He’d thought himself incapable of being hurt any more by Temperance, but this discovery that she’d not known how much he cared for her . . . “Of course I would have sought you out. You were my wife, and”—and more—“you were my friend.” That was what hurt most of all about this damn mess that he—they—had made of their relationship. She’d been the only person he’d let inside, close enough to care: a friend, whose happiness had mattered more than his own. And he’d learned firsthand from his connection to Temperance Swift just why he’d been right to never let anyone else in. “You were that, too.”
“A friend,” she repeated back. A sad little note underscored those two syllables. “It could have been more, though. If you’d been willing to give up thievery, Darius.”
Which he hadn’t . . . and couldn’t. It was a part of him that would always be. And because of that, there was nothing else to say. She, however, spoke as one who believed he’d fully put that life behind him. There was a niggling of guilt that worked around his gut, at letting her to that incorrect supposition she’d made. One that would no doubt result in her hightailing it back to her cottage.
Dare placed himself in front of her. “Very well, you cannot tolerate carriage rides,” he said, bringing them back ’round to the discovery that had unearthed old resentments from their past. “The only answer that makes sense is that you won’t ride in a carriage.”
“We’ll return to my cottage, then,” she said in deadened tones.
Was hers a question? His chest tightened. “Is that what you wish? Is that what you’d like me to do?”
Indecision filled her eyes. Her lips moved ever so slightly; no doubt on the tip of her tongue was just that, a request to end this before it began. But she wouldn’t. Because she’d committed to doing so. Because she’d see herself as a coward for reneging, even though he’d never fault her or blame her.
“No,” she said, and that confirmation came as if dragged from her.
He knew this woman so well. And yet how ironic, at the same time, that he should know her not at all. He’d not known of her friendships or of the little yet important things, like how a carriage ride could set her stomach churning. Or that she’d learned to ride.
“I intend to see this arrangement through.”
She’d yet again agreed to join him. He’d allowed her now several opportunities to remove herself from the arrangement, and as such, he needn’t ask any further.
But he didn’t want her like this, feeling trapped.
She’d been that too many times in her life, and he’d be damned if he allowed himself to be one who’d force her into another—albeit different—corner.
Dare dusted the tip of his index finger along the curve of her chin. “Are you sure?” he asked, hearing her reluctance and wanting confirmation that she’d thought through this decision, and that she would take an out if that was what she wished. “Once we enter London, there will be no going back. The world will know you as my wife.”
She drew in a shuddery breath. Was it his touch, or horror at the prospect he’d raised? How desperately he wished for it to be the former. “I have to do this.” She glanced back to the waiting carriages. “Not just for me, but for Gwynn.”
A wave of relief swept through him. One that didn’t have anything to do with escaping an explanation to the duke.
“From the ashes of our past, perhaps a future can be born for the both of us,” Temperance said.
“We’ll ride together, then.”
“You being in the carriage will not change my reaction to riding.” It would only add a layer of unease, having him in close quarters.
A half grin curved his lips up. “I wasn’t referring to the carriage.” She followed his stare over to the servant holding the reins of Temperance’s horse. “I’ll have your mount readied so that you can ride.”
“Are you suggesting we ride together?” she blurted.
Dare smiled, eager to restore them to some place of ease they’d played pretend at before. “Unless you’d prefer to ride in the carriage . . . ?”
“No!” she exclaimed. “Thank you. I . . .”
He waited.
“I’m a proficient rider. My brother taught me; however, I don’t keep the pace that you set.”
He held up a hand. “It is fine. We’ll arrive in London when we arrive.”
Something glimmered in her eyes, some emotion, some sentiment he couldn’t make sense of.
And as he joined her on the walk back to the carriage, he couldn’t stave off the questions as to what else had changed for Temperance in their time apart.
Chapter 9
Seated on the carved armchair with Gwynn snoring away, Temperance frantically put her needle to work, trying to distract herself from the thought of her undertaking. The bed pillow she’d tucked under her in the form of a makeshift cushion did little in the way of offering comfort.
Sleep hadn’t always come easy to Temperance.
As a small girl, and then as a young woman, she’d learned the cost of slumbering too soundly was that it made one too slow to escape a violent beating from the hands of one’s father.
When she’d left London and started anew in the English countryside, different demons had haunted her thoughts and stolen all peace—the loss of a babe, a child who should have never been. Fate had known it, and robbed her of the tiny girl because of it.
She’d never thought to know rest.
And then somehow, someway, she’d learned to sleep. Yes, in some part, the long days and strenuous work at Madame Amelie’s were what accounted for the mind-numbing fatigue and exhaustion. But it hadn’t been just that. For she’d never worked harder than she had in the Rookeries. No, the gift of sleep was one she’d taught herself. She’d learned to close her eyes and shut out the day’s trials and the past and the fears, and just turn herself over to the oblivion that came with unconsciousness.
Or that had been the case.
This night, sleep eluded her.
This time, however, the absolute inability to let go of the day had nothing to do with the past or the heartache of loss or the nightmares of her father.
This time, it was Dare . . . Dare, with whom she was returning to London.
She continued to drag her needle through the pink fabric, attaching it to the pale-green cotton. Whatever scraps had been set for discarding at Madame Amelie’s Temperance had rescued, and saved to create something when her time was her own.
That wouldn’t be the case when she arrived in Dare’s fine London townhouse. There, she’d live the life of a marchioness. A marchioness with a houseful of servants and a duke and duchess whom she and Dare had to answer to. And she’d be expected to attend ton events with the most powerful, wealthy, influential members of Polite Society. Her palms grew moist, her fingers trembling slightly, and she steadied her grip.
The idea of being with Dare had been sufficiently terrifying enough that she’d not had time to think of everything their arrangement entailed.
She slowed, her needle hovering along the perfect line she’d just stitched.
Soon she’d be in a position where she needn’t rely on anyone ever again. Soon there would be funds enough to see her settled forever. That was what she needed to focus on . . . everything awaiting her and Gwynn when she saw through this arrangement with Dare. All she needed to do was suffer about the ton for as long as it took for his sister to find a husband.
Given the young woman was the sister of a marquess, and the granddaughter of a duke and duchess, it wouldn’t be long at all.
And then Temperance would be free to go on her way and live comfortably forevermore.
And it was all because of Dare.
“Dare the Savior,” she whispered into the quiet. The rescuer of innocents. The saver of damsels. That was the role he’d always craved and one he’d carried out with all—including with her. And perhaps there was something very wrong about her for having wanted more from him.
For them.
He’d always wanted to shield her from suffering, just as he had everyone else in East London. At first, she’d fallen head over heels in love with him, this dashing, mighty man who’d fought to protect and defend her.
It had been heady and shocking.
She, who’d grown up witnessing her father’s frequent beatings of her mother. That same violence she’d also seen carried out against women on the streets . . . So she’d believed that was the only way between men and women.
A bleating snore rent across the small quarters Temperance shared with Gwynn, cutting into her musings. Temperance shook her head, clearing those thoughts, and stared with no small amount of envy at a perfectly rested Gwynn, sprawled on her back with the covers off and her mouth hanging open. The other woman was sleep personified. From belowstairs, the noisy din of the taproom had no impact on the other woman’s slumber.
Abandoning all hope of rest, Temperance briefly set down her sewing. She lowered her legs, the cool penetrating her feet. Shivering, she hurried across the room, and as she went, she shrugged out of her night wrapper and exchanged it for another serviceable chemise and dress. After she’d donned her shoes, she gathered up the fabric she’d been working on and headed for the front of the room.
The moment she opened the door, the ungreased hinges squealed.
Behind her, Gwynn sputtered in her sleep, and then her snoring resumed its regular cadence.
Drawing the door closed behind her, Temperance blinked to adjust her eyes to the nearly pitch-black corridor and then froze.
Stretched out on the opposite side of the hall with his long legs unfurled and a leather book in hand, Dare had set himself up. From over the top of that tome, he looked at her. “Temperance.”
She dampened her lips and briefly considered retreating back into her room. Briefly.
“Dare.” And before she thought better of it, she settled herself onto the floor across from him. At some point, he’d switched the clothes he’d ridden in for a new set of garments. These dark ones were just as fine and flawless. With a book on his lap, he may as well have been a nobleman seated in his office and not a gentleman sitting on the floor of a public resting house.
They sat in companionable silence for a long while, with Dare reading and her stitching fabric into the beginnings of a small throw.
“Unable to sleep still, are you?” he asked, closing his book.
She paused, the tip of her needle piercing the line she sewed, and then made herself drag it through.
Still . . . the assumption was that she’d remained the same all these years later, and she didn’t want to remind him that she’d changed . . . in so many ways. It was, simply put, easier to let him to that conjecture.
“I was unable to sleep,” she allowed. Drawing her knees up close to her chest, she made a makeshift table of her legs, taking some of the strain from her arms.
“London?”
Temperance stared intently down at her work. “Yes.” Why must he continue to remind her of all the ways in which they’d known everything there was to know about one another? So much so that they needn’t even speak in complete sentences to know what the other spoke of.
“You won’t see him,” he said quietly.
Ironically, it was the first time that her unease didn’t stem from fear of that monster.
“He doesn’t leave the Rookeries, Temperance,” he continued on with that same incorrect supposition. “He’s become an even bigger drunkard in his old age. He’ll drown himself in his spirits.”
Unless she’d seen a body upon which to spit, Temperance would never believe anything but that the Devil still walked amongst them. “It’s not Abaddon I’m”—fearful of—“uneasy about, Dare.” Except, mayhap in large part it was. Mayhap she’d just not acknowledged as much until Dare had forced her to. Temperance, however, would be damned if she let him be the root of her fears. Not again. There was nothing he could do that would hurt worse than the pain he’d already brought her.
Dare had always been entirely too confident where her ruthless sire was concerned. And there had been another time when she’d let herself believe in Dare, too. She’d made the mistake of thinking her father had forgotten about her. And that mistake had proven fatal. Tears pricked her lashes, and she gave thanks for the shroud of darkness that shielded those useless drops. She frantically dragged her needle through her fabrics. No good came from crying. If there had, she’d have been healed in those immediate days when she’d birthed and lost her babe. She shoved the needle through the fabric and stabbed the pad of her thumb.
Her breath hissed from her teeth as she dropped her stitchery.
He scooted across the hall. “Here.”
It was those tones, those blasted gentle, tender ones, that sent a single tear falling. And then another.
Burying her head in her shoulder, she angrily swiped back the moisture from her cheeks. “It’s fine,” she said tightly.
Except he reached for her hand anyway, and tugging a crisp white, embroidered kerchief from his jacket, he pressed it lightly against her wound. “It isn’t awful,” Dare agreed, his head bent over their joined palms.
She stared at the tiny crimson drop as it expanded into a larger, distorted blob. Her stomach revolted. A soundless moan worked its way up her throat.
Just look away, and you needn’t see . . . You needn’t remember blood upon your person from another time.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she blocked out the sight of it. Except, different remembrances of that sanguine substance had already taken root.
Slick and sleek, so dark it was nearly black. So much of it.
She bit the inside of her cheek.
“There,” Dare was saying, and just that one quiet word, spoken in his always-assuring tone, pulled her from the fog of the past.
He glanced up.
Temperance drew her hand back and cradled the injured digit close. As she spoke, she directed the words at the makeshift bandage Dare had arranged from his kerchief. “This world isn’t mine.”
Dare stared at her questioningly.
“Not this one,” she clarified, gesturing to the cramped hall they’d made a meeting place.
Understanding dawned in his clear gaze. “Ahh.” He scoffed. “This world is as much yours as anyone else’s,” he said with such affront in his tone and expression, she smiled.
He’d always been offended on her behalf. “It isn’t, though, Dare,” she said gently. “I’ve dressed gentry, but never lords and ladies. I don’t know their dances or their customs or . . . anything about their ways.” And now he’d asked her . . . Nay, she’d agreed to play at marchioness.
Dare shifted, pulling himself around so they sat shoulder to shoulder. And there was a calming peace from that light touch, that shared connection. “This isn’t my world, either, Temperance.”
She looked up at him. “But it is,” she said with a quiet insistence. He might not believe it or want that to be the case. “Regardless of how many years you’ve been away from the ton, you were born to this, and that is all that matters to these people.” These people . . . whose ranks he now belonged to. Her stomach tightened. As the divide that had always existed between them now proved somehow, impossibly, even greater. “By your own admission, the funds are dependent upon your being seen in Polite Society with your sister.”
“And we’ll do that,” he said calmly.
So confident.
Laughing softly, she leaned against the wall and shook her head back and forth. “Oh, Dare.” There wasn’t a single challenge he’d not boldly confront. “You fear nothing.”
He lifted his broad shoulders in a casual shrug. “What good comes from that?”
“None,” she agreed. And she’d once prided herself on being at least like him in this. She, who couldn’t countenance carriage rides or the sight of blood. Temperance glanced up at him again. “And yet I’ve also come to learn that fear is a state that shouldn’t be ignored.” Reading those premonitions and listening to one’s bo
dy’s inherent unease could prove the difference between life . . . and death. It was an understanding she’d come to too late.
Dare brushed several tresses that had escaped her plait behind her ear. Those strands bounced back, resisting his attempts. Her heart thrummed . . . at the effortless ease of the intimacy of that afterthought touch. He smoothed her hair back once more . . . and this time, the locks complied. Yes, because Dare Grey could manage to tame even her recalcitrant curls. “You’ve grown more cautious.” In our time apart.
“Aye.” Temperance faced him and met his gaze squarely. “And you’ve become even less so.” He’d learned nothing from his latest trip to Newgate. By his own admission, some unnamed foe had maneuvered him into a noose, and he spoke with only a casualness about it. “You trust that everything will work out.”
“Because it will,” he said with that same arrogance that pulled another laugh from her.
She lightly knocked her head against the wall. “That isn’t how life works, Dare.”
“It does for me.”
It hadn’t for her. “You won’t always be so fortunate,” she said without inflection. “You will learn that not even you can bend the world to your will. That no matter how much you wish for something”—her gaze slid past him, to the very end of the corridor—“no matter how much you intend to make it be, that sometimes you j-just can’t.” Her voice quavered as, unbidden, a memory of the babe she’d held all too briefly slipped in. Feeling his piercing stare upon her, she schooled her features. “Polite Society isn’t simply going to accept me because you wish for it to be so.”
He flashed a half smile. “And you are wrong, Temperance. They’ll not only accept you; they’ll adore you.”
Laughing, Temperance rested her head against his shoulder. “You are many things, Dare Grey, but you’ve never been naive.”
“I don’t expect it will be smooth at first, but I trust that we will both win their world over.”
He would. That was a certainty. If for no other reason than the charm he oozed and the confidence he possessed, he’d make it happen. In time, however, he’d see that none of this would be effortless in the way he thought it would be. “Good night, Dare,” she said gently as she came to her feet.
Undressed with the Marquess Page 11
