Except she didn’t know how to act like one of them. She wasn’t one of them. Thank God.
Dejected, she brushed past the crowd and wandered into the Shark’s Tooth. As nonchalantly as possible, she ordered a round for all three patrons too drunk to make it outside to stare at her. Susan couldn’t afford the tab anyway, so who cared how expensive it got? She crossed into each establishment one by one, ate a meal on (suspect) credit, and carefully, casually, just-so-happened to end up right outside the Dress Shop of Iniquity.
Rather than go inside and alert the demonic duo to her presence, she collapsed ever so softly against the back of the building, just beneath the open window, and fanned herself as if catching her breath from all that shopping.
(It was a new fan. French, too, by the look of it. Hand-painted and quite lovely.)
Voices floated down from overhead. Boring voices. Voices that discussed this ream or that yard, or what grade of thread was better for such-and-such stitch. Yawn. Had she solved the mystery yet? Susan debated just going in and asking. Or buying up all the illegal cloth on her false credit and telling the hapless magistrate, “What silk? I didn’t see any French silk....”
She wondered how long she could reasonably stand here, cooling her décolletage with her no doubt treasonous French fan. Perhaps she should come back later. Much later. Like never.
Between the disastrous slip of the tongue regarding the chicken shed and the even more disastrous attempt at relaying messages from the dead, the last thing she needed in light of the current social climate was to get caught spying again.
“What the devil do you think you’re doing, woman?”
Susan yelped and dropped her new fan in the sand.
Mr. Bothwick. Solid as a rock.
Not dead, then. Either he’d managed to get away… or he was in league with the Others. Whoever they were.
“Nothing.” She snatched her fan back up and recommenced making furious use of the device. “Why aren’t you buried in the rock garden?”
“I created a distraction.” He stared down at her as if tempted to throttle her and toss her in an unmarked grave himself. “Are you eavesdropping on Miss Grey and Miss Devonshire?”
“Nooo,” she protested weakly, fanning faster. “Why would you think that?”
He snatched the fan from her fingers, snapped it closed, and tossed it backward over his shoulder. “Everybody thinks that.”
When she glanced around his wide shoulders, her stomach curdled.
Apparently, whilst she’d been hiding behind her new toy and straining to overhear fascinating statements like, I don’t know, Dinah, perhaps the mauve would be nicer, the townsfolk had been creeping in. They now surrounded her in a wide, tense circle. Some held... rocks?
Chapter 26
The angry mob was edging closer. Tightening rank. Susan had the uneasy feeling a stoning could break out at any moment.
Miss Devonshire’s threats were certainly fast-acting.
Mr. Bothwick grabbed Susan’s upper arm hard enough to leave a five-fingered handprint. He jerked her out from beneath the window as one might tug forth a rag doll.
“Can you explain what the devil you’re doing here?” he demanded, voice low.
She nodded frantically.
“Is it something we can discuss in front of others?”
She shook her head emphatically.
His eyes narrowed. “Is it a good explanation?”
Susan nodded a bit more frantically.
Mr. Bothwick hesitated, clearly battling inner demons. He scowled at her, displeased with whatever he’d decided. He gave a resigned sigh, pulled her into the wall of his chest, and whispered, “Lesser of two evils.”
Then he kissed her.
Not false kisses, or air kisses, or a simple buss to the cheeks. Nor the sort of chaste, closed-mouth kiss, a brief pucker, that one might be able to explain to one’s betrothed—however unsuccessfully—had been a mere trick of the light.
No.
This was his strong hands gripping her upper arms in suspicion and anger, the heat from his muscular frame melting her core in pure lust, and his warm tongue sweeping into her welcoming mouth in nothing short of... desperation? As if he, too, had never put that first kiss from his mind. As if he, too, had lain awake every night, reliving each moment, each taste, each sensation. As if he, too, had been driven to the brink of madness with the overpowering desire to have the weight of her body pressing into his... and never stop.
But then he did stop. Briefly.
He tore his lips from hers and tilted his head back just long enough to say, in a tone deep enough to be intimate yet loud enough to carry, “I thought I told you to meet me behind the stables so no one would know I wished to make you my lover.”
Lover. The word careened through her spinning mind. The entire town had overheard him. She felt a flash of pique. This was his best attempt at rescue? Although at least he’d had the sense to imply it hadn’t come to fruition—yet—her reputation amongst the locals had just gone up in smoke.
Then another word crashed into the first, shattering her vexation: stables. What stables? She was really going to have to start exploring past the town borders.
Then his warm lips were on hers again and the only thing she wanted to explore was his mouth with her tongue, his bare chest with her fingertips, his naked body with her hands and eyes and mouth.
Her back thumped against the dress shop wall. His leg pressed between her thighs, insistent. His hands now tangled in her hair. She should push him away. Surely this was too much, going too far. Surely this—this farce—had carried on long enough.
But he didn’t stop. And she didn’t try to make him. In fact, one might suppose that the trembling hands tugging him closer were nothing short of encouraging. One might further suppose that the rush of unchecked desire drowning her brain (and the delicious pulsing between her legs) indicated a distinct state known as rampant sexual arousal. A respectable lady wouldn’t feel such salacious, shocking sensations.
Susan felt them like mad.
This time, she was the one to pull away. Raggedly. Reluctantly. But, at last, successfully. While she still could. She risked a heavy-lidded glance behind him.
Most of the mob had dispersed. Those who remained either wore expressions of shock or disgust, or smirked at her in knowing derision. She hadn’t won any friends today. The population still despised her, if for a wholly different reason. Susan Stanton, village slut.
But at least they weren’t trying to stone her.
“They’re gone?” he murmured, his voice husky, raw.
“They’ve... lessened,” she whispered back. Startled—but not surprised—to discover her hoarse words as laced with unquenched passion as his had been.
He nodded, twined his fingers with hers, tugged her from the wall.
“Let’s go.”
She tightened her hold on his hand and allowed him to lead her away from the dress shop, away from the open window, away from the watchful eyes and leering grins of the remaining townspeople. To a desolate strip of empty beach, well out of the line of fire. Yet they kept walking.
“W-where are you taking me?”
“I don’t know yet. Out of here.” He didn’t slacken his pace. “Why were you spying on the dress shop?”
Susan chewed her lip. So he didn’t doubt it for a second. Well, he wasn’t a fool. The townsfolk might have bought his quick-thinking cover-up, but Mr. Bothwick was waiting on an actual explanation. A good one. Which she did not have.
“The magistrate asked me to.” All right, technically he’d asked her to follow Mr. Bothwick. But that made even less sense. So she mumbled, “Sort of.” And left it at that.
Mr. Bothwick was not leaving it at that. “Forrester asked you to spy on a dress shop? What the devil for? Is he afraid they’re embroidering state secrets into snot rags?”
“Not quite,” she muttered. “He thinks they’ve got French silk.”
“He thinks—” Mr.
Bothwick came to a sudden stop. His eyes darkened with confusion, then doubt, then wariness. “He does, does he?” He resumed his previous pace. “What do you figure, Miss Stanton? Do the local girls deal in illegal cloth?”
“Of course they do.” Susan lifted a shoulder. This, at least, was solid ground. “No dressmaker worth her salt would be without all the latest French fashions. Silk is a mere subset.”
Mr. Bothwick watched her, his expression unreadable. “So that’s what you’re going to report back to Forrester? A simple ‘Yes, yes, they do,’ and he’ll be on his way?”
“Not exactly,” she admitted. “He wants to know where it’s from.”
“Where it’s from,” Mr. Bothwick repeated. For a moment, they walked in silence. Then he said, “Why, I remember now! As it happens, I know where it’s from.”
For the second time in as many days, Susan had the discomfiting impression that a man was inventing the “truth” with each word he spoke.
“You do?” was all she said aloud, however. “How serendipitous.”
“Yes,” he said, this time more firmly. “I’ve just recalled.”
Definitely lying.
“Where might that be, if I could be so bold as to inquire?” she asked politely.
He nodded slowly, eyes narrowed at the horizon. “As it happens, Miss Devonshire has a French aunt, who is a famous modiste in Burgundy. I am certain the silk comes from there.”
A conveniently French aunt. Who also happened to be a modiste.
Right.
“There you have it,” he finished, as if she now had anything at all. “Simple as that.”
Utter balderdash.
“No intrigue whatsoever,” Susan agreed aloud—and, for the first time, became truly interested in the fabric’s origin.
There was definitely more to the story. If that was the story. But whom could she ask for the truth? Miss Devonshire herself? Hardly. Not only would that tip her hand—if Mr. Bothwick didn’t warn her before Susan had an opportunity to speak to her alone—but what were the chances Miss Devonshire would actually tell Susan the truth? Whatever that was?
Mr. Bothwick drew to a halt before a warped old rowboat someone had left to rot amongst the weeds and the sand. What drove Bournemouth folk to leave things—and people—forgotten for years at a stretch?
She didn’t realize she’d asked the question aloud until Mr. Bothwick shot her a quizzical glance over his shoulder.
“People?” He bent to pick at a section of peeling paint. “Like who?”
“Like Lady Emeline.” She shivered at the thought of that dank cellar. Susan had to get her out of there. “And her mother. The town abandoned both of them.”
Her parents had ignored them as well. Probably because they had the ill taste to live outside Town borders. She hadn’t known about either cousin until she’d been ousted from her home and sent to live with “Aunt Beaune.” But now that Susan did know, she couldn’t help but feel strongly for both women.
“Superstition and fear, I suppose.” Mr. Bothwick began to flip the ancient rowboat back upright. “There’s those who believed her disease was contagious. Nobody wished to risk catching it. Plus I suppose a bit of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ was at play, too.”
“For thirty years? Shameful, is what that is. Criminal apathy.” Susan crossed her arms and glared at him. “And what of Lady Emeline? Why does no one call on her from time to time to see if she’s all right? For all they know, she could be dead.”
She’d been murderously angry at her parents when they’d confined her to Stanton House after Susan nearly destroyed a marriage by spreading rumors of an illicit tryst she’d had the (mis)fortune of witnessing firsthand. When her mother had tried and failed to pawn her off on the most ineligible bachelor she could find, it was back to the bedchamber for Susan until she’d managed her great escape to the Frost Fair. The friendless weeks of confinement while the bones of her broken arm knitted back together had been an additional torture.
Yet her troubles were nothing compared to what her cousins had been through. What Lady Emeline was still going through.
“She’s not dead. She’s sick.” Mr. Bothwick grabbed the pointed front of the boat with both hands and began to move backward, tugging the reluctant rowboat toward the sea. “Folks around here try not to nose about in other people’s business. In case you’ve forgotten, that’s why they don’t like you.”
Susan’s mouth dropped open. Of all the rude, hypocritical—
“But we’re talking about another human being!” She gestured up at the cliffs behind them. “That’s horrible.”
“No,” he corrected, grunting a little. “That’s life.”
“How could being deaf-mute possibly be contagious?” she demanded. “That’s ignorant.”
Mr. Bothwick glanced up from the boat. “Her daughter caught it, didn’t she?”
Susan gritted her teeth. “Lady Emeline ‘caught’ being deaf-mute from her mother? How the bloody hell did she do that?”
He frowned. “I wasn’t there. Supposedly it happened on her wedding night. Shortly after her mother threw herself from a second-floor window.”
Susan stopped dead. Two rich, landed heiresses. Both with common money-grubbing fiancés. And both came down with an acute case of deaf-mute-itis the very night the contracts were signed and the ceremony performed. This wasn’t a case of happenstance. This was the next thing to murder.
Her mouth fell open. That was it. Poison. The only thing the present mistress had “caught” was a husband with access to the same substance her father had used to incapacitate her mother.
Had Jean-Louis Beaune been behind both unfortunate “illnesses”? Or when he’d passed on, had he also passed the family secret on to the new master of the house? Definitely possible. The giant was more than capable of drugging his helpless wife.
“Don’t you think there are awfully suspicious similarities between her case and that of her mother?” she asked Mr. Bothwick.
“I don’t know.” His boots began to splash. “I wasn’t here when Lady Beaune disappeared.” He rounded the little rowboat and began pushing it into the water. “My brother and I moved here four years ago. We didn’t know there was a Lady Beaune until there wasn’t anymore. And after that, nobody talked about it.
“You weren’t born here?” Susan asked in surprise.
Mr. Bothwick shook his head. “Can’t imagine such a fate. I was always more for city life, until I fell in love with the sea. Still own property back home, though.”
She stepped forward and her shoes squished into wet sand. “Out of nostalgia? Or do you visit often?”
“Out of apathy. I’ve no plans to return.” He swung a buckskin-clad leg into the boat and gripped the thin wooden planks with one hand when a sudden surge of water almost unbalanced him. He reached out a hand. “Come. Get in.”
Susan stared at him, then at the raging sea, with its waves crashing so high and so fast she wouldn’t have risked being aboard a town-sized cargo ship. Then she looked back at Mr. Bothwick. One of his boots sank into knee-high water. The other pistoned alarmingly in the eminently unstable rowboat. He held out an upturned palm and motioned her forward, impatient.
“Are you bamming me?” she burst out, backing up several quick steps.
“Your choices are few, Miss Stanton.” Despite the ice-cold sea lapping at his knees, his open hand didn’t waver. “You can return to town and take your chances there—or you can come aboard with me.”
“In other words,” she said with a gulp, “certain death either way.”
He inclined his head in apparent agreement.
She placed her palm in his.
Chapter 27
He hadn’t thought she was going to do it.
Even when Miss Stanton’s gloved fingertips brushed his ungloved palm, he was sure reason would intercede and she’d run screaming down the beach.
But then they locked hands, palms-to-wrists, and he pulled her inside the boat. She sat i
n the center of the wooden cross-plank, feet tucked beneath her, hands twisting in her lap. Terrified. But determined.
Evan fell for her a little more.
The waves were calmer today. To someone unused to the sea, he supposed they would still be unnerving, but when were the waters ever truly motionless? Never. That’s why he liked it.
He rowed them away from shore. The ocean sighed, stilled, stretched out around them in a deep blue forever. The sun glittered in the ripples made by his oars. He let them rest, allowing the boat to float freely. Silence, except for the waves slapping against the side of the rocking boat and the occasional call of a bird.
He loved this. Loved the sun, warming his face and his neck and his hands. Loved the bite to the breeze, ruffling his hair and unknotting his cravat. Loved the salt-fresh scent of the sea, the little fish darting beneath its surface. Loved feeling alive. And Miss Stanton—
Seemed to have forgotten her terror entirely.
She wasn’t walking a tightrope above her seat, mind you, but she was gripping the side of the boat instead of ripping her skirt to shreds, and staring out at the sea in openmouthed wonder.
“Don’t lean too far,” he couldn’t help but tease. “You might tumble over.”
She whipped her head around to face him, eyes overlarge, then smiled despite herself when she saw that he was baiting her. He smiled back. She stuck her tongue out, laughed at his surprise, then returned her gaze to the endless horizon, as if they were but two carefree lovers set adrift for the day with nothing more on their minds than the promise of romance amidst the beauty of the sea.
If only that were true.
Content for a moment to just pretend, he watched her gasp in delight at the tiny fish she’d just discovered a hand’s reach from the surface. She stripped off her gloves and braved the icy coldness to try to touch one. They kept swimming, just out of reach.
“First time in the water?”
Too Sinful to Deny: Gothic Love Stories #2 Page 18
