Her Every Wish (3 page)

She let out an exhale. That was all she was to him at this point—a wager to be won. He looked at her and saw shillings rattling in his pockets.

“I'm not going to win,” she informed him.

“Aren't you?” His eyes bored into her. “The Daisy I once knew would never have said that.”

She didn't want to be reminded of the person she had been. Gullible, naïve, and optimistic. She'd believed him when he said that he loved her as much as he breathed. That of course, had been
before
he took her virginity.

“As you are, you're not going to win. There's no chance of it. You need someone who will teach you how to swagger,” he said in a low voice. “To ignore the shouted insults, the thrown horse droppings, and to shout out your confidence to the world. It's the only way you'll have a chance.”

She folded her arms and glared at him.

He went on as if she'd issued an invitation for him to make a speech. “Make them believe that no matter how they posture, no matter how they bluster, you have nothing but victory in you.”

Statements like that had drawn her to Crash. He could make the entire world disappear. He could make her forget how cold her feet were, how little money she had. She could look into his eyes and believe that she could prevail despite everything.

He was right. If she floundered about a week from now the way she had just now, she was not going to win.

She was not going to win with his help, either.

But some part of her, some foolish part, had never quite managed to give up all her naïve confidence. She had a brief vision of herself, standing on the stage in front of the crowd. Of the grocer calling her name as the winner.

She shoved it away.

She
wasn't
going to win, no matter what she did. But if she did her utmost… Maybe, maybe this time she'd finally learn not to waste her effort trying.

“Very well.” Her voice came out a little too high. “I accept.”

“An excellent choice. To us prevailing, then.” He held out his hand as if he expected her to shake it.

She looked at his fingers. They were encased in wool gloves. She wouldn't have to touch his skin. She would scarcely even feel him. But she remembered too much about Crash, and
scarcely
was already too much.

Daisy put her hands behind her back. “No,” she said. “No handshakes. There will be no touching of any kind. This is just business.”

He gave her a sardonic smile. “We're nothing but business, you and I.”

Her cheeks flamed and she turned away. Her legs could not move fast enough to get away from him and the memory his words sparked in her mind. Once, he had—

No. Absolutely not. She was
not
going to think of what she'd let Crash do.

“I'll see you Monday,” he called after her. “At three, when I've done my rounds, outside the general store. You should be finished at the flower shop then, yes? Wear skirts that allow a good deal of movement.”

She knew better than to let Crash get under her skin; really, she did. Still, she turned around. “Don't talk about my skirts!” she hissed. “It's not proper.”

He simply laughed.

God, what had she agreed to do?

C
rash's aunt
—and his uncle, when the man was in England—lived in a flat over a cooper's shop. At night, with all the customers departed and the apprentices off, the neighborhood was quiet. As quiet as anything ever was here, a quarter-mile from the eternal hum from the St. Katharine docks.

He stepped close to the door and detected the muted sounds of spirited voices.

His aunt had guests over. She often did; her husband was the first mate on a trading vessel, and in the months when he was away, she entertained.

He knocked and waited. The door opened, and a brilliant dazzle of light from every oil lamp met him. For a moment, his aunt was nothing but a dark silhouette lit from behind. Then she moved back a pace and the palette of her skin shifted from midnight to umber.

She tried, oh, she tried, to frown at him disapprovingly. Alas. His aunt was terrible at disapproval, particularly where he was involved.

He embraced her. “Aunt Ree.”

She gave him a grudging pat on the back in return.

The other two women seated at the card table smiled at him over Ree's shoulder, as if the evening's entertainment had just arrived. Three white-haired women looking at him with that particular expression might have put another man off, but Crash knew them better.

Harriet Cathing had been his aunt's friend since before he was born. She'd been a laundress then, before she married a ship's lieutenant. Now she was… Well, technically, she was a laundress married to a ship's lieutenant.

May Walsh hadn't married anyone—at least not in a legally binding ceremony. She swore by the strategy to any of the young girls who would listen to her. She had a strong jaw and dark freckles spattering brown skin.

Once, Martha Claving had been the fourth whist player in their little quartet, and May's long-time partner and companion. A little pencil sketch in a black crepe-draped frame marked the place she would have taken.

His aunt was shaking her head at him. “Crash,” she said, “Crash, Crash, Crash. You know Saturday night is whist night, and still you chose to invade. Ladies, you all know my scapegrace nephew. Crash, do try to be respectable.”

It was a bit of a joke between them, that word.

Crash gave the gathering a sweeping bow. “I am
always
respectable. If anyone chooses not to respect me, however…” He gave his aunt a low grin. “There's very little I can do about that, is there?”

“Pish tosh,” Miss Walsh said. “I so hate when men are respectable. It usually involves rather too much posturing.”

“Nonsense. You remember old Barnabas Tucker? Well, he…”

And they were off, as they so often were, on the sort of conversation that would have offended the more proper households three-quarters of a mile to the north.

“Speaking of Barnabas and his unfortunate predilections,” Miss Walsh said. “Have you all heard what happened at Redding Copy House?”

The other two women shook their heads and made little tsking noises.

“Badly run,” Harriet said. “Staff constantly embezzling. No discretion in the clientele. I was certainly not surprised when it closed.”

“I am so glad to not have to labor in my advanced age,” Miss Walsh was saying. “It leaves me free to pursue leisure activities in my final years. Like—”

“Cheating us all at cards,” Ree put in.

Yes. That was their favorite pastime of a winter evening: playing whist and cheating wildly. Cheating was the unspoken rule of the game. Cheating, in fact, was the
only
real rule of the game, and the competition was cutthroat.

Much of England would have summed up these three women with one word: whores. They'd won that epithet by virtue of the poverty they'd labored through, the men they'd associated with, and the color of their skin.

It wouldn't have mattered if they'd ever sold sexual services on the streets. They'd been poor. Aunt Ree and May Walsh were too dark to be considered anything other than unacceptably foreign; Harriet Cathing's mother had also been what the uptight middle class would call a whore.

They had never been seen as respectable by England's rules. The rules had written them out of the game centuries ago.

Crash set his bag down. “I've brought rum, milk, bread, spices, potatoes, and eggs. It's cold and you're almost out of everything.”

Harriet beamed at him. “How utterly darling. He brings rum. Ree, I must get myself a nephew like him. How ever does one obtain one?”

Ree rolled her eyes. “Don't let the rum fool you. It's scant penance for all the woe he's brought into my life. Fortunately for us all, Crash is one of a kind.”

Crash waggled his eyebrows at his aunt. “You know you love me.”

She glowered at him. “Unfortunately.”

“I've always meant to ask. What sort of a name is Crash? Is it a first or a family name?” Miss Walsh frowned at him. “That can't be your real name, can it?”

“His Christian name is Nigel,” Ree put in, “but we started calling him Crash at a very young age, and it stuck so well that we've just decided to forget there was ever anything else. As for family names, we don't deal in those. It's a bit of a tradition. But if you feel better calling him Nigel—”

“Refer to me as Nigel again,” Crash said with a raised finger, “and I'll start calling you Catriona.”

His aunt made a face. “You don't want him,” she explained earnestly to her friend. “He talks back. And he only brings enough rum for a little glass here and there. He's hardly worth all the bother.”

But she gave him a proud smile.

And oh, he
had
been a bother. Never sitting still, always moving. Once, when he'd been a child scarcely old enough to learn his letters, he'd lived up to his assumed name. He'd dashed around a corner in a store and ran headlong into a display of canned goods. They'd toppled to the ground with a resounding crash.

The shopkeeper had grabbed him up, shaking him viciously, calling him a good-for-nothing hell-bent bastard who would end his days in a noose.

“Just like your father,” he'd said. “But then, you don't even know who that is, do you, you worthless little mongrel?”

His aunt had taken Crash's hand and conducted him out of the shop.

“Don't you listen to him,” she had said, her voice shaking. “He can't see you, not as you are. So don't you listen to what he says. You're good for anything you want to do. You'll have to try harder, and you'll have to do it a little differently—but don't you ever listen to him.”

Twenty-six years of
don't you listen to him.

Every time someone crossed the street at the sight of him. Every time someone spat in his direction. When the vicar announced at Sunday service that unnatural attractions to men were a sign of moral turpitude. The morning when a well-meaning woman had sought him out in a crowd and earnestly explained that foreign heathens like him needed to learn of Christ and seek divine forgiveness.

For twenty-six years, his aunt had told him not to listen to any of them. After all she'd done for him, a little rum was the least he could offer.

“You know,” Miss Walsh put in, “if we could get this fine young man to play Martha's hand for us, nobody could use her to cheat.”

Three faces considered this contemplatively. Crash was fairly certain that all three women were considering the many ways he might choose to play Martha's hand.

“Speak for yourself,” Ree said piously. “I never cheat. I win by skill.”

This was met with the raucous laughter it deserved.

Ha. She'd give up cheating the day she… No, he didn't want to think such morbid thoughts. His aunt was fifty-four; she had decades left in her, god willing. She'd taught him everything he knew about cheating. Cheating was the only way to win, and so she did it assiduously.

He sat and dealt.

“He won't do for a fourth,” Harriet said. “But you know, May…”

May frowned. “I know. It's been a year. We should…consider a replacement now.”

“I am not available on a permanent basis,” Crash said smoothly. “My innocent young ears would burn off if I had to listen to more than an evening of your conversation.”

They all laughed good-naturedly.

“Young man,” said Miss Walsh, “you do realize that we know you?”

“Who?” he asked. “Me? You must be thinking of Nigel.”

Ree had taught him to cheat, too, with everything he had in him. When the rules were stacked against you, cheating was a moral necessity.

A moment earlier in the day flashed in front of him—Daisy looking up at him in disapproval.

Stop flirting with me,
she had said.

As if he
wanted
to flirt with her. Every time he saw her, every time she threw her so-perfect fiancé in his face, he became more and more certain that he'd had the luckiest of escapes. All those months spent worrying while he was in Paris…they'd been for nothing. He'd hoped for a letter. A telegram. A single word.

Not a damned thing had come. He'd not thought her the sort of person who would treat him like a shameful secret, one to be hidden as soon as possible. He was done flirting with Daisy.

She could have her emporium and her sweetheart. He'd learned long ago not to waste tears on anyone who pushed him away. Not shopkeepers. Not stablehands. Not even sweethearts he'd once intended to marry.

He smiled and poured little jiggers of rum for the women who had raised him. They had told him not to listen when the country shouted that he was nothing. They had taught him to walk with his head held high, to act as if he meant something even though nobody else would agree.