And whenever she was alone in her room, fear began to crowd her once again.
Her other option for financial salvation (albeit by way of a salacious offer) had taken a little table along the wall. He was once again in her line of vision.
He’d brought a few half sheets of foolscap and a pot of ink and a quill into the room with him.
She noted with undue fascination how he gripped his quill tightly and wrote at a deliberate, careful pace, his brow furrowed in concentration.
Have you ever eaten a rat?When she imagined the frightened, starving boy he’d once been, her breath went short. How and when had he learned to read and write? How had he acquired an entirebuilding? Not to mention employees and a fortune?
His very survival struck her as a miracle worthy of a myth. He might as well be a demigod.
He looked up abruptly, intercepting her gaze just as she was thinking this.
You never take them off me, he’d said about her eyes after they’d both departed the Earl of Sydenham’s house.
He’d known she’d be looking.
But then, he’d grown up needing to notice everything.
She flushed and dropped her eyes to her hand of cards.
He’d made it very clear how much he noticed about her.
The ways in which he made it plain that he desired her were somehow both elegantly subtle and wholly shocking. It was in the amused smolder in his eyes when he fixed her in his gaze. In the way his eyes lingered on her mouth. It was in the contrast between his polite restraint and solicitousness andthe way he toyed with the elasticity of propriety. He was frank, rather than insinuating. All of it was hopelessly compelling.
None of it bore any resemblance to Francis’s shy, glowing, respectful admiration.
After their misadventure in the park this afternoon, Marchand had sent her back in a hack by herself to the Grand Palace on the Thames.
“I’m off to Lucifer’s Fall, because I have a meeting with Mr. Ogden to negotiate the price for new linens for the tables on the gaming floor,” he’d told her, as he helped her board the hack. When he’d offered his hand to help her up into the carriage, she’d taken it without thinking. “No rest for the wicked.”
He’d smiled at her expression.
“It’s the mundane things that keep the industry of debauchery profitable, Miss Woodville,” he told her, ironically.
It was only when he’d stopped speaking that she noticed she was still gripping his hand as if he were the very thing tethering her to earth.
And he was allowing her to do it.
Little by little, in increments, she’d begun to feel safer with him than without him.That realization had made her tug her hand away as if she’d been burnt.
Expressionlessly, he’d nodded, touched his hat, then closed the hack door.
She flexed her hand absently now, reliving the way it had felt to touch him. Then she flattened it deliberately on the table, as if to punish herself for thinking about him.
Suddenly a familiar tension rippled about the room. Daniel Peck’s arrival was nigh. This time he’d brought an entourage.
Mrs. Peck was leading Daniel by the hand. And trailing them was his nurse, who was carrying something.
Or, rather, a little someone.
The baby!
“Mr. Marchand?” Mrs. Peck said almost shyly.
Mr. Marchand glanced up, surprised. “Good evening, Mrs. Peck.”
“Daniel wanted to show his baby brother to you.”
