“Esther—”
She shook her head when he stepped toward her. “We really are incompatible. I’d thought perhaps our differences would prove an interesting challenge, but clearly there isn’t enough understanding between us to bridge the gap—”
“Esther. Stop. Good God.” He reached for her, but she dodged away.
“No, there’s no point in—” She sidestepped him again, narrowly avoiding his grasp. “You’ll never want…”
“Come here, damn it.” He lunged and caught her around the waist. A choppy laugh broke from his throat.
He was amused? She was a hair’s breadth from tears and he was laughing? She struggled in his implacable hold. “Why are you laughing?”
“Because you’re bloody hard to catch, for one thing.” Adjusting his grip, he pulled her even closer. “Esther, listen to me. It’s only an argument. We’ve had them before. There’s no—”
“Of course we have.” She ceased her attempts to break free but remained rigid in his arms. “But this is different.”
“Why is it different?”
“Because it’s important!”
Because I am afraid.
God, she was positively drowning in fear. She was scared she’d already gone over the edge of that cliff. She was afraid she’d jumped over with a man who thought she was someone else. She was worried that one day she would look at Samuel and find him staring at her just as he had in the parlor, his steely gray eyes brimming with anger and contempt. That would break her heart as nothing else ever had or ever could.
All humor fled from Samuel’s face. “Sweetheart,” he said softly, and his hand came up to gently cup the side of her jaw. “It’s important to me as well.”
“But you aren’t listening. You don’t understand.”
“I’m trying to,” he said carefully. “You believe we don’t suit because I want a biddable woman and you are, most assuredly, not biddable. Do I have it right?”
“That is part of it,” she said and watched him warily. “You were of a similar mind yesterday, and again this morning.” He hadn’t been willing to consider even a friendship with her.
A furrow formed across his brow as he considered her words. “I was angry,” he replied after a time. “I resented being reminded of a time when I felt helpless and unnecessary.”
Reminded…? Oh, God, of course. His mother. Another wave of remorse washed over her. She should have thought of that. She should have taken better care. “I’m sorry. I—”
“No more apologies,” he cut in and bent his head to press a kiss to her brow before brushing his thumb along the edge of her cheekbone. “As for the rest—you’re wrong.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I don’t want a biddable woman, Esther. I want you.”
“No, you don’t. You want—”
“Stop presuming to tell me what I want,” he ordered with a hint of impatience. “I’m not a child to be told what’s best for me any more than you are.”
“I’m not…” She wasn’t getting through to him. “Why won’t you open your mother’s letters?” she tried instead.
He drew back in surprise. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I think it’s because you’re afraid she might be sorry,” she pressed. “And you’d never be able to reconcile that with the woman who betrayed you all those years ago. I think, with you, it must be one or the other.”
“One or other what?”
“One sort of person. Good or bad. Honest or a liar. Trustworthy or untrustworthy. Your world is so black-and-white.” And she was decidedly gray.
“My views are slightly more nuanced than that,” he muttered. “You think I should forgive my mother?”
“Not unless that’s what you want. But shouldn’t you make certain she is still a villainess before consigning her to a lifetime of your hatred? Perhaps she is…” She struggled to find the right word. “Imperfect. Perhaps she is imperfect and still worth knowing.”
Hope flickered when he didn’t immediately argue against the idea. “I don’t keep—”
Whatever he’d been about to say was lost when a hesitant knock sounded on the door.
“Come in,” Samuel called out as Esther quickly slipped from his arms and backed away a respectable distance.
Sarah stepped inside, studiously avoiding eye contact with either of them. “Begging your pardon, sir, but this come for you. I was told to bring it to you straightaway.” She handed Samuel a letter and quickly disappeared again.
Esther knew she should be embarrassed to have been caught in a closed bedchamber with Samuel, but she just couldn’t work up the energy for anything more substantial than a resigned sigh.
Samuel read the contents of the note and swore under his breath. “That’s it,” he growled in disgust. “I’m retiring. End of the year.”
“You’re what? Why? What’s happened?”
She reached for the note just as Samuel crumpled it up and shoved it in his pocket. “Our erstwhile lovers were arrested for a four-way brawl on Bond Street.”
“No,” she breathed, fascinated despite herself. “Even the ladies?”
“Evidently,” he muttered. “I have to go.” He reached for her again, catching her chin in his hand and holding her gaze. “I know what I want. You. Only you. Understood?”
Before she could respond, he took her mouth in a brief but hard kiss, then strode to the door.
For a long time after, she stood in the middle of the room staring after him as his words played in her mind over and over again.
I know what I want. You. Only you.
She wanted to believe him. She wanted to go back to envisioning a future with him. And yet she couldn’t shake the fear that someday he would change his mind. That there would be more fights like the one yesterday. They would add up over time, she thought, like letters piling up in a drawer, waiting to remind him of a woman he didn’t much like and would be better off without.
* * *
Samuel eyed the desk drawer containing his mother’s letters in the same manner Sarah had eyed the dead rat at her feet—warily, with no small amount of disgust and perhaps a begrudging sense of pity.
He shouldn’t have kept them. He wasn’t even sure why he had. He certainly wanted to be rid of them now.
Briefly, he considered tossing them out as rubbish. Then he thought about burning them. Finally, he imagined opening the drawer, inviting Goliath into the room, and letting nature take its course.
But even as he sat there in the silent, sleeping house, picturing all the ways he could be rid of the damned letters, he knew, in the end, he would open them.
“Damn it.”
It had been well past midnight when he’d finally been able to come home, and his first impulse upon walking through the front door had been to seek out Esther. He could wake her with a slow kiss, watch her eyes flutter open, her lips curve into a soft, dreamy smile. He ached to hold her, to have her skin under his hands, to feel her body move beneath his own.
He wasn’t sure he’d be welcome.
To his mind, their fight was over. They had reconciled, and it was time to move on. He wasn’t confident she shared his opinion, however. He’d sensed a distance between them even after he’d made it clear he wanted her. He’d sensed it even as he’d kissed her good-bye.
And so tonight, instead of holding a warm and willing Esther in his arms, he was sitting in his study, glowering at his desk.
Your world is so black-and-white.
Esther’s words echoed in his head. It was an odd accusation for her to have made. He could be stubborn in his views, yes. He could be harsh in his opinions. But she knew he was neither narrow-minded nor willfully blind. She had been the one to insist he wasn’t a hard man.
Except that now she appeared to have changed her mind, and he suspec
ted he knew the reason.
As he stared at the desk drawer, he absently rubbed his scar with the back of his hand. Old scars were tricky things. They made themselves known in unpredictable ways…pinching and itching when you least expected.
He was well aware that his need to guard and protect stemmed from his experiences as a child. It was like a pain he couldn’t fully soothe, a nagging itch he couldn’t quite reach. It would always give him trouble.
Esther had her own scars—the work she’d done with her father and the years she’d spent twisting her personality to fit the ideals of the people around her. What was it she had told him earlier? That she had acted out roles to please others, because she didn’t know who she really was, but if people liked her, then surely whoever she was couldn’t be all bad.
He should have paid more attention to that last bit, that quick acknowledgment that she did, in fact, have some opinion on the sort of woman she was.
All bad, he thought. The old Esther. The one who’d been inferior in her own father’s eyes. The one Samuel had called a selfish imbecile only a year ago.
That woman. Christ, he owed her a proper apology for that. Not for the words, but for the damning way he’d said them. With one careless, insulting tone, he’d managed to both shame her for the past and insinuate that no portion of the woman she’d once been was worth preserving. It had been so easy for her to hear in those words an opinion he didn’t share—that for the first twenty-seven years of her life, Esther Walker had been all bad.
Good or bad. Honest or a liar. Black or white.
No wonder she’d changed her mind. No wonder she’d been so insistent that he didn’t understand her, didn’t really want her.
At the very notion of not wanting her, Samuel gave a harsh laugh and dragged a hand down his face. Hell, he ached from wanting her. All of her—her sharp tongue, her wind-chime laugh, her passion, her trust, even her stubbornness and terrifying sense of adventure. He wanted every bit of her, every moment of her time. Her past, present, and future.
But he’d been clumsy. She’d prodded at his old scars and, without realizing it, he’d responded in kind.
The error couldn’t be undone. And, God knew, he lacked the eloquence to win her back with pretty words.
He could, however, make a symbolic gesture.
Once more, his eyes tracked to the drawer.
He could prove to her that his opinions were not so black-and-white. That he did believe a person might be imperfect and still worth knowing, worth loving.
Eighteen
To Esther’s surprise, it took Samuel less than half a day to track down Mr. Smith. Her grandfather had moved only once since leaving Apton Street. His new home was a tiny, weathered house in a neighborhood that looked to have just slipped off the edge of shabby-genteel and was now rapidly descending into full dilapidation.
“I should like to do this alone,” she told Samuel as they sat in the carriage outside Mr. Smith’s residence.
Samuel released the grip he’d had on the carriage door. “I don’t think that’s wise.”
Please, not this argument again. “Mr. Smith is more than seventy years old, and I’ve knives strapped to my ankles. I suspect I’ll return unscathed.”
“We don’t know who else is in that house. I don’t know anything about his staff.”
She glanced at her grandfather’s home. It was smaller than her cottage. “He can’t have more than one or two. I’d wager neither are assassins.”
He slanted her a decidedly unamused look. “If he insults you—”
“Then I will wish him to the devil and take my leave.”
A muscle worked in his jaw. “I don’t want you to be hurt.”
She stifled the sudden urge to lean across the carriage and brush her hands across that grinding jaw.
It truly was harder for him to wait.
Samuel had been right—when he had gone off in search of their mystery man alone, she had worried about him, but she had not been terrified for him. He was just so capable. Her confidence in his abilities left no room for something as uncomfortable as raw fear.
She was capable as well, but her abilities were admittedly less honed than Samuel’s. There was room for fear there. And he had such a terrible need to protect.
She glanced at the waiting house and back at Samuel. She felt guilty for not fully appreciating how difficult it had been for him to take her to Paddington station. But she wasn’t facing anything more dangerous here than a spot of disappointment. And for God’s sake, he didn’t need to follow her everywhere.
“I don’t know him, Samuel. I’ve no attachment to him at all. He might insult me. He might toss me out of his home, but it won’t hurt me.” It would, however, add a painful layer of humiliation to have Samuel bear witness to whatever insults or accusations her grandfather might care to hurl at her. “I need to do this alone.”
She watched him struggle with her decision for a moment before giving one curt nod. “All right.”
The concession, and the knowledge of what it cost him, warmed her from the inside out.
Maybe they weren’t so incompatible, she thought as she hopped down from the carriage. Maybe they could always find their way to an agreement, so long as they didn’t give up trying.
Maybe, in time, he’ll replace you with a lady who won’t ask him to subjugate his needs to her own.
She was nearly to the house when this unwelcome thought intruded on her newfound hope. It angered her, even as it pricked at her conscience.
Maybe I’ll replace him with a gentleman who doesn’t ask the same of me, she thought tartly, but that idea only made her feel worse.
She shook her head, setting those fears aside for now, and knocked on her grandfather’s door. A young maid in skirts that were visibly patched promptly answered.
“Mrs. Ellison to see Mr. Smith, please. I am come about his son.”
She was shown into a miniature parlor crammed with furniture that had been out of fashion for at least fifty years.
Esther had barely taken a seat on the threadbare chair before the parlor doors opened again, and the maid returned with her grandfather.
As she rose from her seat, all Esther could think was that Mr. Smith looked even older than his seventy years. He shuffled into the room with the aid of a cane, his back bowed forward and his knuckles white from supporting his weight. A sparse patch of white hair crowned a narrow face heavily lined with wrinkles.
He blinked at her once, then waved a gnarled hand at the maid. “Leave us.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who are you?” he rasped to Esther. “What do you know of my son?”
“I am…” She swallowed hard and glanced at the parlor door to make certain the maid was no longer in earshot. “I am Miss Esther Walker. I believe your son was my father.”
Mr. Smith went very, very still. “You are Esther Walker?”
At least he appeared to have heard of her. “I am.”
He moved toward her slowly, until they were standing nearly cane to toe. Clouded blue eyes searched her face for a long, long time, then, to her astonishment, filled with tears. “You are real, then. You are real.”
He lifted his free hand and she thought for a moment he might touch her face, but he hesitated and patted her shoulder weakly. “My granddaughter.”
Esther nodded, thrown off-balance by his reaction. She had braced herself for insults, recriminations. At best, she had hoped for mild interest. She had not expected tears.
“You are just as she described,” Mr. Smith breathed. “Just as beautiful as she described.”
“I beg your pardon?” Who had described her?
He closed his eyes briefly, as if remembering an old pain. But when he opened them again, the tears had dried. “How did you find me, child? Your mother, I presume?”
“I…”
She shook her head to clear it. She had so many questions, she wasn’t quite sure where to begin. “I found a letter. Or part of one. I thought it was from your son, but—”
“It was from me. Your mother and I kept up a regular correspondence for a time. Did she send you here?”
Regular correspondence? With a woman who would disappear for months at a time and not bother to write her own children? “No, I’m sorry. My mother has been gone a very long time.” Years before the letter she’d found in the desk had been written.
“Ah. I am sorry to hear it.” His gaze turned pensive. “I did wonder if that was the way of things.” He gave his head a little shake, sending the puff of hair wafting. “Well, there is no good to come from wallowing in old grief. Or so I have found. Come. Come. Take your seat.”
He carefully lowered himself to the edge of the settee across from her chair. Both hands braced on his cane, he leaned forward and regarded her with avid interest. “Now then, Esther Walker. Tell me of yourself.”
For the next ten minutes, Esther drew a very faint sketch of her life, offering only the most basic, harmless details. Her parents were gone. She had no children. She enjoyed her art, gardening, and the new game of badminton.
Though it pained her, she also lied. Right through her teeth. She was widowed. She had traveled from Boston to find her father’s family.
Another act, another role to play. But it couldn’t be helped. She didn’t know this man. She couldn’t trust him with the truth. And there was something amiss with his story.
A Gift for Guile (The Thief-takers) Page 26