by Evie Dunmore
He gave her a brooding stare. “You have tried the Manchester Guardian, I presume?”
“Of course. In the end, we decided to acquire our own means of distribution.” She cut him a pointed look. “Unexpected circumstances ruined it.”
A moment of confusion.
As the pennies dropped, one by one, his expression turned vaguely horrified before her eyes. “London Print.”
She nodded.
“Oh grand,” he said, and then, “This could have sunk the entire publishing house.”
“Possibly.” She gave an apologetic smile. “Of course, we very much hoped it would survive. Somehow.”
He gave a shake as if waking from a dream. “You bought an entire publishing house for the purpose of a single publication.”
“It is a very important publication. And it goes straight into the hands of tens of thousands of women of the kind who write to us. They would have known they are not alone. And there would have been headlines after all.”
His mind was churning behind his eyes, rapidly like a flywheel. “The plan is rather convoluted,” he finally said. “But bold, and strangely brilliant, given the circumstances. Ambushing women across the land from the pages of their divertive periodical. Brutal, too. I am, however, surprised you would gamble with the money of your investment consortium.”
“Tristan.” Her tone was gentle. “They know.” And, when disbelief filled his eyes: “I would have never proceeded without the ladies’ consent. No, they all knew they might never see their money again. For that reason, it was rather challenging to pull a consortium together. There are very few women in Britain who are both independently wealthy as well as so supportive of women’s suffrage that they could be entrusted with the plans for our coup.”
He wore the expression of a man who had just learned that the earth was not flat. “We have a circle of financially suicidal lady investors in Britain—little Lady Salisbury? In truth?”
She almost felt sorry for him then. “I’m not the only woman in Britain who is angry.”
“No,” he said slowly. “I suppose not.”
His jaw set in a determined line, and he walked past her, straight out the door.
She came to her feet and rushed after him.
He was in the corridor, wearing his coat, taking his hat off the rack.
Her heart leapt in alarm. “You are leaving?”
He reached for his cane. “To London.”
Will you come back?
One hand on the door handle, he glanced back over his shoulder, his eyes already focused on something that lay ahead. “If you want me tonight, wait for me in our room—though I cannot tell yet when I shall be back. Keep the back door locked, it is safer for you.”
“But wait—how will you get in?”
He was already gone, and only later did it occur to her that he had skipped down her front steps in bright daylight. They were becoming careless in rather too many ways.
* * *
He returned when the night outside the curtains in Adelaide Street was as dark as a pit. She had long slipped into an unruly sleep and woke disoriented at the sound of careful footsteps. She blinked and found it made no difference whether her eyes were open or closed.
“Shh,” came his voice from above. “It is me.”
The bed sagged under his weight with a lazy creak.
She reached for him, and her hands met satiny skin and muscle. She had slept through his arrival, and him discarding his clothes.
“You came back.” Her sleepy hand trailed over his back, down the indent of his spine, eliciting a purr.
He lifted the blanket and moved over her, one with the dark. He smelled good. The warmth of his naked body touched her skin, and anticipation began to simmer.
Her hand found the silk of his hair. “What did you do?”
“I met a few fellows.” His lips teased her ear, then the side of her sleep-flushed neck. “And I have claimed my seat in the House of Lords.”
Her eyes were wide open.
“One more sword for your troops, princess.” His breath brushed against her chin. “I had meant to do it the day after you had told me about a hundred years since Wollstonecraft, but—”
She lifted her head and her mouth met his, and he made a soft noise of surprise. She touched her tongue to his and he grunted, and his weight settled heavily on her. Heat welled between her legs. She arched up, seeking the pressure of his chest against hers.
Not enough—she struggled, trapped in swathes of sheets and nightgown.
He broke the kiss, his laugh a dark rumble. “Such impatience.”
Her nails bit into the balls of his shoulders, because it ached. She was aching for him. “I need you.”
He made a soothing sound. “Then you will have me.”
The bed groaned as he stretched himself out beside her and slid his warm hand beneath the hem, up her thigh, and up. The respite of being intimately touched was fleeting; a tension was tightening beneath her skin and it demanded all of him. She squeezed her thighs together, trying to trap his languidly circling hand.
“Poor darling.” He shifted, and she heard the scrape of the small box that was ever present during their encounters.
Her fingers curled over his wrist.
He stilled.
“Leave them,” she said softly, “if you wish. Be careful.”
He rolled over her, and a haze took her, there was only liquid heat and the blunt pressure of him demanding to be let in. “Oh God,” he said. She could not speak. The silky glide of his movements was unlike anything he had made her feel before. Noises climbed in her throat, uncontrollable, she was dissolving in sensations. Her one hand was on his shoulder, the other low on his back, she saw with her palms how he moved between her legs. From a distance came the rhythmic creaking of bedsprings. An echo of his voice, murmuring that she could enjoy him as long as she liked, as long as it took, the whole night, forever, if he lasted—she did not last, not at all. The tension curled her toes and broke in hot voluptuous spasms, and a starlit sky rushed at her as she screamed.
She was still panting when she came to, and a high-pitched noise rung in her ears.
Her fingers were mindlessly smoothing the damp hair on his nape.
Agony of bliss indeed.
When he stirred and raised his head, she could feel him looking at her.
“Of course.” Soft irony tinged his voice. “I should have known that politics would please you best.”
Her hands flattened on his sweat-sheened back. His muscles were tense, he was supporting his weight, careful not to crush her.
Her belly felt sticky. He had been careful.
“You please me very well,” she whispered.
She strained to stay awake, to hear him tell her that she must not trust him, must not need him, but he remained silent until she was asleep.
* * *
He was lying on his side, his body protectively curved around the sleeping woman in his arms. His blood was still racing, his eyes and ears straining as though threats were hidden in the shadows, and he was ready for them. He would try and protect her from anything.
Of course, he was currently a threat himself. He felt her heart beating beneath his hand, his careless hand. Did she know she was in love with him?
He was painfully aware that he was. He had nearly lost himself in her when she had come undone. For a mad moment, he had wanted to do it.
He buried his face in her hair and breathed her in. Hubris came before the fall, they said. And he had fallen hard, and was falling still. It meant he could not stay in India. He had to make a new plan and it involved returning posthaste. And he had to do the dreadful thing and tell her everything. It was what a good man would do. He had not wanted to be good in half a lifetime, but now he did; he fair ached with it. Cecily, Rochester, India. He would
tell her. His arms tightened around her of their own volition at the thought, as though to say they wanted to hold on to happiness just a while longer.
Chapter 30
The next afternoon when he arrived in his lodgings in Logic Lane, he had a letter from General Foster on his desk—it would be his pleasure to accommodate Tristan and his mother in Delhi until Tristan had set up a household of his own. The confirmation elicited no sense of relief, for at this point, he resented the idea of leaving Britain almost bodily. He still instructed Avi to purchase three tickets for a ship leaving Southampton in three weeks. It would give him enough time to settle his financial and administrative affairs and to oversee the production process at London Print. To lengthen his workdays as required, he decided to spend a few nights a week in the director’s apartment on the publishing house’s top floor. He resented that, too, for it would mean spending nights away from Lucie. He had, of course, not told her a thing this morning. Her eyes had been filled with an emotion that he, very selfishly, had not wanted to destroy. He would find a solution first; if he had to confess, he would not do so without being able to offer a solution along with the confession, whether she still wanted him or not.
Could he entice her to stay in the offices in London with him? Hardly. He wanted to bed her on silk, not another battered settee. Besides, she would balk at being taken away from her duties in Oxford. Only during their parting this morning, she had told him not to come see her tonight, as her work was weighing upon her.
He sorted through his remaining pile of mail. Another kindly threatening note by Blackstone, from the looks of it. He binned it unopened.
A cable from the editor of the Manchester Guardian. He set it aside on the important pile.
An envelope without a sender’s address, the handwriting distinctly female, nearly followed Blackstone’s letter. It wouldn’t be the first time a woman had ferreted out his current address and sent an unsolicited love letter . . . and then he did a double take. Cold foreboding trickled down his nape. It was the hand of his mother’s lady’s maid. Familiar from occasional correspondence when his mother had been too listless to write herself. He ripped the envelope open.
Milord,
I write to inform you that my lady, the countess of Rochester, has disappeared from Ashdown last night, and there is no certainty of her whereabouts. There had been talk she might not be safe at Ashdown among some of the staff. I believe she would have wanted your lordship to be informed; your return had reawakened some of her strength. I hope this missive reaches you, as I have reason to believe that I am being watched. . . .
The letter was dated three days ago. It meant his mother had been missing for four.
“Avi,” he said. His voice was ice. “Get ready. We are going to Ashdown.”
* * *
Jarvis, his father’s valet—spy—bodyguard stood in front of the door to Rochester’s study, feet apart.
“You can stand aside now, or die,” Tristan said pleasantly.
Jarvis leapt out of the way as though he had found himself barefoot on hot coals, and Tristan strode into the office unobstructed. “Where is she?”
Rochester was behind his desk, assessing his crouching stance with narrowed eyes. “Tristan. How timely. I was about to send for you.”
“Strangely, a change in rules is not what I had expected from you.”
Rochester was observing his approach warily. “I told you I was watching you. And what I saw was the usual lack of cooperation—”
Tristan had walked straight around the desk and gone toe-to-toe.
“You gave me three months,” he said, thrusting his face close to Rochester’s cold visage. “They are not up.”
“There was no need since—”
“Where is the countess?”
“Sign this. And she shall be back.”
Rochester never broke eye contact, but his fingers were tapping one of the documents laid out on his desk. Tristan glanced at them, barely deciphering the script through the red haze before his eyes, but it was enough to understand that it was a marriage contract. Already signed and sealed by the honorable Earl of Wycliffe.
He stepped back and pulled the blade from his cane so fast, a high-pitched ringing sound filled the air.
Rochester stood still as stone, his eyes flitting from the sharp steel vibrating near his cheek to Tristan’s face. “You would not dare,” he said, his lips barely moving.
“Dare what,” Tristan said. “Slicing up Harry’s old carpet? But I think I do.” And the tip of the sword dug into Rochester’s beloved royal tapestry, right into the heart of the tree.
“No!” Rochester made a grab for the blade, before thinking better of it and going for Tristan’s throat.
Tristan was faster.
His father’s fingers were digging into his arm, trying to dislodge the fist twisting his cravat.
“Where is she?” Tristan demanded.
“This is undignified,” Rochester growled as he grappled.
Tristan gave a shake. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
A flick of his right wrist, and century-old silk threads parted like butter.
“I don’t know where she is,” shouted Rochester, his handsome features distorted with fury.
Damnation.
Bright hot anger was pulsing through Tristan, but his intuition was rarely wrong—his father was speaking the truth. His mother was gone, but not the way Rochester had planned.
Which meant the bastard had just tried to get him to sign his life away by bluffing. Which meant he was worried that his leverage over Tristan had significantly dwindled.
He released his father’s cravat. He did not lower the blade.
“What does her lady’s maid say, or is she gone, too?”
Rochester touched the tip of his tongue to the corner of his mouth. The look in his eyes was murderous. Tristan had to look more murderous, for Rochester to stay put and compliant like this.
“The wench had run off,” Rochester said. “We found her, but she claims she knows nothing, so we let her go.”
“And put her under surveillance.”
“Of course,” Rochester snapped.
Tristan made a mental note to seek out the woman, to see whether she had been harmed, and whether she did know something. She had tried to speak to him during his last visit, after all. Bloody Jarvis has deterred her, and he had let it happen.
The earl peered at the foot-long gash that Tristan had inflicted on the tapestry. “I shall cut your allowance to nothing for this.”
Tristan shook his head. “I have never seen you act as concerned toward a human being as you are acting toward this piece of cloth.”
Rochester’s upper lip curled with contempt. “People die,” he said. “Ideas and traditions and glory survive—long after your flesh has rotted into the ground.”
Tristan nodded. Spoken like a tyrant, then. True to their ancestors eternalized on the tapestry, who had gained and defended their titles and estates by cleverly using their underlings as cannon fodder in this war or that. Considering the same blood rolled in his veins, he could probably be a lot worse than he was: an outright monster in addition to being a careless libertine. Except that . . . he was not.
He was not.
He stared at the family tree, the swirling names of all those who had come before him, and knew in his bones that he would save a beggar in rags before he worried about saving a material thing. There was a rightness to the realization, an instinctive quality like that of drawing breath. He gave a bemused shake. Here in this study, before the now maimed tapestry, Rochester had tried to beat this instinct out of him, year after year. Had killed a kitten or two in between, too. He beat you out of shape, not into it.
He sheathed the blade. He gave Rochester a pointed look. He strode from the room without a backward glan
ce. Was his disposition twisted in places? Undoubtedly. But Rochester had not succeeded to upend his foundation. He had not succeeded at all. And the most remarkable thing was that it had taken him so long to see it.
As he climbed aboard the carriage awaiting his return at the back entrance, it occurred to him that his mother had perhaps planned her flight all along. In hindsight, her parting words during his last visit sounded suspiciously like parting words for good.
Now he just had to find her before Rochester did. Annoyingly, the one possible clue he had thus far required him to call on two ladies he would have gladly never called upon again. Back in Oxford, he stopped by at the Randolph Hotel and left a card addressed to Lady Wycliffe with an invitation to an outing.
He returned to Logic Lane to answer a few important letters and to write a couple of his own, then he made his way to Lucie’s house against her orders, for he needed her tonight.
She didn’t open the kitchen door. But she had to be home; he had seen the flicker of light behind the curtains of her drawing room from the garden. When she did not react to knocks on the drawing room window, he took the liberty of picking the kitchen door lock and let himself in.
“Lucie,” he said softly into the silence. Her housekeeper was probably home, asleep upstairs. It was careless of him to be here. Lucie would be spitting mad. It would be worth it, he supposed.
He halted two steps into the drawing room.
She was curled up on her side before the fireplace, asleep on a pile of letters.
Behind her, the logs on the grate had collapsed into a softly crackling heap of embers, the glow delineating her curled-up form with a fiery edge.
His men would sleep like this, after battle, not caring where they lay.
Boudicca was sitting on her skirt, her yellow eyes fixing upon him in a quiet warning when he approached. The little black fury was guarding her mistress better than he could have hoped.