Proof by Seduction (25 page)

He shrugged. “I am naturally inquisitive.”

“The story doesn’t paint me in the best light.”

“Jenny, I met you when you’d garbed and painted yourself as a Gypsy. You couldn’t say anything that would
worsen
my opinion of you.”

She blew out her breath, and Gareth winced as he realized what he’d said.

“I mean—”

She put her hand over his lips. “I know what you meant.” There was a current of amusement in her voice. The light was fading fast. Her hips cast lengthy shadows down the bed.

“When I was eighteen,” she said, “the older brother of one of my schoolmates fell in love with me. Or so he claimed.”

“A lord?”

She shook her head against his shoulder. “You do me too much credit. A mill owner’s younger son. He said he could never marry me, but that his love would never die. Et cetera et cetera and so forth.” Her hand trailed the et ceteras down Gareth’s abdomen. “So I ran away with him.”

“You loved him?”

“No. But I wanted to be loved, you see. I should have known better. You said it once. Everyone lies. Even then, I knew that. Immortal love? Of course he was lying.”

“Then why run off?”

“My future had been much on my mind. I felt trapped. I knew I’d need to make my own living. I could have tried for a position as a governess, but my references were not precisely stellar.” A sniff, to indicate the statement drastically understated the truth. “And I had no family. So the best positions—even the middling ones—would have been closed to me. As for the worst ones…Well, if I had to sell my body, I didn’t want to care for children alongside everything.”

“You could have married. Most women do.”

She snorted incredulously. “You recall I have no family to speak of. No dowry.”

“Farmers. Clerks. Surely there are men willing to overlook a few defects of your birth in exchange for a good wife.”

“A good wife?
Me?
To a farmer or a clerk or the like?”

Gareth considered this. On the one hand, he couldn’t imagine Jenny marrying a straightforward fellow like White. She’d have tied him in knots within seconds. On the other hand, in Gareth’s experience, Jenny’s knots had proved to be…fun. “Well, aside from your recalcitrance. And a few other, um, minor character defects.”

She rolled her eyes. “Gareth, you really have no notion what this world is like. The school I attended was in the business of turning out
ladies.
I learned how to curtsy properly. I learned the correct way to pour tea. I was drilled in my accent and taught just enough conversational French to start a good argument, but not so much that I would be able to do anything so gauche as to win it. I learned watercolors and a few rudimentary piano pieces. I did not learn how to milk a cow, or how best to promote laying among broody hens. What use would I have been to a farmer?”

There was the use Gareth had just made of her. There was the sense of playfulness that made him want to tug her close and hold her tight. There was her sharp intellect and her unflinching insistence that Gareth treat her with respect.

“I lacked the birth to match my education and the skills to match my birth. No, marriage was not an option for me. I ran away with the man because he seemed a pleasant enough fellow. And besides, he swore his undying love. I’d never experienced love of even the short-lived variety before. It seemed a rare treat.”

Gareth knew how this story was going to end. It would end with Gareth wanting to punch the man. Even though he knew—not in his gut, but in one uncomfortable corner of his rational mind—that one day, he too would have to leave her.

“He brought me to London and set me up in a dull, unfashionable part of town. And two months later, he cheerfully handed me a silver bracelet and wished me well. I was…furious. You see, I knew his love would die. I just expected that its life span would be closer to that of a dog than a—a—”

“A dung beetle?” Gareth suggested.

She smiled at him and, thank God, snuggled closer.

“What did you do?”

She shrugged. “I had no desire to continue along the path he’d set me. Being a mistress is quite boring—there’s no challenge, nothing new to discover. And at that point, any position I could obtain as a governess given my preceding conduct would have been unsavory indeed. I figured—everyone lies. Why shouldn’t I?”

“You could have—” Gareth paused. What could she really have done? As a man with a solid education, she could have become a clerk. As a woman, though…“You could have made hats?”

“I’d have ruined my eyesight in short order, while starving myself on too little coin. Lodgings and food are dear in London. I had nobody to vouch for my character. And besides, I wanted more than that. I wanted independence. I wanted people to look at me with honor, as they’d never done—” Her voice trembled. “Do not lecture me for trying to have a tiny portion of what you’ve always known.”

Gareth shut his eyes. He’d thought more knowledge would reduce her power over him. But it wasn’t working that way. What he felt…

He didn’t have a word for the images she’d conjured up in his head. Some unnameable emotion accompanied them. The thought of Jenny, betrayed at eighteen and deciding to show them all up, made him ache down to his bones. Whatever this nameless feeling was, it seeped into his soul like dirty black water, biting as the Thames in winter.

She hadn’t curled up like a pill-bug, or hidden herself away like some fragile creature. She’d rejected the usual options and found a choice that afforded her everything she wanted.

“The best part of being Madame Esmerelda,” she said, “was that I had to learn everything—gossip, of course, but finance, industry, even science. It’s much easier to foretell the future if you’re aware of the present. Before then, nobody had ever expected me to know anything.”

He’d expected familiarity to breed, if not contempt, at least indifference. It didn’t. It bred respect.

“Tell me,” he whispered against her shoulder. “You told me you learned everyone lied when you were nine. How did that come to pass?”

Twilight had passed. He could feel her breath in the expansion of her chest against the palms of his hands, hear it soft and sighing in his ears. But the visible line of her shoulders had faded to an indistinct silhouette, rising and falling with each exhalation.

“When I was very young,” she said, her voice quiet as the sound of still water running, “I was brought to school. I was distraught and confused as only a four-year-old child can be. The instructor tasked with my care told me if I stopped sniveling and was good, my mother would come for me soon.”

Maybe it was because his hands over her shoulders gave the illusion of closeness. Maybe it was because he hadn’t expected a revelation of that magnitude from her. But he shook with the cruelty of telling a small child a lie of that nature. His hands tightened.

“So I was good.” Her matter-of-fact delivery only drove the ice deeper into his bones.

“It may be hard to believe, but I was quiet and polite and…and honest. At that age, at least. I never wept, not even—well, you can imagine how cruel young girls can be.”

Gareth had seen how the boys at Harrow tormented those not from the oldest of families. How they’d singled out the awkward and the quiet. He could extrapolate.

“I was uncommonly good until I turned nine. Then one of the other girls pushed me down and I skinned my knee and got mud on my dress. Nothing unusual, you understand. And while I was telling myself it would all come right when my mother came for me, I realized it had been years. She wasn’t coming for me. Nobody ever would, no matter how good I was. Mrs. Davenport had lied to me, and I was all alone.”

Gareth swallowed the lump in his throat. “So what did you do?”

Her shoulder blades leapt under his hand in what Gareth supposed was a fatalistic shrug. “I stopped being good. And here I am.”

Here they weren’t. She shifted and smiled at him. Pretending it didn’t matter.

“But all this talk of me is boring. What of you? Twenty-one, was it, when you discovered everyone lied?”

Gareth paused, reluctant. In part, he held his tongue because he wanted to learn more of her than she did of him. But he also didn’t want to air his petty complaints to her. Not now, in the barren aftermath of her revelation.

“The usual,” he eventually said. “Delusions of love.”

“A woman?” He must have made some sign of acknowledgment, because she covered his cold hand with hers. “And another man, I would imagine.”

“And more than one man,” he corrected. “One of whom was my grandfather.”

Her breath hissed in. “Good Lord. How did that—I mean—why?”

“It was a wager. I’d planned to ask her to marry me. My grandfather—he had the training of me after my father died—thought she wasn’t good enough to be the future Marchioness of Blakely. I said she was. He wagered he could prove otherwise.”

“What do you mean,
wagered she wasn’t good enough?
That sounds horrific.”

No more horrific than sending Gareth’s mother away from her son just because she remarried. Gareth waved his hand. “It was part of his lessons. Learn about the estates. Accept responsibility. Noblesse oblige. He said I had plebeian instincts, and he needed to drive them from me.”

“So he—he—”

“So he shagged the woman I intended to marry, yes.”

“And he called that a lesson? It sounds more like a travesty. How did he dare tell you what he’d done?”

“There was no need. He made sure I overheard them. She called his name, you see.”

Long silence. “At the time,” she finally said, “he would have been Lord Blakely, yes?”

Thank God for intelligent women, who understood the import of his little speech without him having to bare himself any more than he’d already done. Gareth traced his hand down the curve of her spine.

“So since you inherited—” she started.

“It’s been years. And no. Since I became Blakely myself, I haven’t been able to hear that name on a woman’s lips. Not like that.”

At twenty-one, he’d had as much perspective on life as an ant had of the horizon. He felt rather like that ant now—as if he were utterly trivial. A pimple on the face of an enormous mountain situated in a massive range.

She’d
had nothing. By all rights, Jenny should have followed the path of doomed women everywhere. Increasing desperation. Sexual immorality. It should have culminated in her dramatic death in some snow-filled alley, as if she were some desperate female in one of those gothic serializations. But Jenny had not made a serial of herself.

Instead, it was her arm that fell comfortingly over his chest, her head that rested against his shoulder. She gave succor to him, and he, selfish creature that he was, sucked in all her heat, hoarding it as selfishly as he’d taken her body.

Years ago, he’d traded the uncertain comfort of companionship for the surety of superiority. It had been his grandfather’s last gift—or perhaps his curse. If this was what he’d given up all those years ago, could he justify those years of loneliness?

Gareth shook his head and sent the dark thoughts back from whence they came.

Twilight had passed, and now he could make out nothing of her features in the thick darkness. He pulled her against him. She was limp and no doubt weary. She hadn’t slept much the previous evening. Neither, for that matter, had he.

The last of the light faded as he held her close.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

W
HEN
J
ENNY AWOKE
the next morning, the side of the bed next to her felt cold. He must have left sometime in the night. She opened her eyes. Pale light touched the walls. Outside, she could hear the sounds of early morning in London. A cart rumbled by, and the market a few streets down was coming to life. A butter-maid’s shout punctuated the dawn. “Freshly churned, freshly churned!”

Jenny sat up and looked around the room, stricken. Every scrap of clothing he’d set on the chair the previous night had vanished. After the conversation the previous evening, she had begun to believe she meant something more to him than a mere sexual relationship. She had thought that they had formed a deeper attachment.

The secrets they’d shared on the previous night had left her feeling vulnerable. Apparently, it had passed him by completely. It would be foolish for Jenny to harbor illusions about Lord Blakely. He wouldn’t care for her. For him, this was a temporary circumstance. It was physical pleasure. And no matter how close he held her, he would one day leave. When he did, she would not let her life be as empty as this room.

She swung her feet to the side of the bed and stood up. She’d slept in nothing but his arms. She reached for her clothing, heaped in an uncertain pile on the floor. Drawers first, and then her shift. The working woman’s stays that provided support rather than shaping.

As she dressed herself, she realized one last thing: Her desire to be loved hadn’t lessened during the decade since she’d embarked on that first disastrous affair.

Her feelings for Gareth had passed the point of danger. She was desperate to take everything he said as an indication that he cared for her. But aside from a few comments made in the heat of the moment, he treated Jenny as if she were nothing more than a mistress. And that she’d vowed never to become. Not again.

There was no good way to take his departure in the morning without so much as an explanation. No doubt he’d come back some other evening—and no doubt, he’d try to buy her participation in the sexual act with another piece of furniture. Perhaps he’d give her a silver bracelet when he was done with her.

Perhaps by that time she would be desperate enough to take it, to accept the bare monetary value he placed on her heart.

Jenny vowed not to let him fool her again. She’d let her own desperate loneliness overwhelm her. She had more important things to think about. Such as how she was to rescue her four hundred pounds from Mr. Sevin’s clutches. And what she was to do with the funds once she had them in hand.

She hugged her knees.

Had she not foolishly told Gareth about her childhood last night, she could have withstood this. But she had felt naked and exposed—and afterward he’d held her so gently. She’d felt as if she’d come home. She’d never had a
home
before.