Chapter Six #2
The corners of her mouth twisted, like they couldn’t decide whether to form a smile or a frown. Instead of either, she merely sighed. “You really are a terrible liar.”
Arden could hardly argue that point. “Regardless, you’re wrong.”
“Am I?” she asked, bemused.
“We made no deal,” he reminded her.
She frowned, and he could see her sifting through her memory of the night before. After a moment, she shook her head. “Only because you’re too stubborn for your own good.” Her tone was mild, but the words still unnerved him.
“Is that a threat?”
She paused, as if considering it. “No. Just a statement of fact. I understand that you’re angry with me, embarrassed, certainly—”
He cut her off with a laugh that even to his own ears sounded foreign, too rough edged and bitter to be called a proper laugh.
“You don’t understand anything about me,” he told her, aware even as he said the words that they weren’t the truth.
She’d known him well enough to play him like a perfectly tuned piano five years ago, and while he felt like an altogether different person now, he had a nagging suspicion that she could manage it all over again if she tried.
He could see in her smile that she recognized the lie in his words as well, but, mercifully, she didn’t call it out this time. Instead, her expression softened.
“Whatever it is you want from me, Arden, I can’t give it to you.” Her voice was so quiet he barely heard her over the caw of seagulls above and the waves crashing at their feet.
When Arden was a boy, his mother had read to him from a book of fables each night, and one in particular came back to him now.
In it, a rabbit asked a fox for help in escaping a hunter.
The rabbit knew he had as much to fear from the fox as from the hunter, but since the hunter was hunting them both, he reasoned they could work together.
They did, but when the rabbit and fox were successfully free from the hunter, the fox wasted no time devouring the rabbit himself.
Arden had never understood the rabbit’s decision until now, hadn’t been able to understand what desperation truly meant or how it could turn the wisest men into fools.
Now, he only hoped his own story would end better than the rabbit’s.
“Yesterday, I suggested we work together,” he said.
She looked sideways at him, furrowing her brow. “Which was a mad idea that I assumed was due to your surprise and an overindulgence of whiskey. You aren’t still drunk now, are you?”
Arden laughed. “I wish I was.” He paused, bracing himself for the next words, knowing they would taste vile. “I need your help to convince Oriana Mayles to marry me.”
She turned to look at him fully, eyes narrow and mouth pursed.
“I already told you—I can’t.”
Bitter frustration coursed through his veins—just the sort of emotion his father always told him was ungentlemanly, but for once, he didn’t stifle it.
He was hardly a gentleman anymore, and he couldn’t afford to live by his father’s rules.
The woman before him had no qualms about morals or what was polite.
She fought in the mud, and if he wanted to survive, he had to join her.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” A hard edge leaked into his voice. “Because if you don’t, I’ll have no choice but to tell everyone the truth about you.”
If he weren’t watching for it, he might have missed her small, sharp inhale or the way her green eyes widened slightly before she gathered her wits and her expression smoothed out once more.
“As I said yesterday, telling anyone the truth would hurt you just as badly as it will hurt me. Your aunt will never name you her heir after the scandal hits.”
Ah, but that was where there was a flaw in her logic.
“If I can’t convince Miss Mayles to marry me, she won’t name me her heir anyway,” he pointed out, his mouth curving into a thin smile. “And if I’m going down, you can be damned sure I’m taking you with me.”
He met her gaze and forced himself to hold it.
This was the part where she called his bluff, where she smiled that mocking smile and told him he was a terrible liar, that he simply didn’t have it in him to blackmail her.
Five years ago, she would have been right about that, but he wasn’t the same man he’d been then.
Now he knew what it meant to have your back against the wall, and he no longer had the privilege of taking the high road.
Her jaw tensed, her eyes narrowed, and when she finally spoke, her voice was strained.
“Has it occurred to you that you give me too much credit? Even if I did help you, I can’t guarantee Oriana will agree to marry you.”
Arden tried to ignore the triumph surging through him. “You sell yourself short—you’ve convinced people to marry you in far less time than that.”
She scoffed. “Men are simpler creatures than women, and Oriana is particularly shrewd when it comes to suitors. Besides, has it occurred to you that you give yourself too little credit? After all, if . . . what was it you called me yesterday? Ah yes, if a vagabond urchin like me can manage it, surely anyone can.”
Despite the lightness in her words, he still had to fight the urge to apologize, but that was where he drew the line. He might be desperate, but he wasn’t that desperate.
“And yet,” he said instead, “when it comes to Oriana Mayles, it seems plenty of men have tried and failed.”
Her mouth pursed. “Having seen a few of those men, at least, I wouldn’t let their failure discourage you too much. The girl has standards, yes, but any decent man could meet them. And you are a decent man, Arden Ryskamp.”
The words sounded trifling, but Arden had the impression that she was bestowing him with high praise all the same.
He thought back to earlier that morning—an even more uncomfortable situation.
One that he would rather pry his own fingernails off than share with her, but prying his own fingernails off wouldn’t help him convince Oriana to marry him.
He took a deep breath and told her about Oriana’s morning visit and how spectacularly he had embarrassed himself. When he reached the bit where he’d catapulted jam all over her, the woman who was not Arabella clapped a hand over her mouth, but not before a bright burst of laughter slipped out.
Her laughter should have made him burn with shame and anger, but it didn’t.
It was so different from any other laugh he’d heard from her in the last two days, unrestrained and vibrant.
The sound of it settled over him like a cool breeze on a hot day.
It felt like it lifted a weight from his shoulders he hadn’t realized was there.
In that brief instant before she smothered the sound, Arden was back in Strall five years before, when her laugh was his favorite sound in the world.
He offered her a small, self-deprecating smile. “So you see, I am in desperate straits. I need you to help me, Arabella—Delphinia—whoever the hell you are.”
For a long moment, she didn’t speak, turning her gaze back out to the sea as if she might find an answer there.
“And if I don’t?” The corners of her lips twisted down in disdain. “You’ll turn me in? You’ll see me thrown in prison for the rest of my life? Is that what you’re saying?”
Arden had no doubt that the woman in front of him deserved to be in prison for what she’d done to him, not to mention the eight other men and Thaddeus Mayles, but could he send her there himself?
He hated her, hated what she’d done, but the thought of it still lodged beneath his skin like a splinter.
She was right about him—he was a terrible liar, and he knew if he tried to tell her yes, he would, and she would call his bluff, but whether either of them liked it or not, she was his last hope, and he couldn’t let her go without a fight.
“I don’t think either of us wants to find out what I would do, if it came down to it.”
Mavis didn’t know if Arden would truly turn her in if she didn’t agree to help him, but there was one thing she was certain of: The Arden Ryskamp standing beside her on the beach today was a stranger to the Arden Ryskamp she knew five years ago—he was bitter, angry, desperate, and that combination made him more dangerous than Mavis realized.
But despite every scrap of survival instinct she had, she couldn’t bring herself to fear him.
Maybe that made her a fool, but Mavis’s instincts hadn’t led her astray before, and she hoped they wouldn’t start now.
She thought about how hopeless she’d felt when she woke up this morning, the long stretch of cons that awaited her, how tired she was of all of this.
She thought about the figure Leif gave her: one million three hundred thousand five hundred and sixty-three solas.
To her, it was an unfathomable amount of money, but to Arden and most other Lusters, it was fathomable enough—a fortune, yes, but a perfectly attainable one.
Hell, whatever Arden hoped to inherit from his aunt was surely ten times that.
Even Oriana’s dowry was two million solas.
An idea came to her—a risky idea that was all the more dangerous because it dangled hope in front of her for the first time in more years than she could count.
“If I were to help you,” she said slowly. “It would come at a cost.”
Arden frowned. “The cost is my keeping your secret.”
Mavis shook her head. “My help is more expensive than that. If I convince Oriana to marry you, I want her dowry.”
Arden balked. “I’m not giving you another sola.”
“If you want my help, you’ll give me all two million.” Mavis lifted her chin and held his gaze. “And not a sola less.”
Arden’s eyebrows shot up. “Oriana Mayles’s dowry is two million solas?”
“Does it really matter?” Mavis asked. “Given the size of your aunt’s fortune, you won’t need the dowry on top of everything else.”