My Pleasure (22 page)

“You do not know what circumstances have led me to your salle or what has led me to closet myself alone in this room with you at the risk of my reputation.”

“No,” he said flatly. “You are correct. Why don’t you tell me?”

He wouldn’t help her unless she explained, and she could not explain everything. She had sworn to protect Flora and Oswald’s identity, and until she was released from that vow, she could only allude to the situation.

“Be seated, Miss Nash.”

Reluctantly she retook the seat as a rap on the door heralded the arrival of Gaspard, carrying a tea service. He set the service out on the desk—there being no table—as Helena considered what she might say to win Ram’s aid. When he had left, she began without preamble, “I am being followed.”

Ram cocked his head. “I am sure you have many followers, Miss Nash.”

“No,” she said impatiently. “I am being followed, dogged, my steps hounded.”

“Most unpleasant,” he said sympathetically. “But the obsessions young men form for their inamoratas are fleeting. You have only to remove yourself from public view for a while and, fickle as men are, when you return to Society I have little doubt you will find your admirer’s fancy has fixed on a more available—or at least visible—lady.”

“I cannot remove myself from the public,” she said tersely.

“Oh.” He sounded no more than faintly intrigued. But his fingertips drummed on the end of the chair’s arm. “Why is that?”

She took a sip of the tea she’d been offered. “I am looking for someone.”

“Someone in particular?”

“Yes. A gentleman.”

“Can you not find this gentleman a week hence? A month? Is it so necessary you have him now?”

“Have him?” The expression snagged her attention, but only briefly. She was too frustrated to bother over his word choice. If Oswald’s creditors got hold of him, he might not be here in a month. She had heard grim stories of how some of the cent-per-centers dealt with those who reneged on their loans. “He very well may disappear forever.”

“And this would be unendurable?” he asked coolly.

At the thought of Flora enduring the scandal of her pregnancy alone, Helena’s teacup rattled in its saucer. Quickly, she set it down. “Yes,” she said quietly.

“Then, ma’am, tell me who hounds you, and I will stop him.”

“Stop him how? Stop him from what? Being on a public street? Lounging in a public coffeehouse? Accepting an invitation to an acquaintance’s house? Viewing an art exhibit at a gallery?”

“Ma’am?” Ram insisted.

“Lord Forrester DeMarc.”

His brows shot up in surprise. “Viscount DeMarc? The man I just fought?”

“Yes.”

His amazement was unfeigned. “I can scarce countenance it. He is far too proud to dangle after a woman in such an obvious manner as you describe. He is far too proud.” His gaze narrowed. “You are certain?”

She should have known he wouldn’t believe her. DeMarc studied with him. “He is not obvious. He is most subtle. And yes, I am certain.”

“If what you say is true, then I will escort you when you go in search of your young man.”

Ramsey see her in her costume? Realize her identity? Know her to be the woman who’d all but begged him to take her in a dark alley? Her cheeks burned at the idea. He saw the bright flush on her cheeks, and something withdrew in his expression, a subtle shift, a door closing.

He thought she didn’t want a witness to her tryst, she realized. Of course. What else was he to think? Still, it hurt that he thought so little of her. Which was stupid. He didn’t know her.

“No,” she said, lifting her chin. “You cannot. That is the problem. The gentleman I am seeking will not come to me if he sees another man in my vicinity. So you see it is imperative I keep DeMarc from following me, just as it is imperative that I go alone.”

“Dear God, woman,” he said with a trace of anger, “no man is worth imperiling yourself. If you really fear DeMarc so much, you would be a fool to risk yourself for an assignation.”

“I do not know what I fear!” Helena exclaimed, exasperated. Would DeMarc hurt her? She did not know. She only knew that she was afraid, afraid to walk alone down a busy street in broad daylight because he would be walking fifty feet behind; afraid to look out a window because he would be there, standing at a street curb or reading a newspaper on a bench; afraid to turn a corner because he might be waiting for her.

“DeMarc believes that I have purposefully beguiled him,” she continued, her hand rising in an unconscious, imploring bid for understanding. “I think he is unbalanced. He wants me to know that he follows me, spies on me, watches my every move.”

“And you have not purposefully beguiled him? Teased him into this state?”

The cool question shocked her more than anything else he could have said.

“No,” she whispered. “No. I am not…” But then honesty jolted her with sensually explicit memories, and she could not continue her mechanical denial. Her cheeks grew chafed with hot humiliation. That is exactly the woman she’d been a week ago.

She struggled on, tongue-tied with misery. “He has even gained access to my bedchamber. He spread them on my coverlet as a sort of warning that there is no place sacrosanct. No place where I am invulnerable.”

“Spread what across your coverlet? Left what?”

“Roses,” she said dully. “All those roses.”

“Roses?”

Something in Ram’s voice caused Helena to look up from the crumpled kerchief she’d twisted into a ball in her lap. “Yes. I find them everywhere. Like the one that—” She stopped herself before she mentioned the boy at Vauxhall who had pressed a rose into her hand on the night they’d met. Anxiety was making her careless.

Ram’s brow furrowed. “But DeMarc is extremely allergic to all manner of flowers. We held a bout in a garden once, and DeMarc attended. He reacted most violently, ultimately having to withdraw from the match.”

“You choose not to believe me.” Helena shook her head. “I do not care. What I care about is whether you intend to honor your pledge to serve me at my request. I am making that request now.”

Ram stood up and she followed suit, determined not to let him cow her with his skepticism. He had no reason to trust her. He did not know her. Perhaps she was overestimating her danger, but she did not want to search for Oswald when she was afraid to leave the house. Added to which, she needed to slip out from under the viscount’s constant observation or else, even if she did find Oswald, he would only run away upon seeing DeMarc. And then, if DeMarc confronted her later…when she was alone…She drew a shaky breath.

“You make little sense, Miss Nash. You refuse to let me accompany you, and yet you insist you are in danger.”

“I fear I am in danger. I am not so dull-witted nor so certain of my situation that I don’t realize that what I perceive to be a danger may be in fact no more than an annoyance. You doubt DeMarc’s…interest yourself. But I dislike fearing anything, Mr. Munro. It is not a pleasant way to live. Perhaps you have never been afraid?”

It was an unworthy taunt—particularly knowing his history and that he’d endured nearly two years in a dungeon—but from the slight tensing of his shoulders she saw that it had hit its mark.

“I have come to you seeking the means to rid myself of my fear, precisely because I myself am uncertain of whether DeMarc poses a real or an imagined danger,” she said with as much dignity as she could find.

“I would think you would be appreciative of my refusal to give in to hysteria and insist you guard my every step for as long as I desire. I would think you would see this as a relatively simple and expedient way to repay a debt of some standing, one you maintained you owed, not one I insisted upon.”

She looked him straight in the eye. “All I want, Mr. Munro, is some knowledge of how to protect myself so that I might have the confidence necessary to go about freely. Surely you can understand that?”

He considered her for a long moment. “A well-thought-out argument, Miss Nash,” he finally said. “Are you always so lucid?”

An image of his arms holding her against a damp brick wall as she pulled his head down to meet her rising lips bloomed in her mind’s eye. “No.” Her gaze dropped. “I fear I am not.”

He smiled, but his gaze was still assessing. “All right, Miss Nash. I will teach you. Come to me on those days DeMarc prepares for the tournament, and Gaspard will bring you up here by the servants’ staircase.”

He bent down suddenly and swept something up from the floor. Then he straightened and reached out, securing her hand. His touch electrified her. His fingers were lean and long, as gracefully wrought as one of his beautiful, deadly swords, and just as strong. He prised her hand open and placed the little silk rose in the center of her palm, then very carefully, with almost ritual gentleness, folded her fingers back atop it. “We shall count your lessons a percentage of my debt. Keep this until it is paid in full.”

“Thank you,” she said, aware that fear marched alongside her gratitude. Gratitude that he’d agreed, fear that he would find her out.

Fool. From the vantage of his window, Ramsey watched Helena wait while the driver withdrew the stair block from within the carriage. When he’d received the note he’d thought—God help him—he’d thought she’d come in reply to his hushed, irreverent plea to become his lover. For those few, eviscerating moments his heart had hammered in amazement and gratitude.

Then he’d heard her light York-accented voice, so unlike the husky, cool whispers in which she’d spoken before, and he’d known: She’d come to him as a stranger.

He should have known better.

As he watched her from above, she looked up over her shoulder as if she had felt his gaze, but the darkness of the room concealed him. Even on this dank midafternoon, her blonde hair glistened like new-pulled taffy, and her skin shimmered like mist-cloaked alabaster. He had forgotten how beautiful she was. But then, it wasn’t her beauty that had attracted him. Beauty was not always a boon.

But she was beautiful, like a gorgeous statue wrought in the finest marble, smooth and cool and quiescent, unaffected by the gawking crowds, aloof, immutable, her isolation a mystery and a challenge.

Except he knew it to be a lie. He knew her refined, unassailable façade masked a passionate nature. He almost wished he didn’t. Almost. He raked a hand through his hair as she disappeared into the carriage and drove away.

Whatever else he believed after their conversation, he no longer believed Helena Nash searched for a lover gone missing. Not only because a woman like Helena Nash did not take lovers, but because there had been nothing about her in the least ardent or eager as she spoke of the man she wanted to find.

There had been desperation, yes. Even anger, but not affection. And most certainly not passion. He knew the taste, the cadence, the sound of her passion. Its memory had damned him to too many sleepless nights.

So who was she looking for, and why? Unconsciously his hand lifted to the gold rose pinning his cravat. From her manner, he would almost think that she owed moneylenders, except that he had never heard of anyone having to search for a moneylender whom they wished to repay. Then who?

And what was this of roses?

Ram stood at the doorway to St. Bride’s walled garden. His neck was blistered from the sun, and his fingers were cracked and embedded with dirt. His thighs ached from bending down all day, and his shirt clung to his back, sweat-stained.

But the soft late-afternoon air whispered balm-like across his face, and the perfect clarity of the mountain sunlight etched each rose vibrantly against the deep green banks of foliage that carried them. A few thrushes trilled from deep in their thorny bowers, and the trickle of water bubbling from the well answered their music with its own. Objectively, Ram did not think anything in the world could match this place for beauty.

“Do you love them or hate them?” a voice asked seriously.

Ram looked around. Surprisingly it was Brother Martin, the abbey’s crabbed and crabby herbalist who stood beside him, his thoughtful gaze fixed on the blazing and brilliant-hued beds of roses he so often, and so publicly, denigrated as nature’s useless fribbles. Brother Martin also very publicly had no use for St. Bride’s orphans, unless he could make use of them to weed his own extensive herb garden, so that he stood here now, speaking to Ram for the first time as a man, if not an equal, gave Ram pause and made him consider his answer.

“A little of both, I suppose,” he finally said.

Brother Martin nodded. “That’s the way of things out there in the world. Hate and love, longing and aversion, two sides of the same coin, and why that should be is a mystery, and beauty for beauty’s sake one of God’s greatest conundrums.”

“How is that?”

Brother Martin glanced at him sideways. “Well, young Munro, is beauty without merit a waste…or a gift?”

“Why do you dislike the rose garden so much?” Ram asked suddenly.

“I don’t,” Brother Martin said, frowning as he turned away, their momentary equality apparently ending, “I like it too well.”

“Mr. Munro?” Gaspard stood in the doorway.

With a start, Ram turned from the window. “Ah, Gaspard. Good. I need you to send a note.” He could not follow Helena himself. There was something between them. She could feel his gaze, his presence, too easily. But he could send someone else. Someone who would be watching the viscount DeMarc as well. And closely. That left out Bill Sorry.

“Yes, sir. At once.” Gaspard came into the room, holding out a sealed envelope. “This came for you a short while ago. I thought it best not to interrupt you and the young lady.”

“You aren’t implying anything improper went on in this room, are you, Gaspard?” Ram asked in the casual tones that those who knew him well found it best not to ignore.

“No, sir,” Gaspard said, repressing a flicker of surprise. “Not in the least. I did not presume a need for discretion as much as prudence. The young lady looked most resolved.”

At this Ram smiled. “Aye. She is that. But you are mistaken, Gaspard. A need for discretion in regards to her is most important. Not a word of her visit or any subsequent visits are ever to leave here. Do we understand one another, Gaspard?”