Chapter Fourteen
For the third, and hopefully final time, Wolf sat in Lord Kemberley’s study.
At this point, he was thoroughly ill from the ostentatiousness of the place and beyond disgusted by the man sitting behind the desk in front of him.
While his instincts had initially told him not to trust Kemberley, he had never imagined the depths he would sink to.
The harm he had caused innocent servants.
The pain he had caused his own daughter.
Bile filled Wolf’s throat as he thought of young Petra’s betrayal and he forced the horrible image from his mind’s eye.
Petra was strong. Far stronger than her father believed. Far stronger than Wolf had given her credit for, he thought with great shame. She had taken the wreckage of her past to forge a sanctuary for others.
He couldn’t love her more if he tried. That thought forced the bile away, but left an unfortunate melancholy aftertaste. Petra didn’t love him.
She doesn’t ever have to love you, but she will never be at the mercy of Kemberley again.
You can do that for her.
“Wolfridge,” Despite his schooled features, the man harbored a distinctly knowing gleam within his gaze that Wolf did not like one bit.
“Kemberley,” Wolf growled.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit? Is it perhaps that you have found and secured my daughter’s hand after all? My sources tell me that she has been seen visiting your townhouse.”
“Your sources are incorrect.” Wolf spat.
That knowing look wavered with a brief, flickering uncertainty, yet it failed to perish entirely from his countenance. “Is that so?” Kemberley rose and strode toward the bell pull, summoning his butler. He spoke to the man in a whisper that Wolf could not hear before the man returned to his desk.
“Would you care for a libation, Wolfridge?”
Wolf gave a slight shake of his head, willing this meeting to proceed quickly. He needed to understand why Kemberley believed Petra to be at his townhouse.
Kemberley went to his sideboard to leisurely pour himself a brandy and sat back down.
The two men stared at each other for a moment as Kemberley set his brandy in front of him, untouched. Wolf sensed that Kemberley always poured himself a drink but never actually drank it in these sorts of meetings.
“So, if my daughter is not at Wolfridge House, why is it that you have called, Wolfridge?”
The hour had at last arrived for him to unveil the true nature of his designs.
It was a climax toward which he had been laboring for longer than he had been truly cognizant of his own industry, as though some unseen architect of fate, far grander than his own meager will, had finally compelled this definitive stroke.
Extricating a multitude of papers from his frock coat, Wolf proceeded to arrange them in a meticulous stack upon the polished mahogany of the desk before him, his every movement a study in contained, predatory resolve.
Kemberley’s annoyed expression faded the moment his eyes narrowed on his own writing of the first note, but Wolf continued dramatically before he swept them all together and placed them inside his coat pocket again.
He had always enjoyed the drama of a monster receiving his just reward and he wished to savor it. After all, Kemberley deserved it.
His only regret was that Petra was not present.
“These go back years…” Kemberley muttered, for once his smug surety was not present in his voice.
“All these years, I thought I was doing it for Longley. You were watching him, but I was watching you. But now…I know I was doing it for her. Because she deserves a hundred times better than the likes of you.”
The smugness unfortunately returned. “So what are you going to do, Wolfridge? Call these all in? Ruin me? That would ruin her as well. Is that what you want?”
“Oh, these?” Wolf patted his pocket theatrically. “I won’t be doing anything with these—or rather, I will be selling them to someone for one halfpenny. And she will decide what to do with them.”
Kemberley stood rooted to the Turkish carpet, his features assuming a mask of unreadable stillness at Wolf’s pronouncement, just as a sudden clamor erupted from the corridor beyond the study.
Dismissing the unbidden interruption with a sharp shake of his head, Wolf went on, determined to press his advantage.
“All she ever wanted was for you to love her, Kemberley. You have built your house of cards with such precision, yet you failed utterly in doing the easiest thing in the world.”
The heavy oak doors were flung wide at the precise instant the butler’s frantic cry of “My lady!” resonated through the walls, and the love of his life tumbled into the room.
“Whatever you are doing, whatever you are offering him, don’t do it, Julian!”
Rising to meet her halfway, Wolf shook his head in wonder.
“Oh, I think you will want me to do this, my lady.” Pulling the IOUs from his pocket, he handed them to Petra.
“These are years of your father’s vowels all put together.
I am giving them to you to do with as you will.
If you want to call them in, if you want to hold them over his head…
” Wolf trailed off as his heart swelled at the sight of her.
Slightly rumpled yet still utterly delectable, she had clearly raced to come save him. His warrior.
Holding the vowels in her hand, a furrow was beginning to form between Petra’s brows as she stood frozen before him.
“You would give these to me?” Her dazed voice was tinged with wonder.
He smiled for the first time since he had arrived. “You deserve to decide, my love. Not me. Nor any man.”
“My Pet would never call in a debt on her own father. That is unheard of. It would not just ruin me, it would ruin her.” Despite the dismissiveness in Kemberley’s tone, Wolf swore he heard a tinge of fear.
At the sound of Kemberley’s voice, Petra’s dazed expression hardened. “You do not, nor have you ever had any idea what I am capable of, Lord Kemberley.”
“Now, now, Pet,” Kemberley droned with an acid familiarity.
Petra’s body went as rigid as that evening in the library those many weeks prior.
Just as in the library, the skin on the back of Wolf’s neck prickled at the diminutive.
Yet watching Petra stiffen this time, Wolf did not think of prey, but a predator recognizing a foe.
Eerily still, she faced her father, her face a mask.
“If you ever call me Pet again, I will call these debts in like that.” Petra snapped her gloved fingers. “Otherwise, I will show you the mercy you never showed to any of us.”
Kemberley betrayed no emotion, yet a vein pulsed at his temple.
Petra went on, her voice a previously unknown ice.
“But if I hear one whisper, one breath of a rumor that a servant or anyone else is being interfered with at Kemberley House, hang my connection to you, hang my reputation, these will all be called in. Do you understand?”
Kemberley stared at his daughter as if he had never seen her before. “Pe—” he began, which only made Petra clutch the paper more tightly. Wolf was rocked back on his heels by the image as he recalled her sword and her shield behind the rose.
Kemberley clenched his jaw, his eyes darting between his daughter and what was clutched in her fingers.
Wolf had the sense that the man was sketching the potential outcomes before him, weighing the risks and the benefits.
He gave a stiff nod at his daughter, looking toward her but not truly meeting her eye.
Wolf clicked his tongue against his teeth.
Ultimately, conceding to Petra was the wisest option.
While Kemberley might be sacrificing a potential means of blackmail, he would not court ruin.
Besides, the sly spider was likely already planning his next move against his peers.
Though as long as it did not harm Petra, nor any domestic worker, Wolf couldn’t care less.
“And if I choose to marry Lord Wolfridge, it will have nothing to do with what you want and everything to do with what I want. I wash my hands of you, Kemberley.”
With that, Petra turned imperiously and strode out of her father’s townhouse, Wolf following silently in her wake. While everything that had happened in the past few moments was fantastical, it was her parting words to her father that left him without the power of speech.
Once they were outside, both spoke at the same time.
“I saw your books—”
“Did you mean what you—”
Summoning a patience he did not know he possessed, Wolf gestured for her to go on as they walked away from the Belgravia townhouse toward an unknown destination. An undetermined future.
Wolf was utterly indifferent to their destination as long as he was walking beside Petra.
Losing some of the bravado with which she had stared down her father, Petra bit her lip and Wolf willed his blood to cool so that he could hear her out.
“I hope you can forgive her, but your aunt showed me your books in the library.” The fierce lady of moments earlier was rambling now. “That is, I met your aunt and uncle today. And they inadvertently invited me to take you up on your offer to stay at your townhouse.”
He wanted her to stay there forever. As his wife.
But it had to be what she wanted as well.
Vulnerability seeped through his being that his feelings were so exposed, yet her words to her father gave him strength. “I suppose I imagined reading them with you. Wondering what your thoughts were. Whether you would be surprised at parts.”
“An entire stack of books…” Petra trailed off as she searched his eyes. “That would take anyone quite a while.”
“A library,” he began slowly, willing her to see the truth in his eyes. That he was casting off the shackles of what his father constructed a gentleman to be and laying everything bare. “Would take a lifetime.”
He watched her chest rise and fall as he waited for her to absorb the weight of the question hidden within his words.
“What you did for me…” She began, gesturing toward the IOUs that were still in her hand but he cut her off.
“I only did what I should have done from the beginning, offer you choice and freedom. It was never my place to make decisions for you. I meant what I said that day, Petra, I love you with my entire being. All those years I spent snatching up your father’s vowels, I swore it was for my friendship with John, but the truth is it was for you. You always intrigued me.”
She began to open her mouth but he went on, putting a finger against her delectable lips as she had done so ages ago.
“As so much more than a mystery. Perhaps the faux courtship was my excuse, but it allowed me to be near you in a way I never could before. When I actually got to know you, spend time with you, I was done for. My heart was forever in your keeping. Even if I have no hope. But what you said to your father…”
Blast, she was biting her lip behind his finger, which made him almost lose his words.
Still he pushed forward, “Please do not feel that you owe me anything. Especially after everything I did. I understand now how badly I betrayed you. If I could, I would rip my arm off for causing you a moment of pain. But if you could ever change your mind about me…”
Her breath seemed to come faster, the pulse at her throat beating like a fairy’s wing. That small detail raised his hopes even higher and Wolf slowly lowered his finger.
“Or your heart,” he whispered, barely daring to hope.
Drawing a ragged breath, Petra reached a tentative hand forward to trace his faint nightbeard. “Most certainly my heart.”
Hercules himself could not have held him back as he crushed Petra against him, bringing her lips to his, uncaring of their whereabouts.
What location? He could hardly remember his own name let alone the street he had been walking.
Kissing Petra before had been a gift, a tantalizing offering on a life that had been lonely and unremarkable.
But kissing her now, drinking in her fierce response, the way she threw her arms around his neck with abandon, the world no longer seemed unremarkable, nor predetermined.
With Petra, life could be a delightful mystery. One he did not need to solve alone.
Drawing back after an eternity, he rested his forehead against her own. “Wait,” he groaned, “I wish to do this properly this time.”
Dropping to his knees, he held her small hands in his much larger ones.
“Will you marry me, Petra? If you say yes, say it because you want to. Because you love me as much as I love you. You are so much more than a mystery, yet you are the only mystery I want to solve every day for the rest of my life.”
Petra pulled him to his feet with strength that belied her petite frame and a smile that would light up the London sky.
“Yes, I will marry you. Because I want to.” She kissed his hand, which he had left bare.
“Because I cannot live without you.” She kissed his temple, then his cheek, and whispered, “Because I love you too.”
He did not think his happiness could fly any higher, but as always, here she was, proving him wrong. Picking her up at the waist, their lips met again in an undeniable heat that he now knew was also a lifelong love. Pulling back, Petra traced the side of his face with her fingertips.
“I’m sorry it took me so long to figure it out.”
Nuzzling against her hand, he smirked. “Well, I certainly did not make it easy for you. But I promise you this, I will always support you and your sanctuary. I will always back you and I will always be in your corner.”
“Even when I am cross with you?”
“Especially when you are cross with me.”
“You always enjoyed ruffling my feathers.” She huffed, running her fingers down his lapel in a possessive manner. “But I need to tell you something. Something secret.”
“Another mystery?” He kissed the small dimple that appeared on her right cheek.
“Of a sort,” her laughter was like music to his soul.
Petra craned her head so that she could whisper in his ear.
“I always secretly adored when you ruffled my feathers.” She looked up at him with an expression of tenderness and heat, that the rest of the walk home, all Wolf could remember was the taste of her lips and the feel of her body against his.
He should have been commended for remembering where he lived at all.