A Lady’s Lesson in Scandal

  She nodded and settled back against the squabs. Tears pricked her eyes—tears born of disbelief, of dumb amazement. Simon had been right; she loved him, there was no other explanation for this, yet she’d mistrusted him, reviled him, because it was easier by far to hate him. Of course it was easier to mistrust than to love. She’d seen firsthand the hells into which a heart could lead. She’d seen where love had taken Michael’s wife.

  Yet here she went, tripping down the same path for Simon’s sake! Twenty years from now, no doubt, she’d still be cursing herself for this unforgivable stupidity.

  When the coach took a sudden, sharp turn, she manufactured a choking noise.

  “What is it?” Grimston asked.

  “Nothing,” she whispered.

  A brief silence fell.

  She took a deep breath, willing all this pain, this confusion and despair, into her stomach. If only she could rid herself of them and feel nothing at all—not even love. Especially not love.

  She retched.

  “Good Lord!” Grimston snapped straight. “Are you going to be sick?”

  “Think it’s—the nerves,” she mumbled.

  He banged on the roof. “Do not vomit in this vehicle,” he said sharply.

  “No, no—” She clutched her stomach and heaved again as the coach slowed.

  “Open the door!” he shouted, and then the cool night air was flooding in, and strong hands wrapped around Nell’s waist to lower her to the ground.

  She bent double as though to puke, and then straightened with her elbow aimed straight for the footman’s groin.

  The man howled as the blow connected. She hiked up her skirts and started to run.

  Grimston’s roar echoed after her down the street: “You are making a grievous mistake!”

  She didn’t waste her breath on a reply.

  Simon spotted Nell in the road, stumbling to a stop, her hand lifting, waving tentatively at his vehicle, as though she feared he wouldn’t stop. His rage was an animate, living creature that had overtaken any part of him that he recognized. He banged the roof and did not wait for the vehicle to slow; he opened the door and leapt down onto the pavement, catching her by the elbows as she sagged against him.

  Her warmth, her cheek beneath his, was the first clear and clean sensation he’d felt for an eternity it seemed. “Are you all right?” he demanded.

  She was breathless, her body shaking with exertion, her skin damp with sweat. He pressed his lips against her brow, his hands flexing on her arms, straining not to tighten too fiercely, not to hurt her.

  “I’m—fine,” she gasped. “Please—let’s go—he was turning the coach—to—follow me.”

  “Grimston,” he said.

  She nodded against his chest.

  He would rip the man limb from limb. He would cut that bastard’s heart out and feed it to the crows. He lifted her, ignoring the way she jerked, her startled exclamation, and installed her in the vehicle. “Take her home,” he said to the staring coachman, who had twisted from the waist to peer at these curious events.

  “What—” Nell leaned forward, the light from the streetlamp on the pavement behind him lending her face a bluish hue, rendering in chiaroscuro her panicked expression. “You come with me!”

  “You said he is coming,” Simon said flatly. “I need to—speak with him.”

  Her eyes rounded. “Not now! Simon, please—”

  Please. Her voice broke on that syllable. He sucked in a long breath. Please. She’d been arrested. Katherine had sent a goddamned note. A note to break these tidings, a slip of paper that had lain in the entry hall hidden amid a pile of bloody invitations for—he knew not how long.

  “Please,” she repeated, and her voice snapped him back from red reverie: he looked at her, exhaled, and bounded into the vehicle, slamming the door shut himself.

  As he sat down on the bench beside her, the vehicle launched forward, jolting her into him. He felt the contact like a shock, a blow to the brain; his intentions shifted, resettled; he drew her to him so fast and forcefully that she made a small sound of protest.

  On a long breath, he forced his grip to loosen. His fingers threaded through her hair; he stared unseeing at the window as her breath puffed against his throat in ragged, uneven pants.

  “How long?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Oh. A … few hours?”

  He gritted his teeth. What to do with this emotion: he held very still, not even daring to breathe for a long moment, because his muscles were knotting and balking and she leaned against him, fragile, shaking, he was going to kill Grimston subtly; the man did not deserve a trial or a notorious death; he deserved to be stamped out, exterminated like a rat, in some back alley execution.

  She tried to pull away. He stopped her, and then caught himself and let her go. She would be angry at him, no doubt. She had every right to rage. She was his wife. She was … Nell, he had let her spend hours alone, surrounded by enemies—”I didn’t know,” he said hoarsely. “I promise you—the moment I found out, I came. The carriage was already readied—I was going to look for you—my God, had I not thought to look at those letters, I’d have gone in the opposite direction, to Bethnal Green—”

  His throat closed. The prospect of her running alone in the dark—not encountering him—fleeing from Grimston—caught by him—

  “It’s all right,” she said softly. She shoved a hand across her nose and blinked at him. The curves of her face, the wideness of her dark blue eyes—he was not going to recover from this: the agony of helplessness in which he’d sat right here, not minutes ago.

  He exhaled. Marshaled his thoughts. “Why did they take you?”

  Her breathy laughter hitched. “You didn’t know? The spoon. Grimston says I stole it.”

  He nodded. He could not take his eyes off her. “Are you all right? Did anyone lay a hand on you?”

  She blinked. “No. I’m … fine.”

  Of course. She was always fine. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she said after a pause. “Yes, Simon: I mean it.” A frown dawned on her brow. “Come here,” she whispered, and then contradicted herself by moving back into his arms.

  He closed his eyes as he held her. His pulse was finally slowing. “When I read Katherine’s note—” He swallowed. “Nell, I might have—” He felt a shudder move through him. Words defied the experience.

  “I can guess,” she murmured. Her face turned, her nose pushing hard into his chest. “He offered me money to leave you,” she whispered.

  Fleeting surprise flattened into black humor. Of course Grimston had offered her money. He’d been the messenger sent to Maria, too, so many years ago.

  But unlike Maria, Nell had refused his bribe.

  He turned his face into her hair, breathing deeply. Nothing in the world had ever felt so right as her in his arms.

  “What will we do?” she asked.

  We. Never had a word sounded so sweet. “It’s a lunatic charge,” he said. “We’ll put them on Michael.” And he would deal with Grimston.

  She shook her head. “Michael was in Ramsgate when the spoon went missing. And I can’t have the Crowleys involved.”

  None of this interested him. He wanted her home, upstairs, as far from the exits as possible, with every door between her and them locked, bolted; he wanted to have her squarely, securely, ensconced. Miracles were to be guarded. He would guard her with his life.

  “Not right now,” he said. “Later, we’ll discuss it.”

  “But—” She sat up, pushed away from him. “I can’t involve the Crowleys. There’s no way to disprove it.”

  “I’ll make it go away.”

  “But what if you can’t?” Her wide eyes searched his.

  “I can.” If he could do anything, put his mind and all his energies to anything, it would be this.

  She stared at him a moment longer. Opened her mouth as if to reply—then seemed to think bet
ter of it. With a sigh, she rested her head again on his shoulder, exactly where it belonged.

  This time, Nell didn’t let him keep her out of his conference with Daughtry. When the lawyer arrived and Simon tried to dispatch her upstairs, she stood firm. She kept her composure when Daughtry said, “Plainly speaking, this looks very bad.” When he said, “It would be irresponsible of me to suggest that these charges do not deserve your grave concern,” she received the words calmly.

  Simon did not.

  He lost his temper, though the lawyer wasn’t the man who deserved his abuse. She listened to his anger, so different from Michael’s, words without fists, the cold beneath it harder and more dangerous than Michael’s fire—but not to her. It was clear to her suddenly that he’d never be a danger to her.

  The lawyer tried to defend himself. She could see in his uneasy, sidelong glances toward her that he was censoring what he really wanted to say. He wanted to urge Simon toward that annulment, no doubt. “I must remind you,” he finally said, red with frustration, “of the provision we once discussed. If your financial concerns are paramount, then you must consider … that discussion.”

  Simon cursed. “Absolutely not.”

  Well, yes, she thought. It had come to that, now.

  She slipped out. Simon caught her on the stairs. His hand closed on her arm to commandeer her progress, to direct her, to make it seem, maybe, as though she moved at his bidding. He was, after all, the Earl of Rushden.

  She didn’t fight. She came to a stop. “He’s right,” she said. “Nothing good can come of it now.”

  “You cannot mean to give up,” he said.

  “It’s not giving up. It’s sound strategy.”

  His voice came in her ear, a raw whisper. “God damn you, Nell. Do you not understand that I’m in love with you?”

  She stared unseeing, straight ahead. Those words. “I wish you weren’t,” she said. It made everything so much harder.

  Abruptly his arm was beneath her knees; he was scooping her up, lifting her. As he looked down at her he showed her the face of a savage. “You’re not running away,” he said.

  She turned her own face away. As he carried her, stone busts marched by, eyeing her from their comfortable pedestals. In love, he’d said.

  He shifted her in his arms, his biceps flexing as he angled himself to strike the door with his shoulder. She could feel him vibrating, the muscles in his chest and abdomen contracting, turning into stone. A clever trick, a handy ability for his kind. In death they became immortalized in stone busts; in life they turned to stone when events opposed them. He stalked onward, immovable against her squirming.

  She twisted out of his arms in his sitting room, turning to face him.

  He stared at her. Not stone, after all. He looked … ravaged. Exhausted. “I would never let you go,” he said slowly. “Do you believe me, now?”

  “Yes,” she said. She wanted to weep for them both.

  He pushed his hand slowly up his face, through his hair, knocking it into disorder. Beautiful, weary, and all at once, visibly disgusted: with her, or himself, or both of them, who’d made a simple business deal into something so dreadfully messy.

  He turned away, pacing toward a cabinet; pulled out a decanter of brown liquid, making violent splashes into two glasses with a hand that shook.

  Her numbness evaporated so suddenly and completely that she keened silently for its loss. Without its substance to cushion her, she felt hollow, ripe to shatter. He’d decided love was a part of it now. The money had always and ever been his explicit aim, but now he felt differently—now, when she’d be a criminal, not an heiress at all.

  “You wanted the money,” she said. The reminder felt like a favor she was doing to him at her own expense; the words lacerated her throat.

  He loved her. They loved each other. She loved him, too, and that was now the secret she was keeping. Because tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that—what was to hold him when they had nothing? What was to hold him when he woke up to poverty?

  He knew so little of being poor. He couldn’t understand what it meant. He traded on credit, but credit could not last forever. Then life would grow bitterer than he could imagine. There would be no piano for him to play. Had his thoughts gone that far yet?

  He turned back. At first she thought he meant to hand her one of the glasses—and perhaps so did he. But he bolted the first one directly, and then, looking at her, he lifted the other and drank it down, too.

  He sat into a wing chair. “Yes,” he said dully. “I did want the money. And so did you.”

  She sank down across from him, unable now to remove her eyes from his face. Complex, important things moved across it, tightening his mouth, narrowing his eyes as he looked blindly around him, from her to the fire to the glasses in his hands, the sight of which abruptly caused him to grimace. He set them onto the table and locked his hands together, his fingers threading, folding at his mouth as he drew a long breath.

  “This will be difficult,” he said. “More difficult than we imagined.”

  He sounded dazed. A sharp little laugh caught in her throat. Defeat, the world’s refusal to bend to him, had stunned him.

  “But that doesn’t mean—” He locked eyes with her and she felt as though she’d been pierced, blinded by a sudden bright light. She looked down, blinking back tears.

  “That doesn’t mean,” he said hoarsely, “that we turn back now.”

  He sounded desperate, as well he might. If he wanted reassurance, she could give him none. His lawyer knew better. Grimston knew better than both of them. Even she herself had always known it was a gamble. But a good gambler knew when to withdraw.

  She exhaled, twining her own hands together, squeezing hard. He would hold her here and watch her be jailed. She would go to jail for him, because he was the only reason she’d not taken Grimston’s offer tonight. She would rot in prison and he’d be left bankrupt—rotting more slowly, but rotting all the same.

  He believed that keeping her here was love. They both would suffer for it.

  Only natural that she saw it more clearly than he did. His arrogance was finally blinding him to facts. She could not wait, for love of him, to be captured in Grimston’s trap. One of them needed to be sensible, and she, the one with the most to lose, would have to play that role.

  She’d planned for this once. It seemed hard to remember that conversation with Hannah in the coach. So long ago, it seemed now. The … dresses, she thought. Her brain moved sluggishly. She’d promised she would take the dresses when she went.

  “Nell,” he said. “Look at me.”

  She lifted her head and fixed on a point just to the right of him. She didn’t want to look at him like this, with his desire plain on his face, more vulnerable than she’d ever wished to see him. She couldn’t wish to hurt him. But he himself had planned to leave her once, and he would hurt her if she stayed—hurt not just her but also himself.

  He had such faith that life would turn out right in the end. Maybe it was his gift to believe that in spite of all that her father had done to him. Maybe that was why he’d hidden himself from the world: so it couldn’t correct these romantic notions.

  She would have liked to live in his private world. To keep this precious confederacy of two, their bold, intoxicating alliance. But love wasn’t enough—not in a world where her history in Bethnal Green could become a weapon to be wielded against her. Not when both their futures were at stake.

  He spoke flatly. “You are a coward.” He saw in her face, perhaps, the path her thoughts had turned down.

  She shrugged. Maybe she was cowardly. She couldn’t live here on a knife’s edge, her heart growing ever softer, sprouting countless tendrils that would wrap around him so tightly that she’d never recover her own independent shape—knowing, all the while, that the day might come when they would be yanked apart, and the sudden distance would rip her heart from her chest.

  The law would take her from him. And as she sa
t alone in jail, Daughtry would come whispering in his ear. He might reconsider his love. He might not. She and he would both be doomed, regardless.

  She rose slowly. She had the dresses to gather.

  In the next second he was in front of her. She didn’t see him move; she didn’t realize he had until his broad palm cupped her head, his fingers pushing through her hair, pulling her face up, his mouth coming down onto hers.

  A hitching little sound escaped her. She leaned into the kiss, let her arms twine around him. She ached, and when he touched her, the ache did not lessen; rather, it strengthened, it grew unbearable—but sweeter, all the same. This dark, consuming kiss assured her that there was cause to ache, that something great and magnificent would be lost tonight: the sweetness of him, the perfection of him, the strength and the skill and the force of life in him, were worth aching for. It was like holding her hand to a flame, but she put herself to him and reveled in the pain.

  Somehow they were moving now; somehow she was lying back on the bed as he came over her. Feverishly they kissed; their hands coursed over each other’s bodies as though not touching this curve or that surface would consign parts of them to the ether; as if only their touch made this real. In the back of her brain, that pulsating, terrified part of her so concerned with survival, with tomorrow, warned her, screaming, that she should not take this risk. Carrying his bastard, she would find the path ahead even steeper to climb.

  She didn’t care. Life had denied her a million things, the chance to know her true family not least among them. Now it was denying her him. Life was cruel, not a fairy tale; one took one’s happiness long before the ending, because the ending never came prettily or well.

  She struck his shoulder, sharply, the blow itself reviving her anger. Nothing was ever fair. He understood; he caught her hand and held it to him as he rolled, putting her on top of him—for once, in these brief moments, in control.

  She wanted him beneath her; but then she didn’t. She did not want to look at him. She shook her head as their eyes met, furious, furious as she took him by the hair and pulled up his head, pulled him halfway off the bed and shoved his jacket from his body. Off with the waistcoat and the braces and the shirt and the vest beneath it; she fell back over him like a ravening creature, sinking her teeth in the solid muscle of his shoulder, glad, violently so, when he shuddered beneath her.