The Ravishing One (30 page)

Thomas had come farther into the room. “Don’t, Fia.” His voice was urgent and low, his expression guarded.

“Don’t?” she repeated uncertainly.

“You don’t need them, Fia. Destroy them.”

“I can’t!” she exclaimed. Nothing would change if she destroyed them. Carr would still be able to—

“Fia, I beg you. You don’t need to use these things to gain you Bramble House. You can’t be so desperate for it that you would take your father’s place in subjugating these poor fools. It’s vile to even consider it! And it’s not necessary!”

She stared at him, saw his horror and felt its echo within herself. He was right to be horrified, she had been close to doing what her father had done. Never mind her motives.

“Don’t. Please don’t,” she whispered.

“I’ll give you Bramble House, Fia,” he said.

“You will give me Bramble House,” she repeated numbly. He came and took her hand. She hadn’t the strength to resist. She felt as though every last bit of her vitality had drained away and that all that was left was a shell.

“Yes,” he said, his eyes somber. “When your father came to me, he threatened to expose me unless I do what he demanded. He also told me about Bramble House and how he’d cheated MacFarlane of it and how you’d hoped to get it through James Barton. He laughed about it, Fia, and then he told me about Kay.”

“Kay. Yes,” she said tonelessly.

“I couldn’t stand the thought of Carr stealing yet another boy’s birthright, so I told him I would agree to his proposition only on the condition that he sign Bramble House over to me. He didn’t want the house. It only meant something to him because you wanted it and Carr thought—he was certain—it would never come to your hands through me.”

“You didn’t tell me,” she said. But of course he didn’t. He didn’t trust her. And with good cause.

“I wanted it to go to the boy. But if you will just burn those papers, I swear it is yours.”

She pulled her hand from his. He let it go easily. So easily. She turned, seeking that flawless serene mask. Her eyes closed, she bit hard on her lip to keep from sobbing. Where was her bloody, bloody mask?

“We can’t burn the papers,” she finally managed to say. She’d dared to dream that it would end like some fairy tale, that she and her tall, dark captain would sail away and live happily forever after.

“Oh, Fia.” Two such simple syllables invested with such disappointment. A death toll.

“I never wanted Bramble House for myself,” she said. “It was always our intention to have James sign the house over to Kay.”

“It was?”

“Yes,” she said, turning back to him.

He regarded her closely, surprise and then hope and finally joy reflected in his expression. “Oh, Fia!” He started eagerly toward her.

She stepped back. “You can, of course, verify this with James Barton.”

“James?” He stopped, puzzled. “I don’t need—”

“I’d rather you would. I want you to know that I never began this for my own profit or comfort. That I would not submit James to something so dangerous lest I could think of no other way to obtain Bramble House for Kay.”

“Of course not.”

She could not contain a bitter smile in response.

He saw then, understood. “Fia, please, just because I did not guess what your plans were does not mean I do not …” He stared at her, feeling her withdrawal, and reacted with shaken alarm. “Please, Fia. I love you.”

She flinched, but there was no return of warmth to her lovely, cool features.

The ground seemed to open beneath Thomas. A black abyss yawned at his feet and he was teetering, off balance with no handholds in sight. “Fia, please. You can’t condemn me for misjudging you. You can’t throw away what we have, what we are together, because I doubted your motives.” Fear brought anger to his voice. “You said you wanted the house. You never implied you wanted it for anyone other than yourself. Don’t condemn me for ignorance, Fia, I beg you!”

“I don’t condemn you at all,” she said, vanishing inside herself.

“The hell you don’t! I am being tried and convicted for thinking what any man in my place would think. How could I not?
You are Carr’s daughter
, for the love of God!”

Her eyelids fluttered, as if his words dealt a final, fatal blow to something essential inside of her, something fragile that she had thought to protect and discovered too late was still exposed. “You are right,” she murmured. “How could you think otherwise?”

He grabbed her shoulders and there was no reluctance in his touch, only desperation. He would have told her again he loved her but she’d dismissed the same avowal moments before. He would not bleat piteously, begging for an emotion she might not own.

He shook her lightly but she’d left as surely as if she’d walked from the room. She was gone and he’d done this thing. “For what reason are you punishing me? What have I said, what have I done that is so unforgivable?”

Her sorrow matched his pain. She touched his cheek gently.

“I am not punishing you, I am saving us both a great deal more pain.”

“What could be more painful than this?” he shouted.

“You’ve done nothing that is unforgivable. It is I who am unforgivable. Not because of anything I’ve done.” Her smile was rueful. “At least not yet. But because
of what I am. You yourself said it. I am Carr’s daughter. How can you ever trust me?”

“Dear God, Fia!” Desperately he sought the right words. “I don’t give a damn if you are Carr’s daughter.”

“But you do,” she avowed with such conviction that her certainty shook him. “You always will. You might forget for a while, you might pretend I am someone else, but every time a doubt shadows your thoughts you will wonder.”

“No.” He shook his head. “No.”

“Yes,” she answered. “And you are right to say that, because I say it myself. I’ve wondered and waited since childhood for the taint of his blood to show up in me, for his black murderer’s spirit to reveal itself in me. Because I
am
Carr’s daughter, Thomas. I always will be, and you will never be able to forget it. Nor should you. I can’t. I won’t.

“Even here. Even this afternoon. You were right to wonder what I would do with those letters. My first thoughts were not to destroy them, as yours were, but to keep them, to use them to set myself free from him. So you see, I can’t …” At last her voice broke, just a small crack immediately mastered. “I can’t sentence you to a life of watching and waiting, too. Because I can tell you with absolute assuredness that I am
not
a good woman, Thomas.

“I hunted down an elderly widower and connived for him to marry me, all for his house and land and money, and when I found out he had children, heirs, I hated them for inconveniencing me with their existence.”

“Fia, anyone in your—”

“No!” Her voice rose now. She shrugged her way out of his grip. “Not anyone else did! Only me! Carr’s daughter.”

He moved forward and she shrank back, trembling like a roe in a net, her eyes large and unseeing and blank as the sapphire gems they so resembled. “Please, take me back.”

“To the manor? Yes,” he agreed in relief. If he could just—

“No. Back to London.”

“A few days—”

“Please. Now. Today. Please. I don’t think I can stand to be here any longer.”

“Give me two days,” he pleaded.

She looked as though she would break apart if he touched her. She wrapped her arms around her torso, hugging herself tightly. “I am begging you, Thomas. Take me back to London. You promised when you took me from that house that you would return me unharmed.”

Her words pierced him to the heart. “Fia …” He held out his hand. She ignored it.

“If you do not return me at once, you will have broken your promise to me.” Her voice quavered. “And whatever we know of each other, Thomas, I know you to be a gentleman whose word is his bond.”

He would break his word a thousand times over if he thought by keeping her with him he could take back the last quarter hour. But he could not hurt her by keeping her against her will.

He turned. The abyss he’d felt at his feet disappeared and in his mind’s eye the landscape smoothed into one vast, unending nightscape desert, empty and silent and cold. He began walking.

“We’ll leave come nightfall.”

Chapter 24

A
sulphurous glow poured from the front door of the exclusive address and streamed over the wet cobbles where two men waited. A moment later a gentleman emerged and pattered down the stairs to the street.

“Tunbridge isn’t in the club,” Johnston announced on making Thomas Donne’s side. “And I doubt he’ll come later. It’s almost three o’clock in the morning, Thomas.”

Thomas nodded grimly and began walking. Both Johnston and Robbie hastened to match his stride. “This is madness,” Robbie said. “He’s gone to ground, I tell you. He hasn’t been seen in public since just after you and … since your arrival two weeks ago!”

Thomas stopped. His face was dark at any rate, and
now, even more so, cloaked in shadows. Only his gaze appeared alive, a mercury-bright glimmer. Instinctively, Johnston backed away.

Thomas looked like some awful angel of doom. It seemed grim determination was all he needed to sustain his body.

He’d put that implacable resolve to one use: placing himself between society and its burgeoning condemnation of Lady Fia MacFarlane. A condemnation that Tunbridge had begun, along with a sustained and vicious rumor campaign.

“Tunbridge,” Thomas said tightly, “is most certainly in town. He could not very well be spreading his vitriol from afar. Someone is shielding him and I will find out who, and then I will find him.” The very softness of his voice caused his friends to shiver.

“But Thomas,” Johnston reasoned, “even if you find Tunbridge and silent his cursed mouth forever, I fear we both know it is too late.”

“No,” Thomas snapped. “It is not. Especially if Fi—Lady Fia could be convinced to retract her preposterous statement that she willingly went away with me.”

Johnston’s gaze fell. “I’ve tried. She’ll not see me. In truth, she will not see anyone. She has become a recluse, further confusing the matter and titillating the gossips. Society believes her story, you see, not yours.”

Thomas let forth a stream of violent epithets, but Johnston went doggedly on. “It’s just that, with her reputation,” he said carefully, “what she claims seems so much more probable than your story, Thomas, that
you kidnapped her against her will.” His gaze darted to Robbie in appeal.

“You must allow, Thomas,” Robbie said, “it makes no sense for a wronged woman to protect her kidnapper.”

“I don’t give a bloody damn what makes sense! That’s what happened, and I’ll challenge any man who says differently.”

“We know,” Robbie finally put in. “How many duels have you challenged others to since your return? Five? Six? And how many of those were you obliged to carry out? One. You are fortunate the fellow called it quits before either of you was seriously injured. For, just in case it escaped your notice, dueling is against the law!”

When this produced no reaction from Thomas, Robbie continued in frustration, “You’re pushing your luck, Thomas. Soon someone with more skill than you will repeat what everyone is repeating anyway and you’ll die for it and it will all be for naught because it will only add to the rumors surrounding her.
You’re not helping her, Thomas.”

At this Thomas swung around, his cloak fluttering as he strode away. With a quick look of helplessness at each other, Johnston and Robbie hurried after him, catching up as he crossed the street.

“Where are we going?” Johnston asked in bewilderment. He barely knew Thomas anymore, the man was so changed. His face was as still and hard as the bronze engravings of the martyred warrior in St. Peter’s catacombs. His voice was harsh.

“Hyde Park. A Captain Pierpont is meeting me
there tomorrow at dusk and I’ve a whim to see it at dawn.”

A premonition caused Johnston’s spine to tingle. “Dear God, Thomas. Pierpont is a most skilled marksman.”

“So am I.”

Robbie shook his head. ’Twas suicide. But perhaps that is what Thomas want—No. He’d too much courage to seek his own death. “I will be your second, of course.”

Once more Thomas stopped. This time the anger that filled his gaze lifted, and suddenly he looked spent beyond what he could pay. “I’ve never asked anything of you in this. I don’t now. Go home, Robbie. Take Johnston here with you. I don’t want—”

A hand gripped Thomas’s shoulder and spun him around.

“Oh, Lord, no,” Johnston murmured. Pip Leighton had backed several paces away from Thomas. He wore a sword at his side and his hand clenched the hilt as he glowered at Thomas.

“ ’Sblood, boy!” Thomas thundered. “You’ll get yourself killed that way.”

In answer, Pip raised his hand and lashed it across Thomas’s cheek. “That’s for what you’ve done to her, you cur!”

The red welt on Thomas’s face brightened, yet he regarded the boy stonily. “Go home, Pip.”

The boy’s lips curled back over his teeth, and with purposeful slowness he lifted his hand again and brought the back of it smashing into Thomas’s other
cheek. His head snapped back under the impact. Still he didn’t move.

“Go home, Pip. I won’t fight you, boy.”

“Boy?” Pip shouted angrily, drawing his sword on a hiss of steel and holding its point a foot from Thomas’s throat. “Boy, am I? Well I’d rather be a boy than the man who seduced and destroyed her!”

Thomas’s eyes narrowed to silver gleams. When he spoke his voice was low and throbbing. “You cannot begin to loathe me as much as I loathe myself for my part in her distress.”

The thin veneer of hatred crumbled, exposing the hurt and confusion beneath. “ ‘Distress’ is too easy a word for what you’ve done to her!” Pip said, his voice cracking. “You should see her, and
then
you might feel some portion of what you’ve done!”

“You’ve seen her?” Thomas asked, suddenly eager.

The boy clenched his teeth on a renewed surge of hatred. “Aye! I have. And spoke to her, though I received little back. There’s no life in her, in her eyes or her voice. There’s nothing. She’s empty. You’ve destroyed her.” Thomas moved closer. The tip of Pip’s sword brushed his chest. “And now I’ll destroy you.”