Fool Me Twice (21 page)

She dug her nails into her lap to punish herself. She should not feel flattered by the idea that Marwick viewed her as feminine. He might be kind, very well. He might have gorgeous eyes. But he was not—
could
not—be a man to her. She had no wish to make a fool of herself. Say this spark between them was mutual. It only became an invitation for him to take advantage of her. And then . . . what? She would steal from him regardless.

She made herself give a devil-may-care shrug. “Hardly a slip of a girl. Why, I’m taller than most men.”

His arrested look made her realize her mistake. Her remark revealed all too clearly that she had fixated on his description of her. That she cared how he saw her.

Which she didn’t.

“True enough,” he said. “But since I happen to be taller, I have the luxury of failing to notice that.” He smiled again, a slow, openly suggestive smile.

She cast a panicked glance toward the door. That it stood shut had not bothered her before. But now the sight left her breathless.

He followed her glance. “You may open it if you like,” he said casually. “But I insist that we finish the game.”

“I have duties, Your Grace.”

“They can wait.” He toyed with one of her captured pawns. His fingers were long but not slender, his hands large, his palms broad: the strong hands of a
workingman, misplaced on an aristocrat. Only his nails suggested his privilege, neat and clean. “As you say, it is good strategy to coddle one’s employer.”

“I never used that word.” He wore two rings now: the signet on his pinky, and a gold medallion on his middle finger. “Coddle, I mean.” At this rate he’d be bejeweled as an empress by spring.

“I beg your pardon. Then it is good
strategy,
as you would say.” He eyed her. The smile playing at the corners of his mouth made him look boyish, mischievous. “You really did miss your calling when you declined to become a governess.”

His flirting outclassed hers by far. She stood.
Here ends the lesson.
“Regardless, I am a housekeeper. And there are several items remaining on my—”

“And there’s the starch.” He leaned back, linking his hands together behind his head as he surveyed her. “You carry it off very well. Once you have a few lines in your face, a bit of gray in your hair, you’ll be fearsome indeed. Small children will flee, and all the housemaids will scrape and cringe.”

Something trembled inside her. She knew she had a starchy aspect. Did he imagine she was glad of it? She had no desire to be a Medusa. “Don’t mock me.”

“Oh, I don’t,” he said softly. “But the glasses do give you away, Mrs. Johnson.”

She hesitated, riven by twin impulses: the burning desire to know what he meant, and the fear of what he might say. That he might somehow say something true.

What a terrible thing it was to wish to be known, to be
seen,
when one’s life depended on remaining unnoticed.

He could not know her. A man of his station lacked the insight—and she could never permit it anyway. Nobody
could know her until she was safe. She gathered up her skirts. “I must go.”

“You don’t wish to hear my theory?”

A flash of anger made her turn back. When had
he
ever known the kind of vulnerability a woman must suffer, when left on her own to face the world? How could he know that a woman might seek any strategy to render herself ineligible, invisible? “I am sure it will be very
entertaining,”
she said. She was, after all, a curiosity to him, was she not? A cure for his boredom, that was all.

“I don’t know about that,” he said gently—yes; to her amazement, there was no other way to describe his tone. “You’re a woman who has made her own way from a tender age. Unusually tall, conspicuously redheaded, very young, quite intelligent, and driven from your last position by a man who took unwanted note of you.” He tipped his head. “Mrs. Johnson, I would guess there is only one reason for you to wear those glasses.”

“And what is that?” she whispered.

“You wear them to hide.” He gave her a wry half smile. “Alas that we don’t all have the luxury of a townhome in which to closet ourselves. But you are welcome here to play chess any time you wish. You are, after all, far better at it than you wanted me to know. But to my credit . . . I’d rather suspected you would be.”

She gaped at him. The force of her reaction overwhelmed her: distress, shock, embarrassment,
gratitude
. For he was right. She was so much more than she permitted others to see. Yet he had seen it anyway. And imagine what it would be like—what it would mean—if his remark was an offer of true friendship. For with a man like him to aid her . . .

Why, he was one of the few men in the world with no cause to fear Bertram. Quite the opposite: Bertram should rightfully fear
him.

But what madness! She meant to deceive him. She already
was
deceiving him. She could not bear to think his offer was genuine—that his sympathy might be more than a passing lark. For what would that make
her
?

The outright villain of this piece.
Again,
the villain.

“I must go,” she said, choked.

He nodded. “Go, then.”

Only after she had shut the door did she realize, with a pang, the strangeness of their final exchange: she had not been asking his permission, but telling him what she must do. And he had not
given
permission. Instead, in a very small way, he had ceded her the authority.

CHAPTER TEN

Moonlight filtered through the crack in the curtains, bringing Alastair’s half-written letter to his brother into stark clarity:

My behavior was abominable. I would put it down to madness, but that smacks too much of excuses. I would offer my most abject apology, but that would imply that your forgiveness is possible. Believe me, though, when I say that I wish all the happiness in the world to you and your wife. And if I could undo only one thing, it would be my

Alastair laid down the pen. He could not write a lie. If he could undo only one thing, it would not be his behavior toward Michael. The memory shamed him deeply, but the whole episode, his insistence that Michael marry to his choosing, and Michael’s enraged rebellion—all of it seemed only a piece of the larger nightmare.

If he could undo anything, it would be his marriage.

Why had he wanted Margaret? Had he really imagined ambition would bind them? He had wanted a beautiful hostess of impeccable breeding on his arm. She had wanted a salve for her wounded pride. But while they had dreamed together of the empire they might build, they had never dreamed of each other.

I never would have married you.
So she had told him shortly after their first anniversary.
Had you told me the whole of it, I never would have accepted you. And you knew it.

He had imagined that she would overcome her anger. She would come to see that he hadn’t deceived her, not really. He would make a far better husband than Fellowes could have done. She would realize this in time.

And in time, she had seemed to forgive him. He’d considered the matter finished.

Obviously she had not.

He walked to the window and pulled open the curtains. What had his housekeeper once told him? If the atmosphere was gloomy, one’s mood followed suit. Very true. But on this night a harvest moon, low and golden, gilded Mayfair’s rooftops, lulling him.

He remembered a similar moon. A spring night at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and himself drunk on a narrow victory in the Commons, a margin of fourteen votes. His father had still lived, then. He himself had been a mere MP, the entire future before him. He’d sprinted up the cramped stairs to the gallery high above, so high that the air was colder, the wind scouring. London sprawled beneath his feet, the ancient river and manicured squares, the dark maws of the parks, the distant slums lit by scattered fires.

He had never liked heights, but that night, he’d not
been dizzy. The city had seemed like a private omen, a sacred charge upon him. He would protect and serve this place. He would spend his life striving to improve it. Here was his calling.

He wanted that back. All of it. His youth, the ferocity of his convictions. A time before all the mistakes. Somewhere out there tonight his brother lay sleeping, a stranger to him. Could that be undone? In one of their last conversations, Michael had accused him of giving up, of letting Margaret win. But he’d not spoken in anger. He’d seemed only . . . astonished.

It was true, Alastair supposed, that he had never been the weak one. From his earliest memories, his role had been to protect.
You are the heir.
Again and again, this message had been driven into him.
Protect the family; do honor to your name.
Even at a young age, he had taken his duty very seriously. Too seriously, perhaps, for a child. To see others suffer had caused him the sharpest anxiety—the sense of having failed, somehow, to prevent it.

Chicks fallen from nests. Cats trapped in trees. The village idiot in Hasborotown, where his family had wintered. The local children had liked to pelt the man with stones. At eight, Alastair had taken them on, and won a blackened eye and chipped tooth before Nurse and Coachman had intervened.

At home, this protective urge had proved all the fiercer. What had he been to Michael? Never merely a brother. How much simpler that would have been. Perhaps had they only been brothers, Michael would have found it in his heart to forgive Alastair for the madness of last spring. Brothers quarreled—and then they forgave each other. That was the natural way of it.

But Michael had never viewed him with the casual regard of a sibling. How could he? Alastair’s earliest memory was of Michael’s head tucked into the lee of his arm, Michael’s tears soaking his shirtfront. It had never been their mother to whom Michael ran for comfort—even if he spoke of her now as though she’d been a saint. She had been too busy waging combat against their father to coddle her sons.

No wonder Michael loathed him. To be failed by a brother was one thing. To be failed by one whom you counted a hero—well, that was a bitter thing indeed.

Almost as bitter as being failed by yourself.

He knew he would not be able to sleep now. The view could no longer soothe him. He left his room, walking swiftly down the stairs, past the snoring night porter, for the distractions of the library.

Inside, a single lamp was burning. Its dim light illuminated—he felt a strong premonition, a sense of inevitability—his housekeeper curled up on the sofa, a billowing white dressing gown bunched over her feet. As she pored over a book, she tickled her mouth with the ends of her long red plait.

He stood there a moment, gripped by conflicting urges. A housekeeper should not be making use of her master’s library. She should not wander barefooted in her nightclothes. She should not look so young, so untouched, so solid despite her slimness, so composed despite her undress.

He had invited this temerity, of course. Hell, he had hoped for it. If he could have stolen her self-sufficiency, her fierce sense of direction, by laying his hands on her, he would have done it in a moment. He had never felt more of an ass than when viewing himself through her
eyes—the eyes of a woman who had been turned out upon the world at the tender age of seventeen, and had
made do.

Was he really less courageous than a would-be maid?

“Good evening,” he said.

She flinched violently, then snapped the book shut and yanked her gown over her toes. “Goodness,” she said. “I didn’t think . . .”

When she rose, the light was strong enough, or the robe thin enough, or his appetites imaginative enough, to discern the contours of her body: the slimness of her waist; the curve of her hips; the fecund thickness of her thighs, which tapered neatly into square knees and rounded calves.

He did not admire her simply for her courage.

She took a step toward him—or rather, toward the door. She intended to leave. She felt the way his gaze devoured her. She knew where his interests lay.

He should let her go. But she had started this, somehow. Until she had opened the curtains and disrupted his solitude, he had been content to stay lost. Did he blame her for it? Or was this anger a product of indebtedness? He had never wanted to owe anyone anything. “What are you doing here?” he said.

She came to a stop just out of reach. Very wise. She had called herself tall, as though it was a mere matter of height, rather than abundance. So many more inches to her, so much more skin, white, smooth. He’d learned Margaret too easily, and never learned her at all. He would not make that mistake again. The next time, he would not leave the bed until he had mastered the woman in it. He would learn that trick, no matter how much study it took.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. Her voice sounded strange, unusually rough.

He reached for the light. For months, he had lacked any clear sense of his own motives. But clarity was coming back to him, bit by bit. If he decided to keep the lights low now, it was simply to blur this scene, and what he intended to do here.