The Heiress Effect (8 page)

She set her fingers against her temples,
wishing all the tension away, letting her eyes drift shut in
relief.

Silence. Blessed, blessed silence.

“Thank God,” she said aloud.

“I rather think you should thank me.”

Her eyes jerked open, and Jane pushed herself
to her feet. Her gown caught underfoot, the beads clicking
together. She scarcely managed to catch herself from falling—and
she swiveled, just in time to see Mr. Marshall. He was still
sitting in his chair on the other side of the room. He watched her
with a look of amusement, tapping his fingers against the arm of
the chair.

Oh, God. Hadn’t he left with the others? What
had she said aloud?

“Mr. Cromwell!” she blurted out. “I thought
you had gone with everyone.”

His fingers paused in the middle of a tap.
Those blue eyes of his met hers. The dim light made his spectacles
into a shield, reflecting her own image back at her.

“There’s no need to pretend.” He spoke as if
he were a mesmerist attempting to send her into a trance. “And you
have no cause for worry.”

There was nothing common about him, first
impressions be damned. Behind those spectacles lurked something
feral and untamable. He hadn’t moved from his chair, and yet still
she felt a little tickle in her palms. A catch in her breath.

His eyes were too sharp, his expression far
too even. He set his glass on the side table next to him and leaned
back, looking her over as if he were royalty and she the thief who
had been caught raiding his larder.

“Worry?” she repeated in her best breathless
voice. “Why would I worry? You’re a gentleman. I’m a lady.” She
took a step closer to the door. “I’ll join the others after
all.”

He waved a hand. “Don’t bother, Miss
Fairfield. I have sisters enough that I can recognize the
supposedly innocent act from a half-mile’s distance. You’re not
fooling me.”

She blinked. “Why should I not act the
innocent? I have no guilt on my conscience.”

Mr. Marshall clicked his tongue and stood up.
There ought to have been a rule somewhere that men who wore
spectacles could not exceed six feet in height, but he was easily
that. He should have been a jovial, round-faced clerk. He should
have been anywhere else but here.

He shook his head and took a step toward her.
“You’re wasting your breath. I know your secrets.”

“I haven’t any secrets. I—”

“Cut line, Miss Fairfield. You are either
very, very stupid, or extraordinarily clever. And I, for one,
suspect that you fall on the side of cleverness.”

She stared at him. “Mr. Cromwell. This is
becoming improper.”

He shrugged and moved closer to her. “How
convenient,” he said, “that you notice impropriety when it serves
your purposes.”

She sucked in her breath as he reached out
his hand.

“And when it doesn’t…” His fingers were
inches from her face. He could have reached out and touched
her.

He didn’t. He snapped his fingers. She
jumped.

“Miss Fairfield,” he said quietly, “I am not
your enemy. Stop treating me as one.”

Her heart slammed in her breast. “I have no
enemies.”

“That, Miss Fairfield, is bullocks, and you
know it. You have only enemies.”

“I…I…”

“And I,” he said, “know exactly what that
feels like. Look at me, Miss Fairfield. Think about what I am. I’m
a duke’s bastard, raised on a farm. I’ve never belonged anywhere. I
spent my first few months at Eton with these jackasses, getting
into fights three times a day because they wanted me to know I
didn’t belong. There’s little love lost between me and
Bradenton.”

She swallowed and looked at him. There was a
proud set to his jaw, a fierce light in his eyes. She knew all too
well that a little thing like expression could be falsified, but…
She didn’t think he’d manufactured that note of anger.

“Bradenton thinks he can dictate what I do,”
he told her. “So insult him and his ilk all you wish. I’ll applaud
you every step of the way. Just stop lumping me in with them. I’ll
tell you my truth, if you’ll tell me yours.”

She shook her head, not knowing how to
answer. Nobody had ever questioned her act. “I don’t know what
you’re talking about.”

“Then don’t talk,” he said. “Sit, and hear me
out.”

She needed to go. Immediately. She shouldn’t
listen. She…

“Sit,” he repeated.

Perhaps it was because he didn’t speak it as
a command. He indicated the chair she had recently vacated, and
somehow turned a word that would have been a single, solitary
demand in another man’s throat into a polite gesture.

She sat. Her stomach fluttered. She didn’t
know what to say to him, how to regain what she had just lost. “I’m
not going to marry you,” she finally blurted out.

He blinked twice and shook his head. “Is that
what this is about? You’re trying to avoid marriage? You’re doing a
good job of it.”

She couldn’t breathe.

“In fact…” He tilted his head and looked at
her. “But I promised you truth, so here is mine. You’re the last
woman I would marry.”

Her breath sucked in.

“I don’t need your money. My brother and I
are on good terms, and when he reached his majority, he settled a
good sum on me. If I needed more for any reason, I would apply to
him first.” He shrugged. “I want a career in politics, Miss
Fairfield. I want to be a Member of Parliament—and not some distant
day in the future, either. I need time to gain influence. I want
people to listen to me, to respect me. I will be prime minister one
day.”

Not
I plan to be
or
I want to
be.
Not for Mr. Marshall.
I will be.

He leaned forward, his eyes blazing.

“I want every man who slighted me—everyone
who called me bastard behind my back—to bow down and lick my boots
for daring to think I was beneath him. I want everyone who tells me
to know my place to eat his words.”

The air felt heavy and thick between them.
His hand was a white-knuckled fist at his side.

“And so the last thing I need is to be tied
to you. You’ll open no doors for me, bring me no influence. If the
rumor is right, you only have a fortune in the first place because
you’re a bastard like me.”

She let out a breath.

“Just like me,” he said. “Yes, you legally
have parents. But the man who sired you…”

Those damned hundred thousand pounds again.
She put her fingers to her forehead. She’d been thirteen when a
complete stranger had died and left her a fortune. She’d been
fifteen when she finally understood why the man she thought of as
her father had abandoned his wife and her children—those two
so-different-looking daughters—on a country estate.

She was the bastard, the foul fruit of that
imperfect union. She was the one Titus Fairfield disapproved of.
She’d never belonged—not here, not in her uncle’s home. Not
anywhere. And those hundred thousand pounds marked her out.

“I know,” he said. “I know what it is like to
lie awake at night scarcely able to breathe with the weight of
isolation. I know what it’s like to want to shout out loud until it
all falls to pieces. I know what it’s like to be told again and
again that you can’t belong.”

It was too much, too much to hear the words
she’d whispered only to herself echoed in the real world. “Why are
you saying these things?”

He shrugged. “It’s simple, Miss Fairfield.
Because I think everyone deserves a chance to breathe.”

Breathe? Around him, she could do no such
thing. The light of the oil lamp reflected off his glasses,
obscuring his eyes, making it almost impossible to divine his
intent. But she could feel, rather than see, his gaze on her—a
sharp, penetrating look, one that cut straight through the garish
pattern of her silk gown. No. He didn’t make breathing any
easier.

“I have no difficulties drawing air,” she
said with no regard for the truth.

“Oh?” His eyebrow raised and he tilted his
head at her. “That’s not what I see. I see shoulders that dare not
relax, muscles that dare not twitch, lips that dare not do anything
but smile. You’re awash in choices, Miss Fairfield, but you know as
well as I that the wrong one will bring your carefully husbanded
awful reputation to naught.”

She swallowed again.

“Don’t lie to me,” he said. “What is it that
you say to yourself in the dead of the night, when nobody is about
to hear your words? Do you shut your eyes and look forward to the
morrow, eager to greet it, or do you dread each new day and count
them off as each one passes?”

He took a few steps toward the door.

“You count,” he said softly. “That’s what it
means, to not belong—it means that you count. It wouldn’t be
bearable if you didn’t know it would end. How many days, Miss
Fairfield, until you can drop this illusion? How many days until
you can stop pretending?”

“Four hundred and seventy-five.” The words
escaped her. She raised her fingers to her lips, stricken, but he
didn’t look at all pleased at having wrested that admission from
her.

He shook his head instead. “You have four
hundred and seventy-five days of
this
on your shoulders.
Miss Fairfield, don’t tell me you can breathe.”

“I have no difficulties…” The words sounded
weak, though. Unconvincing.

“I know that,” he said. “If I’d not been
here, you’d have kept on. That’s what it means to count—that you
get through it, no matter how crushing that number is. I know that
because I’ve counted. I counted my way through Eton, through my
years when I was a student at Cambridge; I’m counting my way
through this particular visit. I know what it’s like to count, Miss
Fairfield.” He took off his glasses and rubbed the lenses against
his shirt. “I know it quite well.” He looked up.

Without his glasses, she had imagined that
he’d be bleary-eyed, unable to see her. But whatever the fault in
his vision, his eyes fixed on hers, sharp as ever, blue as the
sky.

“You’re an intelligent woman,” he said.
“Logically, if you’re pretending to this…whatever it is that you’re
trying to avoid is awful.”

She wanted to speak, wanted to say something,
to say
anything.
But all that came out was a little choke,
deep in her throat—something guttural and painful, something she
hadn’t even known was lodged inside her.

So this was why she’d felt that frisson. It
wasn’t his eyes. It wasn’t his height. It wasn’t even his
shoulders—and she absolutely was
not
going to think of his
shoulders. It was simply that he knew what it was like to stand
outside everyone else. He knew, and she hadn’t even had to tell
him.

“That’s the truth?” she finally managed to
say. “That is the truth you promised me?” It had been more than
anyone had given her.

He tilted his head and replaced his
spectacles.

“It’s ninety-five percent of it,” he finally
said.

He inclined his head to her, and then—before
she could think of anything to say—he tapped his forehead in a sort
of salute and left her alone.

It was the missing five percent of the truth
that rankled Oliver. The air on the verandah was cold against his
cheeks; behind him, he could hear the sounds of a piano duet played
by the inimitable Johnson sisters.

Nobody had said anything when he’d wandered
from the music room out onto the verandah, cold as it was.

They really didn’t care about him, and he
returned the favor as best as he could.

He didn’t want to take Bradenton up on his
offer. He’d told himself that he’d find another way to convince the
man. Maybe that was why he’d talked to Miss Fairfield the way he
had—to prove he wouldn’t do it.

But he hadn’t said
no
the other night
when Bradenton asked.

And Oliver had greeted her on the streets in
part because of Bradenton’s suggestion. Some part of him—some sick
part—had wondered how it might be done. He thought of her eyes just
a bit ago, so wide. Her mouth parted ever so slightly, as if to
whisper her agreement. Her hands wringing together. He’d hit on the
key to Miss Fairfield and he knew it.

Bradenton was right; he could break her. He
knew exactly how it was done.

It was that memory—one that made him break
out in an uneasy sweat—that had brought him out into the cold. It
was possible to break someone who was alone. It was easy to break
someone if you gave them a support, allowed them to lean on it…and
then swept it all away.

Oliver had no answers, which is why he was
standing outside in the middle of a January night. The chill
brought no clarity of mind. Cold stone and cold walls surrounded
him in the middle of this cold city. The verandah was little more
than a square space of outdoors a few paces wide. He’d grown up on
a farm; this was hardly any room at all.