An Affair Most Wicked (31 page)

“Yes, but Clara severed her relationship with him, and he went to prison.”

“But he is out now. Here in London, in fact.”

Seger found himself clenching a fist. “In London, you say?”

“Yes, but it’s worse than that. He came to the house looking for Clara, and she went off with him in the coach. Alone. I don’t think she realized that I knew who he was. She said he was an old family friend.”

Seger glared at his stepmother, then uttered an oath and turned to summon his carriage.

Seger walked into the house, where he found Clara sitting alone in the drawing room, gazing absentmindedly out the window.

At least she was here, and not somewhere else.

He approached and stood over her where she sat on the sofa. Eyes wide, she gazed up at him.

“Care to tell me what happened today?” he asked directly.

She stared dumbfounded for a moment, then went pale.

He suspected she was recognizing the hostility in his voice and grasping the fact that he had already heard.

“Seger…” Her voice betrayed her trepidation. “You know?”

“Yes. But I wish to hear your description of it.”

She continued to gaze up at him with dismay, then she rose to her feet, wrapped her arms around his waist and buried her face in his chest.

“I tried to find you when I came home, but you had gone out.” Her voice began to quiver. “Oh, Seger, Gordon has come to London.”

He would have liked to see her eyes when she spoke, but her cheek was still pressed into his chest. “I know. What happened, Clara?”

“He caught me off guard. I was on my way home from Piccadilly, when he opened my carriage door and got in. There was no warning. He must have been following me.”

“He got into your carriage?”

“Yes. I told him to get out, but he wouldn’t.”

Seger reached around to pry her arms off of him. He stared at her, trying to see the truth.

Just then, Quintina entered.

Seger held up a hand. “Let my wife explain.” He turned his attention back to Clara. “He did not come to the house? You didn’t go with him willingly?”

She shook her head.

Quintina stepped forward. “What do you mean, Clara? Of course he was here. Mrs. Carruthers told me who he was, and I watched you leave with him. I watched you from my window upstairs.”

A heavy silence descended upon them while Clara and Quintina stared at each other, as if they were each trying to comprehend what the other was saying.

“I didn’t leave with him,” Clara finally professed. “I don’t know what you think you saw, but I did not see Gordon in this house.”

Quintina shook her head in disbelief. “You think both the housekeeper and I imagined it?”

“Yes!”

Quintina turned her gaze to Seger and gestured toward Clara with a hand. “Perhaps she wishes to spare your feelings, Seger.”

Clara’s voice took on a more aggressive tone. “I don’t wish to spare my husband’s feelings. I did not go anywhere willingly with Gordon Tucker. He got into my carriage uninvited. Seger, you must believe me.”

Seger’s gaze darted back and forth between his wife and his stepmother. “One of you is not telling the truth.”

He looked down at his wife, whose face had gone ashen. He felt a stabbing sensation in his heart. It was fear, and it was sickeningly
familiar.

He tried to ignore it and focus on the matter at hand-determining the facts.

“I swear on my honor, Seger, I did not leave this house with Gordon.”

“But what motive would I have to lie?” Quintina asked. “And the housekeeper, too?”

Seger was not about to guess anyone’s motives. He had not trusted his stepmother in many years, yet how well did he really know Clara? She had kept the secret about the embezzlement from him until he discovered it on his own on their wedding day. Now Quintina was telling him that Clara was not innocent after all, that her signature had been discovered on certain related documents.

He didn’t know what to believe. His gut pitched and rolled.

Clara took a desperate step toward him. “Seger, please…”

He held up a hand to silence her, then turned to his stepmother. “Excuse us, please, Quintina. I must speak with my wife privately.”

“Seger, I am very sorry. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Yes, you should have. Now leave us.”

Quintina hesitated a moment before she walked out and closed the door behind her.

Chapter 21

“It seems to be your word against Quintina’s,” Seger said to his wife.

God
, the thought of Clara in the presence of her ex-lover—whether she was telling the truth about how she encountered him or not—enraged Seger. He tried to push the fury away, but couldn’t.

He wasn’t accustomed to such weakness where a woman was concerned. It had been years since he felt anything like it. His hands were shaking.

“I am telling the truth,” Clara said. “I don’t know how to convince you, except to ask for your trust.”

“My trust? You lied to me once before about this matter. I would be a fool to offer my trust blindly.”

“I never lied. I told you about Gordon, I just didn’t tell you everything, because we barely knew each other. There was so little time.”

“But you could have found the time if you’d wished to.”

Her chest rose and fell with a sigh of defeat. She collapsed onto the sofa, and buried her face in her hands.

“You’re right, I could have. My only excuse is that I was afraid you would change your mind about marrying me, and I wanted you more man anything. If I neglected to tell you, it was only because I loved you.”

He almost laughed at the idea. “Love? You just said, Clara, that we barely knew each other.”

She looked up at him, her eyes red and puffy, laden with a mixture of anger and bafflement. “Don’t you believe in love, Seger? Have you forgotten how you felt when you first met Daphne?”

“I spent four years with Daphne. I’ve known you little more than a month. And Daphne has nothing to do with this.”

“But you told me you fell in love with her the first time you saw her. That you’d decided she was the one for you after a mere week of knowing her. Can’t you believe that that kind of magic could happen again?”

He did not want to think about how quickly he had leaped into an intimate relationship twelve years ago, how quickly he had given away his heart. “I was only sixteen, and I am no longer that boy.”

“Only because you have given up hope. You have become jaded and you have not let yourself love me, Seger. I deserve a chance to earn your love. I want to be more to you than just a wife in name.”

He suddenly wondered why they were having this conversation, when the issue of her ex-lover still hung in the balance. He paced the room.

“What happened today, Clara?”

She sighed in frustration. “I already told you. Gordon walked into my carriage uninvited. I never met him here in our home. Quintina is lying.”

“Why would she lie? She told me today that she wanted our marriage to be a success.”

Clara spread her hands wide. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s lying about that, too.”

He remembered the day Quintina had explained that Daphne had gotten on a ship bound for America. Quintina had spoken in sympathetic tones and tried to explain and defend her husband’s actions. She had held Seger’s hand as she delivered the news, but he had known she harbored triumph on the inside.

Today, he didn’t know whom to believe.

He watched his wife wipe the tears from her eyes. Something inside him throbbed with deep, agonizing empathy. He hated to see her cry.

Christ
! He did not want to feel this pain that was cutting him from the inside out. He wanted to crush it, like he’d learned to crush all feelings for other people years ago.

He didn’t want to face the possibility that Clara had been dishonest with him, or that she was somehow involved with another man and was lying about it, as Quintina was suggesting.

He didn’t want to face the possibility that she had married him for his title, like so many of her fellow countrywomen did these days, because he could not deny that he’d always felt certain there was something more than that between them. He’d always known Clara desired him in a basic, elemental way, and that had pleased him. It had been his justification for marrying her. Desire was something he understood and could handle. Now, everything was falling into question.

He wanted to leave this room, to shut himself off.

He also felt the urge to protect what was his.

Seger walked to the door.

“Where are you going?” Clara asked.

He did not look back. “Out.”

Seger went to five hotels before he found the one that had Gordon Tucker listed as a registered guest. It was an expensive hotel. Too expensive for an ex-prison convict.

He tapped his walking stick on the man’s door.

A few seconds later, the door opened and Seger found himself standing face-to-face with his wife’s one-time fiancé, a man who had recognized her passion and had taken advantage of it in the worst possible way.

He was a good-looking man, tall with brown hair and blue eyes.

Seger wanted to strangle him.

“Lord Rawdon,” Tucker said with a vile grin. “I was expecting you. Eventually.”

He opened the door the rest of the way. Seger walked in and glanced around the familiar room. He had been in this hotel—and every other decent one in the city—a number of times, but he didn’t want to think about that. He was a husband now, and the sheer, rock-hard density of that role seemed to fill his entire being.

“I presume you have come to ask me to stay away from your wife,” Tucker said.

Seger replied with absolute calm. “I’m not here to
ask
you anything. I’m here to tell you that she doesn’t want to see you, and that you should get the hell out of England today.”

Tucker pulled a cigarette box out of his breast pocket, removed one and lit it. He took a deep drag and blew the smoke off to one side. “I don’t think so.”

Seger moved forward. “Clara belongs to
me
, and you’ll be back in prison by nightfall if you choose to ignore that fact.”

“She belongs to you, does she? American women are not meek little lambs, Rawdon. You should have learned that by now. Clara is a passionate woman, and one should not attempt to contain her.”

“My reason for coming here is not to contain my wife. It is to get rid of
you
.”

Tucker raised an eyebrow. He sat down on the bed, leaned back on an elbow and crossed one leg over the other. “If you force me out of the country, you’ll make Clara very unhappy. Is that what you want?”

“She won’t be unhappy.”

“Yes, she will.”

Christ
. Seger wanted to end this conversation right now by throwing Tucker out the window, but he smothered the urge because he wanted information.

“I understand that you forced your company upon her today,” he said.

“I wouldn’t call it that,” Tucker replied. “She received me in her drawing room like the proper lady that she is.”

Seger cleared his throat.
She received him
.

If that was true, it meant Clara had lied about what had really happened.

But God
! Even after hearing Tucker uphold Quintina’s claim, Seger still had trouble believing it. He wanted to trust Clara—his instincts were telling him to—but how could he, when three people were now saying one thing, while she said something completely different?

He loathed being in this position—in a battle, unarmed, ignorant of his enemy. Unaware of the terrain.

He decided to take a risk. “She didn’t receive you. You forced your way into her carriage.”

“Is that what she told you?” Tucker rose to his feet. “She’s a sneaky one. You probably shouldn’t have married her. I’ll tell you what—I’ll take her off your hands and marry her myself, if you’ll agree to give her to me. A quiet divorce shouldn’t be difficult for a man like you. You’re an aristocrat, you must have connections in high places. I reckon she’d be happier with me, anyway. She doesn’t have it in her to stay in one place for too long. Besides that, we’re drawn to each other.”

All at once, Seger could hear the rush of blood pounding in his ears. He clenched his jaw, hauled back an arm, and threw a hard punch at Tucker, knocking him flat onto the bed.

“Jesus!” Tucker said, cupping his chin in his hand.

Seger turned to leave. “Be out of here tonight, sir, or I’ll be back in the morning to continue this conversation exactly where we left off.”

Gillian heard the hotel door click shut, and stepped out of the wardrobe. Heart racing within her, she smoothed a hand over her skirts and observed Gordon sitting on the edge of the bed, clutching his jaw. He glanced up at her with a feeble expression in his eyes. His lip was bleeding.

“He bloody well hit me!”

She crossed over the carpet to stand before him, took a look at his lip, and removed a handkerchief from her reticule. “Here.”

He reluctantly accepted it. “I thought you English were supposed to be polite and reserved.”

“Not Seger. Well, he’s polite when he wants to be, but never reserved.”

Gordon shook his head. “I don’t know what you see in him. He’s a brute if you ask me.”

“You were plenty brutish yourself.”

He didn’t look up at her. He just dabbed at his lip with her handkerchief.

For a long time she watched the top of his head. His hair was a shiny brown color. She liked the way it parted in waves.

“I would have thought you’d be used to fighting,” she said, “after being in prison.”

He tried to give back the handkerchief, but it was stained.

“Keep it,” she said.

He stuffed it into his pocket and stood up. He was very tall. He towered over her, and he smelled like cigarette smoke.

“I had a talent for talking my way out of most fights,” he told her.

“I’d wager you did.”

The side of his mouth curled up. “Not this one, though. Seemed more like I was talking my way into it.”

Gillian shrugged. “It’s what you agreed to.”

“Yeah, and I agreed to a hundred pounds. I said exactly what your aunt asked me to say, so where’s my reward?”

She paused and looked up at him. He was a criminal. She’d never known a criminal before.

“I have it here.” Gillian reached into her reticule and pulled out a bank note. She held it up between two fingers and waited for him to take it, but he didn’t right away.