. Why, you practically do, even knowing what happened.”
“That’s not true.”
“Hear me out.” Her breath grew ragged. “It’s clear that you want vengeance—”
“Justice,” he shot back. When she flinched, he cupped her cheek. “Don’t you want that, too, after what they did? Don’t you want to see them punished?”
“I would, if there was any way to do it without punishing me as well. And there is none.” She shifted to face him. “If you capture them and haul them back to Amsterdam to stand trial, they will blame me for the theft. It will be their word against mine. And as you said, they didn’t have the skills to make the parure. I did—a point they are sure to make. I could very well hang, and they could get off scot-free.”
His breath stopped in his throat. He hadn’t thought of that possibility. Of course, until this night, he’d assumed she deserved the same punishment they did. But since she didn’t . . .
“Nonsense,” he rasped. “Once I testify, there will be no question that they were guilty and not you.”
“You’re my husband, and you were once a suspect. Do you really think that the authorities will trust your word over my family’s?”
Perhaps if he brought his cousin into it to vouch for his character. But that would mean dragging Max through another scandal. And during a trial, all the nastiness about Victor’s father would come out, and that, too, would affect Max and Lisette.
Damn it all. It had been far easier seeking justice when he thought she deserved it.
He gritted his teeth. “You can’t expect me to just forget what they did—to me, to you, to both of us. They deserve to suffer.”
“Oh, believe me, I agree,” she said softly. “But I don’t see how they can be made to suffer without ruining my life. And possibly yours. Which would be patently unfair, since neither of us did anything wrong.”
But Dom and Tristan had resources he did not. They might be able to build a case without damaging her interests—or involving Max.
“Surely the truth will count for something,” he protested. “We have the note, which isn’t written in your hand. A good examiner of documents—and I happen to know one—could easily affirm that it was forged. That alone throws suspicion on them and off of you. The very fact that they’ve been living the high life in Paris while you struggled to build a business here also adds to their guilt.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Does it? You were telling Mr. Gordon just this morning about how I either used the money to build the business or I fled to keep from being caught. My coming here clearly didn’t eliminate my guilt in your eyes. How will it eliminate it in the eyes of the court?”
God, he hated it when she made sense. “So you’re saying that I should just sit here and let them get away with it.”
“I’m saying that whatever you do is bound to hurt me as well.”
“I don’t believe that!” When she stiffened, he moderated his tone. “I only want to do some preliminary investigation, to see if I can build a case. If we take Gerhart and Jacoba by surprise, we may even find evidence in their lodgings. Just tell me their aliases, and—”
“No,” she said, her eyes wary. “I dare not risk it.”
His temper rose. He couldn’t believe she would thwart him on this! “Now that I know what city they’re in,” he said, fixing her with a hard glance, “I can probably find them without the names, especially since I have connections to the French secret police. I’m giving you the chance to make it easier for me—but that doesn’t mean that if you don’t tell me, I won’t pursue it.”
Fear lit her eyes briefly before she wiped all expression from her face. “You do what you have to do.” Slipping from the bed, she began to gather up her clothes. “But I will not put my neck in the noose for your vengeance. I have too much to lose.”
A curse left him as he watched her slip on her drawers and stockings. This wasn’t what he wanted. And he doubted that she wanted it, either.
He left the bed to draw her into his arms. “Don’t you trust me to protect you, lieveke?” he asked softly. “I would never let anyone harm you, I swear it.”
She remained rigid. “You may not have a choice. Once you pursue vengeance—”
“Justice, damn it!” he growled. “If I wanted vengeance, I would exact my own punishment.”
Her eyes lifted to him, large and luminous in the firelight. “Is that why you came here? To exact your punishment against me?” When he just stared at her, wondering how much to admit, she said, “Why did you come here, Victor? How did you even find me after all these years?”
He tensed. “Does it matter?”
She gazed steadily up at him. “You say I should trust you to protect me. You want me to throw myself into your hands, but you won’t tell me something so small as how you found me. Or why you’re grand friends with a duke. Or even whether you’re really Lady Lochlaw’s cousin. Clearly you don’t yet entirely trust me.”
“That’s not true.” Except that it was.
If he told her about the duke, that still wouldn’t explain why he’d come here. If he told her about the Duke’s Men, he’d have to admit that he’d been hired to find out her secrets.
Then she could threaten to tell the baron about the dowager’s actions. Since Lochlaw was about as discreet as a four-year-old, the man would instantly plague his mother over what she’d done, and his mother would complain to Dom about Victor’s lack of discretion.
And if Dom were angry enough over it, he would refuse to help Victor bring Gerhart and Jacoba to justice—especially if there was a chance it might embroil the duke and Dom’s half sister in scandal. Then Victor would be stuck trying to capture the Hendrixes without help.
Out of nowhere came the voices of his inquisitors. Admit it—she learned the truth about you and your father, learned how low you really are, and she aspired toward more. You were the guard, you besotted arse—that’s why she chose you. And like a dolt, you helped her.
Damnation, that was the real reason he didn’t want to reveal his high connections. No matter how much he told himself that everything the prince’s guardsmen had said was a lie, part of him feared it wasn’t. Part of him still wanted to be sure that she wanted him for him, not for his connections or anything else.
Isa regarded him expectantly a moment longer, but when he offered nothing more, she sighed and returned to dressing. “It’s late, Victor. I have to be at the shop in the morning, so I must go. We can discuss this more tomorrow.” She slid her corset down over her chemise and turned her back to him. “Would you lace me up, please?” she said in a prim voice that annoyed him.
He strode up behind her to catch her about the waist and pull her back against him. “I don’t want you to go,” he murmured into her silky hair. “Stay here tonight.”
“You know I can’t.” Her breath was coming quickly. “I have a life in Edinburgh. If I stay out all night, my neighbors will notice, and I’ll be the subject of gossip.”
“Because you spent the night with your husband?” he bit out.
“They think my husband is dead, remember?” She faced him, her expression once more wary. “Of course, if you choose to tell them otherwise, there’s not much I can do about it. But then they’ll know that I lied about my past. And if you tell them why—”
“I wouldn’t do that to you, damn it.” He caressed her cheek. “Honestly, lieveke, I don’t want the world knowing about the theft any more than you do.”
She dropped her gaze to his chest. “You can’t avoid that if you pursue justice for Jacoba and Gerhart. The whole world will learn of it then.”
“You’ve made your point. And I admit it’s a good one. But there must be a way to solve this. I just need to think, to decide what to do.”
“I understand.” A small smile graced her lips as she met his gaze once more. “But you won’t get any thinking done if I stay.”
“That’s an understatement,” he muttered.
Already he was rousing again, wanting her again. It seemed he couldn’t be sensible or reasonable or even logical when it came to her.
“Fine,” he added and turned her so he could lace her up. “I’ll take you home.”
“No,” she said quickly. Too quickly. Even as he scowled at her back, she added, “That’s as bad as my staying here the night.” She glanced at the clock. “If a mysterious gentleman brings me home at midnight, my neighbors will almost certainly talk.”
He jerked the ties of her stays hard enough to make her gasp. “I daresay the baron has brought you home late a time or two.”
“Not that late. And my neighbors and my servants know him. They don’t know you.”
She had an answer for everything. But that didn’t change one essential fact.
He tied off her corset, then turned her to face him again. “They will know me eventually, lieveke—I promise you that.” He clasped her head in his hands. “I refuse to lose my wife again. We will figure out how to manage it so we can be together, without ruining what you’ve built here. But let me make one thing clear: I’m not letting you go.”
The yearning that flashed across her face was unmistakable. “I don’t want you to.” She covered his hands with hers. “But unraveling this will take time. And I prefer to maintain my respectability until we can settle matters.”
Although he knew she was only protecting herself, it chafed him to watch her leave. “I’m beginning to miss the old Isa,” he grumbled, “the one who deferred to her husband.”
She grew solemn. “I hope not. She was the one who didn’t believe in you when she should have. Who didn’t stand up for herself.”
“Who was sweet and shy and guileless—”
“Not guileless,” she said earnestly. “I hid the imitation parure from you. I hid my family’s greed. I didn’t tell you what they wanted from me.”
“True.” Back then he had thought he knew her, but he’d been wrong. He wasn’t even entirely sure he knew her now. She was still hiding things from him. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he did.
Or was he just so used to distrusting her that he simply didn’t know how to begin trusting her again?
“So I don’t want that Isa back,” she said. “And you shouldn’t, either.”
The fact that she clearly regretted so much of what had happened made it hard for him not to trust her. And he had to admit that he did like his new, bolder wife.
“Very well. We’ll put the old Isa to rest,” he said, running his thumb over her lower lip. “But the new Isa had best get used to my being around. Because I’m not going anywhere ever again. You’re still my wife, and that isn’t going to change. Young Lochlaw will just have to look elsewhere for a bride.”
“As if Rupert could ever be a match for you,” she said lightly, then brushed her lips over his.
With a growl he drew her back for a longer kiss, reveling when she wrapped herself about him like a tree putting down roots.
She might not yet trust him completely, and she might have doubts about how he wanted to handle the matter of her relations, but one thing was certain. She desired him as much as or more than the old Isa.
And that would be his way back into her life.