Fool Me Twice (17 page)

For that matter, he wasn’t even thinking of his late wife and the men with whom she’d betrayed him.

Put that way, how refreshing: he was thinking of his subsiding erection. And his housekeeper.

He looked at her. Really
looked
at her, in this space that echoed with memories of a life that had nothing to
do with him now. The ever-present rage seemed, for a moment, to recede, making way for an interest that no servant should elicit—not from an honorable man.

But where had honor gotten him? Moreover—the strange thought riveted him—what had it denied him in the past?

It was not a gentleman’s business to stare at a domestic. His precious
honor
would have blinded him to the shape of this woman’s mouth, wide and more mobile than she probably liked. And he was very close now, he suddenly realized, to memorizing the arrangements of her freckles. Her left cheek bore seven beauty marks (could freckles be beauty marks? He suddenly thought so) arranged like the stars of Pleiades. Her right cheek showed the constellation of Cassiopeia, minus the southernmost star.

A
gentleman
would have castigated himself for noticing these details. England’s
bright hope
would have called the freckles blemishes, for he’d believed perfection to be the image of his wife—whose skin had borne not a single mole, and whose dark, foxish beauty must (so he’d believed) set the bar for all women, just as he, with his accomplishments, set the bar for all men.

Only now did he see that freckles were not blemishes, they were
lures.
And though so many of his old pleasures were dead, he understood, suddenly, that new ones would arise—such as this one: to be fascinated by a servant, whom his old self never would have noticed.

She shifted a little in her chair. His silence unnerved her, but this minute adjustment would be her only admission of it. Another realization: a servant’s self-possession could rival his own.

It could surpass it, in fact.

Give me the gun,
she had said coolly, unafraid and unflinching.

“Who are you, Mrs. Johnson?” He found, suddenly, that it was not suspicion that drove him, but amazed curiosity. “What brought you here?”

She sat straight, blinking like an owl. “I . . . don’t understand, Your Grace.”

“Lady Ripton seems to have employed you in any number of capacities, some of them quite distinguished. Yet you left her service to apply for a position as a maid. Why?”

She hesitated. “Why . . . a chance to work for you, Your Grace. For the Duke of Marwick.”

“Liar.”

Her mouth tightened. “If you will abuse me—”

“You’ll what? It isn’t as if I haven’t abused you before.” He shrugged and pushed aside her neatly penned notes. “Very well, let’s pretend it was my reputation that brought you here. All those glorious tales of noble doings, all the encomiums in the papers.” God knew the journalists had adored him. “What kept you on? When I threw that bottle, why did you not turn heel and flee to Lady Ripton? Don’t tell me she wouldn’t have welcomed you back. That reference might as well have been an ode.”

She fidgeted in her chair. “It was . . . not entirely my wish to leave her. But I fear one of her acquaintances took an unseemly interest in me.”

He thought on that. “A gentleman?”

She grimaced. “If you must apply the term so loosely, Your Grace, I will be forced to agree with you.”

He caught his smile before it could spread. Her peculiar fixation on diction was better suited to a governess than a domestic.

That notion made him wonder. “You seem remarkably accomplished for one so young.”

She eyed him warily. Her spectacles were an atrocity against nature. They warped the shape of her eyes and made her look cramped and sour. “Thank you, Your Grace.”

A man who had only seen her without those glasses might never have recognized her as she looked now. And if he did, he might be congratulated for restraining himself from removing them from her face. They were abominable.

He cleared his throat. “Italian, for instance, is not among the usual maidservant’s qualifications, I think.”

Her freckles grew livid against her white skin. “I don’t . . .”

She didn’t understand how he knew about the Italian. He felt a sudden, purely malicious enjoyment. How pleasant it was to have her on the run for once. “You talk to yourself. And to ledgers. Quite sloppy, signora.”

“Oh.” Blinking rapidly, she looked into her lap, teeth worrying her lower lip.

He supposed countless women bit their lips when nervous, but he could not recall ever having noticed it before. Most women, of course, were not blessed with such a long lower lip, the shade of a blush rose. Perhaps that was why. Her mouth demanded attention.

“Well, Mrs. Johnson?” She’d best give him a damned answer, and leave off with her lip.

When she looked up, reluctance stamped every line of her face. “I suppose . . . I was not raised to service,
Your Grace. Many of my oddities are owed to my upbringing.”

Now they were getting somewhere. She might as easily have said that she’d been born in Italy, but this carried a ring of truth. “And how is that?”

“My family was . . . modestly comfortable, I should say.”

“Define that for me.” Hearing himself, he felt amused. Now he was encouraging her craze for precision.

She shifted in her seat. “I was educated, of course.”

“At a particular school?”

She shook her head. “I had tutors.”

“Ah.” That sounded somewhat more than modestly comfortable. “And what else?”

She frowned a little. “Of my education, do you mean? The usual program: history, rhetoric, mathematics in the morning. Drawing and piano in the afternoon.” She gave a fleeting smile. “The occasional game of chess.”

“Properly educated, then.”

She smiled again, wanly. “Obviously, my position is not what it once was.”

He looked her over, impressed with this, the first real divulgence she’d made. He had suspected it, hadn’t he? Her accent, her bearing, her mannerisms all seemed odd for a domestic.

His instincts weren’t so rotten, after all.

“What happened?” he asked. “How did you end up in service?”

She shrugged. “Nothing so uncommon. I was . . .” She took a deep breath. “Orphaned. And provisions had not been made. So I was forced to make do.”

He frowned. “Make do? Do you mean, support yourself?”

Her smile was faint and humorless. “As you see.”

What he saw was a girl not much older than twenty, who was telling, elliptically, a story of how she had been cast from bourgeois comfort into utter want. For surely only the direst of needs could drive a pampered child, provided with tutors and pianos, to apply for positions in service.

Indeed, such stories did not generally end with the hapless orphan managing to
make do
in any regard. The only accounts he could recall were moralistic parables, in which the sheltered miss encountered some predatory young buck who turned her into a kept woman. Times were changing, of course, but the world still offered few opportunities to a gently bred girl forced to work.

He let some of his skepticism show. “What of your extended family? They had no care for you?”

“My family was never so large.”

“But surely there was someone.” He himself had not enjoyed the warm embrace of a large family—but even he’d had his brother, Michael.

She met his eyes and let the silence sit between them for a long moment. “No,” she said at last. “There was not.”

He felt somehow stung by that reply. What an absurd reaction! Yet for a moment, it felt as though he were the callow youth, and she, his superior in experience.

It unnerved him. He took a brisker tone. “How old were you, then, when you first struck out on your own?”

She answered readily enough. “Eighteen, Your Grace. Nearly.”

Nearly? “Seventeen then, you mean.”

She looked briefly bewildered at his tone. His anger
was showing. He did not understand, any more than she, why he should be angry. But he was. “Yes,” she said slowly, “I suppose so.”

Seventeen. “And yet you had no connections—no family connections—to service? How then did you find your first position?”

“There is such a thing as a servant’s registry, Your Grace.” There was a dry joke hidden in her voice, no doubt at his expense. “One pays a small fee to discover the households where applications are wanted.”

“Yes, of course.” Naturally he knew of such things. “But how did you make the decision that service was the thing for you?”

She shrugged. “Anybody, they say, can wield a rag.”

She was being deliberately obtuse. Many young women would have sought alternatives to scrubbing floors. “You have an education. You might have been a companion or a governess.”

Now her amusement faded, leaving only cynicism in her face. “At eighteen, Your Grace? By those who sought companions, I was more judged in need of accompaniment. And as for being a governess . . . I doubt many wives would have liked that.”

No, he supposed not. The last sort of governess a housewife looked for was the dewy young lady. But he was startled by her forthrightness, and she saw it. “Forgive me,” she said, and then frowned down at her own hands, looking genuinely embarrassed. “I have shocked you.”

He checked his snort. “That’s rather a strong word for it.” And then he inwardly sighed. It seemed her quibbles with diction were catching. “Surprised, however—yes. One doesn’t often find would-be maids of
your background. The Italian and piano, and whatnot.”

Her small, pleased smile was somehow charming. And then, quite suddenly, it . . . wasn’t. Though it had not altered a fraction, he could not look on it.

He stared over her shoulder. He had forgotten that there were all manner of tragedies in the world. Hers was not the greatest—but neither was his. Was there any cliché more tired than the cuckold?

The realization might have carried a bittersweet relief—for a commonplace tragedy was also a tragedy that might pass. And yet instead he felt stung, for he saw suddenly the difference between him and this girl: confronted with unimaginable loss, she had rebounded with ambition, whereas he, a man ten years her senior, had . . . how had she put it?
Retired from the field.

She had put it more gently than he deserved. What in God’s name must she think of him?

He felt himself turning red. Odd sensation. Why the hell did it matter what a servant thought? He turned his attention to shuffling the notes she had made. Gladstone had written: he wanted Alastair’s help in ousting Salisbury, retaking the government. God’s blood—he’d written
thrice.
The man would not give up.

Damn right he wouldn’t. Alastair had won two elections for him. Provided Margaret’s letters were never made public, he would certainly be remembered for that.

But what of it? He no longer gave two bloody figs for his legacy. Naturally, some lingering vestige of his old self refused to believe this. But he had no use for it: his old life was dead.
Done,
damn it.

He laid down the papers. His housekeeper was sitting rigidly, braced for further interrogation. But he had the general outline of her secret now. She had been raised to hope for better, and she could not forget it. That explained a great deal about her.

He made himself say it: “You do yourself credit.” The words burned his throat, for he knew he could not speak them to himself. “You have cause to be proud.”

For some reason, she went white again. “Thank you.”

“And now I will give you a piece of advice.” He made himself smile. “Write to Lady Ripton. Tell her you require a place to stay while you seek a new position.”

A line appeared between her brows. “Are you sacking me again?”

“No. I’m doing you a favor, in fact.” He rose, and she hastily followed suit.

As he walked around the desk, he kept his eyes on her face, for there always seemed to be something new to see in it. And it gratified him to a baffling degree when he spotted the precise moment she realized he was walking toward
her.
Another man would have missed the fractional widening of her eyes. But not he. He saw what others would miss. He saw
her.

Nobody, however, would have missed the quick hop she took away from him. “Must I always exit in this manner?” she said on an awkward, breathless laugh. “Chased out by—”

He looped his arm around her waist, and she gasped. With his free hand, he caught her chin and tipped it up.

How had he ever imagined that a petite frame was the key to feminine appeal? Miniatures might be compassed in a single glance. But such an abundance of perfection, long limbs and generous hips, nearly six feet
of woman, made for an endless expanse of skin. Such a woman would demand hours to properly peruse. To taste. To penetrate.

“You should find a new position,” he said, “in the house of some honorable gentleman. I am not one.”

He brought his mouth down onto hers.

CHAPTER NINE

From the moment Marwick had appeared in the doorway, Olivia had felt as though the world were spinning. Shock had all but knocked her off the ladder. Before she’d even had a chance to skip forward to triumph—at last, he was out!—her worst fear had been realized:
he’d seen through her.