Scandal (13 page)

“You’ve done nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “Indeed, what you have agreed to do will better your station.” But even he knew that didn’t sound right and so he added, “You are amazing, Anna. Lovely and intelligent and witty and courageous. If you’d have been born into a different family, you’d have likely netted yourself a besotted fool who possessed a title and a fortune and would love you until the day he died.”

Someone like me.

But he shooed the voice away, for if he and Anna had moved in the same circles he’d have stayed away, knowing that a woman such as herself wouldn’t have cared a whit about his title. She’d have met him and quizzed him and realized he’d the intelligence of an otter. Anna Brooks needed a man who was her match. That man was not him.

He rolled off of her then.

“What is it?” she asked, looking like a mermaid, her golden hair falling over her breasts as she rose with a white sheet around her.

“I am…” What? What did he feel? Inferior? Beneath her? “Ashamed,” he found himself saying.

“
Ashamed?
”

He nodded his head before answering, trying to gather his thoughts as they floated through his mind. “I took advantage of you,” he said at last. “I saw the desperation in your eyes and took advantage of your plight.”

She stared him. “What do you mean?”

“’Tis why I am here, Anna, here in St. Giles—because of the way I’ve spent my life, engaged in one scandal after another. I thought I had learned something during the week I have been here, and yet the moment I am faced with a situation where I could use my wealth to gain something I want—you, Anna—I accept.” He looked out over the rooftop. Looked out over the world, her world, the black smoke that rose from numerous flues noticeable even in the darkened sky. “I should have told you no. Should have insisted you continue your quest to win your competition, not sell yourself to me.”

“Rein, if we are being honest, I wanted you to have me.”

And that made it all the worse, for he sensed her growing regard for him, sensed that they would end up as far more than mere lovers.

Friends.

He stood.

“Where are you going?” she asked, her amber eyes puzzled as she sat there, the sight of the breasts he longed to touch and suckle causing him to turn away. God’s teeth, what was he doing?

Acting like a bloody fool,
said the old Rein, the one who took his pleasure wherever he wanted. Who commanded the world to do his bidding. Who had never, not once, considered the welfare of another before his own. Who, even now, urged him to turn around and go back to her.

But the new Rein, the one he suspected his uncle had hoped to find, straightened after he’d hurriedly dressed, turned to her and said, “I must think.”

“Think?” she asked with a wide-eyed look, her eyes, Rein noted, still moist from her tears.

It made him stiffen his resolve. “Yes, Anna, think—as difficult as that can be for me at times. Good evening,” he said with a bow, ludicrous, really, when one considered what had just occurred between them and the state he was still in. There would be nothing good about this evening, he would wager. He turned on his heel to leave.

“Rein—”

But he ignored her because, God help him, if he turned toward her again, he wasn’t sure he would leave.

It was a long night complicated by the fact that he knew Anna slept above. And as Rein lie in his chair, thoughts of being with her at the forefront of his mind, he also relived his life, going over his childhood and youth, trying to discover when he’d become the way he was. Certainly there were things in his past that had helped to shape him, but when had this hedonistic pursuit of pleasure become the basis of his life?

In the end he supposed it didn’t matter. He was what he was, but he would not drag Anna down because of it. He was many things but not that depraved. At least he hadn’t supposed he was until that moment.

It was a sleepless night, which was why when the note came he heard it pass under the door with a swish of sound that immediately caught his attention. The fire he had stoked all night still glowed brightly. When he sat up on the pathetic little mat he slept on he could see the room perfectly, Anna’s grandfather’s odd inventions and pieces of furniture black shapes in the room. The door lay on the opposite wall, a rectangular shape that he immediately went to, spying the folded note visible beneath its edge, his blood thrust into instant speed as he stared down at it.

His name could clearly be seen on the outside. His
real
name.

Lord, what if Anna had seen it first? He bent and snatched it up, wondering what new game this was. Could it be from the Runner? Or was this a new taunt?

My Lord Duke—

This is your final warning. Leave St. Giles today or the next unfortunate event will happen to your lady friend.

The note whitened before Rein’s eyes, the disbelief the words roused within him making him read the thing over again. Then another time.

Leave or the next unfortunate event will happen to your lady friend.

Good God, had whoever wanted him to fail the challenge been behind Anna’s ship setting sail?

Lady friend.

Someone was threatening Anna.

Without thought, Rein crumpled the note and threw it into the grate. His hands shook as he considered the words.

Someone had threatened Anna.

Fury made him stiffen, made him turn toward the door.

Threaten her? Threaten one of the most brave and noble creatures of his acquaintance? Well, he would just see about that.

Mr. Stills was none too pleased to see Rein burst from Anna’s building, cross the already busy street with a few backward and then forward steps (to avoid carriages and, in one instance, a loose pig) and demand his assistance.

“What the blazes are you doing out here?” Stills asked.

“I must speak with you.”

“About what?”

“I received another note this morn.”

Mr. Stills straightened. “When this morn?”

“Just now.”

“Bloody ’ell. I just arrived.”

“They threatened Anna.”

For a moment they both lapsed into silence as the coal porter walked by singing his rhyme.

“Where’s the note?” the runner asked.

“I burned it.”

The man looked like he’d announced Rein had set his hair on fire. “You
what
?”

“I wasn’t thinking,” Rein admitted, feeling rather foolish suddenly.

“Did you keep the first one?” the Runner asked.

Rein shook his head. Bloody hell. Should have thought of that, too. How he hated being bungle-brained!

“Next time you get one, don’t throw it out. The writin’. The way of speech. A person can tell a lot about someone by the way they write and phrase things.”

Yes, Rein supposed one could. Damn it all to hell. It made him all the more angry. “They threatened Anna,” he said again.

“I’ll talk to your uncle’s man about doublin’ up on a watch. Obviously, someone means to frighten you into giving up in the hopes that they will eventually come into your title.”

Rein straightened. “Well, they shan’t. I will not allow a hair on Anna’s head to be harmed.”

And the feeling that overcame him was not unlike when he’d finally gotten tired of being beaten as a youth and finally fought back.

“The blood of a warrior runs through my veins,” Rein answered. “I may have forgotten that for a bit, gotten soft, as my uncle ofttimes pointed out, but I will not allow anyone to harm a woman in my protection. This is war. A war someone will lose.”

“What do you intend to do about it?”

“As to that, I have an idea.”

Mr. Stills rolled his eyes. “God help us.”

Molly wasn’t certain what to expect of Anna when she saw her that same morning, but it sure as certain wasn’t the hangdog face.

“Lord, Anna, you’re as pale as the corpse what fell outta that casket on Oxford Street.”

“Sleepless night,” Anna said by way of greeting.

“Oh?” Molly asked with a suggestive leer, wondering if she and his arrogance might have gone at it bread-and-butter style.

“It’s not what you think,” Anna said, the gray cloak making the half-moon shadows beneath her eyes more pronounced. She gave a shake of her head, then turned to walk down the alley.

“Is it having to bow out of the competition?”

She shook her head.

Molly stopped her before she’d taken three steps, the two of them ducking out of the way of people passing by.

“It’s that man, isn’t it? Got your corset in a twist, ain’t he?”

“
Isn’t
it, Molly. One says
isn’t.
”

“Ach, now you’re startin’ to talk like the bloke.”

She thought her friend might turn away from her then, but Anna shocked her instead when tears entered her eyes.

Molly had never, not once, seen her friend cry—not since she was sixteen and she’d come back from that godforsaken little town where she’d grown up, brokenhearted and nearly destroyed over something that had happened there.

“Anna, there are tears in your eyes,” she felt the need to point out.

“Of course there’s tears in my eyes, you great booby. I learned yesterday that the ship that was supposed to fly my sails has left port, and then when I offer myself up to a man in a fit of desperation, he doesn’t want me.”

Molly felt her mouth drop open, all the more so when Anna turned away—not to fetch her barrow down the long, dark alley, but instead to stand there, her shoulders stooping as she lifted a hand to wipe tears away.

“Annacries, Annacries, look at little Anna cry.”

It was a rhyme Molly had coined years ago when they’d first met near the water pump, Anna sitting nearby and all but spewing more water than the bloody well.

“Anna, don’t cry,” Molly said softly, gently. The thing of it was, it was one thing to have known a sad and frightened little girl who cried—quite another to see the courageous young woman she’d become having a fit of the vapors. It frightened Molly half to death. What was the world coming to if the one person Molly was certain would escape the Giles was crying?

“Anna love, you can’t be cryin’ over that silly cull of a man?” she asked, because she truly couldn’t believe Anna, of all people, would do so. “What do you mean, he doesn’t want you?”

Anna whirled to face her. “He doesn’t want me, Molls. He left me last eve on the rooftop after he’d, he’d—”

“Diddled you?”

Anna shook her head. “No. Not precisely.”

“What do you mean, not precisely?”

“We had agreed,” and Anna, confident Anna, suddenly looked uncertain. “That is to say, I had agreed to be his”—more uncertainty—“paramour, only when it came time for us to join—”

“His
what
?” Molly cried. “Lord, Anna, are you saying you agreed to become his mistress?”

“I did.”

Molly slapped her forehead. “And I thought you bobbish.” She shook her head. “I said to lie with the man, not agree to become his mistrees.”

“I
am
bright, Molly. ’Tis why I agreed to become his, his…”

“Whore,” Molly finished for her.

Anna winced. “His mistress,” she said in a low voice. “He is wealthy.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I know it.” She looked pensive for a moment. “I think he might even be nobly born.”

“Think?”

“He has a mark where he wore a ring, it might have been a signet ring.”

“You think he might be nobly bred? Ach, Anna, ain’t you always the one telling me I have me head in the clouds?”

“I asked him about it. He said it was a family heirloom that he removed before coming to St. Giles.”

“But you think that’s a clanker?”

“It might be. He speaks so eloquently. Looks so arrogant. But more than that. ’Tis the way he acts, too. The way he was dressed when I first saw him.” But then her friend shook her head; her cloak fell farther back as she did so. “But it matters not, for he doesn’t belong to this world whatever his name or title, and he doesn’t want me.”

“Oh, he wants you, all right,” Molly said. “No man doesn’t want to bed a woman. That, Annacries, is a certainty like the rising of the sun.”

“Not this man.”

“Did he say why?”

Anna nodded. “He said to take advantage of my situation was wrong.”

Which made Molly feel as if she stood upon a rotted board, one that broke beneath her feet and caused her to plunge down a hole.

“He said what?”

“That he refused to take advantage of me.”

Lord above. Maybe the bloke
was
a nobleman, for only a nobleman would be so full of himself as to think that.

“And this was before or after he touched you?”

“After, of course.”

Which confused Molly all the more. In her experience, a man didn’t stop diddling a woman until he’d been diddled himself.

“Mayhap you should tell me exactly what you
do
know.”

But what her friend knew was precious little indeed, which was why Molly asked Anna to watch her basket so she could dash off. Anna had looked at her oddly, but truth be told, her friend was not herself this day—not surprising, given all that had happened.

“Who is he?” she asked Mr. Stills after coming up on him from behind.

The man jumped what must have been a foot off the ground, nearly bouncing off the narrow walls of the alley like a ball tossed between them, his foot kicking over a nearby crate of refuse.

“Lord, woman, don’t ever sneak up on me like that.”

“Who is he?” she asked Mr. Stills again, having guessed that their meeting on the stairs might not have been a coincidence.

“Who is who?” he asked.

“Don’t you be playing no games with me, Freddie. You’re involved with Mr. Hemplewilt’s wager in some way, ain’t… aren’t you?”

“How did you sneak up on me?” he asked, peering around and then back down the alley. “And how the blazes did you know I was here?”

Molly snorted. “At least five people knew of a strange man who’s been on watch in this alley since the day Mr. Hemplewilt arrived, a Runner, they’re all saying.”

His brows rose and Molly felt self-satisfied. “You were asking after Mr. Hemplewilt that first day, not whatever name it is you gave me. You wanted to know if he was staying with Anna, didn’t you?”