Chapter Four
Rule Five:
Never Tell a Man Everything
It was astonishing, but to Persephone, Laurie’s shifting moods were as easy to read as they’d been when he was a boy. Calm outside, unsettled within.
He stood on the roof of his massive warehouse in wrinkled trousers, scuffed boots, and nothing else, hands braced on the waist-high brick, a three-quarter moon casting light across him. She’d woken alone, though the spot next to her was still warm from his body.
And she’d known exactly where he was.
Persephone paused, drinking in the sight of him with London spread before him.
He was stunning, captured in shadow, his body layered with ridged muscle and tempting hollows.
She’d kissed every spot her gaze now touched, licked and bitten until he groaned in surrender.
In turn, he’d done things to her she’d never dreamed of, ending with his lips toying between her legs until she screamed.
She would never be able to look at his workbench again—the one he had swept clear before placing her on top—without thinking of his head sinking between her spread thighs.
After they caught their breath, she’d pulled him to the floor and climbed over him, laughing at his dazed expression.
She’d made him put his spectacles on for that round.
Nevertheless, as always with this man, it looked like it would be a fight to keep him.
His head dropped as she approached, his muted sigh floating into the night.
Undeterred, she settled beside him, hip to hip. “We bleed the same, Laurie. Nothing else matters.”
He cursed softly, his fingers tensing around the brick.
“You bring bloody poetry with you, Perce, when life is anything but poetic. You think what we’ve shared changes facts”—he swept his hand between them, his eyes glittering when he saw that she was wearing his shirt, buttoned to the neck, and nothing beneath—“when it changes little. Same issues, same world. Now I merely know the color your eyes turn when you come, a smoky gray, more details to fucking haunt me.”
Turning her irritation into courage, she didn’t flinch at his ominous tone. She knew what scared him, the same thing that had always scared him. “I love you,” she said simply. “Then and now. I don’t care about the rest.”
This was the only fact she had to give.
He dragged his hand through his sable hair and turned to her.
She almost smiled—almost—at his chapped lips, the bite mark beneath his jaw, the scratch on his chest. He looked well-loved, run ragged; only his light brown eyes, shot through with moonlight, were tormented.
“You mean more to me than anyone in this life ever will, Perce. Since the first second I saw you in that decaying stable my father neglected like the rest. Love is not the damned problem. I’m not even sure it’s the right word for what I feel for you.
That requires more, and a thousand words wouldn’t be enough.
You’re the other half of me, leaving what’s left to ache like a wound. ”
He dodged her when she advanced, stalking two steps away, then back. Closed his eyes, jaw flexing. “Don’t make me hurt you,” he whispered, looking so much like the lonely boy that she had to blink tears away.
Persephone waited, doing what she did best: listen. It was how she’d gotten enough information to write a hundred books like the one she’d just published. If society knew how much she’d recorded about them, they would faint.
“How could anything hurt more than being without you, Laurie?”
He scrubbed the back of his neck, chewed on the inside of his cheek, squinted softly.
Somewhere after the workbench incident, his spectacles had gone missing.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think on this, Perce.
Years of thinking. Like mathematical equations spinning through my mind, the possibilities for us endless formulas, though I’ve yet to solve a single one. ”
“I’m a formula?” Obviously, this was what came with loving an exceptional man.
“I kept up with you, do you know?”
She shook her head.
Laurie paced to the wall, scuffed the toe of his boot along the brick.
“I saw you not long after Yorkshire that last time, maybe a year later. On Bond Street. By then, Dorsey and I were making money, enough blunt to employ solicitors. I simply put in a request, our strategy when we’re circling new investors because information unlocks opportunities.
Any mention in the gossip rags, that sort of thing, something about you I might have missed.
I didn’t want to be surprised, walk into some bloody tea I attended to raise blunt for the next project, only to find you hanging on the arm of your husband, Lord Whatever, the Earl of Nothing.
I might have done something really unpleasant. To him.”
Persephone pushed a tight breath between her teeth, her lungs aching from holding it throughout his speech. She shouldn’t enjoy hearing him say he’d have done something unpleasant out of jealousy, but she was weak. “I…I didn’t know.”
He frowned, giving her a cross look. “Of course, that’s the point.
I’m only just now moving to the up-and-up legitimate business, sweetheart.
I guess I held out hope, maybe there was a way once I was wealthy enough to have anything I wanted, which was you.
Until the opera. You were with—” He snapped his fingers, the muscles in his arms tensing, warming her in every place he’d dragged his teeth over an hour ago.
“Cosgrove,” she whispered, licking her lips, trying to ignore how his gaze zeroed in on her mouth. “The Earl of.”
Both a whatever and a nothing.
“Yes,” Laurie growled, his teeth a pale flash in the night, “that one. The woman I was with—”
At her gasp, he held up his hand, fingers spread.
“Perce, please don’t cut me with that blade while I’m pouring out my heart.
Anyway, I must have stared at you, and she said something I will never forget.
Cannot forget even now, with the taste of you on my tongue.
With your scent clinging to my fingertips. ”
“What did she say?” Persephone asked, not sure she truly wanted to know.
“That she’d been cast out of society as a young woman for a lone transgression, and she was now a ghost. To her family, to her former friends.
There, but not really there.” He glanced into the distance, his eyes the color of burnt timber in the moonlight.
“I guessed you’d leave with me, that night, had I asked.
And that you’d someday hate me for it. Lost love, perhaps I can live with, half my soul gone, a missing limb, agonizing but survivable.
Because when is life fair? Your loathing, I cannot live with.
It was exactly what my father said to me before I left Yorkshire: love so easily turns when a man reaches too high for it. ”
When he saw his argument wasn’t landing as he’d hoped, Laurie crossed to her, took her face in his hands, and tilted her gaze to his.
A breeze ripped off the Thames and swept over them, carrying the briny scent of the river and the mudflats lining it.
The pulse at his wrist skipped against her jaw, in time with hers.
“We can’t change the world we were born into, Perce.
I’m not a ‘youngest son of an impoverished baron’ step down, I’m a ‘rookery ruffian, toss the ladder aside’ step down.
Do you understand? This will be worse than a shocking book they might forget in a year or two with the next scandal. This will be forever.”
“I want forever,” she whispered.
He cursed, his fingertips pressing into her jaw.
Persephone’s temper lit faster than a flame held to dry wood.
“I want you to tell me you can’t live without me, Laurie.
That my getting cut dead on the street, for eternity if that’s the way it goes, isn’t worth more than we are.
If you can’t, I walk out that door and, like you, I never come back.
I’ll write my books and have a hundred cats, my warning remains the same. ”
“I came back,” he said, his voice scraped bare.
Crimson washed across her vision as her lips parted on a growl that sounded dangerously like one of his. Knocking his arms aside, she turned and made her way to the staircase leading belowstairs, to his bedchamber and her clothing. She wasn’t going to argue. She wasn’t going to beg.
As she’d threatened, she would be the one to leave this time.
“Perce,” he said, stumbling down behind her. “Hold up, will you?”
Persephone whispered nasty things beneath her breath as she stalked into his extraordinary bedchamber, cursing men.
Cursing love affairs, of which she’d had one before this—a brief, consensual, lovesick misadventure, she could now admit, after reading about another of Laurie’s conquests in the Gazette.
The baron had been shy, kind, and as wearied of his life as she’d been of hers.
Laurie grabbed her sleeve as she passed, her gown and underthings bundled in her arms. “Sweetheart, wait.”
“Don’t sweetheart me, Laurence John Thorne,” she said, clumsily unbuttoning his shirt and shimmying out of it.
Groaning, he stepped back as she stepped into her gown, yanking it past her waist. His hungry gaze singed her skin, head to toe. “You play dirty, Perce, you really do. And this coming from a Limehouse lad who grew up thieving every damned day.”
Refusing to soften, Persephone shoved hairclips in place, crossed to the pianoforte, and snatched up the one he’d pilfered years ago. Let that show him I mean business, she fumed, tears close to falling.
Let him keep his regrets and his beautiful, useless confessions.
She was done being the woman foolish enough to hope when he wouldn’t hope with her.