How to Master Your Marquis (26 page)

“And Smith? Say nothing of tonight’s doings.”

“Of course not, sir. Good night, sir.”

The cab clattered off. Hatherfield went to the door and pulled out his key. Behind him, the water lapped invisibly on the shore. Stefanie was shivering next to him, huddled inside her coat. She hadn’t said a word, the entire journey. The lock released at last, and Hatherfield put his hand to her back and urged her inside. “We’ll go upstairs,” he said. “I’ll start a fire.”

The caretaker’s room was exactly as they had left it a week ago, down to the slight wrinkle on the bed where they had sat, side by side. Hatherfield spared it a single glance and went to the grate. The small remains of the fire still sat there, a damp pile of ash and half-burned coal. He scraped it away and found new coal and kindling.

“Did you kill him?” Stefanie asked, in a clear and brave voice, not shaky at all.

He didn’t look up. “No. I wish I had.”

“I’m sorry. It was my fault.”

The fire had caught. He rose and turned to her. She was sitting on the very edge of the bed, with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Her eyes were huge in her shadowed face, the blue faded to gray in the dim monochrome light. Her hat was gone, and her hair had come loose from its pomade, slipping around her face. She knit her hands tightly in her lap.

He went to her and knelt before her, taking her hands in his. “It was worth it. You saw your sister, you saw for yourself she’s well.”

Tears welled in her eyes. “I put you in danger. You might have been killed.”

“It’s not your fault that evil men want to hurt you, Stefanie. It’s my fault. All these months, I could have been hunting them down, your father’s murderers, and instead I did as Olympia told me and kept you to myself. I assure you, I won’t make that mistake again. Tomorrow morning, Stefanie, I hunt them down. I’ll meet with Ashland and together we’ll . . .”

“No! No, Hatherfield.” She slid down from the bed to kneel next to him, still holding his hands. She was so close, he felt her breath on his cheek. “You were nearly killed tonight, because of me. Killed. I won’t let you do it. I won’t let you put yourself in danger. If I’d known they wanted me, I never would have let you close. You’ve got to go away, Hatherfield, you’ve got to sever yourself from all this.”

“I can’t.” He kissed her hands. “I won’t.”

“Then we’ll both go away. We’ll go together. We’ll find a cottage somewhere, a dear little cottage, and we’ll live there and . . . raise vegetables . . . and grow old . . .” She was sobbing now.

“Shh.” He stroked her hair. “Shh. Don’t be daft. You know that’s not possible.”

“Never mind the vegetables, then. I’m rubbish in the garden, to be perfectly honest.”

“Christ. It’s not the vegetables. You’re a princess, Stefanie. You have a duty to your country.” He pressed her hands together within his. “As do I, one day.”

She looked up. “Listen to me. I can bear the danger myself. It’s what I was born to. But you, Hatherfield! I couldn’t bear it if something happened to you. If you were hurt, or killed, because of who I am.”

I couldn’t bear it.

Her words burrowed through the wall of his chest to surround his leathered heart. She was so soft and willing in his arms, her skin like silk under his hands. His thoughts turned irretrievably to her warm female body beneath her clothes, her wet sheath pulsing around his finger a week ago. This ache of desire, this dull agony of longing, he felt it in every pore of his body.

Control yourself
, his brain said sternly.

He put his hands to her cheeks and kissed her upturned mouth. Just once.

She moaned and burrowed her hands under the lapels of his overcoat.

Oh, very well. Twice.

She opened her mouth and caressed him with her tongue, while her hands attacked his buttons with nimble determination. The sensations came so fast and thick, he was helpless to do anything but kiss her in return, unbutton her coat, pull it from her shoulders, kiss her jaw and her neck, kiss the delicate hollow of her throat above her collar and her sweet-scented earlobe.

Somehow she had his jacket off, she was struggling with his waistcoat. At the touch of his tongue against her hammering pulse, she went still. Her hands fisted around his shirt, right against his skin, tightening and relaxing in a tantalizing rhythm.

He couldn’t do this.

Oh, hell.

He was going to do this.

He unbuttoned her jacket, her waistcoat. The blood sang from his heart. She had left off the linen binding around her chest tonight, and her breasts rose beneath the thin white linen, unchecked, uncontrolled, young and firm, oh God! Her marvelous breasts, so ripe in his palms, making his blood sing and his ears roar and his prick thicken into steel. The tips turned into hard nubs beneath his searching thumbs, and she cried out and ran her hands upward to the back of his head.

Her gaze met his, soft with love. “Hatherfield, you’re so beautiful,” she whispered.

You’re so beautiful, James.
The old words echoed in his ears.

His limbs went stiff against her.

She kissed his lips, the corner of his frozen mouth. “Please, Hatherfield. Take me to bed. Now.”

Now, James. Take me. Do it now.

He sprang to his feet.

She fell forward, catching herself with her hands just in time. “Hatherfield?”

The word tore another hole in the leather of his heart. His skin felt raw, as if he’d physically ripped himself apart from her. He stood and stared at her confused face, her short hair falling about, her open jacket and waistcoat and the tips of her breasts holding up her shirt.

By force, he turned himself away and fumbled for his buttons. His fingers would not obey him. He gave up and found the stack of blankets at the end of the bed and handed them to her. “Go to sleep, Stefanie. I’ll keep watch downstairs.”

She was on her feet, blazing. “You will not! What . . .”

“We will not do this, Stefanie. We can’t.”

“
I
can!”

He picked up his pistol from the table and slid it back into his jacket pocket. “And I can’t. I’m here to protect you, Stefanie, not to ravish you. So go to sleep and let me do what I’m meant to do. Keep watch. Keep you safe.”

He turned and strode to the door, and the sound of her whispered
Oh, Hatherfield!
echoed in his mind all the way downstairs, where he bent his forehead into a wooden hull and closed his eyes and wept.

F
or half an hour, Stefanie sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the red coals in the grate.

This pain she felt, the pain in her chest, squeezing her ribs. It wasn’t the sting of his rejection. That had been sharp and brief, and it had ended when the expression on his face changed from disgust—horror, even—to . . . well, what was it? The hollow shape of his eyes, the clench of his mouth. It was torment.

Hatherfield was in pain.

She felt it herself. How strange, that you could feel another’s pain as if it were inside your own body. If only she could relieve his suffering by taking it upon her soul, but suffering didn’t work that way. Pain didn’t exist in finite quantities that could be transferred to someone else. Pain was elastic, it stretched and grew. It found another host, another heart, and replicated itself there.

Like love.

Love, the opposite, the antidote.

The room was still chilly, still damp, but Stefanie felt a warmth stealing across her skin. The warmth of purpose. She slid off her jacket and her waistcoat, she pulled off her trousers and drawers, until she stood in her shirt and nothing else. She folded her clothes and set them on a chair, and she wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and left the room.

She found Hatherfield among the boats, leaning his sturdy shoulder against the wall, staring out the narrow window to the river. He said, without turning, “Go back to bed, Stefanie. There’s nothing for you here.”

She cleared her throat and tightened the blanket at her shoulders. “I only wanted to say something. Explain something. When I say you’re beautiful, Hatherfield, I don’t mean your face. You’re a terribly handsome man, of course, but you know that. It’s too obvious to be said, really. I expect you’ve heard it a thousand times, from a thousand women. What I mean is your soul.
You
are beautiful. When I kiss you, when you touch me, I feel your . . . your
radiance
down to my bones.” She paused. There was no reaction on his face, no sign that he had heard a word. “I just wanted to make that clear.”

Not a movement, not a single blink of his eye.

Stefanie stamped her foot. “And also. You broke your promise.”

He came alive at that. “What?”

“You promised you wouldn’t jump away next time. You promised to remember I wasn’t her, whoever she was. You promised not to be an ass.”

“I’d be an ass if I
did
take you to bed, Stefanie. Not by resisting my animal urges.”

She stamped her foot again. “You can’t do this. You can’t flirt with me and make the entire world think we’re lovers, and then when we’re together, alone, you pull away. I realize I haven’t come to you innocent, but I’m not defiled, for God’s sake, I’m not some penny strumpet . . .”

“No! For God’s sake, don’t say that.” He leapt away from the wall and paced down the cold length of the room. “It’s not you.
I’m
defiled. I’m . . . God, if you knew.”

“Tell me. Tell me. Do you think I won’t understand? Haven’t I told you there’s nothing about you, nothing you could tell me that would make me think less of you?”

He stopped and spoke to the wall. “This would.”

“Who was she, Hatherfield?” Stefanie spoke quietly, afraid to say the wrong word. “Who did this to you?”

He bent his head into the wood. “My stepmother.”

Shock paralyzed Stefanie’s throat. The room shifted about her, boats swimming past her eyes and ears, cold, damp air and her heartbeat like a distant crash in the center of it all.

“You see?” Hatherfield said. “I’m damned.”

She forced herself to speak. “Tell me, Hatherfield. When did it happen?”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s done, it happened. There’s no rewriting the page.”

“It does matter. She hurt you. What did she do?”

He was silent.

“Tell me, Hatherfield.”

“I’ve never told anyone.”

“Then tell
me.
For God’s sake.
Me
, Hatherfield. Stefanie, your Stefanie, standing next to you. I am not stainless. Please.”

He braced both hands against the wall and spoke in a monotone, as if reading a page from a history book. “My mother died when I was five. Father married her a year or two later. I don’t remember the early years very well. I was up in the nursery, the schoolroom, and she rarely came up. They had four little girls, my sisters, one after the other, and the last birth was difficult. I believe she nearly died; she was in bed for months. In any case, she couldn’t have children after that. I was about twelve at that point, and when she recovered, when she was out and about again, she began . . . began to take notice of me.”

Stefanie swallowed. “Noticed you?”

“She would tell me what a beautiful boy I was. My damned face. She would touch me, hug me, bring up sweets to the schoolroom. I had a tutor at that point. At first I didn’t mind. I was so damned hungry, I hadn’t had a mother in so long, my nanny was busy with the girls, and I . . . God, I just wanted a scrap, just a scrap of . . .”

“Of affection. Of love.”

“Yes. Love.” He soaked the word with irony. “So it was all very well, the hugs and sweets and affection, until she slipped into my room one night. To tuck me in, she said, as if one actually tucked thirteen-year-old boys into their beds at night. She said she wanted to look at me, to see how beautiful I was. I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t had a mother since I was five, I didn’t know what was normal.”

“Oh, Hatherfield.”

“It went on. She began touching me. Not every night, perhaps once a week she’d come in. And I hated it, and yet when she didn’t come, I . . . I wondered why, wondered if she didn’t care anymore. She played it all perfectly, I suppose. One night she took off her robe. I was fourteen, fifteen. By then I knew what she was getting at, and I was scared to death. Of her, of myself. I told her to go away. She said she would tell my father that I’d been making her do it, blackmailing her. She said she knew I wanted it. Then she put her hands on me and . . .” He shook his head. “My own stepmother, and I spent in her hand.”

“You were a boy, Hatherfield.”

“I was fifteen, Stefanie. Old enough and big enough to push her away, and I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was disgusted, and I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t, I let her do it. At that age, my God, a well-turned piano leg made me hard as stone. What was I supposed to do when a beautiful woman came to me at night and took off her clothes and . . .” His fist hit the wall. “I went off to Eton soon afterward, thank God. I couldn’t even look at the other boys. I was dirty, I was different.
Oh, that beautiful Hatherfield, that golden creature, that angelic boy!
If only they knew.”

“It wasn’t you. It was her, she was the dirty one. You were a boy.”

“Yes, but who would have believed my word against hers? Who would have believed I didn’t want her there? I let her in. I let her in. I never said no.” He shook his head. “I dreaded coming home during school holidays. I learned to make friends, so they would invite me to stay. I learned to put on a show, to play the proper role. Charming old Hatherfield. Just enough that everyone thought I was a regular chap, a good fellow to bring home to the old pile over Easter, or during the summer. When I did come to my own house, I prayed my father and the duchess wouldn’t be there. That they’d be away in London and wouldn’t send for me. Christmas was the worst. I couldn’t avoid her at Christmas. I locked the door one year. She changed the lock, so it operated from the outside. She would come in and ask me if I’d met any girls, and what I had done with them.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That I hadn’t. Which was true, because I didn’t dare, didn’t trust myself even to look at a girl. I was seventeen when she got into bed with me. Boxing Day. I leapt out and ran for the door. She said she would scream for the servants, for my father. She actually started to scream.”