Page 36 of Secrets of the Heart

Rachel glared at him. “I am not sure what you are implying, but I find you most impertinent.”

“No doubt you will find me more so. I want to know why you asked me if I sometimes work with the Bow Street Runners. Did someone tell you Westhampton did?”

Rachel stared back at him defiantly for a long moment, but then she shrugged and nodded. “Yes. A—a friend of mine. He said that Lord Arbuthnot had told him that Michael had helped Bow Street with their investigations.”

“Arbuthnot! How the devil would he know about it?”

“I don’t know. Anthony just said that Arbuthnot told him something about someone’s jewels being recovered. Godfrey, did he say?”

Beside her, Hobson went very still. “Who said this about Arbuthnot?”

“My friend. The man who came to ask me for help.”

“What is his name?” His voice was clipped and hard as stone, his eyes glittering coldly. “Anthony who?”

Rachel raised her brows at his tone. “Birkshaw, but I hardly see that that is any of your business.”

“I don’t know,” he said roughly. “Maybe he’d like to hire me sometime, him or his friends. I’m always interested in more business from the toffs.”

“Perhaps.” Rachel had no intention of revealing anything about this man to Anthony; she was not about to reveal Michael’s family secrets to anyone. She quickly steered the conversation away, saying, “I didn’t see how it could be Michael he was talking about. But he seemed so certain of it….” Rachel remembered the anxiety that had gripped her when she realized that she knew even less about her husband than she had thought. It was an enormous relief, she realized now, to have learned that none of those things were true, after all.

“No. It could hardly have been Westhampton. He is much too stodgy and dull to do anything like that.”

“He is not stodgy and dull!” Rachel protested. “He is a very intelligent and interesting man.”

“Oh, yes, I can tell that you are simply fascinated by him,” Hobson prodded in a gravelly voice, his lips curving up on one side into an irritating smirk. “So fascinated that you cannot bear to live in the same house with him.”

“That is not true! I told you, he prefers the country, and I—”

“You prefer the city,” he finished for her. “Doubtless because your ‘friend’ is here.”

Rachel scowled at him. She did not like the way he looked at her; it was far too bold, not as a gentleman would look at her at all. And the mocking way he spoke to her was highly annoying, as if he knew some wicked secret about her.

“Why do you say it that way? What do you mean? It is rude. You are rude.”

“Aye, so I’ve been told. What should I have said instead of ‘friend’? Would you like it better if I called him your lover?”

Rachel gasped, shocked by his words. “What! How dare you say something like that?”

“I’m a man for plain-speakin’ myself. It’s hardly a surprise—of course you would take a lover, as your husband clearly doesn’t suit you. Poor sniveling bastard, he’s the perfect cuckold—”

He broke off in surprise as Rachel’s hand lashed out and slapped him hard against the cheek. The slap surprised her almost as much as it did him, and for a long moment they stared at each other. His eyes were bright and glittering, even in the dim light, his mouth drawn into a tight line.

Slowly, not taking his eyes from her, he stretched out his hand and wrapped it around her wrist. Rachel’s eyes widened, and just as she opened her mouth to protest his further impertinence, he jerked her across the seat so that she slammed into his side. She let out a shocked breath as his arms went tight around her. He bent and seized her mouth in a long, bruising kiss.

Rachel’s hands went instinctively up to his chest, but she did not push him away. She could not. She felt as if all her bones had suddenly turned into jelly. Heat shimmered through her, and a yearning like nothing she had ever felt before opened like a flower inside her. She shivered, her hands curling into themselves, lying limply against his chest. For a long moment she was able to do nothing, say nothing, merely drink in his kiss like nectar.

His lips dug into hers, and a small moan escaped him. Then, as if the sound had snapped him back into awareness, he stopped as abruptly as he had begun. He raised his head and stared down into her face, his eyes wide and intense, dark with hunger. Moving a little jerkily, his arms slid away from her, and he moved back until he came up against the side of the carriage. Their eyes were still locked on each other. Rachel could not look away. She was lucky to be able to breathe, she thought, given how scattered and strange she felt.

She raised a shaky hand to her mouth, the realization of what she had done sinking in on her. She had kissed this man! This rude, uncouth, bizarre twin of her husband. And she had felt a kind of glorious, intense pleasure she had never before experienced.

Rachel let out a choked cry and whirled away. Sticking her head out the window, she cried to the driver to stop. Behind her, she heard James say, “No! Wait—”

He reached for her, but she jerked away, flinging open the door of the hansom. The driver was pulling to a halt as she had directed him, and she stepped out before he was even quite stopped, evading Hobson’s hand again.

She heard him curse and lurch toward the door, but she did not glance back at him, just clung to the bar on the carriage beside the door as she scrambled down the step and onto the ground. She stumbled slightly, but caught herself. She hurried across the street to the sidewalk, glancing around her. She saw that she was only a few blocks from her house, back once more on familiar ground, and she started up the street, not turning to look back at the hansom.

Behind her, the man watched Rachel hustle across the street and up the sidewalk, his hand grasping the side of the door, though whether to keep himself inside or propel his body out of the vehicle after her, he wasn’t quite sure. Taut and teeming with hot emotions, he watched her walk away.