Lorraine Heath - [Lost Lords of Pembrook 03] (17 page)

“Yes. You’ll hear a loud crack.”

A circle of damp heat caused dew to form on the sensitive flesh near her left ear. It was all she could do not to turn into it. He slid his mouth to the other side. Her eyes slammed closed, and she thought of rainy mornings buried beneath a mound of blankets.

“What if he doesn’t let me go?”

Silence followed, thick and heavy, and she wondered if like her, he was trying to decipher whether she was still referring to an attacker, or if she was asking about the man who now stood behind her, trailing his lips so lightly, so slowly along the nape of her neck, causing the fine hairs to rise.

“He will,” he finally said, and she could have sworn she heard regret in his voice. He moved away from her. “I think you have the gist of things now.”

She turned around to see him slipping beneath the rope and going toward his clothes. “We didn’t practice overly much. It hardly seems worth it to have gone to the bother to come here.”

He snatched up his shirt, shoved his arms into the sleeves. “The flooring is softer within the ring, there is no clutter or trinkets that can be broken, and you were less likely to get hurt if we took things further.”

“Why aren’t we? Taking things further, I mean. I think I was beginning to get the hang of it.”

He didn’t bother with his waistcoat or jacket. Just clutched them in his hand. “Are you that naive?”

She could see the strain in his features, the white of his knuckles as he fisted his free hand. He strode over and lifted the rope as though he’d like to use it to strangle someone.

“This was a bad idea,” he said. “We need to go.”

“I thought it was a rather good idea.” She slipped beneath the rope. “Now I know how to punch Geoffrey the next time I see him.”

“Just remember to keep your wrist level. I shouldn’t like to be inconvenienced by your being hurt.”

She wished he’d smiled when he’d said that so she’d know whether he was joking. “Since we’re here, may I have a look around?”

He studied her for a moment. “I suppose no harm would come from a quick peek.”

She followed him out of the room, up two flights of stairs, and down a hallway with several rooms. She might have thought this was the bordello portion except that the doors were open. The walls were papered in burgundy, with gold vines. More tasteful than she would have expected. Gas lamps flickered along the walls. Glancing through a doorway into a room they were passing, she stopped.

“This is your office; it’s where you work.” She strolled inside. It was Spartan. A desk. A chair in front of it, and another behind it. A table with decanters. The windows were bare, looking out onto the night.

“Why do you say that?” he asked.

Looking over her shoulder, she saw him leaning against the doorjamb, his arms crossed over his chest. “The globes.”

They were sprinkled about numerous shelves on three walls. “There must be a hundred of them.”

“A hundred and two to be exact.”

Astonished, she twisted around. “Does that include the ones at the residence?”

“No.”

“Why do you collect them? What’s your fascination with them?”

He just stood there, staring into the dimly lit room.

“Is it because you were planning to travel the world and you wanted to study where you might be going? You can confide in me. I won’t tell anyone.”

“You have no one to tell.”

“I suppose that’s true enough. I collected dolls when I was a child. Not by choice, but rather it’s what my father always gave me. So perhaps I wasn’t so much collecting dolls, as I was collecting symbols of his love. Maybe that’s why I smashed so many of them. I was angry, and I couldn’t very well smack him.” She turned away from him. She hadn’t wanted to travel into her own life. Rather, she wanted to journey into his.

“They gave me hope.”

Her heart hammering, she jerked back around. Just a glimpse. She wanted only a glimpse into his soul. She waited. Surely there was more. And then her patience was rewarded.

“They gave me hope that there was someplace better than where I was.”

“So you collected all these when you were a child?”

“No, Eve, I still collect the damn things.” He shifted back into the hallway. “Did you want to see the gaming hell or not?”

He was still searching for someplace better than where he was—just as she was. She didn’t want to be a mistress, she didn’t want to live in a house that belonged to a man who wanted her only for sport. She wanted something better: a husband, a family, a home.

His residence would never be a home.

Nor would his office. It didn’t satisfy him. As comfortable as he appeared, nothing here—except the globes—reflected the man. She had thought she’d make some small discovery about him that would explain him, but even here he was very careful to reveal nothing about himself.

“Yes, I want to see it.”

Maybe there at last, she would come to understand him.

R
afe had an unsettling suspicion that he hadn’t brought her to the club in order to teach her how to defend herself. That he’d used it as an excuse—to himself of all men, someone who had no tolerance for excuses—because he wanted her to see his establishment. Not the sins perpetuated within it, but rather what he’d managed to make of it, something that ensured he would never again be in another man’s debt, that he would never suffer, that he would never be forced into doing what he had no desire to do.

She could learn from him. Yes, for a time she would be unhappy, but when she was free of him, she would have the means to do whatever she wanted. Between now and that time, she needed to come to understand exactly what she wanted. He suspected that as soon as she was handed her first doll, the only thing she had envisioned for her future was becoming a wife.

Just as he had spent his first ten years believing that he would be a gentleman.

As he escorted her down a darkened hallway to the shadowed balcony, he drew forth a memory that he had long ago locked away. Sitting on his father’s lap at his father’s desk, watching as he carefully turned the pages of his atlas, and pointed out all the places that Rafe would someday visit.

“Pembrook brings in a fine yearly income so you’ll have an allowance. No army or vicarage for you. I know it troubles you when Sebastian and Tristan go off without you, but someday you shall travel the world, while Sebastian will be forced to remain here.”

In the end, they’d all been forced to leave.

He drew back the thick heavy curtains, inhaled Eve’s rose scent as she walked by, and followed her onto the balcony. She went to the very edge, wrapping her hands around the carved railing. Even there, though, the shadows kept her hidden from those on the floor below. No one would ever know she’d visited. Although he suspected her phantom scent would haunt the hallways through which they’d walked. It was a mistake to bring her here, to risk having a memory of her within his club. When he let her go, he wanted nothing of her to linger. He wanted no recollections outside the bed.

Yet here he was enjoying the vision of her profile, while she studied everything spread out before her like a feast of sin. He could hear the cards being shuffled, the dice being thrown, the wheels being turned. He could hear the exclamations of joy and the groans of despair. He didn’t have to look onto the gaming floor to know what he would see.

“There’s so much activity. It’s very much
alive
, isn’t it?”

He didn’t have to ask her to explain. He knew too well what she meant. It was a pulsing room of activity. Always something was happening. A card turned, a die tumbling to a stop, a ball dropping into a slot.

“What appealed to you about this place?”

Had he ever known a woman who asked so many questions? Had he ever known another woman who made him want to answer? Inquiries irritated him. They were bothersome, intrusive. Yet when she questioned, a small kernel of something in his soul snapped to attention and wondered, foolishly, ridiculously, if she cared.

“The money I could rake in.”

She peered over at him, gave him what he suspected she thought was a knowing smile. “You could also lose it.”

“The house always wins in the end, Eve. It wouldn’t be unusual for a million pounds to exchange hands tonight, and most of it will go in the Rakehell’s coffers.”

She spun around, her eyes wide. “You’re joshing.”

He gave a small shake of his head.

“That’s obscene.”

“There are worse obscenities.”

She scrutinized him, and he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. “Such as,” she finally asked.

Using children for labor. Sending them down into the mines, in the dark, alone—except for the rats, and the roaches, and other multilegged creatures that bite—expecting them to sit still, open and close a door as needed for the horses and wagons. Sending them deeper into the pits, crawling into tiny spaces where they barely fit, having the dirt cave in on them until they thought they’d suffocate.

But he couldn’t tell her any of that. It wasn’t meant to be brought up to the surface. It needed to remain buried as deeply as the coal.

“Wortham for one,” he said flatly. Perhaps the other lords who had been there that night as well. He was ready to move on. “I think we’re done here.”

S
he had thought he would escort her out to the carriage. Instead, they trudged up another flight of stairs.

She had to admit that Geoffrey was an obscenity, at least the manner in which he’d treated her. However, she didn’t think for a single moment that Rafe had been considering Geoffrey while she’d waited for his answer. His facial features had not moved at all, but within his icy blue eyes she’d seen something—only a flicker—yet it was deep, powerful, and haunting. Something from his past perhaps, an incident, a person, a place that had been part of the process that had forged him into the man he was.

For a moment she’d thought he was going to share it. She didn’t know if she wanted him to. She had a keen desire to understand him, but she was beginning to think it would come at a high price—that his nightmares might become hers.

At the top of the stairs, in the middle of the hallway, he opened a heavy mahogany door. She stepped through into a large living area, not quite as sparsely furnished as his office but he obviously cared nothing at all for knickknacks. She could see hallways branching off on either side of it and assumed they led to other rooms, bedchambers perhaps.

“My living quarters.”

“Why do you have these when you are in possession of a lovely residence?” she asked as she wandered over to the large bare windows. She looked out on the street below. The fog was rolling in, giving an ominous feel to everything around which it swirled.

“I prefer here. The residence . . . I acquired it because it was within my power to do so.”

She peered over at him. “This is where you’ll reside once the residence is mine.”

“In all likelihood, yes. Although perhaps I’ll purchase another before that happens.” He leaned against the edge of the window.

“You don’t fancy draperies.”

“Why put glass in a wall and then block the view you’ve obtained?”

She turned her attention back to the street. She could see gentlemen coming and going. “No one leaving has quite as lively a step as those arriving.”

“When they first get here, they think Lady Luck sits on their shoulder.”

“I suppose they soon discover that she doesn’t.”

Reaching out, he tucked a few loose strands behind her ear. A warm shiver flowed through her, but she kept her gaze focused on the street. It might prove very dangerous to look at him just then, with other rooms—bedchambers—nearby.

“She doesn’t exist. She’s merely a figment of some poor fool’s imagination. Do you know the worst thing that can happen to a man the first time he visits a gambling hell?”

“He loses everything?”

“He wins.”

She snapped her gaze over to him. He was watching her intently, but she was coming to realize that he always studied her as though he wished to decipher every aspect, every nuance, of her. She had journeyed through life paying little attention to anything of importance, while he allowed nothing to escape his scrutiny. He survived while she stuttered along, striving to find her way. She could learn from him.

“It’s the winning that causes the obsession,” he said. “That momentary exhilaration as though you’re on top of the world, unbeatable, invincible. You experience it once and you never forget it. No matter how often you lose after that, you keep seeking that elusive thrill that for a time made you forget all the troubles in your life.”

“So which was I, that night at Geoffrey’s? Something to possess because you could? Or something to win for the momentary delight it would bring?”

He moved nearer, took the strands that had again worked themselves free, and sifted them through his fingers as though he’d never seen them before. “Some day some gent will win your heart, and the elation will far exceed anything he will experience with the turn of a card or the roll of the dice. He won’t care that you’re ruined or that your father never married your mother.” His knuckles grazed her cheek before he slid his hand around to cup her chin. With the roughened pad of his thumb, he painted sensations over her lower lip.

She realized that he’d neatly avoided answering her question by filling her with hope that she might still possess all for which she yearned. “Will you ever marry?”

The words came out on a whisper of air. She didn’t know why it mattered if he took a wife, but suddenly it did. Would he bring his lady here, teach her how to defend herself, show her his apartments? Would he allow her to put up draperies?

He shifted his gaze up to her eyes, and she saw the resignation and the truth there before he spoke.

“No.”

A simple word that left no doubt, that allowed no space for the unexpected.

“What if she wins your heart?”

“She would first have to find it.”

His mouth covered hers, with purpose, his tongue impatient to dance with hers. The intensity had her swaying, reaching up to wrap her arms around him for balance, to keep her knees from buckling and carrying her to the floor.