by Edie Harris
Be grateful to me, he’d implored her that morning, and she couldn’t lie to herself—she was grateful. Her awareness of her body had grown apace with the inherent danger of their liaison, but gratitude was a tricky emotion, one that could encourage a woman to be unwise and forever alter the course of her life. And all because, for a few stolen hours, a handsome man had made her feel special.
Her current predicament was her own fault. Divested of her virginity, disillusioned by and engaged to a French spy, and grappling with the confusion, dismay and elation fighting for purchase within her. She wanted to wallow, to call herself a fool for ever thinking she deserved better, but there was no point to it. She would make the best of the situation and move forward.
She trailed lazy fingertips over the back of one broad shoulder, noting the incremental warming of his flesh as he drifted closer to slumber. All tension had leached from his large form as soon as she’d laid a hand on him again, and she smiled to herself in the darkness of his cabin. Something primal in him recognized the latent power in her and responded to it, calming at her gentle urging.
How he must hate me for that.
His breathing had slowed to match the creaking of the ship when she noticed the anomaly to his skin. Faint raised scars striped him from the middle of his back to the base of his spine. Welts, she realized, thin welts that had healed long ago but left him permanently marked.
“What happened t-to you?” she whispered, not expecting him to answer.
So it startled her when he did. “I was caned with a walking stick.” There was nothing but weariness in his gravelly voice. “Repeatedly.”
“B-by your father?”
“By the army captain I served under during the war.”
She traced the lowest welt, the one spanning from the narrowest part of his waist across the small of his back. “Why?”
“Because he could. Because no one stopped him.” He shifted until his hip rested against hers. “He used to pet the marks, as you do now.”
A chill gathered at her nape, and her hand froze. She understood but she didn’t, and the longer she thought about it, the uglier that understanding became. “You mean—”
“He had me serve him in many ways. For none was I willing.”
A lump formed in her throat, but she couldn’t swallow around it. She couldn’t speak.
Gaspard sighed. His face was barely visible in the shadow-strewn blackness, but though he’d tilted his chin in her direction, she sensed his eyes were closed, as though he couldn’t bear to look at her. “I lied about my name and—”
“You lied about your n-name?” Oh, no. No, no, no. Not more lies. “B-but you’re…Gaspard.”
A pause, then a whisper. “Luc-Gaspard Tannet. That is the name I was born with.”
Luc-Gaspard Tannet. Not Gaspard Toussaint. “S-so I am engaged to Luc-Gaspard T-Tannet.”
He pressed his face into the pillow before mumbling, “Non. When I signed this name over to the army, it became mine, in every way that counted.”
She said nothing, because there was nothing to say.
He turned his face toward her, voice quiet. “I lied about my age too, and joined the army as a foot soldier—I was sixteen, and small. Thin. But they took me and put me under the command of le capitaine, Marcel de Courreaux, and made me his steward. I do not think they knew what would happen, but it does not matter. If it were not me, it would have been some other boy.”
“Why did you join the army s-so young?”
He shrugged, the tangled sheets beneath him shifting with the movement. “I was the second son of a blacksmith, one of seven children. I would eat better as a soldier.”
“A b-blacksmith?” Smoke in the air, iron in his scent…
“Ah, I did not tell you this? My title is a bribe.”
“I don’t understand.”
It seemed as though he wouldn’t speak again, willing him to talk as she sat next to him in the darkness but secretly hoping he would stay silent. Hearing about his past hurt her, and she could only imagine what sort of torment he suffered in the retelling of it.
Finally he spoke, his words cold and matter-of-fact. “For three years, I was beaten and raped and forced to serve the captain. I was no better than a dog, and I tried to escape. Each time he chased me. Caught me. Used me harder and threatened me with hanging for…for—” He growled and nudged her, her cue to help him find the English word that evaded him.
She wracked her brain, desperately fending off the reality of his confession as she searched her vocabulary. “D-desertion?”
“Oui. Desertion. I did not want to die—though I do not know why I wanted to keep living—so I stayed.”
His hip pressed more firmly against hers. She responded by leaning closer, letting her hand resume its trek up and down the length of his spine as she carefully avoided spending too much time over the caning scars.
“But I grew.” There was malicious pleasure in his rasping voice. “I turned twenty, and I was bigger, stronger. Le capitaine was nervous around me. He stopped coming to me in the night.” He paused, and Claudia tried, unsuccessfully, to draw air into her seized lungs. “Then I saw him leave the tent of a young soldier, one who looked more like a boy than I did, and I knew Courreaux was hurting someone again, as with me. So I took him to the edge of camp and strung him up by his legs from a tree. And I beat him with his cane until he died.”
It was as if her stomach had caved in on itself, empty and clenching and torn apart with claws and teeth. She couldn’t have spoken, even if he demanded it of her.
“That was the day I met Sabien.” Gaspard’s tone was thoughtful. “He was riding into camp, an officer in shiny boots. He saw what I had done.”
“And what did he do?”
“He cut Courreaux down with one swing of his sword.” Gaspard made a noise she thought was meant to be a laugh. “He helped me bury the body. He watched me wash blood from my face and hands, and we walked into the camp together, leading his horse. He did not say a single word.”
The recounting of Sabien’s loyalty staggered her. They’d been strangers, and Sabien could have easily had Gaspard hanged for murder, but the lieutenant had chosen instead to keep a tortured soldier’s secrets. Sabien was a good man—the best of men, perhaps.
A shame that Claudia didn’t want the best.
Gaspard’s hand settled heavily on her thigh. No pressure, no massage—just contact, tired and needy. “Sabien believed it was jealousy. Why I killed the captain. Those who suspected thought the same.”
“B-because of the other boy.” She laid her free hand over the top of his, feeling the massive web of scars stretching taut across the bone-and-tendon puzzle of the back of his hand. She swallowed past the lump of dread in her throat. “These s-s-scars.” She tapped a fingertip against his knuckles. “These are not from a c-cane.”
“Might I not keep one secret for myself tonight, chaton?”
The strain in his tone softened the reprimand, but it quieted her nonetheless. “Of c-course you may.” She slid her hand to his nape, playing lightly with the damp ends of his thick hair.
Silence, and then, “Hot wire.”
“The c-captain did this?”
Gaspard’s resigned sigh echoed on the walls of the cramped cabin. “I was forced to my hands and knees, and hot wire was staked to the ground to stretch over the backs of my hands. It was meant to keep me from running away while he raped me.”
And yet those scars said Gaspard had attempted escape. Repeatedly.
Oh, God, she was going to cry.
No, no, she couldn’t cry. Could. Not. He would think she pitied him, but pity was the last emotion she felt in regards to her fiancé.
She respected him, even though he’d used her. She admired his strength, his resilience. Somehow, born of his terrible experiences, the man lying prone on the bunk before her was an aristocrat and a spy, and he’d capitalized on the ignorant expectations of others in order to become both. Gaspard had taken hi
s ill-used body, now so big and strong, and turned his victimization into his stock-in-trade.
A stock-in-trade that likely had him kneeling behind strange men, cold and determined as his thick cock did…whatever it would do to another male. She could hear the phantom, panting breaths of his lovers—no, his marks—as they whined in the wake of oncoming ecstasy.
Claudia hated her imagination.
Her fingers clenched in his hair before she could school herself not to react, and hoped he hadn’t noticed, teetering on the edge of sleep as he was.
Claudia, on the other hand, remained at the mercy of her whirling mind and the excruciating inner turmoil his confessions had evoked within her. She was torn, her anger with him over his deceit still a living thing beating against the cage of her ribs, but she wanted him too. More than ever, she wanted this violent man. This tortured man.
This young man.
A murderer at age twenty.
“How old are you?” He’d seemed so worldly from the moment they met, and his face, roughly handsome and sharply planed, could have spanned anywhere from his early twenties to his later thirties.
“Six-and-twenty, come May.”
And come June, Claudia would turn one-and-twenty. A scant five years separated them, yet he had lived so much more, and so much harder, than she. She was thankful and resentful in the same breath, because it had never been so apparent just how little they had in common as it was in the darkness of this tiny cabin.
What would happen when they reached London? They shared no interests outside the bedroom, and barely spoke the same language, with her stuttering and his less-than-perfect English. His costuming was a mask meant to fool a blind public, worn by the blacksmith’s son to keep the spy alive and well, but perhaps he planned to shed his years of cover when he set foot upon the safer shores of her country.
He was a spy, and Claudia knew enough of spies to anticipate the worst. How easy it would be for him to sneak away from her in the night, seeking out excitement and pleasures and God only knew what until, eventually, he never bothered to creep back home come morning light. Gaspard was a man drawn to intrigue and adventure, and she…
Well. She was drawn to him. That was hardly enough upon which to base a lifetime together.
A snore interrupted her morose thoughts. He’d fallen asleep, thank goodness. She wished she could smile down at him, wished the betrayal with which he had blistered her heart would transform into the tender hope she’d felt for their future in the moments after he’d stolen her from Évoque, before he’d confessed his terrible lie.
Yet she couldn’t bring herself to leave his side. She couldn’t even lift her hands long enough to break contact with him, so she eased down next to him, ignoring the uncomfortable compression of her lungs beneath her stays. His arm immediately banded around her, tugging her into him as he shifted his overheated body to hold her.
She didn’t protest when he squeezed her until she could barely breathe. She didn’t do anything but lay her hands to his bare chest, letting the light dusting of hair over his hot skin gently abrade her palms. And when he nuzzled his face into her loosened braid, she exhaled against his neck, closed her eyes and sleep finally came for her too.
Chapter Fourteen
21 February 1820, London, England
Something was wrong with Claudia, and if Gaspard didn’t figure out what it was soon, he would take the knife hidden as usual up his coat sleeve and start stabbing members of the British ton, until they told him exactly why his fiancée looked so miserable.
Because she was miserable. She stood to the side of the opulent ballroom in her family’s Mayfair mansion, magnificent in royal-blue silk that made her creamy skin look like something from a confectioner’s shop. But her usual blush was missing, and her lips were pressed into a tight line that leached them of rosy color. She was beyond lovely but unhappy, and it was obvious she wished to be anywhere but where she was.
Where she was, he thought ruefully, was at their engagement ball, his and hers. Everything had been rushed, due to their hurried return from Paris, but the Pascales seemed to want them wed as quickly as Gaspard himself did, though for far different reasons.
Auguste and Phoebe wanted the daughter they were ashamed of off their hands for good…whereas he just wanted his hands all over their shameless daughter, every minute of every day.
He wasn’t touching her now. He wasn’t even standing near her. It had surprised him, how many Parisians were in attendance. He’d thought he would never again be surrounded by so many familiar faces, but there they were. Staring, assessing. Murmuring wonderingly behind gloved hands and snapping fans. They watched him as they might a zoological oddity, waiting for him to roar and charge and devour them all.
The only spectator he wanted to devour was Claudia, and she refused to so much as glance in his direction. He scowled. In the days following their arrival in London, Gaspard had barely had a moment to spend with her, and he had sinking suspicion that he’d revealed too much of himself during that torturous boat crossing. Her distant behavior tonight only worried him more.
Tolerating that distance felt like a rotten tooth demanding to be yanked from aching gums. In four days’ time, they would marry—and he would not allow her to renege on their engagement. She would finally belong to him, until death did they part, unable to ignore him as she currently did. She was his, as she had been since the closet, and Max’s ballroom, and Évoque’s mansion.
His need to possess every inch of her body and every shadow in her soul would likely terrify him if he wasn’t so hell-bent on owning her.
He needed to own her. He needed one person in this ugly world to be his, solely and unalterably, and if he had that…then maybe he could determine who he’d be now that he wasn’t a soldier or a whore, or even an active spy, if Évoque planned to honor their sordid agreement.
His mind blanked as Sabien approached Claudia where she stood on the ballroom’s edge. Sabien bowed, and the expression on her face as she accepted his proffered hand… Gaspard’s stomach twisted, but he didn’t stride forward to stop them from dancing together.
She’d told him she didn’t dance often. He wouldn’t deprive her, even though he seethed inside. This possessiveness was a wretched thing, and God, he hoped it dissipated with time, because he was blisteringly aware of the eyes upon him, and upon his fiancée.
They wanted to know, he realized. They all wanted to know if this was the sort of marriage Gaspard and Claudia would lead—wherein they had their…individual pursuits, he as a known buggerer and she as an innocent English rose. The outside world would never believe there lived an attraction between Claudia and himself, and because of his past, they could never prove that world wrong.
Claudia and Sabien made a striking pair, with her darker coloring and his fair male beauty, like something out of a children’s fable. It poked at Gaspard, made him want to shift and stir and transform into the beast he knew himself to be on the inside. But he couldn’t react. To react was to give away everything he’d striven to conceal in one fell swoop. If they suddenly knew what a liar he’d been, how he’d conned them into so many instances of trust—and then betrayed those confidences—the world would turn on him. His every action dissected, his every acquaintanceship investigated. His true association with Sabien and Max and Faron would be revealed if he wasn’t careful, and he found he couldn’t put them in peril, even though he’d continually decried emotional attachment to his fellow spies.
The consequences they’d suffer would be…heavy.
Not to mention the consequences to Claudia. He stared out at the dance floor, watching her waltz gracefully in the arms of his friend. She was an excellent dancer, he discovered, a small pang of something that felt like remorse rattling beneath his breastbone.
He should’ve asked her to dance. It was his duty as her fiancé to twirl her around ballrooms, if that’s what she wanted to do. She didn’t have to be a wallflower anymore—he was going to make her a damn co
untess.
But if he were found out, she wouldn’t get to stay a countess. The title would either be revoked or tarnished beyond repair, and she would be an outcast. Regardless of the fact that she vowed not to care for society, there was more to being an outcast than simply not being invited to the right parties. Her family, awful as they were, would cut her publicly, and no doubt cut her off financially. Friendships would disappear, and she’d be harassed on the street, making it unsafe for her to leave her home. And eventually, when he was hanged or guillotined or brought before the firing squad for his crimes, she’d be made a widow, and by that time utterly alone.
Dread filled him, quashing the jealousy at witnessing Sabien hold Claudia so close. There would be no quiet existence for Gaspard and Claudia, no out-of-the-way life for them to share in anonymity. This was the price he paid for his past, and the deal he’d made with Évoque. He wouldn’t disappear. He’d attend the soirées, wear the fine clothing suited to his public persona and be noticed. Dismissed as the quasi-outcast he was but always, always noticed.
He now understood why she appeared so miserable. She had reached the same conclusion as he: Gaspard would forever be the molly comte…and because of that, Claudia would forever be an object of pity and ridicule.
Because of him.
His heart seized as he stared at her, the waltz coming to an end. By marrying him, Claudia was consigned to a life of constant public humiliation. No matter what he did after the vows were spoken, she would suffer. Much as she suffered now.
He’d never hated himself as much as he did in this moment. Never.
Sabien bowed over Claudia’s hand, and Gaspard watched as she was led over to him. “You’re a lucky man,” Sabien said, without a trace of irony.
“I know.” And he did. Gaspard took Claudia’s hand and tucked it into his arm, ignoring the look of surprise on her face at the lieutenant’s words. He didn’t want to know if those words made her happy or angry. He didn’t want to know if just hearing that compliment from a man she’d once intended to wed, coupled with her epiphany about their future together, was enough to make her cry off, which he couldn’t allow to happen.