The Rogue's Conquest (Townsend series)

by Maxton, Lily

  “Women don’t attend.”

  “I know. I would like to, though.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…it’s…it’s something you love, isn’t it? I would like to see you doing something you love.” She realized, too late, how ridiculously besotted that made her sound.

  “You can train yourself not to miss things. I’ve done it before and I suspect I’ll do it again.” He caught her gaze and a silence followed that soon turned fraught. “Eleanor.”

  The way he said her name immediately grabbed her attention. It sounded…final. Her pulse quickened. She felt like she was on the edge of a great precipice.

  “Lady Sarah won’t marry me if I’m still prizefighting.”

  Everything inside of her turned to ice. All thoughts of telling him about the Natural History Society fled. All thoughts of finding comfort in him fled. All thoughts fled.

  “You…” Her tongue was thick in her mouth as she tried to find the words. “You still wish to marry her?”

  Still? A world of meaning was contained in that one tiny syllable. After everything between them? After everything she’d hoped for? Her heart wrenched in her chest.

  “If things were different…if I was different…” He broke off, shrugging helplessly, his expression rueful. He made a small, irritated noise. “I’m not. This is…this is all there is for me…this is everything. You understand, don’t you?”

  He sounded a little desperate now, as though he needed her to understand.

  And this was the worst part. She wanted to hate him. She wanted to be able to turn away and not feel like her heart was shattering into a million pieces. But she knew the soul-deep ache of wanting to belong. She knew how hard it was to let go of. They were not so very different, underneath the skin.

  What she didn’t understand was how he couldn’t see that he might belong somewhere else instead.

  “I wish…” Her voice shook, and she ruthlessly smoothed it. She would not fall apart in front of him. She would not cry. “I wish you realized that your everything could be more.”

  He didn’t realize. She could tell from the smooth confusion etched over his face. Oh, James. She felt sorry for him in that instant—he’d been fighting his entire life, for survival, for money, for respect. He couldn’t understand that something could be given without anything being asked in return. He didn’t realize that respect and admiration didn’t have to be earned the hard way to be true.

  “Eleanor,” he repeated, frustrated.

  He’d told her before, it wasn’t about happiness. Whatever they could be to each other, whatever they already were…he didn’t want it. Not enough, anyway. She was a stepping-stone for him, not the destination. And arguing with him would only shred her heart even more.

  So she did the only thing she could do to salvage some small part of herself—she opened her hands and she let him go.

  “I understand,” she said.

  He nodded, but he didn’t look pleased. He just looked…resigned.

  When he leaned forward and brushed his lips against hers, softly, softly, more caress than kiss, she knew it was good-bye. She wanted to savor the kiss, wanted to etch it into her memory, but she had to close her eyelids against the sudden, sharp prick of tears. His mouth was on hers, and all she could focus on was willing herself not to cry, willing her lips not to tremble, willing her lungs to draw breath.

  It was different from their first kiss. It was as gentle and brief as falling rose petals. And just as bittersweet.

  When he was gone, she pressed her fingers to her mouth to feel the fast-fading warmth. She breathed in, short and tremulous, and swallowed against the pressure in her throat. To no avail. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes.

  She stared at the empty doorway for a long time, trying to reconcile herself to his absence. It shouldn’t be this hard. She’d known, since the beginning, what he wanted. He’d never made any secret of it, and Robert was right—he’d never told her he’d changed his mind.

  But still—her hope had been real. And this hollow pain, it was real, too, and sharp.

  She sank down against the wall, curling up her knees to hug them, and that was how Georgina found her a few moments later.

  “Eleanor?”

  “I think I’m broken,” she whispered, rubbing furiously at her tears. They wouldn’t stop. They simply wouldn’t stop. “What sort of mechanism is crying, anyway? What purpose does it serve? It’s a waste of water.”

  Humans were so stupid and so messy.

  And even knowing that, even knowing how stupid and messy and wasteful humans were, when Georgina sank down next to her and wrapped an arm around her, Eleanor couldn’t stop herself from crying harder.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Anticipation was the order of the night. James took his carriage to Lady Sarah’s town house, gray stone and symmetric sash windows and steps leading up to a black door. It looked like every other house in the row, except for the carriages milling about and the people entering.

  If all went according to plan, Lady Sarah would be his wife before dawn broke.

  He’d thought this fact would fill him with joy. All he felt as he sprung down from the carriage was a strange sort of bitter satisfaction. If she agreed to elope, he would be married to the daughter of an earl, the most sought-after woman in Edinburgh. He would possess the wealth of a lord.

  Thomas Clark’s arrival would not matter. James’s dwindling savings, the money he’d spent to pursue Lady Sarah, would not matter, even if his students were gone, even if his source of income was lost.

  None of it would matter, once she married him.

  If Sarah married him, his father could look at him like he was nothing all he wanted, but they would both know it wasn’t the truth.

  He would know it.

  Instead of reveling in this, he kept remembering how soft and sweet Eleanor’s mouth tasted.

  He hadn’t been planning on kissing her—nothing about Eleanor had gone according to plan—but he had anyway, as a sort of good-bye.

  Good-bye kisses were not supposed to make his chest feel like it was going to crack open. Good-bye kisses were not supposed to linger on his lips, as though they were a permanent fixture. Good-bye kisses were not supposed to make him yearn for more kisses.

  And by God, they were certainly not supposed to make him feel like he’d ended something good, something wonderful, before it had even begun. Like he might have said good-bye to the best thing he would ever have.

  They weren’t supposed to ruin him utterly.

  With his heart in his throat, he practically ran up the steps to Lady Sarah’s front door.

  The ball was a crush. The heavy perfumes made his head ache and the press of bodies annoyed him. He felt like pushing people out of the way, but with his strength, he’d probably send them careening into walls, and that wasn’t a very good impression to make on one’s future wife.

  He scanned the drawing room for Sarah, but couldn’t find her. He did, however, see Georgina Townsend chatting amiably with some other guests.

  He frowned, scanning the room again. There was Lady Sarah, entering from another part of the house, probably the retiring room. She looked as beautiful and untouchable as a diamond in a pale-blue silk dress. When she turned her head, jewels glinted in her hair.

  That bitter satisfaction rose in him again, even more potent than before, like the taste of copper in his mouth.

  The Duke of Sheffield was there, too. He was tall, and fairly easy to spot among the crowd. He walked like a man who owned the world. He did own the world, at least one corner of it. Soon, James would be one step higher, one step closer to him. Someday, perhaps, they would be equal.

  He started to make his way toward Lady Sarah, but he glanced at the chairs along the wall, hesitating when he noted that Eleanor wasn’t in them.

  It wasn’t that he wanted to see her, exactly. It was just unusual that her sister would be here and she wouldn’t be.

  He paused
, resisting the magnetic attraction that Lady Sarah had on him in her icy-blue dress, with that easy smile that had been bred from wealth and time and class.

  He would just see. He would just make sure that Eleanor was all right, and then he would go back to his plan. He would go back to all of the things that had made sense for so long.

  When he finally reached Georgina through the crowd, she smiled brightly up at him. “Mr. MacGregor.”

  “Why isn’t your sister here?”

  Georgina glanced around with a twist to her lips and tapped her head, as though she hadn’t realized Eleanor wasn’t there. The little devil was playing with him. James was torn between wanting to throttle her and wanting to laugh. He wondered if that was what it felt like to have sisters.

  “Eleanor is not feeling quite herself. It all started with the meeting, I think, but your little visit certainly didn’t help.”

  He ignored the reproach in her clear eyes, and the idle thought that he wouldn’t want Georgina Townsend as an enemy. “Meeting?”

  “The Natural History Society meeting.” She blinked at him.

  “She went to another one?”

  “Mmm,” Georgina uttered, noncommittally.

  “Damn that woman! Is she trying to get caught?” he asked, annoyed. He wasn’t one to tell people how to live their lives, but it seemed like Eleanor was playing with fire. She couldn’t keep up such a ruse indefinitely.

  “Don’t worry so. She wasn’t trying to get caught. She went to tell them the truth.”

  James froze. “The truth?”

  “Of Cecil’s identity.”

  “You…I…what?” He sounded crazed. He was feeling a bit crazed, come to think of it.

  Georgina spoke slowly and simply, as though he were a child. “She went to the meeting to tell them that she is Cecil Townsend.”

  His heart plummeted. “Is she mad? Are you mad? What in God’s name is wrong with your family?”

  “I’ve always been quite fond of my family. People think we’re a little eccentric, I know, but I’ve always enjoyed eccentric people.”

  “Why didn’t you try to stop her?”

  “She had made up her mind, and I admired her decision.”

  They were mad, the lot of them. It figured he’d get mixed up with a family like the Townsends. “What happened?”

  Georgina peered up at him. “They were…upset. They dismissed her from the society for good. From what Eleanor said, they wouldn’t even listen to her, once they knew.”

  That would have devastated Eleanor.

  “When was this?”

  “The day you last visited. Not long before your visit, actually.”

  “But she didn’t tell me. She didn’t say anything about it!”

  “Should she have?”

  “Yes!” James exclaimed, his chest tight. He hated the thought of Eleanor in pain. Hated, even more than that, the thought that she might have hidden it from him.

  “Why? You’re courting another woman, are you not?” she said, before glancing behind him. “Lady Sarah is looking at you.”

  James turned. Lady Sarah was, indeed, watching him from several feet away. He couldn’t interpret the expression on her face.

  He started toward her. All he had were his plans. What was he without them?

  Nothing. No one. The voice in his head was his father’s, but it sounded like James, too.

  Without his plans, he was just a man who’d grown up in the slums and made his living with his fists and wanted to be something he wasn’t.

  He stopped a foot away from Lady Sarah. For a moment, they didn’t speak.

  He thought of Eleanor, so stubborn and so brave, facing a roomful of men who dared to pretend they were better than her, and smarter than her. He thought of how scared she must have been, and how hopeful.

  She had gone to them and they had turned her away.

  This Society—it took extraordinary things and it turned them ordinary. It took an intelligent, independent woman and it tried to break her down until she felt like nothing. For the first time, James didn’t want to be a part of it. For the first time, he very nearly loathed it.

  He drew in a breath to speak.

  Sometimes, in a boxing match, skill would only take you so far. Sometimes, instinct took you further. A gut reaction. A feeling you couldn’t ignore.

  That was the only explanation he had for what happened next, because it certainly wasn’t what he’d thought he wanted. In that moment, his gut took over. Or his heart. Maybe they were the same thing.

  He just knew that the dreams he’d held onto for so long were tilting, falling, crashing, and he didn’t lift a hand to save them. He just stood there and watched them burn.

  Maybe the foundation of that other life he’d envisioned had been shaken the very first time he’d met Eleanor Townsend. Maybe every moment after that had only weakened it further, until this—an entire collapse—was inevitable, and he was just the idiot who hadn’t seen it coming.

  Who hadn’t realized that this aching tenderness in his chest had a name, and it wasn’t something he could fight.

  It wasn’t something he wanted to fight.

  “I’m sorry,” he told Lady Sarah. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, backing away. “For everything.”

  And then he was pushing people out of his way so he could get to the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Jeffries told him that Eleanor wasn’t in, which James didn’t believe for a second, so he pushed past the butler and ran straight into Robert Townsend, who pushed him right back out into the night. The oil lamps by the house cast a murky light between them.

  “She doesn’t want to see you,” Robert said.

  James, who’d had to catch himself on the rail so he didn’t tumble down the front steps, straightened to his full height. “Did you ask her?”

  “I don’t need to ask her,” Robert said. He’d always seemed like a fairly even-tempered fellow to James, but now his eyes were narrowed, his mouth flat in anger. He looked like he might be tempted to strike James, if James would only give him a reason. “You bloody bastard. You broke her heart.”

  James’s breath turned to smoke in the air, emerged in fits and starts. “I didn’t… I…” But he had, hadn’t he? She had just been rejected by the society, and then James had come along and more or less done the same. His heart sank straight down to his toes. How could Eleanor ever forgive him?

  And how could he possibly deserve her, even if she did?

  “I made a mistake,” he finally said.

  Robert snorted. “You did a little more than make a mistake.”

  “I know. I know I did. I’ll find some way to make it up to her, just—”

  “How?”

  “What?”

  “How are you going to make it up to her?”

  That Robert was asking at all shocked him. “Do you think I can?”

  “I don’t know. But before you failed miserably, you made her happy, for some reason that I cannot begin to fathom.”

  His heart leaped. “Let me see her.”

  “No.”

  James took a threatening step forward, and Robert lifted an eyebrow, unimpressed. James halted on the top step. Getting into fisticuffs with Eleanor’s brother wasn’t going to help his cause.

  But the thought led to another, and another, and spiraled into memory.

  Suddenly, the world around him seemed to quiet.

  Would it be so bad?

  Would it be so bad for people to see who you are?

  When the idea struck, it burned like lightning. It was, he realized, exactly what he needed to do. Eleanor had been brave. He needed to show her that he could be brave, too. He needed to prove to her, and to himself, that he was worthy of her strength. And he could think of only one way to do that—by going back to the start.

  “Tell her there’s going to be a prizefight,” he said, heart pounding. He could already taste the iron in his mouth.

  His statement was greeted b
y complete silence.

  “That’s your plan? A prizefight?” If it was possible, Robert seemed even more unimpressed than he had before.

  “Will you tell her? I can write you the details later. Just promise me you’ll give them to her.”

  Robert wasn’t swayed by the plea in his voice. “I’ll think about it.”

  With that, the door was shut in his face.

  James chose to be hopeful…Robert hadn’t said no.

  …

  Eleanor’s hand paused over the article, just above her hastily scrawled name. It hurt to look at it, hurt to remember. The society’s rejection and James’s rejection were inextricably connected in her mind. She could not think about one without thinking about the other, without remembering just how horrible it felt to be unwanted.

  But she needed to continue her work, somehow. She supposed, since she couldn’t cut out her mind, she would have to cut out her heart.

  She had just dipped her quill in ink, resolving not to think about it, to work until the pain lessened, when Robert appeared at her door.

  He sat down on the corner of her bed and she turned to face him from her writing desk. The night outside was dark and quiet, and they studied one another in the candlelight.

  Robert was not usually so intent, which worried Eleanor. “What is it?”

  He sighed. “I kept debating whether this was the right choice or not, and in the end, I came to the decision that it isn’t really my choice at all. I would like to protect you from any pain you might face, but that would be a disservice to you.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  His mouth twisted wryly and he handed her a small slip of paper that listed a time and a place, and nothing else. “There’s going to be a fight between MacGregor and Thomas Clark.”

  Eleanor felt a curious pain in her chest. Here she was, trying not to think about James, and the man wouldn’t let her be. And instead of letting her be, he was sending her notes? She stared down at the paper, holding it in a tight grasp. “Did he tell you this?”

  Robert nodded. “I assume it’s his way of asking for a second chance. He seems to think you’ll understand the significance of it.”