To Kiss a Thief

To Kiss a Thief

Susanna Craig

LYRICAL PRESS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com

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Copyright © 2016 by Susan Kroeg

 

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First Electronic Edition: August 2016

ISBN: 978-1-6018-3615-1

eISBN-10: 1-60183-615-5

 

ISBN-13: 978-1-60183-616-8
ISBN-10: 1-60183-616-3

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All authors incur debts of gratitude, but a first book racks up more than can ever be repaid. So if there's a debtors' prison for writers, that's surely where I'm headed.

Many thanks to my agent, Jill Marsal, who saw a sparkle in a rock and was endlessly patient while I chiseled it out, and to my editor, Esi Sogah, whose enthusiasm and guidance made the final polishing of it (almost) a pleasure.

Jenni McQuiston has been an extraordinary mentor and friend, providing much-needed encouragement, offering advice, and answering odd questions at even odder hours.

Other writers also offered helpful feedback. Thank you to the anonymous contest judges whose comments on the early chapters of this book made me want to keep going. A $1 raffle ticket won a priceless critique from Sarah MacLean, who generously gave a master class in character development.

I could not have done this without my dear friend Amy, who has read more drafts of this book than anyone should have been subjected to and who always found something to praise, even when there wasn't.

And finally, thank you to my husband, Brad, who has supported me through the tears and the fears, too much take-out, too little housecleaning, early mornings, late nights, and all the other tortures writers put their loved ones through. I'm blessed to have you for my biggest fan, and I hope you know I'm yours.

 

S
arah Pevensey Sutliffe had never before noticed how much light was cast by candles thrust into a darkened room.

It seemed two wax tapers were more than sufficient to illuminate her total humiliation.

As the library filled with light and people, Sarah leapt to her feet and immediately made two more regrettable discoveries. First, the glass of wine she had drunk—or had it been two glasses?—made the floor pitch rather alarmingly, and second, her gown felt oddly loose about the bodice. Clutching the ivory silk to her breast with one hand, she waved the other behind her back, searching for something against which she might steady herself.

But Captain Brice, on whose knees she had been so precariously perched just moments before, was no longer within arm's reach. He had stood in the presence of ladies.

The Marchioness of Estley. The Honorable Miss Eliza Harrington. Mama.

Ladies—among whom she was no longer to be classed, if the expressions on the faces now confronting her were any indication.

Five sets of eyes took in the disorder of her gown and the darkness of the library and drew the inevitable conclusion. Only Mama looked away, her face turned into Papa's shoulder. Beside Sarah's parents stood her father-in-law, the Marquess of Estley, a thundercloud darkening his brow. Lady Estley's wide eyes darted to and from the fan she was fiddling with, as if she had witnessed some horrific accident and was trying to make herself look away. Next to the marchioness, Miss Harrington clutched the brass candelabra in a steady hand; the flickering candlelight danced across her deep red curls, flame against fire.

Sarah's startled gaze fell last on the impassive face of St. John Sutliffe, Viscount Fairfax. Her husband of just two weeks. His pale blue eyes betrayed not even a glimmer of surprise.

It had only just occurred to her to wonder what could have brought them all there at once when Captain Brice spoke. “Lady Fairfax felt a bit faint. I was merely offering her some assistance,” he drawled in a tone that quite clearly said he expected no one to believe such a preposterous tale.

Horrified that she had allowed Captain Brice to set the tone of her defense, Sarah closed her eyes. But rather than settling her nerves, she was instantly assaulted by the memory of the scene that had sent her scurrying for safety.

Captain Brice had found Sarah fumbling blindly with the stubborn knob on the library door, although it had proved to be unlocked. The wine he had offered had been cool and crisp, a balm to her hot, angry tears. His whispered consolations had been more welcome still.
“Who would dare to distress the bride at her nuptial ball?”
he had murmured, drawing her against the breadth of a shoulder made somehow broader by his regimentals.

Sarah jerked herself back to the present and met her husband's scrutiny. She suffered no illusions that his indiscretions would excuse her own. As their eyes locked in mutual distrust, her field of vision narrowed and everyone else fell away. For a moment, it was just the two of them. She stretched out her hand, grasping for words of explanation. “My lord, I—” But the wine seemed to have hobbled her normally quick tongue.

“Lady Fairfax.” So cold, so formal. Had she ever heard his voice sound otherwise?

“This is not what it seems, my lord,” she insisted. “I swear I am innocent.”

St. John cut his gaze away.

Forgetting the state of her gown, Sarah took a step toward him. Her slipper caught the hem and jerked the neckline even lower.

“
Innocent?
” Lord Estley's eyes—ice-blue, like his son's, and capable of freezing the object of their stare with a single glance—darted over her rumpled skirts and gaping bodice. “Not precisely the word I would have chosen.”

Sarah felt a traitorous blush stain her cheeks.

Just then, Miss Harrington whispered something in the Marchioness of Estley's ear. That lady's eyes grew wider still, and she gave a soft, shrill sort of scream. “My sapphires!”

Sarah swept her hand across her throat, expecting to brush against the heavy, old-fashioned collar of gems her father-in-law had placed on her neck earlier that evening, proof to the dazzling assemblage of titles to which he had been about to introduce her that this merchant's daughter was now one of their own.
“Presented to my ancestor by Queen Elizabeth herself,”
Lord Estley had said proudly, drawing her attention to a portrait of a man in doublet and hose, posed with one foot on a globe and a cache of blue gems spilling from his hand.
“Only a Sutliffe lady wears these jewels.”

Sarah's icy fingertips encountered nothing but an expanse of gooseflesh.

“Those sapphires have been in my family for eight generations. Where are they?”

Try as she might, she could not remember when she had felt the gems last. “I d-don't . . .” she stammered, shaking her head.

“That necklace is not something one could simply
lose
, like a—a handkerchief, or a hairpin, for God's sake,” Lord Estley ground out. “No matter the distraction.”

He flicked a disparaging glance toward Captain Brice, who stepped nimbly away from her, merging into the crowd of her accusers. “I say! Come to think of it, she wasn't wearing them when I found her—trembling like anything, she was. Said she had to get away . . .”

Sarah started.
Had
she been wearing the necklace when she had entered the library?

Her memory felt strangely fuzzy around the edges. She recalled gasping, choking, nearly fainting for want of air. Captain Brice had loosened her gown to help her draw breath—had he not? How much, if at all, had the stones at her throat contributed to the sensation that she was being smothered?

At the time she had been conscious only of the leaden weight in her chest.

Lady Estley was the first to shape her thoughts into an accusation. “Gone? Why, there must be three hundred people in this house tonight,” she cried, snapping open her fan and speaking behind it to Eliza Harrington. “She might have passed that necklace to anyone.”

The candlelight jerked and fluttered as Lady Estley's fan stirred the air, lending Miss Harrington's expression a menacing cast.

Sarah turned beseechingly to her parents, but shock had drawn shutters across her father's eyes. Her mother stared fixedly at the floor.

Was there no one who believed her innocent?

Surely St. John did not believe she had been unfaithful. Surely her husband did not think she was a
thief
. She shifted her gaze to him just in time to see his dark blond head disappear through the doorway.

* * *

Sarah watched the sky reflected in her dressing table mirror as it lightened, gradually but inexorably, from a darkness that was not quite black to a gray that was not quite dawn. Unwilling to allow the memories of the night before to overwhelm her again, she refused to close her eyes, although they burned with fatigue and unshed tears, and her head felt as if it might split in two. She understood now why the only wine she had been allowed to taste at Papa's dinner table had been watered down—unlike the wine she had so rashly drunk last night.

God, what a fool she was. A fool to believe that the marriage her father had arranged might grow to be something more than a business agreement. A fool to have thought that by virtue of her upbringing, her education, her marriage—and the title that had come with it—she could ever belong in the Sutliffes' world, in their house, in their family.

A fool to have fallen in love with her husband.

She turned toward the door when she heard the latch
click
and watched the knob turn. She had not bothered to lock it. Anyone who would want to come to her now had a key.

Lady Estley bustled into the room. “Hurry, dear! We haven't much time.”

“Time? Time for what?”

The marchioness, who seemed always to be in motion, stopped and regarded Sarah with a puzzled look. “Lord Estley is on his way to escort you down to the library. The public rooms have already been searched, and your rooms are to be next. If the necklace isn't found, he intends to send for the Bow Street Runners.”

So she was to report to the scene of her supposed crime, in order that this room, which was not yet her room, and these things, which were not yet her things, might be searched by strange hands, and all in an effort to uncover what? Proof of her guilt? But everyone already knew she was guilty—guilty of foolishness, and naïveté, and marrying above her station.

Theft seemed a trivial matter in comparison.

“I didn't steal it,” Sarah gritted out from between clenched teeth, fighting back the desire to proclaim her innocence with a scream.

Lady Estley tilted her head to the side, as if considering the matter. “But you must have done. Everyone says so.”

“And does everyone—or anyone—say why I would have done such a thing? Am I generally thought to be mad? Or in want of money?”

“Why no, dear. Until last night, you seemed quite levelheaded, and everyone knows you're a great heiress, even if the money isn't as old as one would like. No, I believe the general consensus is that you passed them to someone who was in more straitened circumstances—a friend, perhaps.” With a tittering laugh, she hurried toward the dressing room. “Or a lover.”

Sarah felt her face heat again. “Ma'am, I assure you . . .”

But Lady Estley continued as if Sarah had not spoken. “I confess myself rather surprised,” she said, poking her head around the doorjamb. “I had thought that the middling classes objected to such arrangements, even for married women. And really, it is customary to wait at least until the heir has been born.” She clucked her tongue and ducked back into the dressing room. “But Captain Brice is a dashing one. I do love a red coat.”

Sarah opened her mouth to protest once again but shut it just as quickly, certain her words would fall on deaf ears.

“The sapphires, though—a priceless family heirloom—that was going a bit too far, I fear,” the marchioness piped from the next room. “Lord Estley is really quite furious.”

“If everyone is sure I passed the gems to Captain Brice, ma'am, then why isn't he the object of this investigation?”

Lady Estley reappeared in the doorway and looked pointedly at Sarah. “He was—at first. His commanding officer was even called in to search his person. But nothing was found, and we could not prevent him from leaving the house after that. I have no doubt but he'll make himself scarce,” she said, handing Sarah a pair of kid gloves and a wide-brimmed bonnet. “And that's when I began to think that if he could disappear, why shouldn't you?”

“D-disappear?”

Lady Estley nodded. “Oh, I suppose there ought to be
some
punishment for what you've done, but I cannot abide the thought of you in Newgate, or sent to Botany Bay, or any such nonsense.”

Prison?
Transportation?
Surely Lady Estley was mistaken. Even if Sarah
were
guilty of a crime, a nobleman could stand between his wife and the law—if he chose. And she was, after all, the Viscountess Fairfax now, for better or for worse.

Sarah tried to shut out every distracting thought, to focus on her mother-in-law's words. But nothing made them clearer. “I don't understand. If you believe I am guilty, why would you help me evade punishment?”

Lady Estley's voice took on an edge Sarah had never heard in it before. “Because Fairfax is miserable about this—this mésalliance his father insisted upon.”

Sarah had known it, of course, but it stung nonetheless to hear that truth spoken aloud.

Her marriage was not all that Sarah had hoped for, either, come to that. A title had been her parents' dream for her, not hers.

She had dreamed of being desired for more than her dowry.

But really, what had she expected? She was no beauty—certainly nothing on the order of Miss Harrington.

Still, she had dared to dream of a love match.

Where had such a preposterous notion come from? Some book, perhaps, for she had no model for it in life—certainly not her parents' marriage, which had been arranged by their parents for the sole purpose of joining her father's burgeoning wealth with her mother's good breeding, to produce sons who might someday pass for gentlemen. The sons had never materialized, so the responsibility for elevating the family had fallen to their only daughter. Fortunately, impecunious noblemen were never in short supply.

Believing that love could grow under even the unlikeliest of circumstances, Sarah had nursed her dream through a perfunctory courtship, through a stilted exchange of vows, through a wedding night with a man not unkind but hardly brimming with passion for his new bride. Without conscious thought, she cut a glance to the door that separated her apartment from St. John's, the door through which he had entered her bedchamber and dutifully come to her bed every night of their married lives. Every night but the last.