Fool Me Twice (30 page)

“That must be pleasant.” Her voice was bitter.

The coach stopped. “Come.” He opened the door and stepped out. She could find her own way onto the pavement.

But when she stumbled on the step, he cursed and took her by the forearms, lifting her safely to the ground.

She did not thank him, which was wise of her. The feel of her burned his palms. She should not feel so soft. She should feel like iron. He remembered the
expression she had shown him in the garden, her face as he’d walked toward her . . .

He released her. “Follow me,” he bit out. He didn’t want to look at her.

*  *  *

Marwick led her through a discreet door set into a brick building not two hundred yards from Claridge’s Hotel. Wasn’t that where his wife had died? Olivia vaguely remembered Elizabeth mentioning it, having heard it from Lord Michael.

At the top of a narrow, creaking staircase, she stood aside so the duke could unlock a door. It opened into a simple bachelor’s apartment, two rooms sparsely furnished. The front room, which was larger, held a slim bed, one chair, a desk. The dressing table was covered in a thin film of dust. Nobody had lived here in some time.

Of course, Marwick probably had keys to any number of rooms across town. He owned a good portion of the city; she had seen the rental incomes in his ledgers.

“Sit,” he said.

Since he stood in front of the single chair, she took the bed. Her head pounded. Crying had not helped. Why had she cried? She wanted to kick herself. She was not weak.

His boots thumped hollowly against the floorboards as he walked to the window and latched the shutters. The room grew abruptly darker.

“Oh, look,” she said tiredly. “You’re returning to old form.”

“Fewer jokes would serve you better.” His boots thumped as he returned to sit across from her. “So tell
me. In my place, how would you deal with this betrayal?”

Perhaps he meant to kill her.

No. She did not believe that. But the idea triggered an icy thought: perhaps he
was
reverting. He had been betrayed before, and it had made him deranged, for a time. Now, in his view, history was repeating itself. What cause had she to hope for mercy?

He had not saved her, after all. He had simply reserved her punishment for himself.

Bile burned her throat. She pressed her hand over her mouth, suddenly fearful that she would be sick.

“There’s a chamber pot by your foot,” he said. “Take care with your aim.”

She lunged for it. The violence of her illness left her weak and clammy. A washbasin stood in the nearby corner; she rinsed out her mouth and then sat back on the bed, breathing hard.

He came forward, his features clarifying. When he reached for her face she jerked her head away, but he would not brook refusal. He gripped her jaw, pulling it around. They stared at each other.

“Did you strike your head somehow?” He sounded bored. “Your pupils look even enough to me.”

She was glad for his hostility. It was simpler this way. If the past did not matter—if he meant to forget all of it—then she could forget, too. She needn’t feel any guilt for what she’d done. “I’m fine,” she said. “Let go of me.”

His hand dropped. He stood staring down at her. “I am going to give you a very simple choice.”

“How good to know I’ll have one.”

“Oh, you’ve already had choices. You could have chosen to stay in Newgate, for instance. Those documents
were forgeries. You would have been called to trial for creating them.”

She blinked. “What?
Forgeries?
You forged them?”

His smile was thin as he took his seat again. “Bertram did—in collusion with my late wife. When, if, I ever used them, I was to be made a public fool.”

She pondered this for a moment. “So then I saved you from that as well.”

He leaned forward onto his elbows, nostrils flaring. “You paint a very rosy picture of yourself, don’t you?”

“And you paint a very black one.”

His eyes narrowed. “No matter.
You
will take the blame for them. You’ll be tried for fraud, forgery, and extortion. And I doubt the courts will treat you as kindly as they would have done me. That is one choice for you.”

He was trying to terrify her, and doing a very good job of it. She reminded herself desperately that his threats had always outstripped his actions. “And the other choice?”

“Obedience.” The word cracked like a whip. “Bertram has an interest in you. That makes you valuable to me.”

She exhaled. “You know that’s no choice at all.”

He crossed his legs and drummed his fingers atop his thigh. “Where is your fine grasp of precision, Miss Holladay? It is a choice. It simply isn’t one you like.”

He was punishing her. It was, from one view, only what she deserved; from another, he was even being generous. He could have left her to rot in Newgate.

But these were both views from
his
eyes. She was done trying to see his perspective. “What do you mean by obedience?” she asked. “What will you require of me?”

His smile mocked her. “Whatever the circumstances demand.”

She hesitated. “The circumstances of your revenge against Bertram, you mean.”

He followed her meaning. He took a very thorough, insulting survey of her body, head to toe. “What a deviant it would make me,” he said, “to demand
that
from you. Why, one might be forced to conclude that I had a particular taste for treacherous women.” He gave her a half smile. “It
is
possible.”

She gritted her teeth. On one thing, they would be clear. “I am nothing like your wife. I did not fool you for my pleasure. It had nothing to do with you, don’t you
see
that? Or are you too pigheaded and vain?”

“So you continue to protest. Very well.” He reached into his jacket and extracted a pocket watch that he laid beside him. “You have five minutes to tell your story. If I am satisfied, we will discuss the specific nature of my offer. And if I am not . . .” He made a soft click of his tongue, a preemptive chide. “The authorities don’t know the half of what you’ve done. In addition to forgery and extortion, there is also the matter of your theft from me.”

She stared at him. He had not managed to intimidate her when she’d been his servant. Why permit him to do so now? Her pride demanded better of her. “Not only that, Your Grace. You mustn’t forget my theft from your brother’s wife. I was her secretary—did you know that? All those letters, I stole from her. Indeed, in the interest of good relations, you should give her a chance to convict me, too. And perhaps Lady Ripton?” She would make sure he never blamed Amanda. “For I forged a reference from her. Yes, why not contact her as well?”

His pause suggested surprise. She took a ridiculous pleasure in it.

But then, with a shrug, he said, “Good. A piece of honesty; you are learning. Well, do begin your tale, Miss Holladay. The clock ticks.”

And he settled back, lacing his hands over his belly, looking for all the world like a very skeptical critic prepared for a second-rate show.

*  *  *

Five minutes to tell him everything. The challenge focused her—and revealed to her, with miserable clarity, how neatly her entire life might fit into a cliché: the cliché of the bastard child.

“Bertram met my mother when she was very young,” she began. “She was only sixteen when I was born. He installed her in a village called Allen’s End—that is where he kept her. Us, I mean. He has property very near there, but the cottage was rented from a local family.”

He remained silent, watching her. The light slipping through the shutters laid bars of shadow across his face, through which his eyes glittered.

He was not going to encourage her. Very well. “He and my mother were very happy when I was young.” She hesitated. “I was, too, I suppose.” The village lay on a tributary of the River Medway. With an apple tree to climb, a garden in which to hide, and the entire countryside to explore, Allen’s End had seemed a paradise to her. It had been her mother who felt the village’s scorn most keenly.

“He loved her,” she said. “He did, in those early years. And he must have been kind to me, for I have . . .
dim memories, very dim, of calling him Papa. Being dandled on his knee.” She felt her mouth twist out of her control.

“What changed?” He spoke softly; she barely heard him. She did not like to think of Allen’s End anymore. The villagers had been kind to her as a child, but as Olivia had matured, they had begun to treat her with the same contempt they showed Mama.
Like mother, like daughter.

How curious then to realize that her imaginary village, the place she would belong, looked so much like the place she had been desperate to leave.

She frowned into her lap. “What changed? He married, of course. That American woman.”

“The heiress to the Baring fortune.”

She nodded. “I remember his first visit, afterward. I knew something important had happened, for he brought me a present—not books or a new dress, nothing so ordinary, but a doll, a porcelain doll from Paris, the most splendid doll you could imagine. She had real hair, the very same shade as mine . . .”

She had always loathed the color of her hair. Some of the village children had called her
Ginger-girl,
which they had not meant as a compliment. But when she’d been little, Bertram had called her hair beautiful.
The rarest and loveliest shade.

She shook her head.
Bah.
“The doll wore a miniature replica of a Worth gown, made by Worth himself. I can’t imagine how much it cost.” She shrugged. “I played with it for a few days. I adored it. And then I built up my courage and smashed it.”

*  *  *

Her wistful expression did something strange to Alastair’s chest. It contrasted so shockingly to the hardened courage she’d been attempting to embody before. “You
smashed
it?”

Her smile was thin. “I was only seven, but I knew a bribe when I saw one.”

He had an unwilling vision of her, freckled, knobby-kneed, her thin face terribly serious as she laid the doll she loved into the dirt and lifted a rock. “You must have had cause, then.”

“Well. By that time . . .” She sighed. He watched her closely. A concussion would make her sleepy. He waited, willing her not to yawn.

When she drew herself up again, he relaxed. Curtly she said, “She must have seen the notice of his marriage in the newspapers. From the very moment he arrived, as soon as he’d given me the doll, they began to quarrel. He left again to the train station that same night—I was so confused; he always stayed for a week at the least, and I’d been . . .” She grimaced. “Looking forward to it. But he was gone; and the next morning, Mama took me and left, too.”

“Because he had married someone else.”

She shook her head. “It makes no sense, I know. He stood to inherit a barony. She was a farmer’s daughter. He couldn’t marry
her
.”

But there was something brittle and bleak in her words that he did not like. “Love has made mésalliances for greater men than he.”

She hesitated, head tilting. “Did
you
love your wife, then?”

He took a long breath. “You must have a death wish. Is that it? How amusing.”

Their eyes locked. In the dim light, her skin looked so flawless that the effect was uncanny. She seemed made of porcelain, not flesh; too delicate, too breakable, the smattering of freckles only for verisimilitude. She must look very much like the doll she had smashed.

The notion made him strangely uneasy. He wondered if she had seen the resemblance. If she had felt, for a moment, as if she were smashing herself.

No child should have recognized a gift for a bribe. But he knew how wise children could become—his own parents had taught him such lessons, too.

“I think you did love her,” she said softly. “I think you would have answered the question very cuttingly, if you felt comfortable with your reply.”

Her audacity should not be able to surprise him any longer. But he still did not understand how she did this: how she shifted the balance of power between them so suddenly that he felt compelled to reply, to prove himself, to be
accountable
to her.

He had learned how to shift it back, though. He rose, crossed to the bed. As he sat down beside her, she froze.

“Too late for caution, Miss Holladay.” He reached out, slipped his hand beneath the heavy weight of her hair. It was coming down in pieces, as soft as he’d remembered; siren’s hair, the color of fire. He gathered up these locks into a mass so thick that his fist barely proved sufficient. He tugged very lightly, tilting her head back just a fraction. “This is how lambs are slaughtered,” he said. “Did you know that?”

Her eyes found his, wide, her lashes fluttering. He was terrifying her. Good. He needed to know he was still capable of it.

“You’d make a poor butcher,” she managed.

Brave to the end. He lost the stomach, all at once, for bullying her.

He loosened his hold, allowing her to relax into a more natural posture. “Why do you care if I loved her?” he asked. “Never say, Olivia, that you have developed an
interest
in me?” He stroked his thumb down the rim of her ear, hearing with satisfaction the shudder of her breath. “Something beyond your larcenous aims? Surely your mother’s example taught you not to aim so high.”

She jerked away, removing herself from his reach. “You do cruelty very well. Is that why your wife loathed you?”

He marveled at her. “You truly don’t know when you’re beaten, do you?”

“Am I?” She shrugged. “I haven’t yet finished my story.”

“But your five minutes are up.”

He heard her breath catch. And then she closed her eyes and bowed her head. “Fine,” she said quietly. “Do what you will.”

The bare patch of her nape riveted him. Such a vulnerable, tender spot. “What I will,” he mused. He tracked his knuckle down her throat, then traced back up to her chin. Gently, he nudged her face toward his.

She blushed, but did not open her eyes. “I feel nothing.”

“I see your face,” he murmured. “I see the lie.”