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“I shouldn’t think so,” Lady Charlotte protested. “You must think me quite naive to leave my friend with—“
“With whom, exactly?” Benjamin soured. “Thomas may not know what a quadrille is, but he’s no less a gentleman than the men of your station.”
The lady seemed put in her place. She turned to the blonde woman. “Scream if anything happens.”
Lamb grinned from ear to ear, suddenly turning quite bashful. “I’ll get my coat.” He dropped his gaze to his feet and gave a wiggle of his toes. “And my boots.”
Benjamin led the lady to the most isolated room in the house. It was the only one that promised privacy, for it was the only room he forbade entry into. His study. It was not quite a study, of course—nothing in this house wasquitewhat it was supposed to be since his mother had lived there. It was a small attic room, once used as a ladies’ dressing room, or a storage room, of something of the sort, with low ceilings and lower light, stinking of dust and old paper. He left the door open a crack, not wanting to scare his unwanted visitor, as he set about lighting some rushlight torches downstairs, having left the lady alone with a candle.
He returned with them to find Lady Charlotte inspecting something on his desk. She snapped her head back as soon as she heard him enter, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, but her shoulders were covered with dust and cobwebs as though she had been looking in the recesses of the attic for clues. He stifled a laugh because he really shouldn’t find her appearance at the house funny. He settled opposite her in his creaking armchair.
“I know who you are, Lady Charlotte. We’ve no need for disguises between us.” He gestured for her hood, though she was still quite occupied looking around the room.
With a tempered nod, she peeled the fabric back, revealing her face in all its splendor. Benjamin’s breath hitched at the sight of her, cursing his desire. Two silver earrings hung from her ears, and they sparkled in the soft light of the candles. When she pulled back her cloak, a soft maroon fabric flashed at her midsection.
Despite her compliance, she didn’t make to speak, but he could see her anger in the slight trembling of her gloved fingers.
“I will ask a second time what I asked you a first—why have you come here?” He let his head hang back, averting his gaze, for every time he looked at her, his annoyance dissipated. Heneededto be angry if he was to smother her attempts at undoing him. “And don’t speak to me in riddles as you did downstairs.”
The woman’s jaw ticked. “You will not order me about, sir. I have come here primarily to make sense of things.”
“And a letter would not have sufficed?”
She stood unblinking. “I must hear you say it.”
“Say what?”
“That you know the work of Charles F. Huxley is not your own. That you are not a writer but a thief.” She dropped her gaze for just a moment to his mouth, and her cheeks flashed red. “I want to know how you did it first.”
The skin around Benjamin’s shoulders and neck prickled. The woman was so commanding with just her presence; her voice was melodic, rich, and stately, and it coerced his soul from him. He reined himself back in.
“Please, allow me to understand this.” He drew his fingers to a point before his mouth to conceal a smile. “You have decided to call upon me unchaperoned to settle a score of your imagining between us—over poetry, no less. It seems rather a trifling matter upon which to gamble your reputation. Say someone spots you here. What might your brother say? Your father? I assume they did not agree to this visit.”
“You will not scare me away.”
“You don’t know me well enough to say that as assuredly as you do.”
“Our dance has been revealing enough.”
“And without so much as a ‘good evening’? A ‘how do you do?’”
“The time for courtesy is long past,” she spat out. “You had ample chance to act the gentleman at the Singberry ball—and again this morning. I have pressed you twice about your deception, and you have continued to undermine me at every turn.”
“So, what do you propose to do about it?”
She looked away, clutching her hands behind her back. “I plan to do the only thing I can to save myself from this nightmare. I plan to reveal you as the fraud you are.”
Benjamin thought of what lie to spin her next. Something about Lady Charlotte made him want to cast all secrecy aside, to give her the answers she so desired instead, damn the consequences. He wanted to deliver her from her muddle, himself from his lies, to admit thathewas the man who had stopped her carriage, that he had stolen the poems when he had stolen her pearls and purses. It was eating away at him, one riposte at a time.
He wished more than anything to tell her that he had not done so out of sadism but out of need, that his crimes were fueled by a belief that the world was unfair and greedy... but those confessions and more would only lead to his downfall. He would be thrown into some prison or hanged if they were not so cowardly as to kill him. His truth would mean his death.
Not only his death but her detestation of him. She looked at him with wrath—but that, he could suffer. He could not live in a world where she looked at him with dismissive pity.
He fastened the mask from where it had slipped. “What difference does it make if it is my word against your own?”
“It makes a difference where my spirit is concerned, where your conscience is concerned too.”
Benjamin let slip a low, rumbling laugh. “My conscience is nothing you need trouble yourself with.”
