“I’ll hold you to your professions of honesty!” she pretended to protest.
The meal unfolded in casual steps and before long they were both laughing at the turns in the easy conversation between them. Without any rush, the plates were set aside and the chess pieces were pulled out of their carved wooden box for another game.
“I warn you”—he sighed—“my soldiers are determined to recover their pride and take the field. I’ve tried to preach mercy, but . . .”
“I’m not afraid, Mr. Thorne.” Isabel meant it as a taunt, but it rang with a clarity that made her breath catch in her chest.
Here. With him. I’m safe.
“Then it’s your move, Helen.”
She forced herself to study the board and not the beautiful masculine lines of his face and embarrass herself any further. She pushed one of her soldiers out, mentally giving them both an internal lecture on bravery on the field and the advantages of going first.
“Don’t look so worried for him,” Darius said. “He has an army at his back after all.”
She smiled. “I was just thinking of telling him the same thing.”
“Good. Because my men were about to remind him about the army in front of him.” Darius made his first move in one confident gesture, matching her strategy as she squeaked in protest.
Once again, the game unfolded, still in a modified teaching rhythm that allowed her to catch her mistakes and learn from every effort that went into the battle. His patience never wavered, and Darius narrated his own choices to help her see how his strategies were formed and how he attempted to anticipate her moves to shape his own.
Isabel clapped her hands in triumph as her forces began to encroach against his, her eyes locked on the prize of his lonely king.
Only to gasp when suddenly his knights were deep inside her kingdom and her queen was threatened.
“You! How?” she protested, fighting not to pout at the reversal in her fortunes.
He smiled and held up his hands in submission. “Scouts.”
“Spies,” she amended, eyeing the pieces with suspicion.
“Ambassadors.”
“Assassins!” Isabel put her elbows on the table and perched her chin on her palms, surveying the damage. “Look at them! They are hardly innocent sitting there, eating off my best plate and upsetting my courtiers!”
“I assure you they are doing their best to mind the local customs and not frighten the natives.”
She lost the battle to stay aloof and found herself pouting. “Well, my queen is determined to remove herself from this mess until her bishops can show your ‘ambassadors’ back out.” She reached for her queen but Darius gently caught her wrist to stop her.
“Be careful, Helen. Don’t retreat without thinking it through. See? See what’s waiting for you?”
Isabel’s heart was pounding so loudly she was sure he could hear it.
But it wasn’t from fear.
The world narrowed to the touch of his fingers capturing her hand and the searingly sweet hold that was keeping her queen from harm. It was electric and unexpected, and suddenly all Isabel wanted was more.
She didn’t want him to let go. It made no sense. But ever since he’d taken her hand the night before, Isabel had been faced with the illogical truth that, with this man, none of the rules applied. She wanted to be held, to yield control to this man and surrender herself to the consequences of the restless coils of hungry heat that began to unfurl inside her slender frame.
But he misinterpreted the change in her expression and released her.
“Do you see them, Helen?” he asked again, even more gently.
She forced her eyes back to the pieces, struggling at first to identify what he saw. But then she saw it. A black rook was sitting benignly to the side. A black bishop was nonchalantly standing near a small group of weary pawns. Her queen would have stormed off into an ambush.
“I see them.”
“Are you all right?” He lowered his chin to look at her over the rim of his glasses, and Isabel smiled.
“I am. But my queen—is in a quandary. She cannot run and she cannot stay. Now what does she do?”
“She makes a new path.” He tilted his head to one side to eye the board anew. “Ah! There! She isn’t alone. Don’t forget those courtiers, Helen. My ambassadors could easily be distracted by one of those rude bishops. Maybe you could talk one of your soldiers into stomping on my toes?”
“The reputation of my court might suffer after all this discourtesy,” she offered with a sigh. “But it’s good advice.”
She leaned back in her chair, easing against the cushions, and found herself staring at the fire instead of her miniature army. “I wonder at all the ambushes I’ve walked into simply because I wished to be polite or adhere to social courtesies.”
“I try to remind myself that not everyone sees the world the way I do,” he said. “But I cannot look at everyone as an opponent or an enemy and abandon manners. I want to believe in man’s better qualities.”
Her attention turned to him, and Isabel made a study of her host and friend. “I don’t know what to believe anymore. I don’t know if I can trust my own judgment. What if no one is what they seem?”
“Don’t mistake secrets for goblins, Helen. Everyone has something they’d rather keep private, but their character shouldn’t be too difficult to discern. Not in ordinary circumstances.” He reached up to take off his glasses, wiping them off with a handkerchief. “Only villains wear masks.”
Only villains wear masks.
Isabel watched him work the delicate spectacles, marveling at how the deduction of a single element from his face made him look so very different. Without his glasses, he was even more handsome—in a devil-may-care fashion. The firelight struck his features to golden flesh and shadows, a handsome mask that made her wish that there was nothing of secrets between them. He was a hero tipped in darkness and light, and she had to clench her fingers together in her lap to tamp down the desire to reach out and touch his face with the blades of her fingers to make sure that he was real.
“I am—like the queen on the board. I want to run but I . . . I’m afraid I’m going to just rush into a terrible trap. I’ve already moved without looking.”
“In running? In escaping your husband?”
She nodded. “In running. In marrying him. In everything. I’ve apparently made a habit of it throughout my life, blindly believing that whatever was around the corner would be better. I was a shallow, silly girl that thought of nothing more than invitations and balls and when . . .”
He said nothing, the living essence of patience as she gathered her courage.
At last, she continued. “He was very attentive and flattering. He was handsome and . . . my parents approved of him. My father’s title and estates are entailed to a distant male heir, and I think they were relieved to see me well matched. I imagined myself in love because that was the very next natural thing that I should be, after all. I was pampered and convinced that everything in my life would be . . . lovely.”
He nodded, his attention unwavering.
Isabel sighed. “I never knew that things could be so ugly, that it could change in a single breath, and that a person could be robbed of the ability to say no.”
“You never lost that power, Helen. You did whatever you had to do or told him whatever you needed to say in order to survive. But hear me now, from this moment forward, you possess the power to say no to anything and to anyone.” Darius leaned forward, replacing his spectacles, and then deliberately knocked over the black king on the board and yielded the contest. “And there is no ambush here.”
She nodded and stood, suddenly too anxious and restless to stay. His company was compelling, but she blamed the length of the day on the unruly turns in her thoughts and inability to focus on the game. “I should retire.”
He immediately stood when she did, bumping the table and overturning a few of the pieces. “Of course! It’s—I’m exhausted
myself.”
She started to go but turned at the last. “I wish to ask you something, Mr. Thorne. But it is terribly forward and . . . rude.”
“Is it?”
She nodded miserably. “I’m afraid so. But—I have to know.”
He smiled. “Then you should ask.” He straightened his coat and kept his place by his chair. “There is no question out-of-bounds. My old teacher, Professor Warren, used to say that curiosity is a thing never to squander.”
She took a deep breath. “Why are you not married, Mr. Thorne?”
“Ah,” he said softly, “that question!”
She almost tried to take it back, offer an apology, and assure him that he needn’t answer. But Isabel held her ground.
“Why do you think I’m not married, Helen?”
“That’s not fair. You cannot use the Socratic method and turn this all around!”
He merely smiled at her and folded his arms. “Well?”
“Mrs. McFadden has hinted that it’s all to do with your eccentric wish to spend every waking moment in your library and your inability to hear dinner bells.”
“Hmm. That sounds promising,” he said carefully.
“No, it doesn’t! The love of books does not disqualify you as a husband.”
His eyes flashed with something, a surge of hope—or heat—or . . . Isabel wasn’t sure what it was in the quick betrayal of his expression before he ducked his head to examine the fraying threads on his shirt’s cuff.
“I am not married, because I am not married, Helen.”
“That hardly tells me why,” she whispered.
“No, and I promised you could ask.” He sighed and looked up, the vulnerability in his eyes sending a wash of aching raw electricity through her. “Don’t mistake secrets for goblins.”
“Is it a secret, then?”
He nodded. “It’s not that I’m not inclined or interested. It’s not that I don’t envy my friends who’ve found their happiness in matrimony. But I’m . . . Marriage is for better men than myself. Let’s leave it at that. Please.”
Please. He gives me all the power and I’m so clumsy with it that all I can do is hurt him somehow.
“Of course.” She turned and left to hurry upstairs without looking back.
The evening was definitively concluded and Darius stayed behind in the library as she retreated up to the sanctuary of her bedroom.
Why are you not married?
One day I’ll tell her and be done with it. It’s stupid pride that kept me from it tonight. Stupid pride and the hope of a fool trapped in a penny novel—I didn’t want her to think less of me.
He had never allowed himself to get too close to anyone, terrified at the thought of becoming that monster he’d grown up with. A priest had told him when he was six that it was a family curse. “Your grandfather was a tyrant and your father . . . It’s the way of it. Thorne men are handsome as the devil but known for their quick tempers and quicker fists.” Thorne men. Even at six, he’d absorbed the worst of the implications.
He was a Thorne man.
That must mean he would grow up and become cruel like his father.
And so he’d set it all aside. All his energies had gone into a pursuit of a life that was not his father’s. He’d drowned himself in books and avoided the company of women for fear that if he lost his heart, he’d lose his head as well.
Of all the women in the world, perhaps Helen would understand and respect my desire not to inflict harm.
Or see it as confirmation that all men are secretly base and unworthy.
At the moment, he felt extremely base. Every nerve ending was alert and alive, and there was nothing of pristine chivalry in the thickening weight of his flesh and growing demands of his body in her presence. Realms of intellect abandoned him and Darius sat down at his desk to face the truth.
He was losing ground quickly in his battle to keep her at arm’s length.
Damn. I’ve sworn to protect her, but I never thought to worry about protecting her from me.
Chapter
8
The next morning, Darius was in his library penning a letter to Ashe about his revelations on the lack of leads amidst the Scottish gem dealers, oblivious to the usual noise of the house until the tone of the bickering drifting up from the kitchen seemed to change.
Darius stopped what he was doing and cocked his head to one side, listening to a new undertone of upset in their banter. With a sigh, he pushed back from his desk and headed toward the back of the house, his pace increasing at the sound of a scream followed by a great crash of metal and china against the floor.
Darius threw open the door only to freeze at the sight of Hamish laid out on the flagstones next to an overturned worktable, with Helen standing over him in tears, holding a cast-iron skillet upraised as if to strike him again. Mrs. McFadden was frozen with her apron held up to cover her mouth, her eyes wide with surprise.
Helen dropped the skillet and the jarring sound of it hitting the stone floor made poor Hamish groan and sit up. “I’m . . . so sorry,” Helen whispered.
“What happened?” Darius asked.
Mrs. McFadden looked as miserable as any creature he’d ever seen. “I . . . I . . .”
Hamish reached up to cradle his skull. “It’s a goose egg but I’ll survive.”
Darius tried again. “What happened?”
It was Hamish who finally answered. “I found out your housekeeper’s first name and . . . got clouted for it.”
“Truly?” Darius asked, struggling not to smile.
“Here’s a hint.” Hamish moaned after running his hands through his hair. “It isna’ Mary.”
Mrs. McFadden nodded, her cheeks patchy with splotches of red betraying her embarrassment. “Margarida is hardly a good Scottish name, sir. My mother heard it from a Spanish gypsy and took a fanciful liking to it. I confess I’ve always been a bit sensitive over the matter and might have made a bit of a squawk. I believe madam thought to come to my rescue. . . .”
“A bit of a squawk?” Hamish scoffed. “Ye came at me like a Morrígan with that tongue of yours, you banshee!”
Mrs. McFadden crossed her arms defensively. “You laughed at me, you insensitive boor!”
“Well, here.” Darius stepped forward to help the man to his feet. “Let’s get you off the floor and get a cold cloth for your head.”
“I’m so sorry, Mr. MacQueen!” Helen said as she offered him a cold, wet rag, her hands shaking badly. “I can’t believe—I am truly very sorry, sir!”
The housekeeper took the cloth from her, folding it over expertly and stepping in. “Don’t apologize to the brute, madam. It’s his own fault and—mine. I should mind my temper. Here, I have him in hand. Why don’t you take a glass of sherry in the library and I’ll be in with some pies in a bit.”
“Yes, a truce.” He held out his arm to Helen. “Come, Helen, let’s leave them to patch things up. Mrs. McFadden can manage from here.”
Helen meekly ducked her head and took his arm, allowing him to escort her from the kitchen. As far as Darius could tell, the sanctuary of his library had never been a more welcome sight. He showed her to a chair by the fireplace and then retrieved the sherry. He filled a small crystal glass with a generous pour and then knelt at her feet with his offering. “Here.”
She took the glass, and Darius’s stomach clenched at the fear in her eyes. “You have every right to be angry, Mr. Thorne.”
“But I’m not angry.”
“How is that possible? I hit Mr. MacQueen with an iron skillet and nearly killed the man.”
Darius lost the battle not to give in to the strange mischief of circumstances and the comedy of his household. “Helen,” he started, but had to stop as his merriment overtook him. Darius took the chair across from her as he laughed out loud. At last, he sobered enough to speak. “Anyone with sense would applaud your actions.”
“Why?”
“Because you were being so brave.” He watched her close
ly. “You didn’t know that Hamish wasn’t truly a threat, and yet you leapt into the fray and acted on Mrs. McFadden’s behalf.”
“I heard her screeching and then when . . .” Her blue eyes misted at the memory. “He—he called her a witch and was grabbing her arm . . . and I . . . made a fool of myself.”
“Ah yes, a witch. I think it’s a term of endearment in this instance. In return, she often calls him an idiot and something in Gaelic that I cannot translate in good conscience, but let’s just say it’s related to his profession and a certain fondness for cattle.” Darius smiled. “But they’re not enemies and Hamish would throw himself in front of a firing squad before he’d see a single hair harmed on her head. He adores her.”
“Really?” she asked. “I didn’t have that impression at all!”
“It’s easy to misjudge that pair.”
“Is he all right?”
“He’ll live. It’s just a small knot, and by the attention he’s getting from Mrs. McFadden, I’m sure he’ll thank you for it once his ears stop ringing.”
“She shares his sentiments?” Helen asked, her expression rapt and serious as she wiped away her tears.
Darius nodded. “I knew it after I watched her one morning preparing a breakfast tray for the man after he’d taken ill. She drizzled honey on his porridge in the shape of a flower and strained his broth with the best linen—twice.” He sighed, a touch of envy coloring his thoughts.
“But they are so cruel to each other. Is . . . all love . . . unkind?”
Darius’s heart grew heavy as he realized the direction of her thoughts. “No. Never at its core should love be anything less than kind. It is the highest ideal for a reason, Helen. Their words are a false show. It’s in our actions that we demonstrate our true nature.”
“The honey flower in his porridge?”
“And a hundred other small gestures between them. I have a friend who is a zoologist, and after reading some of his works, I swear watching my housekeeper and my driver is like watching the courtship of porcupines.” Darius smiled. “It’s a prickly business but it suits them.”
“So sweet,” she exclaimed softly.
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