Unclaimed (23 page)

“Just go ahead and try,” he said coldly, rummaging in his pockets. “Here.” He pulled out his fob watch, flicked the gold face open. “It’s three past eight. Now go on. Scream as loudly as you like. Don’t mind me. I’ll just stand here and keep time until you’re bored.”

He didn’t need to tell her about the ticking of time. She had two days to seduce him, and she couldn’t bear to do it any longer. He stared back, tapping his foot. And it was only then that the utter, impossible ridiculousness of it swept over her and she began to laugh. He was by her side in a trice, his arms around her. Her shoulders shook. She wasn’t sure if she was laughing or crying until his hand ran down her head.

“There now,” he said. “Has it really been so long since someone took your side?”

“It’s been ages. Too long for me to remember.” It had long ago ceased to be a matter of
if
she would have to rely on herself—just how much it would sting when her legs were kicked out from under her.

After they left the buildings behind them, she took a deep breath.

“Sir Mark. What you said at the meeting tonight—it struck me.” That didn’t describe what she’d felt. He’d looked like an avenging archangel, ready to rain fire and brimstone down on the men around him.

“You don’t say.” His tone was dry.

“Why have you chosen to champion male chastity? Why not focus on—oh, the Corn Laws or suffrage or education? There are myriad social causes you could champion. Most of them are easier than the one you’ve chosen.”

“Well.” He slanted her a look. “When men are unchaste, women bear the burden. You see—”

She moved in front of him swiftly, and he stopped. She raised one hand to his mouth, touching his lips. Cutting off those words, before he could speak them. His breath wafted through the knit of her gloves.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to hear the theory. I’ve read your book. But when you spoke today… A man doesn’t get so angry about something unless it’s personal. I am not asking why
someone
should be chaste. I am asking why
you
in particular have dedicated so much of your life to the pursuit.”

He stared at her. No warm breath touched her fingers.

Slowly, she pulled her hand away, wondering if he was about to denounce her.

Instead, he shook his head. “You know, nobody has ever asked me that question before. Not even my brothers.”

“I have always been particularly impertinent.”

Mark met her eyes again. There was nothing importunate about his gaze—no ogling, no sense that he was measuring her for his bed. Still, she saw in him a fierce, possessive hunger. “Impertinence suits you,” he finally said and held out his arm for her. She took it once more, and they began walking again.

He said nothing more for a few minutes, but by the tense jump of the muscles in his arm, she could tell that he’d not forgotten her query.

“It was my mother,” he finally told her.

“I’ve heard of your mother. People talk of her sometimes.”

His tone grew warier. “What have you heard?”

“She was a generous, godly woman.” Jessica didn’t want to say much more. Men reacted strangely when you criticized their mothers—even if they’d just done it themselves.

“Ha. Surely the gossips have told you more than that.”

“She was a mill owner’s wife. I heard that when your father passed away, she grieved. And that in her grief, she became a little…strange.”

“She went mad.”

Jessica nodded in acquiescence. “It must have been difficult, to have a mother so overtaken with sadness—”

“She didn’t go mad with grief,” Mark interrupted. “She hated my father. She was always quite religious—extraordinarily so. He, in turn, scarcely cared to attend service. That alone wouldn’t have done the trick. But he was not faithful to her. She got the notion in her head that he’d forced the women who’d worked in his mill years before to whore for him in exchange for a position. And that when they complained, he brought in laborsaving machinery, so he could sack the ones who caused the unrest.”

“Oh.”

“She wasn’t entirely wrong about that,” he added. “A handful, certainly. All of them? No. But she had this notion that our entire family wealth was built on his debauchery. She began to see sin everywhere. She began to hate money, to hate every thing that reminded her of him. If she saw a woman on the streets, she instantly believed her to be a victim of my father’s profligacy. She began to sell…at first, just
things.
Then she started to give away the respectable competence my father had left. When my sister fell ill, she refused to pay a physician, saying it was God’s will whether she lived or died.”

The sun was setting. It hung, red and warm at the edge of the field. It painted his cheeks in orange, his hair in rust.

“She died. I scarcely remember that. I was still young at the time. But I think my mother took her death as a sign of God’s judgment. After that, she became very strange indeed. Soon, very little remained of the legacy my father had left. Very little except my brothers. Have I mentioned that my brothers look a great deal like my father? That didn’t help. I take after her more. So she beat them, and took
me
along with her on her errands of mercy. I met the poor, the weak, the afflicted.”

“She was mad.”

“I know,” he said quietly. “But…underneath that insanity, there was a core of truth to everything she said. I’ve seen the ones who are destroyed in the wake of profligacy. The man takes his pleasure, and women and children suffer. My mother most of all. I don’t know what she would have been like if he’d been faithful. She never would have been comfortable, I don’t think, but at least she might not have tried—”

He caught himself and stared off into the distance, his shoulders pinched together. He looked miserable, so lost in memory.

“Ah,” she said softly. “Is that all, then?” She’d meant to interrupt his grim reverie, to put a soft smile on his face. Instead he looked at her, his eyes haunted.

“No,” he said softly. “It is not.” He turned from her and began to walk down the path again.

She followed.

“She nearly killed my brother, Smite. It was a…a matter of punishment and neglect. Not intentional, I don’t think. But she’d gone so far beyond rationality. She put him in the cellar and hid the key from me. Ash had been in India at that time, and we’d gotten word that he’d be coming home soon. When I managed to get Smite out, we walked the thirty miles to Bristol to wait for him.”

He wasn’t looking at her, but when she put her hand on his arm, his fingers closed around hers.

“We waited three months. We ran out of the shillings we’d taken within the first month. We spent the next two months on the streets. I don’t know if you can understand what it means to be starving—not merely hungry, nor even famished, but slowly
starving.
You stop caring about anything except food—not laws, not manners, not right nor wrong. The world disappears, until there is nothing but you and the constant struggle to put something—
anything
—in your belly.”

She’d never got to that point. She’d never come near. All she could do was listen in horror.

Mark didn’t look at her. “At least,” he said, “that was how it felt to me. My brother, now…Smite would have fed his last scrap to a hungry cat. He had no sense of self-preservation, not even when matters were at their worst. We hid in an alley one evening. I woke in the middle of the night, to see a woman walking through the gloom. She didn’t see me. There was a pile of refuse in the back of the alley—moldering bits of food that even I would not have tried to eat, discarded fabric that had worn so thin it was little more than a collection of threads—that sort of stuff. She set a bundle on the heap, and then, without looking back, walked away.”

Jessica felt a pit in her stomach. She could feel her hands start to shake. She knew what was coming. In the wretched sisterhood of whores and courtesans, there were some things that never changed.

“I went,” he said. “I looked. Of course I looked. But the bundle was an infant—tiny and red. It could not have been more than a few hours old.”

He paused. The sun had disappeared beneath the horizon; only a ring of red painted the hills.

“Even starved, homeless and desperate, I knew what the right thing to do was. As little as my brother and I had, we had more than this wretch. We could have done
something.
And knowing Smite, he would have done it.” His hand balled into a fist. “I knew the right thing to do. And I also knew that if I picked that child up, my brother would not let it starve—even if it meant that we would. And so I walked away. And I didn’t tell him.”

He stared off into the twilight.

“You cannot blame yourself for that. How old were you?”

“Old enough to know right from wrong.”

“Fourteen? Fifteen?”

“Ten.”

She balled her hand and brought it to her mouth. Ten years old and starving on the streets.

“Ash arrived that afternoon. I insisted that we go back, but the infant was gone by then.”

“You were ten. You had nothing. And in any event, that baby needed a wet nurse, not your leftover scraps.”

He said nothing in response.

“While we’re at it, the reason it was gone was probably that someone else found it and brought it to the parish.”

“But
I
didn’t. Every time I have been tempted to sin since—and I have been tempted a thousand times since—I have remembered that discarded, unwanted bundle of humanity. I think of the woman who left her newborn child in an alley. But mostly, I think about how alone she was. I think about the man who was not there in that alley at all. I am not going to be him.”

Her hand was on his elbow. She let it slide down his forearm until his hand engulfed hers, warm and alive.

“I see,” she said. He’d earned his knighthood years ago.

His grip tightened around hers. “That’s what I mean when I say I’m not a saint.”

“You’re a good deal better, Sir Mark.”

He reached with his free hand and caught her other elbow. Their fingers twisted together. In the fast-fading light, his expression was shadowed. “No.”

“Yes.”

“I meant—no. After what I’ve told you, I had better be just Mark to you. Only Mark.”

“You will never be
only
Mark to me,” she said fiercely. “Not in a thousand years. You’re—you’re—”

“What, just because I know a little thing like chastity would make the world a better place? I’ve said nothing that every woman does not already know. Tell me, Mrs. Farleigh—if your Mr. Farleigh had kept to the laws of chastity, what would your life be like now?”

There was no Mr. Farleigh. There never had been. But there had been a man, once…

She shut her eyes. “He seduced me,” she finally said. “At that age, I didn’t think. Or if I did, I believed I was indomitable. When you’re young, nothing can ever go wrong. Bad things happen to other people—people far less clever, and far uglier—than I was. The rules of propriety existed for stupid, unlucky girls.”

She swallowed. “I thought nothing would ever happen to me. Until it did. He kissed me, and I didn’t think about chastity or right or wrong. I didn’t think about the consequences, or what effect my choice would have on my parents or my sisters. Before I knew it, I was compromised so thoroughly that my family wouldn’t have me in the house. It
did
happen to me, and I
was
the stupid girl.”

His hand twisted in hers, slipping, caressing her palm through her glove, her wrist. Then his fingers found the edge of her glove. Slowly, he stripped it off, baring her hand to the cool night air. To his touch. Skin slid against skin.

“I’ve been miserable ever since,” she finished.

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen.”

He didn’t say anything to that, just drew her closer, pulling her hand, leading her as if in a dance until she stood inches from him.

His other hand moved to her chin and tipped it up.

“Jessica,” he said gravely, “I will be your champion, if you let me. If I have to take on the role of knight, I want to be yours. Let me be your protector.”

The words sent a flurry of confusion through her. “You’re offering to be my
protector?
You’ll get no honor from association with me.”

In response, he kissed her. Not a short, chaste kiss. Not even a long, lingering kiss, sweet and yet still chaste. No. It was heat. It was fire. It was everything he’d been holding back. His body pressed against hers, hard, leaving no secrets. His mouth took hers without question.

She dissolved in his touch, disappeared as his hands cupped her face, pulling her closer still. Not chastity, this, but an invitation. A prelude to sin and scandal. It made no sense, not with what he’d just told her.

“Hang honor,” he whispered, pulling away to breathe kisses against her neck. “Hang my reputation. I don’t care what the world thinks of me.”

He pressed against her once more. His words were as drugging as his kiss, threatening to overwhelm her.

She set her hands on his chest and pushed away. “You can’t mean it. You’ve lost your head over a kiss. You can’t mean that you’d give up fame, your prestige, your rank in society—”

“It will hardly be so dire. But yes, Jessica. If that’s what it means to have you.” He sighed, blew out his breath. “I’m getting rather ahead of myself.” His voice was rough. “I…I’d like a chance to do this properly. Might I call on you tomorrow evening?” His voice dropped. “Alone.”