Chapter 4
“Now, listen, Margo. I think it’s time we made a plan.”
Margo looked up at Henry with a start. They were well out of London now, and the road was growing pitted, the carriage swaying from side to side.
She’d been watching him sit stiffly in the center of the bench, and every time the carriage took a sharp jounce, she was certain she could see the muscles of his thighs flex to hold himself in place.
Good Lord, she was demented. How long had she been staring at the man’s legs? This was Henry, she reminded herself. Sober, patient, virtuous Henry.
“I thought we had a plan,” she said. “Is this whole journey not the culmination of our plan?”
“You had a plan,” he said flatly. “And it makes no sense.”
Margo couldn’t help herself. She pinched her lips together and raised her chin. “No one asked you to go along with it.”
“For God’s sake, Margo, you asked me to go along with it!” Henry ran his hands through his hair, which had long since dried in the carriage. A clump of it stuck up endearingly on one side, and Margo felt oddly delighted by Henry’s dishevelment.
Which was ridiculous. She was always ridiculous.
“Fine,” she said. “We need a plan. Direct me. Consider me entirely under your command.”
A muscle in Henry’s jaw ticked. It was remarkable. Margo had heard of such things, but she wasn’t entirely certain she’d seen it in the flesh.
“Do you not want me to be under your command? I didn’t say that to upset you—”
“No. No, damn it, don’t look at me like that, or I’ll call this whole thing off.”
Everything felt upside-down. Matilda had run off with Lord Ashford, and Henry was cursing and discomposed and acting entirely out of character. “Like what?”
“Like I’ve taken your champagne glass and dumped it in the grass.”
Margo felt her lips curl up. “You did take my champagne glass and dump it in the grass.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose again. “Yes, well. You were nineteen and your cheeks were nearly the color of your hair. I was trying to save you from yourself.”
She laughed. “I can’t believe you remember.”
“I can’t believe you remember. I wouldn’t have—”
He stopped abruptly. His cheeks colored, and Margo was reminded of how delightfully Henry blushed. “You wouldn’t have what?”
“Carried you,” he mumbled, addressing his waistcoat. “Had I thought you would remember.”
She hadn’t been nearly as tipsy as Henry had imagined—her face grew remarkably flushed with very little alcohol, a fact which she had not yet grown wise to at nineteen—only pleasantly dizzy and delighted when Henry had scooped her up after dinner at Number Twelve and hauled her from her spot in the garden to the door of her bedchamber.
She’d curled her fingers in his hair and buried her face in his neck, and—
Well, Henry had never mentioned it, and so she’d rolled her eyes at her folly the next morning and attempted to put it out of her mind.
She felt very odd, at this particular moment, upon hearing that Henry had not forgotten after all.
She tried to straighten the seam of one of her leather gloves and then gave up and peeled them off. “In any case. Tell me what kind of plan you’d like for us to have.”
Henry loved plans, and at this mention of his hobbyhorse, he perked up. “As far as I see it, we have two choices. We can stop to search the major villages along the route or we can attempt to arrive at Gretna Green before Matilda and Ashford, so that we are waiting for them when they get there.”
Margo pursed her lips. “I suppose we cannot do both.”
“Not without the power of flight.”
God. She was not very good at arranging things. She plunged headlong into action, and then, like as not, had to spend twice as much time picking through the wreckage of her impetuous choices.
“Which option do you prefer?” she asked. “Does one stand a better chance of success?”
Henry drummed his fingers on his thigh. Margo was, unfortunately, helpless to avoid watching. His fingers barely made a dent. Was the man cast from bronze? Surely he had not felt so firm at twenty-two when he’d carried her up the stairs at Number Twelve.
She would have remembered that.
“Obviously finding them on the road would be preferable,” Henry said finally.
Margo ordered her eyes to return to his face, which was very grave and Henry-ish.
“But I think the risk is too great to take. If we miss them entirely, they could be in Scotland and have the thing done while we’re still searching Nottinghamshire. ”
“So we proceed directly to Scotland?” She had to admit, it made sense.
“How do you feel about traveling night and day? If we stop in the morning and evening to change the horses—and prepare to spend a great deal of money on new cattle and coachmen—we can get there in a few days.”
“And then we just … wait for Matilda and Ashford to turn up?”
Henry’s eyes crinkled in the corners, and Margo felt on more familiar footing.
“I know you don’t like to wait, but yes, I suppose that’s what we would have to do.
Fortunately the two of you look enough alike that we need only parade you around Gretna Green and tell everyone that they’re not to witness the handfasting of your double. ”
He was smiling at her, obviously expecting her to laugh, but instead Margo felt sick. It was too close to what she had done to Matilda, what had driven Matilda to elope with Ashford and she—
Shame was a hot burning sensation in her face and her fingers, and regret tasted sour in her mouth.
“Margo? What’s the matter?”
Bollocks, Henry was so bloody perceptive. It was as though he had a tuning fork that caught the shades of her moods.
“I’d rather not say,” she said, and now she was sitting as rigidly as Henry. Every bump of the carriage felt like it rattled her bones.
Henry didn’t say anything for a long moment.
She chanced a glance at him from underneath her lashes. He was scowling rather fiercely at his poor waistcoat.
“Margo,” he said finally, “I don’t mean to pry. But … has Ashford—that is, have you and Ashford—” He broke off, clenched his jaw, then tried again. “If Ashford has left you indisposed in some way, Margo, you can—”
“Good Lord!” Did Henry think she was pregnant? By Ashford? She wasn’t sure whether to laugh or vomit. “That would be a tangle, but no. No. Ashford’s—bloody hell, Henry, I’ve done wrong here. Not Ashford. At least … I hardly know…”
She trailed off. God. She didn’t really want to share her shame with Henry—most especially not with Henry—but on the other hand, Henry probably ought to know what exactly Matilda had gotten entangled in.
Margo barely knew what Matilda had gotten entangled in.
“All right,” she said. “Fine. Henry, I’m so bloody humiliated over this. I know I’ve done wrong. All right? So please—do not make it worse.”
Henry didn’t say anything, only waited patiently for her to continue, which somehow made her feel both comforted and faintly resentful.
“I followed Matilda. We’d gone to one of Denham’s routs—not really our set, but Matilda had a burning desire to look at some sculpture in his gardens—and she’d all but vanished for half the night.
It was peculiar, and then she started acting even more peculiar—not telling me things.
Holing up in her bedchamber and emerging with ink on her hands. ”
It had been so strange, not to be in Matilda’s confidence.
They did not always get along, but they were painfully intimate with one another, half in each other’s skin most of the time.
It had come, Margo supposed, of how they’d clung to one another after their parents’ death, after they’d been sent to school and then, quite horribly, sent down less than a year after.
Aunt Lavinia had despaired of their ever becoming ladies—recalcitrant hoydens, she had called them—and almost without realizing it, they had decided it was better to flout society’s rules than to fail at trying to follow them.
“It was peculiar,” she said again, “so one night I listened at the wall between our chambers, and when I heard her go out at one o’clock in the morning, I followed her. She walked straight out of Mayfair and into St. James’s Park—”
“Good Christ,” Henry said, “in the middle of the night?”
Margo waved a hand dismissively. “I carried a pistol.”
He made a choking noise.
“I didn’t need to use it.”
Henry did not look particularly reassured.
“In any case, I watched her walk straight up to Lord Ashford. I recognized him straightaway”—Ashford wore facial hair, which was startlingly out of the ordinary, almost as unexpected as the large white scar that knifed through his beard on the left side of his face—“and then I saw them embrace. He led her off into a darker part of the park, and I turned and fled back to Number Twelve.”
“That’s not so very bad,” Henry said. “Conversation probably would have been preferable to voyeurism, but not so terribly shameful.”
Margo made an inarticulate negation. “I haven’t even started on the bad part yet, Henry, believe me.”
He winced.
“The next day, we had plans to attend one of Lady Montmorency’s midnight card parties”—she heard Henry stifle a groan; the card parties occasionally verged on orgies—“and Matilda was dead set on our arriving separately. I knew—I just knew she was planning to meet Ashford there. So I arrived ahead of her. I wore one of her favorite gowns, and I—” She forced the words past numb lips.
“I pretended to be Matilda. I went right up to Ashford and acted as though I knew him intimately.”
She gave Henry a pleading glance, though she had not intended to try to defend herself.
“I only meant to try to talk to him, Henry! I wanted to see what he said to her, whether there was anything in his manner beyond desire or madness. I hoped that perhaps he was different from what the rumors said, that he had a tendre for her, maybe that he loved her. But he—he—”
Her face was hot, and she pressed her fingers to her cheeks.
“He thought I was Matilda, of course. He pulled me into an alcove and kissed me and told me that he wanted to see me—her—to see Matilda tied to his bed with the strings of her corset, and he wanted to—to—” Dear God, she was going to die of humiliation.
“To use a riding crop on her. He probably realized it was me at that point, because I slapped his face and then ran home like an idiotic rabbit.”
Henry had not said a single word, but he was staring at her with an unreadable expression on his face.
“I know it was awful!” she said. “I know I shouldn’t have done it.
I confronted Matilda as soon as she returned.
I told her what Ashford had said, told her I was just trying to protect her, but she was furious.
She told me after everything we’d done together, I had some nerve to cast judgment on her. ”
She felt frustrated tears fill her eyes, and she blinked hard so they wouldn’t fall. “I wasn’t judging her. I didn’t—I mean—bloody hell, Henry!” She looked across the carriage at his impassive face. “Matilda has never displayed romantic interest in another person before Ashford.”
It was one of the many ways in which they were different.
Margo loved pleasure, giving and receiving it.
Her first liaison had been with another one of the girls at school—they’d been like two fawns, learning each other’s bodies and their own.
In the seven years since her debut, Margo had carried on semi-discreetly with two charming widows and one very decorative and solicitous footman, until Matilda had pointed out that Margo was putting him in an awkward position with respect to his employment, and Margo had broken it off in horror at her own poor judgment.
But Matilda had never done anything like that.
She kept her desire for pleasure—if it existed—close to her chest, unlike Margo.
She had certainly never told Margo of any romantic attachments, physical or cerebral.
And for her first affair to be with Ashford—to involve riding crops—made Margo half-consumed by worry for her twin.
“I don’t think it’s entirely regular,” she finally managed. “Not that either of us is governed by what is typical. But Ashford is so much older, so much more experienced than Matilda, and I—I’m afraid for her.”
There. She’d probably scandalized Henry half to death. He’d witnessed her do plenty of outrageous things, of course, but kissing her sister’s amoureux and then confronting him about his sexual proclivities seemed a new level of infamy, even for her.
She peeked up at him. He regarded her steadily.
“Margo.” His voice was kinder than she deserved.
“Perhaps—well, I don’t pretend to know what’s in Matilda’s mind.
But do you think it possible that if she does have, er, certain specific desires, she might hesitate to share them with you?
And that her particular interests could explain why she’s remained single thus far? ”
“Of course I’ve thought of that.” She’d thought of nothing but that. “But—if Ashford is the first person to meet her needs in this way, I fear she might be blind to his true nature. He did not speak respectfully to me—her—me, Henry!”
“I believe some people like that.” The tops of Henry’s ears were red.
Margo blinked. “To be spoken to in such a fashion?”
“To be ordered about. To do the ordering.”
“And you do not think that suggests something dark about his nature?”
“I hope not. I’ve certainly thought about turning you over my knee plenty.”
Margo gaped.
As if he had said nothing untoward, Henry continued speaking. “As long as they’re able to discuss their desires, freely and consensually, I wouldn’t think twice. But I agree that Matilda’s inexperience is concerning.”
Margo had no idea what he was saying. He had thought about … about her? About spanking her?
Because she was so ungovernable, surely. Because she was wild and unseemly. Not in a suggestive way.
Yet to her abject horror, she was now thinking about it in a decidedly carnal fashion. When Ashford had threatened her with the crop, she’d been equal parts horrified and repulsed. But now—with Henry—warmth prickled throughout her body, an ache rising between her thighs.
She could see it, suddenly. Feel it. Henry’s big, blunt-fingered hand on her naked flesh. Her hips lifted for him. His dark eyes hot with desire, her hands digging into his thickly muscled thighs as she writhed with impatience and demand—
“Don’t you think?” Henry said.
She looked up. He looked perfectly normal, his expression a trifle concerned.
Her face was hot. The carriage was stifling. She pressed her bare fingers against her skirts and tried desperately to appear as though she had not just experienced the most vivid erotic fantasy of her life.
“To be sure,” she said, and had no idea what she’d agreed to.