Ways to Be Wicked (24 page)

Sylvie listened, fascinated, and watched as little Jamie delved about in Tom’s hair with his hands, and kicked at Tom’s chest once or twice with a small foot, while Tom absently jounced him a bit, and absently but firmly removed Jamie’s fingers when they probed into his ear. He somehow looked as natural with a small boy at his head as he did when he greeted the guests arriving at the White Lily.

“Mr. Shaughnessy, I’m afraid he’s named the horse...” Mrs. May lowered her voice to a whisper, and turned a shade of pink. “Bloody Hell.” She sounded faintly accusatory.

“I’m terribly, terribly sorry, Mrs. May.” Tom was struggling not to laugh. “Perhaps he’ll grow out of the horse and forget all about it.”

“He’s growing so quickly. I thought...” Mrs. May paused and cleared her throat. “I thought you might like to take him for a day, Mr. Shaughnessy. You should hate to miss any new words.”

It wasn’t a dramatic change in expression, really. But Sylvie noticed the shift. Tom’s lighthearted pleasure became a mask over something careful.

“Perhaps,” he said lightly, and lowered Jamie to the ground. “Perhaps we’ll discuss it.”

“Why did you not tell me about him on the way here?” Sylvie asked him when the carriage was once again pulling them home.

“I wanted you to see him first. Before you judged me,” he said.

For of course he knew she ultimately would be judging him. She understood his point, even as she hadn’t enjoyed the suspense.

“Who is his mother?”

He cleared his throat. “Maribeth May was an adventuress of the first order.” Tom smiled wryly. “She and I enjoyed each other on several occasions”—he gave the word “enjoy” an accent of irony—“and then she left for...oh, I believe it was Shropshire, word had it. . . with another man, one who doubtless had more money or perhaps prospects than she assumed I had. She was ambitious, Maribeth was, and one could scarcely blame her. I was not heartbroken, nor was I terribly surprised, given what I knew of her. I was informed of Jamie’s existence by letter.”

As he spoke Tom absently, slowly, worked the fingers of his scarred hand with the other fingers. “I imagine she found him an inconvenience, perhaps financially. Or perhaps she found him a...a hindrance to her pleasures.” The last words seemed difficult for him to say.

They both fell silent for a moment.

“I have no doubts he is my son,” he added.

No one who laid eyes on the boy could ever have any doubts, either, Sylvie knew. She simply nodded. “He is beautiful,” she said gently.

Tom looked up quickly, some emotion flaring in his eyes. And then he gave her a swift smile, teasing her, knowing she’d just complimented him, too. “You haven’t asked about Kitty.”

“And Kitty?” Sylvie obliged him.

“Kitty was...” Tom smiled faintly. “Quick-witted, more so than the other girls. Lovely. I did like Kitty. But then she came to me and told me she was pregnant. She was afraid I would be angry and let her go, and it was a valid fear: I would have
had
to let her go, regardless. I can’t put a pregnant girl onstage, God knows. Her man had no employment at the time, and so I. . . I gave her some money. Enough for them to marry. To find their own rooms in town. I made some inquiries and found a position for her husband.”

“But this...” He paused. “This was after I learned of Jamie.”

Telling her, quite frankly, that his Jamie had perhaps changed the way he viewed the world. That perhaps his generosity toward Kitty had a little something to do with his own guilt.

“Give your hand to me,” Sylvie said quietly.

Tom looked up, surprised.

“Give your hand—” But then she stopped and simply took his hand in hers.

She skillfully began working his fingers, kneading between them, stretching them, gently rubbing the joints. She was an expert at this since it was a necessity to do this to her feet after rehearsals, after performances. She knew intimately the little universe of bone and muscle and sinew in her own feet.

“Good?” she asked.

He nodded. But his expression was guarded, a little bemused. As though struggling with or suppressing something, and so he couldn’t speak. She thought of the ways in which Tom Shaughnessy had always looked after those around him, including her, in his way. She wondered if anyone had ever truly looked after him. It was almost as though he didn’t know how to allow someone to do it.

“He’s your only child,” she said, half statement, half question.

“The only one I know about.”

Ironically said. And no doubt something that could be said for nearly any man, even—perhaps especially— someone like Etienne.

Finally, Tom sighed and closed his eyes slightly, leaned back against the carriage wall, accepting her ministrations.

What a pair we are,
she thought half-ruefully.
I rushed across the Channel from the arms of one lover to learn about my past, to learn who I am. Never dreaming I’d land in the arms of another lover.

And finally, she stopped massaging Tom’s hand and simply held it for a moment, drew her fingers lightly over the lines in his palm, daring a caress. He opened his eyes then, and slowly withdrew his hand from hers, lifted it to her face. With his thumb, he traced, very lightly, the line of her jaw. She turned her cheek into his hand; for a moment he cradled it.

And she thought he might kiss her, but she wasn’t certain whether she wanted him to kiss her just now. She wanted to sit quietly and absorb this matter-of-factly recited tale of a casual liaison with a woman that had resulted in a beautiful bastard child, and to picture how Tom had looked a moment ago when he held that child.

And to remember the look in his eyes when he hovered over her, moved inside her. When he had kissed her for the very first time. The stunned darkness in his eyes.

And when she did, like a wave it swept through her, the desire, fierce and complete, spinning her head.

She wondered if today’s journey was his way of warning her away.
This is who I am.

Or whether, in showing her Jamie, he had just shown her the inside of his heart and was waiting for her to tell him what she thought of it.

He didn’t kiss her. He took his hand away from her cheek, then turned his head toward the window. He remained silent for the rest of the journey.

When the White Lily’s brilliantly ostentatious sign was once again in view, the coach stopped.

Tom reached out a hand and helped her down from the hackney, then paid the hackney driver, counting out coins and seeing him off with the lift of a hand.

Sylvie shook out her skirts and looked for Tom.

He wasn’t looking at her; his head was pointed toward the center of London, squinting in the sunlight. He had the abstracted air of one looking through a telescope, attempting to bring something very far away into focus.

She noticed he was standing very still, lightly tapping his walking stick absently into the ground.

“Your prince...is he very wealthy, Sylvie?”

“Yes,” she answered, after a hesitation.

“Can he give you a life of comfort and certainty?”

She watched him, attempting to gauge his mood. She frowned a little. Reluctantly—as though she didn’t want him to arrive at whatever conclusion he seemed to be seeking, she answered: “Yes.” Her heart had begun knocking strangely.

“And he loves you.”

It was a statement; he already knew the answer to the question, for she had told him the night before. He seemed to be adding all of this up in an equation of sorts in his mind.

Suddenly, Tom looked at his hat, as though he’d just remembered he was holding it, and then placed it on his head. Ruefulness in the gesture, as though he knew a real gentleman would not have forgotten to replace it once removed.

“Then you’d be foolish not to marry him.”

He looked at her evenly when he said this.

And when she didn’t speak, because she couldn’t speak in the aftermath of those words, he nodded shortly, as though she’d answered some sort of silent question.

He turned and pushed open the door to the theater, and she watched the White Lily swallow him up.

The note was in The General’s handwriting, and was succinct, as befitted the gravity of it. It had been placed under the paperweight that Tom had finally, wisely, acquired, given The General’s penchant for gusty sighs.

Pinkerton-Knowles backed out. That’s the last of them.

Tom didn’t swear. Or toss the note down. Tom simply held it, felt some cold sensation wash over the back of him. The wave of disappointment, followed by the wave of inspiration, which would normally have followed such a total defeat—it wasn’t as though he’d never known defeat—had given way instead to a peculiar quiet fury.

Something was amiss, and he couldn’t begin to guess what that might be. When the enthusiasm had been so uniform and total, when the idea was so good, when all of it had been taking shape so splendidly. When his days were spent marshaling builders and making plans.

When he had already committed all of his own spare capital to it. And now, in the absence of a strong dose of capital from some other source very soon...he would be swiftly ruined.

It started as just a tiny spark, a spark that resulted, she supposed from striking his words over and over again in the tinderbox of her temper.

Then you’d be foolish not to marry him. Then you’d be foolish not to marry him. Then you’d be foolish not to marry him.

They played in her head beneath the words of the silent music she danced to as she taught the girls the steps to the ballet that afternoon. She heard them in her mind as she praised their form, laughed with them. She heard them in her mind as she argued with The General over what the next step in their dance should be.

And then the spark grew when she applied the little puff of her pride to it. She supposed she wanted to be the one to tell Tom, “Oh no, this could never be. I am promised to another. Thank you for the moments of pleasure.” Sylvie Lamoreux, the much-desired queen of the Paris ballet, had taken a lover, a ruffian of a lover, as a lark, and now it was over. She had sampled something she wanted, and now it was over.

But Tom Shaughnessy, the name purred most often on female lips throughout London, or so it was said, had tired of her after one evening of sensual pleasure. She told herself this to see if perhaps it felt true, to see if this was why she was so furious, so that then she could spend her uncomfortable anger on it and have it be done.

But no. This didn’t feel true, either. So she probed about in her mind for whatever it was that seemed to be feeding her temper, flushing her skin until it felt burned.

And then realized she should be probing about in her heart instead.

And that was where she found the answer.

And that was when she became well and truly furious.

She flung open the door to his office, heedless of who might see her enter, slammed it again, glanced about, seized his paperweight, and heaved it at him.

It would have struck him square in the chest, but Tom caught it just in time, looking startled and very briefly impressed, either with his own reflexes or with her aim.

“What the bloody he—”

“Tu est un lâche!”
Sylvie reached for a book and hurled that.

But Tom was a quick study. He nimbly dodged it, backed away from her around the desk.

“
What
am I?” He was genuinely befuddled, backing away from her. “What the devil are you—”

She stalked him around the desk. And finally, in the flames of her temper, she found the English word and spat it:

“Coward.”

She saw it happen, the instant and terrifying transformation: his eyes go the color of slate, his mouth become a tight, white line. She’d made him furious.

“Explain yourself.”

Any sensible person would have been frightened and backed away. She’d witnessed his temper, and knew it was easily the equal of her own. But she was too angry to be sensible.

“‘Then you’d be foolish not to marry him,’ ” she mimicked nastily. “Coward! You are just afraid because. . . because. . .

“‘Because’?” he snapped.

“Because you are in the love with me.”

Tom blinked as if the words had struck him between the eyes.

Silence fell, guillotine-swift.

Then Sylvie became aware of the sound of quick breathing, her fury mingled with his.

His eyes never left her face. His hands remained tensed at his sides, at the ready to defend himself if she intended to throw anything else.

And this struck her as somewhat comical, even as Sylvie was aware that neither of them had blinked for an unnatural amount of time.

And then—and then—the bloody man’s mouth slowly tilted up at the corners. And as usual, anything approximating a smile transformed his face.

“‘In the love with’ you?” he repeated softly.

She squeezed her eyes closed.
Damn.
Her cursed temper had made smithereens of her English. She took a deep breath, soothing her mind, recovering her dignity.

“
In
love,” she corrected quietly. “
In
love with me.”

She watched the rest of his anger leave him. And somehow, the silence had gone from fraught...to velvet.

“Well,
I
think,” Tom countered finally, softly, “that you are ‘in the love’ with
me,
Sylvie.”

Neither of them confirmed or denied a thing.

Simply watched. Simply breathed.

But finally, this silent stubbornness of his was enough to stir the cinders of her temper again.

“And because you are afraid”—Sylvie waved her hand abruptly, in helpless frustration—“this is why you push me away.”

He stared at her wonderingly. The beginnings of a frown creased his forehead.

And then he drew in a breath so deep it was as though he was trying to suck patience from the very air. He sat down hard in his chair at the desk.

“Listen to me. You saw that child today, Sylvie.”

She nodded, though she knew he didn’t require it.

His words were careful, and they almost had the sound of a recital. She imagined he’d rehearsed them in his head during their silent ride back to London.