Chapter Fourteen
Eleanor Townsend was at his door, dressed as Cecil, leaning against the frame like she didn’t have the strength to stand up straight. Both her wig and her spectacles were askew.
For the space of a heartbeat, James simply stared at her, certain he was dreaming. And then, when he blinked and she didn’t disappear, a spark of fear shot through his chest.
“What are you doing?”
She laid a hand on his stomach and pushed. It was a gentle contact, and if he hadn’t wanted to move, it wouldn’t have budged him, but he found himself stepping back to let her in.
“Where are your servants?” she asked, slurring her s’s.
He paused at the startling revelation that Eleanor was foxed. But maybe it wasn’t that startling. She was always surprising him in some way or another.
“I don’t have any who live here at the moment,” he said. “Just maids who come during the day to launder and cook.”
“Just maids? And they don’t live here?” Her lips pursed in puzzlement. “Surely you can afford more?”
“I’ve been using most of my money on new clothes and horses and a carriage.”
“You are not wealthy, then?”
He exhaled softly. “I do well enough, but I’m not wealthy by your standards, and certainly not by Lady Sarah’s.”
His recent purchases had been…an investment, so to speak. Money put forth to court Lady Sarah in the fashion she was accustomed to. He couldn’t sustain this way of life on a moderate income indefinitely, but he wouldn’t have to, if all went well.
She shook her head and said in a low, chiding voice, “Pretending again.”
He expected her to say more, or at least to elaborate, but then she was peering around his entrance hall, looking a little blurry eyed, as if she’d already lost track of their conversation. That insidious worry crept into his chest again.
“Where have you been?” he asked too harshly. He didn’t like this—worrying about someone. It had been so long since he’d done it, the emotion felt foreign and tight, like something unpleasant against his skin.
“Is the saloon here? I’d like to see it.”
He hesitated, sighed, and then led her up the stairway. The house was about half as large as the Townsends’ and not nearly as extravagant in its decorations, but it was his. He was proud of this residence. He didn’t want to admit this to himself, but a part of him hoped Eleanor liked it.
They emerged in the saloon. What would have been two drawing rooms, side by side, or one large one, if they were open, was simply a bare, open space. Wooden chairs lined the wall, for men who wanted to observe or rest. A table stood at one end, where refreshments would be placed. Clean linen towels and mufflers hung on hooks on the wall.
Eleanor shrugged off her greatcoat and left it in a heap on the floor, then after pausing a moment, she tore off her wig and spectacles.
It was a strange juxtaposition—Eleanor’s face, undisguised, her dark hair pinned back tightly, but her clothes unabashedly male.
She went to the wall and retrieved a pair of boxing gloves. She pulled them over her hands. “I challenge you to fisticuffs,” she said, voice too loud in the silence.
“You can hit me if you want, but I won’t hit back.”
“Hmmph.” She marched straight to him and punched him in the chest. She eyed his body and then she frowned down at her hand, looking puzzled. “You barely moved. Did I do it wrong?”
He pulled gently at her right glove until her hand was bare. “It’s best to learn the proper way to form a fist before you go around hitting things.” She formed a fist, and he readjusted her hand a bit. “Thumb here, along the outside. You hit with these knuckles.” He ran his thumb along the knuckles in question, held their contact for a touch too long. A shiver traced down his spine.
He’d noticed it before, during the dancing lessons. This…awareness. This…magnetism. It was as startling as it was unwanted. It was as unwanted as it was frightening.
“Try it again.” He held his hands up.
She punched into his palm, first one, then the other, a series of resounding thwacks. “Better.”
“I could get used to this,” she said with a smile. “I like hitting you.”
He laughed. “I’m sure you’re not the first to feel that way.”
She kept punching his palms, until sweat glistened on her forehead and her chest heaved with heavy breaths. He let her take out her frustration and restless energy. Eventually, when her hits began to slow, he caught her hands in his and held them there. “Eleanor…why are you here?”
“I don’t…I don’t know,” she said. She sounded more alert than when she’d first arrived, but he could tell she still wasn’t thinking clearly. How much had she had to drink? “I was invited to a gentleman’s club. I went. And the conversation was glorious. Until Smith’s punch started taking effect. Why do men ruin things?” She shook her head. “It’s true. They ruin everything with their condescension, and their snuff, and their punch. And why, why have a scientific society and not allow female scientists? They’re limiting themselves, and their knowledge…and it’s…it’s bollocks!”
He was torn between amusement, and sympathy, and the urge to cradle her in his arms. Which was bollocks itself. He wasn’t the sort of man to give comfort to anyone.
“And you!” She whirled on him.
“Me?” he said blankly.
“Lady Sarah is not a trophy to win. She deserves to be loved for who she is!”
“And you think that would happen? Even if I stepped out of the way,” he said. “It’s called a marriage mart for a reason. And it isn’t one-sided. If I’m weighing how Lady Sarah’s position in Society can help me, she’s also weighing what I have to offer.”
“Then why does it have to be you?”
“Why shouldn’t it be me?” he asked harshly. It was a question he’d repeated to himself for practically his entire life. For as long as he could remember.
Eleanor made a small noise of disgust and turned from him. She hung the mufflers back on the wall. And then she shrugged out of her tailcoat and waistcoat and fumbled with her cravat. In just her shirtsleeves, her cravat hanging open at her throat, she walked to one of the sash windows and pushed it open.
His gaze inadvertently drifted over her body. The breeches she wore clung tightly to her legs and backside, revealing more than a dress could, even a gauzy muslin one. She was slender, delicately built, but soft in the right places.
Fire danced in his blood. He hadn’t been this aware of a woman since… Had he ever been this aware? Maybe when he’d been a boy, and he’d first started noticing the opposite sex, noticed that they were different, and had been intrigued by those differences.
But that was so long ago, he could barely remember. And this, Eleanor, was only feet away.
“Why is this room so hot?” she wailed, leaning on the windowsill.
“It’s not,” he said, moving closer against his better judgment.
“It’s Smith’s punch, isn’t it? They might as well drink lamp oil. It would probably taste better.”
He laughed.
“Do you ever overindulge?”
“I have, but not often,” he said. “It doesn’t have a very good effect on the body.”
“How did you become a pugilist?” She wasn’t looking at him. She was still staring out the window, her face taking the full brunt of the cold air. For some reason, the lack of eye contact made him feel easier about discussing his past.
“We lived in a close in the Old Town. My mother and I. Tenement housing. She laundered clothes when she could find work, but it was barely enough and I wanted to help. I…I tried my hand at being a resurrectionist.”
She faced him, frowning. His chest throbbed fiercely, and this time it wasn’t worry over her wellbeing. It was worry over what she might think of him.
“A grave robber,” he explained softly. “Selling bodies made good money. They need them for dissection—surgeons and doctors, the university.” He didn’t know why he was trying to explain it as though it had been a good deed. She probably knew more than he did about dissections, and he hadn’t cared what the bodies were used for, he’d wanted the blunt. A freshly buried, well-preserved corpse could fetch up to ten pounds…that was more than his mother made for months of work.
Her eyes widened, and this time, he was the one who turned away. “Of course, it was risky. There were patrols to dodge, and other body snatchers to compete with. I got pummeled a few times, and lost out on a lot of money. Eventually, I learned to fight. And eventually, I realized I liked fighting. A hell of a lot better than I liked robbing graves.”
He lifted his shoulder. “I got bigger, and better, and I snuck into as many prizefights as I could to learn even more. And then I started entering them myself. I lost a few, but I won most of them. I made enough to keep a roof over our heads, and to take care of my mother when she was healthy, and then when she took ill.”
When he told his story, so simply, so inarticulately, he realized he’d been fighting his whole life. Ever since the time he’d first stepped into a graveyard at night, afraid of every little rustle or snapped twig, but determined to do whatever he had to do to survive.
He glanced at Eleanor, but her face, usually so easy to read, was impassive. He wished he knew what she was thinking. He wished he knew if she was disgusted. Good people didn’t steal bodies. Good people didn’t leave the relatives of the dead to mourn the violation of their loved ones’ graves. Only poor, desperate cowards did that.
And he’d been one of the poorest and most desperate of the lot.
But if she was horrified, she didn’t tell him.
Finally, he had to break the silence. And change this godforsaken subject. “How did you become interested in entomology?”
After a very long pause, she said softly, “I was very close to my father. He was a physician, but he liked to picture himself as a man of all science, I think. He would point things out to me—plants, insects, stars in the night sky. One day we were walking, and we came across a dung beetle. It was rolling a ball of dung that had to be at least a hundred times its own weight. And my father said, ‘Just imagine, Elle, if humans were as strong as insects, we would be invincible.’”
She laughed quietly, almost sadly. “After that, I was fascinated by beetles. I never stopped being fascinated.” She glanced at him. “Do you miss your mother?”
He answered the only way he could. With the simple truth. “Yes.”
She nodded. “I miss my parents, too. But I have my siblings. You’re alone.”
He knew she didn’t mean anything by it. He knew she wasn’t trying to hurt him. But still, the words struck him like a blow. He’d been alone for so long now, he should have been used to it.
But he didn’t know if one ever got used to silence.
He was quiet for too long. She stepped close to him and rested her hand on his sleeve. “Are you all right? James?”
The sound of his name in her soft, careful voice—not Mr. MacGregor, not just MacGregor, but the name his mother had given him—the closeness of her whisky-speckled eyes, the way her breath felt puffing gently against his cheek—all of these things made him forget just what he’d been fighting for so long.
Maybe he was alone, but right now, he didn’t feel alone.
“Eleanor,” he said. He didn’t know if it was a plea or a question or if he was simply saying her name because he wanted to. He just knew that her eyes darkened, and then she was leaning, leaning close, leaning against him, her face tilted toward him. She pressed her cold lips to his.
When he didn’t move an inch, she started to pull back, but the hesitant motion finally spurred him into action. He followed her, and then his mouth was on hers, and one of his hands wrapped around her waist and the other buried in her hair and her back was against the wall.
He warmed her wind-cold lips, tasted them, sipped at them, and then he tasted her tongue. Rum and heat. Spice and sweetness and desire. He was hard almost instantly.
She arched into the kiss. Her hands settled on his ribs, moving, testing, greedy. They were both greedy, like they’d been waiting for this for days. Like they’d been starving for just one taste of each other. And perhaps they had been.
Their antagonism had imploded, and all that was left was the fast, sweet ache of lust. Maybe the antagonism had been the only thing standing between them and lust in the first place.
No longer. The barriers were down. The gloves were off.
She slid her palm to his throat, to make contact with bare skin. It was a sudden, delectable shock. He wanted her hands everywhere—his throat, his back, forging trails down his chest, gripping his cock. He let his own hand slide down and grip her backside through the soft, stretchy fabric of the breeches. He yanked her forward with a growl, hips against hips, softness against hardness, and she gasped into his mouth.
“You smell like rosemary,” she drew back to whisper, almost accusingly. Hot breath fanned his cheek. “I love the smell of rosemary.”
Her words penetrated the smoky spell that had wrapped around them. It was like being dropped in an ice bath.
He’d forgotten…for a second, he’d forgotten the state she’d arrived in, because he’d been drowning in her kisses. And even if she wasn’t quite as foxed now as she had been, she was still foxed. And he was still courting Lady Sarah. Or hoping to court her.
His hands moved to her shoulders and pushed back gently. His body felt bereft as soon as the soft pressure of hers was gone.
“James?” Her lips were bruised, red, and swollen. Her hair, once pristine, coiled around her head like Medusa’s snakes. She looked like she’d just tumbled out of bed after a night of wild lovemaking. His gut clenched. Unfortunately, not with remorse.
“I’ll take you home,” he said.
She frowned, teeth denting her swollen lower lip. “I can take a hackney.”
He backed away from her. He wasn’t positive he could stop himself from pulling her back into his arms if she was within arm’s length. He retreated, almost to the other side of the room, and watched her smooth her hair back and pin it with ruthless efficiency. Watched her put on the wig and spectacles and turn, once more, into Cecil.
He still desired her. Even her transformation into a small, bespectacled man couldn’t stop the throb of lust in his groin.
It was a damned bloody nuisance.
One that he had to put an end to, here and now. “Have you sent out the invitations yet?”
“The invitations?” She stared at him, lips twisted downward. And he knew the instant she remembered what he was speaking of. Her face flushed a violent red. “I should…should I still send them?” Her voice was quiet, hesitant.
His heart ached, but he pushed down any shred of feeling, any shred of decency or guilt. He mercilessly stamped out the last remnants of desire still clinging to his skin.
He gave one curt, unmistakable nod. “Let me know when you do.”
“I…” She swallowed hard. Blinked twice. And then her back straightened, until she was as stiff and pointed as a steel rod. “Yes, I will,” she said, too loud in the silence.
She left the room without another word to him, and he sagged against the wall in relief. He glanced out the window to make sure she made it safely to a hackney coach, but he didn’t let himself feel anything as she bundled her greatcoat around her, braced against the wind, and disappeared inside.
He’d come too far, and fought too hard, to let one kiss disrupt his entire life.