Cathcart, who’d come round to put the cue balls in place, maintained an eloquent silence.
“They’re entirely agreeable.” He ran an idle finger over the tip of his cue. “Only I expect I should enjoy a lady more if I won her than if I plucked her up like a cake off a footman’s tray.”
“And a choice bit of cake she is, I assure you. Don’t expect me to put her up cheap.” Fool couldn’t resist the sensation of being envied. Even if he meant to ultimately refuse, he was going to play this out as long as he could. Already he was raising his voice a bit, that the half-dozen men round the other table might be privy to this drama.
Well, that was to Will’s benefit too. Square-jaw would find it difficult to back down from the bargain in front of witnesses. “Undoubtedly a permanent arrangement would be beyond my means. I had a single night in mind. What would be a reasonable wager on my side?”
“You tell me.” He had the whole room’s attention now, and he knew it. “She’s got tits the size of plum puddings, she’ll rake your back like a wildcat, and she can suck a man into next week. What’s a night of that worth to you?” He drained the rest of his rum and set the glass down hard on the table’s cushion.
“Plum pudding. Who wouldn’t be tempted by that?” The viscount sent this mild remark into the silence that vibrated between the two men. He’d taken one step this way as well. He didn’t look at Will, or raise a hand, but he’d clearly positioned himself to stop his friend doing anything idiotic.
Will’s hands clutched tight on his cue. Cathcart could block some things. Not all. One elbow brought up, one fist jerked down, a lunge on one leg and Roanoke would have the butt end of his cue across the face. Teeth flying like wheat-kernels out of a mill chute. Blood spouting down and spreading like contagion on the crisp white of his cravat. Let that remind you of what’s due to a lady.
He wasn’t going to do that. He was going to win her away. His hand relaxed its grip and he tapped the cue against his palm. “Two hundred. It happens I’m fond of pudding.”
It was a ridiculous amount of money. If he hadn’t already been aware of the fact, he certainly should have learned it from the reactions of the men listening.
“Three hundred.” Square-jaw’s eyes had gone glittery with greed.
“Two-fifty.” More astonishment from the audience, and a jocose remark or two questioning his sanity.
“Two-fifty it is.” Roanoke caught up his cue, grinning, and came to the bottom of the table to take his first shot.
“Good God, man, there’s girls can be had for a guinea will do all those same things.” A dandy in a purple velvet waistcoat made this appeal to reason.
“Doesn’t matter.” Will rolled one shoulder to loosen it. “I’m not going to lose.”
And he didn’t. He needed to win, so he won. Now and again life really was that simple. Every violent impulse channeled itself into the next smooth stroke of his cue. Cue ball off the red ball. Red ball in the pocket. Cue ball off the cushion and all the way into baulk, out of Roanoke’s reach. No flourish and no gloating, just quiet, lethal accuracy.
When he stroked his final shot he turned and handed off his stick without even waiting to see the balls drop in. “You may send her as soon as you like. Do you remember which room you put me in, or shall I provide directions?” He reached for his coat.
DO YOU know the one called Barbara?” Eliza leaned forward in her armchair, elbows on the arms and fingers laced between. “I spoke to her this afternoon. She said they had a conversation in the library last night, but when it came to the point, he excused himself and went away.”
“Is that so very wonderful? Perhaps he’s courting someone and doesn’t want to do anything unseemly.” Lydia smoothed her skirts, carefully avoiding Eliza’s eyes.
“Then I question his decision to come to this house party at all. What young lady would like to hear that her suitor was …” Maria’s voice trailed off. Lydia glanced up to find her twisted to face the door, a single line of disapproval wrought into her brow.
She turned. There stood Edward, his coat over one arm and his eyes roving round the ladies’ sitting room. His gaze connected with hers, and held. He cleared his throat. “Lydia.” He shifted his coat to the other arm. “Might I have a word with you?”
Chapter Fourteen
WILL STOOD at the fireplace, facing the open door, perfectly still but for the restless toes tapping in one boot. From the moment he’d left the billiard room, a notion had been creeping over him—like a great double handful of snow plunked atop his head and left to melt and trickle down his skin—that he might after all have made a mistake.
At least it’s not the worst mistake of your life. His mouth twitched, grim laughter surging up from some mutinous place inside him and nearly making its way out. Devil take honorable intentions. Would he never learn his lesson? He tried to do good, and he only made an infamous farce of everything.
Footsteps sounded in the hallway—too many footsteps—and a memory flared through his muscles before his brain could lock it down. That first night at Beecham’s, his refuge in the library disturbed by approaching footsteps, one set heavy and one set light. She hadn’t come on her own, then. That might not augur well.
Indeed it did not. When she arrived in the doorway it was with Roanoke at her side, gripping on to her elbow as though to prevent her dashing away. She wore only nightclothes and a dressing gown, with her half boots clutched in one hand and a pile of what must be tomorrow’s clothing pinned against her chest by the opposite arm. Her hair hung down her back in plaits.
Hell. He hadn’t known she’d be paraded through the corridors half-undressed. She stood rigid as a bedpost and stared straight ahead, her eyes blank as he’d ever seen them.
“Well, I’ve delivered her.” Square-jaw’s face, too, was impossible to read. “More than that I cannot guarantee.” Indeed his mistress’s reluctance rolled off her like mist off a moor. Even a man as thick as Roanoke couldn’t fail to perceive it.
“Very good.” Will gave a slight nod but stayed where he was. “I shall manage the rest.”
“Manage as best you can.” He propelled Miss Slaughter a few steps farther over the threshold. “Only don’t send her back to me if she doesn’t please you. I’ve made other arrangements for that place in my bed tonight.”
Will’s heart sank like a boot heel in muck. The lout must have engaged one of the hired ladies. Curse his lack of foresight: the possibility had not occurred to him, and certainly the idea that the man might wish to announce it in Miss Slaughter’s presence never had.
She stood precisely where he’d pushed her, and made no response at all. She looked the way she would surely look if she should ever be pilloried in a public square: neither shamed nor defiant, but willfully absent, rolling all her sensibilities smaller and smaller until she need feel nothing at all. Any crowd pelting her with rotten fruit would be pelting a mere empty shell.
“Close the door on your way out, if you please.” He didn’t spare Roanoke another glance.
The door clicked shut and Miss Slaughter stirred to life, crossing briskly to the window seat where she dropped her half boots and clothing. “Had a change of heart, have we?” Her voice could curdle milk.
“I’m so sorry, Lydia.” He advanced only a step or two; to go to her felt presumptuous. “Believe me, I had no idea of spurring him to such a coarse betrayal.”
“I’m not naïve enough to suppose it’s the first.” She kept her straight back to him. “I don’t know what he promised you, but I do not consider myself bound by that promise. He had no right to offer me up.”
“He didn’t. It was I who proposed the wager.”
She half-turned, showing her face in profile. A muscle seized in her cheek. “Then what the devil was all that nonsense this morning? Is this your way of courting a lady’s trust? Or did you abandon that plan and decide to settle for a quick tumble after all?”
“Can you really think me capable of that?” He went a few ste
ps nearer the window, to be in her field of vision. “Do you believe that is the response I would make to the things you told me this morning?”
“I don’t know what I’m to think!” She turned her face to the window again. “I’m in your bedroom for the night because of a wager of your own making. Tell me how I ought to construe that.”
He rested a hand on the nearby armchair’s high back, and raked the other hand through his hair. “I lost my head at the table. I confess it.” Lord, but he was an idiot. “I wanted to goad your protector and I wanted … I wanted to free you from your obligation to him, just for a night. Now that I know the things you’ve borne, I couldn’t help—”
“I’m not some bedraggled kitten for you to rescue from a ditch.” Her anger came cleanly as arrows from a bow, no energy wasted. “I chose to be obligated to Mr. Roanoke. I enjoy my transactions with him. And I don’t go about staggering under the weight of those things I told you today. I’ve learned to keep them out of my thoughts.”
Her words resonated as though he were all made up of harpstrings inside. Didn’t he know exactly what it was, to gain that particular mastery over one’s thoughts.
He could tell her. I understand. I have things that don’t bear thinking of, too. But he hadn’t brought her here to be his confessor. She had burdens enough.
He pushed away from the chair and crossed to a pier glass in the room’s corner. “Be that as it may, you have the night off from your duties. You needn’t entertain me in any way.” He started on his coat buttons. “Needn’t even converse with me, if you’d rather not.”
“That’s very noble of you, to give me a choice in the matter.” Caustic. If he touched her she would probably burn his skin, like lye. “Ought I to offer myself in gratitude?”
He sighed, slipping out of his coat. Clearly he oughtn’t to have wagered for her. She’d developed certain views of men who treated her as a commodity, and she wasn’t able to make an exception for him. “I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by our speaking further. The bed is yours.” He flicked his coat up over one shoulder and pivoted. “I shall sleep on the floor. I’ll go to the dressing room now, unless you’d like to put your clothes away first.”
She didn’t. When some ten minutes later he returned in nightshirt and dressing gown she stood in the same place he’d left her, still facing the window. Perhaps she meant to defy him by standing there all night—but no, as soon as he was far enough clear of the door that she needn’t sidle by him, she picked up her clothing and retired to the dressing room. And when he came near to the bed he saw a pillow and the heaviest of the blankets had been put down on the carpet alongside.
A peace offering, maybe. Or maybe a proud partial rejection of his charity. Things would never, never, never be simple with her.
He left one candle burning that she might find her way back, and he rolled onto his side, scrupulously facing away, when the floor creaked with her footsteps. The candlelight went out with a puff of her breath. The mattress sighed. The sheets and blankets rustled.
And there they were. The woman he wanted above all others in his bed, and he a million miles away on the floor. Confound the perversity of things.
He rolled onto his other side, and pulled the one blanket up to his ears. Nothing to do now but wait for morning.
HE’D LEARNED, in the army, to recognize the sounds of a nightmare. Her first one came just after he’d slipped into sleep.
Will sat up, then rose to his knees. Damnably tall bed. She hadn’t pulled the bedcurtains, and her terrible closed-mouth cries told him exactly where to find her. His hand was on her shoulder before he’d stopped to think of whether there might be some more proper way to do this with a lady. “Lydia.” He shook her gently. “Lydia.” He found her other shoulder and shook with both hands.
She came awake with an awful gasp, sitting straight up and nearly knocking him in the face. Her hands scrabbled at his as though she believed she were being overrun by great spiders.
“Lydia.” He took a tighter grip. “Nothing’s the matter. It was only a nightmare.”
“I don’t know where I am.” The panic in her voice was like a bayonet plunged straight into his conscience.
“You’re at Chiswell. Mr. Roanoke’s house. But in Mr. Blackshear’s room.” He needed a second to gather the next words, and her rapid breathing filled the silence. “There was a wager. Do you remember?”
She breathed. “I …” He could feel the force of effort with which she mastered herself. “Yes. I remember.” Somehow her hands had ended up on his wrists, clamped tight as if he were all that stood between her and drowning. She loosened her grip now, and let her hands fall away. “I woke you. I’m sorry.”
“I’m the one sorry.” He found her forehead with the knuckles of one hand. Damp. “It’s disconcerting to wake in a strange place. I oughtn’t to have brought you here.”
“Yes. Well.” She pulled away from him and lay back down. “You’re paying now, aren’t you?” Thank God for her pertness: it was just the salve his bayoneted conscience required.
“I suppose I am at that.” He sank to the floor again and waited for her breathing to lengthen.
But scarcely had he dropped back into slumber, or so it seemed, when the same desperate sounds started up again. Lord above, he’d thought he’d left nights like this behind him when he’d sold out. He hauled himself to his knees and got his arm across her to stop her springing up.
“It’s Mr. Blackshear,” he said this time as soon as she woke. “You’re in my room. I gave you my bed. You’re safe. I woke you because you’re having a nightmare.”
Her chest heaved under his arm, but she didn’t scrabble at him this time. “I’m sorry,” she said again as soon as she’d come to herself.
“Don’t be.” He could feel the way she grew calmer. The reassurance he gave, and she took. “Is this common for you?”
“Sometimes.” Embarrassment muted the word. “I often sleep in daylight.”
“I see.” He let his hand go to her forehead again, and pushed back a few damp strands of hair. “Would you like me to light the candles? I could sit up with you. I might find some cards.”
“No. Thank you. I’ll be fine. Thank you.”
He might have argued with a single thank you, but two added up to a dismissal. He withdrew and rolled himself up in his blanket.
A pack mule on a three-day march could not be so bone-weary as he was. Still, he didn’t go to sleep. And when the third nightmare started he climbed right into the bed and folded her in one arm. “It’s Will,” he said, near her ear. “You’re in my room. Nothing can hurt you here. Go back to sleep.”
She woke, just barely. The twitching and the thwarted cries stopped. Her breaths sounded, shallow at first and then deeper, slower, as her body went limp in his arm. Against his chest. Lord only knew where she thought she was, or with whom. It didn’t matter. He wanted nothing in the world but this: to be someone’s balm, to have the power of comforting, to know he kept her safe from whatever terrors haunted her sleep.
Such peculiar creatures, human beings. He had thought it was only men who managed their torments so, cramming them into some closet at the back of the brain from which they poured forth to run rampant at night. He would think more on it in the morning. Perhaps they’d discuss it then. He was so tired.
He didn’t go back to the floor. He slept when she did, and he woke when she needed him to wake, and again and again he reminded her of the same few facts. Chiswell. Will Blackshear. It was a nightmare. You’re safe. By the time the sun was rising some bit of her mind had retained enough that he need only tighten his arm at the first stirrings and murmur the single word safe. Then she’d sigh, and slacken, and be at peace. And so would he.
SHE WOKE in a bed that was not her own. That was the first odd thing. The linens felt different and sunlight came in at the wrong angle. If she were to open her eyes she would see strange wallpaper. She held still, and kept her eyes shut.
The second odd thing was the weight of an arm laid across her. She lay on her side. The arm indicated someone was lying behind her, and for all the times she’d had a man in her bed, she did not sleep or wake up with one there. Though this wasn’t, as had already been established, her bed. Things must have gone awry in consequence.
The third odd thing … Oh, the third odd thing. She pressed her lips together and drew in as deep a breath as she could, to fill all her perception with the third odd thing. Her brain clamored to name it and to declare, like a gossip, what it meant, to whom it belonged, but she would not make room in her perception for that. There would be only the scent, during these seconds she’d come up out of the ocean of sleep. She would fill her lungs—one more deep breath—and submerge herself again, beyond the reach of whatever all this meant.
“You’re awake.” His voice was soft but clear. Its tone suggested he himself had been awake for some time. The words vibrated in his chest, which touched her back.
“I’m so tired.” She let her eyes open part of the way. There was a hand. He had his right arm about her middle, his left laid over the pillow above her head. That couldn’t be comfortable. “Do you know the time?”
“Past noon, I think. My watch is in the dressing room.” His ribcage pressed and receded with a breath. “You slept poorly.”
“So did you, I fear.” She sounded shy. Like a bride who’d gone to her wedding bed a virgin, fumbling for things to say to her husband on the morning after. Not like herself.
“You’re wrong.” He might have been waking up after a wedding night himself, to judge by the warm satisfaction in his voice. “I didn’t sleep as long as I might like, nor as deeply. But I can’t remember when I slept so well.”
There was an erection. Ordinarily she would have noticed that first out of everything. Her whole body had been gathered in against his, with only the cotton of her nightgown and his nightshirt, two modest layers, between them. With his arousal between them as well. It pressed hard and redoubtable against her. She wouldn’t speak of it. “How long have you been awake?”
A Gentleman Undone Page 19