by Zoë Archer
To his surprise, this evening he learned that his young, aristocratic wife was neither of these things.
“Why not invest everything into a single trade?” she asked, pouring him another glass of Bordeaux. “Concentrate all your interests in the development of a single product—perhaps even fund its advancement.”
“Limiting one’s investment into only one commodity means disaster comes when that trade fails.”
“It might not fail, though, and the lion’s portion of its profits go to you.”
His smile was fashioned from witnessing many a disaster. Mr. Holliday’s gift showed him nothing else. “At one time or another, most everything fails.”
“How grim.”
“Many things are.” But not this conversation. For the past hour, as Anne had plied him with a cold supper, she had asked him many questions about his endeavors in Exchange Alley. She knew little of business, nor how one might buy and sell shares of things that only existed in theory, yet her mind had proved agile and eager for information.
Even the other Hellraisers had not shown as much interest or enthusiasm for his work.
Candlelight gilded her smooth face and the soft expanse of skin above the neckline of her peach silk gown, and her eyes were emerald one moment, topaz the next. He watched her hands as they floated over her wineglass, lively as birds.
Desire surged, low and tight in his belly. Pleasant in its demand and, surprisingly, pleasant in its deferral. He liked feeling it, the anticipation of what might be. For a long time, he had wanted certainties about the future, and thanks to the Devil, there were things about the future he knew with absolute authority. So he actually enjoyed not knowing entirely what the next few moments, or days, might bring. Including the pleasure of his wife’s body as he came to know her heart and mind.
“Thus the necessity for diversification.” He swirled the wine in his glass, fashioning a small vortex. “If a cotton mill burns down, or the canal bringing iron becomes impassable, I have other sources of income.”
“Yet any one of those ventures is also vulnerable to misfortune.”
“Never the ones in which I invest.” He could say this assuredly.
She tilted her head to one side, considering. “Never?”
“Not a one. So you’ve no fear of becoming destitute.”
Her laugh was unexpectedly low and husky, sensuous for all its innocence. “I’ve already been destitute. I have no fear of that condition. But,” she continued, “how is it that none of your investments suffer disappointment? If what you have said is true, that most everything meets with failure at some point, you must be either very sagacious or very lucky.”
“A compound of both.” The Devil’s gift remained a secret known only to him and the other Hellraisers. As far as Anne and the rest of the world understood, the Devil was an abstract, an idea preached about on Sundays and on street corners, but never truly believed as real. If he told Anne of what had transpired beneath a Roman ruin three months earlier, she would have him committed to Bedlam. There was nothing to be gained by telling her.
No, she could not know. Her learning about his magic would jeopardize this tentative connection growing between them, and he found—to his surprise—he valued that connection too much to place it at risk.
“So it was luck and wisdom that saw you from a saddler’s son to ...” She waved her hand at the parlor, its walls covered in ivory damask, gilded carvings adorning the mirrors, moldings, and sconces. In truth, he found the style of the room to be oppressively ornate, but had permitted the designer to decorate the whole house as he pleased. Naturally, the man had employed the most expensive designs and artisans.
Leo had been home too infrequently to be bothered. So long as his house had displayed his wealth, he did not care.
Now, however, seeing Anne like a bryony amongst rotten hothouse roses, he found that he did.
Abruptly, he got to his feet. Anne blinked up at him in confusion, until he came around to pull out her chair. “This room feels choked. There’s a garden out back. At least,” he amended, “I believe there is one.”
“It has paths and a fountain, though it is a little barren so early in the year.” She rose, and he caught her scent of green meadow and young woman.
He had an urge to place his mouth at the juncture of her neck and her shoulder. But it was too soon. Instead, he strode to the door and said to the footman waiting outside, “Have Mrs. Bailey’s maid fetch a cloak for her mistress. And don’t light torches in the garden.” After the glare of indoors, he wanted the darkness.
He turned back to Anne. “You don’t mind.” Leo realized he spoke this more as a directive than a question, but he wanted out of this room, out of the house. And he wanted her with him.
“I often walked in the garden at night. After the chaos of the day, it gave me some peace.”
He would scarce recognize peace if it shot him in the face.
In a moment, Anne’s maid appeared with a sapphire woolen cloak. Leo took the cloak from the maid, dismissing her with a nod. He stepped close to Anne and, with a flourish, draped the garment around her slim shoulders. A flush of awareness pinked her cheeks as he worked the fastening at her throat. Good. He wanted her affected by him, for he found himself growing more and more responsive to her.
Claiming his glass of wine, he offered her his arm. Her fingers rested lightly on his sleeve. Had his other hand not been occupied with his glass, he would have clasped her fingers closer. A testing, to see whether she would retreat, or push forward. Yet without the slightest provocation on his part, her hold became more secure, fingers curving with purpose around his forearm.
Desire knifed through him. He mentally shook himself. I’m a sodding boy again. A time in his life when just the fan of a girl’s eyelash could rouse his cock. Now, years later, only the firmer press of Anne’s fingers on his arm caused him to respond.
“Comfortable?” He wasn’t.
At her nod, they walked downstairs and then out together. Brittle air scented with smoke and fog bit at exposed skin, but after the close heat of indoors, Leo welcomed the bite. He led her down pathways paved with crushed shells. Accustomed more to purposeful striding than a placid stroll, Leo forced himself into an even, steady pace, feeling the cold air abrade his lungs.
Bare-branched privet hedges squatted beside the path, and Leo could just make out in the darkness the skeletal arms of espaliered fruit trees reaching toward the sky. He tried to remember what might grow in the neat rectangular beds and found that he could not.
“In the spring, this will be a very pretty spot.” Anne spoke softly, a deference to night and its muted expectation. “Broom, and Sweet William, and candytuft. The pear trees will have lovely white flowers.”
It was the first he knew of it, or even what fruit the trees might bear.
“We had no garden,” he said. “The saddlery shared a common yard with a potter and a chandler, and we lived behind the shop. The yard was just that, a square of dirt. It smelled of wax, clay, and leather.”
“That’s where you played?”
He snorted. “No play. From the time I could hold a pair of shears, I helped my da. Schooling first, then work. Da wanted to be sure I knew my letters. He didn’t, not until he reached four and forty.”
Leo had never spoken of this to anyone, not even Edmund or Whit. They knew many aspects of his low birth, but never such intimate details, and it surprised Leo that he talked so openly to Anne now. The false affinity created by darkness.
As if sensing this, a cloud over the moon abruptly shifted and icy light spilled into the garden, washing away the intimate dark. In the light, he felt exposed, the distance between him and his wife all too evident. Moonlight drove them apart, for now he had nowhere to hide.
He cursed himself for being so unguarded. Surely she’d mock him for being the son of an illiterate. He readied for her cutting words, telling himself that he didn’t care what she thought of his humble blood.
“Y
our father must have taught himself,” she said instead.
Leo’s steps slowed a little, surprised by her response. “He did. Sat at the kitchen table with a hornbook, struggling to sound out the Lord’s Prayer.”
“With such a determined son, I expect no less from the father.” Esteem warmed her voice.
Leo felt as though he’d taken a punch to the chest. To steady himself, he took a drink of wine. He had expected bafflement from her, or outright disdain. But not this ... admiration. Especially not in the clarity of a barren, moonlight-blasted garden. Yet she saw him fully, and liked what she saw.
“No one more determined than Adam Bailey,” he said after a moment. “Was as determined.” Leo’s father had died as he lived: working. Always wanting more. A trait shared by his only living son.
Leo had advantages his father did not. More wealth, a greater understanding of the exigencies of business. And magic, given to him by the Devil.
Leo would use his every power to seize whatever he wanted.
As if frustrated by the growing bond between him and Anne, clouds slid across the face of the moon, blotting out its light. The garden sank back into darkness.
“Fifteen shillings a week. That’s what he made.” The same amount Leo carried in his pocket wherever he went. “Hardly more than subsistence.”
“Something altered your circumstances.”
“A rich man’s fancy.” The irony hardly escaped him.
“He gave my father a commission. A bloody big commission that meant pulling me from school so I could help complete it in time. The man wanted a dozen racing saddles. And he wanted them within a month. So we made the damned things, my father, my mother, and me. I was ten at the time. We had to hire the coffin-builder’s wagon to make the delivery.” Sometimes he woke from dreams to find his fingers holding a phantom awl.
“The man must have been quite fond of horseflesh,” Anne murmured.
“He owned two horses only, to pull his carriage. Said that he’d been thinking about taking up racing, and wanted to be prepared, should he ever indulge the whim.”
Anne’s laugh was wry. “No wonder you think all noblemen are fools.”
He stopped and faced her. “I never said that.”
“Those words specifically? No.” Some light escaped the house, tracing the line of her cheek and curve of her ear as she stared up at him. Her gaze was alert, unblinking. “Yet it’s there, just the same. Your opinion of the upper classes is ... low.”
“They haven’t given me much cause to believe otherwise.” Memories of university lacerated him. He still heard the taunts of the noblemen and gentlemen commoners, how they’d called him scum and upstart vulgarian and emptied their chamber pots onto his bed when he was out attending the classes they disdained. The burning shame of those days still charred him around the edges.
He had returned home after one term, swearing never to go back. After that, he had worked beside his father once more, only by then work meant not the saddlery but Exchange Alley.
She dropped her gaze, yet only slightly, before looking up again. “So, those of noble birth are all the same person wearing different masks?”
Her voice held a bite, faint, but there, and he respected her for it.
“There are ... exceptions.”
“And I am indeed grateful you made an exception for me.” She moved away from him. “I find myself chilled. I’ll return inside.”
He caught her wrist as she turned, and drew her back. “Neither of us is who others suppose us to be.”
She gave this consideration, which was more than he had given her. “These past few days have been educational.”
“For both of us.” He still believed most aristos to be spoiled buffoons, but he was sage enough to admit when there was something to learn. Mostly, he was learning the intricacies of his wife. “Stay out here with me. Please,” he remembered to add.
Her wrist slid from his grasp, and for a moment, he thought she would storm back into the house. Instead, she looked pointedly at his arm, which he offered. She accepted, and they resumed their stroll, with the sounds of crunching shells beneath their feet and the distant tolling of Saint George’s bell marking the hour.
Ten o’clock. Bram would be at the Snake and Sextant, the usual meeting place for the Hellraisers before they ventured out for the night’s exploits. Edmund went out seldom, now that he had the wife he had coveted. John often had dealings at Whitehall that kept him late. Which meant that Bram was alone. Unless Leo joined him.
He waited for the feeling of restlessness that always presaged his evening entertainment. The need to do and see more and more. An unceasing appetite for the pleasures afforded by wealth.
Part of him felt he should go, merely on principle. Prove to himself that marriage had not changed him, nor the essence of himself.
Yet jagged and uncertain their conversations might be, he found himself enjoying Anne’s company. He liked talking with her. If he required a rationale, he could tell himself that he merely wanted to speed up the process of rogering his wife. And he did want that. But she was more than a receptacle or ornament. A person. Entire and genuine. Soft, but not fragile. Innocent, yet not immature.
There could be much more to Anne than he had first accounted—a thought both alarming and intriguing.
Since the subject seemed to interest her, he said, “The money my father earned from the commission was substantial. More than he could make in a year. But he didn’t put it back into the saddlery. He invested it instead. In a shipment of Indian cotton.”
“I didn’t realize saddle makers knew so much of overseas trade.”
“They don’t. My father would go to the pub and have someone read him the newspaper. Got his imagination sparked by tales of wealthy nabobs and all the faraway places making such wondrous things. He wanted to be a part of that.”
“It was a bold thing to do,” Anne said quietly. “Invest when he had so little experience with it.”
“The neighbors called him a fool for pissing away a year’s earnings, and all for a bit of Oriental cloth. Their smirks died when he earned thrice what he had invested.”
“What a fine day that must have been for you.” She smiled.
He remembered it vividly. The letter that came from London. Leo reading the letter aloud as his father stared at the banknotes stacked on their single, rough table. His mother’s tears. And his father’s vow that he would invest again, and again, until they could have butter on their bread and fresh tea in their cups. His father had contracted a sickness that day, a sickness for the future. Leo caught it, too. A fever in his blood, one he hoped would never be cured.
“By the time I was fifteen,” he said, “we were more than comfortable. We were rich. And every day, I grow richer.”
“Gaining you everything you want.”
He chuckled at that. “There is always more.”
“Never enough?” She glanced up at him through her lashes.
“When I become the wealthiest man in England, perhaps then.” But he doubted it. He stiffened when he caught the soft music of her chuckle. “You think my ambition ridiculous.”
She shook her head. “You mistake me. My laughter is for the peculiarities of circumstance. Yesterday, I found myself married to a man I barely know. And today, I learn that this man and I share something unexpected.”
“We share a name now.” And a bed, though they had only slept in this bed.
“Something else. For I realized just now”—she moved to stand before him—“that the saddler’s son and the poor baron’s daughter are more than husband and wife.” A rueful smile curved her lips. “We have both stood outside the assembly hall, watching the dancers.” She glanced toward the house. “Now it’s time to go inside.”
Chapter 5
After the revelations of the evening, Anne had anticipated Leo might press the moment and claim his husbandly rights. A shivering sense of excitement and apprehension had accompanied her over the course of the ni
ght, that uneasy comingling of want and fear. Yet when they had lain side by side in bed, he had done nothing more than kiss her cheek before turning over and falling quickly, deeply asleep.
Leaving her again to stare off into the darkness, her mind churning.
This morning, she heard him stir, and the quiet exchange between him and his valet. She sat up when Spinner left the chamber.
“Did I wake you?” Leo frowned in concern as he tugged on the cuffs of his dark blue coat. Its slim cut emphasized the leanness of his form, the breadth of his shoulders, and with the early morning light seeping in beneath the curtains, he was a crisp, handsome herald of day.
I cannot believe I am married to this man.
“Last night gave me much to think about,” she said.
He drifted closer to the bed. She felt acutely conscious of her rumpled nightgown, her state of near undress, when he had armored himself in impeccable tailoring. She sat in bed, whilst he stood. Their inequality unsettled her.
“I would like to help,” she said.
“Help.” He spoke the word as if uncertain of its meaning.
She made herself meet his gaze. “You and I, we’re not precisely desirables amongst the ranks of Society. I have breeding and connection, but no wealth. You have fortune, but no pedigree. Each of us with something the other lacks. Before we wed, I was apprised by my father of the monthly allowance you settled on me.” The amount still stunned her. She could not possibly spend it within the course of twelve months, let alone one. “So you have given me what I lacked before our marriage, and I want to do the same for you.”
He raised a brow. “I want nothing given from obligation.”
“Not obligation—a desire to help.” She fought frustration. What a stubborn man, determined to see everything as a battle. “There are men of the gentry with whom you could form connections. Men of power and influence.”
“I know many of those men, and they’re little willing to accept me as one of theirs.”
“It’s in the approach. If you go at them head-on, they become cornered dogs, snarling and bristling. But a slower side advance might yield better response. Perhaps not a tail wagging, but at least a tentative sniff. That is far better than a bite.”
