Helena swiveled her gaze up to his.
And he, long jaded by life, found his neck going hot with embarrassment . . . and shame. He forced another laugh, and it emerged sharp with enmity. “He wished it so much that he’d even faked he was dying and staged a summer party to marry me off, all with the purpose of salvaging our depleting coffers.” Once again, the still-fresh resentment brewed under the surface, and threatened to spill over.
“Oh, Robert.” Helena covered his hand with hers, pulling him from the brink of bitterness. “And you do not wish to save your family’s fortune that way.” As hers was more statement than anything, he remained silent. Helena caught her jaw between her thumb and forefinger and tapped. “You’re certain there are no other ways. That the man-of-affairs is competent?”
Actually, for his father’s faith in the man, Robert wasn’t entirely certain of the aging man’s skills. With Stonely’s disdain for investments, he very much harkened back to rigid strictures on nobles dabbling in trade. “I believe my family would do better with someone more capable,” he settled for.
“Perhaps I can look at your—”
“Let us speak of something else,” he said quietly. Shame needled at his insides. What a purposeless existence he’d lived for so long. All Helena had shared this day, and she would worry with her eyes and words about his family’s finances. Finances he’d not given thought to in the course of his life. “Please,” he added, when she made to speak. “I just wished you to know why I cannot visit on the morrow.” Even as I desire it more than anything. More than is wise.
She gave a reluctant nod.
As he gathered the reins and guided the carriage from Hyde Park, he reflected on what an utter fool he’d been these years.
How much he’d failed to see. Not only his family’s finances, but beyond that. To something so much more important—the suffering others had endured around him. And how much more he would have failed to see if he’d not stumbled into the wrong chambers in that forbidden hell.
Chapter 15
Rule 15
Always remember who you are.
The following morning, standing in front of the bevel mirror, Helena’s pale cheeks stood in even greater contrast than usual. She stared unflinchingly at the puckered scars, seeing them, remembering: remembering when of late it had become so very easy to forget that this was not her world. To remember that she belonged elsewhere.
Helena touched trembling fingers to the scars left by Diggory’s cruel enjoyments, a forever visual testimony of her place in the well-ordered world. She might don fancy skirts and learn the steps of a waltz, but she was, and would always and only be, Helena Banbury, the daughter of a whore.
And two days earlier she’d proven herself, very much, her mother’s daughter. For she’d panted, pleaded, and writhed on Robert’s lap like a common street doxy. She let her arm fall quavering to her side. If he’d continued, she would have given herself to him. There in the duchess’s gardens, she would have parted her legs, and given him her virtue without a single stab of regret. Nor had it been strictly this physical hungering that only he’d ever roused in her.
. . . So beautiful . . .
Her eyes slid closed, and she drew in a slow, shaky breath. When he’d spoken that word, blanketed in a thick cloud of desire, she had actually believed it. Felt it. Felt she was more than Helena from the streets—all because of his skilled, seductive words.
Only yesterday, something far more dangerous than any forbidden touch had happened. She’d shared stories of her girlhood days, stories she’d shared with no one. Parts of her life that not even her brothers spoke of. You let the past stay buried.
But she hadn’t. She, who’d always been terse and silent, had talked. And talked. And continued talking, telling stories she’d not even remembered until they were spilling from her lips.
Helena jammed her fingertips against her temples and rubbed. This was all careening out of control. The scheme she’d concocted involving the marquess had been simple. Three months together, where he’d pretend to court her, until the end of the Season, when she was then free to go on her practical way back to the Hell and Sin.
What a mocking twist of fate or irony, or both, that in a mere four days, he’d upended her thoughts.
In all her calculations and practical deductions, she’d not accounted for the possibility of not only desiring Robert, but also . . . liking him. Of seeing a man who’d once been a boy who tied sheets together and dangled over ledges. A boy who’d become a man who spoke affectionately to old dukes. A man in need of a fortune, and who’d willingly helped her anyway and forsaken plans that could have saved his family’s finances. She dragged her hands over her face. Those discoveries didn’t fit with everything she’d come to know. With everything she’d been told or seen.
I am losing myself . . . After just over a month amongst the haute ton, she’d somehow forgotten all the rules ingrained into her by Ryker. If he’d sent her here as some test or another, she’d failed abysmally. Her sole intention for enlisting Robert’s assistance had been to avoid fortune hunters out to trap a duke’s by-blow, so she might return to the life she’d quite contentedly lived. In doing so, she’d unwittingly endangered them both: he, with his inability to secure a proper, advantageous match . . . and she, with her weakening heart.
For, how often had she longed for her office? Or her books? Or the actual club itself? Not truly, she hadn’t. Not beyond some amorphous thought of three months from now when she would return.
Panic churned inside, a need possessing her to rekindle that connection with the only life she’d truly known. For what if this was some kind of grander test conducted by Ryker? What if in her absence he discovered someone far more skilled and capable with the club’s accounting? Then what purpose would she have?
She steeled her jaw, tamping down the worry wreaking havoc on her senses.
She may desire Lord Robert Westfield, even like him, but that did not mean she belonged here or wished to. What purpose was there for a woman who lived amongst polite Society? What kind of existence beyond a fat dowry for an impoverished husband who wagered too much and kept just as many whores?
Robert is not that man . . .
Helena froze. Just four days ago she would have scoffed at that defense of him. Given his actions in the Earl of Sinclair’s parlor with that stunning beauty, he’d quite neatly fit within her expectations for him and all nobles.
No longer. She gripped her hands against the fabric of her skirts. Neither did this new appreciation for Robert, as a man and person, matter. There was no place for them together in any sense of the word. She’d no doubt he’d make her his mistress, scars and all . . . but never his wife.
“Not that I want that position,” she muttered under her breath.
Why did that ring hollow?
Striding over to her armoire, she threw the doors open and fished around the far back. Her fingers brushed a coarse, familiar fabric, and she froze. This brown cloak was her world. This was the harsh, but safe existence. Not satins or silks or muslins.
With slow, regretful fingers, she let the garment fall back into place and collected a soft muslin cloak.
Yanking it on, she drew the deep hood up, and sprinted over to the side of her bed. With quick movements, she dropped to her knees and fished under the soft feather mattress. Of course, theft within the duke’s home was as likely as a snowstorm in summer, yet life had ingrained the perils of leaving your monies about; that was why she’d hidden those funds the moment she stepped inside this temporary home.
Jumping to her feet, Helena stuffed the handful of coins into the front of her cloak and strode purposefully across the room. If she stayed here, in this room, in this home, with these turbulent thoughts about Robert and her place in Society swirling around her mind, she’d go mad.
Almost instantly, her maid, Meredith, entered the room. The girl, with heavily freckled cheeks and jutting front teeth, smiled. “You rang, Miss Banbury?”
>
Helena nodded. “Will you see the duke’s carriage readied? I’d have you accompany . . . shopping.” Isn’t that how everyone expected a young lady to spend her days? Bitterness soured her mouth.
The young woman nodded, promptly closed the door, and hurried to do Helena’s bidding.
A short while later, in the duke’s comfortable carriage, with her maid on the opposite bench, Helena made her way to Lambeth. As she settled back in the comfortable squabs, an invigorating thrill coursed through her. Hers was a small show of control, but there was a heady sense of power in stepping outside those suddenly suffocating walls. How many years had she still been viewed as nothing more than the snarling, spitting child of eight, dependent on her brothers to go anywhere or do anything? She’d been that same closed-away person since she’d arrived in Mayfair, dutifully tucked away in the duke’s townhouse like a wounded bird in a gilded cage.
As the carriage drew her farther and farther away, she drew the curtain back more and stared boldly out. Still quiet at the early morning hour, vendors pushed their carts into place, preparing for a day of hawking their wares.
Even the vendors and streets of the nobility were cleaner. As opposed to the crass men and women who’d sell their teeth, soul, and body against a crumbling building for coin, if it were offered. Then, that was the world to which they were born. The ton . . . and everyone else. Nor would Helena trade the freedom and power she had to be one of those purposeless ladies. She’d carved out a world where she’d never be dependent upon a man, not the way her own mother had.
First a powerful lord, who’d chosen a proper lady as his wife, and then the protector her mother had found in Mac Diggory.
An icy dread froze her, and she pressed her eyes closed. Hatred, potent and tangible, all these years gripped her in its familiar grasp. Helena curled her fingers about the edge of her seat. How many switches had he taken to her and her mother’s backs? How many scars did she now wear because of his drunken rages? How many times had he sold his wife to a fancy gent, all for some coin that he only wasted on more drink?
The agonized cries of her long-dead mother echoed around her mind, and Helena pressed her eyes closed, willing them gone. Nothing could come from those remembrances. Pain brought weakness. There was no healing or happiness that could ever come from thoughts of the life they’d lived.
The only good that had come of those dark days, as she’d come to call them, had been the invaluable lesson—men were not to be trusted. Neither gentlemen nor men in the streets. Even as Robert had demonstrated that he was unlike so many of those cruel lords, he’d proven himself far more dangerous in other ways. His touch, heady and hypnotic, had the power to weaken . . . it was the gentle, seductive caress that a weaker woman would have traded her virtue over for.
The carriage slowed to a stop, and she pitched forward at the sudden, jarring halt.
Meredith looked expectantly at her. “Miss Banbury, we’ve arrived.” The girl with her frizzy carrot-red hair pulled back the curtain and stared with a dubious expression out the window.
Yes, ladies did not come shopping in Lambeth, and certainly not in these streets.
“You remain here,” she ordered. “I’ll be a short while.”
The young maid gave her head a hard shake. “Oh, no, Miss Banbury. His Grace would not allow that.”
She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from pointing out that His Grace had, in fact, allowed it for nearly twenty years. Helena gave a firm look, gentling it with a smile. “I’ll be but a short while,” she pledged, drawing her hood up.
Before the young woman could issue further protest, Helena shoved the door open and jumped down without assistance. She shot her arms out to steady herself, and then pulling her hood further over her eyes, she started down the streets. As she wound her way through the throng of wooden carts, and coarse-looking men and women, Helena glanced at this end of London. Women and children held their hands outstretched, begging for coin. From her.
A wall of emotion, shame, shock, and remembrance, all slammed into her with the force of a fast-moving carriage. After she and her brothers had escaped the streets, what had they done for those who were not so fortunate, those people whose bellies were still empty and those children collecting cabbage leaves? Helena struggled to swallow past the wave of guilt choking her.
Fishing out a handful of coins, she pressed them into outstretched hands as she walked. How had she, Ryker, Calum, Adair, or Niall been any different than the lords and ladies they’d so disdained? Because they’d provided employment at the Hell and Sin? Robert, the duke, all of the nobility, they too provided work for men, women, and children. Yet, she’d never seen those as magnanimous gestures.
By the time she reached her destination, her breath came hard and ragged in her ears, deafening.
She looked up at the crooked wooden sign hanging above: In the Spirit.
She pressed the handle and, pulling the door open, stepped inside.
A wall of dust slapped her face, and she promptly sneezed. Shoving back her hood, she perused the small shop. But for a table and a counter, covered in books and more dust, the small space remained devoid of anything else.
Footsteps sounded from within a doorway draped with a black cloth. A corpulent man with greying hair, and spectacles on his nose, stepped inside. “Hullo, how may I . . . ?” His polite greeting died. No doubt it was not every day a young woman set foot inside his shop.
Helena tugged off her white gloves and strode forward. “You supply the Hell and Sin Club with their alcohol,” she said without preamble. Even saying the name of her club, and speaking on a matter of business, brought a calming sense of ease. This she was comfortable with. This she understood. Not goldenly glorious gentlemen who spoke about her past, and caressed her scars with tenderness.
The man frowned, all earlier hint of warmth gone. “It is not my place to discuss Ryker Black’s business with anyone.” Then, he stole a look about and spoke in hushed tones. “Unless ye had some coin to pay. Then I might have details.”
She sneered. Quality spirits be damned, how did her brothers do business with a man such as this one? With that a familiar wave went through her, at the lot she had the sense to see through when her brothers, so confident in their judgments, failed to do so. “Your deliveries are coming through with nearly ten percent broken in transit. Is that also a product of what someone is paying you?” she asked, settling her palms on the counter.
The man’s fleshy cheeks turned a mottled shade of red. “How dare you . . . ?” he sputtered.
She jabbed a finger at him, striking him in the chest. “I dare because I’m the one who has to answer for the erroneous liquor accounts.” Or I did, until my brothers ceased to see my value. Resentment breathed to life again, as powerful now as it had been the day she’d been summoned to Ryker’s office to find the duke waiting.
“You?”
“Yes, me.”
His eyes disappeared into thin slits as he leaned forward, peering at her. “If you’re working for Ryker Black, why haven’t I seen you before?”
Because they kept me sheltered away. Because I was too much a fool to challenge that and not demand visibility in the world.
She continued, deliberately ignoring his question. “If I have my way, Mr. Black will have a new supplier of his liquor.” All the color leached from his face, leaving a pale white pallor. “I expect your next shipment will arrive flawlessly.” With deliberate movements, Helena drew on her leather gloves. “That is, unless Sam Davies at Forbidden Pleasures does not pay you a greater purse to see them ruined?” She winged an eyebrow up.
The man coughed spasmodically. “H-How dare you?”
Her brothers may say she was a rotten read on people. However, this man rung his hands together and rapidly shifted his eyes about, avoiding her gaze, the way any criminal at Newgate did.
“I dare because I’m Ryker Black’s bookkeeper.” Or I was. She’d just omit that particular detail. “And his sister,
” she added. Helena peered down her nose at him. “Do we have an understanding then, sir?”
“W-we do,” he continued to sputter.
“Very good.” Helena dusted her gloved palms together. “I expect this meeting will remain between us?” The forgotten satisfaction that came from actually doing something that was not buying bonnets and fancy dresses, but rather something that required intellect and finesse, filled her with a heady sensation.
He gave a jerky nod, and as Helena drew her hood back into place and took her leave, she cast a final look back at the establishment. This is why she’d never belong in polite Society, no matter how much the duke wished it. The Helena Banburys of the world were not meant to sit politely with their heads bent over embroidery frames, discussing balls and soirees. She was meant to do something more.
This fleeting visit had been reminder enough. She may enjoy Robert’s company, and smile and laugh more than she ever did in his presence, but she could never have anything more with him, not simply because of the station divide between them, but because of her own need for purpose.
Why, gentlemen such as him, they didn’t even know these parts of London existed, no doubt.
Giving her head a clearing shake, Helena turned to go.
When a sharp cry went up.
Always run from a cry . . .
She momentarily squeezed her eyes shut. Never toward it, Helena. Never toward it . . .
Another wail split the buzz of activity.
She opened her eyes just as a small child’s exclamation echoed somewhere in the distance.
Bloody hell.
And Helena started toward that plaintive cry.
Chapter 16
Rule 16
Never venture into the Dials or St Giles alone. Ever.
“Can you not find a perfectly fashionable bookshop to attend?” Robert muttered, escorting his sister through the bustling, dirty streets of St Giles Circus. The Temple of the Muses. The Corner Bookshop. As it was, leaving his sister in the company of a maid and a footman while Robert went on to see his man-of-affairs gave him sufficient pause—pause enough to personally accompany her to the establishment.
The Rogue's Wager (Sinful Brides Book 1) Page 19