Chapter 16
Archer did not intentionally seek her out again.
In fact, he did his best to avoid her, telling himself it was for her benefit, knowing he meant it for his own. It was not quite bearable to look at her—her face so transparent, like the finest new glazing, a thin shell of crystalline glass.
He’d hurt her feelings. He had known it was inevitable the moment he’d realized what his lie to Neri meant. He’d—
Hell. Some part of him had known he would hurt her from the moment he’d tugged off her pearl-buttoned glove. From the moment she’d stepped inside Pomeroy House.
But she would forget her hurt, and him. She would go home to London—perhaps her father would fetch her, despite what she thought—and return to her right world.
Hang curtains and talk of statues and upend someone else’s life for a change.
Worm her stubborn, impossible, interfering way into someone else’s heart.
He had hurt her. He’d known he would. And so he turned around when he saw her in a room and made excuses to be outside when she was in. He carted boxes down to the cove, and took Signor Neri to the public house, and tried, with little success, to separate Zenobia from Gerry.
When he found Ruby in the north tower—at the top of 197 individual stairs, with a crate of fake Greek statues in his arms—it was entirely by accident. A misfortune so great he went briefly lightheaded.
He’d nudged open the door with his toe. His arms were otherwise occupied with the statues, which he still vaguely hoped to sell someday, ideally to someone with fewer knowledgeable dinner guests than the Marquess of Gravesmuir.
He hadn’t been expecting her. There was no reason for her to be there—the tower room was used for nothing besides storage, and the journey up the stairs was protracted.
But she’d found a different use for the room, it seemed. She was painting. Not canvas—of course not, she was too busy with practical things just now—but rather a trio of decorative screens a head taller than she was.
Archer was fairly certain that, two weeks prior, the same screens had been located in the music room and had functioned as trellises for a variety of intrusive plant species. But now they were soft, dreamy seascapes, pale and luminous with Ruby’s delicate brushstrokes.
The tower had large windows, and the glass opened onto the sea. The room was half drowned in liquid gold from the setting sun. Everything smelled of walnut oil and turpentine, and Ruby was—
She was—
She had stripped out of her pretty flounced frock and hung it on a peg on the wall.
In its stead, she’d wrapped herself in some sort of .
. . of hellborn painting smock. It was made of a stiff, heavy fabric, splotched with blue and white.
It tied at the front—a deep vee that revealed a stupefying display of Ruby’s paint-spattered bosom.
Her tongue peeked out at the corner of her mouth as she concentrated on her work.
Her skin was pink from the sun and slightly damp with sweat.
She had a streak of blue paint in her hair, and one on her cheek, and he could nearly see her areolae, for Christ’s sake, if he looked hard enough, which he most certainly was.
Dear God. She was the Scourge of St. Petroc’s.
He needed to sit down. There was a battered chaise longue in the corner, but in his current state of extremity the floor seemed preferable to furniture. When he let his eyes linger on the chaise, his mind instantly furnished a vision of—
He dropped the crate, which crashed notably, and Ruby looked up with a start.
“Oh! Captain Archer.” She did not adjust the Torture Smock, possibly because she had no idea what she looked like, or else because she was a demon sent from hell to make Archer pay for his sins.
God grant him mercy. He was paying.
“Ruby.” He cleared his throat. “Lady Ruby.”
She looked curiously at him, nosy hellion that she was, and then down at the ground. “You’ve brought . . . something? All the way up here?”
Oh Jesus, the statues. He shoved the crate as hard as he could with his boot, into the corner where the sunlight did not reach. “Nothing. Empty crate. Getting it out of the way.”
She looked at the crate, which had groaned its way across the floor as he’d shoved it. “Empty?”
“Mm.”
“Is it . . . made of lead?”
“Lead-lined walnut.” His mouth wanted to curve up at the expression on her face, and—because he could not stop it—he let himself smile at her. “A new device—all the crack in Cornish crate-making.”
She laughed, and he felt so damned smug he added it to his catalog of sins.
But then she sobered. “Do you need this room? To prepare the house for the princess? I can leave you to your privacy.”
“No,” he said quickly. “You needn’t go. I can go.”
“You don’t have to.” She plucked up her brushes and some small jars of pigment and oils, shoving them haphazardly into a wooden box. “I’m done anyway. If you’ll only give me a moment to clean up—”
“Ruby.”
He’d barely touched her, only brushed his fingers against her upper arm. But she froze anyway, her eyes on him, her mouth clamped down tight.
“I’m sorry,” he heard himself say.
He had not meant to say it. It was . . .
Hell and damnation. It was not a good apology. He was sorry for the expression on her face, sorry he’d had a hand in putting it there. But he was not sorry for what he’d done.
He did not regret the fact that he’d pushed her away in the stables. He’d had to do it. Her father might come; her father might know him as Quenby. There was no possible future that allowed him to put his mouth on hers again, and smile while he did it.
And at the same time, he could not bring himself to wish he had not kissed her.
He wasn’t sorry for it, not even a little bit.
Every time he closed his eyes, the world was all sunset and Ruby Ballimore, and there was no part of him that wished it had not happened.
He wouldn’t give the memory up. Not for a fortune of gold.
“I assure you, there’s nothing to apologize for.” She said it so brightly her voice cracked.
The sound made Archer’s throat hurt. He wanted to hold fast to her arm. He wanted to kiss her again, hard enough to wipe away the memory of what he’d said.
“The house seems ready,” he told her, instead of whatever madness was in his mind. “Everything looks in order. I could not have imagined it would come together so quickly nor so well.”
“I’m glad.” She looked down, then back up, and then said, all in a rush, “I had thought to go to Bridestowe. Soon. Now. Before the princess arrives.”
“Go?”
She waved a hand. “Alice and Tamsin are the ones who ought to stay to receive the princess. They possess the skills to be her ladies-in-waiting. I’ve finished. My contribution is at an end.”
Some mad revolt had started up in his body, in his fingers that couldn’t quite let go of her arm, in his feet that had brought him closer without his realizing it.
He said: “You’re giving up, then?”
“I’m not giving up.” Her voice was a touch too loud in the quiet room. “I am accepting the reality of my circumstances, Captain Archer. I am perfectly cognizant of my strengths, and I do not need the appearance of Her Royal Highness to remind me that the social graces are not among them.”
He remembered the way she’d flinched in the tavern when she’d heard Benji laugh. The way she’d assumed it directed at her.
The story she’d flung at him in frustration in the library. I recently finished my fourth Season, which places me very nearly on the shelf. I did not dance at parties because I was not invited to do so.
“Ruby—”
But before he could say anything more, she jerked her chin up. “Alice and Tamsin will do perfectly well for the princess. Better, in truth, if I am not around to make a mull of things.”
“You don’t make a mull of things.”
She did not let him go on, only barreled forward, stubborn and bright and lying through her teeth.
“I will no doubt prefer to reside at Bridestowe anyway, rather than blunder about trying to pose as a court lady. Alice and Tamsin will know better than I what to say to the princess when she arrives. They’ll know”—here she stumbled, just a bit, on her words—“how to act.”
“Ruby.” His thumb just stroked her sun-warm skin. “You don’t have to go. Not on the princess’s account—nor mine.”
It was absurd. Stupid. He had spent weeks trying to persuade her to go, and now that she was poised to do it . . .
Bloody hell. He could not stand to watch her flee. He couldn’t stand to see her look this way, foolish and stubborn and heartbroken and brave.
But she wrenched her arm out of his grasp. “That’s easy for you to say. Has there ever been anyone in your entire life that you could not charm?”
“Of course. A little blond scourge with terrifying eyes.”
She looked up, looked him full in the face. Her gaze—storm gray, sheened with tears—pinned him in place. “You have no idea what it’s like.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
She breathed a laugh, a pained, bitter thing he did not recognize. “Of course not. You can’t possibly imagine what it’s like to walk into a room and be greeted by derision. To be reminded—constantly, daily—that the way you exist in the world is wrong.”
“Ruby—”
“When I wrote my first paper—when it was accepted by the Royal Archaeological Society—do you know what I did?” Her lips pressed hard together, as if to hold the memory back.
But she lifted her chin and kept going. “I laid the journal beside my father’s plate at the breakfast table.
I had woken early, you see, to have it waiting for him when he came down.
I thought—I truly thought—that he would be proud of me. ”
Archer didn’t know how the story ended, but he hated it already. Hated the bruised tenor of her voice.
“He did not look at the journal,” she said quietly. “Only nudged it aside. Finally I plucked up the nerve to show him. That’s you? he said. And then, Thank God you’ve only used initials, Ruby. What a nightmare for me if this got out.”
Archer’s chest hurt. He wanted to run the earl through. Wanted Hangleton on the other side of a cannon.
“I published the next three under a false name,” she said, “to protect his reputation. His career. But I still . . . told him about them. I still—I kept hoping—” She broke off to wipe furiously at her face.
“I don’t understand what’s wrong with me that I can’t stop hoping.
Even this—even coming here—I thought things would be different.
I thought I would be different. And I’m not. ”
“Ruby,” he murmured.
“I would change, if I could,” she said, low and fierce.
“I’ve been trying. If I could, I would be as sweet and pleasing as my sister Cassandra.
But I can’t. I don’t”—her voice cracked again—“want to wait here for the princess to arrive, only to discover once again that I am not suited for the role.”
“Ruby.” He set his hands to her shoulders. She was soft beneath the heavy smock; the blue paint on her cheek had run in a faint trail down to the corner of her mouth. “You don’t need to be anyone other than who you are.”
Her lips twisted down. She said wryly, “Pretty words, Captain Archer. But I have not found them to be true.”
“You don’t.” He shook her, just a little.
He wanted her to listen. He wanted to push the words into her skin.
“You don’t have to make yourself small just to—” He thought of Gravesmuir’s dinner party, the marquess’s angry face.
Her father, whispering furiously into her ear.
“Just to please a pack of fools who cannot recognize what’s right in front of their eyes. ”
If men like that sought to silence her, it was only because she was more earnest and clever than they had any hope to be. For all their words of superiority, the only thing wanting was in themselves.
Ruby didn’t say anything back, only looked him full in the face. Sharp-edged and defiant. Disbelieving.
So he pushed closer. Slid one hand down to her waist and the other up to cup her cheek. Her skin was warm and paint-streaked, and touching her hurt, like a clenched fist of want in his belly. “There’s not one thing about you I would change.”
Her throat bobbed as she swallowed. “Pretty words.”
Goddamn it, she was the most obstinate—the most difficult—
He yanked her up against him. “I’m not trying to flatter you,” he snapped. “You know I’m not.”
Her lips parted, as if to argue.
Archer kissed her instead. He plunged madly into it, leapt toward the dark ocean of her and let gravity and desire pull him down.
He was angry and resentful and fevered with want, and oh, hell, it was relief and torment in one to feel her.
To press himself into the lush shape of her body, feel against his chest the stiff smock and the crush of her breasts beneath it.
She was still with shock at first, and then—
She came up on tiptoe and shoved her fingers into his hair. Her mouth opened beneath his, and she kissed him back, hungrily.
His brain went blurred. He could feel his heartbeat in his cock. He wanted and wanted and wanted—
Half desperately, he pulled back. He was breathing hard, his whole body alight with yearning.
“Nothing,” he said, and his voice was as rough and hot as his need for her. As barely checked. “There is nothing about you I would wish to be different. No possible way you could be more desirable to me. If I wanted you any more, Ruby Ballimore, I’d die of it.”
Her lips were wet. Peach-ripe. Her smock clung heroically to the very tips of her breasts. “I thought you said this would not happen again.”
He had one lock of her hair between his fingers. He’d wound it around his thumb as he’d kissed her.
He bent his head again and let his mouth hover just above hers. Breathed in turpentine and oil, and beneath it the amber scent of her skin. “Ah pet,” he muttered. “I lied.”