That she believed he could do it was . . . deeply attractive. Nick had no power over him—not even the power to intimidate. How could she not be drawn to such immunity, such perfect freedom?
She cleared her throat. “I’m no romantic.” Far from it. She was a cold-blooded woman indeed, if she could desire a man for his ability to kill.
“There’s nothing wrong with romanticism, of course.”
“No, of course not. It’s quite ladylike.” She directed a black smile into her glass. “Of course, Miss Everleigh reminded me recently that I do not enjoy a lady’s privileges. She suggested I find a butcher to marry.” She glanced up, shrugging. “Perhaps I will.”
He blinked. “Any butcher in particular?”
“A decent one. The problem, of course, is that decent men want decent wives—even the butchers.”
His smile looked peculiar. As though he were hearing an unpleasant joke. “And you think you aren’t decent.”
“We both know it. I’m a common thief.”
He looked away. “No call for the butcher to find out.”
“Yes, I’ll have to hide my history from him. More than enough for him to accept that I once was an Everleigh Girl.”
In profile, his jaw looked hard as flint. “If he were fool enough to condemn you for that, he would not deserve your honesty anyway.”
“And my virginity?”
Slowly he faced her. “What of it?”
“Surely I would owe him that, at least. In exchange for his protection.”
“Is that what you want?” he asked very quietly. “Protection?”
“Oh, who knows?” This man had shown her that she knew herself far less well than she’d imagined. “I thought what I wanted was simple—to be a lady.” Her laughter felt false. “It was my sister’s plan, actually. We would remake ourselves. Our accents, our deportment. For gentlemen never tell a lady—a proper lady, like Miss Everleigh—to take it on the chin. It’s their duty to shelter her from harshness. And that seems quite pleasant, never to be expected to endure. To be free to pursue better things, like . . . beauty and honesty and honor. So we—I—set out to become that kind of woman. A woman whom men seek to protect.”
What a strange look he wore. “Then you’ve succeeded.”
“No, not yet. But I’ll know it when I do. He will treat me as if . . .” As if her sensibilities were spun of priceless glass.
“As if you’re cherished,” he murmured.
“Yes.” She had his attention now. But like some wicked drug, a small taste wasn’t enough for her. “It won’t be the butcher who gives me that, though. He’ll be too suspicious of me at first. His friends will have warned him about Everleigh Girls, the rumors that we’re whores in disguise. He’ll need to overcome his doubts before he loves me. Of course, once he discovers I’m a virgin, he’ll feel quite smug. He’ll try to cherish me then. But it will require false pretenses. He’ll never learn about my past. He’ll never even ask, for fear of what he might find out. And if somehow he does learn my secrets . . . why, he’ll recoil.”
He had not looked away. “You’ve given this some thought.”
She nodded. “Generally on the nights after you’ve touched me. I lie awake, thinking about it. There are ways to fake virginity. Some count it a great deceit. But I think, piled on top of all the other lies I mean to tell, it won’t make much difference. Whereas if I had cause to hate this butcher—to resent that I had saved myself for him, this happy fool who would condemn me if he knew the truth about me—well, that would be far worse. One shouldn’t hate one’s husband. Don’t you think?”
He laid down his glass. “Lilah . . .”
A strange exhilaration coursed through her, fear and excitement at once. He understood what she was about now. His focus was so hot and intense that it brought a rush of blood to her face. “Ask me something,” she said. For she would tolerate no false pretenses tonight. “Ask me something I never told you.”
He slowly rose. She moved aside, making room for him on the settee. He sat down, but he did not touch her. “What is your sister’s name?”
“Was. Fiona is dead.”
The compassion in his face caused her chest to tighten. She had so much more practice in hiding truths than revealing them. “How?”
She cleared her throat. “Appendicitis. The doctor came too late. She’d been hiding the pain for days.”
“It’s difficult, isn’t it?” His mouth twisted. “Difficult, hell. I try not to think on Geoff. Otherwise it becomes . . . unbearable, at times.”
Unbearable. She recognized that single word, the naked honesty within it, as the greatest intimacy he’d ever shared with her. And like a gin addict given a sip of the poison, it awakened a terrible desire in her. With all her heart, she wanted to crack his mystery. To make him spill his secrets, speak of everything he’d kept hidden.
Yet at the same time, with a fierce panicked desperation, she also recognized how impossible, how unlikely, what a miracle that would be. All she could do was bare herself, and hope he did the same in reply.
“I have an uncle,” she said. “But he is not really family.”
He caught her hand and lifted it to his mouth, kissed her fingers with a strange formality. “Why is that?”
“He took care of us—Fiona and me—when both our parents were gone. But he was . . .” She hesitated. “Too young, I think, to know how to care for us properly. He felt . . .” Ah, what a strange word to use to describe Nick, but she knew it was true: “Honor-bound,” she said. “He felt honor-bound to try. My mother—his older sister—had been very dear to him. But perhaps we would have done better in the poorhouse.” She winced. “No, of course I don’t mean that. But he . . .”
He was watching her. Listening. The gentleness in his face would break her heart.
“He took over my father’s trade,” she said. “And it changed him.”
He placed her hand in her lap, then touched her face very lightly, tucking a curl behind her ear. “He became a clerk?”
“No, of course not.” Her smile felt real now. “My father was no clerk, and you know it.”
He traced the slope of her neck, his touch whisper soft. “Then what?”
“Nothing too awful. My father wasn’t violent by nature.” How breathless she sounded. She felt giddy, drunk on her own confessions. “But he did anything you might imagine that could make money and get a man jailed, if caught at it. My uncle, on the other hand . . . he’s a crack shot.”
He gazed at her for a long, steady moment. She felt color rise to her face. It wasn’t shame that made her blush. Her entire life, she had been a criminal’s daughter, a criminal’s niece. But she’d always wished to be more. To be seen as more—and never as much as by this man, God save her.
He leaned forward and kissed her mouth. His lips felt gentle, questing, as though they searched for an answer to some question that could not be put into words. When he drew back, he said, “You’ve come very far. It’s a testament to you. Your wit and your courage.”
What a miraculous interpretation. She bit her lip to stop a smile. Then she reached for his necktie, fumbling with the knot.
She sensed his gaze on her face, but she could not meet it. She concentrated instead on the knot, acutely aware of how her fingers trembled.
The knot yielded. Silk whispered across cotton as she pulled the tie free. She opened his collar, baring his throat, then leaned forward and kissed the corded muscle.
He hissed out a breath. She looked up into his eyes. “A hero called me courageous,” she said. “It seems he was right.”
“Ah. A hero.” He reached for her hand, laid it on his thigh. Slowly he set to unbuttoning her sleeve. “Is that what you see in me?”
“No. When I think of a hero, I think of some distant figure from the newspapers—some upright stranger who gives boring speeches.”
He smiled faintly, his attention on his work. “Then you have it right. He’s a stranger to me, too, this idiot from th
e poem.” He rubbed his thumb across the tender skin of her inner wrist, then lifted it to his face, inhaling deeply. “That charge at Bekhole,” he murmured against her wrist. “It was a desperate gamble. Not a choice, not an act of courage, nothing borne of ideals. My aim was to live. I hoped we would kill more of them than they killed of us. And so we did. Turn around,” he added softly.
Butterflies fluttered in her stomach. She resettled herself. “That isn’t fair to you.”
His mouth touched her bare nape. Her eyes drifted shut. His fingers skimmed down her back; her gown began to loosen. “What difference does it make?” he asked. “I have an entire country to applaud me, if I need it.” His hands worked now at the laces of her corset. “Peculiar, though.” His voice was growing husky. “The admirers all ask the same questions. Was it very horrible? Do you think on it often?” Cold air whispered against the top of her spine. His lips found the spot, a teasing kiss far too brief for her liking. “I know what they want to hear. I tell them: No. Not so very bad. I don’t think on it much at all. And they call it a brave face, and applaud me again. But there’s no bravery involved there, either. I’m only speaking the truth.”
“But that’s a blessing,” she said. “To be able to forget.” One that she envied. The darkness would not frighten her, if only she could forget what it meant to be trapped in it, alone.
The corset loosened quite suddenly. His knuckles brushed the length of her exposed spine, pausing to massage her lower back. “But I don’t forget,” he said. “I remember Bekhole very well. The blood and the fear. The way I had to steady my voice during my instructions to the men. My envy . . .” His hand stilled. “My envy for a stray tree, its leaves shaking in the wind. The only tree on that field. That it could stand amid so much slaughter without fear . . . I longed to be that tree. Or to protect it, for nobody else would.”
Clutching the gown to her chest, she twisted back. She caught the quirk of his lips before he shook his head. “The scrubbiest little tree,” he said. “But I felt the oddest anxiety that it should not be destroyed.”
“And was it?”
“Of course.” He caught her hand, gently tugging it loose. The neckline sagged. He made a low sound in his throat, unmistakable approval. “Leveled by cannon shot.”
She shivered.
“You’re cold? Come here.” He drew her into his side, his arm around her shoulders. Her cheek pressed against his chest. For a moment, as he idly stroked her arm, they sat in a companionable silence, the fall of her gown arrested only by the pressure of their bodies pressed together. “No,” he said at length, “the tree didn’t make it. But when I do dream of the war . . . I dream only of that tree. Of my failure to save it. It had grown there for decades, untouched. Perhaps it bore fruit. Its world, its concerns, had no bearing on ours. It was innocent. But we destroyed it, regardless.”
“You . . . grieve for the tree?”
“Yes, well.” He angled a crooked smile down at her. “I never said it made sense.”
She reached up to touch his face. That wicked scar that came so close to his beautiful eye. “How did you get this?”
She felt his jaw tighten. “A man gave it to me.”
“I didn’t imagine it was self-inflicted.”
“Lilah.” He pulled away. “I tell you what I can. Where I’m silent, it’s for your sake. You are the one I’m protecting here.”
His words shot a powerful current through her, more elemental than even desire. Protect me, yes. “So you know my worst secret, but I’m to be spared yours?”
“Your worst secret.” She could not read his expression. “Was that all?”
Stung, she pulled up her neckline. He diminished the effort it had taken her to tell him. “Do you require all the bloody details? How low must I paint myself?”
“You think you’ve painted yourself low? Because you’ve stolen, now and then. Because you were born to a family you would not have chosen.”
She opened her mouth, then shut it. His question felt like a trap. “Do you mean to say you don’t think me so very bad?”
He made a noise of amusement, low and husky. It startled her. And then, in conjunction with his slight, growing smile, it seemed to brush across her skin like fingertips, stirring a thrill that made her stomach dip.
“Well,” she said, barely audible, “I am a thief, you know.”
“Very bad,” he murmured. “Irredeemably wicked.” He leaned forward, brushing a strand of hair from her cheek. “J’accuse. You say I am hard on myself. But you’re no different in that, Lilah.”
Her brain was broken. It interpreted his expression as tender and affectionate. The way he looked at her made her chest heavy and full, so she could not breathe.
“If you think me better than a thief,” she whispered, “then you really have no cause to blackmail me, you know.”
“So I don’t. Look where you laid my tie. Those are for you.”
She had ignored the documents. But now, as she stood and nudged aside the neckcloth, she recognized the shape of the papers. She flipped them over, then looked back at him, amazed. “But I haven’t . . .”
He rose. “You’ll take them back to London,” he said quietly. “Tomorrow. Your obligations here are done.”
Back to London. What a curious sensation, to have such a great weight removed so suddenly, without warning. Her troubles with Nick were over. She would be free of this nightmare. And . . . free of Palmer, too. Her blackmailer. The only man who would ever know her truly—who would recognize her as the girl who had climbed out of Whitechapel into the marbled halls of Everleigh’s.
A testament, he had called that.
She did not want to leave him just yet. “You go too easy on me,” she said softly. “Won’t you demand anything else before I go?”
His fingertips settled against her cheek, five points of infinitely light contact, which seemed to electrify her whole body. “Yes. I think I will.”
“Then take it.”
His eyes narrowed. That was all the warning he gave her before he pounced. His hands at her waist, strong and commanding, lifted her; he carried her across the room.
By the window sat a low daybed, fashioned in a much earlier age, when women’s panniers had spread six feet across. He laid her down there. Stripped off her dress with quick, sure movements. She made no sound. Simply watched him. She had made her choice.
He reached across her, toward the knife he’d laid down earlier when he’d disarmed himself. It felt right to turn for him, to let him cut her free of her underlinens. If he asked, she would bare her throat for him tonight. He knew her. He could do as he pleased.
The blade clattered as it landed in some distant corner. He looked her over, his nostrils flaring. She recognized his expression. Desire and fury were not so different. Both burned. She reached for him, but he shook his head, a small, precise tic.
“I’ll look, first.” His words were rough. He caught her arms and laid them above her. Then, with the back of his hand, he traced down her body. The base of her throat. The swell of her naked breasts. He took an audible breath as he passed over her nipples, which peaked for him. She shifted, restless beneath his devouring gaze, and saw how it affected him; the tensing of his jaw, the ruthlessness that came into his face.
“For weeks now,” he said, his voice almost soundless, “I have made love to you in my mind. But I did not . . .” He placed his thumb in her navel, his mouth a hard line. “I did not do your body justice.” His hand skated down to her hipbone; he gripped her there as he leaned down to take her nipple in his mouth.
No gentleness. She wanted none. His lips closed around her, a hard, sucking pressure. Her body replied, clamoring in pulsing throbs as he laved her. His other hand charted the fullness of her hip, massaged the back of her thigh.
Her hands found their own mind. They landed on his hard waist, clutching at the fabric that kept his skin from hers. “Take this off.” That was her voice. “Do it.” She would have her fill of him. No
posturing, no disguises.
He retreated, straddling her with his knees as he ripped off the offending layers. She understood then why he’d castigated his own fantasies. She’d dreamed of his body—she had imagined she knew its shape. But laid bare, his chest was broader, more powerfully developed than she’d guessed. She reached up to touch it, smoothing her palms over the sparse blond hair, then lower, to the animal flex of muscle in his abdomen. She hooked her fingers in the waistband of his trousers. The front was now tented so prominently that she hesitated, a moment’s fear fracturing her desire.
His hand caught hers. “Go ahead,” he said very softly. “Take what you want.”
Yes. She wanted this. The buttons looked complicated. But there was no lock, no fastening she could not coax open. She fumbled once, then figured out the way of it. The first button yielded. Then the second. The heel of her hand brushed the head of his cock, and he hissed out some unintelligible sound, a spell perhaps, for it triggered a wash of heat through her. She quickened her work. Now the third button. The fourth, ah, God, he was large; the trousers yielded and she pressed her palms to his lean flanks, smoothing over the hot muscled density of his hips as she shoved off the trousers.
His thighs were brawny, strapped with muscle. And what lay between them . . .
She laid her hand against his cock. The thick, solid length of him.
He groaned. Caught her hand and pulled it free. He laid his large body down onto her, a heavy hard weight that trapped her with his cock pressed between them, an inch shy of where she needed it. She squirmed, trying to twist herself into position, but he breathed, “No.” Then his hand slid through her hair. Hooking it in a strong grip, he pulled her head back, so he looked into her eyes.
“Tell me your name,” he said.
She stared up at him, panting. “Please.”
He adjusted his hips, so the head of his cock pressed solidly against the opening of her quim. “Your name.”
Yes. Yes, that was where she’d wanted him. “Lilah,” she gasped.
His hand tightened in her hair. It should have pained her. But in this terrible state, strung on the edge of need, it registered only as another kind of pleasure, fierce and sweet. “Your real name,” he ground out.
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