Chapter 8
As soon as Edward set her down on the front steps of the manor, the servants rushed forward.
Mary got there first and cupped Valeria’s face in her hands, checking for cuts and bruises. Behind her, the other servants pressed in.
Valeria touched their hands and said she was fine. Wet and foolish and perfectly all right. Then she raised her voice for the gentlemen hurrying down the steps.
“And we seem to have a winner in today’s little game.”
Edward felt something tighten in his chest. Pride, maybe. Then she smiled at him. It was small. Quiet.
Nobody had smiled at him. Not in years. People ran. People looked away. He was the Hound. If he was not the Hound, he was nobody.
He nodded to the men who stared at him. Some of them looked as though they wanted to challenge him, but nobody did. He turned and walked toward the manor.
His room was at the end of the guest wing.
He shut the door behind him and stood in the quiet for a moment.
The room smelled of clean linen and woodsmoke.
His coat was soaked through, and his boots were caked with mud.
His shirt clung to his skin, and he could still smell lavender on it.
Her lavender. From the gazebo, when she had pressed her face into the collar of his coat and breathed in, thinking he had not noticed.
He had noticed.
He had noticed other things, too. The way the wet muslin clung to her waist and hips when he carried her.
The weight of her against his chest. The hollow at the base of her throat, where the rain collected.
The way her dress turned sheer where it pressed against her skin, and the effort it took him to keep his eyes on the path ahead.
He was trained to notice details. That training had never been less welcome.
He took off his coat, then his shirt and boots. He filled the basin from the pitcher and washed the mud from his hands, face, and arms. The water was cold. He did not mind cold. Cold was familiar. Cold was simple. It did not ask anything of him.
He thought about her face when she had pushed him away in the garden. Not afraid. Not angry. But something else. Something he did not have a name for yet.
He thought about the way she had looked at him when he told her about the orphans. No pity. No performance. Just attention. As though what he said mattered to her, and not because he was the Hound or because he had a title, but because he was a man standing in the rain telling the truth.
Nobody looked at him like that. Nobody had looked at him like that in twelve years.
He dried his hands. Put on a clean shirt. Sat on the edge of his bed. The mattress was too soft. He had slept on stone floors and ship decks and the hard ground of a dozen countries. A mattress like this made him feel as though he were sinking.
The room was warm. Someone had lit the fire while he was out in the storm. The flames threw light across the walls, the furniture, and the writing desk in the corner.
It was a nice room. Better than most of the rooms he had slept in over the past decade.
Better than the cellar in Vienna, where the rats had names and the water came from a cracked jug.
Better than the attic in Constantinople, where he had spent hot and weary days waiting for a man who never came home.
Better than the narrow cot on the ship from Lisbon, where the ceiling was so low he could not sit up without hitting his head.
He had a house now. Nathaniel had seen to that. A manor in the north, near the Scottish border, with land and tenants and a roof that leaked in three places.
Edward had been there twice. Both times, he had slept on the floor of the study rather than the bed in the master chamber, because the bed was enormous and empty, and sleeping in it alone made him feel like a fraud.
A wife would change that. A wife would change everything.
The house would have someone in it. The rooms would be used.
The tenants would see a duchess at the door, and they would stop looking at him as though he might murder them in their sleep—which was fair enough given his reputation, but tiresome all the same.
He did not want a wife for the reasons most men wanted one. He did not want a companion or a mother for his children or a hostess for his dinner parties, because he did not have children and did not intend to host dinner parties, and companionship was a concept he had never fully understood.
What he wanted was simpler and harder to explain. He wanted someone who knew what he was and chose to stay anyway. He wanted someone who did not flinch.
Valeria Hughes did not flinch. She shook, and she went pale, and her fingers trembled around the ghost of a teacup. But she did not flinch. And that one stubborn act of courage had undone twelve years of careful indifference in the space of an afternoon.
He should write to Nathaniel. His brother would want a report.
How the auction was going, whether Edward had embarrassed himself, and whether the Hound had frightened everyone into leaving.
Nathaniel worried about these things. He believed that Edward could be civilized, which was either touching or deluded, depending on the day.
Edward thought about what Nathaniel had said before he left.
They had been in Nathaniel’s study, a warm room with too many books and a fire that was always too hot.
Nathaniel had sat behind his desk with his fingers steepled and his brow furrowed and that look on his face that meant he was about to say something Edward would not want to hear.
“Ye cannot keep doing this,” he had said. “Living in rooms with no furniture. Eating while standing up. Sleeping with a knife under yer pillow.”
“The knife is practical.”
“The knife is a symptom. Ye are not at war anymore, Edward. The war is over. It has been over for two years. You have a title and a house and an income, and ye are living like a man who expects to be killed in his sleep.”
“Old habits.”
“Old habits that are going to eat ye alive if ye do not find something else. Someone else.” Nathaniel had looked at him then with the expression of an older brother who had spent his entire adult life worrying about his younger one.
“Go to the auction. Meet the woman. Try to be a person for one week. That is all I am asking.”
Edward had agreed because saying no to Nathaniel required more energy than saying yes, and because somewhere underneath the spy and the soldier and the killer, there was still a man who wanted to sit at a table and enjoy a meal without checking the exits first.
However, he did not tell Nathaniel that. He merely said, “Aye, fine,” and then left the study, packed a bag, rode to Thornhill, and walked into a room full of men who were afraid of him and a woman who was not.
He looked at the writing desk. The inkpot. The paper. He did not write. He did not know what he would say.
Dear Nathaniel, I have kissed my hostess in the garden, but she pushed me away. I stopped immediately, and she agreed to marry me. I do not understand any of it.
That was not a letter. That was a confession.
He leaned back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. The plaster had a crack in it that ran from the window to the center beam. His eyes followed it.
Her smile. That was the part he kept circling back to. Small and quiet and directed at him in front of everyone, as though she were not afraid to be seen choosing him. As though he were a man worth smiling at.
He was the Hound. He had killed men in cellars and alleys and once on the steps of an opera house. He had done things that woke him in the middle of the night and kept him awake till dawn. He was not a man worth smiling at. He knew that.
But she had smiled. And he had felt something crack open in his chest that he had spent twelve years keeping shut, and he did not know how to close it again.
He closed his eyes. He would not sleep. He never slept well in new places. But he lay still and breathed and let the quiet settle around him. In the dark behind his eyes, he saw her face, rain on her cheeks, her chin up, her blue eyes steady on his.
He thought about the way she had held his gaze in the entrance hall when every other person had taken a step back.
He thought about the way she stuck out her hand like a man.
He thought about the riddles in the gazebo, and the way she laughed, real and startled, and the look on her face when she told him about three years of silence.
He thought about what she had said before he had carried her to the gazebo.
“How would you treat your wife and the people who work for you?”
Nobody had ever asked him that. Not in twelve years of service. Not at Court. Not in any of the rooms where men decided the fate of nations.
The question assumed he was capable of gentleness, which was either brave or foolish of her, and he was not sure which was the case.
He had told her the truth—respect. He had not planned to say it.
It came out because she asked him plainly, and he was too tired to lie, and the rain was loud enough to mask any mistakes, and she was warm in his arms and looking at him with those blue eyes, and he had simply had enough of pretending.
He thought about Gordon Hansley, a man he had never met and would never meet. A man who had starved his wife and locked her in her rooms and controlled her meals and her letters and her laughter.
Edward had killed men for less. He had killed men for much less. The Crown had asked him to, and he had done it, and he had not lost sleep over most of them.
He would not have lost sleep over Gordon Hansley.
I will not ruin this. Whatever this is. I will not ruin it.
He lay there for a long time. The house creaked around him. Footsteps sounded in the corridor. A door closed somewhere. They were the sounds of a house full of people settling in for the night.
Somewhere below, he heard laughter. A woman’s voice, then another. Valeria, maybe. Or her sister. He could not tell from this distance. But the sound, warm and unguarded, drifted up through the floorboards and settled in the room with him.