The Revenge of Lord Eberlin (27 page)

Her cheeks bloomed. “Please do not dismiss him, Tobin. He has two young children.”

“I have no desire to dismiss Ranulf. He’s too good a footman to be let go for that. And apparently a loyal one, too.”

Lily’s brows dipped into a dubious frown. “That’s all you will say?”

“Not all. I warn you that if I find he is still spying after today, I will remove him and make certain he cannot find work in West Sussex.”

Lily returned his gaze just as intently. “Fair warning.”

Tobin smiled fondly and held out the bundle. “For you.”

She glanced at it as if it were a snake. “What is it?”

He put it on the desk.

Lily continued to eye it warily as she untied the string. She moved the paper aside and her frown deepened. She carefully touched the gown, felt the satin
trim. “Why did you bring it back?” she asked, her voice full of resignation. “I cannot wear it.” She removed her hand from the garment and moved away.

Her pronouncement was met with a painful little twinge in Tobin’s heart. “Why not?”

Lily snorted. “Is it not apparent, even to a man like you?”

A man like him …
There it was, the painful twinge again. “Nothing is apparent to me.”

“Really, Tobin,” she said, as if she was exasperated. “How many ways can you humiliate me?”

The word confused him. How could she think a gift was designed to humiliate? “That was not my intent.”

“Then what, pray tell, was your intent? To suggest to the world that I am a kept woman?”

“Pardon?” He suddenly felt hot. And dishonorable. He was so foolish. He should have understood how this gift might be perceived, how she would perceive it. But had he not spent his adult life keeping women at arm’s length, treating them each as his
fille de joie
and lavishing them with gifts instead of affection? He cleared his throat; gripped his hand into a fist. “That was not my intent,” he repeated roughly, and struggled to swallow. “I saw this gown in London and I thought it would look particularly lovely on you. That was my only thought, Lily. I did not think how it would . . . look,” he said tightly.

Lily’s cool gaze faded and she looked at him closely. “Tobin? What is wrong?”

He coughed and moved away, looking to the windows. “I am naturally displeased that you would construe this gift in that way, but perhaps I . . . I should have realized how it would be perceived.” Her touch on his arm startled him. He flinched and tried to move away, but Lily was peering up at him.

“You look unwell. Would you like some water?”

“I am perfectly fine.” Her eyes were filled with concern. He swallowed again and wished desperately that she would back away. “I regret the misunderstanding,” he said and gestured lamely to the gown. “Do with it what you will, but I have no use for it.” He stepped away from her and Lily’s hand fell to her side.

“Thank you.” But she was still staring at him curiously. “It’s my fault as well,” she said and looked down. “I thought I could play this game of yours.” She fluttered her fingers. “This game of seduction and ruination. I thought I could win, but I have discovered that I haven’t the stomach for it. I want more from my life than to be taken in by you, Tobin.”

Tobin could feel a gulf opening in the mud inside him. He supposed he should have been offended, but what he really wanted to know was what she
did
want from life. He suddenly had a burning desire to know, but before he could force the words from his frozen throat, before he could lift his arm to reach for her, she’d turned back to her desk.

“I have news,” she said lightly as she moved the gown to the corner of the desk and sifted through
some papers. “I reviewed the Ashwood ledgers as you suggested, and I found mention of a man named Walter Minglecroft.”

Tobin clenched and unclenched his fist, willing his body to return to its natural state. “Who is he?”

“I do not know,” Lily said. She picked up a ledger and held it out to him. “But the earl paid him handsomely.”

Tobin opened the ledger to the marked pages.

“Mr. Fish said he supposed that the earl had bought art or something like it from the gentleman.”

Tobin looked at the entries. “That’s because Mr. Fish is not the sort of man to frequent gaming hells. These look to me as if they could be gambling debts.”

Lily sagged a little. “Of course.” She looked defeated.

“I would think you would be pleased not to discover any evidence of wrongdoing,” Tobin said as he closed the ledger and put it aside.

“I wish I had discovered the truth there, written in black and white. Something happened here, Tobin, and I feel helpless to know how to discover it. There are rumors that my aunt was murdered. Or that she drowned herself. And really, where is the earl?” Lily asked. “Earls do not simply disappear, do they?”

“Lily, this is not worth your distress—”

“It is worth every
bit
of my distress,” she said sharply. “I may very well have set wheels in motion that destroyed the lives of so many!”

Tobin felt as if he’d managed to open Pandora’s box
and now couldn’t put all the ills back into it. “Please do not burden yourself so.”

Lily sat on the chair at her desk. She reached into the pocket of her gown, withdrew a yellowed vellum, and handed it to him. “I found several letters like this one. It is from my aunt Lenore. She is the one who took me in when I was sent away from England.”

Tobin opened the vellum and skimmed the salutations.
We have lost yet another governess,
the author had written.

The poor dear explained to my husband that while she was fond of the children, she found the twins quite unteachable. She was driven to that unkind characterization after they filled her boots with mud.

Darling Al, I have thought quite hard about your last letter. It has left me at sixes and sevens, for I cannot bear knowing you are so astoundingly unhappy. It is terribly unfair that he should deny you simple pleasures while seeking his quite openly and without conscience. I have written Margaret and asked her to come to you straightaway, but she writes that her cough has returned …

There was more about another sister, Tobin gathered, and a growing concern as to the state of that one’s health. When he’d finished, he folded the letter and handed it to Lily.

She gave him an earnest look. “What does it mean?”

“What?”

“This,” she said and opened the vellum, reading, “‘
He would deny you simple pleasures while seeking his quite openly and without conscience.
’ What precisely does that mean?”

Tobin looked at his hand again and imagined her fingers touching his. “I think you know very well what it means.”

“I can speculate, but I do not truly understand it,” she insisted.

“It means,” Tobin said as he walked to the sideboard and helped himself to the decanter of whiskey and a glass, “that your aunt’s husband likely had a mistress.”

“But openly, and without conscience?” she asked, staring at the letter. “Do all men take a mistress without conscience? Is that the nature of marriage, that everyone must have an illicit affair?”

Tobin downed the whiskey. “Many men do, and many do not. I don’t know why you fret so. It’s hardly as if marriages among the Quality are love matches.”

“How cynical,” Lily said. “Does no one marry for love?” she asked plaintively. “Does no one desire to share a life and make a family? I cannot imagine a happier existence, yet I can count on one hand the marriages I know to be full of love and shared dreams and hopes. How many women live like my aunt must have lived, married to a selfish man who would take his pleasure openly and deny hers, without conscience?”

Tobin’s father had been involved in an illicit affair with her aunt while his mother had remained at home with him and his siblings, waiting patiently for him to return from Ashwood. How many ways had his mother been made to suffer? Tobin felt a rumbling in the darkness. He stared into the amber liquid in his glass. “Is that what you want from life? Love and marriage?”

Lily drew a deep breath, then vaulted up from her seat and began to pace. “I have never wanted for anything more than a family I could call my own. I only vaguely remember my parents’ passing, but I remember quite clearly the desire to
have
parents, to belong somewhere.” She briefly closed her eyes. “I thought that I might have it here,” she said, opening her eyes. “I did not want to come back, I did
not,
what with all that had happened here. But as I became accustomed to the idea that this was indeed my destiny, I allowed myself the fantasy that perhaps I might find my dream here. That perhaps I would meet a gentleman who would love me, and our children, and I would live in this peaceful setting until I died.

“But there has never been happiness here. There has been no history of love in this house.” She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead as if it pained her. “I am a fool.”

“Lily,” Tobin said and touched her arm.

The touch seemed to ignite her; she suddenly whirled about and grabbed his hand. “Come.”

“Wha—”

But Lily was moving, tugging at his arm. He scarcely managed to put the tot of whiskey aside as she pulled him out of the room.

In the corridor, she linked her arm in his and walked purposefully, her head down. They rounded a corner, went up his father’s staircase, down the corridor, until Lily stopped before a door and opened it. She strode inside. When he didn’t follow at once, she took his hand again, dragging him inside.

They were in the music room. Tobin recalled it now, for he had been here the day the pianoforte had been delivered. The countess had been beaming with delight, and she had taken Lily’s hands and danced around in a circle as he and his father had stood to one side, watching. His father had been laughing, enjoying their delight, almost as if he were responsible for it.

Had
his father been responsible for the countess’s delight that day?

Lily let go his hand and went down on her knees beside the piano stool, moving to turn it over. Tobin caught it and turned it over for her.

“Look,” she said.

He recoiled from it, feeling the swell of discomfort beginning to thicken in his throat.

But Lily tugged him down to one knee and pointed to the inscription:
You are the song that plays on in my
heart; for A, my love, my life, my heart’s only note. Yours for eternity, JS.

“What of it?” He tried to stand, but she held him there.

“
That
is what I want, Tobin. I want a love like they must have had—”

“And destroy another’s happiness in the bargain?” he asked sharply. “You put romance into their affair—”

“It
was
a romance.”

“Lily, for God’s sake. If that were true, if she truly loved him, would she not have stepped forward to keep my father from hanging?”

“She loved him, Tobin,” Lily said softly. “But the earl gave her an impossible choice. He threatened to put me in a London orphanage if she spoke out.” Lily told him everything she’d learned from Donnelly.

Tobin was appalled. He knew what London orphanages—essentially, workhouses—were like; Lily would not have survived it. He wondered if his father had known about the choice Lady Ashwood had been forced to make.

“Do you see?” Lily asked.

Tobin shook his head. “What I see, what I
know,
is that their love affair was carried out at the expense of my family and your happiness. Theirs was a selfish affair of the flesh that hurt many innocent people.”

He pulled his hand free and stood up. He would not repaint history to suit her.

“They did hurt many people,” Lily softly agreed, and gained her feet. “But you cannot look at this inscription, you cannot recall the many times we saw them together, and deny that they truly loved each other. Perhaps they were victims of circumstance—we will never know. I only know that I want that sort of love, one that runs so deep that I would face death rather than betray the one I love.”

Tobin would never know what it was that struck him so violently. It seemed almost a waking dream, a snatch of imagery, a sensation unlike anything he’d ever felt. He caught Lily at the same moment she seemed to reach for him, his mouth finding hers, his tongue touching hers.

Tobin kissed her passionately as he tightened his embrace, crushing her to him as if he was afraid she would fly away if he let go. His desire exploded within him, enveloping them. It was as tormenting as it was pleasurable, as heart aching as it was heart-stopping. Tobin was jolted to his core; he could feel the mud in him drying and cracking, and great shafts of light shining through and warming him. Her body seemed to blend into his; she clung to his lips, her hands on his shoulders, her breasts against his chest.

The groan in Tobin’s throat came from somewhere that seemed almost outside of him, a stifled cry of relief and of need. He nipped at her lips, sucking them, his tongue swirling around hers, his hunger and emotions clashing in a storm of desire.

Lily’s response was as heated as his own. She eagerly met his kisses as her hands swept down his arms and up his chest; her fingers tangled in his hair, stroked his cheek, caressed his ear.

Tobin suddenly lifted her off her feet and moved her to a chair. He dipped down to the hollow of her throat.

“I shouldn’t,” she said breathlessly. “I should not . . .”

Tobin took her hand and pressed it against his chest, gazing into her eyes as his heart pounded wildly, hammering to be free. Lily’s eyes widened—it must have felt as if his heart was about to burst—and Tobin forced himself to draw a breath. He brushed the back of his hand across her cheek. “You see what you do to me.”