That man.
After he strode away from her, Olivia closed her eyes and rested her head against the brick wall of the alley. A few minutes later, she was still shaking. His otherworldly blue eyes bearing down on her, the evidence of his arousal—it had stopped the breath in her chest. Not only for what it called up in her in the present, which alone was enough, she was sure, to bring any woman to her knees, but for what it recalled of her past. A past that she had put away long ago and endeavored to never think about.
But standing in this alleyway, shaking and wanting, Olivia had no choice but to remember.
He hadn’t been her first lover, and she had not been his, but it hadn’t mattered. They had been so young—each twenty years old—that they might as well have been each other’s firsts. The fumbles with kitchen boys and footmen that had constituted her experience before Augustus had barely left a mark on her. The truth was that her spirit had been just as pure and untouched as if she had been a virgin in fact.
She had been a maid in his mother’s house. At the orphanage, where she had grown up, girls didn’t usually get placements at such fine houses. The orphanage had been a sober place, even a grim one, but it had also been an efficient and an effective institution. They had taught her to read and write—skills in which she had always exceled, relatively speaking—and the housework that was to secure her employment in the future.
She hadn’t started out in the home of an earl. At the age of thirteen, she had left the orphanage and gone to work for a rich widow. She had served the woman for two years, so grateful for the little liberties allowed to her, but she had been lonely, separated from anyone her own age. She was used to being around other children and she had found her work in a household of adults strange and terrifying. The work had been hard, too. What she remembered most from those two years, besides the loneliness, was the hard stone on her knees and the way she coughed cleaning the ash out of the grates.
When the widow died, she left Olivia five pounds and a sterling character. The character got her placed in the Dowager Countess of Montaigne’s London mansion, a place that, in comparison to the widow’s, was bursting with life. The staff was twice the size and there were many more people her age employed there, in addition to the children that belonged to the family. Of course, the servants didn’t usually converse with the Carrington children on familiar terms, but their mere presence made the house lighter, the environment more familiar to her. And the Dowager Countess kept a happy home. It hadn’t been stiff and formal in that ways that she soon learned other aristocratic houses were. She was naïve to have been deceived by that environment of openness, but she had been young.
How she and Augustus had come together had been so simple—you would think, given the differences in their stations, that it would have felt complicated. But it never had. Even now, she couldn’t bear the taste of caramel. It made her remember too much. It made her too sad.
Olivia opened her eyes.
She was a fool for indulging in such reflections.
A crude gesture from Augustus Carrington,the Downstairs Menace,was not an expression of desire or regard or fond remembrance. She wasn’t a wide-eyed maid any longer, who thought that any sign of interest from a man meant that you had won his admiration. She knew how the world worked now. He had meant to degrade her with his attraction, to show her that she was still within his power.
He likely still had his sights on Natasha. His brother had seemed besotted, it was true. But Augustus was the earl. He could easily push his younger brother out of the way. He was used to plucking what he wanted, damn the consequences.
She pressed the palms of her hands to her eyes.
Stop,she scolded herself.
She mustn’t think about the past.
*
By the timeOlivia reentered the townhouse, the suitors had vanished, and she found Eloisa, Natasha, and Nathanial in the middle of a row. From the sound of their voices, she knew exactly the scene that would stand before her when she entered the drawing room. She had witnessed many such before.
“Your hypocrisy is astounding, mother,” Natasha said, her languorous tone doing nothing to conceal her temper, “You won’t bar him from the house because his presence here is a boon to my prospects, but you nevertheless prohibit me from thinking of him seriously.”
“Natasha,” Eloisa countered, “Neither of those men can be trusted. One is an earl, and the other is his brother. I have explained to you our position in England. At best, they are merely curious. At worse, they have designs on you that are not honorable.”
“At the risk of defending a pair of Englishmen, they did only—”
“Oh, quiet, Nathanial, no one cares what you think on the subject!” Natasha hissed.
“I was about to take your part, sister,” Nathanial spat back. “But now I won’t trouble myself.”
“I don’t need your help. As I plan to do what I want regardless of whateitherof you say.”
“Natasha!” Eloisa broke in, her pitch rising to one that she only used when she was deadly serious. “If you think such a show of impudence will get you anywhere, I will take you back to Paris tomorrow. I have clearly mistaken your maturity.”
“Mother, you wouldn’t!” Natasha exclaimed, dashes of pink appearing on her cheeks.
“I will do what I need to for this family,” Eloisa said, regaining her composure, “Just as I have always done.”
“I promise not to give Lord Percy my exclusive notice,” Natasha placated. “And I will be careful. But I don’t see the harm in seeing whether he is sincere or not.”
“Very well,” Eloisa nodded.
Olivia was not surprised to see her friend so expertly maneuver Natasha. Eloisa had raised her children to speak their minds, but, underneath their free-spirited, opinionated demeanors, lay a bedrock of respect for their mother.
And the conclusion of this argument brought back to Olivia what currently sat in her pocket. Her lustful thoughts of Augustus and the tumult of her memories had chased the vouchers from her mind—but she knew she needed to reveal them now.
