Linda Needham (20 page)

“Stop me, Hollie.”

“I don’t think I will, Charles.”

There was a moment when his exquisitely shaped mouth was poised above hers, his intensely dark eyes blue-black in the shadows; when she wondered if he’d just been tormenting her all along, if this was his punishment—all this wanting and yearning for him.

Then in the next breath there was nothing else in the world but the deeply shattering bliss of his wonderful mouth on hers, soft and hot and hard.

Oh, my! The savory taste of his plundering was exotic spice and passion and danger; the faint stubble of his beard was a delight beneath her hands.

She never could have imagined that her blustering, wicked-hearted earl would have such splendid lips, let alone that she would be standing in the circle of his arms with him kissing her and whispering her name against her mouth or that she would be climbing deeper into his embrace.

Yet of all the unimaginable things that had happened in the last few weeks, the very last thing she could have imagined was that she would come to love him.

But she had fallen hard, deeply and forever.

She loved her greatest enemy. The man who threatened her life and her livelihood and everything that was true and dear to her. Somewhere in the midst of all their wrangling, he had ceased
to be her enemy, this remarkable man she’d once believed was wicked and unjust and sought only the truth that he wished to find.

But that wasn’t her Charles at all. He was a man of honor, and she loved him. Loved that he was making growling noises in his throat and holding her face steady with both hands, cradling her head, strewing his lingering kisses everywhere.

His kiss was deep and thrilling, reached to her core, and left her breathless with wanting more. He was forceful in his embrace, caressing and completely marvelous. She welcomed the touch of his hand at her neck, his fingers slipping just under the edge of her bodice, leaving a searing trail of longing.

And then he stopped as suddenly as he’d begun. His dark eyes flared when he raised his head, and his brow deeply furrowed.

“Enough, Hollie,” he whispered against her ear, where his words were a flame that left her aching and wanting more of him, because she was wicked and she would lose her soul for it.

“Yes—enough, Charles.”

Enough of paradise.

And yet she found it again when he caught her inside his cloak and protected her with his heat all the way to the gatehouse. And when he lifted her hand and touched an astounding kiss to her palm.

“I’m more grateful than you could ever know,
Hollie. Wanting so much more than I am entitled to.”

He left her at the gatehouse door, her knees weak, her heart soaring and swooping, still having said nothing at all about her most recent crime.

Almost as though he approved.

But that couldn’t be the case.

There was a far deeper reason for his silence. Something that had niggled at her all day long, yet nothing she could put her finger on.

Something profoundly important.

And, she suspected, utterly devastating.

H
ollie waited until Charles was long gone from the gatehouse and his heady kiss was just a lingering ache before she crept back up the drive and into the conservatory, where she’d left her broadside so long ago.

Throughout the staggering magnificence of the day, when his hair shone obsidian in the autumn light, when Chip was turning his pony in trotting circles, and later while he was intoxicating her with his lovemaking, it had been so easy to forget the terror of a few hours before.

He’d picked up the broadside and read it through, of that she was certain. And yet he’d set it aside as though it meant nothing that she’d obviously rifled his desk and stolen secret papers.

And not only stolen his private correspon
dence, but was preparing to broadcast the information it contained.

She lit a candle against the moonlaced darkness and studied the broadside that he’d so purposely ignored.

It seemed clear enough to her.

PUBLIC WARNING AGAINST
SIX ACTS OF SUPPRESSION

Lord Sidmouth’s threats enumerated, simplified, emboldened. The terror of random search and seizure, the prohibition against political gatherings, an impossible increase in the newspaper and stamp duties, banishment for those writing papers found to be blasphemous and seditious. And the other cruel acts.

Was her broadside missing the point entirely, had she lost her touch?

Didn’t he recognize his own ministry’s text? Or had he yet to read Sidmouth’s letter? No, it was there on his desk, opened with the others. With notes in his script, or Bavidge’s.

He must have read her broadside. The words were bold and crisp-edged and clear enough for anyone to read at a dozen paces.

Unless they were blind or utterly stupid or—

Dear God!

Read it, Bavidge
. The hair stood up on her nape.

How many times had she heard Charles say that when she’d first arrived at Everingham?
How many times had he gruffly tossed a document in his clerk’s direction and then turned away to listen?

Read it, Miss Finch
. The note from the village farrier. And she had done so, because he’d ordered her to.

Read it, Hollie
. All that lounging grace and arrogance, his long legs stretched out as she read
The Times
to him, offering her arguments, debating his opinons. In the shadow of all those books.

But he’d read all those broadsides and handbills that first night, hadn’t he? No, he’d barely looked at them. Had memorized them.

And the word “forever,” the last word in the Magna Carta. He hadn’t been looking at that either; he’d been looking at her. He’d only known the last phrase because he had committed it to memory at some time before.

And his anger at her note about their indiscretion and the rags—Bavidge must have started reading it. That’s why Charles had been so angry, so misdirected.

And though she’d thought it odd at the time, there had been two lines of writing below his name on the sheet she’d printed for him. His son’s primitive C-H-I-P, and above that, an entirely different hand: C-H—uncertain, but bolder, larger than the boy’s.

Oh, my dear God. Charles can’t read.

But that was impossible. Completely absurd. He was a politically powerful earl, educated at
Oxford. He was wise and disciplined. She’d seen him transfix the members of parliament with his speeches, laying out his arguments point by point.

Without a single note
. Holding nothing in his fine hands. Not a single reference.

Because he couldn’t read it anyway.

And nobody knew.

Nobody but her.

Her heart dropped into her stomach. Charles was illiterate—and was so ashamed of it that he had been hiding it from everyone for a very long time.

But how? His life revolved around paper.

And what about the Peterloo file? Dear God, he’d never read a word of the evidence for himself! If he had, he would have come to better conclusions, because he was a good and intelligent man. He would have known that his commission was corrupted—if not deliberately, then simply because Charles couldn’t oversee the truth.

Impossible.

Improbable. But Charles Stirling was improbable in so many ways.

She needed to be sure that he wasn’t leading her on, that he wasn’t using her to further his plans to capture her “husband.”

He would discover her deception as soon as her broadsides began appearing in the countryside. In three days Captain Spindleshanks would
put in an appearance at the reform meeting at Wolverhampton.

She’d have to leave the Stanhope behind—and all her memories. She’d need to leave Everingham tomorrow night after she’d read Chip a good-night story one last time.

After Charles had left the gatehouse.

But how to test him and yet not break him? Anyone could pretend that he couldn’t read—though she couldn’t imagine why he’d want her to believe that of him.

Whatever the test, it had to be something remarkable, something startling, something that he couldn’t hide his reaction to.

Not an open threat or a curse. Something that would strike him in the heart. Something she could see in his eyes.

I love you, Charles Stirling.

Yes, that. Because it was true and startling and would break her heart in two.

Forgive me, Charles.

C
harles found Hollie busy as usual in the conservatory the next morning, fast at work on the book of songbirds. Chip was at his lessons, making long lists of his name.

“Papa!” Charles caught the boy’s embrace around his knees and planted a kiss against his cheek, then helped him back into the chair and turned to Hollie.

“Good morning, Hollie.”

She looked up at him from across the hulking Stanhope. Her eyes sparkled with the intense green of springtime, edged with an intense brightness that might be the remains of tears, or a night of sleeplessness to match the interminable night he’d had spent himself.

It had been filled with restless, yearning
dreams of Hollie, of impossible miracles. With what ifs, and an enlightening, thorny study of his honor.

And then this morning’s news: an unequivocal reminder of the insubstantial claim he had upon her.

I have news of your husband.

“Good morning, Charles.” She offered a tremulous smile, overly brave. “I trust you slept well.”

“Well enough, madam.”

He’d learned through the Home Office spies that Spindleshanks was to make an appearance in Wolverhampton the day after tomorrow, at a meeting of Peterloo petitioners.

This time he’d make the damned arrest himself and be done with it. Done with MacGillnock.

Telling Hollie in advance was a risk he couldn’t take—the fiercely loyal wife who had never loved her husband but who championed the man as though he were her matchless hero.

A darkly jealous voice inside him didn’t want her to know of the man’s whereabouts. Because he didn’t want to have to imagine her charging off into the night to warn him; couldn’t have borne finding her in the man’s arms, whatever their marital custom.

And though he wanted to relieve Hollie of her misbegotten marriage, it wasn’t his place to act for her. He’d done enough to tarnish her honor. Stepping away from the situation as soon as the
man was caught was the only way to keep his balance, the only moral action.

Above all, he wanted the matter to be finished: to finally catch the man in the act and hand him over to the courts to be tried and sentenced. The fate of Hollie’s husband would be decided elsewhere.

Mumberton bustled in, wiping his hands on a dishcloth, his clothes smelling of sweets from the kitchen. “Mrs. Riley says she has cakes to be tested. Is there a cake tester anywhere around, my lord?”

“Me!” Chip took hold of his father’s hand and jumped like a jack-in-the-box. “Me, please, sir.”

Charles touseled his son’s hair, unable to resist casting a grateful glance at Hollie, the woman who had turned his life upside down, who’d gifted him with this miraculous bundle of happiness. “Are you a cake expert, Chip?”

“I am, Papa.”

“Well, then, you’d best go give Mrs. Riley and Mumberton a helping hand.”

He was off in a streak of laughter, Mumberton hurrying after him, leaving Charles alone with Hollie, the cool air in the conservatory heavy with the scent of ink and orchards.

He wanted to thread his fingers through her hair, to nuzzle through its curling wildness to her ear. But last night’s stolen moment of joy would have to be the end of it.

For now, at least. Forever, if it had to be.

“I’m to see my lawyer today, Hollie. To make it official that Chip is my son. My heir.”

Her eyes pooled with starry tears. “I’m so happy, Charles. You’re making it right for him. I knew you would. I knew you loved him.”

It was a roaring, aching thing, this kind of love. Invasive and unrelenting. It squeezed his heart and gouged at his gut. It made his hands cold and his belly hot.

“Christ, Hollie, I wish I could make it right for you just as simply.” He wished it wouldn’t mean damnation and shattering repercussions.

“We make our choices, Charles, and live with the consequences.”

And the fathomless ache. And the yearning for something better.

She turned away from him, tears sliding down her cheeks as she went back to inking the plate in her printer’s dance, the one he’d grown to love as much as he feared the product of the Stanhope’s clanking and straining, secrets she could so easily keep from him if he wasn’t vigilant.

But it wouldn’t matter soon. “I must go to Westminster tonight, Hollie.”

“Tonight?” Hollie’s heart leaped, dropped again in misery, then sputtered in great relief: Charles would be gone when she left for the meeting. She wouldn’t have to make excuses or skulk off under his nose with her ill-gotten words in her bags. “Is Parliament in session early this season?”

“Business with your good friend Lord Pudding.” Sharing a smile with him had become so unconsciously natural. When had it started to ache like a cold fire?

“Please give him my best regards.” She took the page of threatening ravens from the print bed and hung it on the drying line, feeling his gaze on her nape like a caress. “How long will you be gone?”

“Why? Will you miss me?”

Like I will miss breathing and laughing and all of my better dreams, my love.
She couldn’t answer for the sob that was caught in her throat.

Banter would have to serve, words that pinched, that might cause him to pace the conservatory as was his wont. Something that would make him find the faithless test she’d laid out for him to happen upon in his stalking.

“What if my dear Adam comes to rescue me while you’re visiting the Pudding?”

He snorted in his arrogant way, arching an eyebrow at her. “I’ll be thoroughly stunned, madam.”

He sounded utterly certain that Adam wouldn’t come, sending her pulse into her ears with absolute terror. Maybe he had been misleading her after all. Maybe she was wrong. Of course she was! He’d read her broadside after all and was plotting to trap her.

She was already damned for her crimes; now
her ridiculous test would lay bare the threat to her heart.

“Then have I lost my charms, Charles? If I’m no longer a provocative enough lure for my husband, why do you keep me around?”

His gaze was steady and heated, and it broke her heart into a million pieces when he shrugged his broad shoulders as though he didn’t care. “You’re free to go, Hollie.”

I’m not free at all!
Not with everything she loved tangled up here at Everingham. “But not with my Stanhope.”

He turned back to her and said with dark amusement, “Not on your life.”

“You still don’t trust me alone with it?”

“I’m taking this damned devil’s tail with me all the way to Westminster, madam. Just in case.”

Too little, my love, and far too late.
She wasn’t ever coming back.

Hollie watched him out of the corner of her eye as she inked the panel of ravens, watched in guilty horror as he picked up the handwritten page that she’d planted where he couldn’t possibly miss it.

A traitorous trap fashioned just for him; the deepest confession of her heart.

She watched his dark eyes move across the page, the midnight of his lashes lowered. Then he turned to her, an unreadable frown set into his brow, a gruffness in his voice.

“What’s this, Hollie?”

I love you, Charles Stirling.

She waited for his thunder, her pulse pounding in her ears. Waited for a sign of his astonishment, his anger; waited breathlessly for any reaction at all beyond his elegantly ordered curiosity.

And the waiting told her more than any stumbling attempt to mask his response would have.

He was so careful, her beloved earl. So guarded with his strategies, so expert at turning the charge back on someone else. Making them read to him what he could not.

Her heart ached for him, for the obstreperous boy he must have been in the schoolroom, and the clever student who must have fought his way through university with every ounce of his courage, terrified of failing, shredding everyone in his way for fear of being caught and having more shame heaped upon him.

Who’d grown into the unrelenting earl who enraptured Parliament and the heart of a young woman in the press gallery with his off-the-cuff speeches.

Because he couldn’t read.

Because he had never learned how, and plainly it shamed him to his soul. Though it didn’t lessen him in her eyes in the least.

“Oh, it’s of no moment, Charles.”
Only my heart and all my love for you. For my sweet Chip and all the might-have-beens.
“A reminder to myself
that I have a short time left to finish the
Handbook of Song Birds
.”

A short time left to look at you, my love, to wish on the last star in a very inky night.

His smile was as trusting as it was relieved. He had succeeded one more time in sheltering his secret from those who might betray him.

“Very well, Hollie. But you’ll have to wait the three days until I return from Westminster.”

“Yes, Charles. I’ll wait three days.”

A lifetime. Longer, my love.

Hollie caught the sob in her throat and turned away as he began inking the plates for her. He made his jests and broke her heart to bits when he lifted the returned Chip onto his shoulders and planted a smacking kiss on her forehead.

She could hardly feel more wretched: she had stolen secrets from a blind man who believed that she was as honorable as he.

He was so trusting of her, so honest in his dealings, that she would easily be able to walk out of his life tonight with damning evidence tucked away in her satchel—evidence against him and his commission and the whole bloody Privy Council.

Her wicked earl had become her heart.

“Good-bye, Papa!” Hollie held Chip in her arms and watched from the gatehouse as Charles cantered off down the drive and into the late af
ternoon sunset. They both waved until long after he had disappeared beyond the coppiced wood.

“How long is three days, Hollie?” The little boy’s tears ran freely down his cheeks.

“Three nights, sweetheart. Three breakfasts.”

“Three stories.”

“Just that, Chip.” What a dreadfully easy liar she’d become. “And then you’ll have your papa back.”

As though nothing else would ever change, Hollie taught her reading lesson that night in the gatehouse, then carried Chip back to the main house and tucked him in this one last time.

“You’ll grow up to be a good man like your papa.”

“And a printer like you, Hollie.”

“He loves you, Chip.”

“He loves
us
, Hollie.”

Dear God.
Allowing him to love her was the worst sin of all.

She held the boy until he fell asleep and then left him to his dreams.

Hollie packed a small bundle of her belongings along with Captain Spindleshanks’s costume and a few dozen fresh broadsides to distribute among the members of the meeting, tucked her love note to Charles into her bodice, and then started off across his tidy fields.

She boarded a post chaise in the village at
midnight and was standing in the bustling lobby of the Fleece Inn at Wolverhampton by the following afternoon, exhausted and dusty and wanting nothing more than to weep.

“Hollie Finch!” Mrs. Conners took her hands, met her cheek to cheek. “What a lovely thing to see you again, sweet girl. I have your favorite room for you. Do tell me you’re staying the night and not just passing through on your way to chase one of your stories.”

Hollie embraced the woman and her chattering, a dear friend from her other life, back when she was as familiar with the country’s roads as most people were with their own village high streets.

“I’m here for a day or two, Mrs. Conners. Maybe longer.” Until Charles realized that she’d betrayed him, that she’d duped him. In the meantime, she was back in her element. A little wiser and so much sadder than she ever could have imagined.

“A hot bath will do you a world of good, lovey, after your long trip. And a tray of dinner. Let’s give your bags to Tommy here, and I’ll go see to your comfort myself. Sit, sit, sit. I’ll come down for you when it’s ready.”

Relieved and heartsick, Hollie was about to drop into a chair in the lobby when she heard her name called out from the low-timbered dining room.

“Hollie Finch! As I live and breathe, girl!”

“Major Cartwright!” Hollie hurried past the other diners and threw herself into the old radical’s spare embrace, inhaling the familiar pipesmoke that clung to his coat. “It’s so good to see you.”

“And you, my dear girl. I don’t know where you’ve been hiding, Hollie, but I’ve missed you sorely. In a cave somewhere? You look pale as a ghost.” The old man peered at her through his spectacles and brushed the rough pad of his thumb across her cheek. “What’s this? A bit weepy too. What’s happened?”

She could never hide a thing from him; he’d known her since she was a babe. A dear friend of her father’s, he’d often been in her parlor, involved in noisy discussions with other radicals.

She’d learned at the knees of the greatest reformers of the age. And now she was back again, from her holiday in the country.

Where she’d lost her heart and most of her soul to a man who shouldn’t have been so easy to love.

“It’s been a difficult year, Major.”

“Ah, your father—I know, my girl. I miss him too. Damn them all.” He leaned forward in twinkling conspiracy. “But you’re here for the petition meeting, I hope.”

“Yes, I need to see Mr. Prentice—”

“Hollie Finch, as I live and breathe!” Joseph Howe plunked himself down on the chair beside her, another old friend, florid and always merry,
a lawyer who practiced on the side of right and liberty. If only Charles could stop in his thick-headed crusade long enough to understand. “You disappeared after Peterloo. I didn’t know what to think, girl.”

“I had some thinking to do.”

“Parliament’s in session in just a few weeks. We’ll need you in the gallery, taking down their blasphemies and seeing them published.”

Sidmouth planned to put a stop to that soon enough—blasphemy being judged in the eye of the beholder, and Parliament determined to make the sinners pay.

“I hope to, Joseph.” She would no longer be free to sit undisguised in the gallery—not with Charles scanning there from the benches, on the lookout for her to return to the scene of her crimes.