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She twisted her head, but she was trapped. They were all around her, too close. She kicked and struggled, but it was all a drunken game to them. Women didn’t matter. Women were for fun.
She opened her mouth to scream. One of them fell onto her, knocking the wind out of her.
Panic swamped her mind. She struggled blindly, couldn’t think. She pushed at the boy and started to scream.
A roar drowned her out.
She looked toward the sound.
Longmore was bearing down, face dark, eyes glittering with rage.
“What the devil?” said the one who’d fallen on her.
Longmore reached out and picked him off her and flung him aside.
“No fair!” his friend cried. “We saw her first!” He tried to pull Sophy against him.
Longmore knocked him aside. Another came at him, and he backhanded him. The boy staggered backward and fell.
Another tried to take a swing at Longmore. He stepped out of the way. The fist kept going, taking its owner with it, through an awkward turn. Momentum carried him to the top of the stairs, where he collided with the head post, and sank into a heap.
The corridor fell quiet.
“Anybody else want to play?” Longmore said.
He could barely see them. The world was a red glare, and he could barely hear above the blood pounding in his ears.
His fingers flexed, primed for violence. Itching to break and crush.
He waited.
There was a flurry and a scuffling and they were gone.
“Cowards,” he said. He started after them.
That was when he heard it.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
He looked that way.
Sophy stood, her forehead resting on the door. He heard a catch and a sob, and another.
He saw her fist rise and go down on the door.
Thud.
Sob.
Thud.
Sob.
He forgot about the drunken gang.
He went to her. He turned her around. Tears streamed down her face. She was shaking.
“Are you all right? Did those bastards hurt you? I know they’re boys, but if they hurt you—”
She hit him. “You idiot!”
She set her forehead against his chest, the way she’d done to the door. She sobbed, and she beat on him, in the same way. Thump. Thump. Thump.
“What?” he said.
“Don’t help me!”
“Are you insane? Did they give you a concussion?”
Clara’s door opened and her nightcapped head appeared. “What on earth is going on?”
“Nothing,” Longmore said. “Go back to bed.”
“Harry, are you brawling again?”
“It’s over,” Longmore said. “Go to bed.”
“Harry.”
“Leave it alone,” he said between his teeth.
Clara glared at him. But she drew back into her room, and the door closed.
“We need to get out of the corridor,” Longmore said. “We’ve attracted enough attention.”
“I don’t care,” Sophy said. She still trembled.
He picked her up.
“Put me down,” she said.
“Stop it,” he said. “You’re hysterical.”
He shifted her to take most of her weight in one arm, and opened the door to her room.
When they were inside the room, he kicked it shut behind him.
“I hate you,” she said, her voice clogged with tears. “Stupid, drunken aristocrats. I didn’t know what to do.”
“I know,” he said.
“I hate to be afraid.”
“I know,” he said.
He carried her to the bed. He was still shaking, too, with rage.
And fear.
If he’d fallen asleep, he mightn’t have heard.
The doors were thick. Sounds from the corridor were muffled. And it was an inn. Drunken voices were only to be expected.
If he’d fallen asleep, he wouldn’t have known.
They would have shamed her. Hurt her.
His gut knotted.
He sat on the bed, still holding her. “Why didn’t you scream?” he said.
“I thought I could deal with it.”
“Four of them?”
“They were drunk. Easily unbalanced. Easily diverted. But . . . I was slow.”
“You were tired,” he said.
“Don’t make excuses! I’m not helpless!”
“I know,” he said. He wasn’t sure what he knew, except that she might have been hurt and she’d surely been afraid, and she had every reason in the world to be wild and unreasonable.
A lot of boys, down from Oxford or wherever, drunk and looking for fun. And she’d looked like fair game: an expensive tart—the disguise she’d adopted to help him find Clara. He felt sick.
“I went for my hatpin,” she said. “But they were all jostling me. So many of them, the clumsy oafs. I dropped it.”
“You should have screamed for help, straight off,” he said.
“I never had to scream for help in my life,” she said.
What hellish kind of life had she led? She was a dressmaker. By the sounds of things, the profession made war look like a tea party.
“There’s always a first time,” he said.
“I was going to scream,” she said. “But that numskull fell on me, and he knocked the wind out of me.”
“Yes, well, I’m sure you could have got out of that on your own,” he said. “But the bumping and bumbling and such had already roused me from a pleasant doze, and I wasn’t about to stand idly by when a fight was on offer.”
“Yes.” She clutched her head.
He brought his hand up and covered hers and gently pressed her head against his shoulder. “You had a bad moment,” he said.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I always know what to do. It’s a horrible feeling, not knowing. Being helpless. I hate it.”
“You’re not helpless,” he said. “You’re too unscrupulous to be helpless. You’re temporarily at sea, that’s all.” He paused. “Not only about those oafs.”
“No.”
“About Clara.”
“Yes. She’s one passenger. On my boat—the one that’s tossing on the sea, rudderless and doesn’t know where it is.”
“What else?” he said.
“You know,” she said. “Your mother. How to bring her round.”
“Hopeless cause,” he said. “Throw her off the boat.”
She pushed his hand away and lifted her head. “She’s making our life so difficult,” she said.
“She does that to everybody,” he said. “Tackle something you can manage. Adderley, for a start. Fix your busy mind on him. Forget about my mother. Forget about those spotty boys. They don’t know how easy they got off. Another minute, and you’d have thought of something, and they’d wish some big fellow would come along and knock them about.”
She was looking up into his eyes, and he saw something change. A flicker, a light, like the first star of evening.
Then her mouth slowly curved upward.
And while he watched that slow smile, the tension he hadn’t known he was holding began to ease.
He saw the devil lurking in her eyes and in the edges of the smile, where it lifted the corners of her lips.
He was so tempted to touch his lips there.
