Silent Surrender (11 page)

“No,” she agreed. “I not go.”

Chapter Eight

Esau sat at the dining table, jumping at every noise the house made. His tea had gone cold, his porridge sat untouched. He wondered if Jude woke her with kisses or if he had gone awkwardly to his own bed, as Esau had done. He didn’t know which he would prefer.

Hadn’t this been what he’d wanted? He leaned his elbows on the table and propped his nose on his clasped fists. Jude wouldn’t let Honoria go now, not if he thought he owed her something for her honor. The man could have been Gallahad, out of one of those poncy stories about Camelot.

He smiled at the memory of his mother’s voice, rough from whiskey, telling him all about the gentle knights of the Round Table. He wondered what kind of stories Honoria would tell her children with Jude. Certainly nothing about parlor floors and hired men. In a few years, she would likely have forgotten all about him. Though he supposed that was all right, it did leave a bitter taste in his mouth to think of it. He might have liked to be remembered by at least one pretty girl. None of the whores he’d ever had would remember him, nor the women he’d had for free, but he didn’t remember all of them, either.

He wouldn’t ever forget Honoria, though. He’d known her a few days and already she was etched indelibly on his mind. He could scrub his skin raw and he’d still remember the feel of her. He could pour hot lead up his nose and he’d still smell her. And all of the times she’d looked at him with that hunger in her eyes, no, he wouldn’t forget those.

The door scraped open and he almost stood, but Jude entered alone. He did not meet Esau’s eyes. “Did you sleep well?”

“I did. Bed wasn’t as soft as I was used to…” That was bad of him, to remind the poor fellow that he’d been there first. “Never mind that now. Have you decided what you’re going to do?”

“I have.” Jude cleared his throat as he went to the sideboard.

“Do you want to tell me?” Esau wondered what had got the man’s back up. Hadn’t he just spent a whole night fucking the woman he’d been lusting over for ages? It seemed to Esau that Jude should be in a better mood, all things considering.

“I don’t know that I do,” Jude answered. “I want to know what your plans are, when your time here is done.”

“Go back to the docks, I expect.” Esau wondered at the question, until a notion came to him. “You’re not worried that I’m going to—”

“No, no.” Jude waved a hand, which then fell to the bridge of his nose to push up his spectacles. “I apologize, Esau. I’m tired.”

Esau laughed. “I should think you are. She’s…what’s the word, when they want to have you all the time?”

“Insatiable?” Jude ventured warily.

“Yeah, that’s the one. Insatiable.” Esau grinned, glad to share the private joke. “She can’t get enough.”

Jude nodded grimly. “I’ve decided to take her to America.”

Honoria walked through the doors, smiling shyly at both of them. Her cheeks flushed to be in the same room with them, and no wonder. The minx knew well enough what would be on the minds of both the men she’d had in the parlor.

Would she want to do it again, he wondered? Would she take them both at the same time? His cock stiffened at the thought. He hadn’t been entirely comfortable with another man in the room, the accidental touches, the strangeness of performing before an audience, but it might be different, that way, and he had always wondered if a woman’s back passage was as sweet as the regular way. The thought of finding out with Honoria would have made him flush if there had been blood anywhere in his body other than his cock.

After an exchange of innocent pleasantries, she got herself something from the sideboard and settled into her usual seat at the table. She and Jude talked to each other with their hands a while, and Esau watched. Some of the motions, he thought he could guess. When she pointed to herself, when she pointed to Jude, when Jude mimed laying notes in his open palm. There was too much he couldn’t follow, though, and when Honoria’s face went white, her eyes wide, and she pointed at
him
, it was disconcerting.

“Are you talking about me?” he asked, looking from Jude to Honoria and back. “She’s talking about me.”

“I told her about America,” Jude explained, signing at the same time. Honoria shook her head, her hands thrown up in exasperation. “She wants to know why you aren’t going.”

“Me go?” Esau laughed out loud. “No, no.”

Honoria stamped her foot beneath the table.

Esau turned to her helplessly. “I signed on for a few days. I have a life here, work. I can’t turn my back on that.”

“You could work for me!” Honoria said, her voice too shrill in the quiet of the room.

“What, as a prostitute?” Esau’s back teeth ground. “I’m no kept man, Honoria. I did this because you seemed like a nice girl and you were lonely. But I’m not about to make a way of life of it.”

Honoria signed furiously at Jude.

“What’s she saying?” Esau demanded. He wasn’t going to let the two of them sit there and make plans for him.

Jude’s hands stilled. “She thinks I’m forcing you to leave.”

“No one forces me to do anything,” Esau said, knowing he was talking too loudly for such a fine room. “Least of all go to America.”

“She says she won’t go if you don’t.” Concern darkened Jude’s face.

“Now, just hold on,” Esau pushed back from the table. “That’s foolish and you know it.”

She turned her head, chin jutting into the air like the handle of an angry tea cup. God, but she was beautiful. Beautiful and stubborn.

“You have to make her go,” Esau pleaded with Jude. “Make her understand.”

“She understands,” Jude said tensely. “She’s not an idiot. She understands, she just doesn’t want to accept it.”

“I was afraid of this.” Esau cursed himself. He hadn’t been afraid, not really. He hadn’t thought that a woman like her would get attached to a man like him. He should have thought it through. Of course a well-brought-up girl, a virgin, might think she felt something for him, since he’d been the one who’d plucked her. Wasn’t that why they kept them all so pure before their wedding night?

“Tell her.” Esau’s mind worked frantically. “Tell her she’s a lovely girl. I just don’t want to go to America. I don’t want it to be like that between us.”

Jude hesitated. He didn’t want to hurt her, Esau realized, and it caused a pain in his heart. But true to his job, the other man moved his hands and destroyed the calm.

Honoria’s face grew ashen, her hands trembled as she signed back to Jude.

“She says you told her that you didn’t want her to go to France. That you offered to help her.” Jude raised an eyebrow.

“I said that if you wouldn’t take her to America, that I would help her. But you’re going to take care of her. She doesn’t need me.”

Honoria’s eyes glazed with tears, and she stood and went to the window in a rustle of fabric.

Jude followed her, and Esau hung back, wondering if it weren’t better to just leave now, let Jude pick up the pieces that he’d shattered. But why was she shattered? She had the man she wanted. She didn’t need Esau anymore.

As Jude tried to console her, Esau watched their hands flashing, her mood heightening. Her cheeks flushed when she was angry, same way they flushed before she cried out with her pleasure. She did her fair share of yelling now, short, sharp bursts of disgust as she argued with Jude.

“Come on now,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t hear him as he crossed the room to join them. When she looked at him, he tried to manage a smile. “This isn’t the way, pet. You don’t want me. You wanted him. You said you loved him.”

“I chose you both,” she bit out, her words clipped and precise in her anger.

“I wasn’t for the choosing.” His temper flared at her words. What was he, a stud at market? “He offered himself, I didn’t. You don’t want me. You want him, so have him. You want a life I can’t give to you.”

She picked up her hands, started to say something else, and he caught her sleeve, thinking to quiet her a moment, to reason with her. She shrank back as though she’d been scalded, and Jude’s expression turned hard.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” the other man said, his voice deadly calm.

“What, it’s not as if I slapped her,” Esau said feebly, but he wondered if he wouldn’t have been better off. The way she looked at him now, as though he were a monster…

“No, you didn’t,” Jude said, drawing an audible breath through his nostrils. “I think you’d better go.”

Esau looked to Honoria, who would not face him. Tears streamed down her cheeks. He glared at Jude. “You could have waited,” he said, his voice oddly devoid of any of the bad feelings that gripped him now. “You could have waited until the days were up.”

“You’ll be paid in full, I assure you.” With that Jude took Honoria in his arms, cradled her head against his chest.

There was nothing Esau could do but leave. If he stayed, he was as good as packed in a crate for America. It would be cruel to stay and tempt her hopes any further. But if he left now, he would leave her like this, crying, in pain. Perhaps that could not be avoided.

She didn’t own him, she or her poncy tutor. They couldn’t make him one of them, and he didn’t want to be one of them. He wanted his life, his clothes, his bed full of bugs and his room full of rats.

Most of all, he didn’t want to bring her down with him. So he left her there, with her love in his fine suit, in their house full of fine things, and he didn’t bother with the damned money.

* * * * *

The clock on the mantle told Honoria that it was well past tea time, and Jude still had not returned.

After the humiliating episode in the dining room, she couldn’t blame him. He had tried to console her, but in her spite she had refused that consolation. She’d told him terrible things, threatened to go to France after all. How must that have made him feel, to hear that she would reject his love for want of Esau’s?

Love, what a silly, fickle thing that was. Of course she didn’t love Esau, nor could she expect him to love her. They’d known each other for only a few days, regardless of the intimacy they’d shared in the bedroom. For years her mother had warned her against following her heart, not because Euphemie Wallis had been a particularly cold woman, but because she sought to spare her daughter the pain of an ill-matched marriage.

What would her mother think of her daughter now?

No, she did not love Esau, but she wanted him. Perhaps it was her upbringing that could be blamed for her earlier tantrum. Her father had given in to everything she asked for. Only her mother had tried to temper her daughter’s appetite for excess with caution. It was as if she’d known that beneath the exterior of dutiful daughter, Honoria was a creature made entirely of selfish desires.

She swiped away a tear. She’d thought they would stop coming, and after a time the sobbing had subsided, leaving behind a gnawing ache. But tears were in good supply and they had caught her at the strangest moments. Jude had grown impatient with them and left. Whether he would return, she could not say. A tray had come to her room, but she hadn’t the stomach for tea time, just as she hadn’t the stomach to follow through on any of her idle threats. But she was stubborn, and Jude knew that much. Perhaps he had taken her rash promise to report to the school in France as real resolve. She prayed he had not.

It was a difficult thing, to stare into the face of disappointment and see that it was entirely of one’s own making.

Perched on a chair beside the window, she pressed her cheek to the glass, heedless of the passersby below. The gray sky had opened up, pattering the panes with small drops, and below a tall, thin figure dashed toward the townhouse. It was Jude, for certain, and he would come inside and make amends with her and all would be forgiven.

She couldn’t move from her chair. She knew she should meet him at the door and beg his forgiveness, that she should consider his feelings above her own, but it was such a hard thing to do when she had never been asked to do it before. So she waited, wondering when he would come to the door, calculating the time it would take him to come in, doff his wet coat, to mount the stairs. When that amount of time passed, she wondered if he walked slowly, or if she’d miscounted. Perhaps he’d been detained by Parker with questions about dinner.

Soon enough, it became clear that he would not come to her, and she twisted her skirt in worry. How could she approach him now? It would be more humiliating than the row that afternoon. She would have to admit to wrongdoing. She would have to be wrong.

Part of her heart must have been made of stone, she was certain, for she could easily imagine sitting stoically in that chair until the end of her days. She could vividly see herself in France, at that horrible school. She had the means to avoid it, yet she did not act.

Cursing herself for a fool, she got to her feet and went to the door. She flung it open and found Jude standing outside, looking as surprised to see her as she was to see him.

“You angry still?” he signed, his face unreadable.

She longed to reach up and cup his jaw. All of his features, decidedly unhandsome when taken on their own merits, suited him perfectly altogether, with expression and movement about him. Now he seemed as a statue, and there was something sad and unusual about him that made her fingers ache to touch him.

Clasping her fist to her breast, she signed, “I sorry.”

“You not go France?” he asked, no sign of relief or acceptance on his face.

She shook her head. Would he still reject her? If that was what her stubbornness had gotten her, she would curse herself until the day she died.

“I want you happy with me. Only me.” His brown eyes were lit with some cold fire. “Not thinking Esau, not missing Esau.”

She nodded. “You I love. Not Esau. Many years, only you. You never tell me you love me.”

“My mistake.” He swallowed and his lips parted, emotion breaking over his features. Wetness shone in his eyes. “Many years I love you.”

Her heart beat against her ribs so hard, she wondered if it would stop, if she would expire from the swelling feeling inside of her. “Where you go?”