As the final note trailed to an end, she looked back at her table of London guests.The ladies looked miffed.Likely they had expected her to play the fool, to perform badly and be laughed out of the room—and she no doubt would be the instant she set foot in a Mayfair ballroom now.
Unless she managed to land an exceptionally wealthy, well-heeled husband.
Thorne had returned to his seat, and as the last of the high, shivery notes died away and Gemma stood there catching her breath, the tip jar made its way back to his hands.
Without looking away from her, Thorne reached into a coat pocket embroidered with exotic butterflies and withdrew a leather purse.With two fingers, he plucked out a single gold guinea and carelessly tossed it into the jug on top of the pennies and ha’pennies.
The humiliation was exquisite.Gemma felt her soul shrivel.She was no better than an organ grinder’s monkey, set to dance for the amusement of the crowd.Who applauded sporadically, the air thick with tension.
Thorne stood, attention already wandering.“I believe it’s time to retire.Ladies?”
Crimson heat flooded Gemma’s face and chest then washed away again just as suddenly, leaving her clammy and chilled as the two women rose in a flutter of beribboned silk and followed him toward the stairs.
There was literally nothing in the world Gemma wanted less than to go with them.But she had to.She looked down at her feet, which seemed nailed to the rough-hewn wooden floor of the inn, and forced them to move.
She made her way through the maze of tables and chairs filled with mostly still-silent guests.When she reached the stairs, an itch between her shoulder blades made her look back at Hal, at his granite-hard jaw and thunderous brow, his white knuckles gripping the edge of the bar.
Gemma looked away.It was an extra twist of the thumbscrews to know that Hal had witnessed that little scene, and understood what was happening as clearly as she did.
Contorting her facial muscles into something unruffled took every ounce of control at Gemma’s disposal, but she managed it long enough to escort the Londoners to their rooms, making sure the fire were lit and the beds turned down and everything just so.Long enough to endure the grudging acceptance of the standard of accommodations, the surprise from the ladies at how comfortable the room seemed.Long enough to withstand the cool judgment of the duke as he surveyed the finest chamber in the inn, scoured ruthlessly clean and decorated lavishly with damask curtains and embroidered tapestries and a huge four-poster oak bed hung with watered silk drapes all pilfered from another duke’s home.
Thorne pronounced it “adequate” and shut the door in her face, so Gemma took a shaky breath and went back downstairs.
The place had mostly cleared out while she was tending to her overnight guests.Only a few stragglers remained at their tables, plunking down money to cover their bills and gathering up coats and scarves against the chilly spring night.
Every bone in Gemma’s body felt as though it had been replaced with marble.The muscles she’d strained that morning in the laundry pulled and ached now.Even the soles of her feet hurt.
Across the room, Hal was picking up chairs and upending them on the tables to make it easier to sweep and mop the floor.The casual, one-handed ease with which he lifted the heavy wooden chairs took Gemma’s breath away.
There was something about the way his body moved that spoke of a man who knew his own limits, because he lived in that body and pushed it every day to the edge of what it could achieve.He exuded a leashed power and banked strength that Gemma would have given anything to be able to lean on in this moment.
But she knew she couldn’t.If she betrayed even a moment of doubt, Hal would sense it and he would use it to make her abandon her plans.
So when she moved to the table next to him and picked up a three-legged stool, she did not flinch when Hal took it from her hands and clattered it roughly onto the table with a loud bang.The last of the customers hurried out, tipping his cap at her with a hesitant smile.
Gemma made herself look up at Hal, right into his furious eyes, and smile.
He expelled a noise between a growl and a grunt, then pointed at the stairs leading up to the bedchambers filled with every hope Gemma had for her family’s future.
Every tendon in his forearm stood out under the bronzed skin as he pointed again before turning and grasping the tip jug from the table.
Turning it over, he poured its clinking contents out onto the table into a small pile.The golden guinea shone like a miniature sun on top of the pile.
“That, Gemma?”Hal’s voice was harsh.“That’s what you want to get back to so badly?”
And Gemma looked him right in the face, the face that flooded her dreams and darkened her fantasies and brightened every day since she’d met him, and lied.
“Yes.”
That handsome face twisted for a moment in what almost looked like pain before he ground out, “I thought you were different, but you’re not.You’re just like all the rest of them.Spoiled, shallow, selfish, insincere…”
“I have never claimed to be other than what I am,” Gemma whispered, stung to the quick.
A lightning strike of strong emotion flickered in Hal’s eyes, but he squeezed them shut before she could read it.“You are correct, madam.I am the one who was wrong.About everything.”
Shoving away from the table so swiftly that he knocked a chair onto its side with a clatter, Hal swung around and threw the jug into the fireplace where it shattered into a hundred shards.Gemma flinched; Hal muttered a curse and strode from the inn.
She watched him go with a lump in her throat and a crack in her heart that threatened to widen into a crevice deep enough to lose herself in.
