Chapter Fifteen
THE FOLLOWING DAY found Andrew discovering a new hatred for the bell that hung over the door of his shop. Word must’ve gotten out that he was supplying Mrs. Parkem’s, because for the past three days all manner of tailors and dressmakers had been visiting Colter’s Fine Notions. Having to pretend that he enjoyed long discussions about horn versus mother-of-pearl and the merits of the different concoctions that could be used to shine brass buttons was beginning to grate on him. It didn’t help that Gillie seemed to enjoy sitting back and watching him fumble his way through the barrage of questions flung at him each day.
However, a job was a job, even if it was a false one, and he was going to do it well.
He put on the same pleasant smile he’d seen Lavinia use and turned to face his customer. Except it wasn’t a customer at all. It was Caleb Malcolm.
“You,” he said.
“It’s been a long time. I wondered if you would recognize me at all,” said Caleb.
Oh, Andrew recognized him. Although the man had grown into his features, he looked essentially the same as he had when he was fifteen, save for a puffiness around his eyes, some bruising, and a slight hunch to his once-proud carriage.
“How could I mistake my childhood best friend for anyone else?” asked Andrew.
Caleb snorted. “Livy always had that title and we both know it.”
There was something about the way that Caleb said Lavinia’s nickname that made Andrew wary. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
“I don’t suppose you’d stay away from my sister if I asked you to,” Caleb said.
So that was what this was about. Caleb was here to warn him off.
“No,” Andrew said.
“And if I assure you that you are not nearly good enough for her no matter how much you were able to scrape together after all your years at sea?”
This, Andrew thought, was the problem with childhood friends. They knew all of your most closely held vulnerabilities and could prod them at will, except Caleb had this one wrong.
It had taken him years to accept that while most people would say he wasn’t good enough for Lavinia, he had done more than enough to prove himself. He’d sailed the world and acquitted himself bravely. He’d been nearly drowned, shot at, stabbed, slashed, and almost poisoned. He’d served Her Majesty, even if sometimes begrudgingly, and he knew his worth as a man.
Being good enough for Lavinia no longer scared him, but the idea of trusting her once again did. He might have grown into the man he was destined to become, but that didn’t change the fact that she’d scarred him deeply. Intellectually he could understand why she’d married Parkem. He could sympathize with her, knowing now the pressure her family had put her under. Still, the lingering thought niggled at his brain, asking him if it was all true.
Yet it hadn’t stopped him when they’d been alone in his office. He’d been intoxicated first by the anger at seeing her wounded brow and then by the relief of understanding she’d left Wark’s house unmolested. He might’ve been able to control himself and set her aside if she’d been cold and rigid in his arms, but instead she’d returned his kiss with every ounce of passion he’d remembered her to possess. That was when he’d lost his damn mind, taken her back to his rooms, and found solace in her.
That was why he was doing his best to try to stay away, checking the tug of invisible forces that kept tempting him to sprint over to her shop, order her staff out of the building, and lock the two of them away in her bedroom for a fortnight.
“What do you want, Caleb?” he asked.
His old friend shot him a rueful smile. “You two always did whatever it was you wanted, damn everyone else.”
“We were in love.”
There. He said it and he hadn’t even choked on his words. It had been a full day since he’d bid her good-bye at the door of his rooms and that had been roiling around in his mind the entire time. Saying it out loud to himself had been something of a test. He’d known that his heart had hardened if not healed when it no longer hurt to say “I loved Lavinia. I no longer love Lavinia.” But the previous night, the words had no longer had the detached quality he’d come to rely on. Now they were imbued with something entirely new that he knew it was best not to grow too comfortable with.
“I was sitting in her kitchen when she came home,” said Caleb.
“She’s a grown woman. She can do as she pleases,” said Andrew.
“You might think that, but no one else does. She brought down her own station in the world, and I’d like to be sure that she doesn’t fall any farther,” said Caleb.
Andrew stared at the man he was quickly beginning to think of as his former friend. “You don’t actually believe that.”
“It’s a fact, and an indisputable one at that. Lavinia was a merchant’s wife, and now she’s a dressmaker,” said Caleb.
“She married a merchant who left her with nothing but debts and she had the fortitude to pull herself out of that situation and strike out on her own. She deserves your admiration, not your disdain,” Andrew gritted out.
Lavinia’s brother blanched at that. “You don’t know a thing about my admiration for my sister. You haven’t spoken to me in more than a decade. Not one letter. Not one note to tell me that you’d survived. My sister wasn’t the only one who cared what happened to you.”
Andrew shoved a hand through his hair, trying to calm the mixture of anger and shame warring in him. Caleb was right. He hadn’t even bothered to write to his old friend to tell him he was alive. Seeing what he’d thought was Lavinia’s betrayal laid out so clearly for himself that day had wiped all desire to retain any aspect of his old life. He’d stayed away from Eyemouth for years, returning only briefly when his father had fallen ill, and refusing to go into town. He’d cut that part of his life out as though it had meant nothing to him because that had been the easiest thing to do. Not once had he given thought to his old friends. To the people who might care.
“I should’ve told you I was alive,” he said.
Caleb snorted. “Well, that’s at least a start. Do you know how I found out?”
“No.”
“My father wrote me. You might think a woman would be inconsolable after her dead fiancé appeared at her doorstep just two days after she married another man, but not my sister.”
Andrew winced, another little slash across his heart, but Caleb continued. “Instead she fell into a state. She wasn’t sad, she wasn’t angry. She wasn’t anything. She walked around for two months with nothing more than a blank stare, hardly seeing anyone. She wouldn’t talk to anyone. Parkem tried raging at her and begging and sweet-talking her. Nothing snapped her out of it.
“My father thought I might be able to talk to her, so I came down from Edinburgh for two weeks. Nothing I said did a thing.”
Andrew’s tongue was dry and it hurt to swallow around the emotion building in his throat at the thought of Lavinia with all the light in her dimmed.
“What brought her back?” he asked.
Caleb shrugged. “I don’t know. Apparently, one morning she woke up and decided to reenter the world. She never told anyone what had happened, but we all know what caused it.”
Him. The things he’d said. Those ugly words. It had felt good saying them and watching her face crumple. He’d wanted to hurt her badly, but now he was a different man. Now he couldn’t imagine anything as cowardly.
“I’m not going to hurt her if that’s what has you worried,” said Andrew.
“You’re a fool if you believe that,” said Caleb.
“It’s the truth.”
His old friend cocked his head to the side and studied him. “It’s too late, you know. You’ve already hurt her just by coming back.”
Caleb’s words twisted, a knife to the gut.
“If you can’t be certain you won’t hurt her again, leave her alone,” Caleb said.
Andrew knew he should be able to promise that. They were just simple words that, with the application of his considerable reserves of willpower, should’ve been easy to execute. But nothing about Lavinia was simple. He’d tasted her again, and his appetite for her had come roaring back. He should be man enough to walk away from her and the inevitability of the mess they would make of their lives if this all went wrong. She was at the center of his mission. He still had to work with her. Protect her.
How are you going to do that when even thinking about Wark looking at her makes you rage?
“You think you know what’s best for your sister?” asked Andrew.
Caleb nodded. “I do, even if she doesn’t want to hear it.”
“And what is that?” asked Andrew.
“She should marry Wark.”
The words hit Andrew like a punch to the gut. Of course Caleb, who knew nothing of Wark’s plot, thought she should marry the man. Wark might be a bore, but he was wealthy and he was clearly infatuated with her, if not outright lustful. Which was why, at the present moment, Andrew wanted to put his fist through a wall just thinking about Lavinia walking down the aisle to meet that man.
“She doesn’t like him,” he ground out.
“Then why did she agree to dine at his house last night?” Caleb asked.
Because she’s working for me and scaring me witless while doing it. Except he couldn’t say that, so instead he kept his mouth shut.
“I won’t pretend to like the way Wark looks at my sister. What man would? But sometimes there are other powers at play,” said Caleb.
“Like what?” asked Andrew.
“Money.”
Money. It was what had motivated Andrew for years, taking him away from Eyemouth and Lavinia in the quest to build a life for her that he thought she deserved. It had been in the pursuit of money that he’d sailed out on the voyage that had nearly killed him. And when he saw who she’d married and convinced himself as to why, it had all come back to money. He’d spent the past twelve years of his life wrapped up in the hard pursuit of it, yet he hadn’t become him any happier for it, only a more comfortable version of himself.
“Your sister is a successful dressmaker. Surely the shop is pulling in a tidy profit,” he said.
Caleb’s eyes darted down to the left, and Andrew knew the next words out of his old friend’s mouth would be a lie. “It’s a more expensive enterprise than you’d think. She’s barely keeping her head above water.”
Andrew frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. I’ve seen the number of orders she’s working on.”
This time it was Caleb to raise his brows. “You have?”
Andrew’s cock thickened as he thought of her spread out on the workshop floor, hair spilling down over her shoulders and cheeks flush from her climax. A vision. A delight. A danger.
“Actually,” Caleb said, “I suspect I’d rather not know. Just remember that she’s had a life these last twelve years without you, and she doesn’t need you now.”
Her brother might as well have growled, Stay away. She’s not for you. But what Caleb didn’t know was that it wasn’t that easy for Andrew when it came to Lavinia.
Andrew grunted rather than giving his consent, but that seemed enough for Caleb, who rapped his knuckles on the counter. “I’m off. They expect me to show up at my place of employment from time to time. It’s rather a bore, if you ask me.”
Andrew watched Lavinia’s younger brother saunter out of his shop and down the street and shook his head. A crumpled piece of paper on the ground caught his eye, and he rounded the corner to pick it up. He smoothed it out on the counter, his lips thinning into a hard line when he realized what it was.
Although I received your banknote of £20, you will find that you still have an outstanding debt of £130. I took you to be a man of your word, Malcolm. I expect the debt to be settled by the end of the month.
Caleb always had been enchanted by games of chance, even when they were small children. Now, Andrew hated to think how many hounding notes from his creditors Caleb had for him to be so casual with the ones he carried.
He folded the note carefully and slipped it into the pocket of his jacket. If Lavinia’s brother was ensnared by debt, she should know. He’d go that night, tell her, and leave. It would be easier that way.
Yet even as he promised himself that he’d steel himself against the temptation of another blissful night together, Andrew knew that one day away from her was already too much.
Andrew didn’t come to Lavinia the night after their reconciliation. She tried not to let that bother her. She had enough to worry about, what with the prince’s ball growing ever closer and the stack of orders that needed finishing seeming to multiply by the hour. After Wark had left her shop, she’d locked herself up in the frantic world of Mrs. Parkem’s workshop, her needle flying and mounds of tissue and string littering the floor as she and her seamstresses sent out package after package. She hadn’t even had time to scribble out a coded message to Andrew, informing him and Gillie of Wark’s invitation.
Now, however, one day later as she walked back from her last delivery of the day with aching feet and a sore neck, she found her unoccupied thoughts slipping to Andrew. Her stomach tightened as she remembered flashes of his lips grazing over her skin, drinking her in as though he’d never be able to have enough. Being with him had felt right, like returning home after a long time away. It frightened her because she knew there was more history there than one night together could brush away—but then, it didn’t have to be only one night. Did it?
She chewed on her lip as she walked, lost so deep in her thoughts that she hardly noticed a large black carriage with gold detailing around the windows pull up to her until it stopped and the door flew open.
“Mrs. Parkem, how fortuitous,” said Douglas, his silver-haired head emerging from inside the carriage.
“Mr. Douglas, you surprised me,” she said, her heart ramming against her rib cage.
The man smiled all too knowingly and stepped down from the vehicle. “Perhaps you would like a ride home. You must be tired after all of your deliveries.”
Something about the knowing way he said it set her on edge. “Thank you, but I’ll walk. I could do with the fresh air.”
“Come along, Mrs. Parkem. There’s no need to be coy.” Mrs. Wark’s voice pierced through from the darkness of the carriage. The lady shifted, the fast-falling twilight showing just the faintest outline of her features.
“Join me,” Mrs. Wark continued. “There are details I wish to discuss about my ball gown.”
That, Lavinia knew, was a lie. They’d been over the design of Mrs. Wark’s gown three times since the lady had commissioned it several months before, and they’d had two fittings. The dress, which would be wrapped in tissue and delivered to the house the following day, was perfect.
Still, she found herself delicately lifting her skirts and placing her hand as lightly as possible into Douglas’s to climb into the carriage. Andrew needed her help, and thus far Wark had turned up little to no useful information. It was time to begin to broaden her strategy.
As Lavinia settled onto the plush bench seat across from Mrs. Wark, the door swung closed, plunging them into near darkness.
“There, now we’re alone,” said Mrs. Wark.
“Will Mr. Douglas not be joining us?” asked Lavinia, wishing her eyes would adjust to the dim light faster.
“He knows that some matters must be spoken of woman to woman, and this is one of those. Mrs. Parkem, you’ll be aware by now that I’m not a woman who minces her words, so I will ask you plainly: what are your intentions toward my son?”
There are some women who speak to their dressmakers as they might to a confidante, hardly able to stop their secrets and worries pouring out of them. Mrs. Wark had never been that sort of woman, instead skewing to the other end of the spectrum. She treated Lavinia at best like a member of staff who had a skill that ensured her continued employment. Yet since Andrew had arrived, their roles had shifted somewhat. Lavinia could feel Mrs. Wark’s grip on the power in their relationship loosening, and she knew the lady must be desperate to clutch it to her.
Perhaps that’s why rather than apologizing or denying, Lavinia simply said, “I believe that’s normally a question directed at the other sex.”
“It’s directed at whomever is the predatory party. In this case, it’s you.”
Lavinia laughed. “If you believe I’m the predatory animal in this scenario, you’re sorely mistaken.”
“You persuaded my son to offer you an invitation to my table. You. A seamstress,” Mrs. Wark nearly spat.
“I can assure you, it was not necessary for me to persuade him. He gave that invitation of his own free will with no encouragement from me.”
“And what of this invitation to the prince’s ball?” Mrs. Wark asked.
“What does it matter to you whether he invited me or not?” Lavinia asked. “I’m a woman of good reputation who isn’t married,” she said, even as she knew how her reputation would suffer for attending an event publicly with Wark. Her reputation had probably already suffered when he’d sent his carriage to collect her before the dinner party. But that had no bearing on what Mrs. Wark spoke of. Lavinia would not be cowed by this woman.
“I am your client and I say that you will not attend,” said Mrs. Wark.
“And your son is the one who pays my invoices, so I’m rather more concerned about his feelings on the matter.”
“My son?” The woman laughed.
“And it seems to me that you’re rather quick to judge for a woman whose own son isn’t happy with the company she keeps,” said Lavinia.
Now that her eyes had adjusted to the light, Lavinia could just see Mrs. Wark’s eyes narrow. “What are you implying?” snapped the older woman.
“That Mr. Wark doesn’t seem particularly thrilled by the attention Mr. Douglas pays to you,” she said.
“Harold doesn’t know anything,” the older woman shot back. “Mr. Douglas is a close business associate.”
“A woolen merchant and an ironmonger? That hardly seems like a fruitful partnership.”
Mrs. Wark’s chin lifted. “Sometimes the mutually beneficial nature of relationships are difficult for the untrained eye to see. Mr. Douglas has just completed the purchase of one of Harold’s warehouses in Leith.”
“Is your son aware of that sale?” asked Lavinia, doubtful that Wark would sell anything to Douglas, a man for whom he seemed to have nary a kind word.
“Harold need not bother himself with every detail of the running of the business. He has other responsibilities.”
“Like the prince’s committee?”
“Just so. Now,” said Mrs. Wark, with a nod to the door, “you will no doubt wish to be on your way.”
Summarily dismissed, Lavinia opened the door to the fresh evening air, happy to be free of the carriage. But before her foot hit the ground, Mrs. Wark said, “Mrs. Parkem, it would be best if you would send one of your girls to deliver my dress. And it would be preferable if a member of your staff were to attend my fittings in your place in the future.”
Lavinia’s cheeks flamed furious red. Mrs. Wark might be difficult, but she was still a customer of long standing. For the woman to suggest that Lavinia was somehow neither fit nor suitable to attend to the lady herself was as clear an insult as a slap across the face.
She drew in a deep breath and turned to face the open door of the carriage. “I believe, Mrs. Wark, that it will be impossible for my girls or myself to attend to you any longer. If you wish to come into the shop for your fittings, you will be most welcome. Good evening.”
Lavinia had intended to march off in triumph at having the parting shot, but instead she found herself almost face-to-face with Douglas, who was watching her with a studied casualness that set her on edge.
“Why, Mrs. Parkem, you look angry enough to bite through steel,” he said.
Ignoring the jab, she asked, “You purchased Mr. Wark’s warehouse?”
“That’s right. The final documents were signed just yesterday,” he said.
“What does an ironmonger want with a woolen merchant’s warehouse?” she asked.
“There’s money in iron, my dear, but every man has to diversify.”
“Diversify into what?” she asked.
“I’m thinking of something rather more . . . dynamic,” he said with a wink.
She opened her mouth to press him, but before she could he asked, “And how is your head wound?”
Her fingers immediately went to the cut on at her hairline that was just beginning to heal.
“You know, it’s a funny thing, fainting. It can be such an easy thing to pretend at. All one has to do is play dead. Good evening, Mrs. Parkem,” he said, touching the brim of his hat.
A touch of fear flared up in her stomach as she watched the man climb back into the carriage. He paused at the door and shot her a smile over his shoulder, but there was nothing sweet about it. It was laced with something harder, something altogether more cunning, and as the carriage rolled off, it took everything Lavinia had not to whirl around on her boot heel and race home as fast as her feet could carry her.