She was actually considering it. Like a madwoman.
Actually imagining what it would be to marry this new, strange Michael. Except, she couldn’t imagine it. Couldn’t even begin to conceive of what it would be like to marry a man who took an axe to a kitchen table without a second thought. And carried screaming women off into abandoned houses.
It would not be a normal marriage of the ton, that was certain.
She met his gaze, straight on, thanks to the step upon which he’d deposited her. “If I marry you, I’ll be ruined.”
“The great secret of society is that ruination is not nearly as bad as they make it out to be. You’ll have all the freedoms that come with a ruined reputation. They are not inconsiderable.”
He would know.
She shook her head. “It’s not simply me. My sisters will be ruined as well. They’ll never find good matches if we marry. All of society will think they’re as . . . easily scandalized . . . as I was.”
“Your sisters are not my concern.”
“But they are my concern.”
He raised a brow. “Are you certain that you are in a condition to be making demands?”
She wasn’t. Not at all. But she soldiered on nonetheless, squaring her shoulders. “You forget that no vicar in Britain will marry us if I refuse.”
“You think I would not spread it across London that I thoroughly ruined you this evening if you did so?”
“I do.”
“You think wrong. The story I would concoct would make the most hardened of prostitutes blush.”
It was Penelope who blushed, but she refused to be cowed. She took a deep breath and played her most powerful card. “I don’t doubt it, but in ruining me, you would also ruin your chances at Falconwell.”
He stiffened. Penelope was breathless with excitement as she waited for his reply.
“Name your price.”
She had won.
She had won.
She wanted to crow her success, her defeat of this great, immovable beast of a man. But she retained some sense of self-preservation. “Tonight must not affect my sisters’ reputations.”
He nodded. “You have my word on it.”
She clenched the torn fabric of her dress in a tight fist. “The word of a notorious scoundrel?”
He took a step up, coming closer, crowding her in the darkness. She forced herself to remain still when he spoke, his voice at once danger and promise. “There is honor among thieves, Penelope. Doubly so for gamblers.”
She swallowed, proximity squelching her courage. “I—I’m neither of those.”
“Nonsense,” he whispered, and she imagined she could feel his lips at her temple. “It appears you are a born gamer. You simply require instruction.”
No doubt he could teach her more than she had ever imagined.
She pushed the thought—and the images that came with it—from her mind as he added, “Do we have an agreement?”
Triumph was gone, chased by trepidation.
She wished she could see his eyes. “Do I have a choice?”
“No.” There was no emotion in the word. No hint of sorrow or guilt. Just cold honesty.
He offered her his hand once more, and the wide, flat palm beckoned.
Hades, offering pomegranate seeds.
If she took it, everything would change. Everything would be different.
There would be no going back. Though, somewhere in her mind, she knew there was no going back anyway.
Clutching her dress together, she took his hand.
He led her up the stairs, his lantern the only refuge from the pitch-blackness beyond, and Penelope could not help but cling to him. She wished that she’d had the courage to release him, to follow under her own control, to resist him in this small thing, but there was something about this walk—something mysterious and dark in a way that had nothing to do with light—that she could not force herself to let him go.
He turned back at the foot of the stairs, his eyes shadowed in the candlelight. “Still afraid of the dark?”
The reference to their childhood unsettled her. “It was a fox hole. Anything could have been down there.”
He started to climb the stairs. “For example?”
“A fox, perhaps?”
“There were no foxes in that hole.”
He had checked it first. That had been the only reason why she’d allowed him to convince her to enter it at all. “Well . . . something else then. A bear, perhaps.”
“Or perhaps you were afraid of the dark.”
“Perhaps. But I am not any longer.”
“No?”
“I was out in the dark tonight, wasn’t I?”
They turned down a long hallway. “So you were.” He released her hand then, and she did not like the way she missed his touch as he turned the handle of a nearby door and pushed it open with a long, ominous creak. He spoke low in her ear. “I will say, Penelope, that while it is unnecessary for you to be afraid of the dark, you are quite correct to be afraid of the things that thrive in it.”
Penelope squinted into the darkness, trying to make out the room beyond, nervousness coiling deep within. She hovered on the threshold, her breath coming fast and shallow. Things that thrived in the dark . . . like him.
He pushed past her slowly, the movement simultaneously a caress and a threat. As he passed, he whispered, “You’re a terrible bluff.” The words were barely a sound, and the feel of his breath on her skin counteracted its insult.
Lanternlight flickered across the walls of the small, unfamiliar room, casting a golden glow across the once-elegant, now hopelessly faded wall coverings in what must have once been a lovely rose. The room was barely large enough to hold them both, a fireplace nearly taking up one wall, across from which two small windows looked out on the copse of trees.
Michael bent to build a fire, and Penelope went to the windows, watching a sliver of moonlight cut across the snowy landscape beyond. “What is this room? I don’t remember it.”
“You very likely never had a chance to see it. It was my mother’s study.”
A memory flashed of the marchioness, tall and beautiful, with a wide, welcoming smile and kind eyes. Of course this room, quiet and serene, had been hers.
“Michael,” Penelope turned to face him, where he crouched low at the fireplace, laying a bed of straw and kindling. “I never had a chance to . . .” She searched for the right words.
He stopped her from finding them. “No need. What happened, happened.”
The coolness in his tone seemed wrong. Off. “Nevertheless . . . I wrote. I don’t know if you ever . . .”
“Possibly.” He remained half-inside the hearth. She heard the flint scrape across the tinderbox. “Many people wrote.”
The words shouldn’t have cut, but they did. She’d been devastated by the news of the deaths of the Marquess and Marchioness of Bourne. Unlike her own parents, who seemed to have little more than a quiet civility between them—Michael’s parents had seemed to care deeply for one another, for their son, for Penelope.
When she’d heard of the carriage accident, she’d been overcome with sadness, for what had been lost, for what might have been.
She’d written him letters, dozens of them over several years before her father had refused to mail any more. After that, she’d continued to write, hoping that he would somehow know that she was thinking of him. That he would always have friends at Falconwell . . . in Surrey . . . no matter how alone he might have felt. She’d imagined that one day, he’d come home.