A girlish giggle erupted from her as she placed her hand in mine.
“I will tell them who you are in an instant.” James Allan spat.
I raised my eyes to my father’s. “Please do.”
His lower lip quivered, and a cold sort of satisfaction ran through me. That was what fear looked like, and I couldpractically smell it on him. This was the price of his obsession, and I hoped it stung like a thousand knives.
“Do not make a scene, James,” my father whispered.
I was fairly certain James Allan was one step away from needing smelling salts. Sweat dripped down his greasy forehead, and he was slipping. Slipping into a slow chaos of insanity.
A tug on my hand, and I was following Rosamund Bailey into a sea of vipers more frightening than anything in the Mysterious Deep. Every eye was on us, watching, questioning. I placed my wooden hand at the small of her back and hated that I couldn’t feel her. It made me want to take the whole thing off and slam it to the ground, but Rose’s hand tightened on my waist.
“It’s just you and me,” she whispered.
“It is most certainly not,” I murmured.
Though the truth was, I was already lost in her. Her crimson dress drew out her eyes like a forest lit by a midday sun. The soft line of her jaw smooth, and a warm flush to her cheeks. All complemented by her slightly upturned nose. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, and she’d sold her soul for me.
“I missed you,” she said, her voice a siren song.
My hand itched to caress her cheek, and if I didn’t kiss her soon, my heart was likely to implode. Obsession. I was as sick as the man watching us with poison in his eyes.
The spell of hers was enough to keep my feet in time with hers, though she was leading me more than I her. Somehow, that felt justified. Two years ago, she waltzed into my life, and I’d been following her ever since.
“Tell me the price, Rosamund.”
More than I needed her, I needed to know what I’d cost her. It was killing me, strangling my heart in my chest till pain inked out of it.
She bit her bottom lip, considering.
“Edmonds needs something in the Atlantic Sea. He agreed to release you and back your claim if I agreed to get it for him.”
Of course he did.
“What is it?” My voice was ash.
“A shell,” she said simply.
A shell. This reeked of something that should stay buried. When it came to the Mysterious Deep and ambitious men, a shell was not simply a shell.
“Did you ever stop to consider why he wouldn’t just get it himself?” I asked, frustration roaring in my mind.
Rose wrinkled her nose and squinted her eyes. “Not really. I think I would have agreed to anything to get you away from there.”
I sighed. Some pathetic part of me wanted to relish in the fact that she was willing to cross any line for me, but that was the sickness because if I truly loved her, I would have only wanted her safe.
“How do you think this ends?” I asked.
My heart stuttered as she tilted her head upwards, stepping a little closer to me with the next twirl of her body, red skirts spread out like a fan of fire. She was incredible, and all of this was like some twisted dream I’d concocted. I was probably still in Newgate, dehydrated and slowly dying to the point of hallucination. The only flaw in that theory was that I wouldn’t have been somewhere with so many watchful eyes.
“Well, right now my family is circulating and feeding the gossip with the truth that I never renewed my engagement with James,” she said. “Oscar will already be informing everyone that he met you in Paris, and as such, our paths have crossed a few times.”
I wanted to appreciate her well-thought-out plan, which was, all in all, clever, but it had one glaring flaw.
“You cannot be associated with me,” I said.
She made a show of looking at our entwined hands and the distance between us.
