Chapter Twenty-Two #2
Panic wrapped its tentacles around his innards. “From the bloody quay! In the dark! On your own!” He knew that awful truth would keep him up at night as his brain worked through every possible dangerous scenario that she could have encountered.
She winced. “I always carry a pebble in my reticule.”
Was she serious? “You think a pebble would stop a gun or a blade or the sort of predator who hides in the shadows on the hunt for a woman?” His heart was racing so fast it was a wonder it didn’t bounce up his throat. “You actually thought a pebble would keep you safe?”
She stared down at her clasped hands rather than his wildly waving ones. “I’ve never had cause to test it.”
“More by luck than judgment!” The potential consequences of that reckless choice made him lightheaded.
“And what of Mr. Percival Digby and the protest?” Rather than sit beside her on the mattress as he wanted, he folded his waving arms and loomed instead, hoping he at least looked in some sort of control even though his emotions were currently running riot and any grasp he had left on his control was tenuous.
“Are you seriously going to deny influencing and aiding Abigail on that score now that we both know that you are a passionate reformer as well as a compulsive liar?”
She sighed. “When Percy arrived at Equitas a couple of weeks ago, I had no clue that his fiancée was Abigail.”
“What?” How the top of his head didn’t explode was a bloody miracle, the anger was so swift and so ferocious.
“They are engaged!” His arms unfolded and waved in the air of their own accord again.
“Over my dead body will she marry that dangerous libertine!” He was going to wring his sister’s bloody neck!
She grimaced. “Sorry.… That was clumsy of me. I thought you knew.”
“I knew about them! Which is obviously why I tried to put a stop to it—but I did not know that things had escalated so far in their relationship that he had bloody well proposed, and she had accepted!” His hair did stand on end then and, typically, the red mist descended ensuring all he saw was danger.
“Not that she can accept without my permission and not that it will bloody well happen—but still!” He began to pace to reassure himself that the ground was still solid under his feet, because for so many hours now it hadn’t been. “How dare he! How dare he!”
“He loves her,” said their treacherous, backstabbing enabler with a shrug, “and, for what it is worth, I know that he is a good man.”
“He’s a bloody revolutionary!”
“He’s a reformer, just like me. One who wants necessary change but who doesn’t want to take up arms to achieve it.
But at least unlike me, he comes from your world and, for what it’s worth, I think that it is obvious that Abigail loves him too.
I know that they are both perhaps too young, but if literature and history are to be believed, there is no force as powerful or as determined as two star-crossed lovers whose love is forbidden.
Perhaps if it wasn’t, they wouldn’t be in such a hurry to dive headlong into forever together? ”
He pointed a quaking finger at his treacherous new wife rather than hear any of her unwelcome counsel.
“I paid you to chaperone her, not to lecture me on my responsibilities or to provide her with clandestine opportunities to meet with the man I brought her here to avoid! And you—” He jabbed the air between them.
“You betrayed me!” And that hurt so much he felt eviscerated.
She nodded, her bare, slim shoulders deflating.
“I did—but not easily. The first I knew that Abigail and Percy were together was that fateful night after I got locked out and we…” She couldn’t look at him then, and he didn’t know exactly how to interpret that flash of shyness from a woman who was usually so confident.
“I couldn’t sleep and saw her sneaking out of the garden, so I followed her as any good chaperone would.
I was doing the job you paid me for, right up until Abigail discovered what I did for the newspaper. ”
“Are you trying to excuse your neglectful behavior by suggesting that my sister blackmailed you into silence?” Inexplicably, as furious at her as he was, a part of him wanted to be able to blame Abigail for Portia’s silence. As if that would somehow make it more bearable.
More excusable.
What a bloody pathetic fool he was!
“She didn’t. Although it put me in such a terrible and impossible position that I resigned the next morning.
I hated lying to you. About everything.” There was pain in her lovely eyes.
Pain he wanted to believe meant more than just guilt.
“But once a lie is out there and it is believed as fact, it is a difficult thing to unravel without dire consequences and, despite all the reasons why I shouldn’t have worked here, I liked being here too much to want to leave.
” Her dark eyes locked with his, pleading.
“I swear on my life that neither I nor Percy had any clue that Abigail planned to attend that protest. I will not deny that I have attended plenty of protests in my time and made and waved more homemade placards than I care to count, but I had no sympathy with that one. Nobody at Equitas had a hand in what Reynolds did, nor condoned it. We were all warned to go nowhere near it, so I planned to stay here all evening where I had witnesses who could provide me with an ironclad alibi. I only went to fetch your sister once I realized where she had gone, and you know all that happened next.”
“Yes, I got to read about it in your scathing article that sealed your fate.”
“With hindsight again, I know I shouldn’t have printed that.
If I hadn’t, then perhaps Nolley wouldn’t have followed me down to the quay the next day.
” Regret was etched into her features and his fingers itched to smooth it away.
“But I was angry at you for talking me into pleading guilty because I knew the consequences of what would happen if ever my involvement with Equitas made its way to the authorities—like it did. Now here we are.” She looked miserable and he sympathized.
Leo had never felt so damned wretched in his life.
“Here we are.” He sunk onto the mattress beside her and wished he did not want to tug her into his arms and just hold her tight and tell her everything was going to be all right—even if it wasn’t.
But he wasn’t ready to forgive her yet. He needed more answers.
More proof that his irrational desire to forgive her for everything wasn’t just a feckless leap of faith.
“You really shouldn’t have married me because the truth is I knew the risks of what I was doing and did them anyway, knowing full well that one day I would have to answer for them in a court of law.
” Her expression was resigned now but oddly stoic.
“Now that I am calmer, more rational, and less petrified, I am fully prepared to face those consequences. I made my bed and I will lie in it, so I will not try to fight the annulment. You married a liar and a criminal when you really shouldn’t have.
You need to go to London immediately and get this marriage declared null and void, your grace, for your own sake. ”
Fresh and irrational fury swamped him, only this time tinged with panic.
“My first priority is to somehow sort out the enormous mess you have made of everything in the quickest way possible! Until I decide how best to do that…” Leo backed away, needing to put as much distance between them as he could until his foolish heart stopped bleeding.
“I expect you to fight your overwhelming tendency to lie about everything while trying to behave in a manner more befitting that of the Duchess of Debden—your grace!”