The Heart of a Scoundrel (24 page)

“They’ll finish their discussion soon, my dear.”

She paused mid-stride and glanced with some surprise at her mother. The viscountess sat with her head bent over her embroidery frame, attending her needlepoint.

“I suspect the marquess has come to make an offer for you?” At last, her mother paused and picked her head up, a twinkle lit her eyes. “Come, surely you do not believe I’m one of those self-absorbed mothers who fails to note my eldest daughter’s frequently blushing cheeks and the rumors being whispered about her and a certain gentleman who—”

“She has the look of longing for,” Justina said from her spot at the windowseat, absorbed in her reading.

Heat burned Phoebe’s cheeks. “I do not have…” Her mother and sister both gave her a pointed look and she sighed, letting the thought go unfinished. There was no need debating the matter with them. In this, they were, in fact—correct. She glanced to the clock once more and the thin thread she had on her control snapped. “I’m going to fetch my book while I wait.” Both women looked up once more. She forced a serene smile to her lips. “It is my latest Captain Cook. I thought it should help occupy my thoughts.”

Justina furrowed her brow and moved her gaze from Phoebe to the unfortunately forgotten until now leather volume. “Isn’t that—?”

Phoebe swung a pleading stare in her direction and her sister widened her eyes in sudden understanding.

Their mother continued working to pull her needle through the fabric on the embroidery frame. “It doesn’t do to appear too eager. Not to a man as powerful as the marquess,” she said, directing her words to the muslin in her hands.

“Er, yes, indeed,” Phoebe agreed. “Perhaps I shall just read abovestairs until the marquess concludes his meeting.”

Before her mother could say anything further on it, Phoebe hurried from the room and started down the corridor. She passed the occasional servant hurrying to attend their day’s responsibilities. It wouldn’t do to appear too eager. Her ever incorrect mama, in this, was indeed surprisingly correct and yet, since their exchange in Hyde Park, Phoebe had been consumed by a need to see him, be with him. This hard, unflappable man misperceived by all, broken of heart and yet daring to trust in her. With each step she took, her heartbeat grew increasingly erratic in rhythm. Phoebe turned right at the hall and tiptoed several steps past two doors, and then paused outside her father’s office.

With her shoulder pressed against the wall, she strained to hear a hint of his voice. “I want to wed your eldest, Phoebe….” A grin that likely would have earned the disappointed groans of Honoria and ever optimistic Gillian played on her lips.

I don’t want anyone and I do not need anyone, but I want you, and I’d have you marry me…
From the moment he’d uttered those words, she’d belonged to him.

“…thought you wanted the Fairfax girl?” Her father’s muffled question cut into her musings and she blinked several times in rapid succession. Surely, she’d misheard—

“Matters have changed.”

Even with the wood panel between them, the lethality of his whisper cut through the door and pierced her slow-moving thoughts. Matters have changed? What was he saying? Phoebe forcibly tamped down the reservations. Of course a man who’d long protected his heart as Edmund had done would not share the depth of his feelings with one such as her father, a man he’d never before known.

“Which one do you want, you say?” Her father spoke the way a breeder would when selling horseflesh to the highest bidder.

“Your eldest.”

A chill ran along her spine. Not “Phoebe”. Or “the woman I gave my heart to”. But rather, “your eldest”.

“…you said you wanted your revenge using the Fairfax girl,” her father wheedled and the dark tendrils of ice plucked at the edge of her heart. “I’ve done my part where that one is concerned. Wed her. I need my Phoebe to settle my debt with Allswood.” The Fairfax girl? Her father’s debt with Allswood? Phoebe’s mind went numb as she sought to put order to those confounding words. “Or take Justina.”

“You would deny me her hand?” For one beat of her heart, hope lived on where Edmund, the man she loved, battled her father for her hand. His next words slayed that fledgling wish. “I own you, Waters. I possess your eldest daughter’s dowry. No one would see your girls wed with the state you’ve left them in. Your family will not be welcomed in even the most unfashionable halls when I am through with you. Your children’s worth will be even less to you if you thwart me.”

A chill went through her at that ruthless pledge of a stranger, not the man she’d lain with under the stars and given her virtue to. She folded her arms close and held tight but nothing could or would ever dull the agony twisting in her belly.

Her father cursed. “After you wed my girl, my debt to you is paid.” With each word her father uttered, the cold fanned out and froze her thoughts, her words, her emotions, until she was an empty shell of a person trying to make order in a suddenly disordered world.

“You will not presume to tell me when your debt is paid,” Edmund’s crisp, clear command slipped into the corridor.

She shook her head slowly back and forth to rid the thick haze of confusion blanketing her mind. And then the floodgates of understanding opened and sent spiraling through her the ugly, black truth—lies. Everything. Anything between them had been based on some sickened, twisted game of revenge. To what end? The air lodged in her chest. She concentrated on the harsh, raspy sounds of her own breathing as it filled her ears to keep from focusing on those words. Her friend had warned her, seen more to the jaded lord’s interest in Phoebe. She dug her fingers against her temples and rubbed hard.
Think. Think.
This did not make sense. If his was a matter of revenge, why would he enlist her? Her father was wrong. He’d been wrong about so many things through life…he’d likely misunder­stood…what­ever it is that had brought Edmund into his life.

Her father had been indebted to him? Edmund, the man who’d professed a love of Captain Cook and shared his dreams and hopes and worse, a man whom she’d shared her dreams and hopes with, the man she’d given her virginity to, had been the kind of man to keep company with her depraved father. Oh, God, had he seduced her all in a twisted bid to forever tie her to him? Phoebe pressed her eyes closed as nausea churned through her belly. She folded her arms across her waist and hugged tight. Who was this man she’d never known? A dissembler. A stranger. An actor upon a Drury Lane stage and she’d been an unwitting player along with him. Bile burned her throat as she fought to keep from casting the accounts of her stomach up. What had she done?

“Are we clear?” Edmund asked with a wintriness she’d never known of him. A tone that would likely strike terror in children and grown men alike. Alas, her father possessed far more courage than she’d have ever expected, or mayhap it was stupidity, for he persisted. “And you’re sure you’d rather have my eldest? I can pass her off to Allswood, and you can have my youngest. Surely a man with your singular tastes would prefer the more beautiful of my daughters.”

Oh, God. Bile burned her throat and threatened to choke her. A loud humming filled Phoebe’s ears. Her sister. Her sweet, innocent, and all things good sister wed to this blackguard? She’d sooner kill the Marquess of Rutland with her own hands than see him destroy Justina; not as he’d destroyed her.

“I—”

Phoebe didn’t want to hear Edmund’s likely acceptance of her father’s depraved counteroffer. She threw open the door. Both men swung their gazes toward her in unison.

Edmund stiffened and his thick, dark lashes swept low, obscuring his obsidian eyes.
Say something, anything! Deny all my father’s charges.
The silence stretched on, interminable and just like a candle’s dying flame, all hope was extinguished. Her heart spasmed, tightening the muscles of her chest.

Edmund’s shuttered expression gave no indication as to whether he felt shame, regret, or sadness. Then, a man such as he was incapable of feeling.

“What are you doing in here, gel?” her father sputtered. “M-my daughter knows better than this.” His cheeks flushed, as he seemed to realize those words even now flew in the face of that claim as evidences of her presence here.

Phoebe and Edmund ignored him. Their gazes locked on one another. She clenched and unclenched her hands into tight fists at her side. How could he be so coolly unaffected?

Her breath came in ragged spurts. She’d only thought to interrupt whatever intentions he’d utter that pertained to her sister. Except, now, as she stood a trembling, quaking mess before this man she’d foolishly loved and given her heart to, she had no grand words. She didn’t have the vile epithets for one who’d speak so casually of destroying her and those she loved. Instead, she just stared at him, praying the hatred gleamed stronger within their depths than that aching agony wrought by his betrayal.

“Leave.”

It took a moment to register that clipped command belonged to Edmund. Her father, unprotestingly hurried from the room as quickly as his large frame permitted. He paused beside her at the threshold of the door. “Do not do anything to ruin this, gel,” he bit out.

Phoebe tipped her chin up a notch, never taking her gaze from Edmund. Her father could go to Hell and he could take the monstrous Marquess of Rutland right along with him in his travels.

Her faithless sire opened his mouth to say something further, but Edmund leveled him with a harsh stare, and her father left. The door closed. The click of it shutting thundered like a shot at night, leaving her and Edmund—alone.

The room echoed with the harsh rapidity of her own painfully drawn breaths and the hum of silence. Through it, Edmund said nothing. He did not move. He remained as frozen as his blasted heart of ice. Then, with a calm she wanted to slap his smug face for, he flicked an imagined piece of lint from his immaculate black coat sleeve. “It is unfortunate you heard that.”

Phoebe narrowed her eyes. “That is what you’ll say?” The shocked question ripped from her throat before she could call it back.

He paused, and for the slightest span of a moment regret flashed in his eyes, but then as quickly as a flame being snuffed out, all hint of emotion was gone, so she was left to wonder if she’d merely imagined it. “What would you have me say?” Bitterness swelled in her chest. Of course she had imagined any and all emotion from the marquess—just as she’d imagined anything and everything to pass between them these past days together.

Edmund took a step toward her and she retreated so quickly, her back thumped noisily against the door. Pain radiated along her spine and shot down her thighs, but she welcomed the discomfort for it detracted from the agony of her heart, still cracking from the truth of his ruthlessness. He continued coming and she held a hand up. “Stop!” She detested that pleading entreaty in her tone. With agony lancing through her, Phoebe turned her palms up, willing for him to deny all. “Tell me it is untrue. Tell me you would not do something so vile as destroy my family over having your desires thwarted.” For none of this made any sense.

He flexed his jaw. “I cannot tell you that,” he said in that flat, emotionless manner of his.

Tension spiraled through her, thick and consuming and out of control. “Why can you not tell me?” She barely recognized the high-pitched tone as her own.

His broad shoulders lifted up and down in a shrug. “Because it is true.”

Of their own volition, her eyes slid closed.
It is true
. “Why?” That strangled response emerged broken and choked. Why would this aloof, emotionless stranger go to such lengths to possess her?

“I want you,” he said with an icy matter-of-factness that chilled her.

She resisted the urge to rub warmth into her arms. She’d not allow him the pleasure of knowing how he’d ravaged her world with his throwaway words to her father a short while ago. Phoebe angled her chin up. “And how does Honoria fit into your twisted life, Edmund?”

A muscle jumped in his jaw. He was a man no doubt unaccustomed to anyone putting questions or demands to him and for an instant, she thought he’d ignore her question, and for an even longer moment, coward that she was, she wanted him to. She slid her eyes closed willing all of this to be nothing more than a nightmare.

“Your Miss Fairfax had the misfortune of sharing the blood of a…previous acquaintance. I intended to ruin Miss Fairfax and then wed her.” Edmund’s chilling words forced her eyes open. Cold stole through her as he moved an unreadable black stare over her. How coolly methodical he was in his telling. He may as well have spoken of the weather or last evening’s festivities. Who
was
this ruthless stranger?

“Whose blood does she share?” That question emerged garbled.

He hesitated.

“Who?” she demanded on a high-pitched cry.

“Margaret, the Duchess of Monteith.” His expression grew shuttered. “The young woman I’d once dueled for.” Oh, God, it had never been about Phoebe. Edmund’s kisses and whispers and promises…they’d all been nothing more than lies borne of revenge against the woman who truly held his heart. She folded her arms and rubbed her hands over them in a bid to restore warmth to the chilled limbs.

Edmund slashed the air with his hand. “Matters changed, Phoebe.”

Her heart wrenched. All along Phoebe had loved him and she’d been nothing more than a secondary pawn in his scheme to hurt another. “You love her that much.” Her words emerged hollow. Why should it matter that this ruthless blackguard who’d threatened her family, a man she’d given her virtue to, loved another? And yet, God help her, it mattered still.

His lips peeled back in a mocking grin. “Do not be ridiculous.” The hard glint in his eyes hinted at a man incapable of loving anyone. Not even himself.

“Then why?” She shoved away from the door. “Why would you seek revenge against Honoria?”
Using me.
“She’s done nothing to you.”

“It wasn’t about Miss Fairfax,” he said with such calm she wanted to slap her hands over her ears and blot out his voice. He took another step toward her. “I always have what I want. Including,”
me?
“matters of revenge.” Of course, not her. He’d never truly wanted her. Not in the sweet, seductive way she’d convinced herself. That dream of a life for them, together, with their broken pasts behind them and their limitless futures before them, had belonged to her alone. He’d merely fed her the words she’d longed to hear in that carriage. A film of tears blurred her vision and she blinked back the sad, sorry, pathetic droplets. He was not worth a single shred of her emotion.