Savage Nights (The Savage Trilogy #2) (17 page)

Perhaps he really believed that I wasn’t his prisoner or that I’d willingly given him my liberty along with my heart and my soul.

I sighed, a deep, shuddering sigh that made the last of my frustration flutter from my chest.

“I cannot possibly dine at Gaspari’s,” I said in a small voice, wishing I didn’t sound quite so petulant. “All I have to wear is my riding habit.”

He smiled slowly, more relieved than I’d expected. Could he have feared that I was leaving, much as I’d feared he wanted me to do so?

“I’d anticipated you might say that,” he said, “and therefore I’ve sent for your own maid to bring you the proper clothes from the Savoy, and to dress you here.”

“You sent for Hamlin?” I asked, surprised.

“If that is your maid’s name, then yes,” he said carefully, as if wanting to not say the wrong thing. “I trust she can bring you a choice of dresses.”

“Of course she can,” I murmured. It wasn’t Hamlin’s choices that concerned me. As my lady’s maid she knew my tastes, and she’d know what was appropriate for Gaspari’s. I didn’t doubt that she’d bring me not only the perfect gown but also the necessary shoes, stockings, undergarments, and jewels.

But I found the fact that Savage had sent for Hamlin to be thoughtful and generous in ways that touched me deeply. He could have just as easily expected me to be assisted by one of his own servants, yet instead he’d chosen the course that would please me the most, rather than what was easiest for him.

Far more important, it proved that he really had intended to dine with me all along, rather than send me away. He hadn’t tired of me.

I was the one who’d misunderstood, and the realization humbled me.

“I’m sorry,” I said softly, simply. “I was wrong, and now I’m sorry.”

He smiled wryly. “I’ll bet you don’t say that very often.”

“I don’t,” I admitted. “Or rather, Mrs. Hart doesn’t.”

“Ah, well, neither does His Lordship,” he said lightly.

I smiled, too. “I’ll bet you don’t.”

“No,” he said. “Though perhaps I should.”

His smile faded, his gaze so intense that he was nearly frowning.

“I’d never want you to leave, Evelyn,” he said. “But there are things that I cannot explain at present—things that are better for you not to know—that may have led me to use the wrong words earlier.”

I nodded, accepting, but he shook his head, refusing my acceptance until he’d finished.

“You and I are two of a kind, aren’t we?” he said. “We say things, do things, in the heat of passion that later become regrettable.”

“That’s why I understand,” I said. I’d often thought myself that we’d much in common, but to hear him call us two of a kind was almost sweet.

“Understanding does not excuse me,” he said firmly. “Please, Evelyn, forgive me if I said the wrong things.”

“Forgiven,” I said softly. “Completely.”

He was still holding me by my wrists, and slowly I bent my head to kiss his hands. His grip relaxed, and I slipped free and into his embrace. He folded his arms across my back as I pressed my face against his shoulder. The soft wool of his jersey pressed against my cheek, and beneath it I could hear the steady, reassuring beat of his heart.

My wrists stung as the blood raced back into my hands, but I didn’t care, just as I told myself I didn’t care about those mysterious things he didn’t wish me to know. If I was meant to know them, I was sure he would share them in time. I’d trust him. We were two of a kind, weren’t we?

For now, this was where I was wanted, where I was safe, and where I’d stay. For now, this was where I belonged.

With this man.

*   *   *

I heard Hamlin arrive long before I saw her, briskly berating the hapless footmen who were bringing my things upstairs to the rooms across the hall from Savage’s. She was not herself a large woman, but she’d a sizable presence among other servants, a useful gift for a lady’s maid.

“Listen to that,” Savage marveled. Despite his earlier refusal, we’d ended up again here in bed together, relishing each other’s company. He was reading the evening paper with one arm draped over my waist, while I had been dozing against him with my head pillowed against his arm. We were naked, of course, and while we had agreed that it was most likely time to rise and dress for dinner, that agreement was as far as we’d gotten. It was cozy and companionable, and I was loathe to leave either Savage or his bed.

“I’m assuming that is your maid,” he continued when I didn’t reply. “Should you go supervise?”

“In time.” I rolled over on my back and sighed, listening to Hamlin launch into another tirade about the cost of carelessness to Mrs. Hart’s things. That two rooms and several closed doors separated me from her seemed not to matter; I could still make out every word of her tart Boston accent.

“I wouldn’t have invited her here if I’d known she was such a tartar,” Savage said. “My staff may never recover.”

“Hamlin’s protective of me, that is all,” I said, finally sitting upright with my arms looped around my bent knees. “She has been with me since before I married, and I suppose I shall always be her ‘poor, motherless lass.’”

“I can be protective of you, too.” He tossed the paper from the bed to the floor and ran his hand slowly and appreciatively down my bare back. “Nor will I make as much of a racket about it.”

I arched my back, letting myself bask in his touch.

“We could dine here,” I suggested, which sounded like a much more appealing prospect. “Gaspari’s will go on without our presence.”

“No, we must go,” he said, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. He sighed and tossed me the blue robe. “Go dress. Don’t keep that fearsome maid of yours waiting any longer.”

I sighed, too, as I slipped the robe over my shoulders and headed for the doorway, silk billowing behind me.

“Wait.”

I’d barely turned before he was kissing me again, as hungrily as if we’d been apart days, not minutes. He shoved aside the robe and his hand found the curve of my waist, sliding impatiently around to cup and caress my buttock, his fingers tensing and relaxing into my flesh. He stepped into me and pulled me close against his lean, hard, naked body as my open robe fluttered around us.

“Just watching you walk is enough to drive me mad, Eve,” he said when we finally separated. “I don’t want to let you go even for the time it takes you to dress.”

“I don’t have to go,” I said breathlessly. “We needn’t go out.”

“No, we do,” he said, his reluctance inexplicably clear. “It’s better this way. Go dress, and return to me as soon as you can.”

He kissed my forehead, a tender little mark of endearment before I left him to Barry, who was doubtless hovering in wait in Savage’s dressing room just as Hamlin was doing for me.

Dutifully I tied the sash around the robe and headed across the hall. I couldn’t fathom why he remained so determined on this dinner at Gaspari’s. His reason earlier—that he wished to show me off—seemed forced and unnecessary. We could just as easily have gone on another night or perhaps ridden in the park again tomorrow and achieved the same thing.

I was still searching for an answer as I opened the door to the bedroom that was ostensibly mine. Hamlin was busily laying out clothes across the bed, and she turned swiftly and ducked a curtsey as I entered.

“Good afternoon, ma’am,” she said, her flinty eyes narrowing a judgmental fraction as she took instant note of how, at that hour, I wore nothing more than a man’s robe. “I’ve brought you things, as was requested.”

She pointedly omitted who had done the requesting, and I realized that whatever misgivings I’d had about her being here in Savage’s house didn’t even come close to the disapproval she was now exuding. True, she was the lady’s maid and I was her mistress, but Hamlin had been with me so long that she’d earned—or, more rightly, claimed—a certain frankness with me that no other servants possessed. I’d told Savage that she was protective of me, but it went further than that. She often treated me like a spinster aunt with a favorite niece, and like that aunt she wasn’t afraid to scold me if she thought I needed it, too.

“Thank you, Hamlin,” I said briskly, striving not to give her an opening. “I have an hour before I’m to leave for dinner with His Lordship. Which dresses did you bring?”

“I’ve arranged them for your choosing on the bed, ma’am,” Hamlin said, stepping to one side. “Since you didn’t say which you wanted, I brought several suitable for dinner.”

She had indeed. There were at least a dozen dresses laid carefully across the bed, a froth of silk, ruffles, lace, and beading, with one of my traveling trunks yawning empty to one side. They were all from the finest houses—Worth, Poiret, Doucet—but they were also all more suited to what I’d worn at home in New York as a respectable widow rather than what I wished to wear now. The sea of pale colors, demure grays and mauves, and cream-colored lace was elegantly genteel but hardly the thing to tempt the eye of a gentleman like Savage at a stylish restaurant like Gaspari’s.

Which, I suspected, was exactly what Hamlin had had in mind when she’d made her selections.

Disconsolate, I halfheartedly sifted through the dresses. I’d have to choose one of them. The minutes were passing by, and I didn’t want to keep Savage waiting.

Then, buried beneath the other dresses, I found the one I’d hoped was there: golden-yellow silk with an overlay of black lace, close-fitting and cut low in front and in back, with small wisps of sleeves that barely clung to my shoulders. It was new, and I’d yet to wear it. Tonight would be perfect.

“This one, Hamlin,” I said triumphantly.

“Yes, ma’am.” Hamlin pursed her lips, and I wondered if she’d brought the yellow dress by accident. “Shall we begin with your hair?”

“Yes, yes,” I said, hurrying to sit at the bench before the dressing table. “I haven’t done anything to it since yesterday, and it’s quite the rat’s nest by now.”

At once Hamlin pulled my haphazard braid apart and began to drag my silver hairbrush down the length of my hair. Usually this was my favorite part of dressing, the comforting rhythm of the brush smoothing the tangles and unevenness from my hair, as if all the cares and worries of my day could be as easily brushed away, too. Seeking that solace, I closed my eyes and relaxed.

But this time instead of peace, my thoughts restlessly returned to Savage and whatever it was he did not wish for me to know. I knew it was not my affair, but there was something about the way he’d phrased it—
things that are better for you not to know
—that troubled me. He had every appearance of being a wealthy, powerful man with a title and property to insulate him, and yet I couldn’t help but wonder if he was being threatened by secret danger.

Was that what he meant about protecting me?

My father had wanted to keep me safe, too, but he had done it with iron gates around our houses and armed Pinkerton men on our train. How could Savage mean to accomplish the same by taking me to a fashionable and very public restaurant instead of keeping me within his house? How could that be a safer place?

Unless the danger lay within this house, instead of outside of it.…

“That’s not your robe, ma’am,” Hamlin said, cutting into my uneasy thoughts. “I’d know it if it were. It’s a gentleman’s robe, not yours.”

I took a deep breath that was more of a sigh and opened my eyes. So much for reveries.

“The robe belongs to Lord Savage,” I said, trying to state a fact and not sound defensive—which of course I already was. “He was kind enough to make a loan of it to me while I am his guest.”

“His
guest,
ma’am.” Hamlin clucked her tongue. “No respectable unmarried lady is the guest of an unmarried gentleman, not in America, not in England.”

“Hamlin, you forget yourself,” I said as sharply as I could—which was nothing to Hamlin, now that she’d begun.

“What would your poor father say to that, ma’am?” she asked. “What would Mr. Hart himself say?”

“They’d say that you were speaking out of turn, Hamlin,” I said. “You are fortunate that neither of them is alive to hear you address me like this.”

“Oh, they’re the fortunate ones,” Hamlin said, undeterred. She began to pin my hair up, jabbing each hairpin into place for emphasis. “Being dead and buried, so they don’t have to see the shame you’re bringing on your self with this lord!”

“He is an earl, Hamlin, a peer of the realm,” I said, “and deserving your regard.”

“And I’m from Boston, America, where we don’t have much use for earls and realms and such.” She sniffed disdainfully, twisting my hair. “Where I’m from, ma’am, we haven’t forgotten 1776 and what Paul Revere and John Adams and all those other brave lads did to toss that English king where he belonged, him and his tea, too.”

Any other time I might have laughed at her version of American history, but now I was too agitated to find anything amusing in it.

“I do not require a history lesson from you, Hamlin,” I snapped, “nor do I have any wish to hear your opinions on my private affairs.”

“But they’re not private any longer, ma’am, are they?” asked Hamlin as she pinned my favorite diamond star into my dark waves. “You haven’t been discreet, ma’am. Every servant in the Savoy is whispering about what you and Lord Savage are doing together, and if waiters and chambermaids are talking, you know their betters are, too.”

I sighed and turned around on the bench to face her.

“That defines backstairs gossip, Hamlin,” I said sternly. “It’s exactly how the most malicious tales and falsehoods are spread, whispered from one to another. Where are my underthings?”

“Here, ma’am,” she said, and in uneasy silence we fell into our shared ritual of dressing me: drawers, chemise, petticoats, corset, corset cover, garters, and stockings, each to be pulled up or smoothed down, tied and hooked and buttoned into place.

All the layers made me feel like the weight of respectability was once again settling over my body, too, constricting me back into its expectations, and drawing me apart from Savage.

Finally came the yellow silk gown, falling over my head and body with a soft
whoosh
. At least that was as light as a rose petal, and when I looked at my reflection in the standing mirror I had to be pleased. The brilliant color would draw every eye, and the black lace made my skin even more fair by comparison. After days of going without a corset, it was oddly satisfying to wear one again, like returning to an old friend, and I reveled in the familiar way it narrowed my waist and plumped my breasts. Over my gown I’d wear a black velvet evening cloak embroided with glittering jet beads, the better to frame the brilliant yellow of my gown.