Chapter Fifteen

Two days later...

"A penny for your thoughts, Kirke," Delacorte said, as he blew a stream of smoke skyward.

He stared across at Delacorte in the smoking room. "Have you any pennies left or are they all in the Epithet Jar?"

Mr. Delacorte's week had been somewhat rough on account of losing to Kirke in chess more often than he was accustomed. Tonight he'd let fly with a quietly heartfelt "SHITE!" which had made all the ladies jerk in surprise, and Dot had accidentally stuck herself with the needle with which she was embroidering.

Granted, she accidentally stuck herself with a needle almost nightly, epithets or no epithets, and had once sewn her own sleeve to her embroidery.

But Delacorte had been mortified and contrite, and he had lost another penny.

"You're glaring at the wall opposite. I'm just grateful I'm not standing in front of you, or I expect my waistcoat would show scorch holes."

"This is just my usual face," Kirke said idly.

Hardy and Bolt, who had taken up the corners of the room with their cheroots, laughed.

Kirke was, in fact, idly, caustically imagining a special room for every vice. A compartment in which a man could privately succumb to his basest impulses, then exit with impunity back into the civilized world.

Like the inside of a dark carriage.

This smoking room was another genius design from the proprietresses. It was decorated in shades of brown and oxblood and cream. The chairs were deep and worn and comfortable, and the little table arranged before the settee was battered, perfect for supporting one's booted feet. The carpet and curtains were as thick and dark as the walls of a cave. It was the perfect room for men to regress to their primitive impulses, cursing, smoking, belching, and using bad grammar and the like. It suggested that women understood that men were little more than animals parading around in Weston-cut suits and Hoby boots, and if this could not ever be fully remedied then setting aside a room for them to misbehave was a compromise, the way one would set aside a box of wood shavings for a pet cat to defecate in.

He realized he had no one in which to confide his torment.

The truth was, he felt as though some scaffolding surrounding him had collapsed. He could not locate the ends of his composure to regather it. He had entirely been faking it for two days. He'd been undone by a kiss and he was appalled at himself.

He'd constructed the last nearly twenty years of his life in order to avoid ever again feeling this appalled at himself.

But every glancing thought of Keating made his muscles tense, as if preparing to pin her to a mattress. He'd meant to look out for her welfare. Instead he'd taken advantage of an innocent girl.

Yet... had he? It had not been calculated or strategic. It seemed to him that it could not have been helped.

This was what disturbed him the most.

He would be leaving London for two days to tour a textile factory for sale in Sussex. It was for the best. He knew she would be kept busy, now that her season was actually a season.

Unlike many men, he appreciated that women were often possessed of lusty natures and singular sexual preferences and he believed they were well entitled to them. He would never condemn Keating—or any woman—for seizing an opportunity for exploration.

Perhaps having had her new experience with a controversial baron, she could turn her attentions to the young heir to an earl. Which would be the best possible outcome.

Why did the notion of this clench every muscle in his body as if it was something beyond endurance?

"I shouldn't let the losing trouble you overmuch," he said to Delacorte, conciliatory. "You're just a nicer person than I am. I am simply too bloodthirsty to lose."

"Your day will come," Mr. Delacorte said sagely. "One wrong move will be your undoing, Kirke."

It felt a little too much like a prophecy.

The day after Lord Dominic Kirke had felt her breast in a carriage, Catherine and Lucy at last stood in front of an exhibit at the Montmorency Museum, escorted by Lady Wisterberg. They stared at the suit of another alleged rake. Lines had formed to see it. It had been nearly an hour before they had been allowed inside.

It looked like an ordinary man's suit, albeit a nicely made one, and she thought perhaps that was the most poignant lesson: you can never tell from the outside what might be roiling inside any man. What secrets he might be hiding. No matter how handsome he was. So many titillating words had been written about Mr. Colin Eversea, the so-called Satan of Sussex, an alleged rake who had escaped from the gallows after being accused of murder and ultimately proven innocent. She and her father and her housekeeper had marveled over his exploits reported in the newspaper.

He was now, apparently, happily married and raising cows, the newspapers reported. He had donated his suit to the museum, elevating the museum's stature, rather the way waltzing with an allegedly scandalous man seemed to have, paradoxically, elevated her own.

Lord Kirke was to be away from The Grand Palace on the Thames for a few days—he had gone to visit a textile factory in Sussex, or so Mrs. Hardy reported—and at first, she was glad about it. She was inwardly stormy with thoughts, desires, confusions, and fears, and outwardly expected to take tea with fine ladies who could look her over and decide if she might be the sort their well-bred young sons and nephews should marry. She'd done this twice, once at Lady Wisterberg's, once at another matron's home. She thought she'd comported herself well enough. The next assembly, during which she could be expected to look beautiful and dance with young men, the sort she'd always imagined marrying, was a few days away. Plans for the party continued apace.

Her nights were wildly restless.

She wanted more than her next breath to feel the entirety of Lord Kirke's skin over hers.

It was the most wrong thing she'd ever wanted.

She longed to talk about how she felt with someone, but of course there was absolutely no one in which she could confide. She entertained herself by imagining the horrified gasps she would draw if she even so much as suggested she'd been alone at length with Lord Kirke, let alone kissed him.

How could she possibly explain? These things she knew to be true: life was short; it seemed a terrible sin not to seize extraordinary pleasures when offered them.

So why was it considered a sin to instead seize them? Why was society constructed in such a way to condemn this?

She might never have guessed that such glorious sensations could be coaxed forth from her body when touched by the right man, like a genie from a lamp. So she touched herself at night, exploring, and imagined her hands were Lord Kirke's, and discovered a few interesting things she might otherwise not have discovered.

At will, she could conjure the taste of him—liqueur and smoke and a rich, singular Essence of Kirke—and when she did, her knees nearly buckled and her groin pulsed with longing.

And then she tried to imagine the hands of other young men on her. For some reason her thoughts reeled away from this. The hands on her clearly needed to be the hands of a man she at least knew.

And trusted.

And wanted. Really, really wanted.

What if he was the only man she'd ever want in this way?

Her stomach tensed at this, too.

Because it seemed he no longer wanted her.

In the drawing room at The Grand Palace on the Thames, she surreptitiously studied Mrs. Hardy and Mrs. Durand and Captain Hardy and Lord Bolt, and wondered about their road to this domesticity—there Lord Bolt sat, holding yarn, while Mrs. Durand knitted, Captain Hardy quietly, intently listened to The Arabian Nights' Entertainments read by Mrs. Pariseau. Had their romances been paved with turmoil? Or passionate grappling?

"Well. Let that be a lesson to you," Lady Wisterberg said, after they had looked their fill at Colin Eversea's suit. "It is best to associate with men whose clothing does not end up in museums. Or whose names do not regularly appear in the gossip sheets."

Catherine and Lucy exchanged swift, droll glances and she led them out of the place to go and get ices.

Within a few days of his return from Sussex, it had become very clear to Catherine that Lord Kirke had drawn a line between the two of them again. This one seemed absolutely impermeable.

He appeared in the sitting room at night, and he either played chess with Mr. Delacorte, or brought a book and quietly read it, or wrote letters or speeches and whatnot at a little table. He did no further orating.

He did not look her way or address her.

Not even once.

This omission seemed so violently apparent to her that she thought surely it was obvious to others, too. But no: the events in the sitting room at night were as peaceful, cheerful, and civilized as ever, with the clicking of knitting needles, the rustle of pages turning, the murmur of voices, the delighted commentary from listeners to the stories in The Arabian Nights' Entertainments. And this was so at odds with how she felt it seemed as though she was observing it all from within a dream.

Suddenly it seemed to her that she was on as much tenterhooks as poor Scheherazade, who had to wait night after night to see if she would get to keep her head.

She began to wonder if he had perhaps found the way she kissed unsatisfactory, though all signs at the time had pointed to otherwise. Perhaps he thought of her as a mere country girl, unsophisticated, not worthy of additional time or attention, after he'd satisfied his curiosity. He'd compared her to clover, after all.

Or perhaps—and this made her stomach turn over in sick misery—she had vacated his mind completely, the way one wouldn't continuously reminisce about or yearn for a perfectly ordinary meal.

She found it difficult to believe any of this was true. But what did she know?

It was as though he was afraid one look from him would feed her fevered imagination and hopes. Which was galling.

Her character clearly held unanticipated corridors, and she would never have known if she hadn't journeyed to London.

It seemed wildly unfair that she would be left to wonder, even as she knew it was sensible to let it be. If she were wise, she would simply follow his example.

A lull in entertainments left Catherine at loose ends the following afternoon, so she decided to visit the library room in the annex in search of a new book to read.

She froze in the doorway when she got there.

Her heart catapulted into her throat.

Lord Kirke was sitting at the little table. His coat was hung over the back of the chair, his shirt sleeves rolled up, leaving his forearms bare.

His quill was darting across a half sheet of foolscap, and around him on the table he had built a little fort of fanned-open books and papers and ink and sand.

She supposed this room offered him more space to spread out.

She stared at him in faint surprise, jarred into a realization. She so seldom saw him in the full blast of sunlight. And she'd been spending so much time of late with coltish boys and dewy young women that she was suddenly forcefully reminded Kirke was a mature Man, with a capital "M," and not a young one—the contrast seemed stark in this light. Everything about him seemed more distinct, imposing. Outside of his dark coat, the shoulders filling his white shirt seemed vast. His arms were corded with muscle and dusted with intimidatingly manly hair, dark as the hair on his head. In which a thread or two of silver glinted. His expression was absorbed and remote, and he seemed charged with fierce purpose. His fist had quite a passionate grip on his quill.

Suddenly confused and abashed, she hovered in the doorway in an agony of indecision about whether to stay or go. It suddenly seemed outlandish that she knew how he tasted, or had ever had the nerve to kiss him first. Or that she knew how it felt when those strong, hairy arms tightened around her body as if she was the thing anchoring him to earth.

His head swiveled as if he'd heard a sound.

She could have sworn his breath stopped when he saw her. He was utterly still.

He rose slowly to his feet.

The only movement for the next few moments was the curtain at the window, languidly lifting in a breeze.

"Good afternoon, Keating," he said politely, finally.

"Good afternoon, Lord Kirke." Ridiculously, she curtsied reflexively.

There was a silence.

"Forgive my..." He gestured vaguely to his torso, apparently meaning his current somewhat ungentlemanly disarray.

"Oh! No need." She cleared her throat. "Forgive me for intruding. I just... I wanted to..." She stopped. "That is, I was going to..."

He waited with maddeningly inscrutable patience.

"Have I done something wrong?" she blurted.

At once, wariness screened his features. "Have you? Your sleeves today strike me as impeccable."

She remained mute because she hadn't known she would dare even blurt that question. She was unnerved, and embarrassed. It seemed to have emerged of its own volition.

His expression softened.

He briefly passed a hand over his eyes. Then brought it down forcefully, and sighed.

"No. I do not think you have done anything wrong," he said quietly.

He didn't pretend he didn't know to what she was referring.

Neither of them moved.

A moment later, very carefully very quietly, he asked, "Do you think that you have?"

She shook her head slowly.

She cleared her throat. "I'd... hoped that... despite... well, I hoped that we could still be friends." Her face was so warm now she could feel her eyes burning.

His eyebrows lifted in surprise. "Are we not?"

She was mute again, her stomach churning. This kindness—this politeness—felt well-nigh unendurable. She found, once more, she couldn't reply.

"Of course we are friends, Keating. My apologies if it seems to you that I've been preoccupied and not... friendly." He gave the word a hint of an ironic frisson. Teasing her a little, quoting from one of their earlier conversations. "My schedule is very full."

"I understand. It's just... you've never been so polite. It's awful. You're not yourself at all."

She felt once more like a complete cake.

She could see him struggling to maintain the detachment. His mouth finally curled up a little. "Well, that's an indictment."

"It just... it just feels as though you are avoiding me. And I don't think you've lied to me yet." She said it in a rush.

He froze warily. There was a scary little swift flare of impatience in his eyes.

How she hated the entreaty in her voice. She sounded like a child and she patently was not.

And yet, compared to him, and in his eyes, and compared to all the sophisticated women of the ton, no doubt she was.

She ought to leave him alone. She should leave it be.

He dropped his chin to his chest for a moment.

Then she watched his shoulders set as though he'd made some kind of decision.

He looked up and held her gaze fast. His voice was low and even. "What do you think will happen if we're alone together for any length of time? You're intelligent. And I know you won't lie to me, either. What is it you truly want? Be honest with yourself. And answer me truthfully."

She couldn't bring herself to say it out loud, but she was certain he read the answer in her face.

"Precisely," he said, as if her silence said it all. "It simply cannot happen again. Surely you understand this. I'm afraid we can't put this particular genie back in the lamp, Keating. This is for the best. It's for your own safety as well as mine. I think you know this. I'm sorry, but it's the truth."

She wished she could see a way in which it was not the truth. Because it meant she would lose his friendship. The notion of this caused a knot of panic in her stomach.

The day became dimmer somehow.

"It's..." She swallowed. "The season is... well, it's very lively now. I'm having a lovely time, for the most part. I've met many new people. But it's... it's somehow lonelier without you."

A soft surge of enormous emotion rushed his features again before he caught himself.

He was silent for a moment longer. The sun through the window slashed him in two, making his eyes brilliant, making the threads of silver glint in his hair, leaving the rest of him in shadow.

"Keating..." he said wearily, after a moment. "I'm an old debaucher."

"We both know you are neither of those things.

"Or at least not entirely," she added, a moment later.

He was unable to help himself: The corner of his mouth lifted. Rueful, ironically proud of her. Amused.

"And I'm a rake," he continued evenly, relentlessly.

"You say that as though it's an immutable quality, like being Welsh. What does it even mean? I've yet to witness you raking."

A long wordless moment later, something like resolve settled over his features.

There was a sort of weary finality to his expression that made the back of her neck tingle with portent that frightened her.

"Do you know how I came to be staying here at The Grand Palace on the Thames?"

She shook her head slowly.

"My mistress, in a fit of pique, threw a lit lamp at me while I lay in bed. It knocked over a brandy snifter, which helped ignite the counterpane and burned my town house part of the way down. I've builders crawling about the place now."

She felt as though a lamp had been hurled at her. Every single one of those words landed on her skin like fire. Her mind retreated from the shock, momentarily blank.

He waited with what seemed to her to be maddening patience after he'd said this extraordinary thing, which could not be unsaid or ever again unknown.

A well-bred girl ought to be appalled.

Well. She'd been warned.

His face was white. He seemed to be waiting, stoically, for a verdict, some reaction or rejection from her, like a man being fitted for a noose.

But instantly she thought of him in bed, naked.

And just like that, her breath came ever so slightly shorter, and her skin took up that sort of silent keening. The air against it suddenly unbearably sensual.

She understood that this need lately uncovered in her was something that men addressed matter-of-factly, which was a luxury that women simply didn't have. She was neither stupid nor naive.

And yet, for her, it seemed tied to one man only. Never, never had she felt anything like this near any other man.

And so she stood, mutely entangled in an entirely inappropriate web of lust and black jealousy.

He waited.

"Is she still your mistress?" Her voice was hoarse.

"Absolutely not. I have it on decent authority that she fled across the Channel after assaulting me. And no, Keating. On my grave I swear that I would never have touched you if I was still involved with another woman."

None of this was comfortable to hear—that these circumstances were so commonplace in his world that he had developed a sort of code of behavior for it. She didn't know whether it was hopelessly sophisticated or debauched or neither. She didn't know whether she regretted losing her innocence—or was it ignorance? It had seemed like shelter. But perhaps it never had been.

"I shouldn't have touched you." His voice was a shred now.

She heard the apology and regret in it. Very nearly anguish.

"But why did... why did she throw..."

"She wanted two things from me that I was at that moment both unable and unwilling to provide. An emerald necklace, and my undivided attention. You would be safe in assuming it wasn't the first time she had a fit of pique." A ghost of an ironic smile here. "All in all, I don't believe she liked me very much."

"Perhaps that was why you found the arrangement comfortable," she said shortly.

He went still. A quick flame of anger flashed in his eyes, then wary respect settled in.

He didn't laugh. Nor did he have anything to say in response.

A silence stretched.

"I met her at a salon," he said quietly. "She eventually made a suggestion regarding a business arrangement which I found amenable at the time, and we came to an agreement. Which lasted for less than a year. I'm nearly thirty-six years old. She was not my first mistress. I find it excruciating to say these things aloud or to burden you with this information, but before you spend another moment of your life missing my company, you ought to better understand who I am."

He said all of this so evenly. Even as she saw the tension at the corners of his mouth. The tautness of his skin across his cheekbones.

Such formal, even-toned words to describe an arrangement in which he paid someone to be available for sex.

Her stomach roiled. This was not a conversation a well-bred young girl would ever have, in any other circumstance.

Her father would be horrified.

And she knew she ought to be more horrified, too. But a thousand feelings swarmed her, like stinging gnats, and one of the strongest of them was fascination. But it was too much, all at once.

"But is it who you are?" she ventured slowly. "Or is it simply something you've done?" Her voice was shaking.

It was both a serious question and a suggestion. She wanted to understand.

He took this in, and something like surprise, or respect, flickered in his eyes.

But then that resolve moved into his expression again.

He was determined to build a wall, and she could not fight against it.

"I know myself. I possess a healthy portion of self-contempt—that is, an accurate amount, the amount I deserve, as you might say. I am aware of my strengths and my considerable flaws and I have abided with them comfortably for nigh on four decades. I know what I do and do not want from life. But if I were to contribute to your ruin, Keating, if I were to prevent you somehow from having the future you want and deserve by making love to you, I honestly do not think I could live with myself. I think it would destroy me."

The words were raw and flatly, quietly, unequivocally delivered.

They nearly pressed the breath from her. Her eyes stung.

It seemed an admission of some enormity. She didn't quite understand why. But simmering about the hard, crisp edges of his words was something like desperation.

Almost a plea.

She could and should walk away now. She should leave it be. It was the sane thing to do. He was doing the right thing to try to brick the two of them apart from each other with words.

But she had left sanity behind in that carriage, when she had moaned pleasure against his lips.

"But you think about it." Her voice had gone hoarse. "Making love to me."

He gave a short unamused laugh and closed his eyes briefly.

When he opened them again, they were hunted. "I have secured my place in hell because it's all I think about, Keating."

It knocked the breath from her.

They stood in fraught silence.

"If you'll excuse me?" he said politely. Finally. Tersely.

She stood, frozen, as he got into his coat, methodically stacked his books, and gathered his papers.

He swept past her out of the room.

And she waited, breathing in and out for the count of twenty, for him to leave, to be clear of the annex. Before she took herself swiftly back to her room. She'd forgotten the book she came for.

She lowered herself to the bed and pressed her fists against her hot cheeks and then against her chest, because that was where the emotion, the great hot, raging snarl of it, had lodged and now threatened to split her apart.

A mistress. How cosmopolitan.

She wondered if the whole of the ton knew.

It seemed as though Lady Wisterberg's gossip had been correct.

No wonder he thought of her as clover. Simple. Innocent. Ignorant.

Well, she wasn't any of that any longer, she supposed.

He shouldn't have told me, she thought angrily. He should have lied. He should have gone on being polite and remote. She'd liked her illusions and her ignorance. She'd pressed for truth, because she'd been simple enough to think that the truth was preferable at all times. Even the hard truths, about her father's failing heart, or her mother's illness and eventual death, were easier to take on; they were facts of existence and no humans were untouched by those.

She wasn't prepared to entertain these sorts of moral complexities. Or to so very much miss someone she had known for such a short time—someone who was apparently, as Lady Wisterberg had described, scandalous by the metric of polite society. Even as he was welcome into ballrooms and society, by virtue of being a lord and a politician, and, of course, so absurdly handsome.

So he'd been doing her a charity by keeping his distance.

But how was it that someone who could "ruin" her could also make her life feel immeasurably more vivid? How was it that he stood out from the rest of the world in a sort of stark relief? How was it that she paradoxically felt a strange sort of peace when she stood near him, despite the turmoil he inspired?

Did the admirable things he did offset the scandalous ones, or did one somehow support the other?

And most importantly: he shouldn't have told her that making love to her was all he thought about.

She felt—she knew—he'd done that deliberately.

Because when she ought to be dancing with bright-eyed boys who hadn't yet gotten around to making sexual business arrangements with women they'd met in salons, it was all she was going to be thinking about.

And no doubt he knew it.

The bastard.

Yes, she knew that word.

She wondered what she would do with the power this had conferred upon her.