How the Marquess Was Won (17 page)

“And yet I told you things. About humidors and the like.”

“Our lives were very different, Lord Dryden. I don’t think you’ll—”

“Understand? Don’t condescend to me, Miss Vale. You’re afraid I’ll judge you. The way you judged me.”

This actually made her a bit angry, he could see, because her pace accelerated and her jaw grew tense and she seemed very focused on whatever was straight ahead of her.

“Very well. It was a very long time ago, mind you. And I was ten years old.”

“And your parents?”

“Well, they left, didn’t they? One at a time.” She’d said it brightly, but the breathlessness in her voice told him it had been difficult for her to say it.

“Did they?” He tried not to soften his voice. She, he suspected, was the sort who would grow restive if subjected to overt sympathy.

“Papa first. We lived in rooms above a pub. He just . . . stopped coming home. Mama was arrested for picking pockets and was transported, or so I was told, by the prostitute who kept rooms upstairs. All I know is that she disappeared one day, too. I didn’t want to go to the workhouse and so I fled and lived with a series of other . . . characters . . . until someone, a gentleman who I believe now was someone’s man of affairs, determined I was clever and swept me away to Sussex, kicking and biting, I might add. I was installed at Miss Marietta Endicott’s academy. I still don’t know who my benefactor was.”

Christ.

It was a good deal to absorb, but he couldn’t remain silent too long or she would know how it had affected him: like a swift kick to his gut. Would that he could undo all of that for her, remake her life with safety and family.

“Do you have any other relatives? Any brothers or sisters?”

“None that I’m aware of.”

“You’ve no one.”

He instantly regretted saying it just like that. For she blinked as surely as if he’d jabbed a finger into a wound.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” she said a moment later. “I’ve a cat.”

This took him aback. He took the view that cats were work animals, and occupied a place just slightly above the vermin they caught. They lived in barns.

“What is its name?” He wanted to know about
her
cat.

“His name is Charybdis. He came with me from St. Giles. He’s a bit elderly for a cat, now, I suppose. Still quite spry, however.”

“You named your cat for a . . . a sea monster?” From somewhere in the mists of memory of Eaton days he wracked his brain to remember the mythology.
Between Scylla and Charybdis
, so the saying went, when one was between two unattractive choices. Charybdis was a nymph-turned-sea monster, daughter of Poseidon, who gulped down ships.

“That’s how they knew I was clever.” Very dryly said. “My cat’s name. Quite a mouthful.”

“But how did you learn to read? Let alone Greek mythology?”

“An apothecary in St. Giles by the name of McBride gave me a picture book of myths that had . . . well, let’s just say, it came his way through one of his customers. I suspect he told one of his customers about me, too, which is how some tender-hearted person decided I should be sent to Sussex and Miss Endicott’s. And my mother could read—I don’t know where she learned, but I always took it for granted that she could—and I would follow along with the story as she read it to me. I suppose I must have learned my letters that way. All I know is that reading came easily to me, and I liked it.”

“Why didn’t you name the kitten something precious, like Daphne, or Apollo?”

“I suppose it’s because I always wished I had an ally, someone to protect me, and Charybdis the monster was the most fearsome thing I could imagine. Even more fearsome than The Watch or the drunk men who fought in the streets and, well, you can imagine. I supposed I had little faith that even the Greek gods would be much of a match for the likes of St. Giles. I wanted something truly
nasty
as a familiar.”

More dry humor.

But Mother of God, what must she have seen as a child?

St. Giles was violence and darkness and noise and rot; sagging drunks leaning against sagging buildings and dying in alleys from gin poisoning. Criminals committed their thievery in other more affluent parts of London and fled to St. Giles like rats into holes.

He looked at her, fine skin, worn walking dress, new bonnet . . . and the thought was unbearable: she’d been so afraid she’d needed a kitten for a talisman. He almost couldn’t breathe from imagining it.

He understood now that her unique light, the light he basked in, existed by virtue of all those shadows. And the shadows were what made her seem more real than everyone else, threw her into relief.

She was right. He didn’t know what to say to her. And until he’d met this woman, he’d never in his life been at a loss.

“Is Charybdis very fearsome, then?” What a coward. And yet it seemed safe enough to keep talking about the cat.

“Oh, yes. Very.” Oddly, she sounded sincere. “He has a good deal of striped fur. One of the other teachers is feeding him while I’m here.”

“And what will he do when you go to Africa?”

“Why, come with me, of course.”

He saw Waterburn turn his great blond head toward him. Then narrow his eyes thoughtfully.

“Seen anything you’d like to shoot?” he called to Waterburn, devilishly.

Waterburn shrugged, bored. The hound swiveled its big head disinterestedly at the sound of a raised voice, and trudged onward with a world-weary, put-upon seen-it-all gait. Honestly, dog, how unbearable could life in the Redmonds’ stables be? Jules wondered dryly.

When he turned back around, Phoebe had vanished.

Completely.

Chapter 12

H
e swiveled his head about madly.

Lisbeth frolicked ahead of Jonathan and Argosy, looking like one of those lacy white flowers she’d just plucked up. Tendrils of dark hair escaped artfully from her bonnet and lay as eloquently as sixteenth notes against the white of her neck.

“It’s this way, Lord Waterburn. Isn’t it, Jon? Since you claim to know. Jules, I cannot wait for you to see it!”

She turned her head, sent a smile over her shoulder. It was a breathtaking angle for her, all cheekbone and long throat. Her eyes flashed blue.

He smiled again. “I cannot wait to see it,” he echoed.

There were ruins simply bloody everywhere in this part of England. They were all to some extent picturesque. The things one did for women.

“No, not that way. There’s a haunted hunting box that way, Lisbeth,” came Jonathan’s voice, “and best mind yourself or someone will mistake you for a deer and shoot you.”

“Oh, Jonathan!” She was irritated. “That would never happen. I’m all in white. I hardly look like a deer.”

“A unicorn then.”

“But who would shoot a unicorn?”

And so they disappeared, bickering, from view.

What the devil—? A woman couldn’t just vanish into thin air. He scanned the pathway. Oaks had dropped their loads of leaves, but hawthorns were everywhere thick and rustling with tiny hidden creatures.

And then he saw the narrow passage between a hawthorn and the trunk of a large oak.

He peeked through.

And there she stood, in an almost magical clearing, a circle of lush meadow grass not yet killed by frost bounded by, hidden by, hawthorne and oaks and trees that hadn’t yet lost all of their leaves.

She was dappled in the shadows of leaves when she stood up, smiling, with a handful of green clutched in her fist.

“You see?” she presented, triumphantly. “I was right. Sage does grow here. And it smells heavenly.”

She pressed it to her nose and inhaled deeply.

He watched her close her eyes to isolate herself with the scent. All at once every corner of his being seemed filled with light.

He’d gone mute.

“There’s a region in France that claims sage helps in the easing of grief. They plant them around tombstones in their cemeteries,” she explained.

“How did you . . .” he tried.

But there really was no point in asking. She read things, she knew things, and out they came, little surprises. It was strangely like unwrapping little gifts, not all of which he appreciated. She clung to facts and information, like flotsam in a shipwreck. They’d saved her.

Mutely, he looked at her. Too full to speak. Her eyes were green. He knew that decisively now. A more facile man would have compared them flatteringly to something—leaves or moss or emeralds or some such—but all he would truthfully be able to say was that no one he’d ever known possessed eyes quite like hers. It had little to do with their color. It was in the way that over the course of mere days he’d found himself saying things just to see how they would change: how humor would kindle them, and kindness soften them, and anger make them flash, and how he felt when the light of them was turned on him. How he wanted to hold up his hands before them and warm them.

“I read about it,” she told him anyway. She looked down at the bundle in her hand, indecisively. And then:

“Here.” She extended it to him. “A gift for you.”

He stared it. All at once too many thoughts and impressions jostled for the exits, and none could escape in the form of words. So he did as she ordered. Slowly, wordlessly, he reached for them.

And as she began to surrender them, her fingers brushed his.

He stopped breathing.

He’d once seen a man struck by lightning. He’d watched as the bolt held him helpless, motionless, arcing his body. Having its way with him.

It wasn’t unlike that.

Breathlessly, dumbly, they both stared at the place where their fingers met. Stunned to at last, at last, be touching. Skin to skin.

He dropped the herbs and seized her wrist. “Enough.”

The word was low and dark. And it thrummed command and something like a plea.

Slowly, slowly, she levered up her head, as if spooling courage on the way up. Her jaw was taut; her eyes were wide when they met his, but comprehension flickered in them.

The air suddenly seemed full of snapping sparks. One would have thought
he’d
captured a unicorn, for God’s sake, for how enervated he felt.

As he watched, a flush painted her from her collarbone upward. Beneath his thumb, placed over a pale blue vein in that silky hand, her pulse raced.

He turned her palm up. He wished he could be certain she was the one who was trembling, for
one
of them was. Her hand was achingly soft, too vulnerable. It was cold, which struck him as poignant. He wanted to warm her. He needed to warm her.

And so he brought her palm to his mouth.

He softly opened his mouth against her skin, touched his tongue there, burned her with a kiss that was at once chaste and perhaps the most carnal he’d ever given.

Her head tipped back hard; her eyelids shuddered closed. She made a soft sound, a gasp of shock and pure sensual pleasure.

Mother of
God
.

He lifted his head with some effort. He curled her fingers closed over the place he kissed her, as if handing her a keepsake.

He knew he ought to. And yet he found he couldn’t relinquish her hand.

“Look at me, Miss Vale.” His voice a low demand.

A moment’s hesitation. She opened her eyes. He was absurdly thrilled to see them again. They were dazed and starry and wary. The sun haloed her, and the light both set her aglow and obscured her. As he stared, he withstood bolt after swift bolt of impression, each distinct and pure and primal:

Who kissed you first? I will kiss the memory of it away. I will run him through with a sword. I can’t recall kissing anyone before you. I am ruined. I am happy. I’m afraid. I need to leave.
You
need to leave.

He was holding her hand as though it was a Fabergé egg. Which rather contrasted his expression, which, little did he know, was edging toward the thunderous.

“I didn’t know I was going to do that,” he said finally.

“Do you always know what you’re going to do?” Her voice was a low husk.

“Always,” he said shortly. It sounded like an accusation.

A heartbeat’s worth of silence passed.

“What are you going to do now?” And in her whisper was both sensual challenge and trepidation.

They could hear the distant voices of Jonathan and Waterburn and Lisbeth and Argosy, all still bickering happily, but they seemed as consequential as the birds rustling in the trees. Dangerous to think that way, he knew.

He heard his name:
Jules!
Cheerfully sang out by Lisbeth.

The rest of their party could come upon them in seconds or minutes. He was just clear-headed enough to realize that arousal could tinker with a man’s sense of time enough to doom the pair of them to discovery.