“He was.”
Should it come as any surprise he’d violated that portion of her trust with his son? The world was controlled by these men called gentlemen, when there really was nothing gentle in them. They were ruthless, grasping, and self-serving. What value would a single one of them ever place on her desire for some hint of privacy in her own past?
Holdsworth set his glass down. With a taunting gleam lighting his eyes, he folded his arms at his chest. “It is no secret my family disapproved of the whore who kept him company all these years. Hardly coin to be had for my sisters’ Come Outs, and yet you lived this comfortable life in the country.”
“Six,” she bit out. That was how long it had been since Sir Henry had insisted Lily go from his maid to his mistress. That was also the day she’d abandoned her name of Lilliana Bennett.
He furrowed his brow.
“It was six years.” A lady did not forget a moment of her life she spent in a hell of her own making. She tightened her jaw. Or in this case, a hell of hers and a now dead duke’s making.
“Six years a whore,” the man mused, more to himself.
She curled her hands into tight balls at her side, not giving him the satisfaction in knowing his words, even for their truth, nay especially for their truth, cut sharper than a dull-edged blade being thrust into her belly. “Yes,” she said with a stoic calm. “Six years a whore.” To a man who’d taken her to his bed, shared his home, and shared her secrets with his son.
“Regardless,” he said with a flick of his hand. “It matters not how long you’ve warmed my father’s bed but rather what brought you in to his life.” He made a tsking noise. “Blackthorne, that lover of all things beautiful.” Things. That was how these pompous, arrogant nobles saw women and objects alike, as mere things for their pleasures. If only her fifteen-year-old self had known the ugliness in their souls. “My father asked that I care for you.”
Dread pebbled in her belly. That tiny, anxious pit born of the treachery she’d experienced through the years. “How very kind of him,” she responded stiffly. Her eyes must have reflected the thousand panicked questions racing through her mind.
He scoffed. “Surely you’d not expect my father to name his lover in his will? Not when he left his children facing financial ruin.”
Oh, God. Was it a wonder that a gentleman who’d promised her freedom all those years ago had also betrayed her? How could she be so foolishly naïve, again? Once again, the floor dropped out from under her and she shot her hands out to steady herself with the support of the leather button sofa.
In a maddeningly nonchalant manner, Holdsworth shoved away from the sideboard, and like a predator stalking its prey, closed the distance between them. The triumphant glimmer in his eyes indicated he relished her shock. He came to a stop beside her. “He was clear what was to happen to you were he ever to pass.”
She braced for the sickening, vile proposition he’d put to her. Nausea turned in her stomach at the idea of spreading her legs for another. “Was he?”
“And I quite assured him that I would. After all, what kind of son would I be if I did not see to his dying request?” A cold, taunting smile formed on his lips.
Bile burned like acid in her throat and she remained frozen, incapable of words.
“By your reaction, you expect an offer of protectorship from me, don’t you? Hmm?” he prodded when she still said nothing.
Heat blazed over her body and she damned the cream white of her skin that surely revealed that telling color. “Do you not?” She prided herself on the steady deliverance of those words.
Holdsworth ran his knuckles down her cheek and she stilled so as to not give him an indication as to how repulsed she was by his touch. “Would you like that, Miss Benedict?” His sickly, sweet breath fanned her cheek. “Would you like me to find a place for you in my bed? To stay in this cottage as my mistress?”
Never again. She curled her hands tight. She’d pledged to never take another man to her bed and, with Sir Henry’s promise of a home in the country, she’d foolishly believed her future secure—at last. “I assure you not,” she said coldly. “Even I, a whore, have too much honor to take a married man to my bed.”
“A whore with honor,” he chuckled. “Imagine that.”
Her fingers twitched with the urge to slap him. “Nor was an offer of protectorship what your father pledged when he spoke of my security.” He’d promised a country cottage in Northumberland, far away from Carlisle, far away from London, far away from anyone and everyone who might know her.
“Ah yes. Northumberland, wasn’t it, I believe?” he asked, dropping his hand to his side. “And you, my dear, may rest assured that even I have better taste than to rut between the legs of my father’s favored and well-used whore.”
Her heartbeat kicked up at his knowledge of the future she’d hoped for herself. She took a step back, putting distance between her and this volatile stranger. No one was to have shared in that unchartered, unjourneyed part of her life. Sir Henry had promised as much. Tired of being the unwitting player in a game she did not know the rules for, she snapped. “Why do you not say what it is you want, instead of speaking in veiled terms of my past?” And my future. A now rather uncertain, bleak future. All because of another broken promise. Another swell of bitterness churned through her.
“As I was saying earlier, about the Duke of Blackthorne...” He stared expectantly at her.
Did he search for a hint of pain at the mere mention of George’s title? What he could not know is that she’d long ago found she’d never truly loved the Duke of Blackthorne. “What of him? It is my understanding the duke is dead,” she said. Not even a frisson of warmth stirred for the late duke. She’d loved the idea of being so very loved by him. She’d loved his whispered words of affection, those falsely whispered words. But she’d been nothing more than an infatuated girl, taken by his charm and looks. She winced. God, what a bloody fool she’d been. The laugh he’d had over her.
“Not a hint of warmth for the man you gave your heart and virginity to?” he observed.
For his obvious cruelness, there was an astuteness to him. “I have little warmth for men who use me and deceive me,” she said pointedly.
A sharp bark of laughter escaped Holdsworth. “So that...lack of warmth as you refer to it, I take, extends to the members who share the blood of those men?” he asked when his shoulders no longer shook with his mirth.
Lily shook her head. “You are speaking in riddles.”
Holdsworth spread his arms wide before him. “Let me be more clear then, Miss Benedict. Would you share an equal apathy for the Duke of Blackthorne’s kin?”
No one could abhor that vile family more than Lily. They’d turned her away when she was most desperate and sent her into the world without a hint of compassion. God rot their souls.
“Ah, I see by the hatred snapping in your eyes, Miss Benedict, we are of like opinion for that family.”
There was no shortage of enemies for the Winters kin. Was it a wonder?
“Something was taken from me, something very valuable and special, and I would have you return it to me.”
So embroiled in her own tumultuous thoughts of hate, it took a moment for the man’s words to register. “Taken?” She blinked several times, knowing she must appear a lackwit, but too absorbed in her own pained remembrances that she couldn’t put to right Holdsworth’s words. What matter was it to her what this man had lost? Whatever it was of the material variety could never, ever come close to the loss she’d suffered at that family’s hands. Lily squared her jaw. “I do not see how this pertains to me,” she said impatiently.
“Ah, but it very much pertains to you.” He returned to the sideboard and retrieved a glass. The gentleman appeared to consider his selection, passing over several decanters before settling on a bottle of brandy. He held the bottle aloft and made a show of studying the amber brew. “Would you care for a drink?”
“I do not drink spirits,” she s
aid stiffly.
His lips quirked in a sardonic grin that set her teeth on edge. “My, you are the very proper mistress, aren’t you?”
Lily bit back the sharp retort on her lips. She could ill-afford to become insolent to a man who with one curt word could see her tossed out on his recently inherited doorstep.
“The French have a great taste for fine things and beauty.” He stared expectantly back at her as though they were to deliver lines in a play and she was absent of verse. But she was remarkably empty in terms of talk on fine things. She’d been born to a vicar and became a maid and then a gentleman’s plaything.
“I do not know much of fine things,” she settled for at last.
“Come, never tell me my father did not see you properly fitted in diamonds and fine baubles?”
He’d given her food, shelter, and not a thing more. She allowed her silence to serve as her answer.
“Oh, that is rich!” Holdsworth tossed his head back on a thunderous laugh and she curled her hands tight as he dashed back tears of mirth.
“Was there something you wished to speak with me on?” she asked, unable to quell her impatience. What a horrid world in which women were born. To be subject to the whims and fancies of men and so very dependent upon them for one’s everything.
“There was,” he said, withdrawing an embroidered kerchief from his pocket. He brushed aside the remaining evidence of amusement on his cheeks. “There is a diamond. A very sizeable diamond, worth far more value than the cottage in my possession.”
Her heartbeat sped up with the fragile hope. Mayhap there had been some honor in Sir Henry and he’d see her cared for. “A diamond?”
“Do not be silly, Miss Benedict, it is nothing left by my father to you. It is a cherished heirloom.”
Hopes dashed once more, she said, “I still do not see what this bauble has to do with me.”
“Bauble?” He winged an eyebrow up. “The diamond I am speaking of is over sixty-eight carats.”
She choked on her swallow.
He took a sip of his drink. “I see you are suitably impressed,” he said over the rim of his glass. “My family descended from a man of French origins. Jean Tavenier.” He stared back at her, as though that name should mean something to her. “After King Louis and Marie Antoinette were killed, my ancestors secreted that stone out of France.”
Lily lifted her shoulders in a slight shrug. “I do not see how your familial lesson on history has any bearings on my future or your father’s promise.” His broken one. Unless his information could ensure her security and spare her from spreading her legs ever again, then it interested her not at all.
Annoyance lit the man’s eyes. “You should care. You see, it is what happened after that exchange you should care very much about. It was in our possession until a powerful, obscenely wealthy duke took it from my father.”
She stared blankly at him, as the words began to make slow sense. “George—” She caught herself. “The Duke of Blackthorne,” she amended.
“A lover of all things beautiful,” he said with a slight inclination of his head. A sneer pulled at his lips as he looked her up and down. “The late duke sought to purchase the stone from my father as a gift for his then betrothed.” A memory slid forth of a long ago night inside the duke’s hallowed halls, but trickled out, as Holdsworth continued. “Refusing to sell that heirloom, my father was convinced to allow the future duchess to wear the piece at their betrothal ball and on her wedding day. Blackthorne paid a fee for that honor.” He tightened his mouth. “It was never returned.”
Of course. Isn’t that what George had done? He’d taken beautiful gems for his own pleasures and the consequences be damned?
Resentment slapped her with a power that drove back all warmth. That was who these gentlemen were. Bored men, each driven by greed and opulence. “Then, perhaps Sir Henry should not have turned the bauble over to the duke.”
Holdsworth rolled his glass between his fingers. “You do not like me much, do you?” he said, unexpectedly shifting the direction of the conversation.
Lily curled her hands into tight balls. “I barely know you,” she settled for the most basic form of the truth—she knew him but a handful of moments and despised him with every fiber of her being.
A chuckle escaped him, and he continued closer. “Why do you not tell me your true thoughts?” He spoke on a jeering whisper. “Tell me how you’d send me to the devil for breaking my father’s oath to you? Slap my face for stealing what you consider yours?”
Lily bit the inside of her cheek. For the truth was, spewing all the vitriolic words on her tongue would likely be the ultimate ruin of her.
“And that is why it was not a, what did you call it?” He arched another crimson eyebrow. “A legitimate exchange. I am a mere gentleman. Now, imagine were it the Duke of Blackthorne making such a request. With his ruthless threats to see my father’s businesses ruined, did he have any choice but to capitulate? Hmm?” he pressed, as she fell silent. Holdsworth ran a condescending gaze over her. “I expected one despoiled by that duke would have learned that family’s ruthlessness.”
She stilled, hating that his blasted words made any kind of sense. “What do you want?” she asked quietly.
He downed the contents of his drink. “I want you to retrieve it for me, my dear.”
She snorted. “If you think my familial connection is anything worth mentioning that will result in the current duke turning over that great gift, then you are mistaken.”
He opened his mouth to speak but a sharp rap at the door interrupted his words. Holdsworth looked to the door. “Enter.”
An older servant shuffled into the room bearing a copy of a newspaper. He handed the London Times over to his new employer and then took his leave.
Holdsworth held it out. “Read the front page.”
She wanted to slap the paper away and throw his more order than request back in his face. Curiosity, however, pulled at her. Accepting the paper with stiff fingers, she proceeded to scan the wrinkled, slightly aged sheet. One name leaped out. Her heart stuttered a beat.
After his disfigurement and near death at war, His Grace, the Duke of B has proven himself cursed once again. The early, tragic death of his eldest brother, George, the 7th Duke of B is now followed by the loss of his mother, and only sister and brother-in-law at sea...
For too many years she’d attended that family, feeding and fanning her hatred. At some point, she’d only absently skimmed the on dits about the Winters family. Angry this man would force her to delve back into a world she despised, Lily tossed the newspaper on a nearby rose-inlaid table where it landed with a soft thump.
“Do you have anything to say?”
“No.” Nothing that she cared to share with this man. She had read that handful of details on the new duke in the scandal sheets, but did not need to personally know the gentleman to understand very well that he’d been cursed. Then, as one who’d been cursed herself, it was easy enough to recognize it in another. And there was no doubt, someone in Winters’ line must have made a deal with the devil and the time of payment was due.
“Humph,” he said after the protracted silence. “The duke’s sister, Lady Stonehaven, left a girl.”
Regret tugged at her heart as it invariably did when thoughts or words of babes and children crept in. “Did she?” she managed to get out past the emotion clogging her throat. For in one reckless moment, she’d thrown away all hope or dreams of her own family; a child to love, an honorable husband.
He eyed her a long while and, for one horrifying moment, she thought he somehow knew that deepest, darkest longing that would leave her exposed in ways she’d not have him see. But then the look was gone. “Guardianship was recently given over to The Beast of Blackthorne.”
She looked at him askance.
He motioned to his face. “The whole disfigurement business.”
How ruthless they all were, these men who ruled the world.
“As you can ima
gine, the man cannot maintain a proper staff and, subsequently, he cannot maintain a proper governess for the girl.”
Winters blood and all, sadness filled Lily for that child. She knew the agony of losing one’s mother and father and being thrust alone into the world. Granted, the girl’s fate as a young lady, ward to a duke, was far more certain than Lily’s own miserable fate as a vicar’s daughter.
Holdsworth fished around the front of his jacket and withdrew a stack of papers. He handed them over to her. “Go on. Take them.”
Lily eyed them a moment and then took them from his long, gloved fingers.
“They are references,” he said as she began to read.
She raised her perplexed gaze to his.
“You will have your property in Northumberland, as promised. Once I have the diamond, my circumstances improve greatly, and that cottage you crave, is a mere pittance I can easily be rid of.”
Her heart tripped several erratic beats with giddy elation. But on the heel of that momentary trace of hope, came the cold crash of reality. No gentleman did anything unless it served him. And her security did not offer anything of worth to this man. “What do you want?” she asked, hating the tremble to that question.
“Why, you are going to retrieve my diamond.” His lips turned up in a triumphant grin. “And you are going to do it by wheedling your way into the duke’s employ.”
He was mad. Mad or desperate, and because of it, he would try and send her back into that vile home she’d been thrown from years earlier. She fisted the pages in her hands. “You are asking me to steal the diamond?” Incredulity crept into her tone.
“Retrieve it,” he corrected. “And, yes.”
She angled her chin up. “For your low opinion of me, I am no thief.” A whore, yes. A thief, never. Lily made to turn the false references over to him. Wordlessly, Holdsworth fished out another note. “What is this?” she asked not taking her gaze from his.
“Take it,” he urged, pressing it toward her.
Lily took the sheet with unsteady fingers. She ran her gaze over it and her stomach dipped. “I don’t understand.” Her words trembled.
Rescued By a Lady's Love (Lords of Honor, #3) Page 4