The Wrong Way to Catch a Rake, page 16
He did as he was told, his beautiful agony growing as her body pressed and bucked. He had no idea what rhythm she was searching for, but the uncertainty of each movement only made him wilder with need. In the fog that was his brain he only knew he was heading into uncharted territory—terrifying and beautiful. He let his body lead, drawn by the pleasure of the friction between them, finding a new, joyous rhythm. Then she froze, her legs clamping hard around him as she shuddered through a long wave of pleasure that drew him in and without warning his world cracked and shattered, tossing him over the edge of the earth. A great wave of joy grabbed him, emptied him out and filled him until he was nothing but light and peace.
Chapter Eighteen
He must have slept. It felt like days but was probably nothing as dramatic because the fire was still bright and cheerful. Phoebe was asleep and Dominic was wrapped around her as he had been the night he’d shared her bed. Except that she was blissfully naked and warm against him and his hand was cupping her breast.
He stayed right there. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so at peace.
Died and gone to heaven.
If that was what it was, he was fine with it. Except he didn’t want Phoebe to die, not for many long years. She deserved better. Certainly she deserved better than him.
His hold tightened. Right now he didn’t want to think sensible thoughts. Right now all he wanted was to explore this magical new landscape again.
And again.
Forever...
‘Dominic?’ Her voice was husky and deep as she turned in his arms.
‘Sorry, did I wake you?’
She shook her head. ‘I was dreaming.’
‘So was I... No, wait...it wasn’t a dream.’
She smiled and tucked her leg between his. ‘I dreamt we were falling off Montillio’s balustrade into the water, but I wasn’t afraid.’
He smiled at how her dream mirrored the one he’d had after their kiss. ‘That doesn’t sound like sensible Phoebe.’
‘Sensible Phoebe doesn’t dream. Not those dreams anyway.’ She traced a line below the purplish bruise across his shoulder. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘Nothing hurts right now. My body is singing too loudly for anything else to be heard.’ A thought occurred to him and he stiffened in a mixture of embarrassment and concern. ‘I should be asking you that. Did I hurt you?’
* * *
Phoebe frowned, puzzled. She ought to be embarrassed, but she felt too comfortable with him to turn prudish yet.
‘No. It didn’t. I’d expected it to be painful, but when you... Well, when you entered, I was too...lost in the moment. Is it strange that it didn’t hurt?’
‘I have no idea. Perhaps it only hurts when you’re not ready. I think we were more than ready.’
She hummed in agreement, moving against him, enjoying the textures of his body. ‘I was so ready I felt like I was bursting from my skin. But it was strange. Having someone inside me. Strange but wonderful. I loved the feeling of you stretching me, filling me...’
Needing me.
He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tightly, and she stilled as they both seemed to teeter on the edge of something. She had no idea what: a warning? A promise? Both?
Then he pulled away and sat back against the headboard, one hand holding hers lightly, his other clasped about his raised knee. His gaze was abstracted, focused on the window. It was still damp with rain and there was nothing but grey beyond. The heavens warning her.
She sat up as well, reality finally beginning to pull her out of her beatific stupor. All too soon she must leave Venice. She’d left so many places, but this time when she left she would be taking something valuable with her and leaving something even more valuable behind.
She could understand greed now, wanting to take and keep. She knew she couldn’t, but she wanted just a little more of him. She wanted to know him in more than the biblical sense. Even worse—she wanted him to know her. She’d never suffered from vanity, but now she wanted Dominic to know she was not merely a meek companion, a victim of life and circumstance. She wanted him to see what she’d achieved in life...
To see her. Phoebe the Zephyr.
But Phoebe the Zephyr was the first to know better.
She finally pushed back the fog of lust and dragged her spy’s instincts back from the depths they’d sunk to. There would be no telling anyone, let alone a man like him—he might not be the drunkard she’d feared, but his proficiency at perpetuating that lie only made it worse. Someone like him, a habitual, calculated liar living on his wits and occasional winnings, a close friend and confidant of the local criminal family... She’d met men like Dominic in her life. Clever survivors who found the weak points of whatever system they occupied and made the most of them, often serving local men in power. They were chameleons, manipulators. Useful and dangerous...
It was damnable that Oswald did not have someone in Venice she could approach for information. He’d admitted that this was a weak link in the chain he’d wrapped around the continent. Haas had disposed of one of the Foreign Office’s men several years ago and made it very clear he would have no qualms doing so again. As far as Phoebe knew, since then all missions to Venice had been handled by people like her and Milly—transients.
She could always contact Oswald’s agent in Rome or wait until Oswald or one of his deputies arrived in Verona ahead of the Congress. Someone was bound to know more about Dominic. The son of a duke would not go disregarded by the powers that be, if only because of the potential for embarrassment.
There could still be no future for them, but she still wanted to know the truth. It mattered.
She looked down at their joined hands.
‘How did you come to live in Venice, Dominic? Was it because of your cousin?’
He glanced at her. ‘Didn’t Agatha Banister regale you with all the gossip?’
‘She said your father sent you away. That doesn’t sound very likely.’
‘Why not? He makes no secret of the fact that he can’t stand the sight of me.’
Her heart clenched, but she didn’t let him divert her. ‘That might be true, but what I meant is that it doesn’t sound very likely that you would allow him to dictate to you.’
His mouth quirked. ‘True. I left because I was in debt. Gambling. Venice is cheaper and more forgiving towards my kind. Perhaps I’ll have to leave here, too, one day.’
His answer was too quick, and again his words rang false. She of all people had no right to resent him for lying to her, but the heat beginning to bubble inside her was definitely anger. She pulled the cover up about her and he moved towards her, his hand curving over her leg, warm and firm.
‘No, don’t cover yourself. If you’re cold, I’ll warm you...’
‘I’m not cold. What is your father like, Dominic?’
He stilled, shooting her a look that was both surprised and annoyed. ‘You choose your moments, Phoebe.’
‘There is never a good moment to discuss horrid parents,’ she replied, and he gave a faint laugh.
‘That’s true. So let’s not discuss them.’
That was a very definite line in the sand. She crossed it. ‘Tell me anyway.’
‘I don’t wish to. Not good for my digestion.’
‘You’re not eating now.’
‘I was contemplating dining on you again.’
That was a different tone—the flirtatious voice she’d heard him employ so often in the salons and casinos. It rang utterly hollow now she’d peeked over his walls.
‘Gossip says he blames you for the estate falling into debt. I presume it was already in debt before you were even out of leading strings.’
The bed shifted as he rose and picked up his trousers from the floor, pulling them on with his back to her. She watched, yearning and sadness and angry determination mixing into a rather bitter brew.
Part of her wanted to let it go. So what if he was lying? She did not need the truth from him; they had no future anyway. She opened her mouth to apologise, but he began speaking, his voice so toneless it took her a moment to understand he was answering her.
‘When my grandmother was killed they took me from her house in London back to Rutherford. My father’s first comment when they brought me to him was that I looked like a girl and a puny one at that. There was a woman standing in the room, very much with child. I didn’t know she was my stepmother. I hadn’t even been told he’d remarried. She stood there watching me, her hand on her belly. My father grabbed my hair and pushed me very close to her belly and told her that she’d better provide him with a better specimen of manhood than his useless first wife had managed. I remember his hand twisting in my hair, almost shoving me into her. She had both her hands on her stomach by then, as if she was terrified I might contaminate her.’
‘I suppose she was more terrified of your father. If he was violent with you, he might very well have been with her.’ She spoke softly, wary of interrupting. He picked up his shirt, shaking it out.
‘Probably. Looking back, I can see she was hardly more than a child herself. She would have been all of sixteen when he married her and apparently she lost quite a few babes before she birthed my half-brother. She came with a nice dowry, too.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘It was gone by the time I was eighteen and not a penny of that could be blamed on me. All I had for those years were my school fees. I spent much of the time between terms at the house of a friend of mine who was two years above me. He was the youngest of a large family and his older sisters already had children of their own, and so Sherbourne Hall was always full to the brim with children and noise. It was hardly a house of vice where I could rack up debt.’
She blinked at the name, but said nothing and he continued.
‘Then I joined the army directly out of school and though my father deigned to pay for my commission, probably hoping the war would do away with me, I doubt that brought the duchy to bankruptcy. My father did that all on his own. Like father, like son. In this case he was just like my grandfather.’
‘You said your father was a model of rectitude.’
‘He is. He’s also vain and arrogant and adores being adulated. He was surrounded by sycophants who stole from him and drained his coffers. His steward and his agent bled him and the estate dry, mortgaged what could be mortgaged, and pawned the rest. And once matters became impossible to ignore they disappeared to South America. When I turned twenty-one the lawyers gave me my grandmother’s jewels, which were the only thing she had managed to keep from my grandfather. She told me she hid them in the wall of her privy and took them with her when she was widowed.’
Phoebe smiled. ‘What a marvellous woman.’
He didn’t turn, but she saw the line in his cheek curve as he smiled and her heart squeezed, hard. She wished his Dommy could have lived a long and loving life so that Dominic could have grown up far from his father’s vain cruelty and disregard.
‘So it was easier to blame you for his mistakes?’ she prodded gently.
‘Don’t make a martyr out of me, Phoebe. Where there’s smoke there’s fire. I learned how to make my way. I didn’t have an allowance like the other boys, so I learned to win what I wanted at cards. Sweetmeats, books, whatever took my fancy. I had other ways, too.’ This time the smile he shot her over his shoulder was cynical again. ‘Some boys were willing to pay just to have me watch while they pleasured themselves. More if they could touch, but after a few times I decided I’d take the lower price. All I had to do was to stand there, like a dumb statue, just like I used to when the artists made me pose for their drawings at Dommy’s house. People stared at me anyway—I reckoned I might as well get paid for it for a change. Easy money. Between that and the cards I had what I needed.’
She was very careful not to let her breathing show how upset she was, but the effort was only making the ache inside her worse. She knew all too well worse things happened to children, but she wished they didn’t, and especially not to him. She wanted to wrap herself around him as if she could reach through time and cocoon him from the reality that had been forced on him.
She thought of herself at his age, living between the drops of her father’s righteous anger and her mother’s meekness and the knowledge of her future closing in on her. Of being stripped down to the value of her body as well, if only as a vehicle to be impregnated for the good of God’s Flock. But she had had Milly and then Uncle Jack, who had given her the strength to break away and choose her own path.
‘Did your friend know any of this?’
His smile lost its harsh edge and he turned back to her. ‘Marcus was furious with me when he found out. I told him I needed the money and he said I was worth more than that and hired me to translate his Latin texts for him.’
‘He had you cheat on his class work?’
‘I thought he did, but it was just a ploy to save my pride. Marcus has a gift for languages and he certainly didn’t need my help. Two years later when I was in the same class as he’d been when I began translating for him he handed me all the translations I’d done for him and told me I already had a whole year’s worth of class work. He’d kept it for me. I was furious with him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I felt he’d acted out of pity. All that time I’d been so proud he needed my help, that I’d earned that money fairly... Discovering he was being noble and didn’t need me at all hurt me more than anything. I think I sulked for a month.’
‘Poor boy. He must have been upset, too.’
‘Why would you think that? One would think he would have been glad to be rid of me.’
She shook her head. ‘He sounds very attached to you. You said he was the youngest in a large family. It sounds like he wanted a younger brother and he’d rather adopted you. How did he make amends and convince you to stop sulking?’
‘Perhaps I apologised.’
She laughed and shook her head again. ‘Too stubborn. I doubt you’d learned to be charming yet.’
There was reluctant amusement in his gaze, and traces of that vulnerability that kept chiselling away at her good sense.
‘I came back to my room one day and tucked into the book I was reading was a sheaf of notes with my latest class assignment in Latin in his writing. There was also a note from his mother reminding him to invite me to stay with them for the summer. I burned the Latin translation but kept his mother’s note.’
‘Why on earth did you burn it?’
‘Because if anyone had found it, he would have been in trouble. The teachers knew my Latin was excellent, that I had no need to cheat, and they might have thought Marcus was trying to curry favour with me for... Well, for carnal purposes. It would have damaged him two-fold. He wanted to prove he trusted me. I went and told him I’d burnt the translations and that he was an idiot and that he could tell his mother I would come for the summer.’
‘And what did he do?’
‘Nothing. He just nodded in that annoying way he has and told me not to forget to bring my cricket bat. And that was that.’
‘Were you in love with him?’ she asked before she could stop herself. His brows rose a little but he didn’t look offended.
‘I love Marcus dearly, but I was never in love with him. He is part of who I am, the better part. He is the only person I truly trust.’
She nodded. She understood that at least. ‘Sometimes that is enough.’
‘True, clever little Phoebe. Who do you trust?’
For a moment the word ‘you’ rang in her head. An absurd lie, or a foolish wish. She set it aside. She might be living a momentary fantasy, but she knew what her life was and what it wasn’t.
‘I trust Milly.’
‘Your aunt?’ He sounded sceptical but she didn’t take offence.
‘Yes.’
‘Is she the sister of the uncle you mentioned?’
She hesitated. Was this how it happened? Little drops of truth leaking through the cracks in her defences?
‘No, my father’s sister.’
‘The religious zealot.’
She nodded and he frowned.
‘I’ve never heard of Lord Grafton. Where did she meet him?’
She’d started this catechism, she could hardly object to it. And there was nothing to be uncovered there, not truly.
‘He was my father’s friend. Part of God’s Flock.’
‘God’s Flock. That sounds rather ominous.’
‘It wasn’t pleasant. Milly was wed at fifteen. Lord Grafton was sixty-three. Luckily a few years later he had an apoplexy. I was fourteen by then and my number was coming up...’
‘Your number?’
‘My marriage number. All the girls had a pledge number and when our number drew near the men would bid on us. Milly got word to my uncle and he spirited us away.’
‘You were to be married at fourteen. By auction.’ He’d become more and more still and there was definitely a menace to him now. Each word was sinking deeper and deeper.
She shrugged, hugging her knees and trying to think back. For the first time she felt an urge to set those long, dark years out in her mind like pages torn from a book. She knew she was the same person as that girl, but she didn’t feel it. Sometimes she thought that girl was far stronger than she.
‘Not married yet, but the pledge preparations and cleansing rituals would begin at fourteen and continue until the marriage. I knew what was waiting for me and I had no intention of discovering the joys of being pledged. I planned to run away and I told Milly, and she convinced me to let her try and find Jack, my uncle. He used to come when I was young and before the Flock separated from the world. He tried to convince my mother to leave my father, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
‘I’d always liked him and he would smuggle books to me even though girls were forbidden to read anything but scriptures. I didn’t believe he would come, but then one night Milly knocked on my window and he was with her and I climbed out of the window and that was that. She took great risks for me. I was still a girl and might have been forgiven, but women who disobeyed were labelled evil and kept in the cellars of what they called God’s House. They were chained to their beds at night. All the girls were taken down there once a month to witness them being chastised.’
