When her crying broke into watery hiccups, she felt Leo tug the jacket of her traveling habit from her shoulders. In her exhaustion she found herself complying like an obedient child, pulling her arms from the sleeves. She didn’t even protest as he took the combs and pins from her hair. Her scalp throbbed sharply as the tight coiffure was undone. Leo removed her spectacles and set them aside, and went to fetch a handkerchief from his discarded coat.
“Thank you,” Catherine mumbled, mopping her sore eyes with the square of pressed cotton, wiping her nose. She stood with childlike indecision, the handkerchief balled in her fingers.
“Come here.” Leo sat in the large hearthside chair and drew her down with him.
“Oh, I can’t—” she began, but he hushed her and gathered her on his lap. The mounds of her skirts spilled heavily over them both. She rested her head on his shoulder, the agitated workings of her lungs gradually matching the measured rhythm of his. His hand played slowly in her hair. Once she would have shrunk away from a man’s touch, no matter how innocuous. But in this room, removed from the rest of the world, it seemed neither of them were quite themselves.
“You shouldn’t have followed me,” she finally brought herself to say.
“The entire family wanted to come,” Leo said. “It seems the Hathaways can’t do without your civilizing influence. So I’ve been charged with bringing you back.”
That nearly started her crying again. “I can’t go back.”
“Why not?”
“You already know. Lord Latimer must have told you about me.”
“He told me a little.” The backs of his fingers stroked the side of her neck. “Your grandmother was the madam, wasn’t she?” His tone was quiet and matter-of-fact, as if having a grandmother who owned a house of prostitution was a perfectly ordinary circumstance.
Catherine nodded, swallowing miserably. “I went to live with my grandmother and Aunt Althea when Mother took ill. At first I didn’t understand what the family business was, but after a while I realized what working for my grandmother meant. Althea had finally reached the age when she was no longer as popular among the customers. And then I turned fifteen, and it was supposed to be my turn. Althea said that I was lucky, because she’d had to start when she was twelve. I asked if I could be a teacher or a seamstress, something like that. But she and my grandmother said I’d never make enough money to repay what had been spent on me. Working for them was the only profitable thing I could do. I tried to think of somewhere to go, some way to survive by myself. But there was no position I could get without recommendations. Except for a factory job, which would have been dangerous and the wages would have been too low to pay for a room anywhere. I begged my grandmother to let me go to my father, because I knew he would never have left me there, had he known of their plans. But she said—” Catherine stopped, her hands fisting in his shirt.
Leo disentangled her fingers and meshed his own with them, until their hands were caught together like the clasp of a bracelet. “What did she say, love?”
“That he already knew, and approved, and he would receive a percentage of the money I earned. I didn’t want to believe it.” She let out a broken sigh. “But he had to have known, didn’t he?”
Leo was silent, his thumb softly rubbing into the cup of her palm. The question needed no answer.
Catherine set her jaw against a quiver of grief, and resumed. “Althea brought gentlemen to meet me one at a time, and she told me to be charming. She said that of all of them, Lord Latimer had made the highest offer.” She made a face against his shirt. “He was the one I liked least of all. He kept winking and telling me there were naughty surprises in store for me.”
Leo uttered a few choice words beneath his breath. At her uncertain pause, he ran his hand along her spine. “Go on.”
“But Althea told me what to expect, because she thought I would fare much better if I knew. And the acts she described, the things I was supposed to…”
His hand went still on her back. “Were you required to put any of it in practice?”
She shook her head. “No, but it all sounded dreadful.”
A note of sympathetic amusement warmed his voice. “Of course it did, to a fifteen-year-old girl.”
Lifting her head, Catherine looked into his face. He was too handsome for his own good, and for hers as well. Although she wasn’t wearing her spectacles, she could see every breathtaking detail of him … the dark grain of shaved whiskers, the laugh lines at the outer corners of his eyes, little pale whisks against the rosewood color of his skin. And most of all the variegated blue of his eyes, light and dark, sunlight and shadow.
Leo waited patiently, holding her as if there were nothing else in the world he would have preferred doing. “How did you get away?”
“I went to my grandmother’s desk one morning,” Catherine said, “when the household was still asleep. I was trying to find money. I planned to run away and find lodging and a decent position somewhere. There wasn’t a single shilling. But in one of the nooks in the desk, I found a letter, addressed to me. I’d never seen it before.”
“From Rutledge,” Leo said rather than asked.
Catherine nodded. “A brother I’d never known existed. Harry had written that if I were ever in need, I should send word to his address. I dashed off a letter to let him know the trouble I was in, and I gave it to William to deliver—”
“Who is William?”
“A little boy who worked there … he carried things up and down the stairs, cleaned shoes, went on errands, whatever he was told to do. I think he was the child of one of the prostitutes. A very sweet boy. He delivered the note to Harry. I hope Althea never found out. If she did, I fear for what happened to him.” She shook her head and sighed. “The next day I was sent to Lord Latimer’s house. But Harry came just in time.” She paused reflectively. “He frightened me only a little less than Lord Latimer. Harry was extremely angry. At the time I thought it was directed at me, but now I think it was the situation.”
“Guilt often takes the form of anger.”
“But I never blamed Harry for what happened to me. I wasn’t his responsibility.”
Leo’s face hardened. “Apparently you were no one’s responsibility.”
Catherine shrugged uneasily. “Harry didn’t know what to do with me. He asked where I wanted to live, since I couldn’t stay with him, and I asked if he could send me somewhere far from London. We settled on a school in Aberdeen, called Blue Maid’s.”
He nodded. “Some of the peerage send their more unruly daughters or by-blows there.”
“How did you know about it?”
“I’m acquainted with a woman who attended Blue Maid’s. A severe place, she said. Plain food and discipline.”
“I loved it.”
His lips twitched. “You would.”
“I lived there for six years, teaching for the last two.”
“Did Rutledge come to visit?”
“Only once. But we corresponded occasionally. I never went home on holiday, because the hotel wasn’t really a home, and Harry didn’t want to see me.” She grimaced a little. “He wasn’t very nice until he met Poppy.”
“I’m not convinced that he’s nice now,” Leo said. “But as long as he treats my sister well, I’ll have no quarrel with him.”
“Oh, but Harry loves her,” Catherine said earnestly. “Truly he does.”
Leo’s expression softened. “What makes you so certain?”
“I can see it. The way he is with her, the look in his eyes and … why are you smiling like that?”
“Women. You’ll interpret anything as love. You see a man wearing an idiotic expression, and you assume he’s been struck by Cupid’s arrow when in reality he’s digesting a bad turnip.”
She looked at him indignantly. “Are you mocking me?”
Laughing, Leo tightened his arms around her as she tried to struggle from his lap. “I’m merely making an observation about your gender.”
“I suppose you think men are superior.”
“Not at all. Only simpler. A woman is a collection of diverse needs, whereas a man has only one. No, don’t get up. Tell me why you left Blue Maid’s.”
“The headmistress asked me to.”
“Really? Why? I hope you did something reprehensible and shocking.”
“No, I was very well behaved.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“But Headmistress Marks sent for me to come to her office one afternoon, and—”
“Marks?” Leo glanced at her alertly. “You took her name?”
“Yes, I admired her very much. I wanted to be like her. She was stern but kind, and nothing ever seemed to disrupt her composure. I went to her office, and she poured tea, and we talked for a long time. She said I’d done an excellent job, and I was welcome to return and continue teaching in the future. But first she wanted me to leave Aberdeen and see something of the world. And I told her that leaving Blue Maid’s was the last thing I wanted to do, and she said that was why I needed to do it. She had received word from a friend at a placement agency in London that a family of … ‘uncommon circumstances,’ as she put it, was searching for a woman who could act as both governess and companion to pair of sisters, one of whom had recently been expelled from finishing school.”
“That would be Beatrix.”
Catherine nodded. “The headmistress thought that I might suit the Hathaways. What I never expected was how much they suited me. I went for an interview, and I thought the entire family was a bit mad—but in the loveliest possible way. And I’ve worked for them for almost three years, and I’ve been so happy and now—” She broke off, her face contorting.
“No, no,” Leo said hastily, taking her head in his hands, “don’t start that again.”
Catherine was so shocked to feel his lips brush her cheeks and closed eyes that the tears instantly evaporated. When she finally brought herself to look at him again, she saw that he was wearing a faint smile. He smoothed her hair, and stared into her grief-ravaged face with a depth of concern she had never seen from him before.
It frightened her to realize how much of herself she had just given away. Now he knew everything she had tried to keep secret for so long. Her hands worked against his chest like the wings of a bird that had found itself trapped indoors.
“My lord,” she said with difficulty, “why did you come after me? What do you want from me?”
“I’m surprised you have to ask,” he murmured, still caressing her hair. “I want to offer for you, Cat.”
Of course, she thought, bitterness welling. “To be your mistress.”
His voice matched hers exactly for calmness, in a way that conveyed gentle sarcasm. “No, that would never work. First, your brother would arrange to have me murdered, or, at the very least, maimed. Second, you’re far too prickly tempered to be a mistress. You’re far better suited as a wife.”
“Whose?” she asked with a scowl.
Leo stared directly into her narrowed eyes. “Mine, of course.”
Chapter Eighteen
Hurt and outraged, Catherine struggled so violently that he was forced to release her.
“I’ve had enough of you and your tasteless, insensitive humor,” she cried, leaping to her feet. “You cad, you—”
“I’m not joking, damn it!” Leo stood and reached for her, and she hopped backward, and he grabbed, and she flailed. They grappled until Catherine found herself tumbling backward onto the bed.
Leo fell over her in a controlled descent—a pounce, really. She felt him sinking into the mass of skirts, his superior weight urging her legs apart, the muscular mass of his torso pinning her down. She writhed in distress as excitement went skimming and tickling all through her. The more she wriggled, the worse it became. She subsided beneath him, while her hands kept opening and closing on nothing.
Leo stared down at her, eyes dancing with mischief … but there was something else in his expression, a purposefulness, that unsettled her profoundly.
“Consider it, Marks. Marrying me would solve both our problems. You would have the protection of my name. You wouldn’t have to leave the family. And they couldn’t nag me to get married any longer.”
“I am illegitimate,” she said distinctly, as if he were a foreigner trying to learn English. “You are a viscount. You can’t marry a bastard.”
“What about the Duke of Clarence? He had ten bastard children by that actress … what was her name…”
“Mrs. Jordan.”
“Yes, that one. Their children were all illegitimate, but some of them married peers.”
“You’re not the Duke of Clarence.”
“That’s right. I’m not a blueblood any more than you are. I inherited the title purely by happenstance.”
“That doesn’t matter. If you married me, it would be scandalous and inappropriate, and doors would be closed to you.”
“Good God, woman, I let two of my sisters marry Gypsies. Those doors have already been closed, bolted, and nailed shut.”
Catherine couldn’t think clearly, could scarcely hear him through the pounding in her ears, the wild clamor of her blood. Will and desire pulled at her with equal force. Turning her face away as his mouth descended, she said desperately, “The only way you could be certain of keeping Ramsay House for your family is to marry Miss Darvin.”
He gave a derisive snort. “It’s also the only way I could be certain of committing sororicide.”
“Of what?” she asked in bewilderment.
“Sororicide. Killing one’s wife.”
“No, you mean to say ‘uxoricide.—”
“Are you certain?”
“Yes, uxor is the Latin word for ‘wife.—”
“Then what’s ‘sororicide’?”
“Killing one’s sister.”
“Oh, well, if I had to marry Miss Darvin, I’d probably end up doing that too.” Leo grinned down at her. “The point is, I could never have this kind of conversation with her.”
He was probably right. Catherine had lived with the Hathaways long enough to fall into their style of banter, slipping into the verbal detours that could start one talking about the increasing problem of the Thames River pollution, and end up debating the question of whether or not the Earl of Sandwich had actually invented sandwiches. Catherine restrained a miserable laugh as she realized that although she might have had a slight civilizing influence on the Hathaways, their influence on her had been much greater.