Chapter Fourteen #3
She did, but it was not a look she could sustain. “It signifies nothing,” she said. “You may put whatever construction you like upon it, but it still has no meaning.”
“So you say.” Griffin caught her chin as she would have turned her head and levered her back using only his fingertip.
“I do love you, Olivia, and that is not predicated on you returning the same feeling for me. I choose to believe you do, though I will not insist upon hearing it. If it has not come to you yet, I hold out hope that it will. Mayhap it will strike you suddenly, for no reason that you can name, and you will know with the same certainty I do that it has always been love, if not from the first, then from only a few moments past it. You could not have known it then, but looking back, you will wonder how it escaped your notice, or why it was so important to deny what so clearly fit, and in our case, was so clearly inevitable.”
Now she stared at him, and because her throat closed again, she said nothing.
“Shall I tell you the rest of what you’re afraid to hear?
” If he hadn’t been watching her closely, alert to the faintest change in her expression, he would have missed the slight parting of her lips and the soft, sibilant sound of her reply.
“I could find no corroboration of your story, Olivia. No evidence that anyone ever died at the inn, no tales passed on about a murder on the grounds, no indication that there was ever an investigation related to a death by any authority.”
Olivia struggled to sit up and realized that Griffin’s arm about her waist now served to restrain her. Frustrated, she lay back and ground out, “It does not seem possible. When they lifted him away from me, he was so heavy. They struggled with his weight. I don’t know how he could have lived.”
“I don’t know that he did.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There was no death at the inn, but a Mr. Rollins—not Rawlings—was found hanged in his room at university. As best I could determine, the timing of his death connects closely to your departure from the inn.”
“But how could you know that? I never said any—”
“The Romneys,” he said, placing a finger to her lips when she would have protested. “You’ve spent these last years looking over your shoulder, Olivia, imagining the inevitability of being found out and alternately wondering if there was truly anything to be discovered.”
He was right, but that did not make it easier to hear. “I don’t understand about Mr. Rollins. He hanged himself?”
Griffin’s reply to her question was a noncommittal murmur.
“I did not learn about that from the Romneys. There would be no reason for them to know of it. I visited Cambridge and made inquiries. You said you thought all five of the travelers at your table were students. It seemed the place to go once I located your inn.” He saw she was not entirely at ease with what he had done, but had little choice to accept it.
“Your decision to go to Alastair while he was yet at university was not without risk. You must have known that. There was every chance you might have had an encounter with the students who came to your aid. Was that what you hoped would happen? You’d have had your answers then. ”
Olivia realized she honestly didn’t know.
“I’m not sure it was done of a purpose. At the time it seemed that Alastair could offer sanctuary, and I rarely ventured far from the residence he found for me.
How curious it is, to think on it now, that I should have put myself in the very midst of a place where I might expect to find answers, then avoid every opportunity to look for them. ”
“Curious, yes, but then we are all pieces of work, are we not?”
“I suppose.”
“There is another matter still to consider.”
She sighed. “There can’t be.”
He gave her a wry grin. “You assumed that Rawlings and his friends fled that night, but I can tell you now it wasn’t so.
Rawlings never returned, but whiskey, gin, and two pints of ale were all present the following morning.
If Rawlings’s friends were able to explain his disappearance to the satisfaction of others, especially the Romneys, what then accounted for your absence? ”
“What?”
“Consider this. You disappeared, Olivia. If there was no evidence that anything was amiss, then it would seem you vanished without cause. The Romneys would have been concerned. You imagined you were leaving behind a body, but I am telling you one was never found there. The good innkeeper and his wife would have wondered at your absence. You have said they cared for you. You left no note, no explanation. What reason might they have been given that would have satisfied everyone?”
Olivia’s eyes widened slowly. “They believed I ran off with Mr. Rawlings.”
“And there you have it.” He tapped the tip of her nose with his finger. “I have never accused you of being a slow top.”
“They told you?”
“It was not so straightforward a conversation as that. I may not possess Restell Gardner’s experience in eliciting information, but I could appreciate there was need for circumspection.
Mrs. Romney in particular was quite willing to talk about the trials of managing the inn.
Finding good help being chief among them.
You can imagine how it went from there. She mentioned one young woman of whom she was most particularly fond, but discovered her to be as lacking in good judgment as those who came and went before her.
‘They meet a rascal,’ she told me, ‘posing as a gentleman who promises much in a fine, silky voice, and then they’re gone without so much as a by-your-leave. ’”
He waited as she took it all in. “It was your disappearance that was remarked on by the Romneys. They would not have recalled anything about the students who stopped at the inn so many years ago if your departure weren’t fixed so clearly in their mind.
It certainly gave me pause, Olivia. You also, apparently. ”
She nodded slowly. “I thought that when no one came for me quickly that the Romneys may have taken it upon themselves to protect me. It never occurred that there might be another reason for their silence.” She searched Griffin’s face.
His expression held no urgency that she accept any of the things he’d told her.
She was free to examine what he’d said, free to discredit or embrace all of it.
He had no compelling need to convince or coerce her.
It was enormously liberating and unlike anything in her experience.
“What is to be done now?”
“Nothing except wait on the confirmation that the man you thought was Rawlings is indeed the same gentleman found hanged at university. It ends there, Olivia. It must. For everyone.”
She understood what he was saying. Whether the hanging was coerced, done by his own hand, or staged to hide evidence of a murder, the inquiry ended with the fact of his death. “The identity of this man, that is what Mr. Gardner is trying to establish?”
Griffin nodded. “He is engaged in a search of the London hells, looking for the foursome who appeared here. He has a description such as I was able to give him, and he expects to be successful. The four of them are bound by what happened that evening, and it makes them easier to find than if they’d scattered. ”
“You have done so much,” she said softly. “Given so much.” How had she not known? she wondered. How had she not known from the very first?
She lifted one hand and laid it along the side of his face. Her thumb made the lightest pass down his scar. “I do love you, you know.”
His smile was gentle. “So you have come to it at last.” He turned his head and caught the heart of her palm with his lips. He pressed his kiss, then folded her hand around it. “That is quite something indeed.”
“It is good of you not to be smug.” She felt as if what she held in her fist had substance. She settled it between her breasts. “It is disconcerting how often you are right about a thing.”
“I am going to treasure you said that and keep it close for all the times I am wrong.”
Olivia drew down his head and raised hers a fraction. “Will you have me now, Griffin? I think I should like that very much.”
Their mouths closed that infinitesimal gap. Heat blossomed the exact moment their lips touched, and their need was mutual and immediate and powerful.
Olivia tore at his stock and linen until she had her hands splayed across his chest. Her fingers curled a fraction, and she lightly scored him with her nails.
His flesh was warm and taut and responsive.
He anticipated her touch, prepared for it, and sucked in a breath just as she would have dragged her hands across his flat belly.
Her fingers dipped unerringly into the small space he gave between his abdomen and his trousers.
He groaned against her mouth as she clutched him.
His fingers fumbled with the fastening to his fly.
She released him long enough to deftly manage the thing herself, then took him in hand once again.
He was hot and hard and thick in her fist. She could feel the coursing of his blood, the steady pulse that matched the one in his throat and was set to the beat of his heart.
Griffin caught her hand and held it still.
“Not yet. Not just yet. I want…God, Olivia…you can’t…
” He covered her mouth hard with his as she squeezed her fingers ever so slightly.
He throbbed heavily in her fist. He pushed his tongue deep in her mouth, ground his mouth against hers, then ground his hips equally hard.
Olivia arched, pushed herself against him, dug one heel into the mattress for purchase, and all but slipped under his skin.
There was a brief struggle, and for a time they were equally matched, but she lost ground gradually as he drugged her with long, slow, deep kisses that left her boneless and pinioned under him.