by Kristi Astor
“I need to draft a piece of legislation before the next Parliament.”
Scully turned toward him and stared. “Did you find Miss Winston?”
The carriage pulled up in front of his town house then. As Max alighted, not commenting, he stared at the ornate limestone and tall windows. He was a man who had so much, but he would trade everything he had for the chance to hold Roxana.
He entered the marble-floored hall and stared at the gold-plated girandoles, the gilt mirrors and expensive paintings. Did Roxana truly prefer her bare wood floors in her drafty attic above her dress shop?
The butler reached for his coat and Max shrugged out of it, forgetting the disarray of his clothing. He headed for the library and sat down to draft a bill to prohibit violence against women. He knew his chances of getting it passed were slim, but he had to try.
Fanny’s knees were shaking as she stood in the drawing room and recited her vows. Scully stood beside her and solemnly repeated the minister’s words. He seemed quite subdued, but he had done as he said and obtained a special license so they might be married right away.
Her French friend had visited this morning with a vengeance. She only hoped she did not soak through her rags and stain her amber gown. That it was not too late to tell Dev that she was not pregnant and end this before he was bound to her for life tormented her.
She had been presented with plenty of opportunities to tell him, but had kept her mouth shut. On one hand she was relieved she was not with child, but disappointed too. She feared her soon-to-be husband’s reaction. Would he hate her? He had insisted on marriage only when he thought she was with child. She had wanted him to insist, and he had left the choice to her.
All her life, men had told her what to do when it came to marriage, love and relationships. Her father had insisted when the over-fifty-year-old duke began courting her that she must dismiss her other suitors. And she had. When the proposal came, she accepted it, as she knew she should. Her husband and then Max had made all the decisions about the upbringing of her children. She did not know how to make decisions for herself. She could furnish a house or arrange a party, but she had never decided her own fate.
And she feared Dev would be angry, feared he would be disappointed and she feared that she had finally done the thing that would make her content at the cost of everyone else’s happiness.
Max stood stoic and silent, his face betraying no emotion. Would he hate her for abandoning him? Would he look for a wife? Would he allow her children to live with her and Dev, or would he insist they remain in his home? He had that right.
The ceremony ended and Dev turned to her and tilted her chin to press the sanctified kiss on her lips. His lips were dry and the kiss quick, as if this was too dignified a moment to ruin with passion.
Julia clapped her gloved hands together and Thomas stepped forward to kiss her cheek.
Scully kept his hand under her elbow as if he could steady her shaking. He cast her a skeptical look as if uncertain why she was exhibiting such a fit of nerves. She had to tell him that she had tricked him. She could only hope that he would not hate her for it.
The packet of papers arrived just a few days before Christmas. Roxana had hung red ribbons around the shop windows and splurged on candles to burn late into the evening. It was an extravagance, but it drew customers’ eyes to her windows in the short dark days before the holiday. She had been lighting the fat candles as the darkness fell, when the footman entered her shop.
She had not heard from Max. She had thought she had seen him standing in the street in front of her shop, but he had not come inside.
As she took the packet of papers upstairs and unbound them she began reading. At first she was confused, but then she began to understand that it was legislation drafted to make it illegal to beat a woman to the point her skin was broken. As she drifted in and out of the legalese she frowned. The last paper was a letter and at the bottom of the page was his signature, “yours forever, Maximilian Trent.”
“Mademoiselle, there is a gentleman to see you,” said Madame Roussard.
If she had been paying attention she might have heard the unease in her manager’s voice, but her heart was soaring believing Max was below.
“Please would you lock the shop, then send him up to me.”
“Yes, Mademoiselle.”
Hearing the footsteps on the stairs, Roxana turned and expected Max, but instead her father stood there with that look in his eyes. Her fluttering heart came to a dead stop, and the raw metallic taste of fear filled her mouth.
“Hello, Papa,” she said.
“So this is how Trent keeps his whores?” he asked.
Roxana didn’t answer. Nothing she could say would dispel his anger.
“How much does he pay to keep you?”
“Nothing. This is all my doing. I pay for this.” Roxana winced. Why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut?
“Anything my daughter owns belongs to me. Where is the money?”
Roxana closed her eyes.
“I saw you lighting the candles. I saw Trent leaving here at night. I know there is money.”
“There is no money for you.”
The first blow across her cheek whipped her head around. The next knocked her to the floor. And then she protected her hands.
Scully entered Fanny’s room, his room now too, without knocking. Fanny had behaved strangely for a bride, shaking and jumpy. Or perhaps not so strangely for a bride, but for a woman of middle years who had been married nearly twenty years before and had been his lover for the last year, she was extraordinarily skittish.
She had disappeared before the wedding breakfast and then several times throughout the subdued celebration of the day. Perhaps the pregnancy made her ill, but she had seemed unwilling to be alone in his company.
She stood fully dressed in front of the fireplace. “Ah, there is my beautiful bride.”
“I have done a dreadful thing,” she whispered.
He walked to her and rested his hands on her shoulders. “Yes, you have become too slender. All that play, Fanny.” He shook his head as if he regretted their days of laughter. In truth, he would regret giving them up during her confinement. “We shall have to take care that you grow fat and round as a dumpling, my darling.”
She turned, her eyes huge in her face. “But that is just it, Dev. I’m not with child.”
He pulled her to him and offered comfort. “I am sorry, love. I am so sorry.”
She struggled away from him. “I knew I was not when I married you. I am so sorry to have tricked you. Can you forgive me?”
Dev felt the side of his mouth twitch. “So are you saying that you wanted to marry me anyway?”
“I am so awful, I . . . Yes. I knew I was only a little late. I have always known when I was pregnant because everything smelled like fish and I could not eat a bite of salmon with getting sick and I had salmon that night that you said we would be married. So I knew right then I was not with child.”
“Fanny, darling—”
“I should have told you then, but you had sent for Julia and Thomas and I did not want to tell you. I think I might have confessed if you had stayed for the rest of dinner, but by the time you returned with Max, I decided I would not.” She burst into tears.
He laughed.
She stared, her blue eyes swimming.
“I’m sorry, love. I cannot but be relieved.”
“You are not angry with me?”
“No, you silly pea-goose. All I ever wanted was for you to decide you wanted to marry me.”
“I wanted you to tell me to.”
“Yes, well, we should both be happy, then.”
“Max told you that you must propose,” she said skeptically.
“Max is my friend, not my father, and his condition was imposed only if I knocked on your bedroom door, love. I chose to knock. I love you, Fanny, darling. You are everything I need to make my life complete.”
“Yes, but what are we to do abo
ut Max?”
Madame Roussard knocked on the door, speaking in a jumble of French that Max’s servants didn’t understand. She’d finally passed a bloody piece of paper to the butler, who had recognized Max’s signature.
He barely remembered shouting for his carriage to be sent round to Roxana’s shop, before running out the door, unwilling to wait while the horses were harnessed and maneuvered through the crowded streets.
“I should not have let him in,” muttered Madame Roussard, trotting along beside him. “I think she think it ez you.”
Madame Roussard gathered the hem of her gown and skipped to keep up with his long-legged stride. He just wanted to get to Roxana.
“He look so like her, I think he ez a relative.”
Chills shot down Max’s spine. If he had been there, he could have protected her. It wasn’t safe for her to live alone in the heart of the city, although he suspected nowhere had ever been safe for Roxana.
“He knows her name, comprendez-vous?”
“I understand,” he answered.
He entered the shop and barely noticed the candles that had been allowed to burn to pools of wax in the windows. Without waiting to be shown back, he wove through the back rooms and noticed the disturbed bolts of fabric with gaps between them. He took the stairs two at a time, barely remembering to duck as he went under the eaves.
While the workspace was hardly disturbed, Roxana’s living corner was a mess. Her table had been turned over and the chunks of her teapot along with clumps of wet tea leaves were scattered on the floor. The way the bloodstained pages of the bill he had written were strewn about made a mockery of his paper-tiger efforts. Bills and laws would not protect her from the irrational acts of what must be a madman.
Roxana sat backwards in a chair, her head slumped forward over the back. A group of women milled around her, dabbing at the wounds on her back. They dipped bloody cloths in a bowl of water that had turned pink.
As he moved forward they parted in front of him, but then one put a shawl over Roxana’s shoulders to cover her bare back. Her head jerked, but she did not make a sound.
He crossed to the other side of the chair and knelt down in front of her, pushing her tangled hair from her face. She blinked her blue eyes open.
“Roxy, you are coming home with me.”
She flattened her mouth and shook her head slightly. “I cannot. There are dresses to be sewn and cut and . . .”
“They will wait or Madame Roussard will handle everything until you are well.”
Tears welled up in her eyes. “He took my best silk.”
“Has anyone sent for a doctor?” Max stroked her hair, seeking to soothe her.
“No doctor. I cannot afford . . .” Her voice trailed off and then she began to cough.
He could see that coughing hurt her. He stood and looked at the women standing around her as if they had lost their guiding star. “Are there gowns to be completed? I see cut pieces over there.” He pointed to one of the long worktables. “One of you clean up the teapot and papers.”
He looked at Madame Roussard. She nodded and began setting the seamstresses to their tasks.
Roxana tried to stand, but she leaned heavily on the chair back while holding her gown so it wouldn’t fall. “I need to get back to work.”
“Roxana, I must insist that you come home with me and allow me to take proper care of you until you are healed.” Her skin would mend as it had before, but would she ever be truly healed?
Max took a step closer and caught her elbows. “Even if I have to carry you out of here.”
Her eyes rolled up and he caught her as she collapsed. The women around him wailed collectively, but Roxana was silent and far too pale.
Roxana woke on her stomach in a bed with several pillows under her. Her back ached and she suspected she had a cracked rib or two. Her wounds were damp, her back exposed and she wondered if she was still bleeding.
As her senses slowly returned to her, she realized the room was much warmer than her attic and the sheets were quite luxurious. She flexed her fingers and was relieved they were fine.
“You’re awake.”
She shifted too quickly and fought a wave of pain, but Max sat at a writing desk in his shirtsleeves. His coat hung on the back of his chair. He set down his pen and moved closer to the bed.
As she started to rise up and then realized she did not have anything on, at least not on her torso, she sank down into the pillows. “Where am I?”
“My bedroom, where I can watch over you.” He knelt down beside her so she did not have to strain her neck to see him. As he did, his gaze traveled down her bare side and then returned to her face. He touched her cheek, gently.
Warmth curled in her belly.
“Am I wearing anything?” she asked.
“Salve on your wounds,” he said with a slight mocking glance.
He stroked her hair behind her ear, although she could see it lay in a braid beside her. Her hair had been combed out and plaited. She could not picture Max being the one to do that. Perhaps he had assigned a maid.
“Your workers are making you a dressing gown with padding on the shoulders that they are convinced will keep the material from touching your back, but I’m afraid it hasn’t been delivered yet. And as soon as you can sit, the doctor says we need to bind your ribs. We can put dressings on your wounds, but you seem to find that distressful, so I thought it better to leave them off until the bruising and swelling eases.”
“How long have I been here?”
He pulled his watch out of his waistcoat pocket and flipped open the gold cover. “Five hours. The doctor thought it was best to let you sleep. Since you pulled away when we tended your wounds he thought your sleep was not too deep, but perhaps borne of exhaustion. Madame Roussard confirms that you often work all day and all through the night. Although the doctor did give you laudanum to ease the pain.”
She closed her eyes. Her father had taken what money she had in the till and several bolts of her most expensive fabric. Without his stealing her goods, she had been barely scraping by. She might as well consider her business a failure.
“Could you eat?” he asked.
Life went on.
“I don’t think so.” She turned her head away.
His hand curled over the top of her head. “We have many things we need to discuss, but you need to know that I have insisted that your father be arrested.”
She stared at the far wall, at the rich paint above the layered wood panels on the lower half of the walls. A carved wardrobe of rich mahogany stood screaming Max’s wealth and standing in the world.
“Roxana, he is a madman and I cannot allow him to roam the streets.”
“You know from the bill you propose to put before Parliament that he did not break any laws.”
“He can be held indefinitely on debts, and I swore a complaint against him for theft.”
She snorted. “I am his chattel and what I own belongs to him.”
“I claimed a partial interest in your business, since Scully’s five-hundred pounds founded the enterprise, and I have assumed your debt.”
So she had a failed business, a loan she could never repay, a criminal madman as a father and Max knew her as a liar and trickster as well as less than virtuous. What would she do now?
Would she have to marry Max now? Did he even want her to, now?
“Sleep, then. Try not to worry. Madame Roussard is minding your dress shop and your father cannot get to you here.”
Max stood and backed away from the bed. “I’ll have a maid come and sit with you. If you need more laudanum, let her know.”
Roxana did not answer, and when Max left the room she mulled over the conversation. Other than a hint of flirtation, he had been matter-of-fact.
Not like a man in love, not like a man who would pledge his life to her, but a duke who had for a moment lost his bearings but was back on track with his plans to leave Thomas his heir.
She’d failed and sh
e could not in good conscience accept marriage as a means to bring her back from the ruins of her life, but stars above, she’d marry him if that was the only way she could keep him in her life.
Max left his bedroom because he could no longer contain his anger and anguish. What good was his power if he could not protect the ones he loved?
As he stormed through the house, he wanted to break things, to destroy everything in his path. Mostly he wanted to kill her father, strangle him until the breath left his body. He had never felt such a murderous rage before in his life. His brothers had occasionally gone at each other, throwing punches and wrestling each other to the ground until they ended up with torn clothing and bloody noses and Fanny had fretted over them and sent them to have baths. Max had never joined in their fracases. He was expected to control his temper. A duke-to-be couldn’t go flying off the handle. Only lately had Max ever felt in danger of losing control.
Roxana was overly affected by displays of temper. He could not let her see his rage.
That she had not mentioned his letter that he had included with the draft of the bill was telling. He had poured out his heart in that letter that had been in Madame Roussard’s hands, then in his butler’s hands. He’d sworn he would never raise a hand to her, no matter what provocation, and that he still loved her and wanted her as his wife.
Since she referred to the bill, she must have read his letter. Clearly she’d had the packet opened.
Then, as he walked through the streets, needing to keep occupied, he headed for her dress shop. If he could make sure her business was maintained until he returned, he could at least serve her in that way. He passed a shop window that displayed china. He stopped, thinking of the broken chunks of pottery lying on her floor.
Then he bought her a new teapot.
Chapter Nineteen
Roxana woke in the darkness. Sleep, laudanum and the heat of the room left her groggy. Hands stroked a soothing salve on her back. The touch was familiar.