A Dangerous Madness (18 page)

He wanted to break through to her. There was something shimmering in her eyes, something just out of his reach and he wanted to force it out, shake her out of her shell. “What happened to the woman who invited me into her bed chamber in her night shift? The woman who went into my arms this afternoon?”

Her gaze flew up to his. “That was…different.” She clasped her hands in front of her and brought them up between her breasts. “I didn’t know you so well, then.”

He gave a low chuckle. “Surely that should have made the invitation less likely, not more so?”

She let her hands fall to her sides. “I trusted…” She looked away, a flush building on her cheeks.

He frowned. “You trusted me then, but now you do not?” The pain of that was worse than the stinging groove the bullet had carved into his skin.

She shook her head, looking him in the eye again. “No. Everything you’ve done since I’ve met you has increased my trust in you. It is myself I no longer trust.”

She stood quite still, head bowed, and he found his feet also cemented in place.

Very slowly she raised her head again. “I
am
that woman who invited you to climb up to her bedroom window. Who pressed herself against you in the garden. And I know…” Her eyes were on his chest, and the look in them made him push off the wall.

She took a step back at his sudden movement, and he stilled so as not to startle her again.

She caught his gaze with hers. “I know there are things I haven’t experienced. Things I want to explore which I have been unable to. And you will think me most unladylike, but I find, after tonight, I am no longer considered a lady, and I was only grudgingly assigned that designation before. So I will be honest with you, Your Grace. If you would like it…” Her voice went down an octave, “I would welcome you as my lover.”

He knew he must look like a man hit once too many times in the boxing ring.

He had wanted to break through to her, to uncover the part of herself that he’d sensed was just below the surface, out of his reach. He had never expected an invitation to her inner-most sanctum.

She looked at his body again and blushed. “After you are recovered from your injury, of course. And you have completed your work for the Crown.” Her last words tumbled over each other in a rush.

James wanted to laugh at her belated attempt to work in a little time for herself to get used to the idea, or for him to back out of it.

He wanted to tell her how dangerous it was to offer herself to a man with that kind of look in her eyes.

And, Fairbanks was right. He wanted to take her up against the wall.

“My lady?” Lewis stood in the doorway, just behind her, a crisp white shirt in his hand. “Everything all right?”

She seemed to come out of the moment with a blink. “I think so.” She glanced at him nervously and he sent her a slow smile.

“Everything is most definitely all right.”

Chapter Twenty-five

W
ittaker’s chest was now covered in a white shirt Lewis had borrowed from one of the footmen, but even sitting with a man in shirt sleeves was scandalous.

Phoebe shrugged off the thought. What was one more scandalous action in a day of them?

She took a sip of the hot tea Lewis had provided and tried to repress the shiver she felt at being so close to him in such an intimate setting.

“Cold?”

She looked up to find Wittaker watching at her intently from his place by the fire. He had the gun Lewis had retrieved from the street in his hands.

She shook her head, but she did lean closer to the flames. She didn’t want him to know how much he could affect her.

She groped for a subject. “If you hadn’t swung me out of the coach, if you’d just taken my hand and helped me down, I might be dead.”

He moved toward her and sat down in the arm chair opposite, placing the attacker’s pistol on the table beside the chair. “I would say it was luck, or chance, but it was neither.” He looked down at the tea that had been poured for him and pushed the cup away. “Why did you look that way, in the carriage? Like I had hurt you?”

She forced herself to meet his eyes. She couldn’t keep looking away. Hiding herself. “It felt wrong, the way you were acting. It wasn’t you, but it was, and it made me upset.” She shrugged. “It was silly of me, I know. You were only doing what you had to do. But it wasn’t real.”

He stared at her for a long time, until eventually she was unable to sit still. She rose up and went to the sideboard, and brought back a crystal decanter of brandy and a glass, instead of the tea he so obviously didn’t want.

“It certainly felt that way. For a long time. That nothing was quite real.” He spoke quietly as he poured himself a small amount of amber liquid. “But no one noticed, including me.”

“What changed?” She leaned back in the chair and watched as he drank the brandy in a single swallow, at the way his throat worked, and the glimpse of skin she could see revealed by his unbuttoned shirt.

“It will sound mad, but I hired a chef.” He quirked a smile. He still held the crystal glass in his hand, and he tipped it this way and that, so the light of the fire danced rainbows over the wall. “He forced me to be present. To be honest. And then he came to me for help, and I almost failed him. All because I was so busy pretending to be someone else, I’d forgotten what I was doing it for.”

She couldn’t tell from his face how the incident he was talking about affected him, but his hand shook a little as he set his glass down.

“So you stopped pretending, and now you’re having to force yourself to pretend again?” She was sorry his father was not still alive, so she could flay him for what he’d done to his son.

He shrugged. “I know now I can’t do the work any longer, even if there was a need beyond this current affair with the Prime Minister. I don’t have the patience for it. And I find I have other…interests.”

He looked up at her, and for a beat the offer she had made him, and his clear acceptance of that offer, lay in the air between them, sensuous as the feel of silk against skin.

She shifted, not sure whether to run or stay, and he slid from his chair onto his knees and was suddenly in front of her, cupping her face in his hands.

“Shhh.” He glanced at the door. “I am going to kiss you. It will not be for as long as I would like because Lewis will only leave us alone for ten minutes at most at a time, self-appointed guard dog that he is.” He slid his hands deep into her hair, and tilted her head. “We can taste each other, to begin with.” The words were whispered against her lips, and then his mouth was on hers.

She had imagined being kissed.

Even when he could have done so, Sheldrake had not kissed her, and she had been worryingly relieved about it, even though she had yearned for the touch of a man’s hands, a man’s lips, on her. Had been impatient for it, as she saw her contemporaries married off, some seemingly in loving relationships.

She had known then that her marriage would neither be happy, nor fulfilling.

It had not made the yearning inside her, the wish for something more, any easier to bear. Every year that passed, she felt a growing frustration, a deep-seated need for a physical release she barely understood, but desperately wanted to discover.

But now, under Wittaker’s hands, she felt wonder and a warmth blooming inside her, and she arched closer to him, her own hands coming up to rest on the strong column of his neck, to slide up to caress the outer shell of his ears as his tongue tasted her.

She made a sound of delight, and he wrenched back from her, a flush on his cheeks. His hands trembled as he raised them again and brought them up to rest on either side of her face.

“I’m sorry. I have to stop now.” His voice was at least an octave lower. He cleared his throat and pushed away, back into his chair.

When he looked at her again, his eyes were burning so hot, she felt their touch on her like a second fire in the room.

And still, she shivered.

“Tomorrow…” He cleared his throat again, slid clenched hands along his thighs. “Tomorrow I’ll send some of the men who work for me to watch your house.”

“What will you be doing?” She took his attempt at distraction gratefully.

“There is only one day left until Bellingham’s trial if Gibbs continues on the course he’s set, and I learned some things today which I need to pursue.”

“I would rather go with you than stay at home.” She saw his face, his almost automatic refusal, but she would
not
be at the mercy of fate any longer. She’d just had her first, heady taste of what it felt like to take control of her own desires, and she loved it.

“Send your men to watch anyway, to see who may try against me again, but if I’m not at home, I’ll be even safer. We can surely get me out of the house and into your carriage without being seen tomorrow. I know I might not be able to accompany you to every place you need to go, but I can wait in the carriage where I can’t join you, and surely I’ll be safer there? You’re going to pretend to be recovering from your wounds at home, aren’t you? So whoever is watching us will think both of us are at home.”

He steepled his fingers. Wavering. “I’ve taken a look at the pistol Lewis retrieved for us, and it has a gunsmith’s mark on it, Beckwith. I’m going to see if he can tell me who bought the gun. That is at least one solid piece of evidence I have connected with this affair. I also need to speak to Bellingham’s defense attorney. Get some sense from him of Bellingham’s financial situation. And if it turns out he truly is without funds or work, I need to visit someone called Wilson, who apparently owes him twenty pounds, and find out where the money is coming from, and for what. I also need to visit the inn where the tailor who altered his coat used to see him, and speak to the locals. Find out if there is a particular woman he met there.”

“A woman?” Phoebe frowned. “What woman?”

Wittaker tapped his fingers together in thought. “There was only one moment when Bellingham lost his calm during the committal proceedings. That was when the Bow Street officer running the investigation mentioned he had spoken to a woman who had something of Bellingham’s in her keeping. He became overwrought, and only calmed when Vickery clarified that it was Bellingham’s landlady he was referring to and the item was a promissory note for twenty pounds.”

“So that was not the woman and the item that concerned him, you mean?” She leaned forward. “You’re wondering who was, and what it is of Bellingham’s she has that he’s so worried Bow Street will find.”

Wittaker nodded. “I think finding her might be the breakthrough we need.”

“Sheldrake would never have included me in a conversation like this.” She didn’t know why the words were suddenly out of her mouth. It was his close proximity, the way the light of the fire lit the planes of his face, and the way his shirt was neither buttoned all the way to the neck nor tucked into his trousers.

The intimacy of it all.

“As I’ve said before, Sheldrake was a fool.”

A log collapsed on the fire, sending up a spray of sparks.

“
Will
you let me come with you tomorrow?” She clasped her hands together, unsure what she would do if he refused. It felt as if more was resting on this than whether she would be safer in one place or another, whether it made sense for her to come with him or not.

He let out a soft sigh. “The idea of you being beside me all day, or at least within close reach, is more temptation than I can pass up.”

She was still smiling at him when Lewis tapped softly on the door and walked in.

“Your carriage is here, Your Grace.”

He raised his head to Lewis slowly, and kept his eyes on her until the very last moment. “Would you and a footman support me out, as if I am badly wounded?”

“Certainly, Your Grace.”

He stood. “Then I will take my leave.”

She stood as well, and he took her hand and brought it to his lips. “Good night, Miss Hillier.”

Before he let go, she leaned forward and whispered in his ear. “My name is Phoebe.”

Chapter Twenty-six

V
ickery was on James’s front step talking to Harding as his carriage pulled up, and although it was a surprise, James was pleased with the timing.

Everyone made a fuss of getting him from the coach into the house, with Vickery assisting, and James decided if anyone was watching, they would certainly conclude he had been severely hit, and if they bothered to follow Vickery afterward or ask after him, they would also conclude James had made a formal complaint about the attack to Bow Street.

As soon as the front door was closed, he took his own weight, shook off the helping hands and asked Harding to bring Vickery and himself some whisky in the library.

He led the bemused Bow Street officer into the room and gestured to a seat in front of the fire.

“Are you, in fact, wounded?” Vickery peered at the bandage visible under his shirt sleeve, making no comment about James being without a coat.

“A scrape, that’s all.” James nodded to Harding as he came in, and his butler put the tray on the table and left them alone.

“To do with this affair?” Vickery accepted the crystal glass James handed him and looked into it, swirling the liquor around.