Twice Tempted (33 page)

“Pure accident. I was checking all the brothels. You said it yourself. I’ve been up and down all the streets singing a sad song of my mad wife.”

She grimaced. “I heard.”

“You did a good job of camouflaging yourself,” he said, his eyes soft with hurt. “I wouldn’t have recognized you at all if I hadn’t heard your voice.”

She struggled to take in a breath. His hand was still on her arm, and it burned her. It stirred her, just like always, until she couldn’t think or move. “You weren’t supposed to,” she finally managed.

She couldn’t take her gaze from him, drinking in those deep, delicious brown eyes like water in a desert. Desperate, suddenly, to run her fingers along his jaw, over his cheeks, his eyes. Needing to know he was more than her imagination.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she finally protested, trying to pull away. “You shouldn’t be anywhere near us. Get back to your father. He needs you.”

He smiled. He actually smiled, and she thought she would weep. “My father is quite well and more closely watched than an heir in the royal nursery. It is you who ran off into the night, Fiona. Couldn’t you come to me?”

“No.” She wanted to get away. She wanted to curl up into his arms. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. She had worked so hard to protect him, to keep him from having to make an impossible decision. “No outcome would have been fair.”

“I’m sorry, Fiona,” he whispered, so that only she could hear it. “I’m so sorry.”

Tears brimming in her eyes, she lifted a hand to his scruffy face. “I know.”

“I wouldn’t have handed you over,” he averred, then, shaking his head, dropped his eyes, his hand holding hers tightly enough to hurt. “I don’t think I would have.”

She squeezed his fingers. “I’m not sure I would have blamed you if you had. Your father is far more precious to the world than an orphan brat with a knack for numbers.”

That brought the thunderclouds. Glaring, he shook her hard. “I
never
want to hear you say that again. Do you understand me?”

Tears again, useless and frightening. She couldn’t lose control now. Not now.

“And on top of everything else,” he mourned, a broad finger up to stroke the fringe from her forehead, “you had to lop off your hair again. I’m almost most sorry about that.”

Her smile was less assured. “It is nothing. Hair grows. At least that is what I have been trying to impress on Mae.”

“Mae’s with you?” she heard behind her and turned to see Chuffy approaching, completely out of breath.

“Lost him, huh?” Alex asked.

Chuffy shook his head in wonder and wiped his sweating face with his sleeve. “Hardy devils, those riflemen.”

Finally, Fiona pulled herself back into the moment. “Why would he do that?” she asked. “Push me and then save me.”

“Get in your good graces, I imagine,” Alex said.

Chuffy nodded. “Easier to take control if he knows where everybody is. Lowers defenses. Mae?”

Fiona managed a smile. “In our room working on the puzzles.”

“The puzzles?” Chuffy leaned close. “She can’t be. They’re in the safe at Willowbend.”

Fiona smiled. “It doesn’t matter. She never really needed the slips. Not that way. She just needed to believe that grandfather felt some affection for her.”

“But she’d need the poem.”

“She had it memorized the first time she read it.”

Chuffy’s face scrunched up in a scowl. “Too bad. Awful poem. Bad metaphors.”

“You wanna jaw all day, it’s nothin’ to me,” Fiona heard at her elbow. “But I’m gettin’ hungry.”

“Where is she, Fee?” Alex asked. “We need to get the two of you someplace safe.”

Fiona looked around, as if calling up Tom Mitchell and the mail again. “How did they find us? I’ve been so careful.”

All she had wanted to do was protect Alex, and she had failed. She wanted to cry.

Alex stroked her cheek. “You ran out into the open. I obviously haven’t impressed on you well enough that the minute you came under my care, you were safe, no matter what. I’ll have to do better next time.”

“Why are we so important?” she demanded. “Mae and I don’t know anything.”

“But you do.” Alex took her hand. “We’ll talk when we get you and Mairead to safety.”

She looked up, seeking the warmth of his eyes, the strength. Bathing in the nearness of him, as if his very presence provided armor.

“Lennie,” Alex said, never taking his gaze from Fiona, “I assume you know where you’re staying.” The answer was an indignant huff that produced a smile. “Why don’t you take Chuffy along so he can make sure Mairead is safe? We’ll follow right behind.”

Only hard-won instinct pulled Fiona’s gaze away from Alex. The light had faded, and they were still standing like a boulder in a fast-moving stream and were receiving more than a few glares as people had to move around them to get home. The cacophony of wagon wheels and hooves and hawkers and broadsheet sellers singing about murder.

Lennie set off running in and out of the passing vehicles like a sparrow among the rooftops, Chuffy following with surprising agility. Fiona didn’t breathe until they made it safely to the other side of Shaftesbury and onto Mercer, where the pedestrians outnumbered the vehicles.

Turning back to Alex, she found herself once again completely distracted. “You look particularly handsome as a rogue, you know.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “I wish I could say the same for you. You look like a Methodist handing out tracts.”

That broadened her smile immensely. “That was what the brothel owners said.”

Placing her hand on his arm, as if they were strolling the park, Alex made to turn her in the other direction. “I will make the Lions pay for making you think you needed to return to the streets like this, Fee. I swear it.”

Fee’s smile was a bit wobbly. “It never hurts to reacquaint yourself with old skills,” she said, suddenly strong in his company. “For an entire week I was invisible.”

She had hoped for a smile. She got a thoughtful frown. “I’d much rather you be allowed to forget. I’d always be afraid you’d slip away and I’d never find you.”

Fiona was too afraid to look at him now, not at all certain what she wanted to see. Did he realize what he was saying? Or was he just being polite? She simply didn’t know.

She couldn’t shake the sense of disorientation. She had been hiding for more than a week, so careful to remain a nonentity, so vigilant. And in a matter of moments, she found herself walking alongside Alex through the noisome alleys of the Dials as if it were the park during the afternoon stroll. The only thing that gave away the danger they faced was the tension in Alex’s arm, the constant swivel of his eyes.

The touch of him distracted her; the sound of his voice resonated in her chest and skimmed along her skin. She needed to remain alert; they still had a way to walk. But a frantic kind of giddiness rose in her chest like a tide, and she couldn’t seem to breathe past it. Alex was here. Alex had been looking for her. She had run to protect him, and yet she was too thankful for words that he walked by her side.

It was when they walked right past Nan’s place that she finally regained her senses. “We seem to be going the wrong way.”

“I know. It’s safer to take a different route from Chuffy. Where are you staying?”

She looked around, as if she could spot a lurker intent on their passage. “Back the other way across Shaftesbury on Stacey Street, just across from the new charity school.”

He nodded and turned down Monmouth as if they were heading toward one of the myriad gin shops, both of them surreptitiously scanning their environment.

The tension fast became unbearable for her. She had so many questions. But she couldn’t imagine asking about the people who were blackmailing him or the danger from the Lions as they walked down the narrow and teeming streets.

“We should probably be talking to each other,” Alex said, giving her a quick glance. “You look like I’m walking you to the gallows.”

She caught sight of a man watching them. Small, thin, furtive. She was about to warn Alex when she caught a telltale motion that actually made her smile. “Beware the pickpocket,” she warned.

Alex looked over. “He can’t think I have anything.”

“You have more than he does.”

Alex considered the man for a moment and nodded. “You’re right.”

“You can never trust the poor,” she said. “There is always temptation.”

He turned to her, looking unsettled. “Even you?”

He still didn’t realize then how far they had sunk. It would have been pointless to tell him, so she just lifted her free hand and opened it. In her palm lay his pocket watch and some change. Then his eyes did get big.

“I was a dab hand at the knuckle by the time I was ten,” she said, handing them over.

“Is that the worst thing you needed to tell me?”

Her heart plummeted. Her belly went hot. “No.”

“Will you tell me?”

She looked up at him under her bonnet, trying so hard to anticipate him. “You tell me why you’re being blackmailed, and I’ll tell you why in the end I will leave.”

For the longest time he only glared at her, as if challenging her to change her claim. She couldn’t, so he began to talk, and talked all the way across to New Compton and back down to Stacey.

And Fiona heard of Alex’s doomed Amabelle, the woman Fiona had envied so unspeakably four years ago, the woman she had drawn in her mind as perfect as Alex deserved. The woman who had been so troubled that not Alex, not lovers, not excitement or danger or threat, could satisfy her. Who, in the end, had been destroyed by her own imperfections.

At first Fiona was furious that the woman could have so capriciously wasted a gift as precious as Alex’s love. She wanted to hate her. But Alex made her see how pitiful Amabelle had actually been. He admitted that rather than one villain, the marriage had joined two imperfect people in a futile attempt at happiness.

“I was too young to help her,” he finally said, his voice low. “I didn’t know how.”

Fiona felt the old desperation well up in him and held on more tightly. “She was still a very lucky woman.”

He looked surprised again, this time in a more profound way. As if struggling to understand Fiona’s words.
Oh, Alex
, she thought.
You have blamed yourself too long.
She couldn’t make him see his mistake, not here on the street with the world passing by and the threat of curious eyes on them. Later, she hoped. When they were alone. When they had time, time enough for honesty and comfort.

She thought of the magic of that last night at Willowbend and wanted to think it meant more than simple pleasure. She wanted to know whether he felt the same way. She knew she shouldn’t expect him to. She shouldn’t hope for what would in the end hurt them both.

But perversely, she did.

It seemed he did, too.

She had no sooner ushered him into the dingy front hall of Mrs. Tolliver’s house than he dragged her into the parlor and kicked the door shut. Ignoring the horsehair sofa, the sputtering fire, and the tallow candelabras, he pulled her hard into his arms.

“Come here,” he rasped, yanking the knot on her bonnet and tossing it on a couch. He was about to kiss her, she thought, suddenly feeling suffused with light. Her heart stumbled and ran. She lifted her head and closed her eyes.

But nothing happened. Frustrated, she opened her eyes to see him looking wistfully at the top of her head. “My poor girl. Look what you did to your lovely hair.”

She looked up, as if she could see where it lay flat against her skull, the stain robbing it of gleam or luster. “I did what I had to.”

“No,” he said, his gaze darkening. “You didn’t have to do it. For God’s sake, Fee, after what we shared, how could you think I would desert you?”

He simply took her breath. How could she tell him how she hoped, but wasn’t sure? How could she ask if he loved her a fraction as much as she loved him?

“You were given an impossible choice,” she insisted. “I couldn’t bear to be part of it. I wanted you and your father safe. Mae and I have survived just fine on our own before. We could have until you dealt with those men.”

He was shaking his head, as if she made no sense. His eyes were so hot, so sweet, so torn. She brushed aside his hair and stroked his face. She thought she saw tears glisten in his eyes as he twined his fingers through her short locks, pulling her face very close to his. “Don’t ever do that to me again, Fee,” he commanded on a rasp. “Don’t ever frighten me that way again.”

She felt tears fill her throat as well. Reaching up, she laid her hand against his stubbled chin. And then, lifting on her toes so they were eye-to-eye, where her intent could not be mistaken, she kissed him. And in that moment, she knew that no matter where she went in her life, no matter what became of her, this was where her home was.

She didn’t have to wait long for his response. His arms came around her so tightly he almost lifted her off the floor. His mouth opened, hot and urgent over hers. His tongue plunged into her mouth, met her tongue, mated. His body, so strong, so welcoming, trembled as if he were in a fever. His touch was incendiary, and she relished it, burning up, burning away until nothing was left but the touch of him, the rasp of his breath, the taste of his mouth, dark and hungry and fierce.

“Promise me, Fee,” he demanded, pulling his mouth away, until she lifted again, seeking its return. “Promise.”

“Anything.” She reached up and tossed off his hat, wrapped her fingers in his hair, and yanked him back to her, meeting him in a frenzy of need and joy and wonder. Relief, as if she had been holding her breath since leaving his bed. “What am I promising?”

“You won’t ever leave me again. Promise.”

Suddenly, it was as if he’d doused her with cold water. From one heartbeat to the next her delight died into ashes and she pulled away. He stared at her, his hands still on her arms. “What?”

“I can’t promise that,” she protested, her voice thick with tears. “I can’t.”

He looked furious. “Why not? Don’t you love me?”

He might as well have hit her with a club. How could he? “Yes.”

She couldn’t say another word. Not until he did.