He sighed. “This would be far easier if you were less clever.” It sounded like a complaint, but he winked at her at the end. “Damn it, Miss Marshall, I’m trying to be a little honorable. But very well. Since I must.” He raised his eyes to her. “You need to work with me because I will betray you.”
She sucked her breath in. “Pardon?”
“How precarious is your position in society, Miss Marshall? You’re young, unmarried, and reasonably good-looking.” He said the last with no emotion, as if he were just reciting facts.
He was. She had to remember that. No matter how flirtatious his tone, that was all she meant to him: a collection of facts.
“I have two possible plans to foil my enemy. One is to work with you to defeat him. The other is to shut down your operations here so thoroughly that he doesn’t get the pleasure of doing it himself. A forged letter of credit sold to your enemy? A missive in your handwriting, written to a lover and indiscreetly left for someone else to find?” He shrugged. “It would take me half an afternoon to make your life utterly miserable and maybe a few days to make it impossible.”
Her heart had begun to thud in a low, heavy rhythm. Strange, how the system of nerves could so overtake the mind, that a man sitting before her and speaking in such an easy tone could make her feel as if she were a hare faced by a pack of wolves. He looked at her with a small smile on his face. It seemed as if he could hear her pulse, and its thready beat was music to his ears.
She wasn’t going to rabbit away. This was her business, her life, and she wasn’t about to let this man ruin it for her. She steepled her fingers, willing them not to tremble, and gave her best impression of a bored sigh. “So this is blackmail.”
The smile Mr. Clark gave her felt like a weapon—one that he’d chosen carefully from his massive arsenal. It was the smile of a man who knew that he could charm and devastate, and he employed it with the precision of a master. He leaned forward. “Miss Marshall, I believe you are mispronouncing that word.”
She looked over at him.
“You should pronounce it like this: ‘Huzzah! Blackmail!’”
Her eyebrows rose. “How extraordinary, Mr. Clark. I thought you didn’t use exclamation points.”
“I don’t.” He smiled at her. “But you do, and there’s no need to be parsimonious.”
“Huzzah.” Free met his gaze with a flat stare. “Crime! Right now, that crime is blackmail, but it won’t be blackmail much longer.”
“No? How do you figure?”
“With luck and a good quantity of arsenic…?” She gave him a smile of her own. “Soon it will be: ‘Huzzah! Murder!’ Now there’s a cause that deserves my exclamation points.”
She’d meant to confound him. Instead, his smile tilted, and all that calculated charm disappeared in a wash of real laughter. He leaned back in his chair, shaking his head. Somehow, it was even more unnerving to realize that he found her amusing. And entirely unfair that some small part of her wanted to make him laugh again.
She raised an eyebrow and regulated her voice to honeyed sweetness. “Would you care for some tea, Mr. Clark? I’ll prepare a pot of my very special recipe. Just for you.”
He waved a hand at her. “Save it. You see, Miss Marshall, I don’t wish to ruin the future you’ve so carefully built. I’m going to play the scoundrel here. All things considered, I’d rather be your scoundrel.”
She sat back. “Go ahead, Mr. Clark. Do your worst. I am inured to baseless threats. I don’t need your lies.”
He leaned back in his chair, a look of dissatisfaction on his face.
Of course he was glaring at her. She huffed in annoyance. “Yes, I am a terrible person. I refuse to give in to intimidation. I don’t need a scoundrel, thank you very much. Now good-bye.”
“Yes,” he said. “You do. Bugger it all.” He shut his eyes and placed his fingers against his temples. “I was hoping not to have to do this, but…”
Free narrowed her gaze at him. They’d run through lies, forgery, and blackmail. What was next? Physical threats?
“I’m going to have to tell you the truth,” he said with great reluctance. “Some of it. And I’m going to have to tell you enough to convince you I know what I’m doing.”
She didn’t believe that for one second.
“The person who is intent on destroying you is none other than the Honorable James Delacey.”
Free went very still. Delacey was also Viscount Claridge—or at least, he would be soon; there was some technical holdup in confirming him, although she gathered it was a simple procedural matter. Other than actually taking his seat in the House of Lords, he was afforded all the other social privileges of peerage. She’d met the man two years ago. Their acquaintance had been fortunately brief, and she had no wish to pursue it further. She set her hands on the table, pushing them flat against the cool surface.
The man in front of her did not mark her unease. “I would say that Delacey has no love for suffragettes, but it’s more complicated than that. His father never liked you; you shut down a factory that he’d invested in and lost him a great deal of money. And Delacey himself asked you to be his mistress some time ago, and you turned him down. He’s held a grudge ever since.”
If Clark knew that, he did stand high in the man’s counsel. It didn’t make him a friend; it didn’t mean he planned to help her. But he at least knew something.
“Delacey plans to discredit you completely,” he said. “He’s going to have one of your writers arrested this weekend on suspicion of theft, and while you’re still reeling from the scandal of that, he’ll point out that several of your recent essays have been drawn from other papers. Your advertisers will withdraw and your subscription numbers will plummet.” Mr. Clark gave her a brilliant smile. “As I’m sure you can see, you are at something of a disadvantage. You don’t have to trust me, Miss Marshall. You don’t even have to like me. But if you don’t listen to me, you’ll regret it.”
“Why?” She speared him with her gaze. “Why are you doing this?”
He shrugged nonchalantly, but his fingers curled on the desk a little too tightly. “Because Delacey and I have an old score that needs to be settled.” Mr. Clark’s lips thinned and he looked out the window again, over her press. “It’s that simple. Delacey wants you hurt, and I will not forgive him. So we have a mutual enemy. I don’t pretend that we will be friends, you and I—but I came here to present myself as an ally. I didn’t have to tell you that I was capable of blackmail. I didn’t have to demonstrate my skill at forgery. If I had wanted to, I would have delivered you a recommendation from Queen Victoria herself. And—Miss Marshall—”