To Kiss a Thief (3 page)

“Oh, yes. If those kittens don't come soon, she'll not be able to squeeze her way down the street for that belly.”

“Mr. Beals promised one to Clarissa, you know.” Mrs. Potts sounded disapproving.

Sarah smiled. “Yes. I expect he thought she'd forget. Little does he know.”

Mrs. Potts gave a chuckle and resumed fussing over Sarah's dress. “I don't know why you don't leave off wearing these widow's weeds, mum. It's been more'n three years, and this black will show the dirt like anything.”

“A new wardrobe would be an entirely frivolous expense,” Sarah chided.

“What about that trunk o' things molderin' away upstairs, then?”

Sarah flicked her skirts away from Mrs. Potts's fingertips and pretended not to have heard her. “Black suits me. I have it on the best authority.”

“Oh? How's that, then?”

“The twinkle in Mr. Beals's eye whenever I step into his shop,” Sarah teased, breaking off a corner of the currant cake and popping it into her mouth.

Mrs. Potts shook her head. “Beggin' your pardon, mum, but I think it's your tuppence he sees comin', afore the dress.”

“Be that as it may, Mrs. Potts, he's going to sell those divine tea cakes of his at the bazaar next week and he's generously agreed to donate all his profits to the Fishermen's Relief.”

“Humph,” was Mrs. Potts's only reply as she turned to lift the boiling kettle, but Sarah knew the woman was reluctantly impressed. “Oh, Lawks!” The kettle clattered back onto the hob. “I forgot! There's a gentleman to see you, mum.”

Sarah smoothed a distracted hand over the damp hair at her brow. “A gentleman? Did he have a card? Or give his name?”

“No, mum.” Having been born in Haverhythe, Martha Potts had little experience with strangers. She had obviously not thought to ask the man's name, but equally bothersome was his failure to supply it. “He's in the parlor.”

Sarah smiled inwardly at Mrs. Potts's insistence on such a grandiose label for the small cottage's plain sitting room, but curiosity quickly redirected her thoughts. The only strangers who called at Primrose Cottage were those seeking some kind of assistance. Her own means, albeit meager, were still beyond many in the little fishing village. But if Mrs. Potts described him as a gentleman, he was unlikely to be a vagrant begging alms or an itinerant laborer looking for work. “I'll see what he wants,” she said. Three steps took her down the narrow passageway that ran beside the staircase. She stopped in the doorway to the parlor to observe her visitor.

The stranger stood looking out the window toward the sea, his back to her. He was tall and well-dressed, his dark blue riding coat and snug buff breeches hugging broad shoulders and well-muscled legs. Puddles had collected around the soles of his boots, and his greatcoat had been flung unceremoniously—almost proprietarily—over a nearby chair. Mrs. Potts had indeed been most remiss in the duties of a hostess.

Sarah stepped forward. Soft as her footsteps had been, the sound evidently attracted the man's notice. As he turned his head, the fading light struck a momentary sheen of dark gold.

Her vision blurred as the blood rushed from her head to her pounding heart. The handsome, blond-haired gentleman offered a stiff bow. “Ma'am.”

“My lord,” Sarah whispered. She curtsied automatically, though a moment's reflection would have forestalled the gesture. As she felt her knees bend, she very much feared she was going to go right on sinking to the floor.

She had no desire to display such weakness to the man who stood before her.

St. John Sutliffe, Viscount Fairfax.

Her husband.

S
t. John had no intention of allowing emotion to color his handling of this situation, but he could not entirely deny the little stab of pleasure he felt at seeing the extent to which three years in the back of beyond had humbled his false-hearted wife.

He stood motionless as she scrambled to her feet unaided. She looked older, of course, and she was. Twenty-one? No, twenty-two. Her jaw had gained a certain firmness. And did her wretched black dress impart that color to her eyes, or had he simply not known them capable of such steeliness?

“What are you doing here?” she whispered fiercely, as if afraid of being overheard.

St. John felt certain that her shock at seeing him was genuine. He had traveled alone and with all possible speed so that no one could have warned her of his approach or given her time to escape. “I would ask you the same, but I believe I had enough of the story to know what your answer will be.”

Sarah's chin lifted defiantly. “Oh? And what—”

The door swung inward, cutting her short. A woman well past the middle years of life, dressed in a serviceable gown and wearing a plain cap, entered bearing a tea tray.

“I thought I'd just leave this and step out to Mrs. Thomas's, mum.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Potts,” Sarah replied. He marveled at the speed with which she could assume at least the appearance of calm.

The woman laid the tray on a low table in front of the window and went out, closing the door behind her.

Sarah took refuge behind the tea table, perching on the edge of one of the two worn but comfortable chairs that flanked it. With deliberate motions, she began to arrange cups and saucers. “Tea, my lord?”

“ ‘My lord'?” he echoed, unwillingly recalling the note of desperation in her voice the last time she had addressed him so. “A wife may use her husband's given name when they are private, Sarah.”

She flinched, but whether at the sound of her name on his lips or at the hardness of his voice when he said it, he could not hazard a guess. “A
wife
may, yes, but I am not certain what manner of relation I bear to you now, my lord.”

St. John took one long stride toward the tea table. “What manner of relation? Are you not my wife?”

“I understood from Lady Estley that your father would arrange to have our marriage dissolved—annulled.”

“Annulled?” He slapped one hand onto the table, rattling the teacups in their saucers. He rested the other on the back of her chair and leaned toward her, so that he was close enough to see her hands trembling in her lap. She did not raise her eyes. “Though our honeymoon was brief, I assure you there are no grounds for an annulment, Lady Fairfax.”

His murmured words found their mark, dislodging some intimate memory that passed through her with a shudder. Revulsion? Fear? He watched a flush as it fanned along her cheeks and down her throat, saw her breasts rise and fall as she drew a steadying breath. Then, much to his surprise, she turned and faced him, her eyes just inches from his own. “A divorce, then. But please, do not call me that.”

“You have cast aside my title?”

“I have cast aside everything—
everything
,” she insisted, her voice cracking with intensity. “No one in Haverhythe has heard me addressed in such a way, and I would prefer to keep it that way.”

“I see.” He pushed himself away, having intended to discomfit her with his proximity and having been disquieted by hers instead. “But a divorce would have required proof of your infidelity, you know,” he remarked, flinging himself into the chair opposite.

It would also require an Act of Parliament and thus his father's assistance, which he could not think he was likely to get and for which he had no desire to ask in any case. Divorces were messy, public, expensive things, just the sort of scandal his father would want to avoid.

But then, his father had gotten him into this fix . . .

Sarah resumed her study of the teacups. “What proof there was, you had,” she said quietly.

He had expected her to proclaim her innocence. What reply could be made to the answer she had given? He watched her pour with a none-too-steady hand and then lift the tongs to drop three lumps of sugar into his cup, as if she remembered that he liked his tea sweet.

“In any case, your demise seemed to render such a step unnecessary,” he observed as she handed over the saucer. No doubt a faked death had been part of Sarah's plan from the beginning, the better to escape with the gems.

But she did not blush at that reminder of her duplicity. Instead she paled and cut a sharp glance toward the bay. “My . . .
demise
? Yes, I suppose it would have.” After a moment, she turned back to the table and closed her hand around a knife. “Bread and butter?” she asked, as calmly as if they were discussing the weather. “Or”—her hand hovered over the tray—“or currant cake?”

“No, thank you,” he said, fighting the sardonic smile that had risen to his lips.

“Something amuses you?”

He took a sip of the scalding tea in an attempt to drive down the uneasy laughter that was rising in his chest. “I confess I find this charming domestic scene a bit at odds with our situation,” he said with a nod toward the knife.

But Sarah did not seem to find any humor in it. She paused in the act of slicing the cake and laid the knife aside. “May I ask again why you've come? And why now? Only Lady Estley could have told you where I was, and I would very much like to hear the story that has brought you here after all these years.”

“Very well,” he said, placing his cup and saucer on the table and leaning toward her. “She told me that you came to her in the night after the ball and professed yourself in love with Captain Brice. You admitted to having the Sutliffe sapphires, but refused to reveal their whereabouts unless she helped you disappear. A few days after you ran away, a body was dragged from the Thames and identified, quite conveniently, as yours. Death by drowning. No more questions.” He watched her profile, the delicate turn of her jaw, as he spoke; her gaze was once again fixed beyond the window, somewhere far out to sea. “And although Mama had done just as you asked, you kept the necklace and have been using it to extort money from her, money on which you have been living ever since.”

A mantel clock ticked loudly in the silence. He could hear greetings called from nearby cottages as fishermen returned home. Beneath it all rumbled the steady sigh of the waves against the shore.

“I see,” she said at last.

“You do not deny it?” he pressed.

The light was fading and no lamp had been lit. When she turned to face him again, her expression was unfathomable. “Would it matter if I did, my lord?” She began to gather the tea things and stack them carefully on the tray. “But you still have not told me why you waited more than three years to seek me out.”

He debated whether to tell her where he had been and what he had been doing since she had seen him last, but he could not think it any concern of hers. “A happy accident, one might say. Just two days ago, I found a record of Mama's last payment to you. She was reluctant to explain what it meant, but I persuaded her that no good could come of keeping secrets.”

“I see.”

When she rose, he stood, too, out of habit. As if her hands were not quite steady, the cups on the tea tray chattered in their saucers, and she paused to collect herself before leaving the room. Making no move to help her, St. John listened to her footsteps as she walked down the hallway and into the kitchen. He heard a rattle, and in a moment she returned with a lamp, driving the darkness into the corners of the room. “This room is rarely used,” she said, as if to explain the lack of comforts. She crossed to place the lamp on the mantel, where a mottled mirror doubled its light. “We usually pass our evenings in the kitchen, to save a fire.”

She settled into the chair she had vacated, arranging her skirts about her with precise movements of her slender hands. He half-expected her to take up some bit of needlework. But her ladylike composure was almost certainly put on. How could it be otherwise?

“And what do you intend to do now?” she asked, her voice as calm and deliberate as her actions.

“Now? Why, I intend to take you back to London, of course, and settle this matter once and for all.”

She gave an enigmatic half smile. “Oh, I think not. I do not choose to leave.”

“Do you think I wait upon your choice, madam?” he asked, taking a step toward her and inwardly cursing as he did so. How could he allow himself to be rattled by a woman who meant nothing to him?

“I think you will find that if you attempt to remove me from Haverhythe without my consent, I have friends here who will . . . put themselves in your way, shall we say.”

“They may try,” St. John shot back, more sobered by her quiet threat than he cared to admit, and suddenly regretting his decision to go haring off to Devonshire alone. He had seen enough of the local fishermen to know it would be folly to test them.

Not half an hour past, he had been standing by the empty fireplace, cold and wet and impatient, entertaining thoughts of carting off his guilty wife, bound hand and foot.

If that particular dark fantasy was to be denied him for the moment, he would have to come up with another way of getting what he wanted.

“Very well, then,” he began again, crossing to her. “I will stay here.” What better way to discover everything she was hiding—including the whereabouts of a certain necklace?

For the Sutliffe sapphires were the key. If he recovered that damned necklace his father loved so much, he would not need to beg the man's assistance in procuring a divorce from Sarah.

He would have the means to make his father offer it.

Her throat worked. “Stay
here
?”

Her reaction—equal parts guilt and fear—told him all he needed to know. “Here. In this house,” he insisted, his voice soft. “You are my wife, Sarah.”

Another small smile. “My husband is dead.”

It was a sharp, quick blow—as she had no doubt intended.

“Dead?”

“Yes. As anyone in Haverhythe will tell you, I am a widow,” she said, smoothing a hand over her inky skirts. “My husband, a junior officer in Colonel Grayson's regiment, died abroad. Grief robbed me of my health, so I came to the seaside to recover.”

“A clever ruse.”

She nodded in acknowledgment, as if the compliment had been genuine. “I was two days and a night in a carriage coming from London. It gave me ample time to think.”

He recalled the torturous weeks at sea, the years abroad. What could she possibly know about time to think?

“Whatever you may choose to believe, I live a quiet life here,” she insisted. “And a respectable one. It would never do for the Widow Fairfax to allow a strange man to share her—roof.”

Mrs. Fairfax
. He was inordinately pleased to discover that she had kept some small part of him alive—and inordinately frustrated at his pleasure. “I am not a stranger, ma'am. I am your husband.”

“The house is small,” she continued, fumbling for excuses now, “and Mrs. Potts has had trouble enough. It would give me pain to cause her more.”

“You'll see me on the street before offending your maid?”

“Mrs. Potts is not my maid,” she retorted sharply.

“Your housekeeper, then.”

“She is my
friend
. And this,” she said with a slight wave of her hand, “is her home.”

St. John started and looked again at the half-empty room. “What of
Mr.
Potts?”

“He died at sea many years ago,” Sarah said. “She took me in when there was nowhere else to go. She has shown me nothing but kindness, kindness I can never hope to repay.”

“A very affecting story.” St. John glanced toward the water, but he could see only the two of them and the empty tea table reflected in the darkened glass. “After we've gone, perhaps your time can be put to good use, setting it all to paper. You might support yourself tolerably well thereby.”

But the insinuation did not appear to frighten her. Her eyes flashed with that unfamiliar spirit. “I have no intention of leaving Haverhythe.”

“Nor do I,
Mrs.
Fairfax. At least, not without getting what I came for.”

She rose and crossed the room to the spindle-backed rocking chair on which his greatcoat lay. “And what would that be, my lord?”

“Satisfaction.”

“Then I fear you are doomed to disappointment.” She walked to the doorway still holding his hat and stood there looking expectant. “But you are welcome to make your way up-along to Mackey's Pub while you wait.”

“Mackey's.” He had passed it on his way through town. “The sign of the fish?”

“The Blue Herring, yes. They have rooms, although I cannot speak for their quality.” She cast a glance at his mud-spattered boots. “You rode?”

“When the mailcoach could take me no farther.”

“And your horse?”

“Tethered at the top of the street.” He did not like to admit that he had stood for a long moment looking down the steep lane, uncertain how best to manage it, even on foot.

“Mackey's has stables in the back,” she offered. “For the donkeys, mostly, but there might be room for a horse.”

Donkeys?
He rather felt as if he had fallen into an alien world and was struggling to maintain a foothold on some unfamiliar surface. He did not enjoy the sensation.

“Don't think of trying to leave,” he ordered as he shrugged reluctantly into his greatcoat.