“Don’t play games with me. I know you arranged for him to have it. What I want to know is why. Why would you want him to see through a lie you helped create?”
For the first time, he looked almost impressed. “I must say, you surprise me. I didn’t realize you were so perceptive. As to why, I think a girl clever enough to guess my gambit with the photograph would know the answer already. You tell me.”
“It isn’t because you want to distract him. This isn’t about the spiritualist scam.”
“Are you sure? You get the duke on our side and no one can touch us.”
She shook her head.
“Use your head, girl. A man like that has a dozen secrets. You find them out and you’ll have him in our pockets for the rest of his life.”
She almost believed him. She did believe him as far as that went, but she was sure there was more. They were supposed to be partners. They were going to help each other make a living, that’s what he’d said when he took her from Miss Rose’s years ago. What a fool she’d been to imagine she knew the limit of Captain’s ambition.
“Why Harcastle? Why not someone else, someone easier?”
“The bigger the risk, the bigger the payout.”
“But it could still be anyone with a lot of money.”
“No, it has to be him.” With this admission, his false geniality fled and his tone was icy.
Even as her stomach knotted, she felt triumphant. At last, she was getting somewhere. “Why?”
“Because he has to pay, that’s why!” he shouted. “Did you let him bed you yet?”
Mind your own damn business. She wasn’t silly enough to say the words out loud. The last time she’d seen him this angry was the day he’d caught her posing for the photograph and he’d ended up blacking her eye.
She thought fast. His anger that day had been real which meant the photograph hadn’t been part of his original plan for her. Clearly, he’d improvised, turned a liability into an asset. He had reacted to events, which meant he didn’t know everything.
“No,” she said.
“Good. No sense letting him have you too easy. Men like that want what’s denied them. Play your cards right and he’ll offer to keep you. When he does, you say yes, understand?”
“He won’t ask me.”
He regarded her in silence, his expression calculating. She kept her face blank, the way he’d taught her. He knew what her poker face looked like, but if she was lucky, he wouldn’t know what it concealed.
“This is what we’ve been waiting for. This is our chance. The big one.”
“What you’ve been waiting for.”
“Don’t give me that. Why do you think I took you from Miss Rose? Why do you think I kept you safe from all the men who offered me money for a tumble with you? When it comes to that, why do you think I didn’t bed you myself?”
Evie struggled against a sudden surge of nausea. She wanted to scream the obvious answers at him: Because I was a child! Because you raised me! Every muscle in her body strained to get away from him, but she couldn’t let him see the effect of his words.
Once again her image of who he was transformed. Everything he’d done for her had been part of a larger calculation. She had always known this to some extent but she hadn’t realized until this moment that he didn’t care for her at all. She was a means to an end. Nothing more.
“This is why I took you from the brothel. This is why I fed and clothed you and kept you safe. If not for me, you’d be a used-up whore by now. Your loyalty is to me and you’ll do as I say. Harcastle will offer for you, if he hasn’t already, and you’ll say yes. Eventually he’ll tire of you, but long before he does, you’ll bleed him for every secret, every sin. Understood?”
“Yes,” she whispered, her skin crawling. “I understand.”
And I will never let you hurt him.
…
Alex gazed grimly into the ornate mirror while his valet fussed at his clothes, checking for lint and stray wrinkles. He looked without seeing, his thoughts as always focused on her. It troubled him, this single-mindedness where she was concerned.
He’d always been monomaniacal about his work. His fascination with the occult had begun early, perhaps as a reaction to his father’s extreme empiricism. At first, he’d been determined to find a genuine medium, but the more he investigated the spiritualist movement, the less he believed in its merit. Each time he’d uncovered a new fraud, his anger had grown until exposing fakes and charlatans had become the entire point, both his reason for living and why he was the best in his field. He was obsessive by nature. Prone to idée fixe. But this obsession with Evie had no practical purpose and needed conquering, much like his addiction to alcohol.
Doing so would be even more difficult now that his affections were engaged. When he’d walked her home from Lord Stein’s, he’d admitted he liked her, but the fury he’d felt when he realized she was using oil of phosphorous forced him to acknowledge a deeper truth. He cared about her, a fact he found especially disturbing when he considered that the addition of Evie’s name to the list of people he cared about brought the grand total to three. His sister and her husband were the other two.
The people who called him a cold fish—never to his face of course—were right, but he made no apologies. So why, instead of striving to overcome his feelings, had he asked her to become his mistress? Gone were the days when he deluded himself into thinking he’d tire of her quickly. Such a connection would only make things worse. Even so, he couldn’t bring himself to fully repent his actions.
He couldn’t afford a mistress; that alone was reason enough to retract his offer. Yet he wouldn’t, and that was the true source of his regret. That he couldn’t bring himself to take the logical, practical course. On the contrary, he fully intended to persist in an action he knew to be folly.
There would be pain too. One day, perhaps a year from now or perhaps less, he would have to choose one of Ellis’s heiresses. He couldn’t in good conscience continue to keep a mistress when he had a wife whose money he’d be spending to rescue the Harcastle holdings. Giving Evie up would hurt him and perhaps her too. But harder to contemplate was the idea of never having her at all.
Farrell, his valet, disappeared into the dressing room and returned with a top hat under his arm. Alex took it automatically and pretended to consider its fitness since that was what Farrell expected. Before he’d had time to murmur his assent, a knock came at the door.
“Come in.”
A footman entered, bearing a silver tray. Placed carefully in its center was Evie’s card, a single white rectangle with Miss Evangeline Jones – spiritualist printed neatly in the middle.