Whatever she did here she’d never see him again.
Whatever Caruthers said, Hawley--funny how she kept thinking of him as that—was innocent. Caruthers couldn’t lock up an innocent man.
I love you and I’m sorry.
Choice.
He’d locked Hawley up once before though. Well someone had.
I love you and I’m sorry.
Choice.
Let her examine the facts. Hawley was a harlot-hardened, narcotic addicted roué, whose world she didn’t belong in and never, ever would. If she’d been Lord Armstrong’s daughter now? But she wasn’t.
What she was, was a woman who’d gone along to see the coot Caruthers expecting one thing and been told another. Times of war indeed. It wasn’t as if she’d started that war. What she was, was a woman who probably wasn’t even related to Matthew. She’d just assumed.
I love you and I’m sorry.
Choice.
A park bordered their side of the road. She glanced at the railings. Ten bob the lot, the state they were in.
What was this? When the damned man was impossible, she thought that if it wasn’t for him, she’d not be standing there, feeling the railings cold beneath her glove. She’d be standing on an executioner’s drop. Not because of him and everything he’d done. Because of herself and everything she’d failed to.
I love you and I’m sorry.
Choice.
There was but one. Just because she wouldn’t, didn’t mean she couldn’t.
That too, was love.
Just sodding great, wasn't it?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Rain drummed ceaselessly on the coach roof, much as it had on the journey to here. Not that Cass felt any better now than then, especially given the fact the blinds had already been rolled down, so she couldn’t see a thing of her surroundings.
“Pourquoi ne font pas vous me bandez les yeux? Ce serait plus simple,” she muttered as the coach door opened. Not especially graciously. Was it any wonder? Colonel Caruthers had kept her here—wherever here was—under lock and key for four months now.
The French she’d learned and the geography, the codes, and the ciphers. It was all very interesting if she was meaning to learn these things. She wasn’t. And, fancy not being able to escape, even if there was nothing to escape for. Owned? It made her time with Devorlane Hawley seem rosy by comparison. Damnable and all as he was, at least he’d never insisted she eat frog legs. If only she’d never found that letter, she’d be there yet. Cassidy Armstrong of Barwych, instead of Cassidy Armstrong of the parish poor. Cassidy Armstrong whose mother hadn’t even bothered to name her. All these years thinking her name was unusual? Laugh? She could end herself.
“Well, I might, Miss, if you’d tell me whot it blasted is I’ve got ter bandes. Blimey, they ain’t bin tyin’ yer eyes ‘ave they?”
Cass’s lips parted in shock. What was it about her and coaches? “C-Charlie? What the soddin'--?”
“Shh.” Swiftly he clicked her door shut. “Don’t go givin’ the game away.”
“You can’t be here.”
He sank into the leather seat opposite. “Sez who?”
“Charlie—”
“The guvnor sent me.”
“The—”
“Dev.”
Cass swallowed. “Devorlane Hawley?” She licked her lips, bone-dry all of a sudden. “Hawley sent you? Charlie, that’s—”
“Wif a little ‘elp from some friends of yours.” Charlie winked knowingly.
“What frie--?”
“Ruby and Pearl. And believe it or not, after a bit of a set to about it, Misses Belle, Eudora, and Tilly too.”
Belle? And Tilly? Eudora she could just about understand. But Belle and Tilly? Not after what had been said to her that Christmas Eve, although everyone had gone for a certain kind of bankruptcy that night. “Charlie, please, this is crazy. You can’t be here. What if you get—”
The coach jolted forward and she held to her seat.
“Don’t look loike it. Anyway, it’s all taken care of. Oih’m the ‘onorable gent what’s been engaged ter take yer back to Lun’on. Well, Oih am now anyways.”
“What do you mean now?”
“Somethin’ shockin’ the accidents some folks meet wif. Nothin’ serious. Nothin’ ter get in a twist about. Lun’on’s only eight miles away. Did yer know that?”
“I didn’t know anything.”
How could she, stuck behind these God awful walls? Not even allowed to walk outside unless escorted under armed guard. As if she was going to run away when she’d given her word. Sort of anyway,
“Well, Dev’n me thought that.”
“Him and you? You mean you’ve been snoop—”
“Except we ain’t goin’ there.”
“What?”
My God. Worse than any trick she’d pulled as Sapphire. Her throat tightened so she couldn’t breathe. Four months? Of steadily piecing herself back together after she had disintegrated into fragments that Christmas Eve. Of believing she would never see Devorlane Hawley again. It didn’t matter how he’d kissed her that night, what he’d said, her palms still bore the marks from that period of raging insanity. It didn't matter the light she left on for him at nights when she was lonely.
She’d managed through these four months, four months of torture in many ways—just--by flattening her emotions, by giving herself these tiny inches at nights. Oh, she might wish herself back in Chessington, but it didn’t mean she’d been happy there. She couldn’t go back to that. Unless he only meant to free her?
“Charlie … you can’t. I can’t. For God’s sake, let me out of here.”
The door handle was there. Even as she sprung for it, Charlie grabbed her wrist.
“Whot the bleedin’ ‘ell do you think you’re doin’? The driver and escort belong ter the colonel. Still, just as well Dev warned me whot you was loike.”
***
As he waited in the low roofed bedroom of the modest house that had belonged to his mother, Devorlane’s palms sweated.
The plan was simple, but the simplest plan could go wrong. Charlie might not manage to convince the driver to stop at the inn. What if the horses weren’t ready? Even if they were, the head start would be short. Ten minutes at most. The colonel’s escort was small but enough to give chase.
Then there was her. Need he start about her and how perfectly capable she was of refusing to get out the coach, or get on the horse—unless it was to make off with it? Saying she wanted to go to France, because she loved Paris? Emptying yet another ton of things she’d blithely stolen from the colonel out of her bag?
He sighed to the pit of his bones. He needed to stop this, didn’t he? And he needed to understand, as he hadn’t understood very well before, that while love wasn’t always rational, it was always forgiving. It didn’t possess, as he’d tried so hopelessly to do. It especially didn’t try to possess a woman like her.
But if he had to let her go? Well, love did that too. Didn’t it? Sort of. Sometimes anyway. Christ, Belle had finally let go of him. Wasn’t the most important thing freeing Cassidy Armstrong from Caruther’s clutches after she’d gone and placed herself in them. Just the sort of thing she’d do. Thank God he’d forgiven her before. It crystallized what he felt now.
He tilted the bottle and filled two glasses from the set he’d unearthed earlier. He just prayed what he’d spent weeks planning, scheming, and dreaming was enough to convince her where her place was. That this could work. It didn’t matter her position was hardly glittering.
He wanted her and he could give her something anyway. Christ, when he thought about how, with all her pride, she’d been abandoned at some church door, he wanted to give her everything. To tell her it didn’t matter a damn she’d been left like that, not to him. He meant every word of what he’d said on Christmas Eve.
Hearing voices outside, he held his breath. Held his breath? He almost suffocated. Eudora. Charlie. His ears strained above the wild tumult in his chest. He couldn
’t help it. Her.
How bloody ridiculous was it, he didn’t even know how to greet her, so he threw himself onto the chair by the fire? The door opened and he leaped to his feet.
“Miss Armstrong, you caught me at a disad—”
It was better to explain the fact the chair toppled over, but so long as she didn’t detect he was nervous, it would be all right.
“You sent for me, Lord Hawley?”
She spoke in that light, cool but still earthy tone of hers that always had him a disadvantage, because it set distance between them, one he’d need a mallet to break through. All the plans, the plans he’d made, the promises too, vanished like smoke up the chimney.
In spite of everything. the sleepless nights, the hunger, the tiresome damned sessions with Tilly, with Ruby, with Belle, the crawling on his belly on the moorland around Caruthers’s Blandish estate, he couldn’t stop himself.
Seeing her again, seeing her properly, not through a spyglass up the top of some tree that aggravated his damaged thigh to climb, his throat knotted. She took his breath away, standing there in the plain corded travelling coat, hatless. Had everything that happened that last night really happened?
But it had happened. It had happened because he hadn’t been able to let her that last inch into his heart, because it seemed to him the papers were all she was interested in, because he’d been afraid of losing her. There could be no repeat now she was here, he saw in a rush.
The room was set for seduction. Why delay?
“Yes. I did, Cassidy. I wanted to ask you if you’d consider allowing me to do something I’ve not done.”
“Not done?” Cass lowered her eyelashes. To quote Ruby, what the bleedin’ hell could that be? In a bedroom--what a surprise. Shabbily furnished—a few shillings the lot. And a slight smell of must as if the place hadn’t been inhabited for years. “Is there anything? I mean … ”
When that last day had been such raging insanity, building up for weeks and weeks to these seconds of blinding madness—madness that could conceivably have destroyed them both—him asking to do something he hadn’t was the last thing she wanted to hear. She fixed her gaze on his waistcoat. These nights when she'd looked out the window and let him into her thoughts would not be her undoing, even though these nights were what had gotten her through these months.
“While that’s very nice for you Lord Hawley, I think I should tell you here and now I’ve spent a lot of time learning French in order to forget the things you did do, we both did come to that. Things that really could have destroyed us —”
He stepped closer. “But you haven’t heard what I’m asking you to consider.”
“Do I really need to, to do that? Just because I haven’t, doesn’t mean I--”
“Lazuli Blenheim. Lady Lazuli. Fair haired. But I swear, if you will let me, I will love you when your hair is gray. I’ll want you too. Just like I do now. It’s the old name for Sapphire. The color of your eyes, which is why I chose it.”
“You what? I’m sorry, I don’t—“
“I have it all here. A new identity for you. I have everything.”
“Not that.”
Love her? Her gaze froze on the silver cravat pin, holding his maroon neck tie. Her throat probably dried on it too. Love was a word to do that, after all. So Christmas Eve wasn’t an aberration? Next he’d be asking her to marry him. Shiny bright? A tinker’s daughter and a duke? It would be dazzling. Well, just because he could, didn’t mean she could. Anyway, he wouldn’t.
“I just want to love you, Cassidy. I just want us and I don’t care who the hell you are, or what the hell you’ve done. That is what I’m asking you to consider. I do love you. And I’m sorry I didn’t manage it before.”
“Well, you couldn’t and neither could I. And if the past four months—which I owed you, not the other way about, so you didn’t have to free me—if they have taught me anything ….”
“Do you understand what I’m saying, Lazuli?” He flicked the hair back from her face. “I never expected it but I want to marry you.”
“Marry?” So he did want? Her throat, already dried as a withered leaf, calcified. “A duke of the realm? And me? A thief? And not just any thief? A thief half the country must be out looking for by now, seeing as I’m apparently not just a thief any more but a spy. That’s before we get to what I can count in my family tree.”
It was true. Never had she understood the necessity of formality as strongly as she did in that second. Love was wanting what was best. She. Them. Was not best. Not even if she remained his mistress. She didn’t want to be his mistress, end of.
“No. Lord Hawley, I must say, in fact, I’ve seldom heard of anything more ridiculous. Especially when I only consented to coming here today—”
“You consented? Listen you damned snit, has no one ever told you what you’re full of?”
“—to thank you for you kind intervention, even if it does mean me now having to sneak about for the rest of my life, once His Grace, Colonel Cootface finds I’ve gone. And let me tell you, if I have come to know anything about that man, it is that he will. If he has to turn the country upside down he will. He won’t let this go.”
“You’re full of the kind of stuff I can see I’m just going to have to kiss out of you.”
She tried to move away but he gripped her waist. “I mean it.”
“You can try, Lord Hawley. Yes. But just because you can doesn’t mean you—”
He bent his head before she could finish and heat coursed through her. Her heart skidded across several beats, as his body hardened against hers. She clung to him, her arms hooking round his neck.
“You are going to let me do this, aren’t you?” He not only swung her up against him, he carried her to the bed.
“What?”
“What we just discussed.” He set her down on the bed, tore off his cravat. “I saw your eyes that first night in the library and I knew you were the woman for me, Cassidy Armstrong.”
“No. You didn’t. What you knew was that I was Sapphire. A thief. And the woman who ruined your life. So will you just stop—”
“Shh. Now, let’s get your buttons.”
She made a grab for her coat flaps. Not that making a grab for her coat flaps meant a great deal to a man like him. “No. Stop it.”
“Listen to me. This is my mother’s house. Inherited from an uncle so it’s forgotten about. I thought you could live here, with Ruby, with Pearl, if that’s what you want.”
“Ruby? You don’t even like— No, give me back my shoe …”
“Just because I can doesn’t mean I will.” He tossed it to the floor. To her horror he yanked up his shirt. “She just takes a bit of getting used to, that’s all. Anyway you do this, so I can court you and then we get engaged.”
“Engaged?”
“I already have the ring.”
“What? Are you mad?”
“Properly paid for too. Not like anything you can produce. Now then.”
Engaged? Her with a properly paid for ring on her finger. Cass’s jaw dropped further as his perfectly shaped chest emerged from the shirt.
“But we’d be married before then. It would mean you always having to have an alias, whatever happens in this war, because Caruthers won’t let this go, you’re right. It doesn’t matter he’s steered clear of me after I turned down his offer, that I didn’t bargain taking your place because I knew that would then rouse his suspicions.”
“I told you he was a damned old coot. You didn’t belie—”
“Don’t tell me that’s something you’re not used to though.”
“What him being a damned old --?”
“No. You not being who you say.”
Dear Lord, although Sapphire was dead, dead and buried, this let her be her in a quite different way. Quite far from her thoughts right now, but there at the far horizons, as he kissed her neck.
“Lord Hawley, stop it. Now. Eudora is in the house. Tilly is in the—”
“I�
��m sure they know what goes on behind my door.”
“Well, that’s just it.”
She’d seen once what passion could do, how close to the edge it had pushed her. Close to the edge? She’d jumped the cliff. Leaped headfirst, taking him with her. What would it do to her if she couldn’t keep him? And how would she ever do that? A man like him? Experienced? Knowing? Hungry?
“I could never keep a man like you. I’d like to—oh God, yes-- but I can’t. Please, you must see that.”
“You have kept me.” Ignoring her protestation, he started opening the tiny black buttons on her dress. “You’ve kept me just fine. Even when you’ve been away you’ve kept me. How’s that for keeping?”
“You might as well know that first night …” It was worth giving this away to end it. “The one you had such a problem with, and I … You weren’t wrong.”
Bemusement flitted across his features. He reached out and touched her face. “Well, Lazuli, if that’s the truth, you’re doing a fairly good job. Ten years for a kiss. I don’t mind it being life for this. Agreed? I can do this, if you can. What’s more, it hasn’t been easy but I’m a better bargain than I was before. I’m also ready to do this properly, to take responsibility for everything. So this … this is like a first time for me. I’m not worried about what happens, if anything happens afterwards. I want you to know that. I want this. I want us.”
“Lord Hawley … For heaven’s sake … Stop it. You should care not to make this mistake.”
She should say no. Except saying no wasn’t an option when his mouth met hers.
The firelight warmed his skin, the flex of his shoulder muscles, the hollows of his back. She pressed her mouth to his chest, feeling his heart pounding beneath her lips.
For God’s sake, if she did this, then she could still turn around afterwards and tell him no, couldn’t she? There were places she could run, especially when he was just as bossy as before and what was worse, her body responded to him as always and she strove to ignore his potent, evocative essence.
“Unless? Unless you really do want to go to France?” he said. “I nearly offered that, my spying, but I knew, I knew from everything that something in you would revolt against being told to do anything.”
Loving Lady Lazuli (London Jewel Thieves Book 1) Page 25
