She would not be drawn into pointless argument. “He’s looking for someone. A Russian. A very dangerous character. The man probably hides among his own people. There are several Russian communities in your territory, aren’t there?”
“They make no trouble,” Nick said evenly. “So it’s none of my concern.”
“It concerns me.”
“No, Lily. It doesn’t.”
“This Russian, he’s after Palmer’s family—”
“The Strattons, is that right?”
His thoughtful tone confused her. Then it gave her a fledging flutter of hope. “Yes. His mother and sister—”
“Seventh viscount in his line,” Nick went on. He pulled apart his hands, took hold of one of his rings and turned it idly around his finger. A ruby cabochon the size of a marble. “Second cousin to a couple of dukes. Hell, he’s even related to the Queen. Ancestors came over with old Willy the Conqueror, don’t you know.”
“You’ve been reading up on him.”
“Thought it wise.” He tipped his head, dark hair falling across one eye. Fine suit, yes. But the shaggy hair of a ruffian. “How much Irish you reckon you’ll find in a family like that?”
“His mother,” she said triumphantly. “She hails from Tipperary.”
He burst into a laugh. “Is that what he told you? Aye, no doubt they ventured beyond the Pale once or twice. Seized some land from law-abiding Catholics. Don’t make them Irish, though.”
She bit her tongue. She must stay focused on her aim. “I don’t have any interest in defending his ancestors. It’s him that I . . .”
“You what?” Nick leaned forward. “What is it, exactly, that brings you to my doorstep to do his begging for him?”
“I’m not doing it for him. He doesn’t even know I’m here.”
“Sure he doesn’t,” he said smoothly.
“It’s true.” The next words came out clumsily, for they effectively bared her throat to Nick. “I care for him.”
He surprised her by sighing. “Oh, Lily.” He sat back, raked a hand through his black hair, then shook his head. “Well, it’s an old story. But I thought I taught you better. Fiona, now—she was softhearted. Took after her da. But you? I thought you were smarter.”
She was foolish, to be sure. No use in disputing it. “You don’t know him,” she said softly. “I can’t hope to persuade you that he’s far better, far kinder, far worthier than you think. Not like the rest of them. Of course you won’t believe that. But if you have any faith in me—then I will beg you. I beg you to trust my judgment, for once.”
His gaze dropped, his long dark lashes veiling his eyes. He nudged the ledger book straight, squared its edges with the corner of the desk. “All right, then let’s hear it. What are your hopes from him?”
“My hopes?” She frowned. “What do you mean? My hope is to find this Russian—”
“Your hopes for you.” He looked up sharply. “I don’t give a damn for Palmer. Let’s speak of what does matter. You want me to help this toff. Find the Russian who would hurt him. What’s in it for you? Think he’ll marry you for it?”
She flinched. “Of course not.”
He studied her a long moment, in which his steady gaze made her feel increasingly exposed, awkward and flushed and miserable.
“Oh, but you do hope, don’t you?” He spoke very gently, which somehow made it worse. “And why not? You walk around that auction house dressed like a lady, talking like a lady. And the swells bow to you, just as they would to a lady—but you’ll never be one of them, Lily. It’s not that you don’t deserve it—God knows you’ve done a tip-top job, remaking yourself. Had I known you had the talent for it, I never would have wasted you on thieving. You’d have made the finest swindler London ever saw.”
She could not hold his gaze. “But?”
“But the swindle ends, darling, when they ask who your father was. And your grandfather, and his father before him. Old William the Conqueror, he’s not in our line. His son killed our kind for sport, back in the day.”
“I know it.” She spat the words. “You needn’t tell me this.”
“I didn’t think I did. But then you came here to beg for one of them. And unless you give me a solid reason why, I’ll be thinking you—with love, Lily; always with love—the greatest damned fool in the city.”
“Here’s a reason.” She raised her head and glared at him. “You won’t have those letters unless you help me find the Russian.”
“Ah.” He steepled his fingertips against his mouth as he considered her. “Threats, is it?” he asked softly. “That wise, Lily?”
“No.” The syllable was threadbare. She cleared her throat and found her voice again. “But if your life were on the line, I would make threats to save it. And I’ll do it for him, too. Punish me as you like.”
“As I like.” He whipped his hands down against the desktop, the crack making her jump. “What I like has nothing to do with it. You’ll never make a lady—but you could’ve been a fine, powerful woman. Stayed here, run an empire with me. But no.” He stood with violent force, and she leapt to her feet, scrambling around the chair to bolt through the door.
But he didn’t come after her. He stared at her, scowling, and her hand, after a moment, slipped off the doorknob. She gathered herself to her full height. “The letters,” she said. “For the Russian’s location. That is the offer.”
“No,” he said flatly.
With the collapse of her hopes, fear seemed to leave her, too. She felt, above all, exhausted. “Very well.” She pulled open the door.
“I’ve a different bargain,” he said. “Nonnegotiable.”
She wheeled back.
“You’re family,” he said evenly. “But this is the last time I’ll do anything to serve Palmer. Understood?”
“Yes. Yes. Thank you—”
“Not yet,” he bit out. “God’s sake, Lily, have you forgotten everything? Hear the price first. Sit back down.”
Something was afoot at Everleigh’s. Lilah knew it the moment she alighted from the cab. The footmen were not at their posts on the front steps. Concern overrode the anxiety still lingering from her conversation with her uncle. She paid the driver and hurried around to the back entry.
The hall was empty. The counting room was locked. Even Mr. Chisholm, that permanent fixture in the contracts office, had deserted his desk. Rattled, Lilah pushed through the green baize doors into the public corridor. Lavender Ames and Maisy Lowell were hurrying up the grand staircase.
“Vinnie!” she called. “What’s going on?”
Lavender looked back but didn’t slow. “Quickly,” she said. “There’s a meeting called in the auction room.”
Lifting her skirts, Lilah took the stairs by twos. As she reached Vinnie’s side, she found herself at the edge of a crowd. The entire staff of Everleigh’s was funneling through the double doors into the oak-paneled hall where auctions were conducted.
Young Pete stood at the rostrum, his sister at his side. Just below them, the senior employees had assembled: the company solicitors; Young Pete’s secretary; and Mr. Hastings, who officially was Peter’s assistant, but in practice led most of the lesser auctions in Peter’s place. They were clustered in a tight, obsequious circle around a tall man, exquisitely dressed in dove gray, whose back was to the crowd.
She recognized the breadth of his shoulders, the way his blond hair curled against his collar. His military-straight posture.
As though he sensed her attention, he turned. Their eyes met across the crowd. He did not smile.
An elbow prodded her, making her flinch. “Hey now,” Vinnie said. “Isn’t that Lord Palmer?”
Her heart gave a queer thump. Like a thousand pricks from a needle, this wave of foreboding. She nodded.
“Why do you suppose he’s here?”
“I’ve no idea.” She cleared her throat. “Perhaps . . . to announce the date of the auction of Buckley Hall?”
But even as she spoke, she knew
the idea was absurd. Vinnie confirmed it: “I can’t imagine they’d assemble us for such an announcement. Perhaps for a royal estate, but you said Buckley Hall was not so very rich.”
“It was rich.” Richer than any estate she could imagine. “But not grand enough for this.”
Vinnie gave her a sharp look. “Are you all right?”
“Quiet now,” Young Pete called. He rapped the gavel against the rostrum, causing the assistant auctioneer below to give a proprietary wince.
Maisy Lowell snorted. “Look at how Hastings fondles the thing!” For he had reached out to pat the rostrum as one might soothe an addled horse.
“He’s in love,” Vinnie cracked.
Lilah felt her lips curl in an automatic smile. But she barely registered the joke. Palmer had looked away from her almost instantly, and from this distance—which suddenly felt so much larger than the width of the room, with him surrounded by fawning lackeys—he seemed every inch the stranger he had asked her to make him. Not the man she had lain with until dawn six nights ago. Not the man who had feared for her, and then called her his weakness.
No, the man across the room looked incapable of weakness. He wore a look of bored amusement that she remembered from the first days at Buckley Hall. The look, she had thought back then, of an arrogant, bullying ass.
“All right now, quiet,” Young Pete called, far more loudly than needed; the room had been designed to carry voices as clearly as an opera house, and everybody had already hushed anyway. Into the tense and excited silence, he continued: “Over five years ago, now, we mourned my father’s passing. I know we mourned together, for my father always considered you all to be as dear to him as family, and your grief was a testament to your fellow feeling. At every moment, since then, I have striven to do his legacy justice.”
“You’d imagine his sister had done nothing,” Vinnie muttered in Lilah’s left ear, while in her right, Maisy whispered, “She looks as sour as vinegar, doesn’t she?”
“It is in honor of that legacy,” Young Pete went on, “that I have called you here today. For as family, you deserve to share in our joys as much as our sorrows.” He lifted his hand, beckoning his sister nearer to him.
And then he motioned also to Palmer.
Vinnie gasped. “Do you think—”
“No,” Lilah said. No. She crossed her arms and gripped them very tightly. She must be mistaken. They had not been in London a week. She had met with Miss Everleigh every afternoon, for lessons in typing that also served to organize their notes on Buckley Hall. By no sign or odd mood had Miss Everleigh indicated that she had news of a private and unusual nature.
Yet Peter was still speaking. “It is my great good fortune to announce the betrothal of my sister to Viscount Palmer. Lord Palmer, as you may know—”
Her ears shut out the words. They buzzed senselessly around her: Pete’s speech, Palmer’s words of thanks, Vinnie’s excited babbling. The roar in her ears made it all unintelligible. She could not remove her eyes from Palmer. Christian. Could not look away, though it seemed to burn her very vision when he lifted Catherine Everleigh’s hand and kissed it.
Miss Everleigh smiled.
The astonished applause threw her back into herself. She would be sick, surely. She felt cold and jittery, as though she had drunk too much coffee, and then gone on a whirligig after.
“You never let on,” Vinnie was saying to her. “How did it happen? How did he win her?”
And Maisy, too, was demanding details: “When did they fall in love? Did you guess it right away?”
“I . . .” She could not do this. No amount of thieving could have prepared her to put on this kind of performance, tell these kinds of lies. What filled her throat, her mind, was only the truth: No, they did not fall in love at Buckley Hall. We fell in love. I fell in love with him. And I swear to you, until this moment, I was certain that he did as well.
But that wasn’t right. He’d never spoken of love. And she had explicitly denied it. Was she in love? She had promised herself she wasn’t.
Oh, God. She had lied.
“Excuse me,” she said, and pushed through the women. Thank heavens the double doors had been left ajar; otherwise, heavy as they were, she might have been forced to throw herself at them, again and again, battering herself until they opened, or she fell apart . . .
She fled through the empty hall, down the slippery echoing staircase, past the deserted salons where she had laughed and flirted and traded quips with a hundred gentlemen whose names she no longer remembered.
The butcher! She burst out through the doors, emerging into a light rain, coming to a stop at the top of the stairs, barely cognizant of the marveling looks from passersby on the pavement. Think of the butcher. Or your career.
But this ache was swelling, an unbearable pressure in her chest. Once it cracked, she’d be done for.
He’d never spoken of love. He’d only warned her. Become a stranger. It is safer. He had all but told her he would be her downfall. But he’d imagined the danger outward. How much easier, were that so! For neither he nor anybody in the world could save her from herself.
Stupid, stupid. She started to walk, blindly pushing past her fellow pedestrians. A vendor of hot oysters called out a warning; he ducked out of her path, grease splattering her wrist. She wasn’t wearing gloves. She’d left them inside.
Fiona, we made no plan for this.
When she finally halted, she found herself at the bustling edge of the marketplace. A hundred carts, vegetables and fruit, livestock lowing, women bawling their wares. By dint of long habit, her hand closed over her pocket to protect her purse. She felt the hilt of her knife. The sensation gave her an odd jolt, a sick thudding sense of sinking back into herself.
The world looked unchanged. She dashed away her tears—when had that happened?—and became immediately unremarkable. The next lot of passersby didn’t even look at her. Even in her fine gown, she fit right in with a common crowd.
She took a long breath, then sidestepped out of the way of a slow-moving oxcart. By a cart selling hot pies, a bearded man was about to clip the strings of a housewife’s purse, for she had turned away for a moment, forgetful, to see to her fussing children.
The knife was still in Lilah’s hand. She lifted it and watched it go.
The thief squawked in surprise, his sleeve pinned against the cart. The housewife shrieked and grabbed back her purse; the vendor bellowed for the police.
Lilah stepped up and retrieved her blade. Thief, housewife, and baker gawped at her.
She was still good for something. Good for a lot of things, in fact. She bobbed a brief curtsy and then turned away, quickening her pace when she spotted the approaching bobbies. Ladies did not throw knives.
Nick was right, after all. She would never be a lady in truth, but she did make a powerful woman.
At the corner, she made herself turn back toward Everleigh’s. The engagement changed nothing. It did not alter her. She remained the same: a woman who fought for the people she loved. She’d never been a coward.
She’d never been a figure of pity, either. Before the day’s end, she would write two notes of congratulation to the newly betrothed.
The fire in the hearth had caused the windows to fog. These cold rains had not ceased in a week, sparing no part of the home counties. They had soaked the ruined bones of what remained of Susseby, raising a strange reek that had permeated Christian’s skin. He’d walked through the property again three days ago. But he could smell the ash even now, battling with the stale, cologne-clogged air of Peter Everleigh’s office.
Catherine signed the last page of the contract, then handed it to her family’s lawyer, a rotund, balding man who treated her as though she were no older than ten. He flipped through the pages, checking each with officious care.
“I was thorough,” she said to him.
He gave her an indulgent smile. “Of course you were, dear.” He handed the contract across the desk to Christian’s lawyer. ?
??Lord Palmer must cosign acknowledgment of each clause. I assume you’ll wish to review them first.”
“Thoroughly.” Dyson slipped the documents into his briefcase. “Shall we reconvene in a week?”
“So long?” Catherine sat forward, ignoring her brother’s restraining hand. “I’d hoped to have it settled before the engagement party.” She grimaced. “If we truly must have one.”
“We must,” her brother said tightly. “I will not have it said that this marriage was done in haste. Let them think we’ve been planning it for some time.”
Catherine wanted her independence posthaste. The contract, once signed, would guarantee it. It laid out the terms of a marriage that would function, as far as Christian could tell, in the same regimented fashion as any business partnership.
“A week is perfectly satisfactory,” said Catherine’s lawyer.
“Quite right,” Peter snapped when Catherine looked ripe to protest again. “You will give us all cause to wonder at your hurry.”
Her mouth thinned as she glanced toward Christian. The meeting had not gone smoothly; Peter had seemed surprised by a number of Catherine’s conditions—above all, the clause that required her future husband to allow her fifty hours a week to pursue her professional obligations.
“You can’t intend to stay on here,” Peter had spluttered. “Why—Palmer, do you mean to allow this? Your wife to work?”
Christian had felt curiously anesthetized since his last walk through the ruins of Susseby. But Peter Everleigh’s distress was mildly diverting. “We can review it tomorrow,” he said now to Dyson. “Will that suit you, Catherine?”
She shrugged off her brother’s grip as she rose. “Very well, thank you. Lord Palmer, will you escort me to my office?”
“Later,” said Peter. “I need a private word with his lordship.”
“Yes,” Christian told her. “I’d be glad to do so.”
They walked in silence through the bustling public hallway. Once they had mounted the stairs, Catherine gestured him inside her office and pulled shut the door. “Thank you,” she said.