A Lady Never Surrenders (23 page)

“Thank you.”

Removing his surtout, he walked over to hang it on top of her cloak, then stood there warming his hands at the fire. “I wish I could say the same about your cousins.”

Oh dear. That was the last thing in the world she wanted to talk about, especially after what Nurse had told him today.

She busied herself with hunting through his saddlebags for more food. “Desmond and Ned have always been … difficult.”

“Yet you were infatuated with Ned when you were a girl.” He continued to sip the brandy, his gaze steady on her.

Seizing a pear, she took a couple of bites as she wondered how to answer. “It didn’t last long.”

“I figured that.” When she shot him a startled glance, he added, “I saw your reaction to him at the ball last night.”

Had she been that obvious?

“What did he do to you?” Jackson prodded as he capped the flask and tucked it into a pocket of his surtout.

She ate the rest of the pear. How much should she tell him? What would Proper Pinter think of her if she revealed everything?

Oh, she could easily guess, and she couldn’t bear it.

“Did he hurt you?” Jackson asked in a harsher voice. “I swear, if he laid a hand on you—”

“It wasn’t like that,” she murmured.

With a darkening expression, Jackson approached her. “Then tell me what it was like.”

“It was a long time ago, really. Nothing to speak of.”

“I saw your face last night,” he said softly. “For one moment, you were afraid of him, and I want to know why.”

“I wasn’t afraid—”

“Damn it, Celia, tell me what he did!”

She swallowed hard, then turned her back to him. “I-I think he tried to deflower me.”

R
ed-hot rage seized Jackson. “
Deflower
you!” he choked out. “You mean he tried to
rape
you?”

“No!” She whirled on him with a look of alarm. “I-I told you, it wasn’t like that! I mean, it wasn’t…” She dropped her gaze to her hands. “Oh, I should never have said anything.”

He struggled to restrain his anger. He was an investigator, for God’s sake—he ought to know by now that you didn’t get the truth out of someone by overreacting. Taking her gently by the arm, he led her over to the bed.

“Start at the beginning.” He urged her to sit, then took a seat next to her, though not too close. She needed some distance just now. “Tell me what happened. I promise, I’ll just sit here and listen.” Even if it killed him, and it very well might.

With a nod, she stared off across the room. “It was all my fault, really.”

“It was
not
your fault,” he snapped.

She eyed him askance. “I thought you were going to sit and listen.”

He sucked in a steadying breath. “Right. Go on.”

“I’d fancied Ned for years, you see. The summer after I turned fourteen, he was seventeen and on holiday from school, so his family came to visit us at Gran’s town house. They stayed a couple of weeks.” She pleated her skirt nervously. “He was quite the dashing fellow back then. He rode well—he and Gabe used to race down Rotten Row all the time—and he was a very good dancer. So when he noticed me…”

Her voice grew choked. “You have to understand—boys never noticed me, not next to Minerva. She’d just had her come-out, and there were men after her everywhere. She said they were all fortune hunters, but it didn’t seem that way to me. Of course, I wasn’t out yet so I didn’t get to witness much of her success firsthand. But at the few events I attended, she was always the belle of the ball, and I was just the scrawny sister.”

It took some doing for him to keep his mouth shut at that, but somehow he managed it.

“Then Ned started flirting with me,” she went on, “and I was terribly flattered. All of us children would go to Hyde Park, and he would escort me as if I were already grown. He … he paid me compliments and picked me flowers—” Her voice hardened. “His attentions were all a lie, but I didn’t find that out until later.”

All a lie? Did she mean because the arse was trying to get under her skirts?

“Anyway, Gran held a large party one summer day, and after everyone else went inside for supper, Ned convinced me to go into the garden shed with him.”

The troubled expression that crossed her face made Jackson want to find Ned Plumtree and beat him to a bloody pulp. He curled his hands into fists so hard that his fingernails dug into his palms.

“At first it was everything I wanted,” she said. “He … He kissed me. It wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t as nice as I’d expected. He was so, well, clumsy at it.” She sighed. “I didn’t like it much. But I figured it was what happened when a boy kissed a girl, you know?”

No, he didn’t know, though he could well imagine a sweet young Celia eager for her first kiss. As his mother had probably been.

But his mother had been old enough to realize what she was doing. Celia had only been fourteen.

He choked back his anger. “You didn’t have anything to compare it to.”

“Exactly.” Her voice lowered. “But when he … put his hands on my bosom … I knew that wasn’t right.”

The urge to kill ripped through him again.

“I told him he shouldn’t do that,” she went on, “and he just kept … squeezing, so hard that it hurt.” The words tumbled out of her now, one after another, in rapid succession. “And then he started dragging up my skirts with his other hand, and I told him to stop it, and he shoved me down on the floor and got on top of me and his hands were all over me, so—” She scowled. “So I hit him with a brick.”

The abrupt cessation of her tale made him blink. “You … you what?”

She cast him a furtive glance from beneath her lowered lashes. “Hit him on the head with a brick. I hit him pretty hard. He started cursing and rolled off of me, and I jumped up and ran out the shed door.”

“Sweet God,” he muttered, his heart leaping into his throat as he realized how close she’d come to being violated.

“He caught up to me in the garden and said some vile things, but I still had the brick, so I threw it at him and ran into the house.”

He gaped at her. “Where was your family while all this was going on?” he asked hoarsely. “Your brothers, your sister?”

“They were at supper. Being the youngest, I and my younger cousins were relegated to the children’s table, so no one was paying much attention to us at that point. Besides, it all happened so fast … I managed to slip in and sit down before anyone even noticed I wasn’t there.”

A ghost of a smile crossed her lips. “They did notice later that Ned was missing, however. When they asked me if I’d seen him, I told them he’d been complaining of a headache ever since he’d fallen off his horse earlier in the day and hit his head.”

She looked smug. “He
hated
that. He was so proud of being known for his riding skills, and after that everyone called him Clumsy Plumtree for a while. And he didn’t dare correct me for fear that I would tell them what really happened.”

“Why didn’t you, damn it?” Jackson gritted out.

She eyed him askance. “Oliver would have shot him on the spot.”

“Good. I’ve a mind to do that myself the next time I see him.”

“I’m not going to let you shoot Ned,” she said stoutly. “That wouldn’t help your chances at being chosen Chief Magistrate.” He was about to protest that he didn’t give a bloody damn about being chosen Chief Magistrate right now, when she added, “And I wasn’t going to let Oliver do it either, not with all the rumors that he’d shot Mama. We had enough scandal in our family as it was.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “Besides, if anyone ever shoots Ned, it’s going to be me.”

And just like that, everything fell into place. “Ah, so
that’s
when you convinced Gabe to teach you how to shoot. That’s why you carry a ladies’ pocket pistol in your reticule.”

She gave him a terse nod. “I wasn’t about to let anything like that happen to me ever again.”

A sudden chill swept him. How could she think herself so alone? “Leaving the possibility of scandal aside, you should have told your family. They could have dealt with Ned privately.”

“And then they would have found out how reckless I was,” she whispered. “How pathetic and stupid, too stupid to … see that Ned didn’t care about me … to realize he was just poking fun…”

With a little moan, she rose from the bed, but he grabbed her hand and tugged her back to face him. “It wasn’t
your
fault that Ned took advantage of your youth and your attraction to him to attempt a seduction, for God’s sake.”

“You don’t understand—it
was
my fault.” She ducked her head, refusing to look at him. “I should h-have known better. Boys had never looked at me in that way … but I thought h-he really liked m-me. All the while, he was just…”

Tears welled in her eyes that tore at his soul. “When I wouldn’t l-let him … you know … he told me he h-hadn’t really wanted to, anyway,” she stammered, her hand squeezing his painfully, “since I was a … a scrawny b-bitch with no tits and not an ounce of anything f-female in me.”

“Oh, sweeting,” he whispered, drawing her down onto his lap so he could hold her close. She was breaking his heart.

All their conversations came back to haunt him.

Unless you think it impossible for a woman like me to keep men like them satisfied and happy?

You wanted to expose me as some … adventuress or man in woman’s attire or … oh, I don’t know what.

You kissed me last night only to make a point, and you couldn’t even bear to kiss me properly again today—

Hell and blazes. The clues had been there all along, and he’d ignored them.
This
was the reason for her leaping to such strange conclusions about her attractiveness when he spent every waking hour resisting the urge to take her to bed. And this was why she was determined to prove her grandmother wrong about her ability to marry.

He held her close as she gulped air, clearly fighting back sobs. “He told me he only d-did it to w-win a bet. H-his friends said he could never get a m-marquess’s daughter to g-give him a k-kiss, so he bet them that he could.”

“That’s a lot of bloody nonsense,” he hissed, then regretted the sharpness of his tone when her face darkened in confusion. “I’d bet good blunt he only said those things because he was smarting over your rejection. A spoiled brat like Plumtree would hate having his pride pricked. When he found he couldn’t cow you into letting him do as he pleased, he attempted to bring you down to his level by speaking vile untruths.”

Brushing a kiss to her damp cheeks, he wished he had the bastard in front of him now so he could thrash him within an inch of his life for making her doubt herself. “It’s what arses like him do if they don’t get their way. So don’t believe a word of it. No boy in his right mind would find you unattractive.”

She gazed into his face, still looking uncertain. “I
was
rather thin then, and I’ve never had … had much in the way of a bosom.”

“Your bosom is fine,” he whispered, thinking of how luscious her breasts had tasted, how firm and beautiful they’d looked through the damp linen of her shift when he’d dared to open her gown for a peek. “And even if Plumtree meant what he said, that only shows what a fool he is. To have a goddess like you in his arms and not appreciate it…”

He kissed her, unable to resist the lush, succulent mouth so close to his. He put everything he felt into it, so he could wipe out any hurt the Neds of the world had given her.

When he broke away, realizing he was treading dangerous ground, she said hoarsely, “You weren’t always so … appreciative. When I said that men enjoyed my company, you said you found that hard to believe.”

“
What
?” he retorted with a scowl. “I never said any such thing.”

“Yes, you did, the day that I asked you to investigate my suitors. I remember it clearly.”

“There’s no way in hell I ever…” The conversation came back to him suddenly, and he shook his head. “You’re remembering only part, sweeting. You said that men enjoyed your company and
considered you easy to talk to.
It was the last part I found hard to believe.”

“Oh.” She eyed him askance. “Why?
You
never seem to have trouble talking to me. Or rather, lecturing me.”

“It’s either lecture you or stop up your mouth with kisses,” he said dryly. “Talking to you isn’t easy, because every time I’m near you I burn to carry you off to some secluded spot and do any number of wicked things with you.”

She blinked, then gazed at him with such softness that it made his chest hurt. “Then why don’t you?”

“Because you’re a marquess’s daughter and my employer’s sister.”

“What does that signify? You’re an assistant magistrate and a famous Bow Street Runner—”

“And the bastard of nobody knows whom.”

“Which merely makes you a fitting companion for a hellion with a reputation for recklessness.”

The word
companion
resonated in his brain. What did she mean by it?

Then she pressed a kiss to his jaw, eroding his resistance and his reason, and he knew precisely what she meant.

He tried to set her off of him before he lost his mind entirely, but she looped her arms about his neck and wouldn’t let go. “Show me.”

“Show you what?”

“All the wicked things you want to do with me.”

Desire bolted in a fever through his veins. “My God, Celia—”

“I won’t believe a word you’ve said if you don’t.” Her gaze grew troubled. “I don’t think you know what you want. Yesterday you gave me such lovely kisses and caresses and then at the ball you acted like you’d never met me.”

“You were with your suitors,” he said hoarsely.

“You could have danced with me. You didn’t even ask me for one dance.”

Having her on his lap was rousing him to a painful hardness. “Because I knew if I did, I would want … I would need…”

She kissed a path down his throat, turning his blood to fire. “Show me,” she whispered. “Show me now what you want. What you need.”