He did not seem to mind her words, for that half smile curled his lips, and the corners of her own mouth tugged upward in response. The streaks of his scars looked almost shiny in the moonlight. She was already used to them, she realized, yet she longed to touch them, to pretend she could ease his past pain, to pretend he gave a flying farthing for hers.
She tangled her fingers together at her waist.
“Actually, I find it a benefit, that my face makes children run away,” he said. “Although their screaming gives me a headache.”
Encouraged by his self-deprecating joke, Thea ventured a reply. “And if ladies swoon at the sight of you, you are spared from having to talk to them.”
“Precisely. Although that raises the question of the etiquette of stepping over their prone bodies.”
“And the men?”
“Ah, the men.” He scratched his chin. “They say something jovial, like, ‘Spot of bad luck there, what?’ as if my cricket match was rained out.”
Thea laughed, the sound a lonely one in the deserted yard, but he was smiling, just a little, and she liked having someone to smile with again. Then his smile faded, for he was searching her face with questions in his eyes, and the silence grew as heavy as the dark. She should go in, but she was not ready to leave him, not while there was the smallest chance they might smile together again.
“The selva is intense,” he said abruptly.
“The… I beg your pardon? What is the ‘selva’?”
“The tropical forest. It teems with life. Everything is bigger, brighter, bolder. One can encounter snakes longer than a warship, butterflies as big as a man’s palm. One can almost see the plants growing. With so much life, death is closer too. There is no past, no future, only the present, as one avoids the myriad of ways to die.”
She tried to understand what he was saying. “So one knows, when one goes into the selva, that one might not make it out alive.” Laughter bubbled up in her throat. “It is rather like a ball, then.”
He made a small sound that might have been a chuckle. “All those poisonous flowers. Vines that will choke you.”
“Man-eating animals.”
“Precisely. I’d risk the selva over Almack’s any day.” He paused. “The point is, I knew the dangers beforehand. No one betrayed me, unlike y–your sister. That makes my loss easier to bear.”
His words stole her breath and a pang shot through her heart. He didn’t understand. Ma and Pa thought she had betrayed them.
Yet he was being kind. Again.
Before she knew what she was doing, Thea’s fingers were untangled and she was moving forward. She placed one palm on his scarred cheek. He did not flinch or object, so she let it rest there. His skin was like her skin, warm and alive and soft, but for stubble of his beard. These scars were not ugly; they were simply part of him. She placed her other palm on his other cheek, and she cradled that bold face in her hands.
“You’re just a man,” she whispered.
He studied her with a faintly troubled expression, as though she was a puzzle he had already solved a dozen times, yet still did not understand. She wished she had the right to ask what thoughts were forming behind those eyes of his.
Then he covered her hands and gently lowered them away from his face, his fingers big and warm as they curled around hers. He was so close, all delicious solidity. If he could wrap his arms around her, pull her against his chest… Oh, how she yearned to be held. It had been so long since anyone had held her.
Too long, clearly, if she looked to him for comfort! She must not forget she was nothing but the means to an end for him, as he was for her. He would never be her friend.
She tugged her fingers free and edged away.
“You need not fear me,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back.
“You threatened my friend.”
“I never intended any harm. That was merely a maneuver to force your hand.”
“It was badly done of you.”
“I daresay it was.”
“You don’t seem sorry.”
He shrugged. “I wanted something. I went after it. I got it. In this case, what I wanted was you.”
A thrill coursed through her and she fought to quell it. How the moonlight made her silly!
“You mean, you wanted me to agree to marry you, so I could not marry Beau Russell and you could get some money.”
“Exactly.” He wiped a hand over his eyes. “I promise, you will be safe.”
How marvelous, to feel safe again. She had always believed herself safe, until those minutes in that ballroom, when her world was whipped out from under her and she learned that everything she believed in could disappear in the blink of an eye.
“Sometimes I wonder if someone like me can ever be safe,” she said. He frowned and she did not want to talk to him anymore. “I’m tired, my lord. I trust you and your plants will sleep well tonight.”
Thea turned away to go inside, and had taken barely three steps when—
“Countess!”
She turned back.
“Those people in there were right,” he said. “Percy and Francis should get their comeuppance.”
She must be more tired than she realized, because all she could think was that the world didn’t work like that. Her scheme seemed silly, so puny and hopeless.
But in the morning, she would feel brave again. So she pretended it was already morning and she was already feeling brave.
“They will,” she said.
Then, before she could do something foolish—something like throwing herself into his arms and pressing her face to his broad chest—she turned and ran inside.
Chapter 6
Ah, London. Rafe muttered curses as he cut through the commerce-fueled hubbub of the City two days later. Grime, stench, noise, people. As usual, London put Rafe in a foul temper, which had the effect of arranging his face into an expression that made people scurry to obey.
So it was with pleasing speed that he and his solicitor—a co-conspirator in Rafe’s fraudulent marriage scheme—convinced the trustees that he truly was married and secured their agreement to release the funds. But such things took time, the solicitor advised: Rafe should keep Thea close to allay any suspicions before the money was definitely his.
“Easily done,” he snapped, ignoring the memory of her hands in his, her palm on his cheek. He would put her on the other side of his house at Brinkley End, where he would never see her or talk to her, or be tempted to touch her again. His plans had no place for Thea and her infectious smiles.
Nevertheless, since they were near the Exchange anyway, an impulse inspired Rafe to call on Thea’s father at the man’s office. It went against all his plans, not to mention common sense, but Thea’s story had roused his curiosity about the kind of man who abandoned a daughter for his own ambitions.
Mr. Knight turned out to be stout and brightly dressed, with a skip in his step and an appealing shrewdness in his eyes. When Rafe informed Mr. Knight that he had married Helen—“met her in Warwickshire…very taken with her…couldn’t wait”—the man seemed to become younger by ten years.
“By my buttons! Our Helen, a countess!” the man repeated, then clapped and laughed and clapped again. He pressed his hands to his chest and murmured, as if to himself, “The girl has done it. We may all rest secure.”