He could hear her exhale, the rattle of her nerves. “I . . . don’t know what you mean.”
He shook his head, recognizing with a skill borne of experience that she was trying to evade some pertinent truth. “It may not be obvious to everyone, but I watch you. I know you, Mary. You refused to learn how to fire the derringer I offered you, even though it is far safer for you to handle than a knife, and you grow pale and quiet every time you see a gun in my hands. Why?”
“It . . . that is, it isn’t precisely a secret,” she stuttered. “Just memories.” There was a moment of silence, and he could feel her tremble through the darkness. “When I was nine years old, my oldest brother was killed by a hunting rifle, and most people believed my brother Patrick killed him, in order to inherit the title.”
“Good God.” West tried to remember if he had heard anything of that sort. Came up blank. Then again, a decade and a half ago, he’d still been playing with toy soldiers, not focusing on mysterious murder plots. But she had borne it. And it seemed she was bearing it still. “But your brother is now the Earl of Haversham,” West said. “He was acquitted, I take it?”
“Yes, but only because”—her voice broke—“because then my father was killed, and there was no way Patrick could have done it, given that he was hiding in Scotland at the time. And so suspicions began to take root, and they finally uncovered the real killer . . .” Her voice trailed off, and he could hear the anguish in her sigh. “I nearly lost Patrick, too, even though he’d done nothing wrong. The point is, I’ve lost so many people in my life, West. It seemed safest to stay in Yorkshire all these years, my nose buried in books. And it isn’t so much guns that I’m afraid of, as the reminder of what they can do. It is losing the people I love that terrifies me the most.”
West’s heart clenched for the shy, scared girl she must have been. He remembered how she had seemed to know, to understand, the source of his nightmares. She had her own demons to fight, it seemed, though she was doing an admirable job stepping out of that shell and standing on the edge of courage now. Only . . .
He sucked in a breath, realizing, then, what lay at the heart of some of this. Damn it all . . . he’d badgered Southingham into a duel, a fight to the death.
With pistols.
A duel he might yet lose.
Good Christ. No wonder she was finding it so difficult to trust him.
The skittering came again, farther away now, and this time he didn’t jump. Perhaps it was because he could feel her hand in his, small but reassuring.
Or perhaps it was because he was more concerned about her.
“Your turn again,” she said, her fingers tightening over his. “Would you tell me what happened in Crimea?”
She was holding her breath, waiting for his answer—he could hear it. Or rather, he couldn’t hear it. But the small telltale sign told him this was important to her.
And for once, it was easier to face this confession in total darkness.
“I told you some pieces of it,” he said gruffly. “How we were sent to Viborg instead of the front lines. There wasn’t expected to be any fighting there.” He could still remember how young and naive he and Grant had been, how the adventure—not the fight—had been the point.
And how quickly it all went to shite.
“But you were wrong,” she prompted, and he remembered, then, how she had followed the accounts of the war in the newspaper.
“It started with an explosive shell,” he said, feeling the sharp edges of the various pieces of that day, the shattered remains of the memory he had tried so hard to forget. “It rolled right up to our feet on the lower deck. Most of the men were laughing over it.” He swallowed. “They assumed it was a prank, you see. But I knew it wasn’t. Or at least, I knew it wasn’t one of my pranks. I could see it was the sort of shell that had a delayed charge, and so I seized it and threw it overboard. It exploded outside the ship, where no damage was done.” He shook his head. “Hardly a brave act, it was simply a matter of survival.”
He could feel her mind working through the tightening of her hand. “Who placed a shell in such a place? I have to imagine it was a calculated act.”
“There was a saboteur on board. A traitor who was willing to sacrifice himself for such a prize as sinking the Arrogant.” He closed his eyes, though the gesture scarcely made a difference in the darkness. “There was a fight afterward. Shots were fired.”
What came next was mostly a haze of fury, flashes of memory. He couldn’t remember the feel of the bullet entering his shoulder, but he could still feel the roar of vengeance pounding in his ears, the solid crunch of his fist striking bone, the way his feet had scrabbled on the deck slick with blood. Too much blood, and not only his own.
He felt the crawl of her hand, reaching toward him, working its way up to land just above his heart. “Is . . . that how you got this?”
“Yes.” He opened his eyes, and stared hard into the darkness that swallowed her. “I was injured wrestling the gun from the traitor’s hand. But honestly, Mouse, I was the lucky one. Three of my men were killed that day, sailors whose only sins were throwing themselves into the fray, trying to help me subdue the threat.” He shook his head, remembering those slow-motion moments all too well, no matter how long and hard he’d tried to forget them. “Afterward, Grant held his shirt over my wound, even pulling out his flask to clean it out. He saved my bloody life. The others weren’t so lucky. One man died there, on deck. The others died later, when their wounds festered.”
He stopped. Swallowed. Gave his tongue permission to go on.
“William Breech. Danny O’Shea. Pete Thompson.” The men’s names came out in whispers, the first time he’d spoken them out loud since that day. “They were sailors for whom I was responsible.” he said hoarsely. “And I didn’t react in time to save them.”
There was a moment of silence, though her hand did not loosen from his, despite the damning confession. “You were credited with saving the ship,” she said softly. “And that is why you were awarded the Victoria Cross.”
“I told you, it was a joke. I didn’t know it was a live shell.”
Although, in truth, he hadn’t known it wasn’t live, either.
Her hand tightened over his chest. “I think that your instincts very likely saved the day.”
“Saved the day?” An aching part of him wanted to believe her words, but his own snarling objections were too great. “Good Christ. Can’t you see? It’s my fault, Mary. The traitor was one of my own sailors, and I should have known, should have been able to stop it before anything happened. I was the bloody officer in charge of that deck that day. And the men who deserve a Victoria Cross are the ones who never made it home.”
She could hear the anguish in his voice. Knew all too well the heartbreak that came from looking back on a tragedy and wishing you had seen something, done something differently.
Her own life had been shaped by similarly violent forces—her brother’s death, her father’s murder, those dual tragedies had consumed her spinning, chaotic adolescence. She had wished, on so many occasions, that she might have been in a position to stop it, to change things. And she knew all too well how such imaginings could eat at you, change who you were.
“I understand,” she whispered, her heart twisting in her chest.
“How can you understand?” His voice was sharp in the darkness, a rooting tip of a knife. “Grant doesn’t even understand, not entirely, and he was bloody there. No one understands why I can’t just move on from it, least of all me. There has been no one I can talk to about this, not the families of the men who died, not Wilson, not even my best friend.”
“You have me to talk to,” she told him gently. She lowered her hand to curl into his again. “And I understand more than you might imagine.” She turned her hand over in his, staring down into the darkness where they were joined, even if she couldn’t see it. Hers was not a fierce battle, perhaps. The balance of a nation’s power had not sat so heavily on her you
ng shoulders. But the endless nightmares, the punishing memories, the questions that she could not seem to stop asking herself—those things she knew all too well.
According to her own sister, those events of her childhood had caused her to lose the vivaciousness that had once defined her, turning her into someone who panicked in crowds and hid away in Yorkshire.
And West’s past had turned him into . . .
She stopped, suddenly fitting it all into neat pieces, a puzzle she’d not previously understood. Her husband’s scandalous reputation, the terrible pranks, the drunken antics, the line of women eager for a chance in his bed—relics of a youthful exuberance, perhaps, but also something more.
He’d been traumatized, looking for an escape.
And she imagined, now that she could see it, that she could understand a bit of what had been driving him since his return from Crimea.
“I believe in you.” Her hand pulled out of his, searching through the darkness until it landed on his chest again, her fingers curling deep. “If you hadn’t reacted so quickly that day, how many more of your men might have died at the hands of that madman? And if the ship had been damaged by that shell, would the Arrogant have gone on to win that day?”
Beneath her fingers, she could feel him suck in a breath. “But—”
“I know you feel terrible about the men who died.” Her fingers pressed into a point over his heart. “I can hear it in your voice, in the tightness of your chest, just here. But they died fighting for something important, and you don’t have the right to take that honor away from them, any more than you have the right to determine who Queen Victoria chooses to bestow the honor of the Victoria Cross upon. What about those men who lived only because you’d had the wherewithal to act in their moment of indecision, those men who eventually went home to their wives and families? Do they mean nothing?”
“No,” he choked out. “They mean everything. But they didn’t realize—”
“No, you don’t realize. You’ve been trying to find a distraction to help you forget what happened. To forget the names of those men who died. But what if remembering them, talking to their families, honoring them in some way, is the real path to healing?”
“I . . . I hadn’t thought . . .”
“It sounds to me,” she said gently, her hand pressing more firmly against his body, “as though you are the only one who thinks this honor that has been bestowed upon you is a joke.” She curled against him, her head somehow finding the shelf of his chest in the darkness. “When I am reading a book, do you know who my favorite sort of hero has always been?”
He didn’t answer.
She told him anyway. “I’ve never really much liked the strutting peacock heroes. They tend to beat their chests and belittle the heroine and generally get too many people killed. No, I’d rather find myself in love with a reluctant hero.” She turned her head. Pressed her lips against the cotton of his shirt, right above his heart. “Someone who shuns the honor, but steps up when the circumstances demand it.”
His breath whooshed out of him, and she could feel his arms come up to cradle her gently. “Are you saying . . . you could love me?”
“Can’t you see?” She turned herself over to it, the truth she’d been trying to avoid, ever since he’d given her cause to doubt him. “I already do.”
Chapter 27
She . . . loved him?
West tightened his arms around this woman who was his wife, his confidante, his partner. If this damp, dark vault was their confessional, she had just confessed a miracle, one he’d not ever imagined earning. Somehow, beyond all reason, she’d looked inside him, seen his faults and his demons, and still found something to love.
He felt gutted by the wonder of it.
He pulled her up the length of his body until their noses bumped in the dark. A tricky business, navigating such blindness, but his other senses filled in the holes. He could hear her softly indrawn breath of anticipation, taste the whisky on her lower lip from where she had spilled a few drops. He could feel, against his hands, the quickening of her heart beneath all those maddening but necessary layers of clothing.
There would be no undressing tonight, not in the damp chill of this place.
Not that he needed such a luxury to show her how much she meant to him.
Somehow, his lips found hers, the sort of kiss that bespoke everything he was feeling inside, a kiss that stirred the blood and made other parts sit up and take notice.
“I love you, too, Mouse,” he murmured against her softly parted lips. His hands lifted, cradling her face, feeling the warm wet tears on her cheeks. He’d never confessed a more potent truth. He couldn’t point to precisely where or when it had happened, but it had. From the moment she’d first kissed him back in that library, he’d not been able to get her out of his head or his heart.
“I don’t know why,” she gasped, but it was a happy sound, one that told him she was as moved as he was. “I’ve been very difficult about all of this.”
He rubbed a thumb along the wetness of her cheek. “Ah, but I love that about you, too.”
She pulled away. “How could you possibly love the fact I am difficult?”
He let her go, not because he thought it was good idea, but because he had an idea to put his hands to a better use. “Mouse,” he told her. “I love everything about you.” He ran his fingers up her arm until they found the front of her bodice. Found the hidden brass eyes and opened them with a practiced flick. “Number One, I love the way you argue with me, and the way you make your endless lists. Number Two, I love the way you look in the morning, with your hair sticking out in twenty directions.”
She made a strangled sound. “That is actually three items. You don’t have any idea how to make a proper list.”
His hand slipped inside her bodice to flirt with the edge of her corset and the thin, worn cotton of her chemise. Even in the darkness he knew they were plain, white, unadorned—and he no longer imagined ever wanting them any other way. “Well then, Number Four, I love the fact there are always ink stains on your right hand, from writing God knows what. Probably from making lists about why marrying me was a very bad idea. Or perhaps you are writing your own salacious novel,” he teased. “The Lustful Librarian.”
“I write nearly every day in my journal, if you must know.” But it was clear from the slight hitch of her voice she was trying not to laugh now.
“Well then, I love that about you, too. There isn’t a thing you could do or say that I wouldn’t find perfect. I love the way you know the oddest things, from all the obscure books you’ve ever read.” He paused, his hand stilling, then added, “I even love the way you are scrunching your nose right now.”
Mary lifted a hand to her face. “How did you know I was scrunching my nose?” she asked in wonder. To know that he knew such a thing about her was one thing, but to hear him make a list . . . to actually catalog those things about herself she so often doubted, to tell her they were the very reasons he loved her . . . it boggled the mind.
“Because you always scrunch your nose when I say things that made you squirm.” She felt his hand slip deeper, beneath her chemise. Moaned as his fingers found the berry of her nipple and rolled it gently between his fingers. “But when I do things that make you squirm,” he added wickedly, “oh, that is a different look you give me all together.”
“And . . . ah . . . what look is that?” She felt breathless.
“Well, it has been a while, but if memory serves, your eyes go a little unfocused.” She felt the swoop of his finger over her mouth, testing, lingering. “Your lips part slightly, all but inviting me to take advantage. And then . . . then you usually do something unexpected.”
Her hand reached out through the darkness to cup his straining length. “Like this?”
“Oh, God, Mary, just so,” he said hoarsely.
His words sounded raw. Driven from an inner need that matched the aching echoes of her own body. She wanted to stoke that fire, push him
over the edge, the way he always seemed to push her. And so her fingers found the buttons of his trousers, working at them until he sprang free into her hands. Her mouth found him in the darkness, the feel of his skin against her lips impossibly warm, impossibly right. She ran her tongue up the length of him, tasting salt and musk. As her tongue swirled warm circles on him, his visceral groan told her more than any list how she pleased him.
But then he reached down to loop his hands beneath her arms, hauling her to his mouth, turning the tables. He kissed her until she was moaning, writhing against him. Until she was climbing onto his lap, straddling his body’s erection, her hands tangling in his hair and pulling him into her mouth, and then, finally, to the entrance of her ready body.
“Good Christ,” he gasped, as if he was only just realizing what she was about. “Mary, wait . . . we don’t have the French letters—”
“I know,” she whispered, her mouth flush against his own, turning herself over to the truth of it. “We don’t need them anymore.”
West groaned his acquiescence, sinking into the blinding comfort she offered him, the act as primal as any he had ever known. He gripped her hips, guiding, steadying.
Gritted his teeth against the urge to spill instantly into her heat.
He discovered, then, that it was an entirely different act, loving a woman with no barriers between them. It was a joining of far more than bodies: it was a joining of trust. No one had ever put so much faith in him.
He turned his fractured thoughts to a different task, straining toward her, his teeth nipping against the soft skin of her neck as she leaned over him. The motion ripped a whimper from her, echoing off the stone ceiling, bouncing off the walls. She began to twist over top of him, her hands gripping his hair, gasping out loud.
I love you. The words had already been offered, but still they echoed like a drum beat through his head. So he said them, blowing softly across her skin, nibbling between syllables.
The Perks of Loving a Scoundrel Page 31
