Chapter Eight #2
She stepped away, letting go of his arm, and Gabe felt the loss of her warmth. She plucked a small white flower growing at the border of one of the garden beds, held the bloom to her nose, then tore off a petal and put it in her mouth.
“Ladies smock. It’s peppery. We can add it to our greens for dinner.” She held the flower out to him as if he too foraged every day and dined off plants in his garden.
He had never in his life seen a lady, not even his mother, pick a plant straight from the ground and eat it. Gabe pinched off one of the small white petals, veined with violet, and laid it on his tongue.
“It is peppery.”
She tasted another petal and surveyed the gardens about her in a small arc. “He’s wrong about something,” she said.
“Who is?”
“Lord Vérité. Lord Sneak.” She pursed her lips together. “I won’t sacrifice all this.”
“Won’t give it up, you mean.”
“I will, if I must.” The bleak expression in her eyes was like a blade descending into his chest. He wanted to howl along with her. She let the stripped plant fall to the ground by her feet.
“If it’s a matter of protecting them… If I must remove myself so the Benevolent Hospital can go on, I must. I won’t stay here and bring it all to ruin.”
“The blackmailer is counting on your need to stay here.”
That expression of hers ripped another hole in his chest. She looked like a woman standing on shore watching the wreck of a ship that held everything she loved.
“Because I don’t have anywhere else to go,” she said.
He took her arm again, drawing her to his side, and steered them down the path. The beat of his heart sharpened when she was near, a painful rap within his chest. “Tell me.”
“If I do, then you know my secret as well as Lord Vérité, and I have no notion how he would have learned anything about me in the first place. When I came here—” She stopped herself from saying more.
He walked them back through the dining hall, where a set of small girls, under the supervision of slightly larger girls, were scrubbing tables and benches.
Several of them paused to watch and giggle as a child in infant’s dress—a boy, Gabe thought—took toddling steps near the hearth, staggering toward one of the rocking elders and catching himself on her knee.
He beamed at the crone, pleased with his accomplishment, and she beamed back, her lips soft around the spaces of missing teeth.
Anywhere else, these souls would be living in abject misery.
Behind him, at one of the tables, a young voice started a chorus of “Home, Sweet Home.” Gabe had seen the opera, Clari, the Maid of Milan, when it was produced in London.
The plot had something to do with a lecherous duke pursuing an innocent country girl, trying to turn her into his mistress.
That was not to the point. The point was, the girls were singing as they worked, making a round of the tune. Everyone had a place here, and everyone a portion. There was dignity accorded to all.
One of the women who sat in a wheeled chair near the hearth worked on a bit of mending.
An elder with hands bent into arthritic claws churned butter as she rocked.
A young woman walked through the hall, a basket of folded linens tucked against a belly swelling with child, and added her voice to the chorus.
Louisa made all this possible. This happiness, their safety, was the result of her toil and oversight and care.
Gabe turned a corner and delivered them back to her parlor. Louisa looked surprised that he could navigate the place, but he had grown up in a warren of alleyways and narrow streets; a building like this, laid out in tidy symmetrical blocks, was a stroll through the park.
“So leaving is not your first choice,” he began.
He got no farther, because a new image assailed him. Louisa, in a velvet riding habit and jaunty hat, parading with him through Rotten Row among his fashionable cohort and the exercises of the Household Calvary.
Louisa, putting a gloved hand in his as she descended from the ducal carriage before the opera or a town home where they had been invited to dinner.
Louisa, presiding in the lady’s seat at his own table, where he could watch her smile and converse with their guests, her face incandescent with the glow of candelabra and the gleam of china and silver.
Louisa, walking up the carpeted stairs of Barkham House with him.
Louisa sitting at a vanity table in his dressing room, removing pins from her hair.
Louisa in his bed in the master’s suite. Beside him. Beneath him. Her calm, sweet face asleep on the pillow next to his as morning sun stole through the windows.
His gut tightened at this cascade of images, chest squeezing, throat strangling with how acutely, how desperately these new thoughts appealed to him. He couldn’t speak.
She stepped away toward her desk, rubbing one hand along the back of her neck as if soothing an ache. “Leaving is my best option.”
Yes. Come with me.
No. It was too soon.
“Not true,” Gabe said. “The best option is to defeat your blackmailer.”
She turned to face him, her skirts a soft rustle, her face pale and stark. “I cannot see how.”
Hell’s elbows, she was beautiful. He groped through his brainbox for the shreds of the master plan he’d developed on his way to Knightsbridge.
“He’s bid you to sell your buildings to his agent, hasn’t he?”
“And the land too, I presume. He said something about development.”
Which would make all this go away. Everything she had built, cast out into the cold world.
“But before he only wanted money.”
She winced. “And I paid. I was a fool.”
“So, with the right temptation, he will grow even more avaricious. More demanding.”
She watched him warily. “I can’t want that.”
“But if he gives into greed, we can make him expose himself. Reach too far, as it were.”
“I don’t see how.” She spread her hands, showing her empty palms. “I have nothing of my own to give him.”
Gabe stepped closer. “I have a plan.”
She bit her lip. That lush, kissable lip. “To catch the blackmailer, and expose him.”
“Yes.”
Her brows drew together. “Will this plan entail my being your lover?”
“Hell’s knees, I hope so.”
Longing chased across her face—oh, yes, she wanted him—before she caught and shuttered her expression into polite disapproval. “I cannot risk my reputation. I have already— He already has enough with which to torment me.”
“What if he thought he could take more?” He stepped so close his chest nearly touched her breasts. His trouser leg brushed her skirt, and even that brief contact made his nerves tighten.
“I don’t have—”
“What if he thought you were going to be a duchess?”