Fool Me Twice

by Meredith Duran

  He gave her a faint, mocking smile. “And then? Did my chivalry win you over?”

  What could she say that he would believe—or that she would wish to admit? Against all reason, I grew to . . . care for you.

  He would laugh his head off. Or worse, take it for another lie, and shove her from the coach.

  “You stole from me,” he continued, his gaze level and unblinking. “Lied to me, defrauded me, pried through my possessions, which you then used to blackmail a peer of the realm. Would you not say this puts me in a difficult position?”

  A strange prickling started behind her eyes. Goodness, was she going to cry? How mortifying. She put a hand over her face, hoping he would think it was simply the pain in her cheek that troubled her. “If you hand me over to him now . . .”

  He made a contemptuous noise. “If I’d wished to do that, I’d have spared my shoes the prison mold. Tell me: why did you blackmail him?”

  She dropped her hand. Let him look at her. Let him see she spoke the truth. “I wanted him to leave me alone. He has harassed me, hunted me, for seven years now. Once he hired—he hired an entire team of private investigators.” They had nearly caught her, too. She’d been three years into her first position, with the banker’s widow in Brighton. That had been the first time she’d fled in the night.

  “Why? What does he want of you?”

  “I have no idea! His obsession has never made sense. If I knew, I promise, I would tell you.”

  “Then tell me this.” He settled back, bracing one elbow against the back of the seat, making himself comfortable. “Who is he to you?”

  She bit her lip. They were drawing near the heart of a secret she had never spoken to anyone. “You must understand, the last time his man caught up with me, he . . . tried to choke me to death.”

  His face darkened. “But you escaped.”

  “Yes. I was lucky; I knew nobody here. I’d just arrived in London.” She had waited four days for Bertram to come to Kent for her mother’s funeral. Finally there had been no choice but to go forward without him. All during her mother’s long illness, she’d planned ahead: found the typing school, written for admission. Bertram had forbidden it, but she did not care. She was not her mother. Her life would not be shaped by his whims. The funeral concluded, she’d gone from the churchyard directly to the railway station.

  On her arrival in London, Moore had been waiting on the platform. His Lordship wishes me to see you safely settled. And then, that ride to the hotel, which had transpired not to be a hotel at all . . .

  “He tossed me out of the coach and left me for dead,” she said. “Seven years ago, now. That was the beginning of it.”

  Marwick studied her, his vivid eyes unreadable. “And you truly have no idea why he pursues you.”

  “No.”

  “I told you not to lie.”

  She shrank back against the window. “I don’t . . .”

  “He’s your father. A small detail you’ve omitted.”

  Her breath stopped. He knew?

  “The resemblance is clear,” he said. “Once I looked for it.”

  God help her. She pressed her forehead to the glass and closed her eyes. “I would rather resemble the devil. Perhaps they’re one and the same.”

  “Tell me. What is your real name?”

  “Holladay.” She whispered it. “It was my mother’s name.”

  “The mother from East Kent.”

  It surprised her that he remembered. She nodded.

  “Olivia Holladay, whose mother hails from East Kent.”

  He sounded as though he didn’t believe her. “Yes!”

  “Are you certain?” His voice was cruel. “Are there any other names you’d care to share with me?”

  She tried for an equally cutting tone, one that would slice through the knot in her throat. “I hadn’t imagined you the kind that enjoys kicking a dog when it’s down. How easy.”

  For a moment, he did not speak. And then he said, “Look at me.”

  On a deep breath, she opened her eyes. A single tear spilled. He reached out, grim faced, to wipe it away with his thumb. “You will be honest with me.” His voice carried no inflection. “You’re no dog. You’re hardly beaten.”

  His words, in some twisted way, were almost kind. But his touch was not. He stroked her cheek again, roughly, brutally, as though that tear had been an offense against him. “We have a common enemy,” he said. “You were right about that. And I do mean to destroy him.” He paused, his thumb digging like iron into the top of her unbruised cheek. “But please note: I have not yet decided what to do with you.”

  * * *

  He watched himself touch her. It seemed impossible that her skin was so soft when the mettle beneath it was steel. The disjuncture angered him. It seemed proof that deception was at her very core, bred into her, as much a part of her as her eyes or her hair.

  Why did she weep now? It seemed baffling, infuriating, that she wept here, in his coach, though she hadn’t in the prison. As though he were the villain.

  He let go of her. The coach was slowing as they pulled into Brook Street. He kept a flat here—once used by his brother, now empty. It was well suited to his purposes.

  She sat quietly beside him. If she still wept, she did it soundlessly. He would not look at her to check. She had a swollen cheek; that was all. It would heal.

  “So you hate me now,” she said quietly. “How convenient for you. As though everything I did for you no longer counts, because I deceived you.”

  He clenched his teeth. He had cause for hate. In his old life, he would never have forgiven her for her crime; his pride alone would have forbidden it.

  But it was not pride that galled him now. It was her temerity. Her idiocy staggered him. Who was she? A lone woman. No family to protect her, to save her when she slipped. She was profoundly alone. And yet, despite the great risk to herself, the lack of any net to catch her, she had acted. What if he were another man? Any other man. A man whose pride had not been shattered so violently by his late wife that he no longer cared to guard it. If he were any other man, she would still be in Newgate. How much she had dared, with so very little by way of defense. That was what galled him.

  “Fair or not,” he said flatly, “your fate is in my hands now. For as you saw today, you are powerless. And I am not.” Compared to her, his power was limitless. Did she not see that? How had she dared to go against him?

  “That must be pleasant.” Her voice was bitter.

  The coach stopped. “Come.” He opened the door and stepped out. She could find her own way onto the pavement.

  But when she stumbled on the step, he cursed and took her by the forearms, lifting her safely to the ground.

  She did not thank him, which was wise of her. The feel of her burned his palms. She should not feel so soft. She should feel like iron. He remembered the expression she had shown him in the garden, her face as he’d walked toward her . . .

  He released her. “Follow me,” he bit out. He didn’t want to look at her.

  * * *

  Marwick led her through a discreet door set into a brick building not two hundred yards from Claridge’s Hotel. Wasn’t that where his wife had died? Olivia vaguely remembered Elizabeth mentioning it, having heard it from Lord Michael.

  At the top of a narrow, creaking staircase, she stood aside so the duke could unlock a door. It opened into a simple bachelor’s apartment, two rooms sparsely furnished. The front room, which was larger, held a slim bed, one chair, a desk. The dressing table was covered in a thin film of dust. Nobody had lived here in some time.

  Of course, Marwick probably had keys to any number of rooms across town. He owned a good portion of the city; she had seen the rental incomes in his ledgers.

  “Sit,” he said.

  Since he stood in front of the single chair, she took the bed. Her head pounded. Crying had not helped. Why had she cried? She wanted to kick herself. She was not weak.

  His boots thumped hollowly
against the floorboards as he walked to the window and latched the shutters. The room grew abruptly darker.

  “Oh, look,” she said tiredly. “You’re returning to old form.”

  “Fewer jokes would serve you better.” His boots thumped as he returned to sit across from her. “So tell me. In my place, how would you deal with this betrayal?”

  Perhaps he meant to kill her.

  No. She did not believe that. But the idea triggered an icy thought: perhaps he was reverting. He had been betrayed before, and it had made him deranged, for a time. Now, in his view, history was repeating itself. What cause had she to hope for mercy?

  He had not saved her, after all. He had simply reserved her punishment for himself.

  Bile burned her throat. She pressed her hand over her mouth, suddenly fearful that she would be sick.

  “There’s a chamber pot by your foot,” he said. “Take care with your aim.”

  She lunged for it. The violence of her illness left her weak and clammy. A washbasin stood in the nearby corner; she rinsed out her mouth and then sat back on the bed, breathing hard.

  He came forward, his features clarifying. When he reached for her face she jerked her head away, but he would not brook refusal. He gripped her jaw, pulling it around. They stared at each other.

  “Did you strike your head somehow?” He sounded bored. “Your pupils look even enough to me.”

  She was glad for his hostility. It was simpler this way. If the past did not matter—if he meant to forget all of it—then she could forget, too. She needn’t feel any guilt for what she’d done. “I’m fine,” she said. “Let go of me.”

  His hand dropped. He stood staring down at her. “I am going to give you a very simple choice.”

  “How good to know I’ll have one.”

  “Oh, you’ve already had choices. You could have chosen to stay in Newgate, for instance. Those documents were forgeries. You would have been called to trial for creating them.”

  She blinked. “What? Forgeries? You forged them?”

  His smile was thin as he took his seat again. “Bertram did—in collusion with my late wife. When, if, I ever used them, I was to be made a public fool.”

  She pondered this for a moment. “So then I saved you from that as well.”

  He leaned forward onto his elbows, nostrils flaring. “You paint a very rosy picture of yourself, don’t you?”

  “And you paint a very black one.”

  His eyes narrowed. “No matter. You will take the blame for them. You’ll be tried for fraud, forgery, and extortion. And I doubt the courts will treat you as kindly as they would have done me. That is one choice for you.”

  He was trying to terrify her, and doing a very good job of it. She reminded herself desperately that his threats had always outstripped his actions. “And the other choice?”

  “Obedience.” The word cracked like a whip. “Bertram has an interest in you. That makes you valuable to me.”

  She exhaled. “You know that’s no choice at all.”

  He crossed his legs and drummed his fingers atop his thigh. “Where is your fine grasp of precision, Miss Holladay? It is a choice. It simply isn’t one you like.”

  He was punishing her. It was, from one view, only what she deserved; from another, he was even being generous. He could have left her to rot in Newgate.

  But these were both views from his eyes. She was done trying to see his perspective. “What do you mean by obedience?” she asked. “What will you require of me?”

  His smile mocked her. “Whatever the circumstances demand.”

  She hesitated. “The circumstances of your revenge against Bertram, you mean.”

  He followed her meaning. He took a very thorough, insulting survey of her body, head to toe. “What a deviant it would make me,” he said, “to demand that from you. Why, one might be forced to conclude that I had a particular taste for treacherous women.” He gave her a half smile. “It is possible.”

  She gritted her teeth. On one thing, they would be clear. “I am nothing like your wife. I did not fool you for my pleasure. It had nothing to do with you, don’t you see that? Or are you too pigheaded and vain?”

  “So you continue to protest. Very well.” He reached into his jacket and extracted a pocket watch that he laid beside him. “You have five minutes to tell your story. If I am satisfied, we will discuss the specific nature of my offer. And if I am not . . .” He made a soft click of his tongue, a preemptive chide. “The authorities don’t know the half of what you’ve done. In addition to forgery and extortion, there is also the matter of your theft from me.”

  She stared at him. He had not managed to intimidate her when she’d been his servant. Why permit him to do so now? Her pride demanded better of her. “Not only that, Your Grace. You mustn’t forget my theft from your brother’s wife. I was her secretary—did you know that? All those letters, I stole from her. Indeed, in the interest of good relations, you should give her a chance to convict me, too. And perhaps Lady Ripton?” She would make sure he never blamed Amanda. “For I forged a reference from her. Yes, why not contact her as well?”

  His pause suggested surprise. She took a ridiculous pleasure in it.

  But then, with a shrug, he said, “Good. A piece of honesty; you are learning. Well, do begin your tale, Miss Holladay. The clock ticks.”

  And he settled back, lacing his hands over his belly, looking for all the world like a very skeptical critic prepared for a second-rate show.

  * * *

  Five minutes to tell him everything. The challenge focused her—and revealed to her, with miserable clarity, how neatly her entire life might fit into a cliché: the cliché of the bastard child.

  “Bertram met my mother when she was very young,” she began. “She was only sixteen when I was born. He installed her in a village called Allen’s End—that is where he kept her. Us, I mean. He has property very near there, but the cottage was rented from a local family.”

  He remained silent, watching her. The light slipping through the shutters laid bars of shadow across his face, through which his eyes glittered.

  He was not going to encourage her. Very well. “He and my mother were very happy when I was young.” She hesitated. “I was, too, I suppose.” The village lay on a tributary of the River Medway. With an apple tree to climb, a garden in which to hide, and the entire countryside to explore, Allen’s End had seemed a paradise to her. It had been her mother who felt the village’s scorn most keenly.

  “He loved her,” she said. “He did, in those early years. And he must have been kind to me, for I have . . . dim memories, very dim, of calling him Papa. Being dandled on his knee.” She felt her mouth twist out of her control.

  “What changed?” He spoke softly; she barely heard him. She did not like to think of Allen’s End anymore. The villagers had been kind to her as a child, but as Olivia had matured, they had begun to treat her with the same contempt they showed Mama. Like mother, like daughter.

  How curious then to realize that her imaginary village, the place she would belong, looked so much like the place she had been desperate to leave.

  She frowned into her lap. “What changed? He married, of course. That American woman.”

  “The heiress to the Baring fortune.”

  She nodded. “I remember his first visit, afterward. I knew something important had happened, for he brought me a present—not books or a new dress, nothing so ordinary, but a doll, a porcelain doll from Paris, the most splendid doll you could imagine. She had real hair, the very same shade as mine . . .”

  She had always loathed the color of her hair. Some of the village children had called her Ginger-girl, which they had not meant as a compliment. But when she’d been little, Bertram had called her hair beautiful. The rarest and loveliest shade.

  She shook her head. Bah. “The doll wore a miniature replica of a Worth gown, made by Worth himself. I can’t imagine how much it cost.” She shrugged. “I played with it for a few days. I ador
ed it. And then I built up my courage and smashed it.”

  * * *

  Her wistful expression did something strange to Alastair’s chest. It contrasted so shockingly to the hardened courage she’d been attempting to embody before. “You smashed it?”

  Her smile was thin. “I was only seven, but I knew a bribe when I saw one.”

  He had an unwilling vision of her, freckled, knobby-kneed, her thin face terribly serious as she laid the doll she loved into the dirt and lifted a rock. “You must have had cause, then.”

  “Well. By that time . . .” She sighed. He watched her closely. A concussion would make her sleepy. He waited, willing her not to yawn.

  When she drew herself up again, he relaxed. Curtly she said, “She must have seen the notice of his marriage in the newspapers. From the very moment he arrived, as soon as he’d given me the doll, they began to quarrel. He left again to the train station that same night—I was so confused; he always stayed for a week at the least, and I’d been . . .” She grimaced. “Looking forward to it. But he was gone; and the next morning, Mama took me and left, too.”

  “Because he had married someone else.”

  She shook her head. “It makes no sense, I know. He stood to inherit a barony. She was a farmer’s daughter. He couldn’t marry her.”

  But there was something brittle and bleak in her words that he did not like. “Love has made mésalliances for greater men than he.”

  She hesitated, head tilting. “Did you love your wife, then?”

  He took a long breath. “You must have a death wish. Is that it? How amusing.”

  Their eyes locked. In the dim light, her skin looked so flawless that the effect was uncanny. She seemed made of porcelain, not flesh; too delicate, too breakable, the smattering of freckles only for verisimilitude. She must look very much like the doll she had smashed.

  The notion made him strangely uneasy. He wondered if she had seen the resemblance. If she had felt, for a moment, as if she were smashing herself.

  No child should have recognized a gift for a bribe. But he knew how wise children could become—his own parents had taught him such lessons, too.

  “I think you did love her,” she said softly. “I think you would have answered the question very cuttingly, if you felt comfortable with your reply.”