Her heart had begun to thud in a low, heavy rhythm. Strange, how the system of nerves could so overtake the mind, that a man sitting before her and speaking in such an easy tone could make her feel as if she were a hare faced by a pack of wolves. He looked at her with a small smile on his face. It seemed as if he could hear her pulse, and its thready beat was music to his ears.
She wasn’t going to rabbit away. This was her business, her life, and she wasn’t about to let this man ruin it for her. She steepled her fingers, willing them not to tremble, and gave her best impression of a bored sigh. “So this is blackmail.”
The smile Mr. Clark gave her felt like a weapon—one that he’d chosen carefully from his massive arsenal. It was the smile of a man who knew that he could charm and devastate, and he employed it with the precision of a master. He leaned forward. “Miss Marshall, I believe you are mispronouncing that word.”
She looked over at him.
“You should pronounce it like this: ‘Huzzah! Blackmail!’”
Her eyebrows rose. “How extraordinary, Mr. Clark. I thought you didn’t use exclamation points.”
“I don’t.” He smiled at her. “But you do, and there’s no need to be parsimonious.”
“Huzzah.” Free met his gaze with a flat stare. “Crime! Right now, that crime is blackmail, but it won’t be blackmail much longer.”
“No? How do you figure?”
“With luck and a good quantity of arsenic…?” She gave him a smile of her own. “Soon it will be: ‘Huzzah! Murder!’ Now there’s a cause that deserves my exclamation points.”
She’d meant to confound him. Instead, his smile tilted, and all that calculated charm disappeared in a wash of real laughter. He leaned back in his chair, shaking his head. Somehow, it was even more unnerving to realize that he found her amusing. And entirely unfair that some small part of her wanted to make him laugh again.
She raised an eyebrow and regulated her voice to honeyed sweetness. “Would you care for some tea, Mr. Clark? I’ll prepare a pot of my very special recipe. Just for you.”
He waved a hand at her. “Save it. You see, Miss Marshall, I don’t wish to ruin the future you’ve so carefully built. I’m going to play the scoundrel here. All things considered, I’d rather be your scoundrel.”
She sat back. “Go ahead, Mr. Clark. Do your worst. I am inured to baseless threats. I don’t need your lies.”
He leaned back in his chair, a look of dissatisfaction on his face.
Of course he was glaring at her. She huffed in annoyance. “Yes, I am a terrible person. I refuse to give in to intimidation. I don’t need a scoundrel, thank you very much. Now good-bye.”
“Yes,” he said. “You do. Bugger it all.” He shut his eyes and placed his fingers against his temples. “I was hoping not to have to do this, but…”
Free narrowed her gaze at him. They’d run through lies, forgery, and blackmail. What was next? Physical threats?
“I’m going to have to tell you the truth,” he said with great reluctance. “Some of it. And I’m going to have to tell you enough to convince you I know what I’m doing.”
She didn’t believe that for one second.
“The person who is intent on destroying you is none other than the Honorable James Delacey.”
Free went very still. Delacey was also Viscount Claridge—or at least, he would be soon; there was some technical holdup in confirming him, although she gathered it was a simple procedural matter. Other than actually taking his seat in the House of Lords, he was afforded all the other social privileges of peerage. She’d met the man two years ago. Their acquaintance had been fortunately brief, and she had no wish to pursue it further. She set her hands on the table, pushing them flat against the cool surface.
The man in front of her did not mark her unease. “I would say that Delacey has no love for suffragettes, but it’s more complicated than that. His father never liked you; you shut down a factory that he’d invested in and lost him a great deal of money. And Delacey himself asked you to be his mistress some time ago, and you turned him down. He’s held a grudge ever since.”
If Clark knew that, he did stand high in the man’s counsel. It didn’t make him a friend; it didn’t mean he planned to help her. But he at least knew something.
“Delacey plans to discredit you completely,” he said. “He’s going to have one of your writers arrested this weekend on suspicion of theft, and while you’re still reeling from the scandal of that, he’ll point out that several of your recent essays have been drawn from other papers. Your advertisers will withdraw and your subscription numbers will plummet.” Mr. Clark gave her a brilliant smile. “As I’m sure you can see, you are at something of a disadvantage. You don’t have to trust me, Miss Marshall. You don’t even have to like me. But if you don’t listen to me, you’ll regret it.”
“Why?” She speared him with her gaze. “Why are you doing this?”
He shrugged nonchalantly, but his fingers curled on the desk a little too tightly. “Because Delacey and I have an old score that needs to be settled.” Mr. Clark’s lips thinned and he looked out the window again, over her press. “It’s that simple. Delacey wants you hurt, and I will not forgive him. So we have a mutual enemy. I don’t pretend that we will be friends, you and I—but I came here to present myself as an ally. I didn’t have to tell you that I was capable of blackmail. I didn’t have to demonstrate my skill at forgery. If I had wanted to, I would have delivered you a recommendation from Queen Victoria herself. And—Miss Marshall—”
He leaned toward her, gesturing her close as if he wished to impart a great secret.
She couldn’t help herself. She leaned in.
“You know,” he said simply, “that if I’d wanted to be gentlemanly and agreeable, I could have charmed you. In an instant.”
A wash of heat passed through her, a flush that was half embarrassment and half acknowledgment of the truth. A beat passed while his eyes held hers. Oh, he was good at that—at giving her just that hint of attraction. Not so much as to put her off; just enough to intrigue her.
Free refused to be intrigued. “You could have,” she told him. “But charmed or not, I would still have been thinking.”
“I’m dishonorable and disreputable. I lie and I cheat, and I am telling you plainly that you are only a means to an end for me. I’m not telling you the truth, but overall, I’m not playing you false. You may not know the exact cards I hold, but you will know the score. I promise you that much.”
She didn’t trust him or his promises—not an inch. And yet he was right. He might be a dishonest man, but he’d not pretended to be anything else. It was a curious sort of honor.
“I am not playing you false,” he repeated. “Delacey is trying to ruin your reputation. Delacey intends to do far, far more, with lasting consequences. Tell me the truth, Miss Marshall. If you had the opportunity to beat Delacey, would you take it?”
She thought of her editorials, so painstakingly written—stolen from her, her heartfelt words twisted and butchered to serve causes that she hated. She thought of all the things that she’d heard Delacey say about her, coming to her on whispers and innuendo.
Every last ugly letter she’d received, every cowardly anonymous threat that she’d shoved in her rubbish bin, every sleepless night after he’d propositioned her.
She couldn’t lay all those terrible letters at Delacey’s door. But if he planned even a fraction of what Mr. Clark claimed, she wanted him held responsible.
He was trying to take what was hers. He was trying to beat her down, to make an example of her to all the women who looked to her and thought, “Well, she did it, so why can’t I?”
And he’d singled her out because she’d said no.
“Do I want Delacey held responsible?” she heard herself say. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
Mr. Clark nodded. “Then, Miss Marshall, you’re in need of a scoundrel.” He spread his hands, palms up. “And here I am.”
EDWARD LOUNGED
IN HIS SEAT, letting Miss Marshall contemplate him. She’d leaned forward an inch, her nose wrinkling. Those things should have signified unease, but paired with the clear, calm gray of her eyes, they gave him no idea what she was thinking.
He had thought she would be easy to read. Ha. He had thought she’d be easy to manipulate. Another ha. She’d not bent an inch. He’d been wrong on both counts, and as confounding as this conversation had become, at least these next few weeks would be exciting.
Miss Marshall, he silently admitted, hadn’t needed to be any more exciting.
Her eyes focused on him unblinking. She tapped her lovely lips with a thumb. “What does Delacey have planned next?” she finally asked. “You said he was going to have one of my writers discredited. Which one?”
She hadn’t agreed yet to work with him, he noted. He’d been furious when he went through his brother’s notes and pieced together the extent of what James had planned. A few things still in motion, his brother had told him, with an airy wave of his hand. No doubt he thought those few things unimportant.
Miss Marshall leaned forward. “Amanda? Alice?” There was a ferocity in her tone, almost a growl at the back of her throat as if she were a mother wolf protecting her cubs.
“Not that I know of.” Edward frowned. “He wants Stephen Shaughnessy.”
She blinked and sat back. “Stephen? He writes one column a week. It’s purely for amusement.”
“Yes, but he’s a man.”
She snorted.
He tried again. “Shaughnessy is an excellent target because so many dislike him.”
Her jaw squared. “Only idiots dislike him.”
Protective and loyal, too. “Ah, but there are a great many idiots,” Edward told her, “and he inspires so many of them. He writes a column making fun of men. He’s Catholic. He’s Irish. He doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut. You saw it yourself—matters are bad enough that his own classmates pelted him with dye.”
Miss Marshall winced. “That was one of his classmates?”
“Yes. There are a great many who are primed to believe the worst of him. And Delacey knows him—his father was a servant on his family’s estate. There’s some sort of bad blood there. I’m sure if you asked Shaughnessy, he could explain the details.”
She didn’t nod. Instead, she set her chin even more mulishly. “So what is Delacey planning to do to him?”
“Tonight, someone is going to remove a family possession from another student’s room and place it among Shaughnessy’s belongings.”
Her expression grew dark indeed. He smiled at her languidly, refusing to let her see the fury he still felt at that.
Having Stephen charged with theft, and likely removed from school, was what his brother had dismissed as a few small things, ones that need not concern either of them overly much.
Miss Marshall considered this. “What do you propose to do about it?”
“I’ll follow the man in, take the item, hide it somewhere outside,” Edward said. “I could do all that without you. But it would be best if Shaughnessy had an unassailable alibi for the evening. I trust you can make that happen.”
“I can get him away,” she said slowly.
“Excellent. Then we’re in agreement.”
She held out a quelling hand. “Not yet. I still don’t trust you, Mr. Clark. For all I know, you’re planning to arrange the particulars of this as soon as you’ve gained my compliance. And since you propose to go alone, there will be nobody to gainsay your word about what you discover. Convenient for you.”
That sense of excitement returned, prickling Edward’s palms. “What do you suggest instead?”
She gave him a brilliant smile. “You may remain as my guest here throughout the day. You’ll be a guest who never leaves, who interacts with no one else. That way, I’ll know you’ve not sent any messages arranging anything.”
“That’s a great deal to ask of a man who is offering to help you.”
She glanced over at him. “But then, you’re not offering to help me. You don’t give a damn about me. You want me to help you achieve revenge. You’ll surely put up with a little inconvenience for that, won’t you?”
She hadn’t missed a thing. Edward conceded this with a wave of his hand. “Continue on. I stay here all day. And then what will happen?”
“I’ll accompany you to Shaughnessy’s room this night,” she said. “I’ll search it. We’ll see if that item is there together.”
“And if it is, you’ll trust me?”
She tapped the forged reference he’d left on her desk and smiled even more brilliantly. “If it’s there, I won’t turn you over to the authorities. It was good of you to demonstrate your skill with forgery so beautifully in front of me. You’ve even left me evidence. So if you’re telling the truth about this, I suppose I’ll let you go free. For now.”
He absolutely should have been annoyed with her. Instead, he wanted to laugh—and to shake her hand and tell her that she played a jolly good game.
Come to think of it, he didn’t precisely want to let go of her hand, once he’d given it a shake.
“Miss Marshall,” he said, “are you blackmailing me with my attempt to blackmail you? Can I now threaten to go to the authorities and turn this convoluted double blackmail plot into triple blackmail?”
She leaned forward, gesturing him to come close with a finger. He set his hands on the desk and leaned in close. They were separated by twelve inches and an expanse of wood. She licked her lips, and he felt his mouth go dry. Oh, no. There was nothing boring about her. He was riveted, in fact.
She smiled at him, and then spoke in a low voice. “You said you’d done your research, Mr. Clark. You said you knew who I was. You obviously didn’t look very hard. A woman doesn’t run a newspaper and perform her own investigations without learning how to deal with scoundrels. You think you can push me around, that you can traipse in here and take charge. You can’t. If you really want your revenge, you’re going to have to work for it.”
He tried to muster up a sense of annoyance. She was complicating everything. She watched with an expression that struck him as halfway between severe and impish. But—alas—he couldn’t come up with even a trace of exasperation.
It was going to be downright fun working with her.
So instead of agreeing, he picked up her pen again and pulled the letter he’d forged back from her.
“Postscript,” he narrated aloud as he wrote. “Don’t let Edward Clark’s patent humility fool you. He is maddeningly brilliant. Beware. It will creep up on you over time.” He passed the letter back to her. “There. That makes it rather better, don’t you think?”
She perused the line he’d added with a dubious raising of her eyebrows. “Not particularly, no.”
“Should I have underlined maddeningly?” he asked. “Or brilliant? I ask because if you’re going to have me up for forgery, I want to make sure you have a perfect specimen to present to the court. A man has his pride.”
“Underline neither,” she said calmly. “I’ll let you know when you’ve earned my italics. For now, you may only lay claim to regular type and full stops.”
He couldn’t outblackmail her, outthink her, or outcharm her. He couldn’t even outbrazen her.
“Tell me, Miss Marshall,” he said. “Do you ever bend to anyone?”
She shook her head. “Only if it will get me what I want. I’m a very determined woman.”
He could believe it now. He’d been misled by her idealism, her smile. A man might see her trim form seated at her desk, her fingers slightly stained with ink, poised above the letter he’d written, and see only a small, lovely woman. He might see that and completely miss the steel in her character.
Edward wouldn’t make that mistake again. A hint of a smile touched her lips as she looked down. She was maddeningly…everything. This entire endeavor had tilted, and now, like a cart on a hill without a driver, it was careening away. He didn’t know when the crash would come, but he w
asn’t about to jump off.
This was so terribly bad that it had actually come full circle round to something…enticingly good.
“Well, then.” He stood. “Lead on, Miss Marshall. If you’re to keep me under lock and key, I suppose you must let me know where I will be staying.”
Chapter Four
MISS MARSHALL PUT EDWARD in something she called the archive room. In actuality, it was little better than a dusty closet. A single high slit of a window allowed barely enough daylight through to illuminate a chair, a spindly desk, and a mass of cabinets.
“Mr. Clark is considering advertising with us,” she told the other women in the main room. “He wants to look through the archives of the paper.”
Which, actually, was not a bad idea. He thought he’d done the necessary research, but he’d had only the vaguest notion of what Miss Marshall was like when he arrived here—and that had been gleaned from five minutes in her company and the combination of notes in his brother’s file. The reality of her had smashed all his dimly held expectations to bits.
He started reading her paper from the first issue.
It took only four issues for Miss Marshall’s thrice-weekly paper to leave him properly terrified. She’d had herself committed to a government-operated lock hospital—one of those dreadful institutions established for the protection of the Royal Navy, where they held prostitutes suspected of carrying venereal diseases. Miss Marshall had stayed for twenty-six days. She’d been examined, mistreated, starved, and frozen. When she’d finally been sprung by her brother, she’d written a scathing report on the conditions inside.
Nobody had been willing to print it, so she’d started her own newspaper.
Her report on the mistreatment of suspected prostitutes gave her material for her first week in operation. In subsequent weeks, she’d taken work in a cotton factory. She’d worked as a maid in the home of a peer rumored to despoil the virtue of his servants. She’d interviewed courtesans and prostitutes on the one hand, and the great dames of society on the other. She wrote about all these things in plain, simple, damning language.