What would be worse? To know she lived close? Or across a continent?
He reached out and covered the hand working tangles into her hair with his own, wanting to soothe whatever anxiety caused her to fidget.
“I never would have hurt you, Nora.” It needed to be said. He couldn’t fathom the reason, but there it was.
She faced him, the lamps glimmering off a sheen of moisture in her eyes as her hand stilled beneath his. “I’ve never feared you for a moment.”
No creature should be so soft. So inviting.
The air thickened between them and Titus didn’t know how they’d come to be closer to one another. Couldn’t say which one of them had stepped forward to close the gap.
“Nora?”
Her tongue darted out, glossing her lips. “Yes?”
“If you knew what I’d become? If you’d seen this place and realized what I could have eventually offered you…would you still have thrown me out that night?”
He watched her features crumple and immediately regretted the question. Even though she’d been cruel in their past. Even though she’d been so contaminated by disgrace in the eyes of society for all her supposed misdeeds.
Even though he’d never truly forgiven her…
It seemed he’d still rather tear at his own skin than cause her pain.
To his surprise, her fingers laced with his and she pressed lips as plush and smooth as petals to knuckles still rough from a youth spent in toil.
“Titus…” She swallowed twice before gathering herself to continue. “You were the brightest, best, most brilliant person I’d ever known. That I’d ever even heard of. I always understood you were capable of this and more. I never for a moment questioned that, unless you had the chance taken from you, you would perform miracles. You were born to astonish the world.”
Pleasure shimmered through him at her words, followed by a dart of ire. “Then…why—”
“Titus?”
At the sound of his name, so familiar on another woman’s lips, he dropped Nora’s hand just in time for the bedroom door to open.
Revealing Mrs. Annabelle Rhodes.
Tossing her abundant copper curls, Annabelle pressed a hand to the deep cleft of her cleavage in a gesture meant to be both enticing and astonished. “It’s been a month of Wednesdays since you’ve taken me up on my…invitations.”
“Annabelle,” he growled.
She drew her generous bottom lip between her teeth, her green eyes already hungrily devouring him. “Since you claimed to be too busy to leave your lair, I decided to join you in it. To steal whatever moments you can spare. I’ve been famished for—”
“Annabelle,” he forced her name through his teeth. “I did not give you a key so you could—”
As she advanced out the door, she finally noticed he wasn’t alone. Her eyes narrowed as she drew her gaze up and down Nora’s dressing gown.
“Titus…who is this?”
“I’m no one, I assure you,” Nora said from beside him, turning the arm in the sling to the light. “Merely a patient.”
“A patient, you say?” Annabelle planted her fists on her buxom hips. “Then what are you doing in the doorway to his bedroom this time of the evening?”
Titus opened his mouth to put Annabelle in her place, but Nora stepped in front of him. “I’m Nora,” she introduced herself in an endlessly pleasant voice. So cultured. So practiced. So false. “Dr. Conleith is an old friend of the family. I’ve been prevailing upon his hospitality whilst visiting London, but I’ll be leaving in the morning when my family arrives to collect me.”
Would she?
Annabelle’s features positively melted with delight, and then sobered when she realized that it was her in the scandalous position. “Oh. Well… I’m also a patient, or rather, my husband was. He died. Not for any lack of expertise on the part of—”
“I understand,” Nora said, rather kindly, he thought, under the circumstances. “I’ll bid you both goodnight.”
“But…” Titus made to take her elbow, but she backed out of his reach. She’d been sleeping in his chamber, the door of which was filled by his current mistress.
“Until tomorrow.” She smiled pleasantly and curtsied with enough grace to please the Queen, before she turned away.
But not before Titus spied the falter in her smile. The crack in her façade.
Then, with her back as straight as any royal, she glided down the corridor and disappeared into the guest room furthest away from his chamber. Shut the door.
And locked it.
Wild Beasts and Savages
Had they? Or hadn’t they?
The question burned a hole into Nora’s brain through the entirety of the night. Slowly. Torturously. Like the dedicated beam of sunlight a cruel child would direct through a magnifying glass at an insect.
Nora did her level best to concentrate on the conversation with Chief Inspector Morley. She knew it was important, that it had to do with her immediate future.
But how could she focus on anything else without knowing if Titus had been inside his mistress last night?
The woman hadn’t stayed over—thanks be to God—but neither had she promptly taken her leave. She’d remained shut in Titus’s chambers for exactly forty and seven minutes.
Long enough for a frenzied tryst, though Nora heard no evidence of pleasure.
Thank heavens for small mercies; that might have done what the bullet had failed to and finished her off entirely.
Titus had not come to her after Annabelle left, and she hadn’t truly expected him to. She had no claim upon his time, let alone his heart.
Or his body.
His lovely, long-limbed, exquisitely sculpted body.
But a kiss had haunted the space between them before they’d been interrupted. Or had she conjured that through wishful thinking?
Nora hadn’t imagined the rather unmistakable outline of his aroused sex pressing against the fitted fabric of his trousers. His physique had been as taut and strong as she remembered, and responded to the feel of her just as it once did.
With hard male need.
And his dratted mistress had been served up to him on a buxom platter, all pouty lips and giant bosoms, apparently famished for him.
For his cock. That was what she’d been about to say…
Had he given it to her?
“Lady Woodhaven?”
Nora blinked against the late-morning light streaming in through the parlor window, somehow blindingly bright even though the sky was a dull silver-grey. She realized she squeezed the handle of her porcelain teacup hard enough to shatter it, and set it back on the delicate saucer.
“Forgive me, Chief Inspector, I haven’t been sleeping. Could you repeat the question?”
Morley cleared his throat and divested himself of his coat. Draping it across the back of the gold damask chaise, he tugged at the thighs of his trousers to perch on the edge.
He assessed her from beneath brows only slightly darker blond than the hair he kept ruthlessly short and elegant, no doubt in a ploy to soften the brutal angles of his features. If there were a more perfect man for Prudence, she’d dare the devil to find him. He was all hard jaw and starched collars, where her sister was flowing ribbons and soft smiles.
She hoped he made Pru happy. He certainly seemed to.
“I asked if the Fauves means anything to you.” He kept his question measured, but she had the impression he evaluated every single aspect of her reaction.
She searched her memory. “A French word, isn’t it? Meaning beast? Wild beast?”
“What about Raphael Sauvageau?”
She shook her head. “Was William working for him?”
“My investigation has borne out that his is the fist tightening around the black market these days. And, for a while, his men were watching your house, and mine.” His expression flattened to patently grim. “It seems you were wise to go into hiding as, the deeper I dig into this brigand’s machinations, th
e more concerned I become. His gang of degenerates call themselves the Fauves.”
“Have you connected him to my—to William somehow?” She’d stopped thinking of him as her husband ages ago.
Morley rubbed at his brow as if erasing a headache. “Several nights ago I—apprehended one of his men and gleaned that cocaine is the least of Sauvageau’s concerns. As he told it, a shipment of unminted gold from America went missing while in your husband’s possession. Sauvageau is lying in wait, it seems, certain that much gold can’t stay hidden for long. To spend it, someone must smelt it. And if it were in your possession and you sold it…your influx of fortune would become readily apparent. I imagine that’s why he’s watching you.”
“Well I’m in no danger of a fortune, apparent or otherwise.” Nora put her tea and saucer back on the tray table at her elbow, and then smoothed the skirt of her cotton frock over her knees with a wry sound. “Do you remember at the docks, before I was…” She cleared her throat. “William was frantic over a missing crate. He was going to take Prudence and me somewhere downriver.”
Morley shifted with consternation, turning to look out the window toward the district over which Harrods gleamed above London’s wealthy merchant class. “I’d give my eyeteeth to know where the crate is now,” he muttered as if to himself. He glanced back at her, his glacial eyes softening for a moment. “We haven’t spoken of that day. You must have complicated—even hostile—feelings about what happened. About me.”
“Why would I, Chief Inspector?”
He blinked thrice before answering. “I killed your husband. In front of you.”
Nora shut her eyes.
Not because she harbored any unpleasant feelings… but because she didn’t. Morley had done what she’d fantasized about more than once. What she’d never had the courage to do.
He’d saved Prudence, and for that she’d always consider him a hero.
He apparently mistook her silence for grief. “In my experience, women often still love the husbands who hurt them. Even after they’ve done their worst. There’s no shame in that. I don’t blame you if—”
“I never loved William,” she said vehemently. “Ever. And I will be forever grateful to you for saving my sister’s life. My husband was a monster and, apparently, a killer. When I think of all he did because of me…” Emotion choked the air from her throat and tightened her muscles in such a way that set her shoulder to aching. “I only wish I’d had the courage to put an end to him sooner.”
“You’d have been hanged for murder.”
“Better my life than those of the innocent men he killed.”
He leaned forward as if he meant to offer comfort, and then thought better of it when he caught the look of caution in her eyes.
“What he did to your…lovers, was no fault of yours.” His eyes shifted away. “Tell me to mind my own business, but were you emotionally involved with any of them? Do you have…someone to turn to with your grief? I’ve always found Dr. Conleith to be a keen and considerate confidant—”
“Titus is the last man I’d discuss such matters with.” Nora stood, pacing away from him toward the window, if only to retreat from her guilt.
“They were all kind men, even George, the philandering rake. Hadn’t a mean bone in his body. But I…was with him because I knew I would never feel attachment to a man like him. Likewise, my time with the Stags of St. James was nothing more than selfish pleasure. A diversion I paid for so I wouldn’t have the complication of emotion. None of them meant more to me than what we did in the darkness. Perhaps that makes me a monster, as well.”
She looked at her reflection in the window, a translucent overlay against the skyline, and didn’t recognize herself in it. “I mourn them. They were vital men who once lived, and because of my actions, they no longer do.”
Morley approached her carefully, standing at her shoulder to survey the city he was sworn to protect. “As much as I’m glad I put William in the ground, I perversely understand the primitive need to kill a man for touching the woman you love. Only… most of us don’t follow through on the instinct.”
That he admitted his jealous nature made her smile for Pru’s sake.
“But what I can’t fathom,” he continued, “is how you can love someone and wound them on purpose.”
Titus’s young face flashed before her mind’s eye, his anguished expression at her long-ago cruelty wounding her a thousandfold.
“William only knew how to hurt what he loved,” she said. “He didn’t beat me, per se. Not with fists and rage and the hatred that I see some men unleash upon their wives. His love was obsessive. Cruel. It was as if he wanted to punish me for not loving him back.”
For loving another, she didn’t say.
Suddenly the tableau of the city melted away, and the years she’d spent with a madman played like a stereograph against the grey sky. “He toyed with me endlessly. Isolated me from having friends. Made me pay for every moment I didn’t spend with him, even when I took a day out with my family. He would profess his effusive love for me, threatening to kill himself if I couldn’t summon warmth for him. And then, when I tried, he would see through my pantomime of affection and would tell me how easy it would be to hurt me while I slept. Would explain in graphic detail what ways he fantasized about torturing me. Terror was his weapon of choice. There were weeks I didn’t sleep for fear of what he’d do, certain that this was the moment he’d finally lose what was left of his mind.”
“It is unfathomable that there is no legal recourse for such behavior.” Morley’s voice was a tangle of frustration, the heat of his breath lightly fogging the window in front of him. “I don’t wish to prod at bruises, but William mentioned that he hurt you…physically. Was that a lie?”
Nora shifted with distress, but for some reason she wanted to say it. To tell someone what the last decade had been like without worrying about their resulting emotions. Morley was a perfect recipient of such information. He wasn’t a squeamish man. He dealt with the worst humanity had to offer on a daily basis. And he’d secret shadows in his eyes that had been put there by someone volatile. Though it was difficult to imagine what could strike fear into a dominant, confident man like him, she knew he understood her sense of helplessness.
“William used to tell me he would someday disfigure me, but he never so much as slapped my face. He would throw things. Break things. He tripped me a few times, once halfway down the stairs. He’d push me into the sharp side of a table or a doorframe. It was all so childish, so retributive.” She swallowed a familiar rise of revulsion. “Sometimes, he would hurt me at night…when we were together. If only to elicit a response from me, he’d say. It was the guilt he felt later that disgusted me the most. The weeping. The begging of my forgiveness.”
“Christ,” Morley hissed, his fists tightening at his sides. “It’s no wonder to me, that you sought comfort in the arms of other men.”
“Comfort was always elusive,” she sighed. “But sometimes I found escape.”
Her surprise at his easy acceptance of her scandalous behavior caused her to study him more closely. “How very progressive of you, Chief Inspector, to be so compassionate, even when my shame is another mark on your own wife’s reputation. All of England knows I paid the Stags of St. James for pleasure. Even though innumerable men openly keep mistresses and courtesans at their disposal or wile their nights away in brothels, it seems a woman’s desire is not to be tolerated.”
He let out a rather undignified snort, a ribbon of color peeking above his collar and crawling toward his cheeks. “I’m hardly one to throw stones, my lady, glass houses and all that. Surely you know how Prudence and I met.”
As if summoned by her name on his lips, Prudence threw the parlor door wide and swept in like an errant ray of sunshine in her buttercup yellow gown. “Look who I found lurking outside of the door,” she said airily, leading an obviously reluctant Titus into the room by his elbow. “He said your stitches come out today, isn’t that marvelo
us?”
“I was waiting for your conversation with Morley to finish,” he muttered.
It only took one look into his blazing eyes to know that he’d overheard everything.
“I wish I had more to report,” Morley lamented. “Raphael Sauvageau is in the wind as far as we know, but I have my best men on it.”
“I have it on good authority that even the Knight of Shadows is searching for him,” Prudence said with a conspiratorial gesture.
Morley sent his wife a quelling look. “We have no reason to believe that you’re in immediate danger, as you are not spending a gangster’s gold. However, it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to remain here for the foreseeable future, if we might prevail upon the good doctor’s generosity for a few days more.” He turned to Titus with a familiar smile, one that stalled when he glimpsed his high color, tense jaw, and the dangerous gleam in his eye. “Unless…”
“Consider my generosity extended,” Titus clipped, setting his medical bag on a decorative table with more force than was necessary.
Morley glanced back and forth between them for a moment, his shrewd gaze narrowing with suspicion and no little amount of concern. “Are you quite certain that—?”
“She stays.” The way Titus stated the directive stirred something low in Nora’s belly. He was a man of unfailing consistency, but something masculine and fierce shimmered in the air around him, even as he stood unnaturally still and contained.
For the first time she could remember, he seemed unpredictable.
It occurred to Nora to be afraid, but the fear never rose within her.
Not of him. Never of him.
Prudence went to her husband and took the arm he offered. “Best we take our leave, darling, so Nora can prepare to have her wound seen to.” She bustled Morley toward the door, but not before arching a meaningful brow at Nora that said she would be asking questions about Doctor Titus Conleith at the first available moment.
“Yes, well, I’ll be in touch.” Morley slapped Titus’s shoulder on the way out, but he didn’t seem to notice.
He just stared at her without blinking, looking for all the world like a man who’d been punched out of the blue, and was shaking off the astonishment before winding up to throw his own fist.
Courting Trouble Page 11
