Written on Your Skin

by Meredith Duran

  Sanburne took another swig from his glass. “The man has no idea. He can’t see that far. But it promises to be more interesting by half.”

  “You should have been a mapmaker.”

  “Christ, no. The point isn’t to chart one’s course. Simply to stumble along, enjoying the pratfalls as one goes.”

  The coffee was dark and bitter, done in the Turkish style. Phin crunched down on the thick dregs; they suited his mood. “How does the man know he’ll enjoy these pratfalls, if he can’t see down the road?”

  “He can guess.”

  “But blind guesses often miss their mark.”

  Sanburne swished the contents of his glass, contemplative. “Marks are overrated. Guidelines only serve the uncreative. Hew closely enough to duty, and one day you’ll look into the mirror and see a stranger.”

  In fact, Phin thought, that sounded like a damned good goal. “But duty isn’t meant to provide pleasure.” Stella’s tragedy, it seemed to him, had only given Sanburne the excuse he’d always looked for. He had never been reconciled to his own privilege, not when it required him to fall in step with his father’s wishes. There were worse fates than conventional luxury, of course, but Sanburne was fortunate enough never to have learned of them. “Duty is meant to keep one from going astray,” Phin concluded.

  The sharpness of Sanburne’s glance put him on alert. This conversation was not as idle as he’d imagined. “And what if one already has gone astray?”

  “Walk very carefully, then. Some roads keep you safer than others.” It took an effort to restrain himself from looking pointedly at the glass in Sanburne’s hand. The man had no cause to swallow his sorrows; his problems were borrowed from his sister, even if he’d managed to blame himself for them. “Some keep you safe from yourself.”

  Briefly, some dark emotion worked its way across Sanburne’s face, and Phin thought, for a puzzled second, that he was going to have to catch a fist.

  But then Sanburne laughed. “Rubbish. I see no reason not to go astray. In fact, I go astray quite regularly, and I always manage to have a jolly good time at it. Besides, that’s the whole point, no? By the time lunch is over, I won’t be able to walk a straight line if my life depended on it.”

  The tight feeling was back in Phin’s throat. “Then I can tell your life never has depended on it.” Fed up with this nonsense, he stood. “I’ll be going.”

  The viscount leaned back in his chair, to all appearances amused by this abrupt announcement of departure. “Perhaps my life does depend on it. The crooked way, I mean.”

  “Oh, you’ll get wherever you’re going,” Phin said, “no matter how you choose to proceed. Your luck always has been with the angels.” It was true: Sanburne was a social Midas. Even his gaffes turned to gold, and when he stumbled, the road rose to meet him. “Good day, Viscount.”

  As he walked away, Sanburne began to laugh. This time his mirth sounded unhinged; at other tables, diners craned their heads to stare.

  Phin turned against his will. “Are you going mad, then?” Trust Sanburne to do it loudly, rather than in slow, throat-closing, heart-pounding silence.

  Sanburne waved a hand to dismiss this idea. “Phin,” he wheezed, “you are in for a surprise, old fellow.” He drew a long, choking breath. “At least I know there are two paths, and can take a clear view of them. You? You tell yourself you’ve got choices, but you have to keep blinders on to make sure you’re heading straight.”

  All right, then, they would have this out. It had been coming for weeks now, with every silent smile Sanburne cast him as Phin turned down a drink or left a party before someone puked. He walked back to the table. “Speak clearly,” he said. “You disapprove of the fact that I’ve not followed your lead? That I actually take my responsibilities seriously?”

  Sanburne lifted his arms in an ostentatious stretch. “If you enjoyed your own righteous rigmarole, it would be one thing. But, good God, man, whom are you fooling?” He dropped his arms and exhaled. “Whether or not you sleep through the night won’t make a damned bit of difference to the world. Drink or don’t drink; it won’t change a whit. You’ll never be your father.”

  Phin drew a hard breath. This was friendship, he reminded himself: plain speaking and hard truths. But they were meant to cost something; one did not toss them out like dynamite simply because one anticipated the entertainment of an explosion. “You think you know me still,” he said. But Sanburne had no idea where such roads could really lead. “There is your mistake.”

  Sanburne shrugged. “I’ve always known you. Better than yourself, maybe. You fancied yourself the grubby one, yes? The diseased offspring of a rotten line. Meanwhile, you tossed future earls into pig troughs and barely took note of the splash. Oh, I know you thought the lads sneered when your back was turned, and perhaps at first they did. But they learned better very quickly. Even as children, they saw you more clearly than you do.”

  Phin stared at him. “Your point?”

  The viscount made an impatient noise. “That you’ve always been more than a mapmaker. Now you’ve got the title to prove it. But the only one who still needs convincing is you.”

  “Ah, yes, the title,” Phin said flatly. It was a license to life, all right, but in a far more literal sense than Sanburne imagined. Drink and debauchery did not cover it. “That does change everything, don’t it, old fellow.”

  Sanburne sighed. “Of course it doesn’t. That’s precisely my point. You are who you are. And unlike you, I’ve never minded it.”

  With great difficulty, Phin made himself smile. “Forgive me if I do not trust the judgment of a man whose standards are notoriously low.” And as Sanburne pulled a mocking, shocked face, he pivoted and walked out.

  That afternoon, as he passed Miss Masters’s rooms on the way to his own, the doorknob rattled. Just slightly.

  He wheeled back, looking at the footman, who’d been standing at attention. “Has she been trying to get out?”

  Gompers shrugged. “On and off about every hour, sir.”

  The rattling ceased. She’d heard his voice, maybe.

  He exhaled. Something about that small sound scraped his conscience, which irritated him. He did not care if she’d saved his life, or a thousand lives, for that matter. No cause on earth would compel him to feel sympathy for Ridland’s minion.

  Of course, he, too, had once been a minion. Ridland had subtle ways of enlisting the unsuspecting. We require a cartographer for this task, a man of unusual skills. The river, you see, has never been mapped; it is not in friendly territory. Ridland preyed on naiveté and idealism, and trapped his victims in cages strung from their own ambitions. Mina Masters was clever, but Phin had been clever, too. He’d still fallen victim.

  Cursing himself, he fitted the key into the door. Here was the real danger with boredom, he thought. One was too vulnerable to being intrigued.

  Miss Masters was sitting in an armchair that she’d drawn up to the window. Her eyes were closed, and the mellow afternoon light lent a warm glow to her ice-blond hair. Had he not heard the evidence of her foray to the door, he would have thought her well settled; she had a rug over her lap, and a book lay open on the floor. She was a brilliant fraud; even on the off chance she worked only for herself, he’d do well to keep her locked up anyway.

  Except, of course, that her genius had saved his life once. In light of that, her innocence would make him a scoundrel.

  He waited a moment, but she did not turn to acknowledge him. “Where is your cat?”

  “Washington? Hiding from me.” She spoke absently, as though her thoughts were elsewhere.

  Silence fell, and she showed no inclination to break it. He leaned back against the wall, crossing his arms. What had he hoped to achieve by coming in here? She hardly required his compassion, even if he was foolish enough to feel it.

  He supposed he only wanted another chance to examine her. He was not accustomed to misjudging a person, and it unsettled him. He did not want to make the same mistake again
.

  Oh, hell, he would not lie to himself. Laura Sheldrake smiled, and he wanted to smash her fingers; Mina Masters pried into his desk, and he wanted to lift her skirts and lick the frown from her brow. He was bloody perverse, a hypocrite beyond measure. He frowned on Sanburne’s waywardness when within himself there lurked far darker inclinations, irreconcilable with any form of reason. Overnight, the dirty, bloody, murky maze he’d known as the world had collapsed into a single orbit, with him at the center; life should be so easy, but this woman made him want to plunge right back into the muck.

  A beheading or suffocation: to Sanburne’s options, he might add Miss Masters. She threatened to lay waste his remaining shreds of self-respect. She would be his own special form of suicide, if he permitted it.

  He was not going to kiss her again. He was not going to touch her. And yet, he stood there. He stood there, and he cleared his throat to speak. “Are you comfortable?”

  “Comfortable?” Her shoulders rolled, an impatient little gesture, but still her eyes did not open. “Answer a question of mine, and I’ll answer yours.”

  His temper stirred. In Hong Kong, too, she’d exhibited a peculiar talent for irritating him. At least now he had a way to account for it. How did one reconcile such wicked resourcefulness with a pampered beauty who made her fortune selling shampoo? Answer: one factored in the hand of Joseph Ridland. It should relieve him to know that her skills were professional. It recast his irritation as the product of expert manipulation, rather than proof of his personal weakness.

  Unfortunately, the fact that it would relieve him made him wonder if he was not biased in his evaluation of the matter.

  “Are you in a position to make demands?” he asked gently.

  She lifted her face so the sunlight caught it in full. Her profile was as pure and lovely as a cameo, and she knew it, no doubt. “Demand? I’d thought it a request.”

  His curiosity was no sin. Even the most wholesome sorts suffered from it. “Ask away, then. Maybe I’ll answer.”

  “I’d assumed that you still worked for Ridland. But now, I think you don’t. Which is it?”

  An interesting question, if disingenuous. Its motive seemed obscure to him. “Why do you want to know?”

  “I don’t trust him, and 1 wouldn’t trust any man in his employ.”

  He paused. “Are you really looking for someone to trust?” Perhaps she wanted out of Ridland’s service.

  Her eyes opened. “Everyone needs to trust someone. Particularly in a strange country where one has no friends.” She began to smile. “Look as hard as you like, Ashmore. I’m being perfectly frank with you.”

  There was no harm in telling her, he supposed. He ceded no advantage by giving her the truth, and if she’d guessed the answer already, his honesty might compel her to relax her guard. “When I came into the title, I ceased to answer to him.”

  She nodded and looked back to the window. He wished she wouldn’t; her expression might have told him something. “As for your question—no, I’m not comfortable at all. My mother used to sit like this, you see. And I’d vowed never to do it myself.”

  “Sit by the window, do you mean?”

  “Yes, exactly. No matter where we were in the world, I would enter her boudoir and find her sitting like this, staring out. It made me quite impatient. I used to wonder what she was looking at, but when I asked, she would never tell me. Today, though, I realized the answer. Would you like to know it?”

  It seemed she’d finally run out of fresh tactics, for she’d already tried to incite his guilt. “Let me guess. Freedom?”

  She glanced back to him. There were shadows beneath her eyes, as though she hadn’t slept well. This apartment was as rich as his own; he would not allow her appearance of delicacy to stir a whit of remorse in him. “No, I don’t expect she saw freedom anywhere she looked. She doesn’t have the imagination for it.”

  He hesitated. He was like Pandora; he did not like a puzzle, and even if he knew that uncertainty was healthier, he still wanted to open the goddamned box and put a period to his curiosity. All right, he wanted to put far more than a period to it; the light across her face highlighted the grainless purity of her skin, and he remembered, with tactile intensity, how she had felt pressed beneath him.

  Besides, she was in his house, which made her his problem. He could not leave her unquelled. “Then tell me, Miss Masters, what was it she saw? And don’t disappoint me,” he added dryly. “I depend on you to make the answer as affecting as possible.”

  She laughed, which took him off guard. The uneasiness that had been stirring for the past few minutes raked its claws through his gut. He did not understand her at all, but he saw why Ridland had tapped her. Impassivity would be impressive, in her circumstances, but this smile was nothing short of miraculous. “I’ve never disappointed you,” she said.

  He smiled back at her, although he could tell that his smile failed to match hers for sheer, brash effrontery. That was fine; she was the one with something to lose. “And here I thought you’d disappointed me in my study last night.”

  She shook her head. “No. To be disappointed, you must have expectations. And you’ve never thought enough of me to form any. What did you think of me in Hong Kong? That I was some daft, silly girl?” She paused. “You asked me whose I was, that night. Do you remember?”

  It gave him a start. Yes, that was right. Even back then, as she broke apart the shutters to expedite his escape, he’d assumed she was part of the game. But she had denied it. I am my own, she’d said. It occurred to him now that the phrasing had been odd and perhaps revealing, though he could not work out the significance. “Yes,” he said. “I remember that.”

  She tilted her head as though his admission had surprised her; that was something, at least. “I wonder, then. Assuming you believed me, how did you explain what I’d done for you? Did you tell yourself that I’d saved you on a whim? For my own amusement, without a thought to the possible consequences?” Her mouth pulled in sarcasm. “Did you tell yourself that I’d regret it when you were gone?”

  Her words cut uncomfortably close to the truth. For four years, he had worked very hard not to remember her. If he had ever thought himself cowardly for the insistence with which he shut out her memory, he need only look at her now to recognize the wisdom of his decision. Sitting there in sunlit splendor, she could not be ignored. She drank up the light, absorbing every measure of his senses; had Cronin been creeping up behind him now, he would never have noticed. She was not safe to look upon, much less think of. “I never gave it much thought,” he said curtly.

  “How odd. I believe I would have given it thought, had someone saved me. No matter,” she said more briskly, and rose. The throw fell from her shoulders, and his breath caught. She was wearing the gown she’d collected from the boardinghouse. Done in the aesthetic style, it fell in a sheer white column from her bust to her feet, and against the backlighting of the window, it revealed every line of her body: her slender waist, the full curve of her hips, the sweet pout of her inner thighs.

  His temper sparked. It was one thing to gawk, and another to be manipulated like a puppet on strings. She had planned this goddamned scene.

  He forced his eyes up to hers. She was still smiling, and he had the unnerving feeling she had divined the exact order of his thoughts from his expression alone. “What I did last night was surprise you,” she said gently. “If you think on it, you’ll realize I’m right. I’ve surprised you a great deal, I think, and not just in London, but in Hong Kong, too. And you cannot account for it, so you resent me. You tell yourself there must be some explanation other than the real one. You think I’m working for someone who’s clever. You can’t even consider that I might be clever, because that would mean—well, that between the two of us, you’re the one who’s the idiot.”

  “Sharp words,” he said. “Cleverly spoken. But if I’m the idiot, Miss Masters, then why am I the one holding the key?”

  “Ah.” Her appearance of go
od humor faded. “For the same reason my mother stared out the window, I expect. She has a great love of nature, Mama does. It’s been decades since she left England, and she still talks constantly of the green fields, the streams, and the forests. But when she looked out the window in Hong Kong, or New York, or Singapore, what did she see? Everything you have done to it. The asphalt men have laid over the grass, the waterways they’ve redirected, the trees they’ve turned into hovels, every manipulation and modification and improvement that suits their shortsighted desires. Of course you have the key, Ashmore. Even when it comes to the arrangement of pens, you like to be in control.” She smiled. “Don’t forget to lock the door when you leave.”

  And then she walked into her bedchamber, and shut the door.

  He stood there, wrestling down an anger that seemed as damning as her little speech—which grated him, no doubt beyond her wildest hopes. He took no pleasure in imprisoning or managing anyone. This imprisonment was not by his desire, but by necessity.

  But the thought echoed unpleasantly in his brain, magnifying his hypocrisy until he could not avoid facing it. Of all men, he knew how bitterly it burned a soul to be deprived of choices. And yet, even as he gloated over his own new freedom and loathed Ridland for attempting to infringe on it, he told himself he had no choice but to keep her like this. Sanburne was not the only one who had a right to mock him.

  He locked the door behind him, all right. Objectively, his guilt was irrational; it seemed clear that his thoughts were not functioning properly. By her own actions, she had proved herself untrustworthy.

  But when he had walked far enough down the hallway to get free of the witchcraft she’d worked in that scented little room, the uppermost feeling that replaced it was not anger, but amazement. She was the prisoner, but she had managed to dismiss him as effectively as a queen.