Vanquished

by Hope Tarr

  "Never say old, not in my line of work." Jabbing Hadrian in the side, Sally tossed back her head and let out a loud laugh.

  "Mrs. Potts, a pleasure." Extending her hand, Callie bestowed the title as a courtesy though she heartily doubted the woman had ever been married.

  Sally turned curious eyes on Callie, making Callie aware of just what a mess she must look, hatless and with her unpinned hair falling wild about her shoulders. Despite Sally's frank appraisal, though, she appeared neither unfriendly nor unkind. "Any chum of Harry's is welcome here."

  "Harry?" Was it Callie's imagination, or did Hadrian stiffen beside her?

  "Oh, did I say 'Harry'? Bless me, I meant to say Hadrian. Lud, I'd forget me own name some days if there weren't friends to remind me of it." Again that thunderbolt of laughter, this time rather studied, or so Callie thought.

  Hadrian cleared his throat. "We're in a spot of trouble, Sal. Oh, nothing too serious, mind, a bit of bad business over at the match factory. Might we stay here until the heat dies down? Just an hour or so, and then we'll be on our way."

  Sally shrugged, the motion causing her breasts to slip even farther out the top of her low-cut gown. "Stay as long as you like. Business always drops off the beginning of the week. It's not like I can't spare the room."

  Hadrian glanced toward the scarlet-carpeted stairway. "Something with a window facing out onto the alley would be just the thing. Just in case."

  "No problem; I have a solution."

  Hadrian and the woman exchanged knowing looks, and Callie felt her heart lodge in her throat. They're lovers, she thought, and even as she told herself she shouldn't care, that what she'd had with him so far had only been a silly kiss and a bit of a fumble, after all, the stab of anguish she felt was a very real thing, a warning that history was about to repeat itself if she wasn't careful.

  Sally led them upstairs, taffeta skirts swishing. At the top, she turned down a long, sconce-lit hallway. Following closely behind, Callie heard the sound of a slap, and then a woman's giggle, coming from behind one of several closed doors. Face heating, she ventured a look over her shoulder at Hadrian, but he didn't meet her eyes.

  Sally stopped at the closed door at the very end of the corridor. Opening it, she stood back and announced, "Here we are, loves, my very favorite room in the house." She shot Hadrian a wink. "As you can see, the window faces out to the alley. Not the best of views, mind, but practical at times and not so high you can't climb out if the need arises. In the meantime, I'll send up some refreshments and a beefsteak for the lady's eye."

  "Thanks, Sal. You're the best," Hadrian said, and Callie didn't miss the easing of his taut features. For the first time it occurred to her she hadn't been the only one in danger of being carted off to jail.

  Sally tossed back her head, painted lips parting into a smile of tobacco-stained teeth. "Oh aye, that's what they tell me." Catching Callie's eye, she sobered and said, "I'll send one of the lads off to check out the situation and then knock on your door to give the all clear. Three sharp raps."

  She pulled the door closed behind her, leaving Callie and Hadrian alone once more. Callie hazarded a glance about. The still air was scented with perfume and sex; the carpet a plush cloud beneath her feet. A big four-poster bed dominated the room's center. The counterpane was done up in crimson velvet that matched the window curtains and bed canopy. A large mirror hung over the gilded dresser.

  Now that the aftershock of fear was draining from her blood, she felt the chill of cold, hard reality setting in. She, Caledonia Rivers, was hiding out in the bedroom of a working brothel, a tart's boudoir. Even her questions over Hadrian's obvious friendship with the madam faded to the edges of her mind as she struggled to absorb this incredulous fact.

  I don't care. I shan't allow myself to care.

  She turned to find Hadrian standing beside her. He'd set the camera down and was stripping off his gloves, the right one split at the stitching. Grimacing, he pulled it off.

  She saw the torn flesh of his knuckles and felt her heart turn over. "You're hurt."

  He tossed the gloves aside with a shrug. "I've been hurt a great deal worse than this. Growing up as I did produced an elephant's thick hide."

  "In the orphanage, you mean? Fighting with the other boys?"

  He shook his head. "On the streets such as the ones we walked today. I lived on my own for almost a year. After that, the orphanage seemed a rather tame place."

  "You were put out on your own after your mother died?" She looked up at him, her heart aching for the lonely, lost boy he once must have been and the secretive man standing before her whom, she suspected, wasn't entirely sure how to either trust or love.

  He hesitated, and then shook his head. "I was a runaway. I heard about her death months afterward from . . . from a mutual friend. By then, it was too late to mourn her, at least properly."

  Callie thought of her own parents, whom she hadn't seen in more than a year. Though they'd never been a close family, still she didn't care to think of the day when they would pass from her life altogether. To lose one's parent when still a child would be devastating indeed. "Oh, Hadrian, I am so sorry."

  "I'm sorry, too--sorry I haven't done a better job of taking care of you today."

  Reaching out, he touched her face with gentle fingers, probing the bruise blooming on her cheekbone just below her eye. Callie shivered, not because the spot throbbed (although it did) -- but because being touched in this way, by this man, made her feel small and feminine, cared for and cherished. For the first time in a very long time, someone, a man, was taking care of her and though the circumstances were considerably less than ideal, it still felt so very right, so immeasurably . . . good.

  And yet the part of her that insisted she could manage perfectly well on her own prompted her to say, "Taking care of me isn't your job. I don't need a keeper."

  He dropped his hand and stepped back to look at her, no doubt put off by her strident tone. "What do you need, then?"

  It was a leading question designed to discomfit, and yet for a moment she paused to consider. What did she need? The answer, crystal clear, came to her as though someone, unseen, were whispering in her ear.

  I need a lover. I need you to be my lover.

  The bruise beneath her eye wasn't the only part of her that throbbed and ached and while a raw beefsteak or a cool cloth might answer to that, the only cure for that other, deeper ache was this man.

  For the first time in perhaps in her entire adult life, she walled off her mind with its niggling self-doubts and persistent insecurities, and allowed herself the freedom to feel. Instead of moving away, she lifted her face to his, offering him her mouth for the second time that day. "I need you to kiss me, Hadrian. On the lips as a lover would. As you did the other day."

  "Callie," he said, his voice a raw whisper. He caught her by the shoulders, holding her fast. Lips, butterfly light, landed on her eyelids, her cheeks, the pulse point at the side of her throat. "Callie." He moved to her mouth, kissing bottom and top lip in turn, running his tongue along the seam, teasing them apart. "I'm wrong for you, Callie, so bloody wrong and yet this feels so--"

  "Right, I know. I know, I feel it, too." Eyes open, she reached up and laid a hand on either side of his neck, the muscles going taut beneath her fingertips. "Right or wrong, I don't care anymore. I want you. I just want you."

  She opened her mouth for him. Later she might look back and rue her foolish, wanton ways but for the present she didn't care to think, only feel. Hadrian St. Claire was kissing her, kissing her as no man had kissed her ever before, and when she felt his tongue slide inside her mouth to twine with hers, the sweet joy of it, the soul-deep sensation of feeling well and truly alive, eclipsed everything else.

  He found her breast with his hand, torn knuckles brushing the sensitive tip. Even through her layers of clothing, she felt herself harden, felt the sweet ache of it all the way down to the throbbing core of her sex.

  "Please." She shivered an
d arched against him, wanting more, wanting all of him.

  He wrapped an arm about her waist and deepened the kiss, tongue stroking hers, teeth gently nipping at her bottom lip even as his clever fingers found the fastenings fronting her coat.

  "Callie." Breathing hard, he unfastened the few buttons it took for him to fit a hand inside, and then found the smaller buttons of her shirtwaist and unfastened them too. He covered a palm over one camisole-covered breast. "So beautiful," he whispered and set his thumb to circling her nipple, calculated torture.

  Without breaking contact, they backed across the room. Callie bumped up against something, and realized it must be the mattress against the back of her thighs. A whore's bed and yet she couldn't wait to crawl between those sex-scented sheets and make love with Hadrian as until now she'd only made love in dreams.

  Outside their door, three sharp raps sounded. Sally's high whisper announced, "Coast is clear. Shall I still send up that beefsteak?"

  Like guilty children, they broke apart. Hadrian glanced to Callie. She shook her head and a moment later he called back, "I think we're set, Sal, but thanks just the same."

  Looking back to Callie, he shook his head. In a whisper meant for her ears alone, he said, "It's just as well. I told you before I'm all wrong for you. I'm the very last man you should let near you. I ruin everything I touch."

  "I don't believe that."

  He rested his head against her forehead, breathing hard. "You should. In fact, you should consider it fair warning."

  "Maybe I don't care for being warned. I'm a grown woman. I know what I'm about."

  "Do you?" Hadrian pulled away. Walking over to the window he pulled back the velvet drapes and looked out. "It's almost dark. The streetlamps are just coming on." He dropped the curtain and turned to her. "In this world where night is day, Sally's patrons will begin arriving before much longer. We should go now before someone sees you."

  Oh God, he was turning her away. The bitter disappointment of it came out in a brittle laugh. "It's rather late to worry for my reputation, wouldn't you say, though I seriously doubt I run the risk of encountering anyone I know in this place."

  "You think not?" He turned back inside. "Don't be a fool. Sally's clients ran the gamut from prosperous tradesmen to London's upper crust, including several Members of Parliament and a cousin to the Lord Mayor of London. There's no telling who you might encounter if we stay."

  He crossed the room toward her. Laying a hand atop either of her shoulders, he turned her toward the room's sole mirror, which hung in plain view of the bed. "That mirror may look ordinary enough but the glass it holds is two-way. Even now, someone could be in the next room watching us." Sliding an arm about her waist, he pulled her to him, her back fitting against his chest. Reaching around them, he cupped her breasts. "Watching me do this and . . . this." He flicked his thumbs over her nipples, once, twice . . .

  Callie moaned and leaned back against him, the now familiar hardness pressing against her buttocks.

  "Perhaps listening to the soft sounds you make when I touch you there and . . . there." He slid one hand down from breast to belly, settling the heat of his palm between her thighs.

  Crushing his hand to her, Callie stared into the mirror, to the flush-faced, disheveled woman who was her and yet very much a stranger, and asked, "And if I said I didn't care?"

  "You may not care at this moment, but I think you'd care very much tomorrow and the next day and all the days after." He pressed a kiss to the side of her neck and let her go.

  The sudden absence of those arms holding her must be among the loneliest feelings in the world. To go ten years without being touched was to know want of the silent, suffering sort, but to have known a man's touch, Hadrian's touch, and then have it suddenly withdrawn was nothing short of torture. Even if he was acting for her good, his withdrawal released all the old insecurities. What would a man like Hadrian St. Claire possibly want with her? She was past her prime, on the shelf, a dried-up spinster. The kissing, the fondling he'd done out of pity and, she suspected, convenience--whatever animal instinct the confrontation on the street had aroused in him had demanded satisfaction, and she'd happened to be the only willing female at hand.

  She turned away from the mirror, fumbling with her buttons. "You're quite right." She struggled to push the words past the knot of hurt blocking the back of her throat. "You'd best take me away from here. Take me home now." Home. Sitting in the worn wing chair in his flat later that night nursing swollen knuckles and a glass of gin, Hadrian asked himself how what had started out as a bad day could have ended so very much worse. The answer was to be found in his poor judgment but then that was hardly new. Hauling Callie off to Bow had set the wheels of disaster in motion. What business was it of his whether or not she understood how the proverbial "other half" lived? Yet if he were going to be honest with himself, his motive in taking her there had been more than didactic. Short of confessing his true name and past, it had been his way of doing just that. When Polly had called out his true name in the market, a part of him had felt almost, well, relieved.

  As it was, the day's events had worked out in his favor, or at least they could have had he pressed his advantage. He'd had a camera with him, after all. Though only a portable, he could have used it to capture any number of damning images including the piece de resistance, a photograph of Callie being hauled off to jail. Instead he hadn't taken so much as a single shot, whisking her away from harm instead.

  Afterward, when they'd paused in the alley to catch their breath, taking her in his arms to comfort her had seemed the most natural thing in the world. Like breathing, he hadn't given it so much as a second's thought. All he could seem to do was to fall into the welcoming sweetness that was Callie.

  Again at Sally's, he'd let yet another golden opportunity slip away. Given the seediness of the setting, even a grainy photograph of Callie in partial disarray would have sufficed to satisfy Dandridge, ending the game in Hadrian's favor then and there. But when he'd reached for her with a mind to tumbling her back on the bed, he hadn't been playing the game, not in earnest. He hadn't been playing at all.

  He glanced over to the table where the case she'd given him earlier set untouched and knocked back the rest of his gin. Ordinarily self-examination was something he avoided like the proverbial plague but now he was aware of a deeply profound discontent, a roiling restlessness. Whoever Hadrian St. Claire was, he didn't much like him. He didn't like him at all.

  And owing to his behavior, in all probability Callie no longer liked him, either. On the carriage ride to her aunt's house in Half Moon Street, she'd kept her gaze trained on the tightly folded hands in her lap or the dark streets visible though the hansom window--anywhere but on him. He'd hurt her feelings and he felt horrible about it and yet wasn't hurting her, vanquishing her, precisely what he'd set out to do?

  There was no getting around it--the woman was working her way under his skin. Like the sliver of lens glass lodged in his palm, the only remedy was excision. He would cut Callie out of his heart. It was the only way, the only chance, for either of them.

  CHAPTER NINE

  "We do not remember days; we remember moments."

  --Anonymous

  Harry lay on his stomach, breeches yanked down to his ankles and head twisted at an odd angle. The counterpane smelled musty; it was made of some sort of shiny, satiny stuff patterned with clusters of roses and a trelliswork of ivy. He traced the raised needlework with one finger, connecting the leaves and branches with the odd stain, making a game of it in his mind.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his mother standing by the scarred nightstand, tears tracking her cheeks. "Here, this'll make it go easier." She handed a cobalt-colored glass jar to the man and turned to go.

  Eyes squeezed closed, Harry listened to her retreating footfalls. The bedroom door closed softly, but he felt the vibration of it, the finality, all the way inside his chest.

  The bed dipped, and a hard knee shoved between
his legs. He tried to rear up but he was pinned, as helpless as a wild animal caught in a hunter's snare. Burying his face in the pillow, he gritted his teeth. "You can't make me like it."

  Ugly laughter greeted that statement, and then the cold, wet smear of grease slathered fingers between his buttocks. "My dear boy, I don't give a tinker's damn if you like it or not. But if you fight me, it'll go hard with you and that slut of a mother of yours. Now be a good lad, and it'll be over soon enough."

  Be a good lad, a good lad, a good lad. . .

  Blunt pressure and then a sudden knife-sharp pain seared through him, threatening to rent him in two. He squeezed his hands into fists until the nails drew fresh blood from his palms, bit down on his bottom lip until he tasted the metal of blood there too. Anything, anything, to keep from crying out.

  A big hairy hand reached around the front of him, fondling his balls. As if it had a mind of its own, his cock stiffened. In his ear, hot breath hissed, "You said I couldn't make you like it only I think you do like it, my little whore."

  My little whore, whore, whore . . .

  Another few blunt, burning thrusts, a hoarse shout of triumph and release, and then it was over. The mattress dipped then steadied as the man climbed off him. Harry curled onto his side, cool air brushing his backside. Hot cheek pressed to the pillow, he listened to the sounds of clothing being adjusted, a satisfied grunt, and then footfalls heading back to the bed. He tensed, waiting. Please, God, no more.

  Paper, a five-pound note, floated down to the vacant patch of pillow by his head. "Next time show a bit more enthusiasm, and I'll make it ten."

  Next time, next time, next time . . .

  He waited until the door closed, then stuffed the money beneath the pillow and rolled onto his back. Beyond that, he couldn't muster the energy to move. How long he lay staring up at the ceiling he couldn't have said. It might have just as easily been hours as minutes, but at some point a soft knock sounded outside the door.