Chapter 25
“Come in,” he said.
She let herself in quietly, her eyes downcast, and closed the door behind her.
“What is your business?”
He received her the way he received everything now. Level, cold, the whole of him shut away like a house closed for winter. She thanked him anyway.
“You needn’t have done it,” she said as she began to wring her hands together.
“The debt was never mine to owe. It belongs to another woman, and yet you settled it as though it were your own…without asking me a single thing about it first.” She waited, half expecting some sharp word, some reminder of exactly how little standing she had left to even thank him for anything. None came. “Thank you.”
He inclined his head, the smallest possible answer a man could give and still be called civil. She understood, watching him, that she would get nothing more than that from him that night.
“May I ask you something,” she said, when the silence had stretched long enough that she thought he might simply wait her out entirely.
“You may ask,” he said, crossing his arms and pacing the length of the room toward her.
“Whatever you hold against me, and I know it is a great deal, do not let it fall on Cassandra.”
“I beg your pardon?” He asked, his eyes sharp on her.
“Do not shut that girl back in the dark to spite the woman who first opened the door for her.” Her voice held steady, though it cost her something to keep it so, for all her throat ached.
“She has waited four years to want anything at all, my lord. Four years of lying in that bed believing the world had nothing left to offer her. She has finally found something worth wanting, and I will not stand here and watch you take it from her because you cannot bring yourself to…”
“To what?”
“To look at me.”
He turned away from Nell then and paced to the other end of the room.
“I have not touched Cassandra’s happiness,” he growled as he set his hands on the windowpane, staring out at the sprawling lawn below. “In fact, I have spent my years trying to secure just that for her.”
“She does not belong to you. She is your sister, not your obligation.”
“You overstep yourself,” he said gruffly. “I have never thought of her as something that belongs to me,” he clarified, though something in his eyes told Nell she had struck a chord.
“You refused her an evening out, and we both know it was never truly about the outing. It was about who she wanted to go out with.”
He said nothing to that at first, which was, she understood, its own kind of admission.
“Perhaps you are right that I have taken my brotherly duties a bit too seriously, and of course I see that my sister is not the girl she once was. She is a woman, and in control of her own future.” “And Tristan is not the boy you knew at twenty, whatever careless thing he once was in your company,” she pushed.
“You have no right to listen to conversations that are not yours.”
“A man can be more than the worst of his own young years, my lord,” she pressed as she began to walk toward him. “You of all people should believe that. You have spent four years proving it of yourself, becoming a man entirely unlike whoever you were before that road took your parents from you.”
“You presume a great deal,” he said as he turned around and raised an eyebrow, “for a woman standing in a room she has no claim to.”
“I presume nothing I have not watched with my own eyes these past weeks. I am speaking truth, and you know it.” She held his gaze, unwilling to let this one thing go, even now, even with everything else lost. “I have watched you become gentler with her by the day. I would hate to see that gentleness undone because of me.”
He turned from her then, toward the window, his broad shoulders and back a wall she could not read at all.
“I will go,” she said then, turning on her heel and walking toward the door. “Quietly, discretely, and for good. Just as Lady Vane planned for me.”
“It will not go without consequence, at least for me.”
“The county may have whatever story is easiest for it to swallow, a countess taken ill and gone to relations to convalesce, whatever tale serves you best,” she said.
“I will not contradict a word of it, and it will all be forgotten when the next scandal comes to the ton. You need never see me again, my lord, and in time this will all seem like something that happened to another man entirely. A dream, or perhaps a nightmare.”
“Cassandra is not strong enough yet to lose you. You will stay until she is well,” he said, his voice suddenly soft.
You are not strong enough yet to lose me, Nell thought and quickly pushed it away.
The offer was not kindness, Nell knew that. But a man who truly wanted her gone from his life entirely would have found a far swifter way to accomplish it than that.
“As you wish, my lord,” she said quietly as she reached for the door handle.
“There is one thing more.”
He paused, and she watched him decide, visibly, whether to say the rest of what he was thinking.
“Yes, my lord?”
“I have not let what you told me on the road lie unexamined, whatever else I have or have not believed of you since. I sent for Greaves this morning. I put my own eyes to the old documents myself, alongside your notes,” he said as he walked toward her.
“And?”
“What I found does not clear him.”
He said it as fact; nothing softened in it toward her. There was no warmth offered alongside the admission, but it was interesting that he had mentioned it at all.
“Thank you for that as well,” she said as she crossed the remaining distance toward him. “Whatever else you believe of me.”
They were standing close now. Nell took a deep breath and savored the scent of him, notes of mountains and pine.
They were closer than they had been in a long time, which only put the distance between them in relief.
She felt, with an ache that startled her, how badly she had missed him, missed the ease that had grown so quietly between them.
And yet, she was a surgeon’s daughter with a forged name, and a rope waiting patiently for her at the end of all of it.
He was an earl, with a house, a name, and a sister to think of.
Even without the lie. Standing this near to him, there had never truly been a world in which she could have kept him for her own.
It surely was all a dream.
And yet, the knowing changed nothing. Understanding the danger, or the sheer folly of it, did not lessen the wanting of him. If anything, it only made the ache sharper. It was almost as if resisting each other, and all that stood between them, brought their secret attraction into sharper relief.
She looked up, catching the warm, ember-bright sheen in his dark chestnut eyes, the hard, sculpted lines of a face that seemed carved from shadow and intention.
For a breathless moment, she let herself simply drift into him, swallowed whole by his presence as he stepped closer.
Standing in his shadow, she felt the sheer, overwhelming reality of him.
The broad set of his strong shoulders, the quiet power in his rigid posture, the reminder of just how impossibly tall he was.
Every instinct warned her to fall back, but being so close to him only diluted her resolve.
She was left with nothing inside but the fierce, desperate urge to lean in closer still.
Neither of them moved. The air between them had gone tight as a bowstring with everything that neither one of them would dare say aloud.
Then, without warning, he stepped back. It felt like a pin prick, sharp, and it left her stunned. Then, she turned on her heel and was barely out of the study, her hand still cool from the doorknob, when she found Greaves waiting for her in the hall. She gasped at the sight of him.
He stood with his usual haughty ease; he’d been summoned, she gathered, from the ledgers tucked under his arm, by Adrian himself. She almost smiled at the thought of him answering at last for his misdeeds, when her eyes caught sight of something she did not expect.
A small folded piece of paper, with words written in her hand.
He has my letter in his hand…
For one wild, hopeful moment she thought he meant to destroy it in front of her. To rip it up as some finale, to end the matter cleanly. But of course, he did not tear it.
He folded it instead, slowly, with great deliberation, in full view of her. It was so that she would understand precisely and completely how he meant to go on keeping it, holding it over her head like a noose. He tucked it into his jacket pocket, then patted his chest as if tucking it in.
“My lady.” He inclined his head, pleasant as ever, as though they were meeting by chance at a garden party.
Nell almost snorted.
“Mr. Greaves, I would say this is a pleasure, but I fear this is the exact opposite.”
“Oh come now. I trust you slept well? After our little conversation the other evening...”
“Say what you mean to say, Mr. Greaves. I have no patience left for the rest of it. The time for games has passed us.”
“Very well. As the lady likes it.” He smiled, and there was nothing pleasant in it now at all. He took a step closer and lowered his voice.
“This is the final bullet, my lady. Your own confession, written in your own hand, every particular of the fraud laid out as plainly as if you’d meant to save the magistrate the trouble of writing it up himself.
Enough to hang you twice over, should it ever reach the right eyes.
And it stays with me, for exactly as long as I find it useful to keep it. ”
“You have made your point. There is no need to parade it around.”
“Humor me then. I so love a parade.” He let the silence stretch for a moment, savoring it as his smile grew wide, his eyes as green as a snake’s scaly skin.
“One word to the magistrate, and this is the very first thing read into evidence against you. You are a proven fraud, my lady, caught out in your own writing…”
He outstretched his hand, the image of innocence. “I am merely the honest man who happened to unmask a thief in the course of his ordinary duties. Not one soul in this county, not the earl, not his younger sister, not a single servant in this house, would take your account of anything over mine.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure—”
“Ahem,” he said, tapping his chest where the letter rested. “Not once this is set before them.”
She said nothing. She had no cards left to play. There was nothing to say to a truth that plain, no matter how despicable the speaker was.
“Why? This can’t all be for sport! You have plenty to gain without bringing me down. It is cruel.”
“Years ago, in Plymouth, I was nothing at all, you know,” he said, his voice dropping, going quieter still and colder, both at once. “A newspaperman, hanging about a surgeon’s sickrooms for want of anything better to occupy my pen. I’ve always had a particular knack for…”
“Exploiting the misfortunes of others in gossip rags?” Nell said, her voice barely a whisper. “Or worse, for extortion or blackmail or—”
“I spoke to your father once, you know,” he said as he took a step closer, and that stole the air from Nell’s lungs. “I told him of my particular regard for you.”
“Your…your regard? For…for me?”
“Yes. Plainly, the way a man is meant to when he means to court a woman properly.” Something bitter crossed his face at the memory, and he snarled. “I was refused outright, you see. Dismissed, in so many careful words, as beneath a surgeon’s daughter. Beneath you.”
“I do not recall the conversation,” she said, nearly stammering on the words as she realized the plot of her plight was larger than she could have fathomed. “I was surely not present. I never heard a single man make such an offer to my father. My life was healing the sick and injured!”
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t recall it then.
” He gave a short, humorless laugh. “That is rather the point, though. You never even noticed me standing there in the first place. Not really. Do you understand that? I stood in that very room, and you looked straight through me as though I were a coat rack someone had left in the corner. I have forgotten neither the refusal nor the indifference, not in all the years since. Every single one of them I have spent making myself into a man who could unmake people, piece by careful piece, for the sake of exactly this moment. Not the money. Never the money, whatever the registers might suggest to a careless eye.”
“But why?” She asked, her voice shaky as she tried to figure out a way out of this mess.
“You were always the whole point of it, from the very first entry.”
She stared at him and felt something in her go past fear entirely, into a clean, reckless clarity she had not expected to find waiting for her on the other side of it.
“What now then, Mr. Greaves?” Nell asked, a tear escaping her eye. “What do you want from me?”
“Now,” he said, “you will do what you would not do then. You will come to me. Be my wife, once this paper marriage of yours is properly undone, as it easily can be.”
“I would rather hang,” she said, and her voice did not shake at all. “I would rather die than come to you. For all the plotting and scheming, it is the opposite of all I hold dear! I seek to save lives while you destroy them!”
He blinked, some small flicker of surprise crossing his composed scowl.
“I will not stand by another single day and watch you bleed a good man dry to settle a score with a girl who never once wronged you, Mr. Greaves. Whatever you believe you are owed for a slight I do not even remember, you will not collect it from him. I mean to stop you, whatever it costs me to do it.”
He opened his mouth to answer her, then his eyes moved past her shoulder, toward the doorway behind her, and went very still. She turned. Adrian was there, watching them.