My Pleasure (18 page)

Forrester DeMarc stood over her, his body rigid, his lips thinned to a bloodless line. “Why did you make me do that?”

She stared up at him, as amazed by his question as she was frightened by it. His gaze fell on her bosom, and with a hot flood of embarrassment she lifted her skirts and covered herself from his gaze.

“Who saw you like that?” he demanded, pacing in front of her. “I’ll kill them. I’ll cut their eyes out. No one sees you like that but me.”

“You?” The paralysis freezing her voice cracked. “What do you mean? I don’t belong to you.”

“Bedamned, you do! You pursued me. Now you’re mine.”

“What?” He was mad. He stopped in front of her, staring down at her with venom-filled eyes, and she scooted backward. “It was you,” she whispered. “In the alley. And you sending the roses.”

“Don’t play games with me, Helena.”

“I’m not.”

“That’s all you’ve been doing lately. Playing games. You flirted with me, fawned on me, set snares to inveigle me. You did everything in your power to make me notice you. Do not try to tell me otherwise.”

“But I did not! I treated you with no more consideration than any of Lady Tilpot’s guests.”

Before she could duck out of his reach, he grabbed her arm, hauling her to her feet with frightening strength. She tried to squirm away, but his grip tightened painfully.

“You are lying,” he said between clenched teeth. “Why are you lying? Are you trying to make me jealous?”

“No!” she denied.

He shook her like a terrier does a rat, his fingers digging deep into her skin. “Do not lie to me!”

“I’m not! I don’t know what you are talking about. I haven’t set any snares for you. I do not want your attentions. You are mistaken. Please, my lord! You are hurting me!”

“Do not want my attentions? Didn’t set snares? Ha!” His laughter held a note of hysteria. “Your machinations are obvious to everyone, my dear. Not two days ago, someone remarked on how obvious you were.”

“Who would have said such a thing? It is absurd.”

“I don’t know what game you are playing, Helena. But I will not have it. You are mine, and you will learn to remember that.”

She stared at him in horror. He truly believed it, she realized. He really was mad.

“Let me go, my lord. I will be better,” she whispered, trying desperately to sound contrite. “Please. Lady Tilpot is due back at any moment, and she might go to my room and discover I am gone. And then,” she said carefully, “I would have to tell her what happened.”

He tilted his head. “Are you threatening me?”

“No,” she denied hastily. “But I should hate to have to explain the bruises on my arm.”

His expression reflected only mild contempt. “Tell anyone you like that I made them.” He leaned closer. “I’ll deny it. Do you really think anyone will believe you? Me, a viscount, or you…a nothing?”

He was right. Without a witness, it was his word against hers. “Please. Leave me alone.”

“Leave you alone? Oh, no. That is the one thing I will not do, my dear. I will most assuredly not leave you alone. Whenever you walk out Lady Tilpot’s door, I shall be watching you. Wherever you go, whatever you do, my eyes will be upon you. Whoever you talk to, I will know about it. And”—his teeth clicked together—“until I decide what to do about you, you are to be on your best behavior.”

She swallowed, hypnotized by the arrogance and cruelty in his voice. He might have been disciplining a dog.

“Do you understand?”

She nodded, but it was not enough; his fingers squeezed until she winced. “You have a voice. Use it. Do you understand?”

“Yes!” she squeaked. “Yes. I understand.”

“Good.” Abruptly, as if he had just realized the thing he held was soiled, he released her arm and wiped his fingertips on his sleeve. “Go then. Run. Run into that house, and do not dare to come out unless it is for a decent purpose, with decent people.”

She nodded frantically. Anything to get away from him.

His eyes narrowed on her. “Mark me, Helena. I will know if you do otherwise. I will be watching you. There is nowhere you can go that I will not follow. Nowhere you can be where I cannot gain entrance. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Go!” he shouted.

She needed no encouragement. She picked up her skirts and bolted, running heedless of any noise she made, arms stretched out as she banged through the garden gate and scrambled sobbing up the path and through the kitchen door. She slammed it shut behind her, driving the bolt home, and dashed through the empty rooms and up the staircase, flying to the safety of her room.

She burst into her room, pushed the door closed and twisted the key in the lock. With a terrible sense of foreboding, she realized that it did not make her feel any safer. She doubted it ever would. With a muted sob, she turned.

Her bed was covered with roses.

INTERCEPTION:

a counterattack that intercepts and checks an indirect attack

“WHERE HAS SHE BEEN?” Ramsey Munro asked Bill Sorry five days later.

“Nowhere.” Bill took a long draught of the beer from the mug the pretty tavern girl had set before him. She had set a great deal more before Ram Munro, but the blighter didn’t appear to notice the bounty put on display for him. Poor sot.

“She must go out sometimes,” Ram insisted. He didn’t dare go to Hanover Square himself lest Helena see him and realize he knew her identity. So he had sent Bill Sorry to watch over her in the guise of a workman repairing the square’s iron fence. Except, according to Bill, there was little to watch. She’d kept close to the house, venturing out only rarely and always in Lady Tilpot’s company.

“She must go out sometimes,” Ram insisted.

“Well,” Bill scratched his head, “she come outside yesterday and waited with Lady Tilpot and the niece until the carriage come round and picked them up. But she went back inside soon as they left.”

“How did she look?”

“Beautiful, of course.” Bill wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Ain’t ever seen a woman to match her looks. Her hair’s like…like”—he looked down at his mug—“it’s the color of clear ale.”

“Sauterne,” Ram corrected absently.

“If you say so,” Bill agreed. “Pretty, whatever you call it. But she looked scared, too, and…”

Ram reached over and seized Bill’s wrist. There was surprising strength in those long, elegant fingers. “And what?”

Bill shrugged uncomfortably. “Alone. She looked…alone. I don’t know why, but that’s what I thought when I seen her, and then I thought how terrible that was.” He shook his head, as if to clear away such impractical nonsense. “Stupid that, eh?”

“No,” Ram said, releasing his grip. “No. It is terrible.”

“Damnation!” Dand Ross dropped the rose vine he’d been tying up to a wicket archway and sucked angrily on his bleeding fingers. “If a knight really did give these bleedin’ yellow roses to St. Bride’s for taking care of his family during the plague, then I’m thinking he might not have been all that happy to see them alive and well on his return from the Crusades ’cause these things is as bloody like to kill someone as please them. These aren’t thorns, they’re bloody daggers!”

Douglas Stewart wiped the sweat from his eyes and stood up from where he’d been fitting shale into a new stone wall dividing the rose garden. “You know, yesterday you took a half-dozen stripes across the back of your thighs without a whimper, and here today you are bleating like a goat kid over a few scratches.”

“That was because yesterday I did something to deserve those stripes,” Dand explained with heavy patience. “And I have done nothing to deserve being stabbed by these bleedin’ roses except spend the last five years tending them with a mother’s care.”

“Your mother must have been a rare piece of work, then,” Ram drawled carelessly as he heaved a heavy stone into the trough he’d dug earlier, “if you are emulating her tender care.”

Kit MacNeill, muscles bunching with his exertions, emerged through the doorway with a barrow piled high with more stones just in time to hear this last. “Dand didn’t have a mother. He was spawned with the rest of the demon whelps in hell. At least that’s what John Glass tells the younger boys.”

“May be true!” Dand, ever impious, grinned. “But I heard John tell them the same thing about you.”

“Blast John, anyway,” Douglas, by far the most thoughtful of their quartet, frowned. “He has those lads thinking we’ve some sort of secret cabal going on in here.”

“Well, don’t we?” Ram asked. The others paused in their labors and regarded him interestedly.

“What do you mean?” Kit, the most forthright, asked.

“Dand said it himself. We’ve been working in this garden, reclaiming it, or so Brother Fidelis says, for Mother Church for five years. But doesn’t it strike you as odd that none of the other lads ever works in here? That we’re the only ones?”

Douglas nodded. “I have thought about that. A great deal.”

“And Brother Toussaint,” Ram continued. “Why would the abbot want him to teach us swordplay and other martial techniques? I know some of the others have instruction, too, but not to the extent that we do. Not nearly.” He rolled his shoulder at the painful memory of the long hours spent practicing the various drills the ex-soldier monk gave them.

“But why?” Dand demanded.

“Because we’re being groomed for something,” Douglas answered gravely. “Something important. Something which relies on us working together, as one, something which relies on our…our brotherhood.”

It made sense. It felt like the truth. Ram looked around. The others thought so, too. Kit was looking stern—but then, Kit always looked stern—and Dand was nodding with uncharacteristic seriousness.

“Well,” Kit finally said, “if that’s what the abbot wants, I have no complaints. You are brothers to me, and I’d give my life for any one of you.”

Only Kit—big, rough and taciturn—could have said something so quixotic without rousing Dand into making a flippant reply. Or himself, Ram supposed honestly.

“I would, too,” Douglas proclaimed.

“And I,” Dand muttered. He looked at Ram and his eyes, momentarily sober, lightened. “What of it, Ram? Are you not feeling the urge to declare your life forfeit for mine?”

“Christos!” Ram declared with an extravagant sigh, unwilling to let the others see how much they meant to him, this family he’d found after he’d lost all else. He supposed the others must feel the same. No. He knew they did. “I suppose if I had to die for someone it might as well be one of you. But only so you would be obliged to spend the rest of your miserable lives singing my praises. Yes, indeed. I rather like the thought of that. It would irk you so. Particularly Dand.”

“I think,” Douglas said slowly, “I think we ought to swear allegiance to one another.”

Leave it to Douglas to make a ritual of something that needed no formalization. But Dand, grinning wickedly, held up his bleeding hand, nodding. “And trade blood on it?” he suggested with feigned innocence. “I’m ready.”

“Aye!” Douglas declared enthusiastically. “The blood of the rose.”

And without waiting for the others to agree, he seized hold of the thorn-covered vine Dand had been tying, piercing his palm in a half-dozen places and wincing with the pain of it. “Damn, that hurts. Now, the rest of you! And then we swear loyalty to one another!”

And amazingly, they did.

At the sharp sound of the snap, Helena jumped.

“I am sorry, Miss Nash!” The footman who’d been opening the napkin before placing it on Helena’s lap apologized, his expression more surprised than contrite.

“That’s all right, Simon,” Helena said. She knew her behavior had given rise to speculation amongst the staff. She was anxious, jumping at shadows. She had to stop. This had to stop.

She glanced across the luncheon table to find Flora’s reproachful gaze on her. Guiltily, she began a minute scrutiny of her hard-boiled egg, though she knew Flora would not assail her in front of the servants. She had avoided Flora since the misadventure in White Friars five days ago. No. That was whitewashing. She had not only avoided Flora, she had abandoned her.

When Flora had crept to her room late at night and knocked on her door, Helena had ignored it. When a tearful Flora had caught at her sleeve in the hallway yesterday, pleading for a few minutes of her time, Helena had demurred, promising a “later” she had no intention of keeping. She was a coward. A rank, pitiful coward.

She had even fleetingly considered fleeing from here, leaving Flora to her fate. It was not only affection and obligation that kept her from doing so. She had nowhere to go. Nowhere she would feel safe, that is. The thought of borrowing money against her expected settlement from Kate was no longer even a possibility. She could not even imagine living alone with only a few newly hired staff. What if he someday decided that something she had done warranted punishment? At least here there were always people about, a small army of servants as well as a formidable employer.

She glanced again at Flora, picking listlessly at her kipper. Not even the jonquil brightness of her fetching gown could conceal her melancholy. Helena felt a wrench of guilt. She would talk to the girl soon, but right now all her concentration centered on Lord DeMarc.

The few times she’d ventured out of the house alone, DeMarc had been there, waiting, watching. He never approached her. He never even ventured close, but he was always there: across the park where she stopped for chocolate, in the Rotunda of the circulating library, lounging in his coach at the side of the street when she walked to the milliner’s shop.

The only times she had been free of him were those times she had been accompanied by Lady Tilpot. Then he vanished, either apparently satisfied that she would do nothing of which he disapproved, or unwilling to have his surveillance known.

“Miss Nash!”

At the sound of Lady Tilpot’s voice, Helena’s hand flew to her throat, startled.

“If I didn’t know better,” Lady Tilpot said, waddling ponderously in on the arm of a footman, “I would think you had been gambling.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Gambling to a bad end.” The old lady waited for the footman to haul out the massive chair at the head of the table and then settled down like a discontented pullet. “The way you start and fidget and shy. All the earmarks of someone who has wagered monies they do not own and now are ill prepared to pay.”