Would he always ache with this hungering for her? It was a potent need that moved beyond the physical and stirred suitable terror for it. She’d burst into his well-ordered life with smiles and laughter and an unguarded honesty, more potent than any spirit. Their tongues mated in a primitive dance, and Penelope undulated her hips against him.
Ryker drew slowly back, and her lashes fluttered, revealing passion-clouded eyes. “Did you do that to silence me?” Her words emerged a breathy exhale.
“I have never known anyone like you,” he said raspily, panicked by that admission. “You make me . . . feel, when I know the danger in it.”
Penelope took his hands and squeezed. “There is no danger,” she said on a sad laugh. “There is far greater danger in going through your life without ever knowing love.”
Love.
He shook his head.
She nodded.
Ryker shook his head once more.
“I love you, Ryker.”
That word speared him, and he went stock-still. Never love . . . That simplest, most saving rule she’d ask him to forsake. He pressed his palm to his mouth. Her words were born of an innocence that didn’t see the darkness in his soul. “You don’t know—”
“I know you are a man of strength and courage who’d lay down his life for me, your siblings, and anyone else in your care. A man who’d take in a boy and his sister on the streets and give them work here, to save them. I know you are a man who never sought to shape me into a meek, proper miss but encouraged me to take ownership of my life.”
People did not love him. And with good reason. His soul was black from crimes he’d pay for in the flames of hell. “I know nothing of love, Penelope,” he said, his voice hoarsened. In that, they couldn’t be more different. She with her adoring, smiling family. And he who’d long insulated himself from feeling . . . anything. “Do you want to know who I am?”
“I know who you are,” she said, her heart in her eyes.
“My mother was the Duke of Wilkinson’s whore. The day I was born, there was no grand celebration or joyful parents.” As her entry into the world had surely been marked by. “There was nothing but a midwife who delivered me and turned me over to a bastard in the streets. A man who used me for his thieving and shaped me in his image.”
An agonized groan caught in her throat. “That is not true.”
“But it is,” he said matter-of-factly. “I ate refuse hurled out into the streets. I begged like a dog. I killed.” In every way, he’d been less than human. But he needed her to know. Needed her to know why even married as they were, she would never truly belong in his life. The mother and father who’d given him life, the cruel bastard who’d made him his son, not one of them had shown him love. He’d been a forgotten bastard, and a useful pawn. “Even my siblings fear and respect me more than anything.”
She was shaking her head before the words had even left her lips, setting her midnight curls shaking. “I do not believe that. Your brothers, Helena, they love you. They speak with you in reverent tones because of all you have done. They see your worth, Ryker.” Penelope reclaimed his hands and gave another firm squeeze. “It is you who fails to see it.”
Her words resonated in his mind.
“I did not tell you because I expect the same words from you,” she said simply. “I shared them because they are true, and they should be spoken because of it.” His wife wandered over to the table and picked up her dagger. He gave silent thanks when she gave all her attention to that blade, sparing him from the tumult of her admission.
With the knife, Penelope drew her arm up and made an awkward slashing movement. His lips twitched. This was something safe. Schooling Penelope on how to defend herself. Even with a knife in hand, there was an innocence to her. His smile faded. It was a gift that would only be sullied by her association with him.
Send her away . . . Niall’s urgings rattled around his mind, and the muscles of his stomach clenched involuntarily.
“Here,” he said gruffly, as he positioned himself behind her. He drew her back so her buttocks nestled in the vee of his legs. “Rule five, always be prepared to defend yourself.”
Her shoulders shook with her laughter, as she looked back at him. “Is your entire life spelled out in rules?”
“Yes,” he said, directly. “Rules—”
“Save lives.” She winked up at him. “Calum,” she explained.
That fertile seed of unease sowed by Niall days earlier continued to grow. Penelope’s innocence had no place in his uncertain world. Send her away . . . “Pay attention,” he said brusquely, instantly quashing her smile. “Most people don’t know how to use a knife, and so when they first stab a man, they raise the knife high and slash down.” Ryker lightly wrapped his hand about her wrist and guided her arm straight back. He placed his lips against her ear. “But it’s quicker to angle back.” He brought her arm at a diagonal, and guided it forward in a slashing movement. “Like this.”
Penelope tipped her head sideways, their gazes locked. “You must think me the most pathetic creature,” she whispered, as the blade slipped from her fingers, landing with a loud clatter.
Their lips nearly brushed.
He grazed his knuckles along her jaw. “I don’t.” She was a lady who’d fully immersed herself in the world he’d dragged her into.
She scoffed and stepped out of his arms. “Come.” She slashed the air with her hand. “I cannot hold a blade. If I stepped out into these streets, I’d likely be killed for my ignorance. What does that say about me as a person?” she challenged, emotion lighting her eyes.
“That doesn’t make you a lesser woman,” he said, taking a step toward her. How could she not see the strength of her courage and character? Where even his own siblings feared him, she was unwavering in her convictions and unafraid to go toe-to-toe with him, or anyone.
“Oh? What does it make me, then? Am I not a pampered societal miss? I can sketch and read and play pianoforte, and that only poorly,” she added under her breath, and the heart he’d long thought dead to emotion filled with tenderness. His wife made a sound of frustration. “What good do those skills do me here, Ryker?”
“It makes you a woman who never needed those skills, until now.” As soon as that assurance left his mouth, the air lodged in his lungs. The implication of those words. The veracity of them. He’d spent countless years hating the nobility because of who they were and for having failed to see the plight of those around them. He’d constructed his gaming kingdom on that hatred. All the while, failing to see just what Penelope had gleaned after a week married. He’d been hating himself all these years. Hating himself for his own failings. Hating himself for having sold his soul to survive.
Penelope gave him a long, meaningful look, and then dropped to a knee and picked up her knife. “The same way I didn’t have a need for certain skills and knowledge, neither did you. It’s life that dictates the lessons we still must learn. I see that, and it is time you see it, as well.” With that she took her leave, and started for the door.
“Penelope,” he called out, his voice drier than a graveled road. She turned slowly back. “You are right.” And that admission didn’t cost him his pride or strength. It didn’t weaken him. It bound him to her, the only person who’d been unafraid to look inside and see someone other than Ryker Black, ruthless gaming-hell leader.
Her lips parted in soft surprise.
I will ultimately destroy her. Keeping her in his world would ultimately see her innocence shattered. A dull pressure cut off air, as he confronted the sudden truth—she was his weakness. “I want to learn.” He’d not be part of the ton. That world would still remain one he never wished to step foot inside. “Will you teach me?”
“There is nothing I would want more,” she whispered.
And standing there, transfixed by the depth of emotion pouring from her eyes, he found he, too, desired nothing more than her.
Chapter 22
Dearest Fezzimore,
Tonight Sin taught Poppy and me how to play hazard. Having handily beat Poppy and Prudence, I now understand why Sin spends so much time at his clubs. It’s deuced fun.
Penny
Age 12
“Would it do any good if I told you that you shouldn’t be in here?”
Standing at the window overlooking the observatory, Penelope smiled. “No.”
“I didn’t believe it would,” Calum muttered.
Nearly a fortnight since Ryker had let down his defenses, so too had she settled into a comfortable arrangement with Calum and Adair. With the exception of her husband, they took morning meals together each day in the kitchen, discussing the club’s business. The jaded mistrust in her brother-in-law’s eyes had been replaced, as had their frequent ordering her about.
Her gaze fixed on Ryker as he moved around the club with the command and control of a king ruling over his kingdom. Lords hastily dropped their eyes when he came near; others stared with something akin to awe. Yes, those were the sentiments her husband inspired in most, alternating terror and admiration. How in his element he was. So powerfully in charge.
She nibbled at her lower lip. And yet a man who possessed such an immense control of his life and his gaming empire should still come to fear entering her world. In her bid these weeks to coax him out, to see his sister and her husband, to visit her family, he remained stalwart in his disavowal. There were books to tend. Employees to meet with. Bookkeepers to interview. In short, Ryker was never short of reasons he could not abandon his responsibilities at the hell.
For the time they spent together talking, the nights they spent making love, Ryker’s life was largely the same, a driven one he’d always lived. Where lords of the ton lived for their pleasures, Ryker lived to work. And for as much as she’d come to know him, she still, if pressed with her life on the line, couldn’t indicate what brought him happiness.
His life was stark and driven. With the exception of one confectionery indulgence he’d spoken with a faraway longing for, there’d been no mention of frivolities but of necessary enjoyments.
Rock candy . . .
Turning around, Penelope perched her hip on the edge of the table.
“Your husband would be rightfully worried if he saw that look in your eyes,” Calum drawled.
“I require an escort.”
“Ask your husband,” Calum ordered, not taking his gaze from the floor.
“I’ve items to purchase. For him. I can’t bring him, Calum.” Did his brother not even recall it was Ryker’s birthday?
Would you have me tell you that Niall and Adair don’t even know the dates of their birth . . . ?
Again, the depth of her own naïveté staggered her.
The door opened, and Niall stepped inside. “She’s wandered off again.” Wandered off. Like she was some disobedient pup. Then, her husband had assigned Niall more of a handler’s role than anything else. “Have ye seen . . . ?”
Penelope waggled her fingers in his direction. Alas, he remained unyielding as he’d been since she’d arrived three weeks earlier.
Calum jerked his chin at the fierce guard. “Your escort has arrived, my lady.”
She swatted him on the arm.
“What?” Niall said, his voice curt enough to deter lesser ladies. Alas, she’d dealt with a far more disapproving brother over the years.
Penelope hopped off the edge of the table. “I require an escort,” she repeated for his benefit. “There are several shops I need to visit.”
At Calum’s chuckle, Niall worked his jaw.
“Shops?”
She may as well have asked for the keys to the Hell and Sin Club for the way Niall stared back at her now.
“Ask your husband,” he snapped.
“I’m asking you,” she said, pulling her gloves off. Walking toward him, she beat the articles together. “And I’m going, whether or not you intend to join me.” Penelope stepped past him, and his furious curse trailed behind her, singeing her ears.
“Get yer goddamn cloak,” he spat.
So it was, a short while later, Penelope made her way down the fashionable end of Bond Street.
Penelope would be damned if she allowed the stonily silent man walking beside her to ruin this day.
As she weaved between the throng of passersby on Bond Street, she hummed a discordant tune. Every lord and lady they passed cast furtive glances at the menacing stranger at her side, and then looked to her.
Whispers trailed behind her, and she ignored them. Of course, everyone knew the latest scandalous Tidemore girl. Having been shut away inside her husband’s club, removed from polite Society, she’d allowed herself the delusion of forgetting that the whispers and gossip carried on about her.
“Shameful creature . . .”
Penelope tipped her chin up and forced her feet to move at a sedate pace, not allowing them to see that their words rankled.
“Of course she knew there was no other way to snare a husband . . .”
That vehement whisper slashed through her musings. Feeling Niall’s sideways glance, she jutted her jaw out. She’d not take his derisive jeering, too. She’d come to accept that the gossip would always be there. It would always surround the Tidemore family. It needn’t define her. But it would still always hurt, if even in some small way.
Never had she been more grateful to reach a destination than when she arrived at the front doors of the Old Corner Bookshop. Where most members of the ton visited the Temple of the Muses, Penelope had long preferred the quiet that came in the less frequented, dusty establishment.
Not waiting for the ever-silent Niall, she pushed the door open and stepped inside. A rusty bell jingled, filling the quiet. Tugging off her gloves, Penelope glanced around the floor-length shelving lining the shop. She took a step forward, and then stopped.
Her brother-in-law crashed into her back, jolting her forward.
She quickly righted herself. “I assure you, I’ll not come to any harm here.”
He flexed his jaw. “Ryker asked me to protect ye.”
Ryker also expected and was entitled to privacy. She inclined her head. “Very well. I forgot my reticule in the carriage. Would you collect it for me?”
Wary suspicion filled his dark blue eyes as he peered at her. Penelope forced herself to go still. Within the folds of her velvet cloak, her fingers twitched guiltily about that very article.
“Do not leave the shop,” he said tightly, and then started from the establishment.
Penelope didn’t waste any time. As soon as the door closed behind him, she rushed deeper into the shop, quickly inventorying the aisles. Before ultimately stopping beside the familiar one she had visited countless times with her sister-in-law.
Quickly scanning the children’s titles, her eyes alighted on Bewick’s Aesop’s Fables. She tugged it free and flipped through the familiar pages that Juliet read to her daughter. A wave of homesickness assailed her, a need for the comfort and ease that came in simply being with the Tidemores. She stared blankly at the open page, unseeing the words in print. How many years she’d spent wishing to move beyond that small world, to find a husband and carve out a life of happiness and love as her elder siblings had.
The tinny bell at the front of the shop jingled, announcing a patron.
Penelope fanned through the book, and then her gaze landed on the image captured of the boy beside his cage:
A Nightingale, with snares beset,
At last was taken in a net:
When first she found her wings confin’d,
She beat and flutter’d in the wind,
Still thinking she could fly away.
Penelope frantically ran the tip of her finger over those words as she read:
Still hoping to regain the spray;
But finding there was no retreat,
Her little heart with anger beat;
Nor did it aught abate her rage
To be transmitted to a cage.
The wire apartment, tho’ c
ommodious,
To her appear’d excessive odious.
Her heart hammering, she slammed the book shut with a loud thwack. For years she’d longed to step inside a gaming hell . . . and now that long-ago dream had, in fact, become real. Only now she’d found those walls to be nothing more than a prison of sorts.
Penelope wanted to toss the book aside for the mocking truth to have danced from its pages. She hugged the book close to her chest, welcoming the sharp bite of the edges through the fabric of her cloak, and then continued walking. Periodically she paused and added titles to her growing collection. Her gaze snagged on the gold lettering of Newbery’s Little Pretty Pocket-Book, and she mouthed the title silently, and then freed the volume.
Doing a quick inventory of the six children’s books in her arms, she shifted the burden and made to go.
“If you are looking for children’s works, may I be so bold as to recommend Gulliver’s Travels, Lady Chatham?” That low, smooth baritone sounded from several feet away.
Penelope gasped. The books tumbled from her arms scattering at her feet. Heart racing she looked to the tall gentleman at the end of the aisle. There was a lean, wiry strength to him. With a halo of loose golden tresses so fair and a slight dimple in his chiseled cheeks, he had the look of the angel Gabriel.
He strode over, his long legs eating away the distance between them, and he sank to his haunches. “Allow me,” he murmured, neatly stacking her pile.
His voice sprung her into movement, and she fell to a knee beside him. “Forgive me.”
The handsome stranger paused in his efforts to grin; and it was an easy, affable one that met his hazel eyes. “It was not my intention to startle you, my lady,” he said as he finished gathering her impressive pile.
Then, his words registered. Lady Chatham? How did he—?
The gentleman shoved to his feet and held a hand out. “I know your husband,” he said by way of explanation, following the precise path her thoughts had wandered.
Her heart skittered several beats as she allowed him to help her up. Unease trickled along her spine, as every warning given her by Ryker rushed to the surface. As soon as the irrational thought slid in, she brushed it back. “Do you?” she asked tentatively. With all her husband’s warnings, she’d begun to see demons in the shadows. Nonetheless, she cast a brief glance over the stranger’s shoulder, searching for Niall.
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