Not that he asked you to even be part of it . . .
Helena glanced out that small crack in the ripped curtains. “It mattered not that I’m their sister. It mattered not that I’ve overseen the books since they opened the club.” Her throat bobbed. “You give so much of yourself, and what do you receive for that loyalty?” She looked slowly back at him, a small, sad smile on her lips. A man just a step below royalty commanded that sentiment just by sheer birthright alone. In her world, it was earned and, often, all that mattered. “Though, I expect you know nothing of that.”
“Because lords and ladies do not know hurt or betrayal?” He winged another eyebrow up.
She wrinkled her brow. She’d wager he’d never known the pain of a gnawing, growling belly or a fist being driven into your face.
Robert hooked his ankle over his knee, and rested his hand on the edge of his boot. “Do you believe members of your station hold dominion over those sentiments, Helena?”
She shifted, and her cheeks warmed. When he put that query to her in that manner, it made her sound self-important. “Do you?” she shot back. “Have you been betrayed by your family?”
“Yes,” he said quietly.
His admission sucked the energy from the carriage. Of all the responses she’d expected, it had not been that gruff one-word utterance. Questions spilled to the tip of her tongue, but she bit the inside of her cheek to keep from probing. It was not her place to know. There was no need to know . . .
I want to, anyway . . .
“My grandfather,” he explained. He grimaced. “And my fiancée.”
His words sucked the air from her lungs. “You were betrothed,” she said, her breath faint. Of course he’d been. He’d just said as much.
When he gave a curt nod of affirmation, a vise squeezed about her middle. He’d been betrothed. To a flawless English lady, and by the tension at the corners of his mouth, mourned the loss of her still. In Helena’s end of London one didn’t probe a person about their past, present, or future. Particularly when futures were often bleak and doubtful. “What happened?”
He flicked a hand. “She was my sister’s nursemaid.”
“A nursemaid,” she exclaimed. Future dukes did not marry nursemaids . . . they didn’t marry any maids. Just as they didn’t wed scarred by-blows who’d lived in the streets.
“It hardly mattered to me if she was a maid.”
Oh, God. He’d loved her. So hopelessly that he would have defied Society’s expectations for it. This was so much worse. A vicious, biting envy ate slowly away at her, threatening to consume her.
Robert held her gaze. “It mattered that she did not see my title.” His eyes took on a distant quality and he was looking back into a world where she’d never been . . . but only that nursemaid who’d won his heart. “I loved her for her kindness and her ability to laugh. I loved that she was not a spoiled Society miss, and that she took pride in her work.”
All this, when nobles failed to see those servants and people in the streets. Only . . . that wasn’t really true. She’d only believed it to be so. This man had seen more. In another woman. “What happened to her?” Her whispered question floated between them.
“My grandfather, the then Duke of Somerset, didn’t find her . . .” His lip peeled back. “Suitable material for a future duchess. I did not care. I would have married her anyway and to hell with him and Society. We planned to elope.”
A knife-like pain shot through her. Unlike her father who’d made Helena’s mother his mistress and nothing more, this was the manner of man Robert Dennington, the Marquess of Westfield, was, then and now. One who’d turn his finger up at the rules and do so for women such as a maid and a bookkeeper. To be the woman deserving of that devotion.
“My grandfather summoned me the day we were to wed. I went to his office.” He cleared his throat. “He was . . .” Robert shook his head. “It is hardly fit for a lady’s ears.”
“I’m not a lady,” she blurted.
Robert ran a tender gaze over her face. “You’re more lady than most queens, Helena Banbury.”
Warmth exploded in her heart. Not a single person, in the whole of her life, had treated her as anything more than a woman who’d climbed from the streets. Even her brothers had so clearly attached that part to each of their individual stories, it had become an inextricable fabric of who they were. Yet, this man before her saw more. “Tell me,” she urged, wanting the details he withheld. Needing them.
He hesitated and for a long while she expected he’d say nothing. Then: “Lucy was there.” Lucy. The woman had a name, which made her unknown-until-now rival all the more real and hated. “With my grandfather.”
His words penetrated her blinding jealousy. Helena slowly blinked. Surely she’d misheard? Surely he’d not said . . . ?
“They were together,” he confirmed with a curt nod.
Oh, God. Agony ran through her in sharp, torrential waves. At the hurt he’d known, and no doubt still did. Was it a wonder he was mistrustful of women of her station? “Oh, Robert,” she said, softly covering his gloved hand with hers.
He glanced down at their connected hands. “My life is not yours, Helena,” he said matter-of-factly. “I did not live in these dangerous streets and I’ve certainly not known the pain you have. But money and status does not make a person immune to emotion or life.”
And yet, she’d gone through her own life naively believing that very thing. Believing that lords and ladies did not feel pain or hurt, and certainly not the treachery he’d spoken of.
His words hung in the air between them, and as they sat in silence for a long while, Helena wished she were one of those skilled with words and not her practical use of numbers, because then she’d have something to say to all Robert had shared.
He motioned to the door. “Would you have me escort you home?”
Her throat closed around the emotion stuck there. He would do that. He would guide her across the street so she might see her family and plead for the opportunity to return now. She should be touched by that gesture and yet . . . his gesture left her with a hollow emptiness. He’d let her go so easily. How to explain the part of her that wanted him to want her to be here . . . ?
I am not ready . . .
She shook her head. “I’d return to the duke’s,” she said quietly.
Robert rapped on the roof. Helena blinked. “What of your carriage?”
“Do you think I’d leave you alone?” he asked quietly. Oh, God. Her heart convulsed, making it impossible to drag forth a single breath. Why did he have to be so bloody caring? To the boy James. To her. It only confounded her already muddied thoughts. “I’ll return for it after I’ve escorted you home.”
A moment later, the hired hack lurched forward, with Helena’s world all the more confused.
Later that night, Robert climbed the steps of his father’s townhouse, this hated home he’d feared as a child and reviled as a young man betrayed by his grandfather.
Just as every loyal butler to ever serve these halls was trained to do, the door was promptly drawn open.
Davidson stepped out of the way, permitting him entry. “My lord,” he greeted, accepting Robert’s hat. It was a testament to the servant’s reserve that he betrayed no surprise at Robert’s late-night visit. “His Grace has retired for the evening. Should I—?”
“I do not require His Grace,” he murmured, turning his cloak over.
The servant bowed and backed out of the foyer, his footsteps echoing in the nighttime quiet. Robert did a small turn about this hated foyer. How many times as a child had he shifted in this very room, dreading those required visits with the great Dennington patriarch? Now he stood here a man still bound by the unrelenting grasp of the past on his present.
Robert started down the corridor, walking with purposeful strides toward one particular room. He came to a stop outside his father’s office, the same space his grandfather had once held dominion over. Pressing the handle, Robert stepped inside.<
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It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the inky darkness. When it did, he closed the door behind him, and made his way to the broad, mahogany desk.
He stared emptily at the immaculate surface where the late duke had taken Lucy like a corner doxy. That had been the single most defining moment of Robert’s life, the one in which he’d resurrected protective walls designed to keep all women out—even in the ways that most mattered. It had proven safer that way. Better to have nothing but meaningless exchanges than the jagged agony of betrayal and pain. He’d been moving along quite contentedly, too.
Until Helena.
Helena, who’d slipped past every defense and slid inside, properly turning his world on its ear.
And who in the span of the evening had proven how little he in fact mattered to her.
Robert drew his hand back and strolled behind the desk once occupied by the late duke, and now the current . . . a chair that would one day, hopefully not until the far-distant future, belong to him. He sank into the edges of the leather wingback seat, and glued his gaze to the place Lucy and his grandfather had fornicated all those years ago.
At the time, there had been no greater despair than witnessing a woman he’d trusted, and believed himself in love with, in the arms of another, his grandfather no less. It had cemented the reality that women, regardless of station or lot in life, would never see anything more than a future title in him.
Then, one drunken evening, he’d stumbled inside the wrong chambers, and now there was Helena Banbury, a woman who didn’t give a bloody damn if he was duke, king, or pauper. Robert brushed his palm along the edge of the desk. And she had thrown into question everything he’d come to accept as fact where women were concerned.
Helena was a woman of strength and spirit who’d battered down every flimsy wall he’d constructed, and who’d in the span of this evening had proven, once again, how very little he mattered. She was the sister of gaming hell owners, men who’d no doubt built an empire in ways that would curdle a weaker man’s blood . . . and knowing that, accepting that, it mattered not. She had mattered. Too much.
He swiped a wary hand over his face. Had the duchess not come to him with Helena’s whereabouts, she’d have disappeared from his life for good. Those moments he’d built up as something so much more, something real and beautiful, she would have forsaken.
Nay, she would eventually forsake. Her words tonight could have not been clearer. She didn’t wish to be part of his world . . . whether he was in it or not. Yet again proving that women ultimately did not choose him. They chose wealth or power, as Lucy had shown. Or, in Helena’s case, chose a previous life and profession.
He let his hand fall back to the desk. He’d do well to remember the folly in caring too deeply. What existed had only been something he’d built to be more in his own mind.
There remained three additional months with her. Three months to retain his sanity and a hold on his heart. He’d been a rake for twelve years. How difficult could it be to retain that former way and wear the false, practiced smile and give Helena nothing more than charming words? To give her more was a peril he could never recover from.
Ultimately, women did not choose him. Lucy hadn’t. Tonight, with the ease with which she’d nearly left his life, Helena had proven it, too.
He’d do well to not forget that again.
Chapter 19
Rule 19
Decide your own fate.
Helena stood on the fringe of the Duke and Duchess of Wilkinson’s ballroom, distractedly eying the festivities.
Through the whole of the receiving line, with bated breath, she’d looked for a single guest . . . with an anticipation that had nothing to do with the ruse she’d asked him to be part of. She ran her gaze over the sea of guests twirling about the dance floor. Whispers and polite laughter filled the room in a cacophony of muted sound.
How very miserable she’d been when Ryker had first sent her to this place. She was as much an outsider here as a fish pulled ashore to live on land, with the breath being slowly choked from her. Until Robert. Until him, she’d not known she could smile or laugh or be happy in this place. Nor had she believed men of his station capable of being hurt or knowing suffering. Last night, he’d lifted the blinders from her eyes and she was shamed by her very narrow view on living and life.
Now that she did know it, she didn’t know what to do with that discovery. For ultimately, it changed nothing. She was still who she was: a bookkeeper at the Hell and Sin Club who wished for control in her life when women were lacking in it. He was a marquess and future duke who’d been betrayed by a woman not far off from Helena’s station. Why, no doubt when she took her leave in two months and three weeks’ time, he’d forget her altogether. Helena caught her lower lip between her teeth, hating that. And hating herself for the vicious pain that truth caused.
There was a faint stir at the front of the ballroom, and she looked to the entrance.
Her breath caught.
Standing at the top of the white Italian marble staircase, Robert surveyed the ballroom with a lazy elegance. The chandelier’s glow cast a soft light on his luxuriant, golden tresses and she ached with the need to run her fingers through those faintly curled strands.
As he made his descent, the flurry of whispers increased. Scandalously clad ladies with plunging décolletage touched their fingers to their chests as he moved past them. Debutantes fluttered their lashes. Never breaking his forward stride, he lifted his head in a vague politeness, revealing that lazy half grin that dulled the pain of rejection.
A rogue. He was a rogue in every sense of the word . . . and she’d fallen hopelessly under his spell. Helena momentarily closed her eyes. She’d entered polite Society with clear expectations of him . . . and for herself. She wasn’t the weak ninny who’d ever fall as her mother had. Only heartbreak and heartache came in loving these men.
Yet, that is what I’ve done.
When she opened her eyes, she found his gaze on her, robbing her lungs of air. The veiled, potent stare that had the power to make her feel as though she were the only woman in the ballroom. Then he smiled, and her heart quickened for altogether different reasons. For this was not the false rogue’s grin he donned for the peers, but rather that smile that reached his eyes.
She returned his grin, inclining her head.
The Duke and Duchess of Wilkinson stepped into their path, shattering that connection. As the trio exchanged polite greetings, the duchess’s warnings and cruel taunts came rushing back.
As long as you do not think to make yourself a duchess. You are not one of us, Miss Banbury. It is important you remember that . . .
Helena fisted her scarred hands, those unwitting reminders standing as a mocking testament to the accuracy of the duchess’s claims.
“I have been studying you for an hour now, Miss Banbury, and I cannot determine whether you are attempting to hide, or plotting your escape.”
She gasped, and spun to face the owner of that unfamiliar, faintly amused voice.
The gentleman of a similar age to the Duke of Wilkinson stood, evaluating her in an appraising manner. Where the duke had let age soften his middle and round his cheeks, this man stood lean and powerful still, even with the cane in his hand. But for the drawn lines at the corners of his blue eyes, there wasn’t a hint of weakness to the man.
“Perhaps a bit of both,” she said at last.
The nameless stranger smiled.
Suspicion brought Helena’s lashes sweeping down. Long ago she’d learned to be wary of the motives of gentlemen. Though she hadn’t been born to this world, she well knew no respectable one would approach a lady so and speak with such familiarity. “Forgive me,” she said between tight lips. “You have me at a disadvantage.”
“Of course,” he murmured. “I am the Duke of Somerset.”
The Duke of Somerset. Robert’s father. The man who by Robert’s admission had sought to manipulate him into a proper match. Her skin pricked under his
pointed stare. He’d surely read the papers linking her name to his son’s and sought to assess her worth as a future duchess. Alas, if he were hoping for a miss with all the proper responses, he was to be disappointed. Helena dropped a belated curtsy. “Your Grace,” she murmured. She cast a look about for Robert. She’d no doubt this meeting was not coincidence, and given his station and connection to the Duke of Wilkinson, his was, even for the ghost of a smile, not a friendly chance exchange.
“So very dreadful,” he murmured to himself, as he turned his attention out to the ballroom. The latest set just concluded, couples filed off the dance floor. Her gaze landed on Diana, being escorted over to her parents, by her respective partner . . . and Robert. A spasm wracked her heart.
“These affairs,” the duke was saying.
Yanking her gaze away, Helena looked questioningly up. What was he on about?
The older man waved his cane over the crowded room. “I never liked them, you know.”
Helena opened and closed her mouth several times. Actually, she didn’t know. She’d simply believed attending these events was an additional function, like eating and breathing, to these people. How odd to know one of the most powerful peers in the realm should also despise them.
“What of you, Miss Banbury, do you enjoy the balls and soirees?”
“I . . .”
Robert’s father settled his walking stick on the floor, and shifted his weight over it with a grimace.
She took in the strain in the older man’s eyes. His ashen complexion. The white, drawn lines at the corners of his mouth. He is ill . . . Sympathy battered away the aloof demeanor she’d donned moments ago. By God, Robert didn’t know the truth of his father’s circumstances. He was so focused on his family’s finances, he’d failed to see the truth right in front of him.
Her gaze locked with the Duke of Somerset’s, and a silent understanding passed between them. His Grace flashed her a sad smile, an affirming smile that said with more than words that she’d correctly gauged his circumstances. “Well, Miss Banbury?”
The Rogue's Wager (Sinful Brides Book 1) Page 23