Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Tap-tap-tap.
Saskia kept her gaze firmly affixed to the book before her and kept reading.
Well, her eyes remained on the book, but she couldn’t truthfully say she was comprehending a word of it.
That tap-tap-tap, in fact, marked the ninth time someone had come knocking on her door tonight.
She’d been counting.
She’d stopped answering the door after the third tap-tap-tap.
A long-suffering sigh issued from her parted lips, and she kept resolutely reading, settling her bottom deeper into worn sofa cushions long since gone flat and hard.
Tap-tap-tap.
She should’ve returned to London. Why had she stayed?
Oh, she knew why.
Because Liam Cassidy was here.
But to what end? To invite him to her room?
Well, she’d fumbled that opportunity.
Tap-tap-tap.
“Go away!” she shouted. She was finished with the niceties. They didn’t work on the determined and inebriated.
“Saskia,” came a muffled masculine voice that sounded as if it were pressed to the crack between door and frame.
Her head cocked. She might know that voice…
“Saskia,” came the voice again, insistent and urgent.
She did know that voice.
Her legs paying no heed to the caution her mind was advising, she was off the sofa and across the room in a trice, her ear pressed to the door as she cinched the sash of her nightrobe tighter. She needed to be sure that voice belonged to the man she thought it might be—
“Saskia,” the voice implored, “come on and open up.”
Liam.
Still, she hesitated.
If she opened this door, the stroke of midnight gone well past, she wasn’t sure she could account for what might proceed. The turn of the lock was yet in her control, but what followed, wasn’t.
Yet, knowing all this, she opened the door.
Before her, arm propped high on the door frame, stood Liam, a charming smile tipping one side of his mouth. At some point, he’d changed out of his racing silks and was now wearing proper, fitted gentleman’s attire and an incongruous laborer’s wide-brimmed straw hat.
Derby Day.
That was how one accounted for such a contradiction.
He lifted his other hand, and she noted the bottle of whiskey. “Celebrate with me?”
His smile… It wasn’t its usual charming self, but rather an echo of it. And within his eyes lurked something…new. A word came to her—one she’d never associated with this man.
Desperation.
That which lurked within his eyes was desperation.
She crossed her arms over her chest. “I was just reading before bed.”
He looked unconvinced. “I suppose you can sleep through raging thunderstorms and howling blizzards, then?”
“And I suppose you’ll state your business?”
He waggled the whiskey bottle, the playfulness at odds with the glint of desperation that yet echoed within his eyes. “Just one drink? Between friends?”
Knowing full well she shouldn’t, she stood aside and allowed him into her room.
He lifted the hat off his head and tossed it onto the table where the day’s pages were strewn.
She hadn’t been untruthful on that account.
She had come back to the room and written into the evening, only stopping when her stomach’s growling had become unbearable.
But Liam paid it no mind as he made for the sofa beneath the room’s wide window long gone dark with night.
He lowered onto its hard, unforgiving cushions and settled back, one arm resting on the ridge of the sofa and an ankle crossed over a thigh.
How elegant and masculine and utterly at ease he looked.
She needed to say something appropriate, she understood. “Congratulations on your win today.”
There, that was most appropriate.
“Thrilling, wasn’t it?” He didn’t sound all that thrilled.
“Thrilling wins must be commonplace for you, I suppose.”
He shrugged an indifferent shoulder. “That going into the memoir?”
“Would you like it to?”
He didn’t answer her question. Instead, he asked one of his own. “Bring a couple of cups on your way over?”
He patted the sofa, indicating she join him.
She shouldn’t.
Yet there were her feet moving of their own accord again, and she’d grabbed a pair of teacups and soon found herself lowering onto the opposite end of the sofa.
“Actually,” he said, pouring whiskey into the teacups, “you and I aren’t too dissimilar on that front.”
“What front is that?”
He held out a teacup for her, which she accepted. “We both like to win. Only horses are my vehicle and words are yours.”
“Writing isn’t a competition.”
He snorted. “Your books are selling like hot gingerbread during Christmastide.” He wagged a finger at her. “I know competition when I see it.”
She smiled, despite herself.
He lifted his teacup, and she followed suit. The sharp, sweet scent of whiskey hit her nose, and she winced. “To winning,” he said and took a large gulp.
Though she held her breath to brace herself, the spirit went down her throat like fire. But unlike the first time she’d tried it as Arabella, this time it warmed, rather than burned.
Liam settled back into his corner of the sofa, as if he were observing her from a great distance—which she didn’t much care for. “Have you a question to ask of me?”
“I do.”
She found her muscles tensing, as if preparing themselves for impact at high speed.
“Would you mind very much telling me of your life before you became Lady Saskia Calthorp?”
Her eyebrows drew together. Unexpected, that question. “When I was merely Miss Saskia Siren?”
He nodded, as serious as he ever was on the track before a race. “Aye.”
Of course, Saskia didn’t owe this man any insights into her life.
After all, she was writing his memoirs, not the other way around.
But this wasn’t about debt or even fair play.
It was about the desperation she’d noted in his eyes.
He needed to hear about her life, and she was powerless not to give him that which he needed.
“My papa made a decent living as a barrister’s clerk in Gray’s Inn, and my mum kept a clean, efficient household.
Both facts I learned from Tessa and Gabriel, of course, as I was three years old when they perished. ”
Liam’s brow furrowed. “They died at the same time?”
“Papa was struck down in the street by a dray horse, and Mum died six months later from a fever.”
“I’m…so sorry.”
“I don’t remember that first life,” she continued. “I only remember the life that came after. Of Tessa taking care of Viveca and me while Gabriel was off at Eton on scholarship, then Cambridge.”
“Tessa must’ve been a child herself.”
Saskia nodded. “She was nine when our parents died. She managed through various means she’s never fully confessed to Viveca or me, but our fortunes took a turn for the better when Gabriel realized he could use his brilliance with numbers to charge all those aristocratic lordlings at Eton a fee for doing their work for them. ”
A sudden grin lit up Liam’s face. “Truly?”
“Truly.” She couldn’t help smiling right along with him.
“So, our fortunes rose, and we got on. Tessa and Gabriel protected Viveca and me from the brunt of it, and by our teen years, we had private tutors and unfettered access to a fine education.” She exhaled a sigh that still held a note of disbelief to this day. “Then, five years ago, it happened.”
Liam nodded, but held his tongue. He would know what was coming.
“Gabriel was informed that he was a duke.”
“How did that come to be, anyway?”
“The short of it is that our grandfather didn’t get on with his father and decided to make his own way in the world. The long of it is that his father was, in fact, a duke, and while our grandfather was a younger son, his brother died without legitimate issue, which made Gabriel the new duke.”
“And you a lady.”
She nodded. “And me a lady.”
The fact still confounded her.
Liam’s head subtly tipped to the side. “Don’t you like being a lady?”
“In some ways, I can’t say I especially do.
” For some reason, she was telling the truth—and couldn’t seem to stop.
Was whiskey a soother of truth? “But in other ways, I have to acknowledge that having our brother Gabriel as the Duke of Acaster and our sister Tessa as the Marchioness of Ormonde, not to mention Celia as our sister by law and Mrs. Eloise Lancaster as our close family friend, have all been instrumental in the success of Sirens. It’s not only money that greases the wheels of success, but connections, too. It’s the way of the world, isn’t it?”
“Aye, it is.” He looked as if he would say more, but wasn’t sure if he should.
“What is it?”
“Yet you write under a pseudonym, Saskia. Wouldn’t it follow that your books would be even more successful if the world knew Harriet LaPlume was Lady Saskia Calthorp?”
“Perhaps,” she allowed. “But I can’t write what I write as Lady Saskia Calthorp. There’s a truer me below her, and it is she whom I must access so I may write.”
“So, you have Harriet LaPlume for that self.”
She felt suddenly awkward and conscious of herself. “It sounds odd, I know.”
Within Liam’s eyes, however, she detected not ridicule or even amusement at her self-seriousness.
Instead, she found understanding—connection.
Something in her words connected to a place inside him, and she couldn’t help wondering why.
Wasn’t Liam Cassidy handsome and famous and the best in his sport? Wasn’t that all there was to him?
No.
She knew that much.
A smile lit within his eyes and found its way to his mouth. “And then there’s Arabella. Where does she fit into all those layers that comprise you?”
Saskia moaned. “I wish you would forget Arabella.”
He laughed. “Oh, I won’t be forgetting Arabella.”
Another groan escaped her, this one accompanied by a mortified laugh. “She will haunt me ’til the end of days, won’t she?”
“I rather liked Arabella.”
“You did?”
“Aye.”
Again, she experienced it—that feeling of connection communicated by a seriousness in his eyes, even as he spoke light words.
“I suppose Arabella has a few worthy qualities.” She could allow that much. “She’s lively and bold.”
He nodded.
For some reason, she continued. “Arabella knows what she wants—and pursues it.”
Without taking his eyes from hers, he asked, “And what does Arabella want…now?”
The question, low and rumbly, slid through her like velvet, sparking tiny nerve endings alight—and there was but one answer that came to her.
You, she couldn’t speak.
But the air between them vibrated with the unspoken, anyway.