Chapter 14

It has been days since we've spoken. My love believes he's offended me, and I'm content to let him to that opinion.

~ The Duchess of A

G ood God, he didn't know which he wanted more: to throttle the lady or kiss her.

The goddamned chit really didn't have a bloody idea the fucking danger awaiting a woman of her beauty, connections, and spirit.

Time and time again, she'd rush off, without a care for her damned well-being. The minute he'd caught her making her escape, he'd been on her, but, with them being separated by a crush of costumed guests and her being fleet of foot, he'd lost her.

"I asked you a question," he bit out.

If he were being honest with himself, the unbridled anger raging through Cadogan was more with himself than her. But he wasn't being straight with her. He wouldn't be— couldn't be —and give her the idea that he was soft and would tolerate her continuing to put herself in harm's way.

"I heard you," she said, the husky quality of her lyrical voice doing maddening things to his thoughts, driving his lust and self-annoyance to impossible heights.

"Look at me when I talk to you," he snapped.

He braced for her customary defiance, instead she quietly and calmly heeded his command.

No doubt so that he'd go easier on her.

To hell with that manipulation.

"Are you determined to get yourself killed or raped or—"

The blistering tirade he'd prepared on his way to her froze on his lips as he caught sight of her. At some point, the elaborate mask she wore had come free and the blue-green feathered silk turban had slipped loose so that the pale glow of the full moon cast a light upon Raina's face.

Her cheeks, usually bright with color, were an ashen hue. Tears gleamed in her eyes.

Rage briefly blinded him. Rage that had nothing to do with this woman and everything to do with the work he'd been hired to do. Even as he reassured himself of that, a growl he couldn't control shook his chest and taunted him with the flimsy lie he'd tried to make himself believe.

"Who?" He didn't bother to conceal the lethality within his whispered query. "Who hurt you? I want his name."

He'd kill the bastard. First, he'd cut his vocal cords out while he slept and forever silence him so he couldn't cry out for help as Severin tortured him to death slowly, and painfully.

Raina hugged herself in a sad, little, lonely embrace. "No one h-hurt me." The tremble there made a liar out of a terrible liar. "Not really."

That visible evidence of her melancholy from something someone had done and said had an unpleasant effect on his stomach muscles.

In this instance, ‘not really' was the same as: Someone hurt me.

Filled with a primal, unrelenting rage, he opened his mouth to, this time, demand the name of her offender—but managed to retrain himself.

As much as he wanted to snarl and roar like an angry animal, doing so would only cause Raina to further retreat within herself.

"Do you want to talk about it?" he asked, infusing a softness into his query.

As he'd intended with his tone, his question penetrated whatever tumult she remained locked within.

She turned her head. The wistful expression she wore hit him square in the gut. "And here I thought I wasn't to come to you as a friend or confidante."

A bemused smile teased her cherry-red, bow-shaped, lips.

Cadogan let his gaze linger on her mouth a moment. Had Wellington had her on staff, he could have avoided the Battle of Waterloo altogether.

"Or, for that matter, I wasn't to seek you out over—how did you say it?" she asked softly. "Whatever it is I got in my silly little head about our time together."

"That's true," he granted. "You're right."

She gave him a sad, little, look.

"But technically, you didn't really seek me out as much as I've come to you ." He flashed a wry half-grin.

Raina's lovely arched eyebrows flared slightly, and she moved her stunned gaze over his face. "Mr. Cadogan, are you… making a jest ?"

"I'll deny it to my grave," he said with false solemnity.

Raina laughed, a wholesome, merry, snorting laugh that made her, a woman so exquisite in her beauty as to be a piece of art, real . Even had she not possessed a grandeur to rival Helen of Troy, Raina's laugh alone had the power to not only launch a thousand ships, but to breathe a lightness into his black, jaded soul, as well.

His response to her gaiety along with her artlessness left him uncomfortably lopsided and annoyed with himself about his own weakness.

"What man hurt you?"

Raina's mirth faded as quick as it had begun.

Her expression grew shuttered.

"He is no one," she said, with an air of finality that indicated, she didn't intend to speak any further on the ‘matter'.

Cadogan silently cursed himself to hell, that underworld that would one day be his final resting place.

He is no one… which meant, there was a ‘he' that she wouldn't speak to Cadogan about.

His impatience had cost him.

Raina's features grew serious once more, and he knew the moment she'd stopped seeing Cadogan or thinking about him.

He frowned.

An unpleasant question whispered forward in his mind.

He thought of the noticeable efforts she'd made to avoid him these past two days. Her silence when they did see one another—her looking through him like he was invisible, which Cadogan should prefer, but which instead, rankled.

Her running away from him at this goddamned masquerade and giving him chase.

He drew back.

Was he the one who was responsible for her bleak, unadulterated misery?

Of course, that made the most sense.

I don't care. I don't care. I don't care.

That phrase rolled around as an unending litany in his head. For maybe, if he continued to silently repeat those words, he'd eventually come to believe them.

Fuck.

"Is this because of what happened between us at Craven's?" he asked bluntly.

Raina gasped. "My God," she breathed. "You are hateful."

Absolutely he was, but it wasn't because of the honest question he'd just put to her.

"Well, the truth remains, as disgusted as you are by me, I am a thousandfold so with myself," she hissed, with a bitterness he'd not believed her capable of, until now. "Panting for you. Begging ."

With every husky whispered reminder she gave of their exchange, his previously flaccid cock swelled to new and painful heights.

"Coming," he supplied gruffly. "You came." And loudly. She'd omitted that best and most important part.

Color blazed across Raina's high, slender cheekbones.

"Very well, Severin." Hurt filled her expressive eyes. "You want me to say it—you were right all along. I'm a whore, just like…" Her voice broke and she spun away from him.

He reeled. A whore? That was what she thought?

Maybe with the words you'd spoken after pleasuring her; because you gave her every reason to believe that.

His frown deepened.

No. Hers were merely the emotional musings of an untried lady.

That knowledge didn't stop him from stepping out of the moment subjectively and silently going over every exchange he'd catalogued away.

He'd mocked her as a bored Princess, with a hungering for the forbidden. He'd never found her less because of her wants—those desires were normal cravings. They were sexual urges that were as natural to a man and a woman as breathing.

A debutante, just out in Society, however, wouldn't view it in that light. She'd see herself as immoral and debased.

With the regal grace of a queen, Raina started a march across the room and made a graceful beeline for the door.

Still stunned, Cadogan stared at her retreating figure.

That is truly what she believed he thought? She, a pixie-like beauty who wore her innocence in her eyes for all the world to see, should espouse her wickedness.

For the first time in the course of Cadogan's existence, he found himself wrong about something. He was capable of real , unchecked amusement, after all .

A rusty-sounding rumble shook his frame.

Raina whipped about so quickly her turban toppled, and her pinned hair tumbled loose and cascaded in a waterfall of whitish-blonde tresses that danced and swayed about her trim waist.

He dimly noted her marching back to him.

The back-and-forth wave of her hips as she walked, held him spellbound. God, she was magnificent. She could have coaxed the secrets out of the world's greatest informants with nothing more than a look, the sway of her hips, and smile.

Raina stopped several paces from him.

"I hate you," she seethed.

The tremble to her full, lower lip muddied the lady's clear attempts at rage and did more uncomfortable things to an area of Cadogan's chest—which felt dangerously close to his heart.

"You, who by your own admission a liar and killer, should pass judgment on me?"

"No one passes judgment on you, Raina," he said, calmly, attempting to de-escalate her rapidly spiraling response. "Most certainly not me."

She laughed. This cynical explosion of false mirth was unlike any other he'd heard spill from her lips. It contained none of the clear, bell-like, peal of real amusement.

She winged an eyebrow up. " You haven't judged me?"

Cadogan paused. Had he?

Then, the fight left Raina. The spirited lady sank into the folds of the leather button sofa near her and waved her hand as in dismissal.

"You're not really like them," she said tiredly. "In the way you make no attempt to hide your disgust and ill opinion of me, you are at least honest."

He frowned. "Not like who ?"

She gave a slight shake of her head, as if trying to clear her thoughts. "It doesn't matter…"

He didn't need a lifetime of service in the Home Office to recognize her flimsy lie. But this vulnerable, hurting side of her was something he didn't know what the hell to do with.

Why, why should he suddenly feel anything about her suffering when he'd not been so moved by a single person in the course of his career?

No, in the course of his life .

Suddenly, an exit seemed easier, and he briefly eyed the doorway out. No need to stay. Plenty of reason to go, and wait for her in the hall, until she collected herself and was ready to return to the festivities.

Then he heard it…the faintest little sniffle indicating the lady cried.

Fuck.

Bloody fuck.

Cadogan, wishing just once he could choose the coward's way out, but knowing it wasn't in his blood, made his way slowly, and more, reluctantly , over to Raina.

Without seeking permission, he availed himself to the place beside her; close enough to confer support, but far enough to not startle her into fleeing.

He reached into his front pocket, withdrew his handkerchief, and then, without so much as looking at Raina, he silently offered her the scrap.

There was a slight hesitation before she finally plucked the article from his fingers.

Don't look at her. For some reason, her tears were like Medusa's serpent-tendrils to Cadogan, but instead of helping him maintain his stony veneer, they made him something far worse. Her tears, nay, this woman , made him— human .

They sat a long while in silence; neither one of them speaking. Nor was this quiet the deliberate kind he often employed.

Oddly, he knew precisely what to say to ferret out the most abominable secrets of even the most adroit emissary but sat tongue-tied next to a virgin who'd just had her Come Out.

From the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of white fabric as Raina wiped at her cheeks.

Bloody hell.

He'd looked.

Why had he looked?

Sweat slicked his palms.

Never again. When all was said and done with this goddamned assignment, he wouldn't let himself within two hundred meters of the bloody chit. She was more dangerous than Boney's best spies and more tempting than the decadent beauties who'd carried secrets he'd needed.

How did a woman such as this glorious goddess come to believe herself a victim of society's nastiness?

Bloody, bloody hell.

Cadogan grunted. "Raina, you are the Diamond, of the first water. Your favor is sought by all."

"My brother's favor," she said bitterly.

"Yes, your brother," he conceded. " And you. There are certainly those desperate, weak, fellows who seek to curry the duke's favor or aspire to link their family to yours. But you are written of favorably in even the most rubbish newspaper."

Raina drew back. " That's how you know of me," she said, her discovery emerging as a soft exclamation. She stared at Cadogan with those wide, unblinking, doe-eyes of hers. "You read about me before you accepted the duke's assignment."

"Of course, I did," he said gently, and strangely the tone he adopted with her in this moment wasn't the practiced one he used to slip past the nemesis of his quarries. "In every word I've read, there wasn't a single bad or even faintly disapproving note recorded."

The big blue-green pools of her eyes radiated joy and Raina clasped her hands close to her chest. "Not a single one?" she whispered.

Good. He'd slowly managed to erase that woeful look of before.

Cadogan nodded. "Not a single one. You are the toast of the ton ." He left out the obvious part, which though true, would only insult the lady—she was mad to believe she was anything less than respected and revered.

He resumed his efforts to break through to her. "Praises are sung to your beauty, Raina."

And he'd pushed too hard.

She let out a frustrated sound. "I don't care if people find me beautiful."

If? There was no ‘if'. Not a single soul would or could gaze upon Raina Goodheart and see anything other than an unparalleled, ethereal beauty.

Cadogan found his footing. "The point being, Raina, are there those who are jealous of you? I'm certain of it. But you are descended from one of the oldest, most respected titles in the kingdom. People clamor for your family's approval, not the other way around." As she somehow thought it was. "There is not some grand number of people speaking ill of you behind your back."

Finally, he looked at her.

She stared at him with a peculiar expression; he resisted the urge to squirm.

Then, she bowed her head. "Thank you, Severin," she said softly. "Thank you for opening my eyes to see all this."

And for the first time since he'd entered this hellish office, a wave of relief washed over him.

Thank God.

Some of the tension eased from him. He'd done his job. He'd secured his quarry and gotten her to a place where he could now be free of her.

"Are you ready to return to the ball?"

Her nod came so enthusiastically, and he should feel a great swell of relief at being done with her—for now. Why then, did he feel something damned close to regret at her flitting among those drunken lords, while Cadogan stood in the shadows and watched her all the while?

He quickly stood.

"Here," he said gruffly, and set to work tucking her blonde tresses back into place.

All the while he fixed her hair, removing pins, and rearranging pieces into their previous artful arrangement, Raina remained regally still.

Cadogan next saw to her shimmery blue and green feathered turban until finally all her glorious blonde locks were concealed.

He paused to assess his finished work.

What a shame to hide all that beauty.

Puzzling her brow, Raina touched a palm to the side of her head. "Is there something wrong?"

There was everything right about the lady. That was the problem. It was… she was…proving an unwelcome, and unexpected distraction .

"The mask," he said. "I was thinking what was missing. It's your mask."

Fortunately believing that prevarication on his part, Raina fished the article in question out of her organza pocket and held it up, so it danced in the air between them.

Wordlessly, Cadogan took the feathered disguise from Raina's bare fingers that were exposed by her open-cut black leather gloves.

Moving behind the lady, he lowered the mask over her face, so that his arms framed her, and affixed the disguise.

When he'd finished, he took a safe step back away from her, putting some healthy space between him and the nymph.

"There," he said, flatly, all business once more.

Cadogan stretched out an arm and motioned to the exit.

Raina eyed him a moment, and then took that silent cue and headed toward the front of the room. When she reached for the panel, Cadogan waved her aside and took her place at the entrance.

Once she was off to the side and safe from view, he ducked his head outside the door, and eyed the dimly lit hallway, several times. He waited a moment more.

Empty.

Glancing over at her, Cadogan jerked his chin.

Raina exited before him. She'd gone several steps when she paused to look back at him.

There was a question in her eyes.

He nudged his jaw. "Go," he mouthed.

They couldn't be seen together, and with Cadogan, undisguised, here at Argyll's behest as a visible reminder that none were to tamper with his sister, certainly not alone.

This time, Raina didn't cast another glance his way. She resumed her stately march, and he stared after her retreating figure, until she reached the end of the hall, and took a left toward the ballroom.