Chapter 12
Rule 12
Never show weakness.
Helena really should have stipulated that Lord Robert be in attendance at any of the balls she’d the ill fortune of having to accept an invitation to.
That realization came entirely too late and she now found herself sandwiched between the Duke and Duchess of Wilkinson. She’d taken refuge between them after she’d noticed some such gentlemen eying her the same way a starving child coveted a slice of bread. She sank back in a bid to make herself as small as possible. A rather impossible feat for a woman nearly six feet in height.
While the duke and duchess conversed, Helena searched her gaze quickly about Lord and Lady Drake’s ballroom, peering around the crush of guests for a certain gentleman, a gentleman who represented her only hope of escape from the grasping attentions of men determined to corner her, ruin her, and be off with her ten thousand pounds.
Though, it wasn’t truly her ten thousand pounds. When she left in three months (two months, twenty-eight days if one wished to be truly precise), then those funds would remain in the duke’s care. Her gaze landed on the neck of a lady across the room. Draped about her neck were enough diamonds and sapphires to have fed Helena’s family for years. During those darkest days, as she’d come to think of them, when she’d suffered at Diggory’s hands, she would have easily sold her soul for a single pound, let alone a thousand of them. Now she’d gleefully burn the thousands of pounds settled on her . . .
She curled her fingers into tight balls. She’d be damned if she accepted a single farthing from the Duke of Wilkinson. Since she’d been delivered to his Mayfair residence, he’d proven himself kind, ready with a smile. But those showings of kindness could never, would never, erase the hell she and her mother had endured.
Helena drew in a slow, calming breath. Alas, she’d slipped the door open and Diggory had stepped inside.
Not here. Not now. These were the moments of madness that saw women carted off to Bedlam. That truth increased the rapid-growing panic.
Around the chambers of her mind echoed her screams and cries until the memories merged with the uproarious laughter of Lady Drake’s guests, forming a cacophony of distorted sound. Her chest moved fast, and she concentrated on the task of drawing in slow, even breaths. Do not look at the light. Do not look at the light . . . Except, like a child too innocent to know not to play with fire, she lifted her gaze to the crystal chandeliers aglow and her stomach lurched.
Helena pressed her eyes tightly closed as the acrid burning of flesh filled her nostrils. Her own flesh melting . . . dying . . . pain. So much of it . . .
You are stronger than those memories . . . Fight those thoughts, Helena . . .
“Helena?” The Duke of Wilkinson’s booming voice cut across her tortured memories, and sucked her back from the abyss.
She blinked rapidly, dimly registering the benevolently smiling duke, his glowering duchess, and . . .
Helena tipped her head, taking in the gentleman who’d, at some point, joined their trio.
Robert. Here. Flawlessly attired in midnight breeches and jacket, the expert tie of his stark white cravat accentuated the olive hue of skin that hinted at old Roman roots. Her stomach sank. How long had he been standing here? Too many times when the nightmares took hold she became lost in them, and when she came to, time and details had all blurred together. The marquess stood, a model of cool elegance, appraising her through thick, blond lashes and she stood there—well, Helena.
His lips turned up in a slow, knowing smile that sent heat coursing through her.
At being caught gawking, she wanted the marble floor to open and absorb her. She was not a weak ninny who’d ooh and aah over a fancy lord. Isn’t that what you’ve done so many times with this man . . .
She gritted her teeth at that taunting reminder rolling through her mind.
Never more grateful for the duke’s garrulous self, Helena sank back a step. “Westfield, my dear boy,” the duke was saying. He thumped Robert hard on the back. “A pleasure, as always.”
The duchess turned her lips in the semblance of a smile. “Do say you intend to come to my ball?” Another bloody ball. At the very least it was in the duke and duchess’s home and it would be vastly easier to escape the ballroom during the infernal affair.
From over the couple’s heads, Robert locked his gaze on Helena. “I would not dream of missing it for the world,” he murmured, his blue eyes radiating a powerful heat and intensity that sent butterflies dancing within.
His words and presence here now were merely a façade at her bequest. How very easy it was with Robert’s enigmatic pull to believe in a sliver of a moment that there was truth to his look.
She studied him as the duke commanded his notice.
“How is my friend, the old duke, doing, eh?” The older man chortled as though he’d delivered the cleverest of quips. “Always jested about that, you know.”
Helena hovered, an outsider to their exchange. What was the jest between those old dukes? For that matter, were peers even capable of humor?
From over the duke’s much shorter frame, Robert caught her eye. “Yes, he’s older by an entire day, isn’t he,” he said, explaining for Helena’s benefit.
And a flicker of warmth fanned inside her at his concerted effort to include her.
Unnerved by that gesture from a man she once believed incapable of anything but his own self-absorption, Helena looked away. For in two days, Robert Dennington, the Marquess of Westfield, had not only agreed to assist her in her efforts, but he’d also shown this additional thoughtfulness. That man did not fit with everything she’d witnessed and heard about members of the peerage, and she didn’t know what to do with this unsettling discovery.
“Indeed, Your Grace. I trust your old injury is not paining you?”
As the duke replied, Helena caught the inside of her cheek between her teeth. With that handful of sentences, and the ease of familiarity between these two men, she had a glimpse into a world she’d never before known existed. Members of the peerage were incapable of warmth and affection. They didn’t speak with any real sincerity, or make inquiries into past injuries. Yet, these two men—Robert and the man who’d sired her—in fact, did. And she didn’t know what to make of it. It unsettled the previously stable foundation upon which she’d built her well-ordered existence.
While the two noblemen conversed, the duchess glared at Helena in a very unduchesslike display of volatile emotion. Fortunately, the duke said something requiring his wife’s attention. At being spared that woman’s open apathy, Helena relaxed her shoulders. She’d faced thieves in the Dials who inspired less evil than the duke’s wife. Not for the first time, the duke’s one-time affection for Helena’s effervescent mother made sense.
Mayhap this was how the other half lived. With men marrying where they had to, but living a life of some happiness outside those respectable unions.
“Miss Banbury?” The duchess’s sharp tone brought Helena’s head swiveling back to the group. Again, her skin tingled with the force of Robert’s gaze. “His Lordship is speaking to you,” the duchess said between tight lips.
A surge of color rushed to her cheeks. “My lord,” she said quickly.
He inclined his head, and took a step closer, effectively angling the duchess out of Helena’s line of vision. Were his movements a deliberate bid to divert that vitriol away from Helena’s notice? “May I?” he asked quietly, that grin the Devil would have traded him for on his lips.
“May you what?” she blurted.
Robert indicated the bloody card dangling from her wrist, and Helena followed his gaze. She snapped her other hand over the offensive piece.
“Dance with you, Miss Banbury,” he said smoothly, and reached for her card.
Helena gulped. “No.” That terse exclamation froze him midmovement. Head bent over her card, he lifted his gaze.
The duke and duchess alternated their stares between Helena and Robert like spectators at a tennis court.
Then, in the show of arrogance she’d come to expect of him, the marquess collected her wrist, and skimmed the empty card.
She tugged. “I don’t.”
He returned his attention to her face. “You do not what, Miss Banbury?”
As though to accentuate the full extent of how ill suited she was to this world, a strand escaped her chignon and fell over her brow. “Dance.” Of all the tutors and instructors Ryker had hired her through the years, there had never been a need for a dance master.
“You do not . . . ?”
Nor had she seen the need or benefit of wasting funds on such a frivolous activity—until now. “Dance,” she again supplied, waving to the couples completing the intricate steps of some set or another. “I do not dance.” Now this inability only accentuated further her oddness amongst this world.
A frown hovered on Robert’s lips. What accounted for that faint expression? Was it disapproval for the woman he’d agreed to help? A pang struck in her chest.
“A stroll about the dance floor, then?” He held his elbow out.
“Go along, Helena,” the duke urged. “Lord Westfield is one of the good ones.”
One of the good ones who’d entered her rooms, kissed her senseless, and then shattered her world. One of the good ones, indeed. Helena tamped down a private smile, and reluctantly placed her fingertips on his sleeve.
Grateful to be free of the duchess’s constant glowering, she kept her gaze trained forward. Again, years away from company, with only her laconic brothers for companionship, she’d little practice with matters of discourse.
Ever the proper nobleman, Robert broke the silence. “You do not dance,” he whispered, that obvious fact coming from the corner of his mouth. “That is a detail you may have mentioned, yesterday.”
“You did not ask,” she returned, eyes trained forward.
He continued in hushed tones. “You are making the whole manner of your courtship—”
“Our courtship,” she interrupted.
“Vastly more challenging.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I expect strolling about the dance floor is statement enough for the guests present.”
He brought them to a stop beside a tall Doric column, shifting his body so he placed himself between her and the gazes of the other lords and ladies present. “Ah, but strolling around the ballroom is markedly different than dancing, Helena.” His breath fanned the shell of her ear, and her eyelashes fluttered wildly.
“I-Is it?” she managed, hating that faint quality of her tone.
“Oh, yes,” he whispered, dipping his head lower still, and the male scent of him, brandy, blended with mint, cast a quixotic spell.
She’d long despised spirits, but on this man, it was more intoxicating than any potent brew. She closed her eyes and drew in a deep, heady breath.
“All it will take is my hand over the small of your lower back as I draw you close to make it very clear that my attentions are not to be challenged.”
Helena could make right and reason out of any set of numbers with barely any effort. That comforting order had been her lifeline when so much of her life had been ugly and unclear. But there was no order to the way this made her feel. There was no way she could neatly reason out what she felt in his presence. This man had a mastery of words that had the power to weaken. Pull yourself together, girl. Helena forced away the seductively thick haze he’d thrown over her and she blinked back that fog. His efforts here were nothing more than a bid to present the very façade she’d asked of him a day earlier.
And for some inexplicable reason, she hated that his was nothing more than an expert show put on by a rogue.
“You are indeed, correct,” she said quietly, and he went still. “Given our . . .” She searched her gaze about, but Robert’s positioning continued to shield her from Society’s view. “Relationship, it would certainly be beneficial that I take part in certain activities that ladies partake in.” Grateful to have logic restored, she gave a decisive nod. “It is settled.”
Robert angled his head. “Settled?”
“Why, you’ll need to instruct me.”
. . . You’ll need to instruct me . . .
For the scheme Helena had enlisted his aid in, he didn’t give a bloody jot that she couldn’t paint or ride. He did, however, for entirely selfish, roguish reasons, ones that had absolutely nothing to do with said scheme, very well care that the lady could not dance.
Robert’s body immediately hardened with her barely there utterance, conjuring all manner of wicked deeds he’d delight in teaching the lady.
Her breathy utterance raised remembrances of the feel of her body flush to his, the crimson hew of her nipples. The breathy moans of her desire.
A groan escaped him.
“Are you all right?” She creased her brow.
No. “Yes,” he managed, his voice garbled. “Surely the duke has hired private dance masters.”
“Three.”
He cocked his head.
She held up three fingers. “He’s hired three of them. In a month’s time. They’ve proven remarkably . . . unhelpful.”
In an attempt to not smile, Robert schooled his features. “And you expect I should have the skill to . . .” He lowered his head closer to her ear. “Teach you?”
Helena snorted. “No. I do think given the need to put your hands on my body in a specific way that I’d be better served by your instruction.”
Robert tamped down a groan as the sound of her hushed contralto unwittingly drew forth wicked images of her on her back, arms extended up toward him, while he worshiped her generous mouth. He shook his head. What a sin that he’d not recalled that night with her in the Hell and Sin Club. With fate mocking him all the more for that failing, the lady folded her arms before her, plumping her small breasts, and bringing his gaze to her modest décolletage as another hot wave of desire filled him. Had he truly found her . . . less than pretty? How, when she was . . . ? He gave his head another hard shake.
The lady made an impatient sound, and tapped her slipper on the marble floor, that gesture faintly muted by the strands of the orchestra. “You won’t, then?”
What in blazes was she running on about? Given the hard look she leveled on him, she expected some response.
“Teach me?” she said slowly, as though instructing a slow-to-comprehend child.
How had the tables been so flipped that she should be perfectly composed while he lusted over her less-than-abundant décolletage? “You wish me to provide dance lessons?” he asked gruffly.
The lady was safer with a knife in her hands than she was with seductive words on her lips. Understanding lit her eyes. “Ah, I see.” Apparently she’d little need for his involvement in the discussion.
“Just what do you see, Miss Banbury?” he said, his voice garbled. The roguish part of him longed to know precisely what wicked suggestions would tumble forth from her lips.
“Is it that you have a problem being alone with me?” Given their first two encounters, when she’d first tried to gut him, and then unman him with her foot, followed by their third encounter, where she’d called into question his honor, he really should have all number of reservations in being alone with this woman from the Hell and Sin Club.
“I assure you, I’ve no worry over being alone with you.” He infused as much sardonicism into that handful of words as he was able.
Her eyebrows dipped, as she took a pugnacious step closer. “Then I expect a rogue such as you can bring himself around to touch me enough for your sufficient lesson.” She wrinkled her nose. “Particularly as you were able to bring yourself to do so in my chambers. Then there was the fact that you were foxed, so perhaps it was that, hmm?”
Understanding dawned.
The lady believed he didn’t wish to dance with her. He ran his gaze over her sharp features, and the mark upon her cheek. The world was on the whole a merciless place. What was that world to a woman who wore scars upon her skin, and called a gaming hell home? “You misunderstand, Helena.”
He may as well have presented her an unsolvable word riddle for the befuddlement in her expression. “I do?”
Something tugged at his heart, an organ he’d long believed incapable of feeling anything for anyone beyond his family. “Quite the opposite, love,” he murmured. “I am looking forward to the opportunity to properly . . . touch you.”
As her eyes formed round moons, and her breath hitched noisily, another surge of masculine triumph gripped him. For her flippant words, desire fairly seeped from her tall, lithe frame. Then all hint of passion receded. She squinted up at him. “Are you making light of me?” she demanded.
“I’ve well learned the perils in crossing you, madam,” he assured her with a dry twist of his lips. Some of the tautness left her narrow shoulders and as she held his gaze, something passed between them. Something indefinable. Some peculiar connection that came in mention of that first exchange that had temporarily changed the course of her life.
God help him, with a sea of the ton’s leading lords and ladies, he was going to kiss her. In a rash moment of madness, he didn’t give a bloody hell who saw it . . .
“Robert, there you are!”
Robert silently cursed as fate tested the veracity of that previous silent thought. He spun toward that excited voice belonging to his sister. He quickly positioned himself between Beatrice and Helena.
Tamping down frustration at having his interlude with Miss Helena Banbury interrupted, Robert greeted his ever-smiling sister. “Beatrice.”
She took his hands, and leaning up on tiptoe kissed his cheek. “Since you’ve left for your bachelor residence, I’ve not had an opportunity to speak to you.” There was a faintly accusatory edge there that fanned his guilt.
“I’ve been otherwise . . . occupied,” he said, mindful of the woman at his back. Helena’s gaze bore into him.
His sister snorted. “Occupied.”
Yes, given the dissolute lifestyle he’d led, why should his sister believe he’d in fact committed himself to daily meetings with their father’s man-of-affairs? Regardless, he’d not have the discussion in front of Helena. He yanked one of her blonde curls. “What do you require, scamp?”
She grinned. “I wish to visit a bookshop on St Giles Cir . . .” Her words trailed off, as past his shoulder, her gaze bumped into Helena. Interest filled her expressive eyes. “Oh, hello.”
Robert quickly shifted so he no longer obstructed the crowd, or his sister’s view of the young woman.
“Hello,” Helena murmured, and dropped a hasty, if less than pretty, curtsy.
He opened his mouth to make the proper introductions, but Beatrice reached past him. “Forgive me, I did not see you there. I am Lady Beatrice Dennington.” She gestured to him. “Robert’s sister.”
Helena hesitated, and then placed her gloved fingers in his sister’s, returning that slight shake. “Helena Banbury. The . . .” Color suffused her cheeks. “Duke of Wilkinson’s daughter.”
A gasp exploded from his sister’s lips and she swung her gaze from Helena up to Robert. Understanding filled her eyes. “You are the duke’s daughter.”
Helena stiffened. “I am.”
He’d known Helena Banbury for only a handful of exchanges but had come to appreciate the way in which she brought her shoulders back, and tipped her chin up with those expressions of pride and defensiveness. What whispers she must have endured in her short time here to account for the reservation there, and how he despised every bloody bastard to put that guarded look in her eyes. She made to draw back her fingers, but his sister retained her hold.
A small, clear laugh escaped Beatrice. “Oh, I am so very glad.”
Helena furrowed her brow and looked blankly at Robert.
He gave his head a shake. It was hardly the place to explain that his sister had drawn the erroneous assumption that he’d launched an official courtship of the duke’s barely out of the schoolroom daughter. Even with Helena’s elevated status as a duke’s daughter, Beatrice would never disdain a person because of their station.
“May I pay you a visit, Miss Banbury?”
Helena tilted her head at an endearing angle. “Visit?” she parroted back.
His sister’s smile dipped. “Unless, you’d rather I did not?”
Wary caution blared in her eyes. “N-no,” she stammered. How much unkindness had she known that she’d built up these guarded walls about herself? “I would . . .” A hesitant smile quivered on her lips. “Like that very much.” And more, why should it matter to him? He was aiding her for the remainder of the Season out of a sense of honor to make right a wrong he’d done. Robert fisted his hands. So why this need to know the stories and secrets that had turned her into this guarded creature?
Beatrice clapped her hands. “Splendid. I shall call tomorrow afternoon.”
That snapped him back from his tumultuous musings. “No,” he exclaimed, earning the attention of both young women. “Miss Banbury was explaining that she has lessons with a very skilled dance master on the morrow.”
A charged look passed between Helena and Robert, and by the rapid rise and fall of her chest, she too was now thinking of all talk of his hands on her and the lesson she expected.
“Oh, drat,” his sister said and patted Helena on the hand regretfully. “They are rather tedious, are they not? Another time, then?”
Helena nodded. “That would be lovely, my lady.” She glanced across the ballroom, and then smoothed her palms down the front of her skirts. “I see the duchess motioning to me. If you’ll excuse me?” She stole another glance at Robert.
He swiftly captured her fingers and raised them to his mouth, damning the fabric between them that denied him the feel of her skin against his. “Miss Banbury,” he said quietly, in even, modulated tones.
“L-Lord Westfield.”
And as Helena turned on her heel and marched away, and his sister prattled on, he conceded that, for the first time in the course of his life, he was rather looking forward to a dance lesson.