Fool Me Twice

  Her audacity should not be able to surprise him any longer. But he still did not understand how she did this: how she shifted the balance of power between them so suddenly that he felt compelled to reply, to prove himself, to be accountable to her.

  He had learned how to shift it back, though. He rose, crossed to the bed. As he sat down beside her, she froze.

  “Too late for caution, Miss Holladay.” He reached out, slipped his hand beneath the heavy weight of her hair. It was coming down in pieces, as soft as he’d remembered; siren’s hair, the color of fire. He gathered up these locks into a mass so thick that his fist barely proved sufficient. He tugged very lightly, tilting her head back just a fraction. “This is how lambs are slaughtered,” he said. “Did you know that?”

  Her eyes found his, wide, her lashes fluttering. He was terrifying her. Good. He needed to know he was still capable of it.

  “You’d make a poor butcher,” she managed.

  Brave to the end. He lost the stomach, all at once, for bullying her.

  He loosened his hold, allowing her to relax into a more natural posture. “Why do you care if I loved her?” he asked. “Never say, Olivia, that you have developed an interest in me?” He stroked his thumb down the rim of her ear, hearing with satisfaction the shudder of her breath. “Something beyond your larcenous aims? Surely your mother’s example taught you not to aim so high.”

  She jerked away, removing herself from his reach. “You do cruelty very well. Is that why your wife loathed you?”

  He marveled at her. “You truly don’t know when you’re beaten, do you?”

  “Am I?” She shrugged. “I haven’t yet finished my story.”

  “But your five minutes are up.”

  He heard her breath catch. And then she closed her eyes and bowed her head. “Fine,” she said quietly. “Do what you will.”

  The bare patch of her nape riveted him. Such a vulnerable, tender spot. “What I will,” he mused. He tracked his knuckle down her throat, then traced back up to her chin. Gently, he nudged her face toward his.

  She blushed, but did not open her eyes. “I feel nothing.”

  “I see your face,” he murmured. “I see the lie.”

  Her brow tightened. “You see nothing.”

  “I see it all.” He slid his hand down her arm, feeling for the slim bones of her wrist. Her fingers curled within his, a reflex; her fingers hid from him in the cup of her palm.

  He pried them out one by one, gently, for fingers were easily broken, and hers were too elegant to abuse. How curious: he’d imagined, a thousand times, what he might have done to Margaret had he uncovered her betrayals while she was alive. But never in any of those black fantasies had he imagined wanting to touch her like this.

  This woman was not Margaret. The betrayal was not the same.

  The revelation broke over him as gently as a breeze.

  He lifted his hand to cup her skull. So strange to be able to compass it so easily. Odd, wrong, that all her vivacity, the force and passion of her, should be contained in such a small, neatly shaped head.

  How much of his anger—for he was still angry, yes, only it existed, side by side, with fascination—how much of it was for her, and how much for himself? The things he saw in her now, even now—resolve; tenacity; determination; dignity . . .

  If those things were true . . . if he separated them from her betrayal . . . how could he not covet them?

  “So your mother loved Bertram,” he said. “And you believe I loved my wife. Does this mean you imagine us to be equal fools?”

  A line appeared between her brows. “Mama wasn’t foolish. She was only . . .”

  “Confused,” he said.

  Her eyes opened. They stared at each other. Some sticky web seemed to settle around them, enclosing them in a lush, weighted silence. Here was confusion in its purest form: finding oneself magnetically attracted to one’s poison.

  He smoothed her hair away from her brow. Her pupils still looked even. She was his responsibility now. Whatever happened to her, it would be his doing. “Do you still feel sick?”

  She gave a small shake of her head.

  “Excellent.” He leaned forward. Put his lips against her mouth.

  She took a sharp breath. But she did not lean back.

  He kissed her lightly, and then shifted so his cheek pressed against hers. He would be the author of her fate—not random chance; not an accident; not Bertram, or any other man. Softly he spoke into her ear, as his fingers felt down her spine. “When your mother left him. Where did she take you then?”

  “Shepwich,” she whispered. “Where her . . . family lived.” He could feel how her muscles tried to tighten beneath his touch; how, with gentle pressure here, and a small rub there, he could make them unwind, and force her to check her sigh.

  “What happened in Shepwich?” He rubbed his cheek against hers like a cat. Let her feel the scratch.

  “It was . . .” She sounded breathless now. “Not a happy reunion.”

  “Ah. They wouldn’t receive you?”

  “They tossed us out.”

  A sad tale, but hardly unusual. He took her lobe between his teeth, nibbled lightly. He licked it, and tasted the salt of her skin. “And so what did she do then?”

  “We—went back—to Allen’s End. Must you touch me like that?”

  He paused, his hand now at the base of her spine, his fingertips just brushing the swell of her buttocks. “How do you want me to touch you?”

  He felt her swallow. But she did not speak.

  “Do you want me to touch you?” he said.

  A shudder ran through her. “I wish . . .”

  “I don’t care what you wish,” he said. “I only care what you want.”

  Her chest rose and fell on a deep breath. And then, very slowly, she lowered her face into the crook of his shoulder. “I wish I did not want,” she said very softly.

  A savage triumph flooded him. He tightened his grip on her lower back to channel it. “And then. What happened then? After you returned to Allen’s End?”

  “Nothing.” Her lips brushed against his throat as she spoke, and all his senses concentrated and collected around that single point. “But things were never quite right between them again. He visited much more . . . rarely. And when he came, they would spend their evenings in cold silence. I couldn’t understand . . .”

  He closed his eyes, breathing her. “Why she went back to him?”

  “No. She had no choice in that, really. I couldn’t—I still don’t—understand why he came back. Why he continued to visit, year after year. He was so . . . resentful. As though he had no choice in it.”

  Her words were growing sluggish. He caressed her spine, long, soothing strokes. “Perhaps she had some compulsion over him. If we could learn what that was, it might prove useful.”

  “I don’t know what . . .” She hesitated. “In fact, there is one thing—something she wrote, the last entry in her diary: The truth is hidden at home. But I never knew what it meant.”

  He did not immediately reply. For as they sat here in silence, her weight against him, a strange feeling was swelling in him.

  So he was not his father, after all. He battled wicked thoughts, dark urges; he would press himself on this woman very soon. But he was not his father. His father had never wanted any woman in particular. And Alastair only wanted this one. This was possessiveness he felt.

  “We must go to Allen’s End,” he said. “Find out what your mother meant.”

  But she did not answer. And when he eased away to look into her face, he realized she had fallen asleep, her head in the crook of his shoulder.

  * * *

  Olivia woke to darkness. Groggy, she listened for the chatter of the servants in the gallery, but heard instead the muted rumble of traffic, as though from a high street. Where was she?

  The prison. She bolted upright. Marwick had rescued her! Where had he gone?

  She spotted a dim line of light beneath the clos
ed door that led to the back room. She stared at it, trying to collect her wits. She had not slept so deeply in months, it seemed.

  The last thing she remembered was sitting with her face pressed into his skin. Had she fallen asleep like that? And he had not woken her . . .

  A bittersweet longing flooded her. She braced herself against it with a long breath, and caught the reek of the mold in the prison.

  The jug on the washbasin still held some water. She rose and silently picked her way to it. The water was not too cold. She wet a cloth and cleaned her face. But what of the grime beneath her sleeves, and under her petticoats? Bits of prison, reeking, still coated her skin.

  Disgusted, she hauled up her skirts and swabbed clean her calves and knees. But it was not enough.

  She glanced over her shoulder. No sound came from the next room. The light under the door did not flicker.

  Quickly, she unbuttoned her bodice. During her time as an unhappy lodger in Mrs. Primm’s arctic boardinghouse, she had developed a talent for washing quickly. Her stays were fashioned for a working woman, and unfastened from the front. She placed them beside the basin and mopped her chest and arms.

  Her back throbbed. She remembered falling onto it after the policeman had struck her. How long ago that seemed now. Weeks, months.

  A particular spot troubled her, just below her shoulder blade. She twisted but could not quite reach it. Sweating from terror: she had not known such a thing was possible until those long hours alone in her cell—

  A hand closed over hers. “Let me.”

  She froze. Her stays sat discarded by the basin. She was naked from the waist up.

  Where was the panic? Was she simply too tired for it? Or was it that this moment felt, somehow, inevitable?

  He had threatened her. Yet she had fallen asleep in his arms, and he had laid her down to rest. How deeply she had slept. It was one thing to sleep alone, and another to sleep in the presence of a man whom she knew would allow nothing to happen to her—except for what he willed.

  Perhaps she was the deranged one here. For she felt safer with him than she ever had on her own.

  She opened her hand. He caught the cloth before it fell.

  His first strokes startled her. There was nothing seductive in them. He cleaned her skin with firm, expedient movements, as though he were a nurse tending a patient, or a servant wiping a vase. When he found the sore spot beneath her shoulder blade, she made some stifled noise, and he paused.

  “Hold on to the washstand,” he said.

  “Why?”

  The next moment she had her answer: his thumb found the spot and began to dig, rotate, massage.

  Her head flopped forward. She bit back a groan. Under the pressure of his hands, her muscles unraveled, growing limp, pliant. “Why are you doing this?” she whispered.

  “There is a Chinese proverb,” he said at length. “ ‘Save a man’s life, and you are responsible for him.’ ”

  “So you feel responsible.”

  He turned his kneading knuckles into her shoulders. “No more than you do for me.”

  She felt a fleeting thrill. There was the admission she’d been pressing for. She’d had a role in his recovery. “I passed your test, then.”

  Another pause. “I’m not sure the test was for you.”

  His hands eased across her shoulders, skated down her arms, and closed in a warm, solid grip just above her elbows. His knuckles brushed so close to the sides of her breasts. They stood silently, breathing together, the water in the basin casting a ghostly reflection of their silhouettes. He loomed behind her, but she felt no fear. She felt . . . protected.

  “Shall I let you dress?” He sounded meditative, as though thinking aloud, the question put to himself rather than her.

  In the library, he had tried to prove to her that he was not a good man. She sensed his indecision now. The battle within him.

  Perhaps she did not need him to be good. “Do you mean to help me with Bertram? I don’t mean murder,” she said. “He has children.” She tried never to think of them. She had let herself look up their names once in Debrett’s, and had regretted it ever after. “But do you mean to help me with him?”

  In the pause before his reply, she heard the rumble of traffic on Brook Street, the jingle of tack. What time was it? She felt adrift in this strange, fraught darkness, pinned between the washbasin and his body, large and hard behind her. She did not want him to move away.

  “It seems so,” he said.

  She turned to face him. Here, in the shadowed corner, she could not make out his features clearly. But she faced the light coming through the shutters, and by his indrawn breath, she gathered that he could see something of her: her bare breasts; her squared shoulders; enough, at least, to make him gasp.

  “You’re beautiful.” He sounded angry.

  Had he sounded ardent, she never would have believed him. But his anger, she believed. She reached out and found his cheek, stroked her thumb along the corner of his mouth. His jaw hardened. He would never admit as much, but she recognized power when she possessed it—as she did now over him.

  The revelation spread like an intoxicant through her. It fizzed in her blood. He was angry because he wanted her. Because he could not hurt her. Because he meant to help her, after all.

  Why had he rescued her? Why had he not arranged to hand her back to the police? He knew her story now. She gave him no special advantage over Bertram. “I think you failed your test,” she whispered.

  His hand came over hers, gripping her palm, pinning it against his rough cheek. “Don’t be so sure. You don’t know me, Olivia.”

  “Don’t I?” Who but she could be said to know him, now? And what she had seen of him, what she knew of him—everything that nobody else did—was what he loathed. She understood him. Like Mama, he judged himself more harshly than anyone else ever would.

  But she had never been able to abide dark moods—not in Mama, and not in him. She leaned forward and found his lips with hers.

  A breath tore from him, hot against her mouth. He stood very still as she pressed her mouth against his. Tension radiated from his clenched muscles. His hands found her waist. Flexed there twice.

  And then he dragged her into him, into a kiss so hot and deep that it felt like the resumption of something, rather than its beginning.

  I agree with the radicals; I place no stock in virginity. She’d once said that to her friends at the typing school, taking private amusement in their shock. After all, it’s very easy to resist men, isn’t it? But managing to pick the right one—that is truly worthy of praise.

  Nobody would judge this man the right one. He was fashioned after Byron’s own model: mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

  But she knew him as no one else did. He was not the man he’d once been; he was the man that only she knew. And when he took her face between his palms and tilted back her head and pressed his tongue deeper into her mouth, questions of wisdom became irrelevant. She kissed him back, eager, ravenous.

  In the library he had taught her about pleasure: how it was at once shared but also private, greedy, provoked by him but involving places known only to herself. She felt it again now, low in her belly, hot flutters that collected into a delicious weight, a hot pulse stirring between her legs. She put her hands over his where he gripped her face and felt the strength in them. She heard the soft sound he made, near to a sigh.

  He had made that noise because of her. She smiled into his mouth.

  He grabbed her wrists and bowed his head to kiss each one, like a vassal paying tribute. She watched him do so and felt, for a dizzying moment, taller than him, a presence larger and grander than her flesh could contain. By his own account, he had seen her, recognized her, as brave, intelligent, resourceful. And he wanted her, against his will. Yes, let him bow his head; let him admit to being conquered.

  And then he flicked his tongue across her palm and she was pulled back into herself, abruptly a slip of a girl enfolded by his large
r body, cradled against his hard chest, gripped by his muscled arms, this man who had swept her out of Newgate. And this, too, exhilarated her. She wanted his protection. She wanted all of him.

  He walked her toward the bed. The mattress hit her thighs and she clutched his waist for balance, but he was prepared for this. Cradling her skull, he lowered her onto the mattress, then came over her, taking her in a long, hot, languorous kiss as he laid himself atop her inch by inch, the planes of his body sparking small shocks along her breasts, her belly, her thighs which he nudged apart and laid himself between. The heat of his abdomen, where his pulse beat strongly. The weight of his upper chest. He laid himself against her with leisurely, masterful care, as a master artisan might bring together the two pieces of a diptych.

  He put his mouth to her brow and breathed against her for a ragged moment. “You want this,” he said hoarsely.

  She opened her eyes. She knew how to listen to him; she could hear the question in his words. Braced on one arm, he hung over her, his face tense, urgent. She reached up to touch his cheek.

  How sober was Alastair de Grey, the Duke of Marwick! How shadowed, how complex and inscrutable—like an uncut gemstone that, in odd lights, suddenly revealed itself clear and sparkling. The light was his hidden kindness, the goodness he tried so hard now to deny. But it flashed through his face as he beheld her. His expression softened.

  “Do you want this?” he asked.

  Olivia knew there was not, after all, anything so virtuous in decency. Certainly it would not give her greater courage. And according to him, she already had enough.

  She stroked his cheek, which prickled from stubble. Vickers was an awful valet. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I do.”

  He loosed a breath, then leaned down to take her lobe between his teeth, flicking it with his tongue as his hand roamed her body, butterfly touches that set off small tremors at her waist, the side of her breast, her throat. The pads of his fingertips brushed up her jaw. He outlined the slope of her cheek like a blind man reading braille.

  Her own hands grew curious. She slid them over the angles of his shoulder blades to the small of his back. The rise of his buttocks was tight, ungiving. She turned her nails into it.