Chapter Nine #3
“There,” said Bernard happily, beaming as he turned to her. “I knew they’d have no choice but to accept my booking as a gentleman—which of course is an outrage, but at least we’ve found a way round it. Right?”
Lucy did not reply.
That was, she did not reply in words. She did not have the words to reply, and so she relied on the most instinctive thing she could think of: a hug.
It was a good hug. As Lucy stepped into his arms, Bernard seemed to read her mind and brought his hands around her, pulling her close. Her face pressed against his shoulder and she breathed him in, the steadiness, the certainty, the knowledge that she could depend on him.
All she wanted to do was stay in this moment.
“My goodness!”
“My word, young people these days,” muttered a pair as they passed them on the street.
Cheeks burning, Lucy pulled herself from of the embrace and looked very carefully not at Bernard.
Fine, it was reckless. But… But it was Bernard.
And it was not as though she could marry him or anything.
The very thought! Which, she realized, meant it was all the more dangerous for anyone to recognize her alone with the man—let alone embracing him.
Bernard was a very nice man, Lucy told herself confidently, but he was a commoner.
Worse than a commoner, a criminal! He had no fortune, no rank, no connections, and no clean record.
He was absolutely not the sort of man that a woman of any good family should be considering as a marital prospect, let alone a Chance.
And yet…
Lucy pushed the thought away as she said determinedly, and as businesslike as she could manage, “Thank you for organizing that. I shall ensure the bill is paid promptly when it arrives. I would hate for you to gain a reputation for avoiding your debts.”
“Thank you,” returned Bernard, a smile dancing on his lips. “Yes, that would really damage my reputation.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him if that was what had led him into a life of criminal and general skullduggery—not paying debts? Had he stolen, perhaps, or rescinded on an agreement, or—
But that was his old life. Lucy could not keep telling herself that Bernard Dixon’s criminal past was in the past if she kept bringing it up, could she?
Even if her curiosity burned to know… Well. Everything. Everything about him.
“I must say, I cannot help but scorn a system like that,” Bernard said as they turned to once again return to the Lindow townhouse.
Lucy glanced up. “A hotel that offers rooms for rent?”
He nudged her playfully with his shoulder, and she laughed, her stomach twisting and her heart telling her to do it again, just to gain the contact.
“No! I mean the fact that poor old Forthright felt obliged to decline your request merely because you were a woman, and yet he had to accept mine for exactly the opposite reason.”
Lucy swallowed. It was a tad more complicated than that, she knew—but she was not going to be the one to reveal Mr. Forthright’s unfortunate and unmerited tangle with the law. “Yes. Most irritating.”
“It’s two-faced, that’s what it is. Treating people differently due only to the way they were made, it’s—it’s barbaric,” Bernard said, and there was a power and a passion in his voice that made Lucy look up.
He certainly looked riled. The injury to the back of his head had faded somewhat and was mostly covered by the borrowed hat, yet there was the same look on his face that Lucy had seen when she had followed him to that alleyway.
A look of power, and rigid control. As though Bernard losing his temper would be a terrible thing to see indeed.
“I know. I have to go to great lengths to go anywhere without a proper chaperone—as you saw today. How we had to lie—first that you were my brother, and then that you were some grand man who was holding some sort of event for which you wanted to book a room.” She smacked her lips.
“I suppose the way women are treated as inferior to men is close to lying, which is something that all humans ought to abhor, even though I’m no stranger to it myself when I want a bit of freedom,” she said lightly as they turned onto her street and its familiar trees.
“Lying, keeping the truth from another, mistruths by omission… It’s all the same.
I wish I never had to do it. I think there’s something in us that, at our core, repels liars, don’t you? ”
There it was—something strange flickered across the man’s face.
Bernard did not change, not in any real sense, but a darkness overwhelmed him for a heartbeat.
A darkness, a shadow, something malevolent but also terribly sad.
Something that altered him, in that moment, from a man whom she trusted and felt as though she knew to… to a stranger.
And the moment was gone, and Bernard was smiling and saying jovially, “Well, I have left my lying ways behind me, Lady Lucy,” as they stepped back into their home.
My home, not ours, Lucy corrected quickly in the privacy of her own mind as her cheeks burned. She certainly did not want to live in a house with Bernard. Not for the rest of her life. Obviously.
That would have been ridiculous.