She wasn’t for him.
That mouth wasn’t for him. It didn’t matter that he’d kissed it less than a week earlier.
“Do you remember the first time we ever spoke?” The soft question distracted him and he met her eyes, no longer on his wound, but now on him.
Heroically, he pulled away from her touch, putting space between them. “You were doing your best to scandalize a battalion of matchmaking mothers.”
She smiled and shook her head. “I mean the first time we ever spoke alone, but I am impressed that you remember our first meeting.”
He remembered every minute he’d ever spent in her company, unfortunately. And he knew what she was about to say. The memory she was about to invoke, even though he thought of it so often it barely felt like memory.
Sesily Talbot, inveterate flirt. Teasing him with a hint of what they might have if he gave in to temptation.
You see how good it would be. Like it was inevitable.
And it had been terrifying in its temptation.
But he couldn’t admit that he remembered it. That way lay a path to destruction. So, instead, he said, “You set a feral cat on me.”
“Brummell doesn’t like men,” she said offhandedly, as she finished her work at his brow. She tilted her head, and Caleb imagined she saw the truth and was disappointed in him. “Do you have a mistress?”
“What?”
“Am I keeping you from someone?”
Tell her yes.
It was an easy escape.
“No.”
She studied him for a long moment, and he wondered what she would do. He’d spent a lifetime priding himself on his understanding of other people—on being able to predict their actions. And somehow, he could never see Sesily Talbot coming.
After a careful inspection, she seemed satisfied with his answer. She nodded once and turned, heading for the far side of the bed.
He took it as his cue, making his way around the room, extinguishing the candles she’d left burning, until there was only one left, on the table next to the bed. The bed she was now in.
Ignoring the way the realization sizzled through him, heightening each of his senses, Caleb found a chair by the dwindling fire, extending his legs before he said, “I shall be here if you need me.”
“I’m sure it will be—”
“Nevertheless, I don’t want you to have to search a strange house if you require assistance,” he grumbled, crossing his arms over his chest. “The last thing I need to explain to your sister is how you broke your neck in my home in the dead of night.”
He hated himself a bit as the irritated words hung in the silence.
An eternity passed before she said, “I am very grateful for your help this evening.”
“It was—”
“Yes, I know,” she cut him off, and it was impossible to miss the curt irritation in her words. “It was the least you could do for your friend.” It was what he should have said, if not what he would have said, and so he stayed quiet until she added, “I don’t suppose I could convince you not to tell my sister about tonight? I would appreciate being spared a lecture.”
“I expect she’d have one for me, too.”
“Maybe,” she replied, and he thought he heard a smile in her tone. “But mine will be worse.”
Her anger and frustration from earlier echoed, and he wanted to ease it even as he knew he shouldn’t. “You weren’t reckless.”
The silence that stretched between them wasn’t easy. It was full of awareness, as though she hovered in the low light, listening, waiting for more. He refused to look in her direction.
“You were …” He trailed off, regretting ever starting.
After a long moment—an age—she said, “What was I?”
He searched for the answer. Finally settled on, “You were Athena.”
More silence. Easy this time.
“I won’t tell your sister.”
A long, slow breath from across the room, like a gift. Then a quiet, “Thank you.”
He willed it to be the last thing she said that evening. He wasn’t sure he could take more.
And then, in the darkness, “Why do you have so many candles?”
He shouldn’t respond. Every question this woman asked brought them closer, when it was absolutely imperative that he keep them apart. When the answers to them threatened to reveal more than he’d ever shared with anyone.
And still, knowing all that, he said, “I don’t like the dark.”
She didn’t reply for a long time, long enough for him to think she’d fallen asleep. And then, “I shall leave this one burning, then.”
He sat in the dim light, the single candle flickering at her bedside, painting shadows on the ceiling, and he considered all the reasons he shouldn’t be in that room. All the reasons he shouldn’t be anywhere near Sesily Talbot ever again.
She was his friend’s sister.
And she was unmarried.
And she was the purest form of temptation.
I know precisely what you want. But I am willing to wait for you to discover it yourself. The words she’d whispered outside the tavern earlier in the evening, a promise. A temptation. An invitation.
One he wanted to accept. One that promised another taste of her. A taste that maybe would be enough. A taste that—maybe—would clear her from his thoughts.
Because she would never, ever be for him.
Never.
“Caleb?”
He sighed. But did she have to say his name like that? In the darkness? Like it was just the two of them in the wide world? “Hmm?”
“You’re not keeping me from anyone, either.”
The words might have shocked another man, but they didn’t shock him, and he didn’t think they were meant to. She was a grown woman long off the marriage mart, and he didn’t fool himself into believing that she’d never had a lover. But still—“Why would you tell me that?”
“I thought you might like to know.”
It was an invitation, and it sizzled through him, making him ache with want. In all his life, he didn’t think he’d ever heard anything he liked so much.
But he didn’t wish to like it. And he certainly didn’t wish to know that Sesily spent her nights alone, just as he did.
Knowing that made him want to rectify the situation.
And long ago, long before he’d known Sesily Talbot, he’d made choices that made a future with her—with anyone—impossible.
Still, he thought about her words all night long, playing them over and over in his head until the candle burned to its end, flickering out just before dawn streaked across the sky, and he vowed to be done with Sesily Talbot that very day.
You’re in a foul mood.”
Caleb looked up from where he polished the ebony bar of The Singing Sparrow, to meet the eyes of Seraphina Bevingstoke, Duchess of Haven—his business partner and the only person he knew brave enough to comment on his foul mood.
Well, one of only two people.
The other one had put him in the foul mood, but he wasn’t about to admit that. To Sera or to himself.
In fact, he’d spent the morning telling himself that his mood was because he’d fallen asleep in that uncomfortable chair in his bedchamber, resulting in a wicked crick in his neck, and not because when he’d woken with said crick in neck, Sesily had been gone.
Skulked out at the crack of dawn what must have been minutes after he finally slept, somehow collecting her dress and letting herself out of the house without notice.
Presumably to skulk into her own house sometime later.
It should have made him happy. After all, the only time worse than the dead of night to return an injured woman to her home on the most coveted block in Mayfair was first thing in the morning. And Sesily had saved Caleb the trouble.
It was sorted.
He never had to think of the woman again.
“I’m not in a foul mood,” he said to her sister, returning his attention to the gleaming wood. �
�I’m busy.”
She looked up from the crate of candles she was unpacking. “At half past nine in the morning.”
“People are busy at half past nine in the morning.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” she retorted. “I have a business and a child. By half past nine in the morning, I’m ready for luncheon.”
He sighed, then looked to her. “Then what is the problem?”
“You are never busy at half past nine in the morning. And if you are—it’s for one of two reasons. One.” She lifted an imperious finger. “You’ve not yet been to bed, or two”—a second snapped up to match the first—“you’re in a foul mood.”
His gaze narrowed on her. “You know, I am beginning to feel a mood coming on. I wonder why that would be.”
She grinned. “Me, likely.”
“I’ve never liked you.”
“Watch it, Calhoun.”
Caleb’s gaze flickered over Seraphina’s shoulder to land on her husband, seated where he always was when Sera was here—at the table by the door, spectacles on, poring over a pile of documents. “I’ve really never liked him.”
The duke didn’t look up. “The feeling is mutual, American.”
Caleb turned away and headed for the stockroom at the far end of the tavern, intending to move a few dozen heavy boxes from one side of the room to the other in a bid to avoid conversation.
Sera had other plans, following him.
He opened the door to the stockroom to discover that it was not empty. Inside, Fetu Mamoe, The Singing Sparrow’s second-in-command, looked up from where he was shifting crates of booze from one side of the room to the other. He turned and looked to Caleb, then Sera. “What’s he doing here?”
“I own the place!” Caleb retorted.
The Samoan’s brows rose.
“He’s in a foul mood,” Sera pointed out. “Which is why he appears to have forgotten that we, also, own the place.”
When they’d opened the tavern two years earlier—Caleb’s first and only business on British soil—he and Seraphina had done so as equal partners. Not soon after, they’d hired Fetu away from his cargo hook on the docks, and he’d made the place infinitely better. Within months, they’d offered him a percentage of The Singing Sparrow’s take. And now, years later, the business thrived in large part to Fetu’s calm presence and keen ability to keep it running like a well-oiled timepiece.
“He also appears to have forgotten that we own the place all year round, and not only when we feel like turning up in London.”
“I turn up in London when you ask me to!” Caleb argued.
“Well, that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be nice to see you more frequently,” Sera quipped.
Caleb ignored her, turning to his other partner. “Alright, Fetu?”
Fetu nodded. “Alright.” He handed Caleb a crate of gin before pointing to the far side of the room. “Over there.”
Grateful for the distraction, Caleb did as he was told. But when he turned back, it was to discover that Seraphina had taken up residence in the stockroom doorway. Accepting another crate from Fetu, Caleb did his best to ignore her.
Unfortunately, it seemed that one of the family traits of the Talbot sisters was an inability to be ignored. He moved two more crates before he gave in. “Goddammit, Sera. What?”
Dark brows rose, and she turned a knowing look on Fetu.
“Say I’m in a foul mood one more time,” Caleb warned.
She rested her hands over her increasing midsection. “I can’t watch you move things about like a brute? In shirtsleeves as well; we could sell tickets.”
Fetu snorted a laugh.
Caleb clenched his teeth and headed for more crates. “If you hadn’t married a duke, you could ask your husband to move things in shirtsleeves for your entertainment.”
“The fact that he’s a duke makes it all even more entertaining.”
Caleb rolled his eyes and hefted a cask of whiskey onto his shoulder and approached, feeling irrationally pleased when she had to move out of the doorway to let him pass. “Funny how you say you’re busy,” he grumbled, returning to the bar and setting the oak barrel to the ground to work the cork out of its seat. “Feels like you’ve got nothing to do.”
“Mmm,” she replied noncommittally, installing herself at the edge of his vision, in the path of his escape. “What happened to your head?”
“Nothing.” He resisted the urge to touch the wound that Sesily had tended the evening before. In his bedchamber. Where he’d resisted a different, baser urge to defile her.
He certainly wasn’t telling her sister that.
“Looks like something,” Fetu called from inside the stockroom.
The two of them were enjoying irritating him.
“It’s nothing,” Caleb said.
“Mmm,” Sera said again. “Do you know, I heard something fascinating this morning.”
He popped the cork and reached for an unused tap. “Scandal at the dressmaker’s?”
“You know, you really are so droll, Caleb. I never tire at your endless amusement at the expense of my title.”
“It’s not your title I mock. It’s the world it comes with.”
“You like the way that world spends money here.”
“Indeed, I do.” Ensuring the tap was seated and sealed, he hefted the cask once more and slid it into place on the strong shelf behind the bar.
“Anyway, as I said, I heard something fascinating.”
“Technically, I heard it,” Fetu said from the doorway.
“Fair enough.”
“And the two of you had a nice gossip this morning before I turned up?”
“Amazing that we exist when you are not on the page, isn’t it?” Sera retorted, and if Caleb had been less in his head, he might have heard the edge in her words. She looked to Fetu. “Would you like to tell him?”
“Nah,” he replied, looking very comfortable against the doorjamb. “I’ll watch.”
“Word is, The Bully Boys raided Maggie O’Tiernen’s last night.”
Caleb froze, his hands still on the front of the oak barrel.
“Word also is …” Here it was. “That you were at Maggie O’Tiernen’s last night.”
“Word from who?” He looked to Fetu.
The big man shrugged a heavy shoulder. “A woman I know.”
“Biblically, no doubt.”
“A gentleman never tells.”
“He tells my business, though, don’t he?” Caleb retorted.
That shrug again, as Sera added sweetly, “Not just your business though, because … and this is the really strange thing … I heard you carried my unconscious sister out of there.”
He looked to the ceiling. “Fucking hell.”
And then Sera wasn’t enjoying it. She was furious. “Fucking hell is right!” He turned to face her as she came for him, setting both her hands on his chest and shoving him backward.
He let her, but not without an aggrieved, “Hey! Watch it!”
“No, I don’t think I will watch it! You’re lucky I don’t crack you over the head with one of these bottles!”
“Sera …” her husband said, from a distance, barely looking up from his work. “Gentle.”
Caleb didn’t imagine the Duke of Haven was suggesting she be gentle for his sake. He spread his hands wide as she kept coming for him. “Nothing happened.”
She stilled, tall and beautiful as a queen, and looked at him like he’d grown a second head. “Nothing happened.”
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Mal?” She looked past Caleb toward her husband at the door. “If I murder him …”
“I know people,” Haven said, unconcerned with their argument. He might not like Caleb personally, but he knew that Sera was safe with him.
“Please,” Caleb replied. “She doesn’t need your people. These two have a clear line to half the criminals in Covent Garden.”
Sera returned her attention to him. “Any number of
whom would happily see an American tossed into the Thames like tea, I’ll remind you, so I’d be very careful with how you play this.”
Fetu laughed again and Caleb threw him a look over his shoulder. “You’re a traitor.”
“I admit, I enjoy the theater.”
Caleb rolled his eyes and Sera said, “Nothing happened?”
“Nothing,” Caleb repeated.
“Caleb, was my sister unconscious at The Place?”
He froze. “Yes.”
She nodded. “And when you carried her from there, she remained unconscious?”
“Yes.”
“And that is when you packed her into a carriage and drove off with her.”
He looked to Fetu. “Your girl really pays close attention.”
“I’m thinking of keeping her.”
“So you did drive off with her,” Sera said, “because that was the bit that I found most fascinating, because at no point last night was I awakened by you turning up to deliver my injured sister into my care.”
“Sera, I—”
“Mal?” she asked without looking away from Caleb.
“Yes, love?”
Caleb crossed his arms over his chest as Sera replied, “Were you awakened last night by Caleb turning up to deliver my injured sister into our care?”
“No, love.”
“The two of you really ought to take this charming patter to the stage,” Caleb said, dryly.
She looked to him. “I ought to punch you in the gob.”
“Not in your condition,” Haven warned.
“He has a point,” Caleb pointed out. “You really shouldn’t be exerting yourself, looking the way you do.”
Fetu coughed.
Sera tilted her head. “Oh? How, exactly, do I look?”
The words were a warning Caleb didn’t immediately understand. “As though you might produce a babe at any moment.”
Haven looked up from his work then and said, happily, “Mistake, that, American.”
Sera narrowed her gaze on him. “I assure you, Calhoun, I’m more than able to produce a babe and deliver you a facer for taking my sister to God knows where, unconscious—”
“She wasn’t unconscious for long. She came to in the carriage.”
“Ah, well,” Sera said dramatically, “then you took my sister to God knows where, conscious, after a recent bout of unconsciousness.”
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