by Alys Murray
Every time Captain got close, a little voice suspiciously like Whoopi Goldberg’s seemed to whisper, “You in danger, girl,” but this was the first time Sam believed it. She’d seen firsthand the brutality Captain’s strong body promised. He’d shattered pint glasses and tossed smaller women around like they were nothing. Until this moment, she’d considered him a threatening non-threat, someone who could hurt her but liked to see her shake more than he wanted to see her in pain. Because the power of possible violence was sweeter than actual violence. Trying to make her cower and quiver satisfied him more than actually laying a finger on her.
But as the cold felt tip of the marker came in contact with her bare stomach, she flinched as if he’d threatened to hit her. Sam believed every fear her body whispered to her. The lettering took time, minutes stretching out in endless reams before her as she stood on display for the indifferent to hungry crowd of regents waiting for their Captain.
“There.” He nodded, satisfied with himself. For a brief second, his eyes paralyzed her, but not in the way the mechanic had this morning. There, she was a participant in an exchange. Here, she was a snake trapped in the spell of a charmer. A charmer who had danger lurking behind his shadowed face. It was a secret moment, one the regents behind him couldn’t see. A private, unspoken intimidation he gifted directly to her before brightening up. His flask flew from his breast pocket to his lips. “All right, lads. To the wine cellar.”
Sam stole a glance down at her stomach.
PROPERTY OF THE FUTURE EARL OF HILLSBOROUGH.
The words crossed her skin in hideous black ink, the scrawls of a deranged man who held her future in his hands. Inside, she shook with anger, burned from the humiliation, and wanted nothing more than to crawl back into her clothes and run away where none of them could ever find her again.
But as the men walked away, their drinking songs banging against the church’s ancient stone walls, Sam couldn’t help but listen to them. Drunk as they may have been, unpredictable and volatile as they were, their words rang out in perfect time and harmony. They clutched one another for support. Laughed and picked PJ up when he tripped over a loose stone paver. Her mind wandered to the boisterous chandelier-shaking laughter they shared with her father this morning.
She’d never had anything like that before. Not in her entire life. She’d never been this close to belonging before.
The Animos Society was everything wrong in this world. Vicious. Cold. Calculating. Demeaning. Privileged. Manipulative. Unfeeling. Cruel.
But, dammit, they were a family. And Sam would stand out in the cold for a million nights like this if it meant she could be part of it.
Chapter Six
Daniel couldn’t sleep. Not for lack of want or trying. After a day of sweat and lugging engine parts across a too-crowded mechanic’s workshop, he needed the rest. Every time his head hit the pillow, he heard Angie telling him about Alanis Trent and the future he could have if only he could write one perfect song.
Her questions didn’t bother him. What really nettled was the uselessness he felt every time he glanced at his guitar or picked up a pen to write lyrics. A song was brewing inside of him, but it dodged and weaved away every time he got close, taunting him. Closing his eyes to sleep would bring the melody closer, out of the fog of noise in his brain, but he only had to reach for his instrument before the song disappeared.
His dream and the song were intertwined. He couldn’t have one without the other.
This dangerous combination of anxiety and hope led to him wandering the streets of Oxford well after midnight, guitar slung over his back just in case the song found him along the way. On a night like tonight, he wanted to connect with the music, not shut it out, and Saturday nights were great for busking.
He loved Oxford. It was a collection of castles playing dress-up as a school. The same awe he felt as a young boy strolling through the yards with his mother filled him anew whenever he surveyed the towering spires and reverent, church-like windows of these houses of learning. If his nan’s shop was straight out of Diagon Alley, the buildings of Oxford were Hogwarts, a magical land kept secret from him by having the bad luck not to have been born rich enough to attend lectures there. But he visited. And often. The darkened shop windows and chanting lads passed him by carelessly until he walked into the vast yard of Christ Church. Christ Church was one of his favorites, a massive cathedral whose reverence was undercut by the flock of longhorn cattle who freely grazed upon their vast green lands.
It was a popular cut-through for people trying to get home after a long night out. The perfect place to sell his songs.
But tonight wasn’t like usual, with a few random kids strolling through or stopping to smoke their cigarettes before they got home to annoyed roommates. There, on the edge of the pavement so as to observe the DO NOT STEP ON THE GRASS sign, was a woman. An almost-naked woman. She stood in the cold without moving, not even tilting her head at the small crowd assembled around her. Even from halfway across the yard, Daniel could hear the barbs on their slurring tongues. Words and insults he wouldn’t sling at his worst enemy.
Instinct forced him to act.
“Hey!” he bellowed.
Power he didn’t know he possessed rippled and radiated from deep inside of him. Like a pack of synchronous flamingos, the taunting party stared in his direction, blinking stupidly as he approached.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Spooked, the crowd dispersed, but the head of the half-naked woman in front of Christ Church didn’t move. She might as well have been a statue. Even when he spoke, she didn’t give him any attention.
“Miss, are you all right?” he called, approaching her, reaching out a friendly hand in surrender.
Then he realized who he was talking to. This was not performance art. This was not a spectacle. It was the woman from the house.
It took a moment—no, longer than a moment—to fully comprehend what it was he had walked into here. In the middle of a cold winter’s night, the daughter of a duke stood in front of Christ Church in her knickers, covered in angry and disgusting black marker scribblings that would have put the devil to shame.
And she was almost crying. Her body trembled. Her knees knocked. The skin around her lower lip was white with the force of her own biting down on it. Her eyes brimmed with tears she refused to shed.
His heart bled for her, but everything about her told him it would be worse to let her know how deeply he pitied her. In spite of her bare flesh and the insults written on it, she held her shoulders back and her chin up. The closeness of her tears didn’t affect the steady, commanding tone of her voice.
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she snarled. Her clenched hands trembled at her side. It had to be from the force it took to keep them there, instead of folded across her chest… Her lace-covered chest that took every ounce of Daniel’s willpower to keep from ogling. Her tone softened slightly. “Thank you.”
“What are you doing?”
“Read the sign. Then go away.”
He glanced at the folded cardboard with scribblings on it. The insignia, he recognized, but the words written on it meant nothing to him. “What does it mean?”
“It’s an initiation thing,” she supplied.
He didn’t miss how fast she was blinking back tears.
“I didn’t know Animos took in women.” Mild surprise colored him. Even without the insignia-stamped sign, this had all the makings of an Animos initiation. Nudity. Public humiliation. The swirling specter of possible accidental death by hypothermia. He’d never seen a woman involved before. Not as a candidate, anyway.
“They don’t. But they will.” For the first time, her voice tilted up. She was past crying. Daniel counted it as a small victory for himself. Maybe it meant she trusted him, even if only a little bit. “What are you doing here?”
The guitar case slid off of his back. With great care, he set it down on th
e stone pathway, snapping open the latches to reveal the instrument to the stars. He did everything as matter of fact as he could. He’d be damned if he left her out here to the wolves, but he’d be even more damned if she realized he was trying to protect her. She didn’t seem the type to want pity.
“I came out here to play.” The body of his guitar lay against him like a shield. Once it was in place, he extended his hand, careful to keep his eyes on hers and nowhere else on her body. “I’m Daniel, by the way. Daniel Best.”
He’d been right about her eyes. Arresting. The ends of her lips twitched upward in the softest hint of a smile.
“Sam Dubarry.”
Removing his hand from hers, he shook it out to rid himself of the tingles she zapped through him.
“Dubarry.” He directed the conversation as smoothly as he could, scraping his internal movie catalogue for some hint of what to do. What would Leo DiCaprio, James Cagney, or Jimmy Stewart do if he were standing here instead of Daniel? “You must know my boss. Thomas the…I don’t know, seventy-eighth?”
She rewarded his joke with a chuckle. It broke the silence of the greens like a tinkling of wind chimes.
“He’s my dad,” she admitted.
Daniel searched his pockets for a pick. Always the most difficult part of getting ready to play, it at least afforded him some cover of casualness.
“The rumors are true, then.”
“What rumors?”
“The rumors that Old Man Dubarry has a beautiful daughter.”
A breath of silence. She ducked her head.
“No one called me beautiful.”
“You have sisters?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then they must have been talking about you.” God, if Angie could see him now. His face was brighter than Fifth of November fireworks. He dipped his head to tune the guitar, toying with the strings until it sounded right to him. “I saw you. Today at the house.”
He couldn’t help the hopeful glance he shot her from under his eyelashes. Maybe she had been playing coy. Maybe she didn’t want to remind him she was his boss’s very not-dressed daughter and he was nothing more than a servant. Her head remained bowed.
“I’ve been doing my fair share of drinking this weekend.” She raised her eyebrows, but the joke was weak. “Can’t remember further back than ten minutes ago, to be honest.”
She shivered.
“Shit.” Daniel lost his guitar and coat faster than she could respond.
“What are you doing?”
“You look cold. You’ll…” He paused, managing to avoid using his grandmother’s catchphrase, you’ll catch your death, but only just. “You could get ill.”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
There it was again. I’m fine. Thanks. Maybe it was her catchphrase. He wondered where she’d learned such a sad phrase. A denial of one’s misery to keep someone else happy coupled with gratitude for actions not taken.
“I’m warm blooded.” He offered her the coat with a smile, careful to keep the coat’s flaps clutched in his hand. He didn’t want it to unroll and release all of his body heat before she had the chance to put it on. “Take it.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t cover myself,” she said. “It’s part of the thing.”
That was all? No problem.
“Well… Here.”
In a few long steps, he circled her, laying his long brown coat over her shoulders. With only a few inches’ difference in their height, it hung around her well, falling to her knees. The worn fabric covered most of her back, but Daniel was willing to wager the guys in her stupid society were more interested in her chest than in her backside.
“You’re going to be cold,” she protested.
Daniel’s heart tugged. For a woman who lived in a house with at least twenty servants and a father who owned half of the country, Sam acted like someone for whom no one had ever done something kind before. She was a puzzle.
“I’m more worried about you. You really can’t cover yourself?”
“Not if I want to be in Animos.”
“Why do you want to be?” he asked, his words too curious.
“It’s none of your business.”
Shit, you’re losing her. Stupid shit like this is why you haven’t met the right girl. You scare them all the hell away. He turned to humor, the one standby he could cling to in any situation.
“Any club that makes me strip is not one I want to be part of. Except a strip club, of course.”
“They’re a prestigious society,” Sam sniffed, but Daniel got the impression it was false, hollow. Like she didn’t believe it any more than he did.
“A prestigious society of people who left you to freeze in your pants.” His guitar returned to its rightful place on his body.
“It’s the rules.”
Rules. That’s all this town was. Rules. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, maybe Angie was right. They were all stuck in a Victorian time warp, where class mattered and people tortured themselves for the privilege of wearing a ridiculous blue uniform.
Dragging his case along the stone, he stopped in front of her, turning his back to her and facing toward the street separating the church’s land from the sanctuary. His fingertips started to pluck at the strings, waiting for a tune to find him. He never did find the pick he’d been searching for.
“What are you doing?”
Her hot breath hit the hairs on the back of his neck in soft pats, and he got the sense she knew exactly why he was standing there, hiding the curves of her body with his own broad frame. She might not be able to cover herself up, but no one said he couldn’t.
“I’m busking,” he said.
The opening chords of Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire” echoed through the empty yard. Daniel flushed. Sometimes the music came through him, saying exactly what he was feeling. He didn’t realize he was feeling that. He swallowed hard.
“But you’re blocking me,” she reiterated.
Did he hear hope in her voice? The flutter in its strength knocked against Daniel’s chest. How bad did these Animos assholes treat her that she would be surprised at a gesture so small?
“Any requests?” he asked.
A moment of music and winter wind passed between them.
“No.”
“Do you want me to go? I don’t have to stay if you’re uncomfortable.”
“No. You can stay.”
So, he played. No grand conversation, no snapping retorts and fiery, sexually charged discussion. Just a beautiful, sad, and strange woman, a man with hope and music in his heart, and a wall of music protecting them both. He’d play a few songs, then stop for a sip of water and they’d share a few words. About Oxford. About Ashbrooke. Strangers passing through would throw a few coins in his case and more than a few strange looks her way, but the yard was safe from insults, spoken aloud or written on the map of her body. They went on like this for two hours. And when some eighties hit his parents loved wound down, she spoke. “Why are you still here?”
For the first time since taking his defensive post in front of her, he faced her once more. Her shoulders sagged, and he was positive it wasn’t from the weight of his coat pressing down on her.
“I like singing.”
Sam lowered to a whisper, her eyes dashing back and forth as if she was afraid the trees and walls of the common were eavesdropping on them. “They aren’t going to be back for me until morning.”
Ah, there it was. All of the cards laid out on the table. But he maintained the premise. She’d lost enough tonight. He didn’t need to take any more pieces of her pride by admitting why he’d stayed.
“I’ve got plenty of songs to sing.”
In the countryside near Oxford there was a hill called Hangman’s Hill. The name wasn’t great, but it had the best view of the stars. No light pollution, no encroaching trees. When he needed to restore his faith in the world, he would wake himself up before sunris
e, drive up to the crest of the hill, and lie there as the stars dissolved into sunrise. He considered it the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
It was nothing compared to the smile she gave him.
Two hours turned into four, which turned into six. By the time the sun broke over Oxford, his throat was raw, and his body shook from the cold. The guitar playing had peeled his skin away painfully from his fingers. Finally, a hand tapped his shoulder. She was once again undressed, his coat extended out between them, putting more distance between them than had been there all night.
“Take this.”
“Hm?”
“They’ll be coming back any second.” She gave a self-deprecating titter of laughter. It didn’t make her smile seem any more genuine. “Don’t want to get caught with my ass covered.”
Begrudgingly, he took the fabric from her; her heat still warmed the inside.
“Listen… This was really…” If things were different, he might have laughed at how difficult it was for her to express her gratitude. What it really told him was she hadn’t been given enough opportunities to be grateful. “Thank you.”
“Like I said. I had some songs I needed to sing.”
As soon as he spoke, a different kind of singing hit them. It hadn’t quite made it to them yet, but it was close. Vulgar drinking songs. A sign Animos was coming.
“Get your tits out for the lads! Get your tits out for the lads.”
“I guess I’d better shove off, then.”
“Yeah.”
Ask for her number, you numpty. How hard is it? “Hey, I like you, and I’d like to have a chat with you when you’re not naked. Can I have your number?”
Daniel shook his head at his own cowardice but collected his things and wandered off. Close enough to hear, but far enough no one would suspect he’d spent the entire night with her.
“Piggy! Here, Piggy, Piggy, Piggy. Time for some bacon!”
Between the name-calling and the sign at Sam’s feet, Daniel could only guess Piggy was her nickname, but his blood chilled as a band of blue-suited assholes in top hats ran up to her, shoving strips of the greasy stuff in her mouth. Even with her obligation to the task over, they made no move to cover her or help warm her up. It sickened him.
