After the Scandal (3 page)

“Yes.” This time the vehemence sounded more like surety. More like a promise.

For which she could only be grateful. “Thank you.” Another small measure of comforting relief tiptoed its careful way into her lungs. And she took the opportunity to take a long look at him, this vehement man she had thought so aloof. “Contrary to popular opinion, you
are
a nice man.”

A nice man who had crippled Rosing, still splayed upon the pavers.

For her. This time the heat in her chest was something more comforting than mere relief.

But there was still a man on the ground. “We can’t just leave him here, can we?”

“Yes. We can. I’m not
that
nice. Someone will find him. In fact—” He came to an alertness, livid with stillness, rather like one of her father’s hunting dogs scenting the air. And then he swore. “God’s balls. Someone is coming. Now.” He turned that implacable gaze upon her. “Lady Claire, you have approximately three seconds to decide what comes next. Stay here and be discovered with Rosing—and bear all the possible and different consequences of that. Or you can come with me.”

“What?” Her heart started pounding in her ears again.

Claire pushed off the wall, and found she
needed
to move. To get air back into her lungs. To get away from Rosing. But not back to the house and the ball. Not with her face like this, still scratched and blotted with blood.

Fenmore had crossed to the narrow wooden decking that projected out over the water, and unwound a line to one of the boats from its cleat. “I can take you away in the skiff. We can slip away, out onto the river, with no one the wiser.”

The idea was astonishing.

And she was truly astonished. Astonished to find the events and words and feelings of the past few minutes swirling and twisting through her head, trying to sort themselves out into something approaching logic.

Going in a boat with His Grace the Duke of Fenmore would undoubtedly be just as rash and stupid as walking into the garden with Lord Peter had been.

But the Duke of Fenmore was not Lord Peter Rosing. He looked across the narrow dock at her, and he understood. He reached behind his back, under the tail of his beautifully tailored coat, and pulled out an elegant, well-polished pistol. The shifting moonlight glanced off the slick metal barrel as he held it out to her, handle first. “So you’ll feel safe. But choose. Now.”

Astonishment
was too tame a word for the rush of alarm and something else—something unfamiliar and altogether off-kilter—that gripped her, once more stealing the air from her lungs. “Is it loaded?”

“Yes. Do you know how to use it properly?”

Claire didn’t answer. But she did take the gun. Because it gave her her answer.

“Yes.” She scrambled into the narrow boat. “Let us go then and escape. Just for a little while, at least. Until I’m ready to come back.”

“Yes.” The Duke of Fenmore gave her an oddly boyish smile that crinkled up the corners of his eyes, and softened his narrow face, and made him appear young and almost vulnerable. As if he were taking as big a chance as she. “Yes. Just for a little while.”

Chapter Two

Tanner wasted no time. Before the rest of the restless energy still coursing through him was spent, he used it to shuck the detestable gloves that made him into a gentleman, wrap his itchy hands around the oars, and slip the skiff out of the boathouse. He pointed the bow into the stream of the river, and put his back into it.

With luck, he might be able to get well away before she discovered his guile in inventing the intruders.

He settled into a steady, hard rhythm, propelling them smoothly downstream on the slack tide, and calming the jangling excitement he always got when he’d stolen something and gotten away clean. He rowed them past the town on the south bank and toward Richmond Bridge at a rate designed to carry them well away from the house for long enough to safely compromise Lady Claire Jellicoe—albeit in a much more civilized and manifestly less criminal manner than the bastard Rosing had attempted.

Just for a little while.

Because a little while was all it would take. With that luck he had always been able to count upon—along with stealth and guile—neither Lady Claire nor her father, the Earl Sanderson, would object when Tanner silenced any hint of scandal by making his very handsome offer for her hand.

But none of this did he share with Lady Claire. He saved his breath to cool his porridge, and acted the gentleman. He let the smooth simplicity of the river work its peace on the still-shaken young lady who gripped the thin rail of the small vessel so tightly the ridges of her knuckles stood out through her gloves.

He wanted to tell her that it would be all right, that she was unharmed and whole and safe. But he knew such empty platitudes were not the truth.

And she wasn’t even safe with him. He wasn’t a rapist, but he was making his play for her just as surely as that bastard Rosing had.

So Tanner shut his gob, and rowed on for a mile or so downstream. Once past the dark eaves of Richmond Bridge, which marked the end of the town, the only sounds were the steady stroke of the oars, the lapping of the river against the banks, and the thick, peaceful hush of the summer night. There was enough of a moon so that as he sat with his back to the streaming moonlight, his face remained in shadow. He could gaze at her undetected, and watch the luminous oval of her face as the quiet of the river wrapped itself around her.

She sighed as if she were trying to exhale her ordeal from her lungs. “Wouldn’t it be lovely if one could always just float away from one’s problems so easily?”

“No.”

Her bright, wounded gaze sought his through the shelter of the dark. “Why not? Are you so cynical and hard of heart that you wouldn’t allow yourself—or me—the kindness of forgetfulness?”

“I am not a cynic. I am a realist. You’ve still got blood on your face. And there”—he nudged his chin at her—“on your mouth. His blood, I should think. Did you bite him?”

“Oh, God.” Her voice became smaller, hiding, as if she were not at all sure she should admit to such a vicious, unladylike action. “Yes.”

He would disabuse her of such a ridiculous notion. “Good. That will mark him. With luck it might fester as well. Bites are notoriously septic things.”

Even bites from immaculate young ladies like Lady Claire Jellicoe, who tore off her soiled gloves, and leaned over the gunwale of the narrow vessel as if she were about to shoot the cat. Tanner shipped his oars so he might be ready to assist her if she needed support being quietly sick over the side.

But she did not vomit. She took another deep, shaky breath, and pulled her tattered composure together enough to dunk his handkerchief into the clear, dark water, and apply it to her face.

She closed her eyes as the cool wetness settled against her abraded skin. “I do wish I could just float away. Float away and forget it. As if it never happened.”

Tanner heard the hurt and bewilderment in her voice, and made his own gentler. “Then that is what we shall try to do. At least for a little while.” He took up the oars again, aiming to take them around the small island that shimmered darkly off the north bank. Beyond the island was nothing but empty countryside of pastures and woods. Too far for them to go this night. “But there is as much danger in forgetting, as there was in not anticipating the trouble in the first place.”

But even as he said the words, he knew he liked—no,
liked
was far too tame a word. He idolized—he was
obsessed
with—Lady Claire Jellicoe precisely because she was so sweet and so optimistic and so sunny a person that she could never have conceived of the idea that Rosing could wish her such malicious harm.

Her he could excuse. But others—her father, the earl; her brother the viscount; and all the so-called men of the world who turned a blind eye to Rosing’s predations because he was “one of them”—Tanner held accountable. And as for Rosing himself—

Tanner felt the black, icy rage grip him again. He should have killed the bastard. He
would
kill him if given another chance.

Lady Claire Jellicoe was not so decided. She was still trying to sort out the tangle of emotions that looked to be knotting her into a tight, miserable ball. “Yes. I know you’re right. But it’s just so…”

“So hard. Yes.”

“Yes.” She looked at him, and eased a bit from her cramped posture. “Thank you. For being so understanding. And for bloody well laying him out like an undertaker.”

God’s balls. Curse words aside,
laying him out like an undertaker
was a turn of phrase so improbable, so cant, and so directly from his own misbegotten youth that Tanner was startled out of his easy rhythm. The idiom was vulgar, street thieves’ cant of a sort that an innocent young woman like Lady Claire Jellicoe ought never have even heard. “Where on earth did you learn that sort of talk?”

There, in the wash of moonlight, was the small beginning of a rueful smile—the first smile she had ever smiled for him—pressing up the corners of her lips. “I have brothers.”

Tanner did not have brothers, and so did not entirely take her meaning.

But he must have frowned at her, because Lady Claire Jellicoe answered his silence. “I have three brothers, to be exact, and they are full of what my father calls ‘buckish slang.’ But I like the way they talk. And I liked that they have always done that sort of thing for me—lay impertinent fellows out like undertakers. My brother Will was especially good at what one might call personal justice. Rather like you.” She stared at him for a long moment, before she turned her troubled, wistful face up to the moon. “But I wish … I wish I knew how to do that for
myself
. To use my fives, as my brothers say. I had a friend once … one of my sisters-in-law, now. Mrs. Jellicoe, not the Viscountess Jeffrey, who is also my sister-in-law. Do you know them—they’re sisters? No? Well, she would have known what to do, Antigone. She would have been able to stop him, Lord Rosing.” Another sigh wrestled its way out of her lungs. “I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything. I just felt so … absolutely powerless. So entirely useless.”

Useless. This he understood. It was one of his greatest fears that somehow, someday, someone was going to find that
he
was entirely useless—a pretender of a duke. A sham of a man. An urchin from the streets. Nothing but a creature of stealth and guile.

Lady Claire Jellicoe wasn’t a sham. She was everything he was not. Polished and easy. Elegant and refined. She belonged to her world in a way he never could, his exact opposite in every way.

Which was why he idolized her. If she had not existed precisely the way she was—beautiful and immaculate—he could not have thought her up and made her any more ideal.

And yet in the quiet intimacy of the skiff she looked more real, if such a thing were possible. It was possible, if only
because
he had idolized her from afar for all those years—ever since she had turned seventeen and made her come out—and never before sought to make her real.

But up close, she looked so much less perfect now, with her hair coming down from its pins, and the breeze blowing one or two fine strands loose across her damaged face. It made her more approachable. More human, and fallible, and frail.

Infinitely more beautiful. And more vulnerable.

And that was his fault. He should have found a way to stop Rosing sooner, before the bastard ever set his eyes on Lady Claire Jellicoe, who was now wrapping her arms about her torso, hugging herself. She was shivering in the warm summer air, her skin shining white with gooseflesh in the moonlight.

“You’re cold.” She might also be suffering from the shock of the bastard’s assaulting her like a ravening beast, but the effects were just the same—she was shaking.

Tanner once more shipped the oars, and let the skiff drift where it would on the outgoing tide, while he shucked himself out of his form-fitting evening coat. And then he leaned forward to wrap it carefully around Lady Claire’s shoulders.

She let him, and clasped her hands into the coat’s lapels gratefully, even as she looked away in embarrassment. “I’m sorry. Thank you. I just feel so … so stupid. So inadequate. I don’t know what I would have done if you had not come.”

He knew exactly what Rosing would have done—which was why Tanner had followed them. He felt the icy rage, the cold, smoldering fury, flare up within him. He leashed it, a power to use later, when he might have need of it. Not now. Not with her. “You would have managed something. You did bite him.”

“Yes.” Another sigh, but this one was perhaps less forlorn and more resolved. “How clever you are to have noticed that.”

Tanner tried not to succumb the bitter thrill of pride welling within his chest. He knew he was clever—it was how he and his sister, who was cleverer still, had stayed alive all those stealthy, guileful years they had prowled the streets. It was why the Admiralty had kept its grappling hooks firmly in him even when he became the duke, using him much as they had his brother-in-law, Hugh McAlden, before him—making the most of his unique, larcenous abilities for the benefit of King, country, and Admiralty with no one the wiser.

But it was strange to find himself the object of Lady Claire Jellicoe’s admiration for being so. And for some reason he didn’t want to examine too closely, he found himself wanting to impress her even more by his cleverness. “His hand was bloody. Back there on the ground. His palm. Only logical explanation was that you had bitten him. You’d have gone on in the same vein.”

“You’re being kind again. And I thank you for it.” Her voice grew small and tight, and she seemed to shrink into the folds of his coat. “But I’m afraid you’re wrong. I don’t think I could have done much else.” The dark fabric swallowed her up until all he could see was the shining crown of her blond head in the moonlight. “I hate it. I hate feeling so … useless. Useless to help myself.”

And because Tanner knew exactly what that felt like—the aching, gnawing desperation of having no good choices, or no choices at all—he could not stand for
her
to feel that way. “I could teach you.”