“I’ll be damned if I’m going to defend a hypothetical failure to do more in your imagination, woman!” He gently seized her upper arms. “You came here to stop him! You were plotting all along for his end! Why not tell me as much? Why lie to me when I repeatedly asked you what your true purpose was?”
“When? When you were convinced I was a scorpion at your picnic? When I had no confidence you wouldn’t run to James and point out the danger?” She shook her head. “Even when we…when it seemed that there might be some hope for us to recover, my loyalty to Delilah made it impossible to tell you anything.”
“Truly?”
“What? Can you look me in the eyes and tell me that if I’d outlined my glorious plans to wrest the house and holdings from James’ hands, catch him in the act of assaulting an innocent maid; you would have cheerfully just watched it unfold?”
He hesitated for the space of a breath but it was long enough to cost him.
Serena pulled away from his touch, her expression alight with disgust. “Yes, of course! No matter if he’d raped a dozen girls! Heaven forbid his rights as a noble Englishman are violated!”
“You are putting words in my mouth! And I am not arguing for that waste of skin but you cannot play judge, jury and executioner. You cannot.”
She laughed in a bitter mirthless melody. “I can because I dare to do whatever it takes to balance the scales.”
“You’ve balanced nothing. You may have stopped him this once. What makes you think he won’t just pounce on the next hapless girl in his employ?”
“Because the only thing he’ll be able to mount will be a saddle.” She brushed her hands on her skirts dismissively. “I neutered him.”
“You—what?! How?”
“I stabbed him in the balls with my hair pin,” Serena said archly.
“My god! I hardly think that’s—“
“I stabbed him with my hair pin coated with the shit of a maid he had raped.” Serena stood. “An infection is inevitable. If the man survives, I highly doubt he will possess his manly powers.”
“And if he doesn’t survive the infection?”
“Then the devil can sort him out when he arrives in Hell.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I got the idea from a historical accounting of England’s infamous long bowmen and archers. They used to defecate on the ground in front of themselves and then plant their arrows in a row, tip down, in the dirt before a battle. It ensured that any injury their enemies suffered, no matter how minor, would likely be mortal.”
Phillip sat down, his knees betraying his shock. “What have you become?”
“I am the Black Rose.”
Chapter Twenty-two
“What the hell is a Black Rose?”
She looked down at him and drank in the sensation of standing on a cliff’s edge. And then she simply took a step out into empty air and accepted the fall. “I’m sure I’ve already described it to you, or perhaps just its origins? It is a secret organization privately referred to as the Black Rose Reading Society if and when we are forced to speak of it in male company. Rest assured, the women of the Black Rose do not sit in drawing rooms to discuss the latest novels. It is an organization founded for the sole purpose of securing revenge for women who need it.”
“Founded by whom?”
“By me.”
“Are there so many women in need of vigilantes wearing corsets?”
“You would be astonished at the numbers I have aided to date.”
“Justice for wealthy women? How is that some kind of equitable move?”
“The Black Rose serves any woman who approaches us with a worthy cause. But then, I don’t have to explain or justify a damn thing to you, Phillip Warrick! You don’t like what you see? Then stop looking and be on your way!”
“I won’t be on my way!” He stood to face her. “If it is so secret, why tell me of it now? Is this what you were hinting at before when you said you’d found your place helping others?”
“It is and you’ll tell no one, Phillip.” She smiled. “Because it’s too fantastical really. Who would you tell? And what proof would you have beyond this private conversation? I’d deny it all and you’d look like a babbling idiot.”
He shook his head. “This is not who you are—not at heart! I won’t see you twist yourself into the feminine version of the demon that made you what you are! Trent was misguided! You must see it! You must see that I never meant to be the architect of a single moment’s misery for you!”
“The Black Rose has nothing to do with you! The letter you shoved in my hands was a godsend. It was the revelation that set me in motion and brought me back to life, but I am not defined by that day; nor by Trent, nor by you. No man defines me! I knew the instant I read Trent’s vile lies—I knew the true source of my misery and the extent of your role. You were as much his victim as I was, Phillip. And though I may have toyed with the notion of revenge against you, it is pointless.”
“Then what was all of this? A seductive game to teach me some lesson?”
“Was it? Was that all it was to you?” She stretched her hand out to him. “A game?”
“I wonder if that isn’t all you know. Games and schemes and revenge—this Black Rose nonsense!”
“Nonsense? Tread carefully, Warrick.” Something in her retreated and an icy coil began to tighten inside her chest. “Do not think you can demean something I have built with my own two hands, not without a reckoning you will never forget.”
“Do you—is murder on the menu, Lady Wellcott?”
“Only our members are free to ask such questions and you, sir, are decidedly not qualified to apply for entry.”
“My God. End this, Serena. End this while you still can.” He shook his head. “You are—better than this.”
“You ask me what I’ve become?” She walked away from him then pulled out her fan with a flourish. “I became what you made me, Phillip.”
“I had no hand in this. None.”
Her breath caught in her throat and she reached up to touch her cheek as if he had struck her. “I—I became what you desired, my love!” She moved toward him, forcing herself away from the wounded woman she had almost crumbled into. “I was always, from the first moment I saw you, in a strange chase to be whatever it was that you desired, was I not? You achieved my virginity in a blaze of glory, did you not? But then you pronounced me a villain and tossed me into the mud, Phillip! Was there a different path for Raven Wells? Was I to marry another? Was I to lock myself away in a religious cupboard and pray for forgiveness? Or would you have preferred a different course? Should I have drowned myself in the nearest pond? Should I have remained broken and cursed?”
He reached for her but she eluded his grasp. “Serena!”
“No! You do not like what you see before you, Sir Warrick? I do not appeal?” Her gaze narrowed in contempt. “What a shame! For let me tell you exactly what kind of villainess I am. I am the kind of woman who refused to let your judgment condemn. I am the woman who refused to be destroyed because the man who vowed to love me for all time proved to be without a shred of honor. I am the woman who decided that if the world were made of games that I would be the mistress of a greater game! And while I could not save my own soul, I would do whatever it took to see that no other woman had to endure the humiliation and cruelty that I had suffered! And my crime when I was yet a child of seventeen, Phillip? I was powerless and naïve.”
“Innocence isn’t a crime.”
Her head tipped up and she gave him one last glimpse of the irresistible allure of Lady Serena Wellcott in full bloom. “You mistake me for the female child that you destroyed on a country road and left kneeling in a mud puddle. You make yourself a fool when you invoke a past that you do not comprehend. I,” she proclaimed as she shifted to rearrange her skirts, a goddess in silks, “am exactly what I was meant to become and you can stand aside. I have no use for you, Warrick.”
She started to sail past him but he caught her wrist and forced her agains
t him. He winced at the bruise on her cheek but kissed her all the same, with a blind hunger that demanded her return to reason, to his arms, to any chance they had for happiness. He kissed her and her mouth opened to him, the familiar taste of her so sweet, the response of her body to his so compelling that it brought tears to his eyes.
So close. God, it’s all so close!
He reluctantly let her go, to look down into her face and search for the answers he so desperately needed to hear. “Serena, how do I reach you?”
“You already have. You alone have my heart, Phillip. You always had it. I never took it back. I never abandoned you but I also never asked you for so much as a scrap from your table. It is you who circled back, you who found me and you who carried me back into your bed.” Tears slipped down her cheeks. “I am what I am.”
“I—cannot escape you. How is that possible that no matter what you’ve done, I can’t help but see the girl I once kissed in a gazebo?”
It was the wrong thing to say. An icy wash of loathing flooded her chest and she began to shift off the bed, retreating from his touch. “Ah! Then here is where I demonstrate what it means to truly love. I love you, Phillip Warrick. I love you so much that I will be the one to spare you the bitter disappointment that comes with the understanding that I am no longer the girl in that gazebo who believed that a single kiss from you was a prize.”
“Raven! Don’t be so quick to push against—“
“Do not call me that name without leave. I am Lady Serena Wellcott. I am a heartless witch who experiences mercy only when I am the one to dispense it.” She shifted her skirts behind her, in a flourish that boded her flight. “I have given you your share. I have told you the truth of that day, indulged my desires in your arms, and we are at an end.”
He winced at the words ‘heartless witch’ recognizing them instantly. “That’s nonsense. Nothing ends. I love you.”
“You? You love the girl in the gazebo.”
“No. I love you, Lady Serena Wellcott.”
She shook her head. “You don’t and I can prove it.”
“What proof do you have? What proof could you possibly offer, woman? I’m standing here before you and I know my own heart and mind. I love you! I love you past reason, past arguments, past everything that has happened and every confession we’ve wrung out of each other! So what is this proof to send me packing?”
Don’t look back. Let him go. Here, cut here…and run.
“Very well. One more truth, my darling Warrick. One more painful truth and then I suggest you take your time and decide if you can truly love me as I am. For I will never apologize for my path or alter it to please you, Phillip. Never. So, hear what I am about to say and do not speak without thinking it through. For there is one more slice of punishment I fear you failed to anticipate.”
“Let’s hear it.”
Love you.
I love you enough to make you hate me.
Here’s the blade.
Brace yourself, Phillip, because this is going to hurt.
“The next time you take a woman’s virginity and make love to her repeatedly over a fortnight, perhaps you should make sure she isn’t carrying your child before you throw her into the hedges.”
“Oh, my God…” Phillip’s voice nearly failed him.
Air fled the room and she watched the fierce light in his eyes give way to pain and betrayal, horror and guilt. She walked past him as brutal shock held him in place. “I win, Phillip. I win.”
**
Their bags were packed before the chimes struck the quarter hour and her gilt carriage was loaded and ready just as she’d planned. Pepper said little, relieved to be gone from the house and any traces of James. Phillip came down the stairs of the house just as the skies opened up in a torrent of rain, moving to intercept them as quickly as he could but Serena cradled Pepper in her arms and signaled her driver to achieve London proper in record time.
“With all speed, your ladyship?”
“As if Satan himself were on your heels, sir.”
Or you were carrying his Mistress back to Hell.
Finis
Table of Contents
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Lady Rises (The Black Rose Trilogy Book 2) Page 15
