The stunning blond beauty wandered over to the collection of white gowns littered about and proceeded to organize the garments. How many times had Clara slept in this very room? How many times had she and Ryker made love here? And laughed here? Bile singed Penelope’s throat.
Ryker’s former mistress paused beside the shell-backed chair and touched her fingertips to the top ruffle. “I came to him with a small fortune I’d amassed working in a brothel as one of the most sought-after whores.” Her gaze went to the bevel mirror and in the glass. Their eyes met. The stark desolateness in their green depths chilled Penelope from within. “It was an establishment where gentlemen with unnatural proclivities went.”
Penelope wrinkled her brow. What?
“Men with perversions,” the woman said bluntly. “Noblemen who fancied a different kind of stimulation—beating women, tying them up and . . .” Her words trailed off. “And other things,” she finished.
Oh, God. Once again, her own naïveté hit her squarely, rendering her silent with the guilt of her own innocence and with pain for all this woman had endured. Still endured.
“I saved my funds and came to the Hell and Sin with a proposition for Mr. Black. I wanted to be responsible for both the hiring and the overseeing of the prostitutes who worked here.”
How very strong this woman was, in ways Penelope never would be. “No wonder he loves you,” she said softly, to herself, a vise clenching and unclenching about her heart. This was the manner of woman he’d wanted—nay, needed—at his side. And in her quest to save Poppy and salvage her reputation, she’d stolen that right from him.
The other woman blinked like an owl startled from its perch. “Love me?”
Why wouldn’t he love Clara Waters? With her strength, courage, and resilience, she’d risen from the hell of their shared world to make a future for herself. “I assure you, Mr. Black does not love me,” she said with a wry smile. “He doesn’t love anyone.” She proceeded to tick off on her long, elegant fingers. “He does not smile. He does not give in to shows of temper. He does not step foot outside these walls.” Clara turned so they faced one another. “Or he didn’t. You’ve been here but a week and he’s done all of those things more than the previous seven years I knew him.”
All his furious accusations came rushing forth. Since her arrival, she’d put demands on Ryker that challenged a world he was very much content with. “It is because I gave him no choice.” Bitterness tinged that humbling admission.
Clara snorted. “No one makes Ryker Black do anything. I saw him with his brothers and sister, and the distance he kept me at. I believed him incapable of knowing any emotion. Until you.”
“You are mistaken.” Fury. Annoyance. Exasperation. Those were all sentiments Ryker had shown Penelope. That was it. This woman was corked in the brain if she believed anything else. Nor would she debate as much with her.
The young beauty gave her a small, knowing smile. “Regardless, it is my hope that we can get along, hopefully one day as friends.”
Make friends with her husband’s former mistress? Penelope’s mother would have needed smelling salts to stir her after that scandalous proposition. However, Penelope had enough enemies in this new home—people who wanted her gone and wished her ill. She was not so proud that she’d reject the offering, so that at the very least they could live in peace here. Penelope stretched a hand out, and wordlessly the other woman collected her fingers in a slight shake.
“I will leave you for the night.”
Penelope nodded, staring after the woman as she glided with an effortless grace over to the front of the room. “Oh, Mrs. Black,” she added, turning back to face her. “For the intimacy you . . . believe, or mayhap expect, I shared with Ryker, he never kissed my mouth and never invited me inside his chambers. Make of that what you will in terms of his . . . feelings for me.”
With that staggering pronouncement, the woman swept from the room, leaving Penelope with even more questions about the man named Ryker Black.
Chapter 21
Dearest Fezzimore,
Our newest governess has so many rules for us to follow. Rules are dreadfully boring.
Penny
Age 7
“Rules are essential. Rules save lives.”
Standing in the observatory that overlooked the gaming hell’s floors, Penelope accepted the certain truth.
Her life was set to be governed by mantras.
This one, now issued by Calum, the man she now called brother-in-law, bore little hint, however, to the societal one laid out by her mother.
“And I expect those rules were enumerated by—”
“Ryker,” Calum interrupted her dry supposition.
She sighed as another wave of regret filled her for the life her husband had lived. She’d found the societal norms drilled into her by countless governesses and her mother tedious beyond measure, but there was a deep sadness in these rules that Ryker lived by. For they spoke of one who battled to survive at all costs.
Suddenly, Calum bent and unsheathed a knife from his left boot.
As the hard blade shimmered, she eyed it warily. Yes, Ryker’s brothers didn’t like her, but surely they’d not be so bold as to slay her in the middle of the day, in the observatory.
“I assure you, I’ve no intention of killing you.” The sardonic grin on his lips earned a guilty blush. “Ryker instructed me to school you on the proper way to handle a knife.”
Her stomach plummeted. “Ryker did?” she echoed dumbly. Long after Clara had taken her leave, Penelope had lain awake staring at the plaster ceiling, awaiting Ryker’s return. She’d waited until her eyes grew heavy and sleep won out. She’d awakened to find not a hint he’d ever returned. Now, he’d turned her over to his brother.
Penelope flattened her lips. “I am grateful.” The lout. The cowardly, blasted lout would avoid her. Or mayhap it wasn’t cowardice. Mayhap he just has no real desire to see you. Given his volatile explosion and charges, should she find that a surprise?
Calum fished another knife out of his opposite boot. “Ryker instructed me to give you this.” He handed over the jewel-studded sapphire dagger they’d purchased several days earlier.
Penelope turned it over in her hands, studying those tear-shaped stones. In polite Society sapphires and other precious gems adorned necklaces and earrings, frivolous baubles that served no other purpose but to prettify a woman. Once again the stark difference between their worlds was glaring.
“Have you ever held a knife?” His question cut into her musings.
She gave her head a shake and met his gaze. “My brother taught me to shoot, handle a rapier, and briefly schooled me in fisticuffs.” That had been the extent of her edification in unladylike pursuits. To her mother’s relief.
He gave an approving nod and perched his hip on the narrow table situated at the base of the window. “Do you know why a person would prefer a blade to a bullet in a street battle?”
A street battle. How quickly she’d gone from proper miss bent on the rules of decorum to a lady conversing about weapons of choice. “I expect having only one shot limits your capabilities,” she ventured.
“There is that,” he concurred. “There is also the matter of avoiding notice. The sharp report of a gun can save you from one foe, but it brings others, and that is only if you do not misfire. Or if your gunpowder isn’t wet.”
Lowering her arm to her side, she strolled over to the table and set it down. “When did you and Ryker learn this lesson?” she asked in a desperate bid to know more of the man she’d married.
Calum’s expression grew shuttered.
Penelope fiddled with the knife and stared out at the gaming hell. Gentlemen whom she’d observed from the sidelines of the Duchess of Somerset’s ball occupied hazard and faro tables. All strangers, still. Never had she felt more alone than in this moment. Her brother-in-law’s closest friend, Lord Maxwell, strolled through the club, and something pulled at that remote but still close connection to
her former existence.
A voluptuous fiery-haired beauty with rouged lips placed herself in the earl’s path. The woman ran searching fingers over his lapels, and Penelope hurriedly looked away. The connection shattered.
She’d spent the whole of the week silently mourning all she’d never have and all that would never be. As long as she remained entrenched in her previous existence, she’d never have a life here.
“What was he like?” The soft question tumbled from her lips. “As a boy,” she clarified, needing to know more about the man she’d married from a person who’d actually been let inside that world.
“Angry,” Calum responded instantly, making no attempt to feign a question as to whom she spoke of.
And that anger had carried over, no doubt sustaining him through countless hells and horrors. “Did nothing bring him joy?” She turned her gaze up to his again, holding her breath, needing the answer to be yes. Needing to know that at some time, some place or some person had brought him happiness.
Calum dusted his hand over his square jaw. “The only time I saw Ryker smile was the day he stepped foot inside this club, as the new owner.”
He does not smile . . . Until you . . . Clara’s words flitted around her mind.
“How did you meet?” Surely that exchange brought with it some happy joining of two boys, desperately in need of a friend.
A chuckle rumbled from Calum’s chest. “A Drury Lane show had just emptied out, and Ryker had filched the purse of a young lord. I followed him down an alley, knocked him down, and attempted to steal his findings.”
A man of Ryker’s resolve would have never allowed such an offense to stand. “What did he do?”
“Bloodied my nose good. Broke it.” Her stomach roiled, and not wanting to show him that weakness, she battled back the nausea. By the odd bend to that once-aquiline nose, it hadn’t been the first break Calum Dabney had suffered. “We went on fighting for a while, neither bending, and then almost at the same time we just stopped because we realized—”
She cocked her head. “Realized what?”
“That together as a pair, we could be invincible, and it would be a bloody shame for two people who could so benefit each other not to join forces.”
Not unlike her and Ryker following their ruin in the duchess’s gardens. As soon as the wistful thought slid in, she scoffed. Ryker didn’t see her as a member of his “family,” but mayhap he could. Her mind raced. Mayhap he doesn’t see you as belonging to his world because since you’ve entered, you’ve only attempted to change it.
Penelope picked up the dagger and raised an eyebrow. “Shall we begin?”
Ryker should be attending the important business of finding a successful replacement for Adair, who’d taken on the bookkeeping since Helena’s marriage almost a year earlier.
Instead, he sat here ruminating over his wife, whom he’d put in Calum’s care. The other man would see her properly trained in defending herself. Aside from Niall, there was no more ruthless fighter in the whole of the Dials.
Yet she was his responsibility. Her care should fall to him. Which was madness. It went against his pledge to put the club before everyone and everything.
Ryker tamped down an agonized groan and forced his attention to the man squirming across from him. His skin pale. His forehead beading sweat. Unable to meet Ryker’s gaze. This is one of the men Adair brought him as a possible candidate to see to the books? Over the shoulder of the man of indiscriminate years he arched an eyebrow at Adair.
His brother who leaned with his back against the door, with one heel rested against the panel, lifted his shoulders in a shrug.
“W-would you c-care to see my references?” The man fished inside his folio and extracted a sheet. Leaning forward, he settled it on Ryker’s now tidy desk.
He pointedly ignored the sheet. “We are done here,” he said frostily, and the man’s already-pale skin took on a waxen hue.
The candidate surged to his feet, relief making his shoulders sag. He hurriedly gathered his belongings and made a beeline for the front of the room. Adair stepped out of the way, pulled the door open, and disappeared outside.
A short while later he returned, wearing a scowl. “What the hell was wrong with that one?”
“You need to ask?” Ryker asked, shoving to his feet.
“If you’re waiting for a candidate who can meet your gaze, you’re going to have to wait until Lucifer is looking for the position of bookkeeper,” he said, laughing as Ryker made a crude gesture with his finger. “There is still an additional candidate coming.”
“When?”
“Half past one.”
Ryker looked to the clock, a restlessness filling him. An inexplicable one that made little sense. His club had always commanded and controlled every bit of Ryker’s attentions, and he’d relished that. Except . . . “Have you seen my wife today?”
Surprise shone in Adair’s gaze. “She was with Calum earlier.” With Calum. Just as he’d instructed. A sliver of irrational jealousy unfurled. “Where are they?”
After all, as her husband he at least had a responsibility to see how she fared in her lessons. He could slip over, observe, and then return for his second interview.
Adair again shrugged. “The last I saw they were headed to the observatory.”
With purposeful steps, Ryker crossed the room and started quickly down the hall. Gaze trained on the door ahead, Ryker lengthened his strides. He reached the observatory door, and froze.
“Thrust, Penelope. Not so hard.” The oak door did little to muffle the raspy command followed by Penelope’s breathless laugh. “That is good. Just like that.”
A blanket of rage descended over his vision, momentarily blinding him as those words conjured wicked, forbidden acts between his wife and another. It was born of a place where irrationality dwelled, and yet even so, it licked at the corner of his senses so all he saw, tasted, and breathed was white-hot fury. Ryker threw the door open with such force it bounced back. He stuck his boot out to keep from being slammed in the nose . . . and then froze.
Penelope, her skin glistening with a fine sheen of moisture, stood with her arm stretched out, a dagger dangling in her fingers, as she stared wide-eyed at him. The blade slipped from her hand and clattered to the floor, restoring logic to his out-of-control thoughts.
Ryker passed his gaze over Penelope, and then Calum, his jacket missing, in nothing but his shirtsleeves and breeches, and then back to his wife. Before ultimately settling on his brother.
“What in hell is going on in here?” he seethed.
She jumped and moved closer to Calum.
A primitive sense of possessiveness filled him.
“He was teaching me how to properly defend myself,” Penelope said in a surprisingly steady voice, the first to speak. Her chin jutted out at a mutinous angle. “Because my husband was otherwise too busy.”
Calum’s lips twitched.
Fury fanned within, and he fed that safer sentiment. A far safer one than the niggling green pit that coiled like a serpent inside, something that felt very much like jealousy. “It is a game, then,” he said flatly, stalking forward.
She shook her head with a dizzying speed. “No.”
“You were laughing.” Had she ever laughed in his presence? Have you ever given her reason to? Why did that truth grate on his last frayed nerve? “Is this a diversion for a bored lady?” he snapped, coming closer.
“Ryker,” the other man said warningly, giving him a look.
Ryker swiftly retrieved the knife she’d dropped moments prior and held it up. “This, madam, may be the difference between life and death.” And goddamn her for not seeing that as truth. One of Killoran’s men could gut her before she’d so much as wrestled her blade from her boot. No, he could not leave this task to Calum.
“Calum, will you please excuse us,” Penelope said in clipped, proper tones the Queen herself would have admired.
A moment later, when Calum pulled the door closed b
ehind him, Penelope swung her furious gaze up to Ryker’s. “How dare you?” she seethed, advancing, and he who’d long been master of this gaming hell found himself retreating. “You turn me over to your brother like I’m a bothersome child you’d rather be free of.”
“Calum is one of the best fighters in the Dials,” he mumbled, backing up another step.
“Better than you?” she dared. But for Niall, no one rivaled Ryker with a blade. “Yet one moment you’d turn me over to his tutelage.” Penelope took another step toward him. “And the next moment you storm in here—”
“I didn’t storm,” he groused, tugging at his collar.
“Lecturing me because I’m laughing.” Her chest heaved up and down, drawing his gaze to her small, pert breasts, and God help him, he should be attending her outraged diatribe, but his shaft stirred with this unending hunger for her.
Singularly unaffected, she gave her head a shake and stepped away from him. “You allow me a glimpse of who you are one instant, and the next you slam the door closed, so resolved to keep me out.” She tossed her hands up, her voice climbing. “You believe yourself fearless, invincible, and yet the truth is, Ryker, you are afraid.”
He recoiled.
“You are so very afraid to let anyone in.” Her words sucked the air from his lungs. “Including the brothers and sister who have lived and fought alongside you.” The truth of her words were shaking him to the core. He swallowed convulsively, glancing about. Not unlike the boy of five, with a noose around his neck in a mock execution. Penelope settled her palms on his cheeks, forcing his gaze to hers. “That is why the moment you let me inside, you then push me away. Don’t you see, Ryker, there is no shame or weakness in wanting or needing another person, and until you—”
Ryker cupped her by the nape of her neck and devoured her mouth, stemming the flow of her words, swallowing them with his kiss. He removed the pins from her hair, and allowed it to cascade down her back in a black, silken waterfall that hung about her trim waist. Penelope moaned and pressed herself against him, twining her hands about his neck. She angled her head, allowing him to deepen the kiss.
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