by Sara Ramsey
Tonight, there were no illusions. She was on display, every move dissected.
And the only moments when she enjoyed herself were with a man who might cost her everything if she married him.
“I won’t marry a stable hand, so I hope you didn’t put money on that,” she said, trying to direct Rafe away from talk of Thorington.
He couldn’t be directed. “Of course not. I put money on my brother. I do hope I’m right — you would be the best thing that could happen to him.”
He didn’t say which brother. And Callie stepped into her room and shut the door before she was stupid enough to ask.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“How long have you been in Miss Briarley’s employ?” Thorington asked.
The small sitting room Thorington had found for this interview was decorated with elaborately scrolling rococo woodwork from the previous century, too fussy to be imposing. But Mrs. Jennings twisted her hands in her lap. “Nearly twenty years, your grace. Lady Tiberius, rest her soul, hired me as a nursemaid to accompany them to Europe, and I stayed on after she passed.”
She hadn’t picked up the cup of tea he had insisted she pour for herself. She sat rigidly in her chair — the chair he had practically forced her into, since she didn’t think it proper to sit with him. Thorington often used his power to overwhelm other members of his class, but he rarely did so with servants.
But now that he wanted a servant to give him a direct answer, his power and title thwarted him. Her answers thus far had been nearly monosyllabic.
And nothing she said could give him any clues to Callista’s secrets.
He smiled encouragingly, a gambit he usually didn’t employ when interrogating someone. “And are you happy to have returned to England?”
Mrs. Jennings nodded.
He debated the merits of plying her with whisky. It had worked with Callista the night before. But the thought of Callista, always dancing on the edge of his consciousness, distracted him. She had been so...alive, the night before, in a way he had never seen a woman be with him.
He wasn’t a comfortable man to be alive with. And he hadn’t realized, until she had left him in the dark, what he had missed as a result.
The memory of that dark, empty room haunted him. He had sat, perfectly still, after she left, staring into the shadows. It was as if her laughter slowly cooled into melancholy. He had dreamed of her — dreamed of wicked smiles and clever words, wickeder laughter and cleverer tongues, the wickedest things she could do to him, the wickedest joy he could wring from her.
There was no word for what he felt — or, at least, no word that he could allow himself to acknowledge. So he didn’t try to identify it. He dreamed instead, until the twilight was completely gone and darkness reigned.
Until her laughter was gone and his heart had gone cold again. There was no future in which Callista would be better for having him.
Even if there was no future in which he was better for losing her.
Still, even though he knew he couldn’t have her, he wanted to see her safe. And the suspicions he’d harbored about her — and, thus far, mostly ignored — needed to be assuaged.
Mrs. Jennings looked down at her folded hands. Thorington reverted to form. “You do realize, my dear Mrs. Jennings, that I must determine whether you are an adequate lady’s maid for my brother’s future wife. You’ve done little to recommend yourself.”
She hadn’t responded to kindness, but she bristled at his bored drawl and the threat behind it. “You’ll find no more loyal servant than me, your grace.”
He shrugged. “Your loyalty is to be commended, I’m sure. But your mistress is destined to be an arbiter of fashion when she marries into my family. She will need a maid who can meet the demands of London.”
“An arbiter of fashion?” Mrs. Jennings repeated.
She sounded like she had choked on the words. Thorington rubbed in some salt. “Forgive my high-sounding speech. It means she shall be one of the foremost leaders in the ton.”
“I know what ‘arbiter’ means,” Mrs. Jennings snapped.
Thorington raised an eyebrow.
Mrs. Jennings flushed. “I apologize, your grace. But if you will allow me to speak freely, I must say that I do not see Miss Briarley choosing to play such a role.”
He stayed silent, waiting to see what she might blunder into if forced to fill the pause.
“Begging your pardon, of course,” she added hesitantly.
She was still too cowed by him to say what else was on her mind, but he’d seen her flash of annoyance — and, before that, what had sounded suspiciously like mirth at the idea of Callista becoming a member of the fashionable set.
“What other role do you think she would choose?” he asked.
He looked at his nails, feigning boredom. Mrs. Jennings hesitated, but again, he didn’t rescue her from silence. Finally, she said, “It isn’t for me to tell tales, your grace. But she would want the freedom to choose her course.”
Thorington returned his gaze to her. The woman was in her forties, perhaps — she may have only been a teen when she had left England with Lord and Lady Tiberius to care for their daughter. She was a handsome enough woman, if a bit unrefined. She was more practical than the fashionable maids he’d hired for his sisters, chosen decades ago for her sturdiness as a child’s companion instead of her abilities with a lady’s hair and clothing.
He wondered, idly, whether there had ever been a Mr. Jennings. Not that it mattered. But the fierceness in her voice as she talked about Callista told him all he needed to know about her.
“You would want to see Miss Briarley safe, wouldn’t you?” he asked gently.
She looked down into her cooling tea. “Of course, your grace.”
“And do you think she would be safer in England than in Baltimore?”
She nodded, decisively enough that Thorington’s suspicions grew.
“Is there anything that may make her less safe? Anything that I, as her future husband’s guardian, should be aware of?”
Mrs. Jennings looked up. He’d startled her. “Why would you ask that, your grace?”
Her voice held some new note — either suspicion or guilt. He didn’t move, not wanting to change the mood in any way when he sensed that he was closing in on his target. “Baltimore has become notorious for its contribution to the British Navy’s woes of late. It strikes me that Miss Briarley’s shipping interests may be in danger.”
It was just a shadow of a suspicion — one that had occurred to him as he’d considered Callista’s necklace the previous night, and what trouble she might have found on the voyage from Baltimore to Havana. If Mrs. Jennings had looked confused, he probably would have moved on from the idea entirely.
But instead, Mrs. Jennings scanned his face.
He didn’t know her well enough to be sure. But the way her eyes moved gave him the hint he’d looked for.
“I admit I am relieved Miss Briarley has come back to England, your grace. But I’m sure I don’t know anything about her ships.”
The second part was a lie. He was sure of it.
The only question was how to arrange everything satisfactorily.
If she were his servant, he would have interrogated her until he knew everything there was to know from her. But her loyalty to Callista was twenty years in the making. He might get every answer he wanted from her — but unless he killed her after, she’d report their conversation to her mistress immediately.
Thorington couldn’t kill her. But he no longer had the money to buy her tongue.
The realization that he couldn’t buy her loyalty was another little dagger to his pride, pride that had already been shredded by similar limitations. But he kept his face neutral as he dismissed Mrs. Jennings. She’d already told him all he needed to hear.
There was something about her ships that merited further investigation. If his messenger to London didn’t return soon, he’d have to send another — and perhaps send men to Portsmouth and So
uthampton as well, in case those ports held any other secrets.
Not that he could afford to send men running around the country. But Callista couldn’t afford to marry the wrong man if it became clear that her shipping concerns were rather less legal than she had made him believe.
And if he had any money left to wager, he’d put it all on guessing that Callista was in quite a lot of trouble.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Callie had felt like a lady when Mrs. Jennings dressed her in Portia’s navy gown before dinner. Her maid had asked one of the laundresses to lengthen the hem slightly, and the woman had done it perfectly — no one could guess that the dress hadn’t been made for her. And Serena had sent her own maid to help with Callie’s hair, with admirable results — curled in perfect ringlets and caught up with a pretty silver ribbon, her hair was better than it had ever looked.
But were ladies always so…bored?
She drummed her fingers on the dining table. On her left, Sir Percival Pickett continued his monologue. “Of course Byron’s cantos would get acclaim,” he said, his voice dripping with disdain. “Our modern age doesn’t appreciate the sublime beauty of the older poets. For my money, I’d rather be a Spencer than a Byron.”
The man on her right, some baron whose name she still didn’t remember despite days of repetition, shoved his peas onto his knife and then into his mouth. “With your money, you can keep trying to be a poet,” he muttered.
It was a cruel jibe, made more boorish by the fact that he shouldn’t have talked over Callie to the man on her other side — and he certainly shouldn’t have talked with a mouthful of peas. Callie wasn’t surprised at her seating arrangement. Lucretia would never put her next to anyone who might be a worthy match. She had been forced to endure Sir Percival at dinner twice already. But for all that she found him annoying, she also found him harmless. If he wished to spend his money printing poems no one would buy, it harmed no one but him.
Still, she couldn’t give her other companion a withering setdown without attracting attention to herself. So she drummed her fingers on the table and thought dark thoughts.
The courses continued. Maidenstone Abbey’s grand dining room was the same as it had been in her father’s time. While most of the entertainments were hosted in the light, airy drawing rooms of the newest wing of the house, the main dining room was still situated in the Palladian wing. It could hold sixty diners with ease, or a hundred with additional tables set in the adjoining anterooms.
Tiberius must have endured any number of dinners here. He’d said that his father insisted on formal dinners even when it was just the family in residence. Callie thought she understood, now, why they all hated each other. If she’d spent years walled up under that chandelier, cloistered in by fake columns and arches, she might have taken a knife to a sibling just to ease her boredom.
The fish course was served lukewarm, like all the others. The journey from the kitchens to the dining room was too long to keep anything hot. When Callie inherited Maidenstone Abbey, she would raze the entire bloody thing and build a house where she could get a single blasted dish served at the right temperature.
“I say, Miss Briarley, are you feeling well?” Sir Percival asked.
Callie looked up. “Perfectly well, Sir Percival.”
He looked entirely skeptical. And then he gestured at her hand.
She had dug her knife into the table without realizing it.
“Marrying a madwoman for Maidenstone would still be worth it,” the baron said, to no one in particular. “Enough attics to lock her in.”
She released her grip on the knife before she put it in his throat. “My apologies, Sir Percival,” she said, ignoring her other dining companion. “I’m sure your poetic discourse set me dreaming.”
He beamed at her, forgetting that he’d eyed her like a dangerous criminal moments earlier.
Then he resumed his monologue. And Callie resumed her finger drumming.
She could grow accustomed to parties like this. She could grow accustomed to wasting her mind on inane conversation rather than intellectual pursuits. To wishing other people would leave, rather than wishing for company.
She could grow accustomed to having roots. To feeling like those roots held her in place like a prison rather than giving her a foundation.
She could.
She had to.
* * *
Two hours later, Callie decided her boorish dinner companion was more intelligent than she had given him credit for. She should lock herself away in one of Maidenstone’s attics forthwith. She couldn’t grow accustomed to this.
Solitude was surely preferable to yet another evening trapped in a drawing room with these people.
A summer storm had swept over the house, forcing them to shut the windows. The conjoined drawing rooms were bigger than the entire main floor of her house in Baltimore. They were also still half empty as the men lingered over brandy in the dining room. But the space closed in on her. How could such beautiful rooms feel like the jaws of a bear trap?
She thought of retiring to her room, but it was scarcely eight o’clock. She wouldn’t want to sleep for hours. And if she wished to inherit Maidenstone Abbey — if she wished to move in the circles that would give her security — she had to practice patience.
She stood near one of the windows, flicking open the drapes to watch lightning flash in jagged waves. The steady drum of rain against the glass was undercut by deeper timpani rolls of thunder. It was a symphony made up entirely of percussion — like horses’ hooves or cannon fire — and Callie would rather listen to the beat than whatever melody Lady Portia was playing on the pianoforte in the next room.
The spectacle outside was far more interesting than the party within the walls. But no one else seemed to hear or care. Occasionally, some ninnyhammer would shriek when the thunder was particularly loud. Otherwise, the guests pursued their varied — and invariably dull — entertainments.
If she were in Baltimore, she might have gone out into the storm. Callie loved warm rain scouring over her face. She’d sought it out often enough, after Mrs. Jennings had given up trying to keep her in the house. She could tilt her face up, let the storm do its worst, and take some thrill in the knowledge that she’d still be standing in the morning even after the storm had faded to nothing.
She traced her finger over the glass, following a rivulet of water down the pane. She couldn’t go outside. She would ruin her dress.
But if she didn’t go outside, she might scream.
“Don’t you look a picture,” Thorington murmured beside her.
Callie’s smile came unbidden as a fierce jolt of joy lit up from the vicinity of her heart. She shouldn’t have smiled. She shouldn’t have let her traitorous Briarley heart view Thorington as anything other than a dangerous, temporary partner.
But the sound of his voice — the compliment sounding true despite his habitual sarcasm — was enough to ease the metal teeth that had sunk into her heart. If the room was a bear trap, Thorington was the only one strong enough to pry it open and set her free.
It wasn’t lost on her that he had sought her out immediately upon arriving with the men.
She turned to face him. The chaos of the storm was nothing compared to him. He stood before her, languid, bored — the devil couldn’t appear to care. But the intensity of his eyes gave him away.
She couldn’t appear to care, either. “If I look a picture, the credit goes to your sisters,” she said. “I might have worn breeches and left my hair undone if it weren’t for their intervention.”
“Thank the gods you didn’t. A lady of my family won’t wear breeches in public.”
“Trust a hidebound aristocrat to lean too much on propriety,” she said. “I’m accustomed to more freedom than that.”
She was teasing, of course. She wouldn’t have worn breeches to a party in Baltimore, either. He smiled. “Have your freedom in private, if you dare to cross me. But be glad you didn’t wear them in publi
c. All the men would ogle you. Then I would have to kill them. And I am not dressed for butchering.”
Though the words were pure Thorington — outrageous and entirely too domineering, driven by a need to protect his belongings — his voice and the light in his green eyes were fueled by something more. By the same thing that had fueled their kiss the night before. That voice, and that light, belonged to Gavin.
And Gavin belonged to her.
The thought shook her, even as another rumble of thunder cut between them. Thorington would never let himself belong to anyone. Any woman who tried to take him was a fool. She may not die in the attempt, but she would be crushed underfoot as surely as any other enemy.
Callie didn’t feel like an enemy, though. Not when she looked into those green eyes and saw her own hunger reflected back to her. For a moment, there was nothing and no one else. She only heard the little hitch of her own breath. She smelled only him, clean with just the barest hint of spice. Her fingers itched to touch him, the way she had the night before, skimming over his coat to find out whether his heart beat as quickly as her own.
Her fingers itched to touch a lot more than his heart, if she were being honest.
He seemed to know what she wanted. His hand took hers. He raised it to his lips, grazing a kiss over her knuckles, never breaking their locked gazes.
He could have asked anything in that moment and she would have done it.
Her head knew this was a horrible idea. Thorington would break her if she let him. And she would never win Maidenstone with him at her side.
But her traitorous Briarley heart wanted what it wanted, consequences be damned.
Mine.
She curtsied. He still held her hand, becoming her anchor as she dipped low, then lower still. When she returned to vertical, the jolt of surprise in his eyes was her prize.
“Willful wench,” he said. His smile was softer than she’d seen it before. “Your curtsey is days overdue.”