by Claudia Dain
He turned away from them both with very little difficulty. He was done with marriage. As long as he kept his distance from Sophia Dalby, he was confident he would stay unmarried.
Fifteen
“Sophia, you’re punishing me for having kept my distance,” Lord Ruan said.
“Punishing you, Lord Ruan? I am hardly that energetic,”
she replied.
He’d found her in the stair hall, alone, and there’d been no simple way to avoid him. If she could have, she would have. She wasn’t afraid of Ruan. Hardly. It was only that she had no interest in him any longer. She might have had, a month ago, but now . . . she indulged in a mental shrug. He had kept his distance when he should have been in ardent pursuit. She demanded that and much more from a man.
“I have been most energetic,” he said. “And with your goodwill in mind. I hardly expected a reward, but this refusal to speak with me isn’t like you.”
“Lord Ruan, you don’t know me well enough to know what is like me or not.”
“I think I might. Now.”
The stair hall was quite large, as was everything in Hyde House, but Ruan, his green eyes glittering in the soft sunlight that illuminated the hall in a warm glow, seemed to fill it up. He was a man who pulsed energy, quietly and steadily. His hair was black, his eyes were green, and his face bore the traces of a life lived dangerously. He was a marquis. There should not have been any trace of danger in his well-constructed life.
“Now?” she prompted, her brows raised in question.
“I had a bit of business to settle with Lord Westlin,” he said.
Sophia smiled and lifted her chin. The Earl of Westlin was one of her oldest enemies, and had been her first protector of note when she’d first come to London. He was also the father of Caro’s new husband. Her daughter would be the next Countess of Westlin. Wasn’t life delicious that way?
“How unpleasant for you. I do hope you managed to get everything you deserved,” she said.
“Thank you,” Ruan said, his small mouth quirked in a half smile. “It was the final scratch of the pen, the conclusion of a service I did for him in exchange for a bit of land that my father always wanted. My absence from Town is explained by that errand. I wanted to inspect the land before signing the papers, making certain that I was getting what I had been promised.”
“A wise course when dealing with Lord Westlin,” she said.
Ruan shrugged slightly. “It was the least I could do for my father. I did so little for him while he was alive.”
“Yes, it is easier to serve the needs of the dead,” Sophia said. “They aren’t nearly as demanding as the living. One has to truly strive to hear their complaints from beyond the grave.”
Ruan smiled slightly and dipped his head down, looking at her from beneath his black brows.
“I wanted to do you a service as well, Sophia. I told you before, I wanted to play the hero for you, kill the beast—”
“But darling,” she interrupted, “are you saying you’ve killed Westlin? Did he die screaming or merely whimpering? Don’t leave out a single delicious detail.”
Ruan did not smile, which had been her intent. No, he frowned. Entirely too serious and not at all what she wanted of any man. “He deserves to die for what he did to you.”
Not that again. How very tedious. Of all things, she would never have guessed that Lord Ruan would turn tedious.
“As he will die one day,” Sophia said, moving past Ruan, “you can take whatever pleasure you will from that inescapable fact. All that is required of you is patience, Lord Ruan.”
Ruan did not allow her to pass. He grabbed her wrist and turned her to face him. It was their first touch, the first contact of his hand on her body. She could feel the hard sculpting of his palm on the inside of her wrist, his strong fingers leashing her to him. She allowed it, testing the feel of his hand, twisting her wrist slightly, measuring how firmly he held her. No man touched her unless she allowed it. If they believed she wanted it, so much the better.
“Sophia, I know,” he said in a hoarse undertone, his green eyes slicing into hers with all the subtlety of a saber.
Sophia stiffened and held his gaze, her black eyes as hard as granite. “He drank deeply, with my encouragement, drank and sank into memory. I was there as the memories bubbled up.”
“That sounds most unpleasant,” she said, twisting her wrist within his hand, pulling free. He did not stop her. He could have, if he’d wanted to. She would have stopped him if he had. Perhaps they understood that much about each other. She hoped so.
“I want to help you,” he said.
Sophia laughed abruptly. “You want to help yourself.
Let’s be honest about that, at least. Play the hero? Over something that happened decades ago? No, Ruan, you were curious, that is all. Knowledge is power—there is nothing truer. You wanted a form of power over me. You don’t have it. No one does. If not Westlin, then certainly not you.”
He did not pull away from her. Perhaps he should have.
Perhaps he truly thought that he held some sort of power over her, though what kind she would not contemplate.
“All right,” he said, facing her, not touching her, though she could see that he wanted to. “I was curious. You arranged for your daughter to marry Westlin’s heir, for her to be ruined by Westlin’s heir—”
“Ruined?” she said, cutting him off. “He kissed her, touched her breast a time or two. It takes more than that to ruin a woman, or it should. She wanted him and she got him, that’s all that matters. As for arranging her marriage, that is my duty to my daughter. She loves him. I did my duty well. There is no stain upon that marriage, no revenge beyond the great knife it was to Westlin’s cock. As you must have heard from Westlin’s drunken babblings, I think I deserved at least that much from him.”
“Sophia,” he said, taking a step closer to her, trying to tower over her, no doubt. A foolish ploy. Did he not know that he took a step closer to her blade? Having heard Westlin’s tale, did Ruan not know that she was now always armed? No man touched her without her consent. Never again. “I am not his ally. I hate what he did to you, what they all did to you. I only wanted to find out why these men are your enemies, why you seek to destroy the third Marquis of Dutton.”
“Ruan, you see dragons where there are none,” she said. “I told you that. Why couldn’t you believe it?” She chuckled. It was not a pleasant sound. “Oh, yes, because I am a woman. I don’t know what’s best for me. Only you can know that, the man who has been caught by the flickering light of my infamous allure. What gives you the right to meddle in the shadows of my life? Even Dalby, who made me his countess, knew to let that part of me remain in shadow.”
“If a man loves you, no part of you should remain in shadow,” he said solemnly.
“Loves me?” she said lightly, smiling at him coldly. “Do you dare to claim that you love me? How could you possibly, Lord Ruan? You only know the barest trace of me.”
“I know that is so,” he said. “I suspected it, and now I know it. You keep yourself well hid, Sophia, still that girl hiding in the wood of Westlin’s estate, still hiding from the men who hunted you down like a wild animal before they raped you.”
Such a tame telling of what happened that long ago season. Such a quick and bloodless declaration of what the girl she had been had survived. He thought he knew, thought he understood what had happened to her, but he understood her less now than he had before he had mined these bare facts of a distant past.
Pity. It was pity she saw in his eyes. Pity? When she’d survived all her trials, and defeated all who had arrayed against her? What fools these English were, to read the story of her life so wrong.
Sophia laid her hand upon Ruan’s chest and smiled up at him. He looked mildly alarmed, as well he should.
“What did Westlin tell you, Ruan? Did he tell you that I shamed him in front of his friends? Did he tell of my base trickery
and how he paid me for it? Did he tell you that I never once cried for mercy?” She withdrew her hand from his chest, showing him the blade she had pressed to his thigh. A thin, sharp blade, hidden within the spines of her fan. She was never without a weapon, and Westlin and the wild hunt of her on his estate was why. “I won, Ruan. I won then, and I’m still winning. Anyone who cannot see that is a fool.”
“Yes, you have defeated them, in your way. Their daughters ruined, their sons . . . what have you planned for Dutton? He drinks himself stupid, out of fear of you, I think.”
“You English,” she said, shaking her head at him, “you think all paths are straight, from one firm point to another, seen clearly on the sun-washed horizon. My path is not straight. You cannot see where it started or where it will end.” All playfulness dropped from her like a mask. “You think I would harm innocents? I was innocent once, Lord Ruan, long ago. I have done nothing to the current Lord Dutton. Everything he is, he has done to himself.”
“You are English, Sophia,” he said.
She smiled. “I thought so once,” she said, walking away from him.
The stair hall was quiet, deserted, which it should not have been. The house was full of guests and the meal was overdue. The stair hall should have been a wild riot of activity. It was not. Perhaps it was the cold chain of destiny, tying her to this moment and this man. It was possible. She carried a blade; she could cut herself free of even destiny, if she were strong enough.
She was at the door to the blue reception room when he called out, “Tell me what happened, Sophia. Tell me, if only to wash Westlin’s drunken ramblings from my head.”
“Still curious, Lord Ruan?” she asked, facing the door.
“Only about you,” he said softly.
He had not moved toward her; she could hear his careful distance. He did not fear her blade, that she knew. She had seen that much in his eyes. Ruan had lived with danger, that much was clear.
Still not facing him, her eyes on the heavy door before her, she said, “Flattery? Sophia Dalby cannot resist it, can she? Very well, Lord Ruan. This small portion of my path I will reveal to you.”
She turned to face him, her eyes not sparkling with the sheen of Lady Dalby’s seductive gleam, but with the dark and unreadable gaze of an Iroquois of the deep woods.
“Westlin was my protector. He took me up and paid quite nicely for me. I was a virgin, you see. Always such a good price for young, pretty virgins. He was quite happy with me, as well he should have been. But then he was told that I hadn’t been a virgin after all, that he hadn’t been the one to pluck the rose.” Sophia laughed under her breath.
“But darling, you can only be a virgin once and it pays so well to be one. Would you like a virgin, Ruan? I can be one easily enough, if that is what you prefer. Some men do, you know. Virgin upon virgin. With the supply so scarce, what’s a girl to do but try to meet the demand?”
Ruan’s eyes looked at her darkly across the marble floor of the stair hall. Not a conversation, then? A soliloquy? She could play it that way.
“The second Marquis of Dutton, I think, was the one who divulged it. Such an uproar. They were visiting Westlin at Idmiston, his estate in Wiltshire. Melverley, Dutton, Aldreth, Cumberland. Westlin. My protector.”
Sophia quieted, remembering, her gaze dropping to the hard marble floor.
“Aldreth wanted no part of it, but he did not attempt to stop it, and that kind of cowardice bears its own scars. The others stripped me bare and set me out upon a meadow bordering a wood. A hunt, you see. Hunt the lroquois. Hunt the Indian girl. I was just fourteen.”
She looked up at Ruan and said, “Did you know that among the Iroquois the children are fully their mothers?
They are of her tribe, her people. I was English, you see.
I was always English because she was. But not here. Not then. Not anymore.”
“I’m sorry, Sophia,” Ruan said, his voice hoarse and low.
She smiled, a full smile that showed her teeth. “They thought it would take minutes. I eluded them for two days and a night. Naked, barefooted, no weapon, and on unfa-miliar ground. Two days, Ruan. I was defeating them, which Englishmen do not endure well, especially at the hands of savages.”
Her smile faded as her thoughts drifted back, the memory of that long hunt, the bleeding of her feet, the wild, pounding fear. She would have run home if she could have, but of course, she couldn’t. She was trapped on an island and her home had been lost to her long before Westlin had entered her life.
She pulled her thoughts back and chained them to this story, this one story that Ruan was so eager to hear. Let him hear it, then. It could no longer touch her, chained as it was in the deepest part of memory.
“They caught me, and they did what men do when they catch naked girls running from them. Men do love chasing things and catching them, don’t they? But you see, Ruan, even in that moment I had my victory. No tears fell from my eyes. No pleas for mercy from my lips. No hesitation. Dutton was so cup-shot by then that he could not rouse himself to play the man. He fell against a tree, vomiting. I can still recall that smell even now, the scent of damp oak leaves and whisky vomit. I took them in, one after another. I took them in, again and again. They thought to break me, to punish me, but I did not act like a woman being punished.”
“Did that not make it worse?” Ruan asked.
Sophia’s head snapped up, her eyes sharp. “Not for me.
I am an Iroquois. I will not break. They wanted to destroy me. I proved that it was not in their power to do so.”
Ruan nodded, his eyes hooded, shielded.
“I left Westlin after that, after I’d got what I wanted from him,” she said matter-of-factly. “I went to Dutton and then to Melverley, seducing each of them into very prof-itable liaisons. Each in their turn gave me what I asked for: money, property, jewels. As was my due. I proved to them that they had not frightened me, nor punished me, nor harmed me in any way. I sliced deeply into their pride, and then they paid me handsomely. I defeated them in every way open to me. Do you think to pity me, Ruan? Why?”
“For the woman you might have been, Sophia. For the life they stole from you.”
But it was not they who stole it. It was someone else entirely. Someone she still hunted for, though not in the way Westlin had hunted her in his wood. No, not quite so loudly, but just as relentlessly.
Of course, Ruan had his story, the one he wanted from her. He did not need to hear another. Her paths had been many, and had many twistings and dark turnings. Ruan wanted a straight path, full of light so that he could understand her. What folly. But then, he was English, wasn’t he?
They were rather known for folly.
Sophia smiled, her dark eyes sparkling as Lady Dalby’s always did. “Everyone loves the woman I am, Lord Ruan.
I am quite famous for it. You should know that as well as anyone. Wasn’t it for love of Sophia Dalby that you sought out Lord Westlin and got him drunk enough to talk about that which he is determined not to remember? Tell me, Lord Ruan,” she said seductively, “are you more fascinated now, or less? More, I should say. You are a man who likes mysteries and layers and intrigues with his women. Have I intrigued you, darling Lord Ruan?”
He stared at her, his green eyes smoldering, likely in frustrated anger. She did hope so.
“I have, haven’t I?” she said silkily. “Now you must decide, is everything I told you true, or did I just weave this tale to give you what you wanted? I am very good at giving men what they want, which I’m certain can be no surprise to you. Good afternoon, Lord Ruan.”
Lady Dalby left him standing alone in the stair hall, making her way out into the light and noise of another London party of yet another London Season.
Sixteen
“Neither one of them is going to give you what you want,”
Bernadette, Lady Paignton, said.
Antoinette, Lady Lanreath, looked at her sister in mild horror and
asked, “And what is it that I want?”
“To marry again, of course,” Bernie said on a pout.
“You were very clear about it and I haven’t forgotten a word. You were inspired by Penelope and what she’d managed for herself and you said you wanted a bit of it yourself.
I’ve done all I can, Toni, at least with the available dukes, and I do think that if you want to marry again you might as well be a duchess, but neither Edenham nor Calbourne seemed interested.”
“Oh, Bernie . . .” Antoinette said on a lingering sigh.
“What have you done?”
Bernadette slanted a gaze at her older sister. “I only talked to them, Toni, just to get an inkling of how they felt about the subject of marriage. Calbourne isn’t the least interested in marriage, and Edenham is probably interested in marriage, but not interested in marrying you. He seems completely taken by that American niece of Hyde’s.”
Antoinette worked her fan around her throat, doing a stellar job of covering her agitation. “How did you ever have the cheek to talk to Edenham after everything that . . .
happened? Did he actually speak to you in return or did you do all the talking?”
“It was a bit awkward at first,” Bernadette said, “but the one thing you can always count on with Edenham is that he’ll do the polite thing. Cut me direct? He’d rather cut off his arm. Of course, Lady Richard wasn’t anywhere near him, and I do think that helped.”
“It must have,” Antoinette said, scanning the room.
Were they ever going to eat?
“Has Edenham left? I do think he must have after that setdown he took at the hands of those Americans. They’re awfully attractive, aren’t they, Toni? I get shivers of—”
“Yes, I don’t need to hear about your shivers. And, no, he hasn’t left. He’s talking with Miss Elliot, and as her brother is at her side I don’t think any more blood will be spilt. At least not today.”
“Rotten bit of luck,” Bernie said, looking through the crowd until she saw Edenham standing with Miss Elliot and the younger of her two brothers. Utterly handsome man, truly, and so unpredictable. There was much that could be said for unpredictability, within strict parameters, naturally. “You’re not upset about the dukes? I did so hope you’d be a duchess this time round.”
