Chapter 4
The attic door was small and roundish, low enough for Stephen to duck his head as he went through, dragging Amelia behind her.
It occurred to her that perhaps she should have struggled more.
Too late now.
The attic was a large, airy room, with huge windows letting in swathes of light.
The floorboards were bare, but old furniture was scattered everywhere, most of it covered in dust sheets.
There were chairs, tables, a sofa, and even what appeared to be a daybed in the corner. A person could live up here.
A cold shiver skittered down her spine.
“You intend to keep me prisoner?” she sputtered. “Are you mad?”
He folded his arms tightly, standing between her and the door. As she watched, he lifted his heel and kicked the door shut. It closed with an ominous click.
Was there a lock on the outside? Yes, she believed there was.
“Mad? No. Furious? Yes,” he answered.
“If you want m-me to r-retrieve your watch, you w-will have t-to let me go home,” Amelia stammered. “I can get it from Marjory, just—”
“Your thieving family will pay for what you did to me,” he spat, each word laced with venom.
Amelia blinked, taken aback. There was real rage in his eyes, and a vein throbbed in the side of his neck.
All this for a pocket watch? One that I promised to give back?
“Don’t talk about my family,” Amelia snapped, her voice tight. “You don’t know us. You don’t know what we’ve been through.”
“No, I don’t know you,” he responded tartly. “I should have known from the moment I read your sister’s name in that notebook. I thought it an odd coincidence, but I didn’t understand. I didn’t see.”
Amelia paled, taking a step back.
No. Surely he cannot know. He cannot know our secret.
“I have no idea what you are speaking of,” she said, her voice trembling.
He smiled grimly. “Oh, no? I think perhaps you do.”
In the blink of an eye, he closed the space between them, leaning over her, close enough to fill her senses with heat and the heady scent of sandalwood and leather, of all things.
“Why don’t you tell me a thing or two about your family then?” he breathed. “Tell me. I want to know.”
She held his gaze, swallowing hard. This couldn’t be real. It had to be a dream.
Yes, that was it. At any moment now, she would wake up, tangled in the sheets in her too-hot bedroom, probably with Nancy having crawled into bed with her sometime during the night. She would wake up as usual and go to work. An ordinary routine for an ordinary day.
She couldn’t be here, in this place, with this odd and confusing man who made her feel afraid one minute and… and not afraid the next.
The feeling did not seem to have a name just yet. Perhaps that was for the best.
“My family?” she repeated, her voice flat. “You know, don’t you? Or at least suspect.”
He held her gaze. “Holt is not a rare name, after all.”
Amelia abruptly turned away. She found herself drawn toward the large windows, like a moth to flame.
“My family is Marjory and Nancy, my sisters,” she stated. “There was Mama, too, but she died months ago. They are my family.”
“And the rest?” he prompted. “Your father?”
“I have told you who my family is. The rest do not matter. Needless to say, we have been shunned by them.”
“Who is them?”
She rounded on him. “Did you plan this all along? I don’t understand you. Do you care about your father’s pocket watch at all? Do you simply want to torture me and keep me imprisoned? Or perhaps Marjory has been in your sights all along. Don’t glare at me, sir. I think I can demand a few answers.”
Stephen glanced away, a muscle twitching in his cheek. He clenched his jaw until she was sure she could hear his teeth click.
“All will be explained in due course,” he said. “Needless to say, I put a few things together. I don’t mean you harm, believe it or not. I don’t mean to harm your sister, either. But I must have answers, and you’ll give them to me, or you’ll stay here. Do you understand?”
She stared up at him, trying desperately to read his face.
That was a skill she’d learned at the modiste’s. It wasn’t just about sewing. It was about making sure a customer who bought something on credit would actually pay and not take the gown, unpick some stitches, tear the fabric, and claim it had been given that way.
Some people were very good at lying, but there was always something to give them away. One just had to know what one was looking for.
“If I tell you who my family is, I will lose even more than I have already.”
His gaze sharpened. He took a step closer. Now, they were practically chest to chest.
Amelia’s breath came hard, her chest rising and falling rapidly. Heat radiated from him, heating her up. She imagined her blood boiling in her veins. Perhaps that would account for the strange tightness of her skin and the knot in her gut.
“Tell me who your family is, or you will never escape this place,” Stephen whispered. His voice seemed to grate in her ears, sharp and low at the same time.
She closed her eyes. “My sisters and I are… are related to the Viscount St. Louis.”
There was a long silence.
Was this what he’d wanted? What he’d expected to hear?
When she opened her eyes, Stephen was staring down at her, his eyes wide, almost frantic. As soon as their gazes met, his face shuttered. Abruptly, he turned away.
“As I thought,” he muttered. “Their family name is Holt. I imagine you know that the old Viscount is dead, leaving his son to take his place. He died about half a year ago.”
“Y-Yes, I know,” Amelia stammered.
“Can I assume that you and your sisters are the Viscount’s bastards? The old Viscount, that is.”
She flinched at that awful word. Bastard. There wasn’t a thing one could do about it once one had been born with that word attached.
“Yes,” she answered, almost dazedly. “They would call us bastards, yes. They’d call Mama a whore, too, if they knew the truth.
There isn’t a word for our father, though, is there?
He’s just a man doing what he wants, living an ordinary life.
But we… we live a life of secrecy and humiliation. Is that fair?”
“Fair? Of course not. I never said it was fair, never pretended that it was fair. The fairness of your situation does not concern me.”
Her anger flared. “You say that, but you seem very interested in other aspects of my situation, as you put it.”
He gave a grim, close-lipped smile. “I’m curious as to how daughters of the Viscount St. Louis are poor enough to work as seamstresses and steal.”
“I am a dressmaker,” Amelia spat, jabbing a finger at him.
Her anger did not seem to faze him. If anything, he seemed more amused.
“And if you must know, we lived a fairly comfortable life when our father was still alive. We were not wealthy, but we did not need to work. Everything was fine, except for the shame of who we were. Then our father died.”
She did not elaborate.
Stephen blinked, some of the anger fading from his eyes.
“You have a brother,” he said.
She breathed out. “Yes, I do.”
“Do you see him? Know anything about him?”
Amelia scoffed. “They say blood is thicker than water. From what I’ve seen of my brother, the only thing that runs in his veins is wine. I have a brother, technically, but I do not have one, if you understand.”
He pursed his lips, nodding thoughtfully. “I understand.”
“Now…” She took a step forward, folding her arms. “Why don’t you tell me how you know so much about my family? What connection do you have to Viscount St. Louis?”
There was a long silence before he responded, long enough for Amelia to think that he wasn’t going to answer her at all. When he did finally speak, there was a rough, strange edge to his voice, as though he were holding back a powerful rush of fury.
“The Viscount once took everything from me,” he murmured. “Everything.”
She frowned. “Your money? I don’t understand.”
“I do not want you to understand. It’s better that you don’t. I didn’t bring you here to pry into my private affairs.”
“No, apparently you brought me here to poke around in my ancestry,” she responded sarcastically.
Anger flashed in his eyes, a pure gleam of green fire.
Before she could blink, his fingers had wrapped around her wrist again, hauling her toward him.
She bounced off his chest, as before, but this time he did not let her stagger back.
The muscles in his arm bulged, straining against the material of his jacket sleeve.
Again, his grip was not bruising. She already knew there’d be no marks where his fingers had pressed into her flesh, but she also could not wriggle free. There was an odd cool warmth to his flesh, not too cold and not too hot, but certainly not clammy, either.
Perhaps the temperature of his skin explained why goosebumps ran across her own skin when he touched her.
“I wondered for a long time how I should get back at him,” he whispered, his voice catching in his throat. “Perhaps if I took his sister, we would be even.”
Amelia’s eyes widened. “You aren’t talking of taking revenge on my father, are you? It’s my brother you hate.”
A slow, vulpine smile cut across his face. This close, she could see flecks of gold in his clear green eyes. She could trace the kink in his nose with her gaze and found herself, shockingly, longing to trace it with her fingertip.
“Clever,” he remarked idly, loosening his grip enough for her to wrench her arm away.
“Hardly,” she shot back. “It’s a simple deduction.
I ought to tell you not to make it public that the new Viscount and I are siblings.
Perhaps you seek to humiliate him, but you will only succeed in humiliating us.
Men can weather such scandals, you know.
As for my sisters and me, he…” She paused, swallowing hard in a last-ditch attempt to compose herself. “He will ruin us, quite frankly.”
Stephen blinked, a faint line appearing between his brows. It was as if he had not expected to hear this.
“Ruin you?” he echoed.