“We cannot burn the house down. No,” Calliope said sternly when Helena started to argue. “Regardless of what happens, I do not wish any ill will towards Beatrice. And I certainly wouldn’t want her or my aunt to perish in a fire.”
Helena rolled her eyes. “It wouldn’t be a big fire. Just large enough to destroy their most prized possessions.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Fine,” Helena grumbled. “But you’ll be singing a different tune when they throw you out. Which they’re going to do, you know. At the very first opportunity.”
Calliope smoothed a wrinkle on her skirt and sighed. “I know.”
“You can always live here, of course. That goes without question. I’ve several spare rooms. You can take your pick. But just the idea of Beatrice and Lady Shillington getting their hands on what is rightfully yours is unbearable.” Helena made a face. “You’re truly a better person than I for not wishing the pox upon them.”
A tiny smile captured the corners of Calliope’s mouth as she allowed herself to imagine Beatrice’s face covered in red dots. Then she banished the image with a shake of her head as guilt flickered at the edge of her conscience.
She knew her cousin and aunt had treated her unkindly. ‘Unkindly’ being the kindest word she could use. But she’d been thrust upon them without warning. A shy, sheltered child who cried herself to sleep for weeks on end. They could have turned her away ages ago. Sent her to the nearest orphanage and been done with it. Because they hadn’t – or rather, her uncle hadn’t – there was a part of her that would always be grateful even as another part did want them to catch the pox.
It was a feeling that had plagued Calliope for most of her life. Belonging to a family, but not really belonging. Wanting to love them, but not really loving them. Desperate to fit in, but not really fitting in.
Not with the Shillingtons.
Not with High Society.
Not even with herself.
“Being a better person isn’t going to find me a husband,” she murmured, picking at a loose thread on her skirt.
“No,” Helena agreed with hesitation. “Probably not.”
Reaching for a ginger biscuit, Calliope dipped it in her tea to soften the hard dough before shoving the entire sweet in her mouth. But self-pity soured the sugar, and after she’d finished chewing she forced her upper lip to stiffen.
No matter how bad things seemed, she could not allow herself to dwell in sorrow or stuff her face with biscuits. She’d done it once before, and she never wanted to go back to that dark place again. Which was why, when the sharp, all-consuming grief of losing her parents had finally begun to fade, she’d made herself a promise. A promise that no matter what happened, she’d never let herself be consumed by the shadows. Instead she would turn to the light and to hopefulness, even if her situation appeared hopeless.
Especially if it appeared hopeless.
“There must be someone out there who is looking for a wife,” she said with dogged optimism. “Preferably a man who isn’t too old, or too young, and is intelligent and kind.”
Helena lifted a brow. “That’s a rather tall order.”
Calliope blinked. “What part?”
“All of it. But never fear,” Helena said, raising a finger when Calliope’s face fell. “You’ve come to the right place. Or rather, the right person. We’ll find you a husband. A good husband, who will treat you as you should be treated and won’t gamble away your inheritance or spend more nights at the brothel than he does at home.” She hesitated. “Unfortunately, true gentlemen don’t exactly grow on trees. It’s going to take a few days.”
“I only have eighteen of them,” Calliope reminded her.
“Yes, well, that is a problem. Unless…”
“Unless?” she asked expectantly.
Helena nibbled her bottom lip. “Never mind. It would never work. He would never work.”
“Who?” Calliope leaned forward in her chair as a tendril of hope unfurled within her breast like a boat opening its sails and reaching up for the breeze. “Who would never work?”
“He’s a confirmed bachelor,” Helena muttered, speaking more to herself than to Calliope. “Hasn’t attended a ball for years. I don’t know how we’d coax him out. But if he did come, and he saw her…” She lifted her head, a smile slowly dawning. “Do you know, I think I have someone. The perfect someone. But,” she cautioned when Calliope gasped in excitement, “it is not going to be easy to win his favor. He’s a recluse, and a bit of an ogre. But he’s also sinfully handsome, not to mention wealthy, and while he likes to bark, he’s never bitten. I even fancied him myself, a long time ago. Until I discovered he’d rather read a book than attend a ball.” Her nose wrinkled. “I could never marry a man like that.”
Helena was right. He sounded absolutely perfect.
“What is it his name?” Calliope asked breathlessly.
“Leopold Maven…the Earl of Winchester.”
Chapter Three
Helena was right about two things.
Leo was handsome. Sinfully so.
He was also wealthy. Embarrassingly so.
But in terms of his bite, she couldn’t have been more wrong. His teeth were sharp, and he did not hesitate to use them on those who annoyed him, those he despised…and those who refused to leave him to his misery.
“Go away,” he told his valet flatly when the short, thin servant with brown hair he kept neatly combed to the side knocked briskly on the partially opened door to his study.
“There is someone here to see you, my lord.” Robert Corish had worked his way up from a lowly footman to become the Earl of Winchester’s personal valet, and he was immensely proud of his accomplishment. Although it hadn’t come without sacrifice. There was a reason he was the earl’s seventh valet in little under seven years. Leo chewed them up and spit them out with alarming regularity, yet try as he might – and he had tried – he’d been unable to shake Robert loose.
The valet’s family had served the Mavens for nearly a hundred years, and in all that time Robert was the first to rise to the highest rung in the servant hierarchy. With his family depending on him (he had a wife and three grown daughters, all of whom worked in the house in some capacity or another) and his pride on the line, he wasn’t about to be driven out of his position. No matter how much abuse he suffered or how many times Leo threatened to fire him. Which, at last count, hovered somewhere around two hundred and thirty seven.
“Tell them I am not accepting visitors at this time.” Dipping his quill, the earl signed his name with a hard jerk of his wrist before setting the missive aside to dry and reaching for another.
Glancing at the enormous stack of papers sitting in front of his employer, Robert forced back a heavy sigh. It was difficult to watch a man you admired and cared for – Robert did care for Leo, much as a father might care for a wayward son – turn more bitterer and harder with each passing day. With no social life, no friends, and no living family of which to speak, Leo had allowed himself to be consumed with work. It was the only thing he cared about. The only thing that kept him going. And it pained Robert to know that Leo devoted more time and energy into those pieces of paper than he did to any living being. Especially since he’d seen how different the earl had been with his beautiful young wife and son.
A horrible thing, to lose a wife. Even more horrible to lose a child. Robert had never experienced the first but he and Alice had wept over two sons, both stillborn. He did not know what would have happened to him – to them – had they stopped trying for children. His daughters were everything to him, and without their presence, their light and their laughter through the years, he knew he would be a vastly different man than the one he’d become.
Which was why he felt empathy, not anger, towards Leo when he lashed out during one of his dark moods. It was also why he’d stuck loyally by the earl’s side when any other man would have abandoned him to his fate long ago. Because family did not abandon family, and although they di
d not share blood, the Corishs were the only family Leo had left.
“The young lady was quite insistent.” Bracing himself for the inevitable blowback, Robert clasped his hands and squared his shoulders. “She said she was a friend. Her name is…” He paused to consultant the small ivory calling card the woman with the red hair had shoved into his hand before she demanded he ‘march his arse to the study and get Leo out here or else’. Robert didn’t know ‘what else’ meant, but he was surrounded by enough strong women to know better than to challenge such a phrase. “The Countess of Cambridge.”
Leo lifted his head sharply. An untended lock of inky black hair swept over his brow. He shoved it out of the way. “What did you say her name as?”
“The Countess of Cambridge,” Robert said after consulting the card once more to ensure he had the title correct. The fiery young lady pacing a hole in the carpet in the green parlor hardly seemed old enough to be a man’s wife, let alone his widow, but he’d given up on making sense of the ton and their eccentric ways. Marrying because of money instead of love. It just wasn’t proper. But who was he to say anything different? He may have been happily married to the same woman for nearly four decades, but at the end of the day he was just a lowly servant.
And no one – including the Earl of Winchester – wanted to hear his opinion.
“I don’t know anyone by that name. Send her away.” His jaw clenching, Leo picked up his quill and resumed his work.
After a quick glance at the desk to ensure there were not any firearms within reach, Robert remained where he stood and it took less than a minute for the earl to notice his demand was not being followed.
“Is there a problem?” he snapped, thick brows gathering like angry storm clouds above flashing blue eyes. “I told you to send her away, Mr. Corish! What part of that do you not understand?”
“It’s not so much that I don’t understand the order, my lord,” Robert said carefully. “It’s that I don’t know if I should follow it.”
Leo’s eyes narrowed to dangerous slits of ice. “You’re fired. Get of my sight.”
Make that two hundred and thirty eight, Robert thought silently. He still didn’t move. “I am sorry to hear that, my lord. Given there is no one currently on staff qualified to take my place, should I have tea and biscuits sent in to Lady Cambridge before I go? I have a feeling she is going to be here for a while.”
Leo thought about that for a moment. Robert could all but see the gears turning in his head. And it took everything within him not to cross the room and lay a heavy hand on the earl’s shoulder and tell him that everything was going to be all right. That he didn’t have to be so hard all of the time. That if he didn’t learn how to bend, at a least a little, eventually he was going to break. But there were some lines even a personal valet couldn’t cross, and he’d toed the edge of them enough to know that if he showed Leo any warmth or kindness he would be fired for the last time.
“The Countess of Cambridge, you said?”
Robert nodded. “Indeed, my lord.”
“Tiny chit, bright red hair, has feathers or some sort of other lavish adornment sticking out of her head?”
So the duke really did know who the woman in the parlor was.
That was interesting.
Very interesting.
“Indeed, my lord.”
Leo muttered an indecipherable comment under his breath. Robert couldn’t hear what it was, but he knew the duke well enough to know it hadn’t been complimentary. Standing, Leo stalked to his generously appointed liquor cabinet in the corner of the study and poured himself a glass of brandy. He drank it in one swallow before immediately pouring himself another. Studying the amber contents for a moment, he took a small, measured sip and then set the glass down.
“Mr. Cornish, you’re rehired.”
“That’s very considerate of you, my lord.”
Leo’s mouth creased in a humorless smile. “How many does that make it?”
“I’m afraid I have lost count, my lord.”
“Liar. You’ve never lost count of anything in your bloody life.” But the earl didn’t push the issue. Instead he sighed, raked a hand through his hair, and seemed to brace himself as if against an invisible force. “Send her in, Mr. Cornish. Send her in.”
There were four people Leo never expected to see again.
The first two, most obviously, were Heather and Henry. His wife and his child. His sweetheart and his son. His beloved and his little boy. Fever had taken them from him seven years ago, and although he’d prayed and he’d cursed and he’d threatened, nothing he did had brought them back.
The third was his mother. Alive, but as unreachable now as she’d been when she walked out the door and never returned, leaving her husband and eight-year-old son behind.
And the fourth…the fourth was Lady Helena Grisham. Or Cambridge, as it stood now.
Bloody hell. How had he forgotten she’d been married? Married and widowed all in the same breath. Yet when she waltzed into his study with a dead bird hanging off the side of her head – at least he dearly hoped it was dead; one never knew with Helena – she looked exactly as she had all those years ago when they’d shared a kiss at Vauxhall Gardens.
A kiss that had led him to being engaged to Heather.
“Lady Cambridge,” he said, acknowledging her presence with a wary nod. “You look well.”
“Of course I do. I always look well. You, on the other hand, look like absolute shite.” Moving past him in a flurry of violet skirts, she made herself a drink and clinked it against his glass before wandering over to one of the large windows that overlooked a neatly tended side garden.
Everything in his Grosvenor Square manor was neatly tended, from the red roses just beginning to lose their summer shine to the bookcases in the vast library across the hall. Neatly tended, impersonal, and oddly vacant despite all of the expensive trim and furnishings. In that regard, the house shared a common trait with its owner. They were both impeccably groomed on the outside, but if one dared to look closer they’d see there was nothing but emptiness within.
Clicking her nail against the glass, Helena glanced back at him over her narrow shoulder, green eyes impossible to read beneath long auburn lashes. “It’s been a long time, Leo. Too long.”
“Not long enough,” he corrected as he took another sip of his brandy. It slid across his tongue like honey and burned as it went down his throat. But even as hot as it was, the brandy was unable to warm the coldness within him. Nothing could. His heart, once shattered beyond repair, had enclosed itself in a thick block of ice. And there wasn’t anything – not drink, not opium, not even women – that had been able to crack it.
“You’re still mourning them?” Helena’s gaze flicked to the black pelmets draped across the top of the windows, then returned to Leo. A frown hovered in the delicate edges of her mouth. “I’d heard rumors that you’d become a recluse. Shut yourself off from everything and everyone. Now I see they’re more than rumors. Leo, it’s been seven years.”
Temper flashed in his eyes. Temper he used to disguise the pain. “It could be seventy,” he bit out, his voice raw with thinly concealed emotion, “and I’d mourn them still. What do you want, Helena? Why have you come?”
“You owe me a favor.” Her stare traveled with deliberate slowness down his long, muscular frame and then snapped back to his countenance. Her frown deepened. “But now, seeing the state of you, I don’t know if I want to collect it. What happened to you, Leo?”
Death.
Guilt.
Unimaginable loss.
What hadn’t happened to him?
“You know exactly what happened to me.” He started to lift the brandy to his lips, then slammed it back down on the edge of his desk with enough strength to send a spidery web of cracks racing up the side of the glass.
Helena arched a brow.
“Why do I have a feeling you’ve spent an inordinate amount of that fortune of yours on glassware?” she asked.
Glowering, Leo pinned her with a glare that never failed to send full grown men running for cover. Helena just blinked, then tilted her head on a sigh.
“You’re not going to scare me away, if that’s what you’re trying to do. I’ve faced down worse monsters than you. I wasn’t afraid then, and I’m not afraid now.”
“What do you want?” he repeated. “If it’s money, you can have whatever you need.”
He owed her that much, at least. More, for without Helena he wouldn’t have fallen in love with Heather. But she brushed away his offer with an insulted flick of her wrist.
“Please,” she said scornfully. “I’ve more wealth than I know what to do with. Not that it’s any of your business. Unless you know who my benefactor is, in which case you must tell me at once.”
“Your benefactor?” he said, caught off guard. “I just assumed you were–”
“Living off the generosity of my late husband?” Although her mouth was curved in a smile, her eyes were hard as emeralds. “Cambridge left me nothing. Less than nothing, as he made sure to take my pride and innocence with him when he went. But that’s neither here nor there. I told you I came here to collect a favor, and it has nothing to do with money.”
“Favors owed have expiration dates, Helena.”
“These kind don’t.” Her gaze softened. “We’ve both suffered, Leo. You far more than I. The past hasn’t treated either of us kindly, which is why we must look to the future. Why you must look to the future. Heather was my friend, one of my dearest friends, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this isn’t how she would want you to be–”
“Don’t,” he said raggedly, cutting her off before she could spill the words he didn’t want to hear. The words he couldn’t bear to hear. Because he knew this wasn’t what Heather would want for him. She’d want him to be happy. She’d want him to move on. She’d want him to cast aside his misery. But knowing something and actually feeling it wasn’t a distinction he was ready to make.
The Secret Wallflower Society: (Books 1-3) Page 3
