Chapter Seven #2
“Though I should warn you, no one has ever gotten the better of me, Miss Woodville.”
“Likewise, Mr. Marchand.” She had no idea if this was true, but she liked the way it sounded.
He paused, seeming to consider what he was about to say. “Did you actually think it would work? Confronting the earl about
the debt? Asking for the money back?”
“God, no. Not for one minute. I felt like an idiot. And I felt like an idiot at Lucifer’s Fall, too. What do you take me for?”
He stared at her. “I honestly have no idea.” He sounded grimly bemused. And as if he were talking to himself.
“If a tiger chased you up to the edge of a gorge that was about, oh, fifteen feet wide, wider than you’ve ever jumped before,
Mr. Marchand, and your choices were either giving up and being eaten by a tiger or attempting to leap to the other side, what
would you do?”
“I would seize his whiskers and give them a tug. I hear they don’t like that.”
She fixed him with a quelling glare.
“Leap,” he admitted tersely. “Always leap.”
“Exactly.”
Thusly two leapers frowned at each other, wary of, and not precisely pleased by, this tenuous evidence of some sort of accord.
“So . . . more desperate than mad, but a little of both,” he said half to himself, as if he’d finally decided upon the answer
to her “what do you take me for” question. “Miss Woodville, whether you know it or not, you’re as much of a gambler as any
man who walks into Lucifer’s Fall.”
She went warily still, as though he’d winkled out yet another one of her secrets. She hadn’t quite thought of herself that
way before. Perhaps taking risks ran in the family?
“I recognize a negotiation technique when I see one, by the way,” he added somewhat grimly. “I know you asked for the impossible
first when you came to my office.”
“Guilty as charged, I suppose,” she said. “But! Look where it got me.” She couldn’t suppress a note of marvel in her voice.
“All I need to do is get the vase for him.”
“Do you actually know where this vase is?”
“Haven’t a clue. See, you couldn’t tell I was lying, could you?”
At this news, his hands went up to grip his head as though he were afraid it was going to launch from his neck.
He lowered them with some apparent effort.
She gave a start when he put two fingers against his lips and whistled sharply.
She hadn’t even noticed the hack approaching. At last.
The carriage pulled to a halt. The horses snorted softly, and shook their heads, sending their tack jingling.
When Marchand reached across her to pull open its door, she took a few steps backward, into the street.
Suddenly he lunged toward her and seized her by the waist.
She shrieked. “What the devil are you—So help me God, if you don’t unhand me, I’ll—”
He lifted and deposited her neatly, and more or less gently, on the carriage seat.
“You’ll do what? Dispatch me with that knitting needle you have tucked in your sleeve?”
She froze and stared at him.
“Ah, sir, er, madam. Is everything . . .” The driver nervously called down.
“We’re fine,” they replied in irritated unison.
“Look down, Miss Woodville.”
Rattled, she peered where Marchand pointed.
And beheld a little tower of horse manure, surrounded by a moat of urine. A common feature of London streets.
She would have stepped right in it if he hadn’t scooped her up with the ease of flicking lint from his shoulder. She was not
petite.
“I realize you’re more or less knee-deep in shite at the moment, so to speak, but I assumed you would prefer not to actually be knee-deep in shite. I’m afraid there wasn’t time to debate it. I leaped, if you will.” After rather too long a pause he
added, almost reluctantly, “I apologize for startling you.”
She could think of a million cleverly scathing little things to say, most involving the word “shite,” but as much as she’d
like to, she couldn’t fault his reasoning, or his gallantry, even if it was more reflex than gallantry.
“Thank you, Mr. Marchand,” she said, resignedly. Subdued.
“You’re welcome, Miss Woodville.” He sounded faintly sardonic.
To her utter chagrin, her throat suddenly was tight.
And then—oh, God, no! Now her eyes were burning.
Why was she about to cry? Why now?
It was just because for those brief seconds she’d been airborne in a rogue’s arms she’d felt weightless for the first time
in nearly a decade. No one had lifted a burden from her for at least that long. The contrast between that moment and everything
that came before was stark.
Now she knew what awaited her if she ever, ever let down her guard: Of a certainty she would fall apart, and that terrified
her.
He peered at her.
“Oh—you’re not—are you crying?” He sounded bewildered and aghast.
Which was almost funny.
“No.” She sniffled.
He made a scoffing sound.
“All right. But not because I’m upset.”
“Of course not,” he said soothingly. “What do you have to be upset about?”
He had the blackest sense of humor she’d ever experienced. She resented it because she actually quite liked it. Probably for
the reason a razor likes a strop.
“I’m just . . .” She did not feel safe completing that sentence in front of him. Embarrassed. And frightened. And exhausted. I can’t shoot darts at you from my eyes, so tears will have to do.
She swiped the back of her hand at her eye.
He sighed heavily. “Here.” His voice was quietly gruff. She glanced up to find him holding a handkerchief. “No need to weep
on your fingers like a . . . like a peasant.”
This surprised a laugh out of her but she bit it back. Because she could just imagine how unbearable he would be if he thought he could charm her.
She took his handkerchief.
The driver politely cleared his throat. “Sir?”
Marchand’s arm shot straight up. “One moment, if you would, my friend.”
The driver leaned over and plucked what appeared to be a shilling from Marchand’s fingers.
A very faint scent, perhaps bergamot, clung to Marchand’s handkerchief, which was brightly clean and very soft. For some reason
this small, elegant comfort made her eyes well again. She kept her head down, sniffed, and gamely undertook her usual methods
for gathering her wits: squaring her shoulders, taking deep breaths.
Marchand remained quiet. He was probably watching her the way he would watch a gambler sitting across from him: for tells,
for sudden moves, for information he could use as ammunition.
She realized she was dragging her fingertip over the initials embroidered on the edge of his handkerchief. She tried and failed
to ascertain what the letter in the middle might be.
“Embroidered. Interesting. I find it’s much more rewarding when you can feel the letters as well as see them,” she quoted,
ironically.
He huffed a soft sound that might have been a laugh. “It’s a funny thing. I told myself that when I made my first one hundred
pounds, I’d buy only the finest handkerchiefs I could find, with my initials stitched into them. And I swore I’d never be
without a clean handkerchief again. That was a decade ago.”
She slowly lifted her head. She studied him in wary surprise.
The new-fallen night was interrupted only by the lamps on the hack, but his eyes still seemed almost beacon bright in this
light. She didn’t know why she found this reassuring instead of unsettling. He would be easy to find in the dark.
“I suppose that sounds a bit stupid,” he added.
She studied him.
“Very,” she agreed, gravely.
His smile began slowly, but it soon took over his whole face. His entire overwhelming self—the innocent boy he must have once
been, the intimidating man he was now—seemed distilled in the wry tilt at the corner of his fine mouth. His eyes had nearly
vanished in amusement. He was all unguarded warmth.
It knocked the breath from her and wrung her heart like a rag.
Holy mother of God. No man had ever possessed a weapon as dangerous as that smile.
But then she realized she was smiling, too, which made her wonder whether she might have been the one to do it first.
She wiped the smile off her face and thrust the handkerchief back at him.
He took it.
“Thank you,” she said again.
He nodded and tucked it away.
“By the way, a small folding knife tucked in your bodice or garter would be more practical than a knitting needle,” he said pragmatically.
“But you shouldn’t carry a weapon unless you’re fully prepared to use it.
Because you’re right-handed, you really ought to keep the needle in your other sleeve, so you can slide it down into your dominant hand and really get a bloke in the gullet.
” He pantomimed a thrust upward and she winced.
“Or just shriek like a bird of prey if someone seizes you the way I did a moment ago. That ought to terrify them into dropping you.”
No man had ever said “bodice” or “garter” to her in conversation before, let alone “gullet,” and she wasn’t certain she wanted
to get used to it. A dose of Francis Balfort’s cautious, genteel admiration would be soothing right about now.
“I didn’t shriek like a bird of prey.” She said this as a matter of rote, because she probably had. She actually found this
vivid assessment funny. “And I don’t think I’ve ever used the word ‘gullet’ in a conversation before.”
For some reason, he smiled slightly again. He shook his head, as if in response to some conversation with himself.
“You are going back to the Grand Palace on the Thames, Miss Woodville. I will not be traveling with you in that hack, for
reasons I hope are obvious to you, given that you were raised the daughter of a viscount. You’re going to need your reputation,
since you clearly have nothing else, and even if we’re enemies, I want the playing field to be fair. And I don’t want to be
evicted from the boardinghouse, because the scones are worth committing crimes for and that bed is sinfully comfortable. Henceforth,
you will not be wandering about the city unchaperoned. You’re a danger to yourself and others when you do that.”
“While it’s hilarious that you think you can tell me what to do, I do not wander. I’m not a toddler, Marchand. I always have a plan.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
The hack driver cleared his throat. “Sir, beggin’ yer pardon, sir, but will you and yer wife ah, yer doxy . . . ah . . .”
“She’s not my anything, good sir, unless it’s my pain in the arse.”
But Marchand sounded less rancorous and more grimly resigned, which she supposed was something of an improvement.
“Just lovely, Mr. Marchand. You’ve such a moving way with words.”
He deftly came out with what looked like another shilling, a princely sum for a hack driver, and handed it to the driver.
“For your time and patience, with our apologies.”
The driver whistled. “For that much I can drive the two of you around while you tup back there if that’s what this is all—”
Marchand and Ginny made nearly identical aghast noises.
“Number eleven Lovell Street will do just fine, thank you,” Marchand told him. “Please take her there.”
He shut the door on Ginny, probably with some relief.
The hack rolled away, and she peered out the window at Marchand’s figure receding into the dark, where he no doubt felt safe.