by KJ Charles
He duly knocked at the door, and Spenlow answered.
“Good evening. I don’t suppose Sir John is in, is he? I was passing by—”
“He is engaged, sir. I will see if he is available.”
“Oh, there’s no need at all. If he’s busy I’ll call another time. It isn’t important.”
Spenlow ignored him. “Kindly wait one moment, Mr. Loxleigh.” He disappeared up the stairs. Robin cursed himself but waited, since it would look odder to leave.
There was quite a long pause before Spenlow returned, inviting him to go up. Robin went, adjusting his bearing to ‘distant acquaintance,’ knocked politely, and went in.
Hart was in his sitting room, his habitual scowl looking like he meant it this time, and so was Giles Verney.
He looked shocking, as if he hadn’t slept, eyes hollow, face grey. He clutched a glass of brandy, and he looked up at Robin with a dull horror of recognition which was entirely mutual.
“I’m obviously intruding,” Robin said, desperately trying to think of a good reason he might have called on Hart, since Verney surely knew they had been at odds. “I beg your pardon. I’ll go.”
“No, don’t,” Verney said. “Tell me, has she accepted him?”
Hart grimaced. “Giles...”
“I just want to know. Will she be his marchioness? Is that what she wants?”
“My sister has accepted Lord Tachbrook’s proposal, yes.”
Verney shut his eyes. “I hope she’ll be happy. I hope she will be very, very happy. She deserves to be a marchioness. I wish he were a better man for her sake, and I hope he becomes one.”
At least he seemed too consumed by his sentiments to ask awkward questions. Hart sent Robin a somewhat wild-eyed look over Verney’s head; Robin returned an equally panicked one. He had no idea what to do now. He’d have liked Verney to come up with a wealthy great-uncle on his deathbed and sweep Marianne away, but he clearly didn’t have one, and anyway Marianne was not easily swept.
“I’m sorry,” he said inadequately.
“So am I. I’ll go, I think. Sorry to pile my troubles on you, Hart.”
“Don’t be a fool. No, Giles, stay.”
“I’d rather be alone. She’s made her choice and there is no more to say. I’ll see myself out.”
They stood in silence for a moment after he had gone. “He’s left his hat,” Hart said at last. “And a glove. Look at it, lemon-coloured. Fop.” He sounded like he was hurting.
“I could run after him? It’s cold.”
“I doubt he cares. My God. I haven’t seen a man so hollowed out before. My poor Giles.”
Robin walked up to him and buried his face in Hart’s shoulder, needing the comfort. “I’m so sorry. You should see Marianne.”
“Are you serious?”
Robin pulled away, startled by his harsh tone. “Of course I am. She’s devastated.”
“Why? She has exactly what she wants.”
“And you think she’s happy about it?”
“Satisfied, at least. She has made her choice, and she must be aware that money doesn’t buy happiness.”
“She also knows that happiness doesn’t buy food.”
“Giles has a good position. She had the chance to be the wife of an excellent man who would love her, and she preferred to sell herself for a coronet. It is a glittering match in the world’s eyes: it merits no sympathy from me.”
Robin took a deep breath, feeling the anger rise and for once not pushing it down with a smile. “She did not have the chance to be Verney’s wife because she believes that if he knew the truth about our past, he would spurn her. Is she wrong about that?”
“I don’t know what he would do. I do know that her birth may be repellent but I find her behaviour worse.”
“No, you do not,” Robin said. “If she was a lady born you’d be shocked if she threw her cap over the windmill and married for love. You’re condemning her ambitions because you don’t think she deserves to have them.”
“I have never objected to her marrying Tachbrook.”
“Yes, as punishment for him!” The flush on Hart’s cheek proved the truth of that. “You don’t want her to marry Verney, you’re just angry because she presumed to reject him. You don’t think she is good enough for him.”
“You are putting words in my mouth.”
“Am I wrong?”
Hart glowered. “If she truly cared for him, she would have told him the truth already, before things reached this point.”
“Balls,” Robin said explosively. “It is not her responsibility to coddle the men who fall in love with her. Should she tell them all how unworthy she is? When, exactly, should she reveal she’s a whore’s bastard to prevent them forming attachments? How could she trust him not to ruin her?”
“He loves her! She could trust that!”
“So he says, and she should just take his word for it, should she? Believe he will never regret his passions? Why do his feelings matter more than her future?”
“Evidently they don’t. And if she doesn’t care for his feelings, then it is undoubtedly for the best that she doesn’t marry him.”
“She does care. She cares a great deal too much. She won’t be his ruin, and she has denied him for his sake and cried her eyes out over it, and you dare to condemn her because she doesn’t also destroy herself in the process? What, if she can’t marry Verney, she should marry nobody? Does she have to become a nun to satisfy you?”
They glared at each other for a moment, then Hart put a hand over his face. “I see. I do see. Damnation.”
“She’s breaking her heart,” Robin said, voice lower. “I can’t bear it.”
Hart pulled him into his arms again. Robin resisted for a second, then let himself collapse. “I’m sorry. Giles is in so much pain and I thought— I didn’t realise she felt for him too. I thought she didn’t care. Oh Christ, what a tangle.”
“It’s not fair,” Robin said, muffled. “This ought to have been a triumph. A marquess. I wish she’d never bloody met your bloody friend.”
“So do we all. Giles is not prone to falling in love. He’s devastated.”
“I suppose she couldn’t tell him the truth, could she?” Robin suggested. “He would feel as revolted and deceived as she fears?”
“I don’t know, and—I don’t wish to offend you, but if he did accept her past, would she really accept his proposal? He is only a younger son, with no prospects but what he can earn.”
“If she refused, it wouldn’t be about the money. I assure you that. If Marianne marries Tachbrook, he can’t hurt her, you see.”
“I think probably he can,” Hart said carefully.
“Yes, of course, but I meant—Ugh. It happened before, is the thing. A gentleman who loved her but not her birth, and it hurt. She’d rather not be loved at all than have that hurt again.”
Hart was frowning. “I don’t quite follow.”
Robin sighed. “It was after we left Lordship and our mother. She acquired a protector in Manchester. A gentleman, rich and well-born. He promised he would marry her, and she believed him. She was very young then, and very much in love. And I had also found a lover, a man for whom I cared and who was very generous to me in return, although I didn’t realise it was in return at the time. My mistake. We were happy, Marnie and I. We thought it was perfect. And then I overheard my lover talking with friends, and one of them was offering to pass his mistress around to the rest of them. He had a fair bit to say about her. I recognised his voice.”
“Oh Christ.”
“Yes. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, my lover capped that with a few remarks of his own. He said I was ‘reasonably priced’. That’s what stuck in my craw the most—on my account, I mean. I don’t know whether I’d have preferred expensive, or even cheap, but ‘reasonably priced’, like a roll of cloth—he might as well have said I wore well, or didn’t show the dirt. It was rather lowering.”
That was an understatement. He and Marianne
had wept, then raged, then pulled themselves together, and left Manchester six days later with quite a lot of money and jewellery that was not, technically, theirs. That had paid for their travel to Salisbury, a new wardrobe, another start. There they had stayed two steps ahead all the way, and when they’d fled again, this time for London, it had been with full pockets and a burgeoning confidence in their powers that now felt wildly misplaced.
Hart was looking quite sick enough without Robin telling him all that. “Oh, dear heaven. I’m sorry.”
“That was the last time Marianne believed in men’s promises. It’s why she won’t believe Verney, and even if she did, she has her pride. She doesn’t want to be stooped to.”
“Surely Tachbrook is stooping?”
“Yes, but she doesn’t care what he thinks.”
“Fair,” Hart said. “Is she not afraid he will discover the truth?”
“If he does so after the marriage, it’s his hard luck and he’ll have to pay her off. If he finds out before—well, there’s no reason he should. There’s no reason Verney should either; that’s not what she’s worried about. Tachbrook is the sensible choice, and Marianne thinks sensibly about the future. My future, even. She thinks if she becomes rich and titled, if I can say My brother-in-law the marquess, I will be safer.”
“Aristocratic connections won’t save you from the law.”
“You should try not having them,” Robin said. “I told her not to consider me but she’s done it all her life.”
Hart took a breath so deep it lifted Robin as he leaned against his broad chest. “Would it help to take that off her shoulders?”
“How do you mean?”
“I realise this is far from an ideal time to raise the subject, but it sounds like it might be relevant. I want to talk about us. In a few days the month will be up and our agreement will end. I don’t want it to. I offered you, or attempted to, a new arrangement before. I did it poorly, though in fairness you didn’t let me speak. I didn’t tell you that I care for you, Robin, very much. You occupy my thoughts to a remarkable degree and I want more of you. Granted, I lack experience, but I cannot imagine anyone suiting me better than you and I don’t feel any need to test that. You truly are everything you promised.” He ran a finger down Robin’s neck, making him shudder. “My incubus. I know what it is to fear for the future, and I don’t want you to feel that way. I don’t have a great fortune, but my land and the brewery do well enough—”
“Don’t offer me money,” Robin said wretchedly. “Please.”
“I’m offering security. It’s what you need, and it would make me happy to give it to you. You often say you like to please me. Well, I would like to look after you.”
“In return for me pleasing you?”
Hart flinched. “That is unfair. I am not trying to purchase you but to help you. What choices have you: card sharping? Hanging out for a rich wife? Hoping Tachbrook will be a generous brother-in-law?”
“I am well aware that’s all very contemptible,” Robin said, trying not to speak through his teeth. “So you want to be my protector?”
“I want to be with you, and the best way for that to happen is surely that I support you. Because you need it, and I can do it.”
“And I can’t.” There was a painful knot in his throat. “After all, I have only two professional skills, and the other one is cheating at cards, so I dare say it’s very reasonable to pay me to fuck instead—”
Hart let him go, recoiling as if struck. “Robin, that is not what I said! I’m not trying to insult you, for God’s sake. I want to help. You have always said you want security, and I can do that for you, so why should I not? What’s the alternative, that I demand your time for nothing?”
“That is what people do when they like one another, yes! Do you bill Verney for his visits, for Christ’s sake?”
“Giles isn’t in need of a protector, and it’s not the same thing at all. I’m proposing a practical solution to a practical problem. I want you with me, and I don’t live in London. You couldn’t make a living in the hells of Aston Clinton because there aren’t any. I don’t know why we are arguing about this.”
“We are arguing because—” Because Hart hadn’t so much as mentioned wherever the hell Aston Clinton was, far less asked Robin to go there; because whatever Robin might want of him didn’t include a bloody ‘practical solution’; because he and Marianne had once more sought safety through rich lovers, this time achieved exactly what they’d wanted, and got it all horrifically wrong again.
He sagged. “I dare say this is my fault. I told you I’d be your fantasy lover, and I was, and I don’t want to do it any more.” The look on Hart’s face hurt. He pressed on desperately. “I want to be real to you, and I’m not. This proves it. I’m simply not.”
“Of course you are. How could you not be?”
“Because you don’t want me. You want the obliging man who always smiles, and makes it a joke when you hurt him, and cares only to please. You can buy that man; you already have. You don’t want the jumped-up fortune hunter who tried to run away with your niece, or the courtesan who might suck other men’s pricks if you don’t pay him to do yours, or the card cheat, or the man with the shameful sister.”
“For Christ’s sake, is not the point for you to escape all that?”
“But I can’t escape it by doing the same damn thing! You want to rescue me, and I would...I would very much like to be rescued, actually, but that’s the problem, isn’t it?”
“I don’t understand.”
Robin rubbed his face. “It has always been about money because that is what I made it. I realise that. But there’s another me who doesn’t care for that, who cares far more for other things. For you. And I don’t think you see him and—I don’t think you ever will.”
“What? Robin—"
“No. You might have if my past wasn’t in the way, but it is, and you can’t see beyond it, any more than you can see beyond Marianne’s. She will never be good enough for Verney, which means that I am not good enough for you. You know I am not, because if you thought I was, you would never have offered this. And I realise that’s mostly my fault, but it’s yours too.” He was, quite suddenly, exhausted: of himself, of the effort it took to wring the words out, of the look on Hart’s face and the knowledge he’d put it there. “I think I understand why she would rather marry a man she despises than be despised by the man she loves. I should have listened to her. I’m going home.”
“Wait. Robin, for Christ’s sake! Will you please talk about this?”
“I’ve talked and talked.” He picked up his hat and coat. “And you can’t argue with me because I’m right. You want to buy me, however nicely you put it, because, in truth, you can’t envisage us, you and me, as lovers on equal terms, choosing one another freely. You can’t believe I’d want you just for yourself. Can you?”
Hart’s stunned look said everything. Robin couldn’t do this any more. He pulled open the door to walk away from everything he wanted and wasn’t going to get, and saw, on the landing just outside, a single lemon-coloured kid glove. The twin of the one on Hart’s table. Right by the door.
And, as he stared, the slam of the outer door, downstairs, as someone left the house.
“Oh, fuck,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Breathe,” Robin said. “Breathe.”
He’d been saying it for some time, and Hart was trying, but his lungs didn’t want to cooperate. Or perhaps the air no longer worked, because no matter how much he sucked in, it did no good.
Giles—his best, his oldest friend—had heard everything. He’d heard what Marianne was, and what Hart had known about her, and he’d heard that proposal to Robin and that meant he’d know Hart not only fucked men but, far worse, tried to buy them, and he’d think Robin was some creature to be bought. He could go to the magistrates, lodge a complaint, talk—
“Hart! Breathe. Do I have to slap you? I will slap you. Honestly, one might think
you never had your life fall about your ears before. You baronets are soft as kittens.”
Hart had to look up at that, although not far because Robin was squatting in front of him, holding his thighs for balance, or perhaps even comfort.
He was still here. He’d been in the middle of walking out, but he hadn’t gone. Hart made a powerful effort to fill his lungs and steady himself.
“Better,” Robin said. “I need you to stop panicking. I’m not saying panic isn’t appropriate, but it won’t help. We need to talk about what we’re going to do.”
“What is that?”
Robin moved so that his elbows were resting on Hart’s thighs instead, which let him put his head in his hands. “I don’t know, but not panic. For all we know he dropped his glove as he left and that was somebody else going out, or Spenlow at the door.” He shrugged at Hart’s look. “It could have been. We have to assume he listened to everything, of course, which means I need to warn Marianne, and when my body is fished out of the Thames tomorrow you’ll know how that went. And you need to find out exactly what he heard.”
“I can’t.”
“Of course you can. He’s your friend.”
“Was.”
“Maybe. Maybe he’ll surprise you. Maybe he’s known for ever. Maybe he isn’t on his way to let Tachbrook know he’s engaged to a strumpet, sweet Jesus. Do you think he would do that, and if not, where do you think he might be?”
“I don’t know. I should have gone after him.” The shock and, yes, panic on top of his realisation that he’d got it so horribly wrong with Robin had hit him too hard. He hadn’t been able to make his legs work.
“Can’t be helped. First, we go to Marianne, all right? That’s the most important thing. Then we will look for Verney.”
We. Hart stared into Robin’s face. “Why are you staying? Why haven’t you gone?”
