“I didn’t know,” she said quietly, “what life might have been like. Because I never knew any different. Not until I met my sisters.”
“And you met them because your mother was extorting your sister?”
“Yes,” she said. “Felicity. She worked as a teacher at a girls’ school in Brighton. Mama thought she could leverage Felicity’srelation to Charity for money. It wasn’t known then, you see, publicly at least, that they were sisters.”
“I don’t understand. Charity is a duchess.”
“Yes, but her marriage was a recent one, and before it she had been a rather infamous courtesan. Reputation is everything in such businesses, you know, and Charity’s was sullied enough to drag Felicity down only by association. It could have ruined the school—which was already mired deeply in debt—if it had become known then. Nobody would have wanted their precious daughters to be educated by a woman so intimately acquainted with a courtesan. The scandal of it has mostly faded with time, and the school is on stable footing once more, but even today there are homes from which Charity is still barred, forever unwelcome on account of her past.” Grace heaved a sigh. “I knew what Mama was plotting, and I helped her,” she said. “I picked the lock of Charity’s flat here in London to rifle through her belongings. I pickpocketed Felicity on the streets of Brighton. I knew they were sisters. I just didn’t know they weremysisters, as well.”
How could she have done, if she had never been told? The youngest of her sisters was a decade her senior at least, and they did not greatly resemble one another. But then, Grace shared only a mother with her sisters, so perhaps it was to be expected.
“How did you discover it?” he asked.
“I overheard Mama talking with her co-conspirator; a brute of a man she had hired to help her frighten Felicity into paying up. It had never occurred to me that I might have a family besides Mama, and I…I wanted so badly to discover if it was true. So when Mama sent me to deliver another of her nasty little notes demanding payment to the school, instead of shoving the note through the mail slot and running off as I was meant to do, I knocked upon the door.”
“You let yourself be caught.”
“Yes. I wanted to know that badly. Of course I was apprehended at once. Ian—Felicity’s husband—had not taken kindly to threats against his wife. He’d hired thief-takers to watch the school and their house. They took me right to him, and locked me in a tiny little room. I was so frightened. I thought I had made the worst mistake of my life. If the theft of a penny bun had earned me a week in jail, how much worse would extortion be? I was certain I was going to be turned over to a magistrate to be transported. Or perhaps hanged.”
“But you weren’t.”
“No,” she said. “They hadn’t known I was involved until then. They had hoped to apprehend Mama, and Ian was furious that I had been caught instead. But he noticed—he noticed that Felicity and I shared the same eyes.”
Green. Vibrant; distinctive. He’d never seen eyes quite like hers. With a sort of depth to them that could suck a man’s soul straight from his body. A fire behind them that made them glitter like emeralds.
“They didn’t know about me, either,” Grace said, “I met all three of my sisters that very night. I told them everything that Mama had plotted, everything she had done, even though I knew it might well seal my own fate. All they knew of me was that I was a thief, that I had done Mama’s bidding and caused them all such worry and pain. I wouldn’t have blamed them if they had sent me to prison. I had earned it, after all. But they didn’t—they embraced me, all of them. They took me in and made me a part of their family.”
What an incredible change of fortunes it must have been for her; a girl who had arrived upon their doorstep with nothing. To go so swiftly from a child whose only relation had been the mother who hardly deserved the honor of the title, to the youngest of four sisters, nestled safely within the bosom of a family so sprawling and affectionate.
In one night, eight years ago, her life had changed entirely. A family gained, which she now cherished beyond imagination. Faith extended to her, of which she had not felt worthy, and a grace given that she had not believed she deserved. And now she extended that same faith, that same grace, to others in need of it, just as she once had been. Like him.
“So you see,” she said softly, her shoulders rolling in a little shrug, “I have always been a thief. It’s in my bones, in the very blood that runs through my veins, for Mama was never anything else, however much she tried to pretend otherwise. Do you think less of me for it, now?”
“No,” he said. “I think you’re remarkable.”
Grace lifted her head from the pillow of her arms, unfolding herself slowly from her wilt over the balustrade. For a long moment she stared at him in mute astonishment, wide-eyed, surprised. That brilliant green gaze searched his face—searched his eyes.
You can always tell from the eyes, she had once told him, and he wondered what she saw in his.
At last she laughed; a lovely sparkling sound. Those sweet lips curled up just at one corner, that darling little dimple shining in her cheek. And she came sailing across the scant space that separated them, into the circle of his arms. “Oh, Henry,” she sighed as she pressed her lips to his, her soft hands framing his face.
Incredible how she had only to touch him like this to make every worry flee from his head as if it had never existed. Beyond belief that she fit so perfectly into his arms as if she had been made to do it. There was a magic in this, in the soft sigh of her breath, in the cool stillness of the night that settled around them. As if the very world had ceased to turn, stretching these few moments out into an eternity made only for them.
Somewhere on the floor below, he was meant to be rejoiningwith the gentlemen for cards and conversation, and she was meant to be rejoining the ladies for similar pursuits. They would be missed, sooner or later, and if Mr. Moore caught them on a secluded balcony absent any sort of suitable chaperone, there would no doubt be hell to pay.
But Henry couldn’t bring himself to care. There was only Grace, and the sweetness of her lips, and her lush little figure tucked into his arms, and the stirring scent of jasmine blooming from her skin.
He could never go back to being just her neighbor, to the mildly-contentious distance that had once characterized their relationship with one another. There was norecoveringfrom Grace. She was in his blood, now, every bit as much as she’d claimed thievery was in hers.
Perhaps she had stolen his heart days ago, and he’d only just now noticed it gone.
Hell. “Grace,” he murmured against her lips, and—
A giggle split the silence. The sound of feet scampering across marble. A masculineshushing sound. A moment later a young couple skittered out onto the balcony, stealing a kiss as they scurried out into the night together. So caught up in one another they hadn’t noticed they had an audience.
Grace turned her head toward the doors, and her brows leapt toward her hairline as she spotted them. “Danny?” she asked.
The young couple froze. The man lifted his head—the same man with whom he’d seen Grace speaking at a ball, once. The one she’d claimed was desperately in love with another woman—Lady Hannah Gillingham, if he recalled correctly.
