34
A
nd then it all ended.
It was, Braden knew, his own fault. He ought to have insisted upon taking her away from there at once. He ought to have whisked her off to Bath, Brighton, anywhere. Anywhere that she could not be traced.
But it was his first time. Not his first time with a woman, certainly, but his first time with a woman whose mere presence so filled his heart and mind, there wasn’t room for anything else . . . rational thought, apparently, included.
If he’d been thinking rationally, of course, he’d have realized the absolute necessity of removing Caroline Linford at once from the reach of her family. But no man, he later consoled himself—small comfort though it was— could have retained possession of his wits when faced with the delightful discovery that the woman he adored, who’d been but a scant few hours earlier utterly virginal, took to lovemaking like a fish to water.
It wasn’t the sort of thing a man—at least a man like Braden—could ignore. Even if he’d had some inkling of what lay ahead, he doubted he could have done anything differently. He’d been drugged by love. He’d thrilled at her slightest touch. He’d felt intoxicated simply by the sound of her voice. He’d fallen in love for the first time in his life, and he’d fallen hard.
How could he have guessed that the mewling bastard would not follow his orders? He ought to have known, of course. He ought to have remembered that there was someone of whom the faint-hearted devil was a good deal more frightened, someone whose methods were a great deal more brutal than Braden’s.
But Braden had dispatched that particular individual. He hadn’t, of course, chosen to share that with the marquis. And that had been another mistake. He had underestimated the man. Vastly, grossly underestimated him.
And because of it—that one, simple mistake—he lost everything.
Even more depressing than that was that when the blow came, he was perfectly unprepared for it. He’d been making breakfast—breakfast!—when it happened.
They’d been in the kitchen. Caroline had been suffering all morning from a guilty conscience; Braden recognized the signs, though he could not think what to do about it, beyond bending down to kiss the slight worry line that he sometimes spied puckering her smooth forehead. When they made love, it was different. Then all her troubles vanished, as if by magic. It was when they were not making love that she seemed to become conscious of the gravity of what she’d done.
He’d tried reasoning with her, telling her that everyone would understand eventually—though he could not, of course, tell her why. He had promised her brother he wouldn’t mention the gambling, and most especially the two attempts made upon his life because of it. He could only hope that the earl would set things right with his sister in his own time.
And Caroline was trying, he could see, to put a brave face on it. But she was not at all used to going against the wishes of her family. Small rebellions, certainly: her horses, her support of Emily’s cause, her seeking out lessons in how to make love. But this sort of grand scale insurgency was clearly making her uneasy.
And though he didn’t like that she should be unhappy, he knew he would not have loved her half as dearly as he did if she’d been callous enough not to care. Lady Bartlett was manipulative, Thomas thoughtless, and her fiancé an idiotic wretch, but Caroline loved them each, in her way, and the thought of causing them pain was upsetting to her.
And so he’d tried to make her forget her troubles by clowning, flipping eggs in the skillet he held—a skill his mother had taught him before her death—tossing them as high as he could, in hopes that one would eventually stick to the ceiling, and speculating on what Lord Woodson’s cook would say when she returned, and found fried eggs in the rafters.
And it appeared that he was succeeding, at least in a small way, at cheering Caroline up, since she laughed at his antics, and even went so far as to try her own hand at the skillet. That any woman belonging to so-called Polite Society should have joined in such a silly game, rather than stand and mock him for it, quite boggled his brain. Out of all the supposedly aristocratic women he’d met before Caroline, only Jacquelyn had shown the smallest spark of humor, which had set her apart from all the mind-numbing socialites in her set. But Jacquelyn’s wit had always been at the expense of others, her ideas often lifted from—but never credited to by her—popular writers or politicians.
Caroline Linford, on the other hand, laughed easily and often, and said exactly what she was thinking, borrowing from no one. He had known from the first time she’d described her rather unorthodox method of supporting the women’s suffrage movement that Caroline was an original, quite unlike any other woman he had ever met before. What he had never suspected was the hold she would eventually have over his heartstrings.
Which was why, when the bell to the servants’ entrance sounded midway through his breakfast preparation, he felt his first tug of foreboding. The house was shut up. Who could be calling?
Caroline was holding on to the handle of the skillet, his arms around her as he showed her how to jiggle the pan just enough to send its contents flying. She must have felt him tense at the sound, since she looked up at him, her already deeply brown eyes seeming to go a fraction darker, and said, softly, “I’ll go.”
He took the pan, moving away from her so she would not realize how deeply his unease ran. His stomach muscles were tightly clenched, his jaw muscles already leaping with suppressed emotion.
“No,” he said succinctly, putting down the skillet. “I will. You stay here.”
But Caroline surprised him. She pushed a few strands of loose hair from her face and said, determinedly, “No,
I
will. I’m sure it’s a message from my mother.”
And she went bravely to the back door.
That had been his second mistake. His first, not removing her at once from Woodson Manor, might have been forgivable. But the fact that he hadn’t thought to intercept any missives from Lady Bartlett was most definitely not.
Still, he set aside the skillet and followed her to the door, just in case it wasn’t a servant with a message from her mother, but one of those nefarious evildoers Caroline had mentioned, from whom she might need protection.
It was, however, only Violet.
“Oh,
hello,
sir,” the girl said, brightening perceptibly when she saw him. If it entered the maid’s head to wonder what her mistress was doing, entertaining Braden Granville in her friend’s empty country house, it did not apparently bother her. She grinned sunnily up at him.
Caroline, however, was far from grinning as she read the contents of the letter Violet had brought to her.
“Caroline,” he said, the foreboding he’d felt since hearing the bell ring turning into full blown alarm at her shocked expression. He could not imagine what her mother had written. Something about Thomas, he supposed. Braden had instructed the boy not to stir from his home until it was deemed safe for him to do so by the men Braden had put on both The Duke and the marquis’s tails. Had the lad taken matters into his hands? Had some new disaster befallen him?
“What—” he started to ask, but when she turned her gaze toward him, he saw that those brown eyes were filled with tears—and a look of such injured betrayal, he very nearly cried out.
“How could you?” Caroline asked, in a heartbroken voice. “How
could
you?”
Braden couldn’t honestly say he hadn’t any idea what she was talking about. What he could not imagine was how her mother, of all people, had found out.
“How could I what?” he asked, carefully.
“How could you have shot Hurst?” Caroline wailed, throwing herself down onto a nearby settle, and the letter into a crumpled ball on the floor. “When you promised me you wouldn’t?”
Braden, conscious that Violet was still standing in the doorway, blinking confusedly at them, stepped toward the maid, and laid a hand upon her arm.
“Would you mind terribly,” he said, giving the maid a gentle push out the door, “waiting outside for a few moments?”
Violet, still staring at her sobbing mistress, murmured, “Oh, but Lady Bartlett said I was to fetch her ladyship home at once—”
“Just a few moments of privacy, if you please,” Braden said.
He closed the door as soon as he’d successfully navigated Violet through it, then leaned down to pick up the discarded note. Smoothing out the foolscap, he stared down at Lady Bartlett’s strong, looping cursive:
Caroline,
her mother wrote,
Your brother did not come home last night or the night before. When I went to look for him at Lord Winchilsea’s, I found the marquis suffering from a bullet wound given to him by your “friend” Mr. Granville. Your Hurst is grievously injured. I can’t imagine what that horrid man was thinking. And I’ve still had no word from Tommy, and can only suppose the worst—he’s gone to Oxford after all. Everything is in a muddle. Do come home from Emmy’s at once. Pettigrew fears my heart palpitations may prove fatal this time.
Mother
Braden felt something constrict inside him, and realized, with a sinking sensation, that what he was feeling was something he hadn’t felt in a very, very long time.
It was fear.
He had dealt, in his lifetime, with every conceivable kind of trouble—generally with a pistol, but occasionally without. And he was no stranger to the feminine variety. He had, he knew, broken far more hearts than he wished to remember.
But those women had been easily assuaged, usually with a diamond bracelet or earrings.
But Caroline’s heart, which he held more precious than his own, was not so easily mended.
He tried an apology.
“Caroline,” he said, knowing his desperation showed in his voice. “I’m sorry. But for what it’s worth, he went for his pistol first. I had to defend my—”
Caroline lifted her face from her arms. He was alarmed at the shiny tracks the tears had made along her cheeks. “You promised me you wouldn’t,” she said, with a sob. “And then you just went ahead and did it.”
Braden, bewilderment tempering his fear, sank down beside her on the settle, and laid his hands upon her quivering shoulders. “Caroline, sweetheart, what are you talking about? I never promised you anything about—”
She’d torn herself from his grasp, and out of his reach, before the words were completely out of his mouth. She stood in the middle of the entranceway, her chest heaving beneath the bodice of her plain white dress, tears standing out in her long lashes.
“You did,” she accused him. “You
did
promise! The whole reason I wouldn’t tell you who it was I saw with Lady Jacquelyn was because I knew you would do something like this, and I couldn’t bear it—”
In a flash, Braden had left the settle as well, and closed the distance between them in two long strides.
“What are you talking about?” He seized her shoulders again, only this time not to comfort her, but to keep her in one place so he could look down into her eyes.
“You know perfectly well what I’m talking about.” Caroline glared up at him, and he realized the tears were only partly from despair. They were tears of anger, too. She was angry with him. “Hurst and Jacquelyn. As if you didn’t know. How did you find out? You made her tell you, I suppose. I hoped—I hoped she loved him better than that.”
“Hurst?” Dumbfounded, he shook his head. Then comprehension dawned. “It was
Hurst
you saw that night with Jackie?”
“Of course it was,” Caroline said, angrily. “Don’t pretend as if you didn’t know. Why would you have shot him if you didn’t know?”
“Are you trying to tell me,” he said, stooping down so that he could look her in the eye, “that when you volunteered to act as a witness on my behalf, it was
Hurst
that you had seen with Lady Jacquelyn?”
“Of course.” Caroline glared at him through her tears. “Why else do you think I wouldn’t tell you his name? I didn’t want to see him shot. I knew all about you and your guns. You think pistols are the solution to every problem, don’t you? Well, they aren’t. They’re wicked and wrong. They hurt people. Do you think I wanted Hurst’s sister— he has one, you know—to go through what I went through when Tommy . . . when Tommy . . .”
She broke off sobbing. Braden, feeling frightened again, tried to put his arms around her, draw her close— anything, anything at all, to stop those angry tears—when a fresh wave of them came, and she pounded a fist against his chest.
“But you went ahead and shot him anyway! How long have you known? You must have been laughing at me all along. . . .”
He could only stare down at her, perfectly bemused by what she’d said. Hurst? It had been
Hurst
whom she’d seen with Jackie at Dame Ashforth’s? Hurst Slater was Jackie’s phantom lover, the man because of whom Weasel had been stabbed? The bloke who could melt into shadow and disappear at will was none other than the Marquis of Winchilsea?
If it hadn’t been for the tears still marking Caroline’s face, and the injured betrayal with which she was regarding him, he might have laughed out loud. Because suddenly, as if a curtain had been lifted, Braden could see. Saw everything, in fact, at last.
Jackie’s phantom lover, whom they’d had so much trouble identifying, hadn’t been hiding only from Braden Granville. Slater had also been trying to keep from being found by Seymour Hawkins.
It was no small wonder he’d been so desperate to escape detection. The man who’d stabbed Weasel could only have been one of Hawkins’s men, sent to track down the marquis, who’d disappeared from Oxford at around the time the Earl of Bartlett had been shot. Hawkins, disliking loose ends, must have realized that the young earl who’d very rightfully accused him of cheating was still alive, and was likely to talk—not to the authorities, of course: the earl wouldn’t want to draw attention to his gambling habit. But he’d surely talk to his friends, and that would hurt Hawkins’s business.
And so Hawkins had appointed someone to finish the job.
But it wouldn’t have satisfied The Duke’s twisted sense of justice to have just anyone kill the earl. No, it had to be Slater, to teach him a lesson for sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong, and hauling Thomas Bartlett back from death’s door.
The earl, of course, hadn’t been able to tell Braden for certain that it had been Slater who’d shot at him the night before. But he’d been sufficiently suspicious of his friend to do everything he could to avoid him afterward.
And that had been all the incentive Braden had needed to pay a little social call on the marquis.
He hadn’t known then, of course, how things were going to work out between him and Caroline. But he’d known he wasn’t going to stand idly by and allow the brother of the woman he loved to be killed—and quite possibly by her own fiancé.
And so he had gone to the rooms kept by the Marquis of Winchilsea and suggested—merely suggested—that if he valued his health, Hurst Slater might want to leave town for an extended period of time.
For, say, a year.
A suggestion at which the marquis had balked. More than balked, in fact. He’d taken umbrage at the idea, and gone for his gun, apparently feeling that ridding himself of Braden Granville was a better alternative.
And Braden had been forced to draw his own weapon—the one he’d brought with him in the unlikely event that gentle persuasion alone proved ineffective with the marquis.
Well, what choice had he had, really? The man had been about to shoot him! And it had, after all, only been a flesh wound. Braden had been careful about that. He could have injured the bloke a good deal more seriously, but hadn’t, only because the foolish man had saved Caroline’s brother once.
Really, he’d been quite reasonable, he thought. He’d offered the marquis a remarkably fair deal. Exile, rather than incarceration or death. Braden could, he’d pointed out to the marquis, have turned him over to the authorities instead—the same authorities to whom he’d sent word that Seymour Hawkins could be found operating a gambling circle in Oxford, the exact address of which he’d ascertained from Thomas.
Only Braden had left out that tantalizing bit of information.
And that had been yet another mistake. Because apparently there was a force greater than Braden’s of which Hurst Slater was frightened. And since he didn’t know that that force—Hawkins—was about to be apprehended, the marquis had done exactly the wrong thing:
He’d stayed in London. And he’d talked.
And if the letter Caroline was clutching in her hands was any indication, he’d talked to the Lady Bartlett.
The irony of it all was that the last thing Braden would ever have done was turn the blighter over to the law. Caroline had troubles enough without adding to them a fiancé who’d been hurled into Newgate. That, he knew, she would never be able to live down.
No, better that the bloke simply disappear than be dragged through the courts.
But this is what he’d chosen instead. To stay and fight. A foolish decision under normal circumstances. No one fought Braden Granville and won.
Except that Hurst Slater had a weapon against which Braden hadn’t the slightest defense.
Caroline.
“You’re hurting me,” Caroline said, trying to shrug his fingers off her shoulders.
He let go of her at once.
“Caroline, you have got to believe me.” He followed her. For some reason, she’d gone to the door. “I had no idea. You’re mistaken if you think it had anything at all to do with Jacquelyn. I did go to have a chat with your fiancé, but—”
“No.” She shook her head. There were still tears running down her cheeks, but she stood by the door with her shoulders thrown back, as determined as he had ever seen her. “I was mistaken, all right, but not about that.
This
was the mistake. You’re the Lothario of London, after all. I should have known that it was all just a great game to you.”
“A
game?”
he echoed, his voice breaking.
“Yes, a game,” Caroline said. “All this time, you knew it was Hurst who’d been with Jackie, and you wanted revenge. Well, you’ve gotten it now, haven’t you? You bedded his fiancée, the same way he bedded yours. And then you
shot
him.”
“Caroline.” He could only stare at her in horror. She was not, he thought, the same person she’d been up until a half hour ago. Suddenly, she was someone he had never met. He supposed she felt the same about him. “Is that what you really think?”
“Well, what else am I to think? Why else would you have done it, Braden? Why
else
would you have shot my fiancé?”
“I told you. He pulled his weapon first—”
“Why?” Caroline’s voice was hard. “What were you saying to him, Braden?”
“Caroline—”
“Tell me.”
In a small part of his mind—a part detached from the present situation—a voice whispered,
So this is how it feels. This is how it feels to have your heart broken.
He’d heard the sensation described many times, but he had never actually felt it himself. The closest he supposed he’d come was how he’d felt at his mother’s death—a panicky, cold feeling, as if he’d been locked in a dank, airless cell, much like the one at Newgate he’d once spent a night in.
Because of course he couldn’t tell her. Not without revealing what her brother had made him swear never to tell. If it had all worked out the way it was supposed to, Slater would simply have disappeared. Braden had never imagined that a cowardly, sniveling thing like the marquis wouldn’t follow his orders. If he’d had the smallest inkling that Hurst Slater was Jackie’s phantom lover, he would never have underestimated the man so badly.
But he hadn’t known.
And now it was beginning to look as if he had lost everything.
“I can’t tell you, Caroline,” he said, knowing even as he said them that the words would never be enough, but praying—yes, actually praying—that she’d understand. He’d given his word. A man lived and died by his word in the Dials. It was so often all he had.
Except in this case, it was his ruin.
“I see,” Caroline said.
And then she turned and opened the door before he could say another word.
Violet stood in the sunlight just outside, flanked by two very large, very intimidating footmen.
“I’m sorry, milady,” she said, glancing nervously at Caroline. “But I heard the shouting, and I thought I’d better fetch Riley and Samuels. . . .”
“Yes,” Caroline said, in a voice Braden had never heard her use before. It was a flat, lifeless voice. “I’m coming.”
Violet glanced from Braden to her mistress, and back again. “But . . .” The maid looked horrified. “Your things, milady. And you can’t go out without a bonnet, and your gloves—”
“I don’t care,” Caroline said, in the same dull voice. “I don’t care about my things, or my gloves. Come along, Violet.”
The maid, after a last, frightened look at Braden, hurried after her mistress.
“Caroline,” Braden said, starting forward. He could not quite believe what was happening.
But even as he moved, the two footmen, after allowing Caroline and her maid to pass, moved to fill the doorway, blocking his path.
“God damn it,” Braden cursed, as Riley and Samuels stared at him impassively. “Get out of my way or I swear—”
“Let the lady go, sir,” the one on the left said. “Don’t make us have to hurt you.”
“You don’t understand,” Braden growled. “I don’t mean her any harm. I just need to make her see reason.”
Glancing pointedly down at Braden’s balled fists, the one on the right said, “That’s exactly why we ain’t moving. Not until she’s safe in the carriage.”
“By then it will be too late,” Braden said, realizing that once she got back to London, and into her mother’s clutches, he’d very likely never see Caroline again.
“That, sir,” the footman said, unruffled, “is the idea.”