He was going mad.
He’d trained to withstand water torture, to suffer broken bones, plucked fingernails, mind tricks, and beatings. He’d learned the art of defending himself with his fists and dexterity, with an expert crack of a pistol or the deft flick of his wrist and a sharp blade. He’d spent nights in brutal cold, days in the company of the most sadistic men and scurrilous criminals in the land. Had survived an assassin and a deadly inferno.
He damn well ought to be able to resist one woman. Even if she was a beautiful goddess of a woman who smelled delicious, whose soft skin made him want to taste her everywhere, whose mere presence in a room made him want to take her so hard and deep he didn’t know where he ended and she began.
“Fuck,” he muttered, glaring at the half-empty glass of whisky in his hands before downing the remainder of the contents in one fiery gulp. The burn distracted him but for a second, and the liquor did nothing to soothe his jagged nerves.
“Jesus, Sebastian.” Griffin, the Duke of Strathmore and one of Sebastian’s oldest and best friends in the League, pinned him with a pitying look. They were seated in Strathmore’s billiard room, sipping whisky. “I can’t believe you agreed to marry the chit.”
That made two of them.
Sebastian slapped his glass down on the carved mahogany table between their chairs and took up the decanter to refill it with another hearty dose of amber-colored liquid. “I took an oath. I do what’s asked of me.”
Regardless of how preposterous it was. Regardless of how much he loathed being the sacrificial lamb. And regardless of how doing what he’d been asked had felt wrong for the first time today.
His oath and his sense of honor were currently at odds, wreaking havoc upon his conscience. Everything within him had wanted to claim Daisy Vanreid as his earlier that afternoon. Even though she was a woman he couldn’t trust. Even though doing so would be akin to using her, manipulating a woman he’d soon no longer even be married to. If she was innocent, he’d never forgive himself. But if she was guilty, there would be hell to pay. None of it—not the way he felt or his reaction to her—made sense. Indeed, nothing about this entire mission did, and it sure as hell didn’t help that Carlisle was keeping him largely in the dark.
Griffin took a drag of his cigarette and exhaled slowly. “I don’t know if I could do the same. The thought of marrying anyone—let alone a saucy American wench suspected of treason—is enough to make me ill.”
Treason.
Hearing the word in correlation with Daisy was like a dagger’s honed blade into his gut. “I don’t think she knows anything Carlisle suspects her of knowing.”
His friend stared at him, his look speculative. Almost suspicious. “You don’t think so? Did you bloody well read the report he sent to the League?”
Of course he had. The letter had arrived transcribed in careful code that to the outside observer would have seemed unassuming as a maiden aunt’s tepid scrawl. But in truth, it had contained privileged information. The same information about Daisy that Carlisle had fed him previously. Connections to an Irish shop girl suspected of working with the dynamitards, a broken betrothal to a Fenian leader. Nothing new, and nothing substantial.
His friend’s probing gaze made him take another swig of spirits. “I read it.”
He’d read it twice and then burned it, just as he did with all League correspondence.
“And?” Griffin raised a brow, raising his cigarette back to his mouth for another puff.
Sebastian fought the absurd urge to take one of his friend’s cigarettes from the paper sleeve on the table and smoke it himself. Perhaps it would calm him, but ever since the fire, he hadn’t been able to countenance bringing any sort of smoke into his lungs. It made him cagey, took him back to the day he’d almost died.
He settled for whisky instead. “And it’s flimsy evidence at best, Griff. I’m not saying I trust Daisy, but neither do I believe it’s in her nature to plot to kill innocent civilians.”
No, he realized as he spoke the words aloud. Nothing in his dealings with her had shown she possessed the capacity for cruelty, or the ability to hurt others without compunction that he’d witnessed in so many other foes over the years. She was an odd woman, sometimes bold and blazing with daring and passion, other times haunted by the brutalities she claimed to have received from her father. He longed to believe her innocent, to accept everything she’d told him as truth, and the knowledge was an unwanted revelation to him.
For there was something she was keeping from him. She had lied to him earlier, boldly and without compunction. That small hesitation had given her away.
“Have you bedded her?” His friend asked baldly into the silence that had descended upon them.
The need to defend her honor rose within him. He was an oxymoron if one ever lived. “No,” he snapped. “Not that it is any of your concern.”
“You want to bed her,” Griffin concluded.
Correctly, damn his hide.
“No,” he lied. “I don’t bed pawns. I never have.”
The last bit was truth, at least.
“She’s a beauty.” Griffin ground the nub of his cigarette into a silver ashtray. “Had half the men of thetonsniffing her skirts. Christ, you must have heard the rumors about her. She couldn’t be an innocent maid by this juncture. No one would blame you for wanting a taste yourself.”
Of course he’d heard the rumors. Had seen with his own two eyes the way she led men on a merry dance, lured them in with her wiles. Kissed them. But something uncoiled within him then, some burning need to defend her, a searing outrage on her behalf. The Daisy Vanreid who had asked him if he had ever hit a woman had been desperate. And she didn’t deserve the scorn of any man. He believed her. Against all reason and ration, he believed her.
“You go too far,” he warned his friend. “The lady is my wife.”
