Fool Me Twice (29 page)

Christ, how was she so alone? How was it that she had been
grateful
to see him here? How had her own goddamned father put her into this mess?

He turned back. She visibly gathered herself, straightening, jaw squaring. She would not beg him. Even her eyes had ceased to plead. She merely watched him, resolute, ready to hear his decision.

She had not gotten her dignity from Bertram.

He held out his hand. Her lips parted. She seized his fingers and he hauled her to her feet—too easily. She was not light, but she was not as heavy as she should be.
Her bones should be made of iron, for what else was fit to support her bravado? It would shame generals. Emperors. Professional pirates.

If anyone was going to break her will, it would be he. Not Archibald bloody Bertram.

He pulled her out the door, past the silent bell, down the hall. In the guardroom, the jail keeper and one of his thugs had begun a game of cards. When they caught sight of Alastair, the keeper stood. “How now, Your Grace! What is this? That woman is a prisoner of the Crown—”

Alastair dropped her hand—ignoring how her fingers clung, how he had to shake them off as he stepped forward. It made something in his chest twist, to feel her reaching for him. It was so unlike her. “This woman was waylaid without cause. The pistol was mine, which she was carrying to be repaired.”

The man flushed. “A likely story!”

He felt a strange smile twist his lips. The jail keeper retreated a pace. “You doubt my word, sir?”

The man looked uneasily to his guard, who found a new purpose in reshuffling the deck. “I—perhaps you didn’t know, Your Grace. But this woman is involved in a very bad business, a scheme to blackmail Lord Bertram—”

“Indeed? You mean to say that Bertram, a member of our prime minister’s cabinet, is in the business of being bamboozled by other men’s domestics?”

The keeper shifted his weight. “I . . . am not privy to all the details, but the charge sheet—”

“Yes, you’ll want to keep your eye on that. The newspapers would be glad to print it. What a curious lark. Rather awkward for Salisbury, of course. Indeed, the
PM should be apprised before all of London begins to laugh at the fool he appointed. Will you inform him, or shall I?”

The jail keeper stammered a few incoherent syllables. Finally he found his retort: “This is intimidation!”

“Is it?” Alastair inspected his nails. “I had imagined that intimidation required a busted face, at the least.” He looked up. “Or was my maid abused for no cause?”

“Perhaps . . . there was some mistake. She was loitering in the very spot that the criminal had promised to wait—but perhaps that was only a coincidence.”

“I will leave it to you and the baron to decide. In the meantime . . .” Alastair lifted a brow. “Get out of my way.”

The jail keeper swallowed and inched aside, clearing their path to the street.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

In the guardroom, Marwick had faced the jail keeper like a predator encountering a new species of food. His smile should have exposed fang. But once outside the prison, he seemed to withdraw into himself. He handed her silently into the carriage and then settled in a brooding silence on the opposite bench.

Olivia kept her eyes on the window, for she barely knew how to look at him. For four days she had nursed her anger toward him. But the moment he had stepped into her cell, her hard work had been undone. He had
rescued
her. How could she recover her resentment? She had wondered before what it would be like to have him as a friend. Now she knew it meant
freedom—
quite literally. The Duke of Marwick could pull a prisoner out of Newgate as easily as some other man might bully a beggar into ceding the sidewalk.

She gazed at the bustle of afternoon traffic. How odd that sunlight still shone. She felt as though she’d lived through a century or more of terror since walking
into St. James this morning. She touched her cheek and found it hot and tender.

“Here.” He moved onto her bench, took hold of her chin, and angled it toward the window. The intimacy, the presumption, made her go still.

She could not quite forget how he had touched her in his bedroom. If he tried that again, gratitude be damned—she would punch him.

But after a moment, he released her and sat back. “Yes, quite nasty,” he said calmly. “Was it a baton?”

“Only a fist.”
Only
. She shuddered.

He remained on her bench, studying her. He was too broad shouldered, his legs too long, to share the space comfortably. His thigh pressed against hers; his knee came into her soiled skirts. She should mind it. For every inch she ceded him, he no doubt intended to take a mile.

But she rather liked the feel of his body against hers. It was not desire; she was too exhausted for that. But he was tall, strong, powerful; he would make a very good shield. A bodyguard . . . She caught her thoughts from wandering. He was no knight. But he’d rescued her from prison, so for the time being, she’d let him crowd her as much as he liked.

The carriage leaned into a turn. She glanced out and discovered the receding shape of Swan & Edgar’s. This was not the way back to his house. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll soon find out. They said you pulled my pistol on them. True?”

“Of course not.” She hadn’t known the police could be so vicious. She had been waiting for Bertram outside the bird-keeper’s cottage in St. James Park. The older
policeman had walked up to her and struck her across the face. “They didn’t say a word. They didn’t even ask my name. They’d been watching me, staring for a bit, and I’d felt . . .” She laughed unsteadily. “
Safer
knowing they were there. And then, all at once . . .”

“Bertram must have given them some incentive.”

He believed her now? She felt a great relief come over her, weakening, like a plunge into a hot bath. “Yes, I think you’re right.” What sweetness to finally have someone who understood, if not the whole of it, then enough to see the blackest implications. Finally, she was not alone in glimpsing them.

But when she turned to him, his expression ended her relief. There was no sympathy in his face. No revelation, no understanding. He watched her the way a cat might watch a mouse hole: narrowly, with dark plans.

“What am I to do with you?” he said quietly.

She swallowed. “You might thank me. Were it not for me, you’d probably still be sitting in your bedroom.”

His mouth flattened. “How you do go on about that. But your entire campaign was designed to facilitate your theft. Is that not so?”

“It did . . .
begin
for that reason.”

He gave her a faint, mocking smile. “And then? Did my chivalry win you over?”

What could she say that he would believe—or that she would wish to admit?
Against all reason, I grew to . . . care for you.

He would laugh his head off. Or worse, take it for another lie, and shove her from the coach.

“You stole from me,” he continued, his gaze level and unblinking. “Lied to me, defrauded me, pried through my possessions, which you then used to blackmail a
peer of the realm. Would you not say this puts me in a difficult position?”

A strange prickling started behind her eyes. Goodness, was she going to cry? How mortifying. She put a hand over her face, hoping he would think it was simply the pain in her cheek that troubled her. “If you hand me over to him now . . .”

He made a contemptuous noise. “If I’d wished to do that, I’d have spared my shoes the prison mold. Tell me: why did you blackmail him?”

She dropped her hand. Let him look at her. Let him see she spoke the
truth.
“I wanted him to leave me alone. He has harassed me, hunted me, for seven years now. Once he hired—he hired an entire
team
of private investigators.” They had nearly caught her, too. She’d been three years into her first position, with the banker’s widow in Brighton. That had been the first time she’d fled in the night.

“Why? What does he want of you?”

“I have no idea! His obsession has
never
made sense. If I knew, I promise, I would tell you.”

“Then tell me this.” He settled back, bracing one elbow against the back of the seat, making himself comfortable. “Who is he to you?”

She bit her lip. They were drawing near the heart of a secret she had never spoken to anyone. “You must understand, the last time his man caught up with me, he . . . tried to choke me to death.”

His face darkened. “But you escaped.”

“Yes. I was lucky; I knew nobody here. I’d just arrived in London.” She had waited four days for Bertram to come to Kent for her mother’s funeral. Finally there had been no choice but to go forward without him. All
during her mother’s long illness, she’d planned ahead: found the typing school, written for admission. Bertram had forbidden it, but she did not care. She was not her mother. Her life would not be shaped by his whims. The funeral concluded, she’d gone from the churchyard directly to the railway station.

On her arrival in London, Moore had been waiting on the platform.
His Lordship wishes me to see you safely settled.
And then, that ride to the hotel, which had transpired not to be a hotel at all . . .

“He tossed me out of the coach and left me for dead,” she said. “Seven years ago, now. That was the beginning of it.”

Marwick studied her, his vivid eyes unreadable. “And you truly have no idea why he pursues you.”

“No.”

“I told you not to lie.”

She shrank back against the window. “I don’t . . .”

“He’s your father. A small detail you’ve omitted.”

Her breath stopped.
He knew?

“The resemblance is clear,” he said. “Once I looked for it.”

God help her. She pressed her forehead to the glass and closed her eyes. “I would rather resemble the devil. Perhaps they’re one and the same.”

“Tell me. What is your real name?”

“Holladay.” She whispered it. “It was my mother’s name.”

“The mother from East Kent.”

It surprised her that he remembered. She nodded.

“Olivia Holladay, whose mother hails from East Kent.”

He sounded as though he didn’t believe her. “Yes!”

“Are you certain?” His voice was cruel. “Are there any other names you’d care to share with me?”

She tried for an equally cutting tone, one that would slice through the knot in her throat. “I hadn’t imagined you the kind that enjoys kicking a dog when it’s down. How
easy
.”

For a moment, he did not speak. And then he said, “Look at me.”

On a deep breath, she opened her eyes. A single tear spilled. He reached out, grim faced, to wipe it away with his thumb. “You will be honest with me.” His voice carried no inflection. “You’re no dog. You’re hardly beaten.”

His words, in some twisted way, were almost kind. But his touch was not. He stroked her cheek again, roughly, brutally, as though that tear had been an offense against him. “We have a common enemy,” he said. “You were right about that. And I do mean to destroy him.” He paused, his thumb digging like iron into the top of her unbruised cheek. “But please note: I have not yet decided what to do with
you
.”

*  *  *

He watched himself touch her. It seemed impossible that her skin was so soft when the mettle beneath it was steel. The disjuncture angered him. It seemed proof that deception was at her very core, bred into her, as much a part of her as her eyes or her hair.

Why did she weep now? It seemed baffling, infuriating, that she wept here, in his coach, though she hadn’t in the prison. As though
he
were the villain.

He let go of her. The coach was slowing as they pulled into Brook Street. He kept a flat here—once used by his brother, now empty. It was well suited to his purposes.

She sat quietly beside him. If she still wept, she did it soundlessly. He would not look at her to check. She had a swollen cheek; that was all. It would heal.

“So you hate me now,” she said quietly. “How convenient for you. As though everything I did for you no longer counts, because I deceived you.”

He clenched his teeth. He had cause for hate. In his old life, he would never have forgiven her for her crime; his pride alone would have forbidden it.

But it was not pride that galled him now. It was her temerity. Her idiocy
staggered
him. Who was she? A lone woman. No family to protect her, to save her when she slipped. She was profoundly alone. And yet, despite the great risk to herself, the lack of any net to catch her, she had acted. What if he were another man?
Any
other man. A man whose pride had not been shattered so violently by his late wife that he no longer cared to guard it. If he were any other man, she would still be in Newgate. How much she had dared, with so very little by way of defense.
That
was what galled him.

“Fair or not,” he said flatly, “your fate is in my hands now. For as you saw today, you are powerless. And I am not.” Compared to her, his power was limitless. Did she not see that? How had she dared to go against him?