The Duke of Hearts (The Highwaymen #2)

Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

“ADAMS, ADAMS,” DUNROSE was saying. He was looking better these days, but that wasn’t saying much. His eyes were no longer bloodshot from vomiting, and he had some color to his face these days. But he was still sweaty and too thin. His chest was bare, as he was wearing nothing but a pair of stained smallclothes. His skin clung to his bones. He had been confined to this bedroom at Arthford’s estate for weeks now.

They’d first tried to get Dunrose off the laudanum at Knotterly, Dunrose’s estate in Kent, but the servants all did Dunrose’s bidding there, so any time he managed to get alone with a servant, they were bringing him the stuff.

When Arthford found this out, he had insisted they leave and come here, and Dunrose had actually agreed. He had claimed he didn’t even want to be free of the laudanum, but then, when he realized how difficult it was to get free of it, something in him had changed. He spoke about it now as if it was something separate from him, a demon that took charge of his mind and spoke in his own voice. A possession, he said, his own will used against him. He wanted free of it, and he was intent on fighting.

“You remember,” said Arthford. “We went to that weekend in Briar Abbey once. It was going to be some debauchery of cards and drinking and the like, and then we got there, and the man was charging admittance to look at his daughter.”

“Oh, yes,” said Dunrose. “I do remember now.”

“Because you did it, obviously. You paid the man.”

Dunrose scratched his bare stomach. He was too skinny and getting thinner. He wasn’t eating. He looked sickly and pale. His stomach was flat and white and his dark hair stood out in stark relief against his pasty skin. “I suppose I did, yes. We weren’t allowed to fuck her, though, wasn’t that right?”

“It was a matter of time,” said Arthford. “Because men were offering Mr. Adams ridiculous amounts of money. Get rich men very drunk and have some bit of female flesh on display that’s untouchable, and they’re putty in your hands. He was going to do it, whore her out.”

“You’re just telling yourself that because you feel guilty about killing him, aren’t you?” said Dunrose. “You did kill him, didn’t you? It wasn’t Rutchester. He wasn’t with us.”

“Just you and me,” said Arthford.

“Not going to admit you killed him.”

“With my own hands,” said Arthford, sighing. “I didn’t mean to get into a discussion of it, truly. I was just explaining where I was, that’s all. She came to see me.”

“Yes, you said she was here.” Dunrose paused, as if reminiscing. “She was good at it, you know, at the whole gambit, at the way she removed things, a little bit at a time, very slowly, starting to reveal the most naughty bits and then covering them before you could really see anything. You’d have to wonder who taught her that. You think it was him, Mr. Adams, teaching his daughter so he could make money off her in that way?”

“I can’t see who else it would have been.”

“Good you killed him,” said Dunrose.

“I suppose.”

Dunrose gave Arthford a grin that looked out of place on his too-thin, pale face. He looked too sickly to be that insouciant. “You’re probably just jealous because you never paid to see her without her clothes. Wishing you had my memory of it, are you? I could describe it all, in excruciating detail.”

“Oh, please, that’s appalling,” said Arthford, who had actually been a bit surprised at himself. When he’d been at Briar Abbey that time, he’d had Seraphine with him, and he hadn’t been the least bit interested in seeing any woman’s body besides Seraphine’s ever since he’d first clapped eyes on the Marchioness de Fateux.

So, it had surprised him when he’d had the urge today to look at Miss Adams with an eye to assessing her attractiveness. He hadn’t looked at a woman like that in a long time. Sometimes, he sort of noticed, he supposed, that women were attractive, but he wasn’t rightly attracted himself. He was consumed with Seraphine, only Seraphine, always Seraphine.

Now, Seraphine was done with him, however. She’d made it exceedingly clear that she never wished to see him again, that she never wished to touch him or kiss him or have him in her bed. She’d been clear. She’d been cruel. She’d made fun of him.

But he didn’t wish to think about that. He never wished to think about that. He couldn’t bear it.

Anyway, there was Miss Adams, and she was pretty.

He hadn’t found a woman who wasn’t Seraphine pretty in years, nearly a decade.

He didn’t even know what to do with the feeling.

And it was appalling.

“I don’t know how appalling it is,” said Dunrose. “She seemed to be enjoying herself. She’d stop and ask for more coin, and whenever we tossed it to her, she seemed quite, quite pleased, and then—”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Dunrose,” said Arthford. “It’s just the same as Rutchester, isn’t it? When you have that sort of thing done to you, you’re broken in some essential way.”

“Well, she’s not broken like Rutchester,” said Dunrose.

“Well, it wasn’t as bad,” said Arthford with a shrug.

“Right,” said Dunrose, thinking that through.

“I mean, who’s to say what’s bad, I suppose,” said Arthford. “I think I’m going to help her.”

“You already helped her,” said Dunrose. “What are you going to do now? Who else are you going to kill for her?”

“I’m not going to kill anyone,” said Arthford. “But I think I’ll need to leave you on your own for a night to do what I need to do. Are you going to attempt to get someone to get you laudanum if I’m not here?”

“Why are you asking me this?” said Dunrose. “You know it doesn’t matter what I say now. Even if I feel determined against such action at this point, a craving could come and grip me and I would not care about anything except soothing that awful pain inside me that wants it.”

“Right,” said Arthford. “So, you’re saying I shouldn’t go.”

“Lock me in,” said Dunrose. “I wish you to lock me in and tell your servants not to do any of my bidding.”

“I shall,” said Arthford.

MARJORIE RODE BACK , sorting through her feelings with a growing kind of dread that was bordering on panic. She’d sort of thought that she might be immune to, erm, to that.

Love.

Or attraction of that sort, anyway. She’d observed it before, of course, observed it at the behest of her own drunken and maddened father, who’d forced her to do things for money that had been dreadful. But she herself had never felt such a pull, not something so wild that she would pay for the privilege of experiencing it, that was for certain.

She didn’t think it was the fault of her father that she didn’t feel such things, though, because she hadn’t really felt them before.

Admittedly, she’d been young the first time her father had paraded her in front of his friends. Those first times, she hadn’t had to do anything or remove any articles of clothing. He hadn’t asked the men for money then, either.

Though her father had profited from it, she didn’t think that her father’s primary motivation in using her thus had even been financial. It was some awfulness inside him, instead. He had liked owning her, showing her off, having something that other men coveted.

Maybe it was a sickness of the soul that was fed by his drinking, though. He was worse in that way when he was drunk.

Anyway, maybe not feeling attraction to anyone at all, it had been her father’s fault, just because of being leered at by men when she was but fourteen. She couldn’t quite say.

But she had always been a tomboy, not interested in anything that girls were usually interested in. She had never liked dresses or playing the piano-forte or learning the proper etiquette at tea parties. She would much rather be outdoors, horseback, exploring what she could discover on the grounds surrounding Briar Abbey.

Her father was landed gentry, but he had no title. He only owned this house, and they likely should never have even hobnobbed with dukes, but by then her father was doing all manner of awful things to make money, and having her show herself off was only one of them.

The money went back into the drink, always into more ale and more liquor.

She had never been attracted to men. She’d even toyed, for some time, with the idea of maybe being herself a man, sort of a man, anyway, and if she were a man, she would be attracted to women, wouldn’t she?

But there was nothing appealing about that idea, in all truth. She didn’t want to touch women the way men wanted to touch her.

However, she’d never really wanted anything from men either. She certainly had never thought she wanted any of those men’s hands on her.

But now, thinking about the distractingly interesting bare forearms of the Duke of Arthford, she wondered what it would be like if it were him, with his startlingly blue eyes and his remarkably square jaw. Would she like him to touch her?

Oh, dear.

Well, this was all very troublesome, she thought as she rode. Her mother had died when she was only ten years old, died trying to bring a little boy child into the world, but the babe had died, too. Her father, in the way of men, had been more upset over the loss of a son than over his dead wife.

But anyway, her mother, when she was alive, used to wrap an arm around little Marjorie’s shoulders, and tell her that it would come to her one day. “One day, my sweet little girl, you’ll understand it. You’ll want to be pretty and you’ll want to wear dresses and it will all make sense. One day.”

But that day had never come, actually, so Marjorie had thought that it wasn’t going to come.

And now. The Duke of Arthford and his damnable forearms!

Well, luckily she’d realized it while it was happening. She hadn’t really come here for help. She’d just heard his name and come up with some excuse to see him, that was all. She had never been in love before, and she expected she wouldn’t be after this, either, for she didn’t regularly see men except the boys who came in and out of the house with her nephew.

So, this would fade, right? That was what happened with love.

This would fade, and she would have experienced it, and it would all go away.

Yes.

Quite.