The Corrupt Comte (24 page)

“I find it b-bitterly ironic that I should be engaged to a s-s-spy,” she told him quietly, “as the only other p-person who sh-showed me any affection in this world was one, as well.”

He lay motionless beneath her palm, her hand rising and falling with each breath he took. “You are referring to your grandfather, Amaury Pascale, yes?”

“You know?”

His shoulders attempted to lift in a weak, Gallic shrug. “An infamous villain among the court of Versailles,” he mumbled in his strongly accented English. “He made them scents, took their secrets, and sold both for a steep price. It is a good thing Amaury Pascale escaped France, but your father was stupid to think France would let
you
escape the Pascale name.”

Her cheeks burned and her chest tightened. “M-my father never had m-much in the way of intelligence.” This would explain why she’d initially been so reviled by the Parisian nobility, more awkward aversion than her stutter typically engendered. “B-but he wanted a French husband for me, m-more than anything.”

“Why?”

She shrugged, though Gaspard couldn’t possibly see the action in the darkness. “Patriotism, of a s-sort. He never got over having been born the s-son of a courtier in France, then being reduced to a shopboy in England. He can’t regain his p-past any other way b-but through me.”

“There must be more to it than—” He lunged for the sick pail, and she helped hold it under his bent head, barely wincing at the horrid noises.

Pity stirred in her as he fell back to the bunk, shivers visibly coursing down his strong shoulders. “I am an embarrassment to him.” Blunt words, and a massive understatement. Her tone was grim as she continued. “My t-tongue doesn’t behave, s-s-so no one t-talks to me at parties. And b-because we made our money in trade, I am already a p-p-pariah. If a p-peer were to approach me at a b-ball, I have no choice but to believe he is either after m-my d-dowry, or he wishes for a bit of s-sport with the—” Anger and shame lodged in her throat. “The s-s-simpleton.”

His whole body tensed. “Your father has said these things to you?”

“He…” Suddenly, Claudia was unbearably aware of the intimacy of this situation—a different kind of intimacy than any they had shared before, one where she was helpless not to tell Gaspard truths she would prefer to have kept hidden, pretending they didn’t exist at all. “He has s-said and done many things over the years.” She leaned away, settling her hands in her lap as her fingers twisted together.

“Do not stop touching me.” There was a domineering note in the gruff words.

She obeyed, though not with the immediacy she had when once presented with his demands. In the short time she’d known him, the
comte
had managed to train her instincts to acquiesce to whatever he commanded of her. But now…now she had sway over herself, and the power he had delighted in stripping her of was returning in slow degrees. It had nothing to do with his current state of weakness and everything to do with the shift in her emotions.

She couldn’t trust him—that was what Claudia had learned today, to heartbreaking effect. If she couldn’t trust him, she refused to allow him to dominate her. Of course she craved the ease of submission, because Gaspard had been right: there was freedom to be found in giving in to a guiding hand, and he’d pleasured her thoroughly with that freedom. But the freedom was gone, hand in hand with her implicit trust, and now she needed to remind her body to behave, in much the same manner as she often sternly had to remind her tongue.

Be grateful to me,
he’d implored her that morning, and she couldn’t lie to herself—she was grateful. Her awareness of her body had grown apace with the inherent danger of their liaison, but gratitude was a tricky emotion, one that could encourage a woman to be unwise and forever alter the course of her life. And all because, for a few stolen hours, a handsome man had made her feel special.

Her current predicament was her own fault. Divested of her virginity, disillusioned by and engaged to a French spy, and grappling with the confusion, dismay and elation fighting for purchase within her. She wanted to wallow, to call herself a fool for ever thinking she deserved better, but there was no point to it. She would make the best of the situation and move forward.

She trailed lazy fingertips over the back of one broad shoulder, noting the incremental warming of his flesh as he drifted closer to slumber. All tension had leached from his large form as soon as she’d laid a hand on him again, and she smiled to herself in the darkness of his cabin. Something primal in him recognized the latent power in her and responded to it, calming at her gentle urging.

How he must hate me for that.

His breathing had slowed to match the creaking of the ship when she noticed the anomaly to his skin. Faint raised scars striped him from the middle of his back to the base of his spine. Welts, she realized, thin welts that had healed long ago but left him permanently marked.

“What happened t-to you?” she whispered, not expecting him to answer.

So it startled her when he did. “I was caned with a walking stick.” There was nothing but weariness in his gravelly voice. “Repeatedly.”

“B-by your father?”

“By the army captain I served under during the war.”

She traced the lowest welt, the one spanning from the narrowest part of his waist across the small of his back. “Why?”

“Because he could. Because no one stopped him.” He shifted until his hip rested against hers. “He used to pet the marks, as you do now.”

A chill gathered at her nape, and her hand froze. She understood but she didn’t, and the longer she thought about it, the uglier that understanding became. “You mean—”

“He had me serve him in many ways. For none was I willing.”

A lump formed in her throat, but she couldn’t swallow around it. She couldn’t speak.

Gaspard sighed. His face was barely visible in the shadow-strewn blackness, but though he’d tilted his chin in her direction, she sensed his eyes were closed, as though he couldn’t bear to look at her. “I lied about my name and—”

“You lied about your
n-name
?” Oh, no. No, no, no. Not more lies. “B-but you’re…Gaspard.”

A pause, then a whisper. “Luc-Gaspard Tannet. That is the name I was born with.”

Luc-Gaspard Tannet. Not Gaspard Toussaint. “S-so I am engaged to Luc-Gaspard T-Tannet.”

He pressed his face into the pillow before mumbling, “
Non
. When I signed this name over to the army, it became mine, in every way that counted.”

She said nothing, because there was nothing to say.

He turned his face toward her, voice quiet. “I lied about my age too, and joined the army as a foot soldier—I was sixteen, and small. Thin. But they took me and put me under the command of
le capitaine
, Marcel de Courreaux, and made me his steward. I do not think they knew what would happen, but it does not matter. If it were not me, it would have been some other boy.”

“Why did you join the army s-so young?”

He shrugged, the tangled sheets beneath him shifting with the movement. “I was the second son of a blacksmith, one of seven children. I would eat better as a soldier.”

“A b-blacksmith?” Smoke in the air, iron in his scent…

“Ah, I did not tell you this? My title is a bribe.”

“I don’t understand.”

It seemed as though he wouldn’t speak again, willing him to talk as she sat next to him in the darkness but secretly hoping he would stay silent. Hearing about his past hurt her, and she could only imagine what sort of torment he suffered in the retelling of it.

Finally he spoke, his words cold and matter-of-fact. “For three years, I was beaten and raped and forced to serve the captain. I was no better than a dog, and I tried to escape. Each time he chased me. Caught me. Used me harder and threatened me with hanging for…for—” He growled and nudged her, her cue to help him find the English word that evaded him.

She wracked her brain, desperately fending off the reality of his confession as she searched her vocabulary. “D-desertion?”

“
Oui.
Desertion. I did not want to die—though I do not know why I wanted to keep living—so I stayed.”

His hip pressed more firmly against hers. She responded by leaning closer, letting her hand resume its trek up and down the length of his spine as she carefully avoided spending too much time over the caning scars.

“But I grew.” There was malicious pleasure in his rasping voice. “I turned twenty, and I was bigger, stronger.
Le capitaine
was nervous around me. He stopped coming to me in the night.” He paused, and Claudia tried, unsuccessfully, to draw air into her seized lungs. “Then I saw him leave the tent of a young soldier, one who looked more like a boy than I did, and I knew Courreaux was hurting someone again, as with me. So I took him to the edge of camp and strung him up by his legs from a tree. And I beat him with his cane until he died.”

It was as if her stomach had caved in on itself, empty and clenching and torn apart with claws and teeth. She couldn’t have spoken, even if he demanded it of her.

“That was the day I met Sabien.” Gaspard’s tone was thoughtful. “He was riding into camp, an officer in shiny boots. He saw what I had done.”

“And what did he do?”

“He cut Courreaux down with one swing of his sword.” Gaspard made a noise she thought was meant to be a laugh. “He helped me bury the body. He watched me wash blood from my face and hands, and we walked into the camp together, leading his horse. He did not say a single word.”

The recounting of Sabien’s loyalty staggered her. They’d been strangers, and Sabien could have easily had Gaspard hanged for murder, but the lieutenant had chosen instead to keep a tortured soldier’s secrets. Sabien was a good man—the best of men, perhaps.

A shame that Claudia didn’t want the best.

Gaspard’s hand settled heavily on her thigh. No pressure, no massage—just contact, tired and needy. “Sabien believed it was jealousy. Why I killed the captain. Those who suspected thought the same.”

“B-because of the other boy.” She laid her free hand over the top of his, feeling the massive web of scars stretching taut across the bone-and-tendon puzzle of the back of his hand. She swallowed past the lump of dread in her throat. “These s-s-scars.” She tapped a fingertip against his knuckles. “These are not from a c-cane.”

“Might I not keep one secret for myself tonight,
chaton
?”

The strain in his tone softened the reprimand, but it quieted her nonetheless. “Of c-course you may.” She slid her hand to his nape, playing lightly with the damp ends of his thick hair.

Silence, and then, “Hot wire.”

“The c-captain did this?”

Gaspard’s resigned sigh echoed on the walls of the cramped cabin. “I was forced to my hands and knees, and hot wire was staked to the ground to stretch over the backs of my hands. It was meant to keep me from running away while he raped me.”

And yet those scars said Gaspard had attempted escape. Repeatedly.

Oh, God, she was going to cry.

No,
no
, she couldn’t cry. Could. Not. He would think she pitied him, but pity was the last emotion she felt in regards to her fiancé.

She respected him, even though he’d used her. She admired his strength, his resilience. Somehow, born of his terrible experiences, the man lying prone on the bunk before her was an aristocrat and a spy, and he’d capitalized on the ignorant expectations of others in order to become both. Gaspard had taken his ill-used body, now so big and strong, and turned his victimization into his stock-in-trade.

A stock-in-trade that likely had him kneeling behind strange men, cold and determined as his thick cock did…whatever it would do to another male. She could hear the phantom, panting breaths of his lovers—no, his
marks
—as they whined in the wake of oncoming ecstasy.

Claudia hated her imagination.

Her fingers clenched in his hair before she could school herself not to react, and hoped he hadn’t noticed, teetering on the edge of sleep as he was.

Claudia, on the other hand, remained at the mercy of her whirling mind and the excruciating inner turmoil his confessions had evoked within her. She was torn, her anger with him over his deceit still a living thing beating against the cage of her ribs, but she wanted him too. More than ever, she wanted this violent man. This tortured man.

This
young
man.

A murderer at age twenty.

“How old are you?” He’d seemed so worldly from the moment they met, and his face, roughly handsome and sharply planed, could have spanned anywhere from his early twenties to his later thirties.

“Six-and-twenty, come May.”

And come June, Claudia would turn one-and-twenty. A scant five years separated them, yet he had lived so much more, and so much harder, than she. She was thankful and resentful in the same breath, because it had never been so apparent just how little they had in common as it was in the darkness of this tiny cabin.

What would happen when they reached London? They shared no interests outside the bedroom, and barely spoke the same language, with her stuttering and his less-than-perfect English. His costuming was a mask meant to fool a blind public, worn by the blacksmith’s son to keep the spy alive and well, but perhaps he planned to shed his years of cover when he set foot upon the safer shores of her country.