Chapter 1

He was drunker than she thought she’d ever seen anybody. Then again, she didn’t have much experience of drunkenness. Her aunt and uncle were tipples-after-dinner-type people, her twin preferred other vices, and Peggy was not one to surrender control lightly. Belle had flirted a little on her own account with becoming a drunk, since it was the sort of thing that characters did in novels when they were unhappy. Unfortunately, she’d found it too unpleasant to stick to. Which was yet further evidence—as if she didn’t have enough already—that characters in novels didn’t know what the fuck they were about.

It was a shame that Sir Horley did not share her sterling common sense on the subject of intoxication, because he looked both miserable and dreadful. A similar sort of puffy-faced, red-eyed dreadful that usually accompanied a bout of intense weeping. Except, in Belle’s experience, the body usually exhausted its tolerance for weeping. Sir Horley had clearly been drinking all night. Perhaps longer. It filled her with that half-angry, half-sad, wholly helpless feeling that often swept over her when she had to bear witness to the people she cared about making messes of themselves and their lives.

“Bonny?” Sir Horley squinted through the gloom.

“Do I look like Bonny?” demanded Belle. “In ways other than the familial, that is.” Twins they might have been, but the passing years had brought, to Belle’s perception at least, only an increasing sense of difference. Bonny was as sweet and round as a summer peach. Whereas she was sharp and stabby and angry, like a hatpin driven into a testicle.

Sir Horley tried again. “Belle?”

“Who else?”

He gave a low rasp she took to be if not a laugh, then the mean-spirited bastard cousin of a laugh. “Who else indeed? I mean, it was never going to be him, was it? Bonny wouldn’t come for me.”

“These days,” Belle remarked, “he only comes for Valentine.” She paused. “That ... that did not sound as I intended.”

Once upon a time, Sir Horley would have laughed and teased her. Now he seemed to be barely paying attention. Or even care that she was there at all. Which was not—if Belle was to be completely candid with herself, as she tried to be these days—surprising. Of course it was Bonny he had hoped for. Bonny, who was loving and easy to love, and who everyone preferred. She had tried, for a while, to be ... better? Different? The sort of heroine the world would always steer towards a happy ending. But she wasn’t that sort of heroine. And she didn’t even know what a happy ending looked like for someone like her.

At last Sir Horley spoke, apparently oblivious to the passing seconds which had marooned Belle in awkward silence. “What are you even doing here? What time is it? How did you get in?”

“How do you think?” Belle began picking her way across the dusty carpet, through a battlefield of empty bottles.

“You knocked on the door and asked to be admitted?”

“Try again.”

Scraping a lank lock of rusty-red hair back from his brow, Sir Horley seemed to be doing his best to focus. “You disguised yourself as—” He broke off, a strange weariness in his tone. “I don’t care.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“Habit?”

“Well, no disguise was required, although I am wearing breeches for practicality’s sake. I simply waited until dark, slipped in via the back garden, and climbed through your open window.”

Sir Horley brought a glass to his lips, realising quite some time after he had raised it and tilted it that it was completely empty. “Belle, my dear, is there a part of I don’t care you’re failing to comprehend?”

“The part where you mean it, I suppose?”

There was another long silence. Belle’s ingress had brought with it some fresh air, but the room was still the worst-smelling room she’d ever encountered. And she had spent a moderate portion of her childhood visiting with Boudica, her uncle Wilbur’s prize pig. This, however, was an unfair comparison to make, for pigs were clean and elegant animals. And Sir Horley, at this present moment, was neither clean nor elegant, and nor were his surroundings.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

Belle’s nose wrinkled. Considering the darkness, the dankness, and the ... pungence , she wasn’t entirely sure anyone should have been there. “Neither should you.”

His look grew fuzzily bewildered. “It’s my house.”

“It’s your aunt’s house.”

“And she’s my family.”

“Only by blood.”

“You Tarletons.” Sir Horley, who had been sitting slumped against the far wall, now slumped sideways and kept slumping, until he landed in a heap on the floor. “Don’t you ever ...”

“Ever what?”

The pile of Sir Horley somehow grew smaller, curling in upon itself like a slug in a rainstorm. “Give up.”

Not for the first time in her life, Belle was beginning to suspect she might be in over her head. Her last encounter with Sir Horley had taken place nearly a year earlier, when she and Bonny had kidnapped him, along with his fiancée, in the hope that an artificially induced sense of extremis would encourage the couple to share some frank discourse about their future together—discourse that was surely necessary, given her tendencies towards religiosity and his towards sodomy. The endeavour had failed somewhat extravagantly and perhaps had always been doomed to failure, given its lack of grounding in anything even slightly resembling reality. Of course, in a story such a scheme would have come off perfectly. But that was fiction for you, thought Belle, hammering yet another nail into the coffin of her naiveté, filling one’s head with false hopes of happiness, and breaking like dandelion clocks at the first rough wind.

Sir Horley had refused to speak to any of them since, which Belle had felt keenly, and Bonny had perhaps also felt keenly. Though, with his duke to distract him, perhaps he had not. Truthfully, it had been quite some time since he’d seemed to care about the same things she did or care about them to the same extent—which was to say, he cared enough to join her in misguided, if well-meant, shenanigans but not enough to deal with the mess such shenanigans inevitably left in their wake.

And yet Belle had still secretly nurtured a conviction that Sir Horley would change his mind. About what had happened. About her. That his anger would fade and with it his insistence that there lay no real affection between them.

But the months had slipped away, and now it was the eve of his wedding, and she had found him like this—drunk and bitter and distant—and it was impossible not to wonder if he’d been telling the truth all along, for not everyone thought of friendship as she did. Cherished it and clung to it. Found it worth fighting for.

Nevertheless, it would not do to falter now. It never did to falter. You could only try, and keep failing, and hope your failures did not pierce you too deeply.

“I have given up on many things,” Belle announced, with a defiant little head toss. “But I will never give up on you.”

Bonny, too, was small and loud and dramatic. The difference was, when he was small and loud and dramatic, people believed him. When Belle was small and loud and dramatic, they didn’t. And Sir Horley was no exception. He laughed his unpleasant non-laugh. “You don’t know the first fucking thing about me, my little Bellflower.”

“I know you’re my friend.”

“You were friends with a phantasm. A pretty figment. Someone who never existed.”

He had said something like this during the kidnapping. Belle had disregarded it then. But she finally allowed herself a moment to consider it. To consider him. The bedraggled, inebriated, under-washed ruin of a man she had once believed simple. As if any man was simple. As if any person was. “I did not feel as though I were friends with a phantasm.”

“Then more fool you.”

“You did fool me,” she agreed. “But why would you?”

A kind of sluggish bewilderment flickered across his face. “Why what?”

“Why would you wish to? Making someone feel close to you, making them trust you and delight in you, that’s an awful lot of work, when the only gain is something you claim you never wanted to begin with.”

“I’m too drunk for your ...” He also seemed too drunk to find an adequate word for what he was too drunk for. “For you.”

“All I’m saying,” she said, as slowly and distinctly as she could get without crossing the line into patronising, “is that the only benefit to simulating friendship is friendship itself. I don’t understand why you would take such pains over something you insist was an illusion all along.”

He shrugged. “I was probably bored.”

“Or it was not an illusion.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Belle.” He cast his empty gaze at her wearily. “The illusion was that I am someone worth befriending. I pretended I was, for a while. To this day, I couldn’t tell you why. Then reality caught up with me. And now you find me as I truly am.”

“Inebriation is a passing state.”

That drew a dismissive sound from him. “Not if you work at it.”

Clearly, he had been working at it. She rather wished he hadn’t. “Is that why you refused to see us?” she asked, trying to sort through what was hurt, what was spite, and what was mere drunken swagger. “Because you believed we could only care for some performance you were putting on?”

Another shrug. “Whatever I believe, it doesn’t seem to have made a damn bit of difference. Because here you are. Attempting to disrupt my life all over again.”

“I’ve been worried ,” Belle cried. “Attempting to disrupt someone’s life is one of the ways Bonny and I demonstrate affection.”

“It’s one of the ways you demonstrate you don’t have a fucking clue about how the world works.”

Despite the harshness of the words, there was very little passion in his tone. Even hostility she would have welcomed. Anything but this hollow resignation. Unfortunately, she wasn’t sure how to stir him from it, which meant she was obliged to fall back on being reasonable. Never her favourite role in a conversation.

“Even if we thought we were acting in your best interests,” she said finally, “it was wrong of us to attempt to force a confrontation between you and your betrothed. Then again, you can hardly blame us for not understanding what you needed, or how to help you, when you apparently spent the whole relationship playing a part for us.”

Sir Horley responded with a groan of displeasure. “How many times, my tenacious little Portia, must I remind you that I am currently a poor subject for your rhetoric?”

“Then simply answer me this: Are you angry with me?”

“My dear, I’m not wholly certain I can stand up. Do you really think I’m capable of complex emotional reactions?”

“I was afraid you were angry,” she admitted. “I was afraid I’d made you hate me.”

“Well, now you know better. Perhaps we should both continue with our lives?”

“How can I? When that leaves you convinced I would cast you aside rather than deal with the reality of who you are.”

His bleary eyes sharpened momentarily. “You mean this reality? This ugly reality? After I made you think I was like you.”

“Which is what precisely?”

“Joyful. Unabashed. When I have always been a coward, a liar, and a whore.”

Closing what remained of the distance between them, Belle dropped to her knees before Sir Horley.

He flinched into the wall. “What are you doing?”

“I am taking you at your word.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means”—Belle put her fingers beneath his chin and made him look at her—“that if this is who you are, then I will not give up on him either.”

For a split second, something small—a mere flicker of light—seemed to be struggling in the depths of Sir Horley’s eyes. Then he pushed her hand away, his touch careless, almost cruel. “Stop trying to save me. I’ve enough women in my life trying to do that.”

“The others aren’t trying to save you, though.”

“They’re offering me family. Security. In their eyes, a future without sin.”

“But we love sin,” protested Belle. “Sin is the best part.”

This didn’t even earn the barest twitch of a smile. “And my family? I’m to abandon them to—what?”

“To be with us.”

“Ah yes ...” Rising to his feet, Sir Horley staggered past her. He was in his shirtsleeves, which Belle knew was the sort of thing a lady ought to be shocked by. But she was long past the point of being shocked by male-presenting arms. “I can live in one of Valentine’s innumerable bedrooms like an unmarried daughter.”

“Oh, like I do?” Belle heard her own acerbity, but Sir Horley—who used to notice everything—paid it no heed whatsoever. He was preoccupied with looking for a fresh drink.

“And how much satisfaction does such an existence give you?” he asked.

“Not very much. But then I begin to question whether a satisfactory existence is to be my lot at all.”

At last, accompanied by a choir of hollow clinking, Sir Horley had located what he was looking for: a half-empty bottle of ... Belle could not tell what—wine, perhaps, or spirits. “It is the questioning that will destroy you.”

“You’re saying I should maintain hope?”

“The opposite, my kitten, the opposite. Accept your fate, as I have.”

Belle remained on the floor, watching him with eyes she had long known were considered beautiful, and whose beauty had turned out no use whatsoever. “This is not your fate. This is a mistake you’re making, for reasons I don’t understand.”

Having flung himself into an armchair, Sir Horley drained his bottle to the dregs. His mouth gleamed, wine-stained and wolfish, in the gloom. “What? You think that because I share the proclivities of your brother and his duke, I am entitled to what they have?”

Belle had promised Sir Horley she would take him as he was. But it was hard, in that moment, not to mourn for her friend, her wicked, laughing, irrepressible friend, who in the end had fled her—as so many had fled her—leaving this rough-voiced, hard-mouthed stranger in his stead. “I think Peggy would tell you there is more to life than this or that .”

“I’m not Peggy.”

“Neither am I. But we can learn from her choices.”

“Leave me alone, Isabella.”

He knew her name. She knew he knew her name. This was nothing but a weak attempt to hurt her. And, given that the deepest hurts she carried came from people who hadn’t even been trying—who had simply been careless or oblivious—it pinged off her like a button, and she disregarded it just as easily.

Regaining her feet, Belle pursued Sir Horley across the room. “Please stop this. And please stop drinking.”

“What does it matter if I drink or not?”

“I don’t think it’s helping you.”

That made him laugh again. “My sweet child”—he reached out, catching clumsily for one of her curls, letting it twine about his finger—“people don’t drink to be helped. They drink because they can’t be.”

“ I am trying to help you,” Belle retorted, pity and frustration and fondness swirling irreconcilably—and unpleasantly—inside her.

“Fine.” Sir Horley’s gaze slipped past her to the greyness beyond his window. “I have a few hours before my wedding. I can indulge you one last time. What’s the plan?”

“The plan?” she repeated, taken off guard.

“Yes, you’re a Tarleton. There’s always a plan.”

In all honesty, Belle had not thought that far ahead. She had rather been counting on Sir Horley not being foxed out of his skull, envisaging instead some kind of triumphant return to his senses. Perhaps a hug. “Well ...”

“You were just passing my aunt’s house in the dead of night?”

“I did not think you’d see me if I called in the usual fashion. I mostly just wanted to talk to you before you did something irrevocable.” She twisted her fingers together nervously. “Find some way to repair our friendship.”

“Oh, Arabella,” he said, faintly chiding. “This will never do.”

“I’ve actually gone to quite a lot of trouble,” she pointed out, not best pleased by his tone.

“For mere conversation? Why, how staid. How commonplace.” He put a hand to his brow in a mockery of mourning. “Am I no longer worth a wild scheme or two?”

She narrowed her eyes, once again adrift on the tides of his drunkenness, uncertain where sincerity lay. “Do you want there to be a wild scheme?”

“How about,” he suggested, “we disguise ourselves as servants, steal my aunt’s jewellery and horses, and ride away into the sunset? Or sunrise, I suppose, technically speaking.”

His tone was sneering, but Belle chose to ignore it. “I would prefer that to watching you marry a woman who cares nothing for your happiness. I would prefer almost anything to that.”

“We start new lives as highwaymen. We become pirates. We open a brothel that tends to the well-being of its workers.” She remembered a time when Sir Horley had delighted in her outlandish ideas. Now he kicked them over like sandcastles. “We build wings like Daedalus and fly across the seas. We enchant a Spanish galleon and sail it amongst the stars. We throw ourselves off the cliffs at Dover and become sea-foam.”

This was the closest Sir Horley had come to an admission that he was not fully committed to seeing things through with Miss Carswile. “Or,” said Belle quietly, “you could simply leave with me tonight. Let Bonny and Valentine and me find some other future for you.”

Sir Horley rolled his eyes heavily, roused at last to something other than sodden apathy. “There is no other fucking future for me. I have nothing, Belle. A meaningless knighthood that I cannot even pass to my children. No home or fortune of my own. Only what my aunt may, someday, deign to bestow.”

“Is that really why you wed to her direction? For money?”

He shrugged. “It’s expected of women. Egalitarian, in a way, to expect it also of me.”

“Perhaps it should be expected of nobody.”

“That’s a fantasy more fantastical than princes who live on the moon.” He was still twisting the strand of her hair that he had captured, tighter and tighter until it made her scalp sting. Not that this little pain was enough to frighten Arabella Tarleton. Or so she told herself for every pain. “Besides,” he went on, “you’ve forgotten what it is to be poor and powerless now you live upon the largesse of a duke.”

Belle sighed. What was it with gentlemen that they laid claim to such cynicism? As if the world was not set up for them. Even the ones born without wealth swam freely upon the tides of opportunity. “It’s sweet you believe that,” she murmured. And then, because he had as good as asked her for a wild scheme, she went on brightly, “Though if material security is all you seek from matrimony, then you might as well marry me.”