Chapter 8
Tremaine’s ruse had gotten off to a successful start. That alone should have been enough to continue in the role of chivalrous gentleman, a role he’d slipped into so easily. Jeremy himself almost believed the act he put on for Linnie McQuoid Smith’s benefit.
Instead, it took everything within Tremaine to keep from laughing in her naive face. God, the chit actually believed the words she spoke.
“I’m the same man I’ve always been, love?” he repeated sneeringly.
She gave a jerky nod. “Y-yes.”
This time, he couldn’t help it. Tossing his head back, he howled.
When his mordacious humor faded, he found Linnie watching him, doe-eyed. “This from the same woman who attested to barely recognizing me and called me repulsive.”
He made a general gesture to his face.
Understanding lit her revealing eyes, followed by a flickering of shock. “When I said those things, Jeremy,” she whispered, “I did not refer to your scars.”
“Trust me, love,” he said scathingly, “I’m well aware of how I look.” Each day Jeremy arose, his mirror served as a reminder of the scars upon his skin.
She drew back like he’d struck her. “You’d believe me so superficial?”
He smiled disparagingly. “What I believe is you’re no different from every other woman I’ve crossed paths with since your bloody cousin nearly ended my life,” he said bluntly. “There’s either a twisted, sexual fascination with those marks, horror, or pity.”
Fire flashed in her eyes. “Well, I am not every other woman.”
No, she wasn’t like any other woman he’d known. That alone explained why the minute she’d entered Lord Rutland’s art room, stepped out of the shadows, and spun in a vivacious pirouette, he’d been consumed by lust. Linnie Smith was more virtuous than the purported Virgin Mary.
“You should know me better than that, Jeremy.”
She scolded him like a displeased tutor. His blood fired at a thought of wicked bed games where he, the student, turned his ruler on her.
“Have I noticed your scars?” Linnie asked quietly. “I’ll not lie to you and say I didn’t.”
His eyes grew heavy. Of a certain, the chit wouldn’t be so blasé if she knew, even now, he was imagining yanking her skirts up and petting her hot, wet, untried quim until he brought the lady to her first release.
Linnie placed her delicate palms upon Jeremy’s chest and lifted those trusting eyes to his.
His pectoral muscles bunched, and his body went on alert from nothing more than her wholesome touch.
Linnie recalled him from the wicked thoughts he’d entertained. “But Jeremy.” She spoke with an earnestness. “The changes I spoke about are not here.” She dusted her fingers lightly, tenderly, along the long, curved white line where the edge of a bayonet had sliced him.
Tremaine’s hungering intensified. God, how he ached to strip Linnie’s hand bare, take her long, graceful, naked fingers in his and show her exactly where he craved her touch.
“I’m talking about the changes here,” she murmured.
Linnie laid her right hand over Tremaine’s heart.
It wasn’t the place he’d imagined her caressing and yet, weirdly, the organ there thumped a peculiarly quick beat.
Sadness gleamed in those candid eyes of hers. “You are angry in ways I never saw you.”
His desire died a quick death.
“Because of your cousin, Linnie,” he barked. “Because of your fucking treacherous, traitorous cousin! He took everything I cared about from me. Everything!”
The blood drained from her cheeks, leaving Linnie’s ashen face marked only by the crimson splotches left by winter’s cold.
This crack in Tremaine’s composure threatened to undo the gains he’d made in his ploy to marry Captain Arran McQuoid’s beloved cousin. But God help him and the bloody plan, Tremaine welcomed the restoration of his sanity.
“I didn’t betray you.” She thumped a fist against her heart.
No, but the day that imprudent fellow crossed Tremaine, he’d doomed his entire kin to a blood feud that Tremaine was determined to win—at all costs.
He flexed his jaw.
That was the sole reason he pursued Linnie Smith.
She ducked her head, but not before he caught the tears clinging to her eyelashes.
She’d always been a crier. As a young man, he’d been annoyed by the ease with which she and her female kin shed those drops. As a man, he still felt the same way about every woman’s tears.
That was, except this guileless minx.
For some reason, the sight of those crystalline drops of hers stirred an uncomfortable sensation in his dead heart.
Cursing roundly, Tremaine fetched another kerchief. “Here,” he muttered, handing the fabric over.
In another show of childlike innocence, Linnie snatched that offering. With a pride he admired, the lady presented him with her back and wandered off several steps.
All the while she wiped at her face, her slender shoulders shook.
A muscle twitched at the corner of his eye; the sight of her suffering caused an odd tightness in his chest, and this didn’t feel like annoyance. This, he didn’t want to examine too closely or give a name to.
Would you please just stop, Linnie! he silently entreated.
Then it was as if she heard Tremaine’s unvoiced petition.
Linnie abruptly stopped. She gave a comically noisy blow into the fabric of his—now her—kerchief.
His lips skewed upward into a grin.
Linnie whipped around to face him, and he swiftly masked that grin.
He needn’t have bothered.
“Why?” she whispered, her voice catching.
Her luminous, bloodshot eyes filled with more of that heartbreak, and he wanted to order her back around so he needn’t deal with the unpleasant sensation roused by her bloody tears.
“If you hate me so, why, then, do you continue to treat me with such kindness?”
Tremaine grunted. “We can agree that with the things I’ve said and done to you, love, I’ve been anything but kind.”
Her eyes grew stricken. “Yes, you have, Jeremy. You let me hide with you last night—”
“You didn’t really leave me any choice.”
“You gave me your cloak.” She might as well not have heard him.
“I already told you; I would have given any chilled lady the garment, Linnie.”
She lifted his latest offering, the kerchief he’d loaned, and waved it like a white flag of peace between them. “Time and time again, you deny those acts toward me as ones of kindness.”
“You’re making more out of it than there is,” he said flatly.
Linnie glanced at her toes. “I see.”
The wind gusted around them, and snowflakes that’d found their resting place upon the hard, frozen earth fluttered and danced on the air, reminiscent of when those flakes had first fallen.
Good, whether it’d hurt his cause or not, he’d put the matter to rest.
Bloody hell.
“What is it you think you see?” he asked brusquely.
“It is just . . .” she whispered, her voice quavering.
When she didn’t finish the thought, he impatiently urged her on. “Yes?”
The intrepid minx, the same one who’d forced her way into Lord Rutland’s conservatory last evening, resurfaced. She lifted her gaze to Tremaine’s. “It occurs to me you didn’t deny hating m-me, Jeremy,” she said, so bloody forlorn that sweat slicked his palms.
He didn’t need more of her tears. He despised the way they made him feel, he who prided himself on no longer feeling anything.
“I don’t hate you,” he admitted grudgingly. “You’re . . . fine enough, and were it not for your relations, I’d have no problem with you, Linnie.”
“Thank you?” Her voice climbed a fraction, transforming that last syllable into a question. “I think?”
Her eyes watered all over again.
Oh, fucking hell.
“I’m not a good man, Linnie,” he said gruffly.
She gave him a wistful look. “The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks.”
He started to counter her vigorous defense of his damned wretched character and stopped.
Christ, what the hell was wrong with him? What good came from belaboring his point? If Linnie deluded herself into thinking Tremaine was something other than he in fact was, it’d be that much easier to wed her, bed her, and—most importantly—kill any alliance between the McQuoid-Smiths and Culross.
“The lady doth protest too much,” he murmured.
Linnie looked at him like he’d sprouted an extra head. “What?”
“I believe the actual quote you were looking for is ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’”
“Yes, I know that,” she said exasperatedly. “I was merely—”
Tremaine winked.
Linnie’s golden eyebrows went shooting up. “Why . . . why . . . you are funning me!”
“I’ll deny it until the day I die, Linnie McQuoid Smith.”
The guileless beauty melted before him; her eyes went soft, her lips parted.
With the depth of her innocence, it was going to be shamefully easy to seduce her. If Tremaine were the good man she insisted he was, he would have felt some compunction, but he felt none. Only a ravenous hungering to make her his.
“There is something I want you to know, Jeremy,” she said. The clear lightness of her voice possessed an ethereal quality that marked her more faerie than mere woman.
His gaze followed her glorious lips as they moved, and for all the pretense between them, his hungering for her was all too real.
Compelled, he drifted closer and stopped with a handbreadth between them. “What is it, love?” he asked huskily.
He’d gone days without having his lust slaked; that alone accounted for this ravenous need for the woman before him, especially this McQuoid.
“My family . . .” she began.
His cockstand fell.
“What of your family?” he asked, not bothering to mask his ire.
God, as quick as the chit could turn him on, she proved just as effective at dousing his ardor.
“Time and time again, I defend your name to my family.”
Tremaine started. Why the hell would she do that? That flew in the face of everything the devout McQuoids were and professed to be.
Knowing she’d defended him when he intended to betray her didn’t give him the twisted satisfaction he’d have expected it would.
“I don’t approve of how Arran cut you from his life, and I support even less my family’s willingness to cast you out.
” Linnie rested a delicate hand upon his sleeve.
“And I . . . don’t know the truth surrounding your and Arran’s falling-out, but I do know you were like a brother to him, and my siblings and I have condemned their treatment of you. ”
“Your family didn’t cast me out,” he said, unable to keep the biting edge from his tone.
Confusion wreathed Linnie’s brow.
“After what your cousin did, his actions at sea, he sealed his and your entire family’s fate as a Tremaine enemy, Linnie.”
Her gaze turned tragic.
Tremaine waited a moment, deliberately drawing out her suffering. “But for you, Linnie”—he murmured, stepping closer, the snow crunching under the heel of his boots—“for you, I’ll make the sole exception.”
She stared at him questioningly. “I don’t . . .”
“We can be friends.”
With that, Tremaine set his trap into full motion.
A tremulous smile formed on her lips. “Friends?”
No. “Yes.” When the Thames runs dry.
He wasn’t friends with women. It was a fact known to men everywhere that one could not have that sort of camaraderie with a woman. It was even less possible for a gentleman to have any sort of friendly relationship with a lady of the ton—at that, a young, inexperienced one.
No. There existed no planet where Tremaine and the engrossing, innocent Linnie Smith could ever be friends, his feud with her McQuoid kin notwithstanding.
“Miiiiiiss Smiiiiith!”
The distant call put an end to their exchange.
Linnie looked in the direction from which it came.
“My maid,” she murmured. Regret tinged her pronouncement.
He lifted his head. “It wouldn’t do well for us to be found to—”
“No, I know.”
Still, she lingered. The wind tossed her blond curls about. Understanding the lure of that fabled father who traded all for the power of gold, Tremaine slipped his fingers through Linnie’s satiny, soft tresses.
Her lashes drifted low, her body swayed closer.
Discovery be damned, Tremaine cupped her nape. He lowered his mouth to pick up precisely where he and Linnie had left off the night before at Rutland’s, before the world had intruded and he’d learned who she was.
“Miiiiss Smiiiiith!”
This time, that frantic voice grew nearer.
Reluctantly, Tremaine released her. To keep from dragging Linnie into his arms, he drew the hood of her cloak back into place.
Linnie moved a passion-filled gaze over his face. “Goodbye, Jeremy.”
“Goodbye, Linnie-love.”
The lady’s eyes widened, and then she hurried off.
Suddenly, Linnie stopped. She whipped back around, knocking free the fur-lined hood. Worry spilled from her enormous eyes. “Will I see you again?”
Tremaine inclined his head in acknowledgment. “You can count on it, love.”
Relief washed over her exquisite features. With that, she hastened off to meet her maid.