Secret Admirer Page 15

  Shuffle, shuffle.

  Was this another dream? She drove her fingernail into her thigh to make sure she was awake. In an instant, her heart was pounding and she felt the hair on her arms standing up. Without being able to see, she felt horribly trapped, like she was being smothered. Stay calm! She forced her mind to pay attention, organizing her observations. The rain had stopped, and in the silence, she could hear Lawrence’s breathing on the settee. That meant it wasn’t him moving around the chamber. That meant it was someone else. There, in her room—

  Scrape

  —near the foot of her bed. She felt like she was in a black box, like she was interred in her death hangings. The air was closing in around her, suffocating her. Don’t let him know you are awake her mind screamed. Don’t shout. Don’t move. This was what she had wanted, to make the killer come after her—

  You just keep your whore mouth shut or I’ll do the same to you as I did to him.

  —to trap him. She felt hot, her palms were sweating. The fabric swayed again—

  shuffle

  —closer to where she was lying now. Don’t move don’t move don’t move. She gripped her hands into fists and tried to make her dry throat swallow. Breathe, lie still, breathe, lie—

  “No!”

  The one loud syllable cut through the air. It took Tuesday a moment to realize the shout had not come from her own throat but from outside the dark cocoon of her bed, from beyond the curtains.

  “No! Stop!” it sounded again, muffled but loud, from the settee. There was no mistaking the pain in it.

  Reason fled. She was out of bed and through the curtains and into the studio in the space of a heartbeat. Moonlight came weakly through the windows, outlining the familiar shapes of furniture, tables, suit of armor, no one else in the room, Lawrence’s figure thrashing on the settee, back and forth—

  “Ever!” he shouted again and then a long, wrenching, “Noooo!”

  She heard the sound of his teeth grinding together as she rushed toward him. That must have been what she had heard before, not hinges, not footsteps. “Lord Pickering,” she whispered, reaching for his shoulder. “Lord Pickering, wake up. Wake up!”

  His head turned from side to side, his eyes closed, his jaw tense. “Don’t,” he commanded to his unseen adversary. “Don’t let go!”

  A hand snaked out and caught her wrist, then slid down to her fingers. Palm pressed against palm and she could feel his pulse racing.

  “I’ve got you,” he shouted. He gripped her hand harder, strong fingers closed around her knuckles. “Keep holding on!”

  “I will,” she said back to him, holding tight.

  “Hold on,” he yelled, his tone different. His free hand cupped his right shoulder and his jaw clenched with some sort of effort and he pulled her to him. “Tighter!” he commanded, and she used all her strength complying. “Just a little more, trust me! I’ve got you,” he repeated, this time triumphant. Suddenly his breathing changed, from frantic to exhausted, then slowed to almost normal. He was holding Tuesday against him but she could see his face relax, could feel his heart stop pounding, hear his jaw unlock. After a few minutes she tried to rise, but he held her fast, her cheek pressed against his shoulder, her chest pressed against his, her body half off the settee. It was the most awkward position in the world. It was the world’s most delicious feeling.

  Three hours later, as the first streaks of dawn lighted her windows, Tuesday woke up in Lawrence’s arms. She had never been held like that by anyone before—no one had ever wanted her to be that close to them—and she felt warm and safe and deeply confused. She felt like she knew Lawrence Pickering well and did not know him at all and she was not sure which she really wanted.

  He was still sleeping and she allowed herself to study him for a moment before sliding away. Even in repose, even without the benefit of his sparkling blue eyes, he was magnificent looking. The careful control he kept over his expression by day slipped away like a mask. There was no frown, no smile, just him. He looked younger, a boy, and yet not more vulnerable. She wondered if anything ever made him feel less than strong. She wondered what it would be like to touch him deeply.

  He let her go this time without protest and without waking. She would not tell him about his nightmare. She would not tell him that waking up surrounded by his embrace was the best feeling she had ever known. Telling him would only make his rejection, when it came, that much more embarrassing. As she registered these decisions she stretched her neck from side to side to work out the stiffness and turned toward her bed.

  That was when she saw what the Secret Admirer had done.

  Fear sliced through her body, and for the second time in her life, Tuesday fainted.

  Chapter 19

  Even as he paced around the room, tossing a stick of charcoal in his hand, Lawrence could not keep his eyes off the knife, buried almost to the hilt in her pillow. The rest of the mattress was in shreds around it, but it was the knife, cold steel and full of menace, that riveted his gaze. Looking at it made his stomach fill with fury, but it was better than looking at the bruise on Tuesday’s forehead from where she had hit the floor fainting. Every time he saw it he felt like it was an indictment of him and his inability to keep her safe.

  Things that had been fuzzy to him before had assumed razorlike sharpness in his mind. Curtis had beat her, he was positive of it, and now, although he had not inflicted the blow himself, he was no better. The difference between letting her get hurt and hurting her himself was negligible. Lawrence Pickering did not allow such things to happen.

  She had given him only a vague answer for why she wasn’t asleep in her bed, but he did not press her. He was not sure he wanted to know. Something that felt like a memory of her hair against his chin, her fingers wrapped tightly with his, nagged at him distractingly. The other possible reason for her vagueness, that she had attacked her bed herself, that she had murdered Curtis because he abused her and then slashed her linens to deflect suspicion, just could not make sense to Lawrence, even if it offered the simplest explanation of the facts. And whatever the truth, all that mattered at the moment was that she was not in bed when the knife was driven into it. He did not want to think about what might have happened if she had been. There would be years for self-rebuke later.

  The Secret Admirer had been right there with them, right in the room as he slept. Right there—he could even point to the exact spot where the muddy footprints, one slightly larger than the other, indicating that it was made by someone with a limp, circled the bed—and yet somehow managed to slip by all of them.

  The footsteps led to a service corridor and from there to the cellar, where a door overgrown with weeds that none of them had noticed opened directly onto the streets. The Secret Admirer seemed to know the layout of Worthington Hall better than its inhabitants and had managed to skirt all fifteen of the men posted inside the house. Fifteen trained guards who should have been aware of something.

  Those men, the night guards, had already gone home to bed when Tuesday’s fainting that morning awakened him, and it had taken some time—several of them seemed to prefer sleeping in beds other than those occupied by their wives—to reassemble them. They filed in now, followed by an older man, one Tuesday had not seen before. The man crossed to Lawrence, said a few words in his ear, and received in reply a scowl and a “Damn.”

  Tuesday was glad to see that Lawrence did not reserve his scowls expressly for her. “Is it news?” she asked from behind him. She was leaning against the wall next to the window, her arms crossed around her stomach. She had been standing like that for hours.

  “Not about this. Christopher,” Lawrence addressed the old man. “Tell them I’ll come as soon as I can. And not to worry.”

  “Where are we going?” Tuesday asked.

  “Nowhere.”

  Whatever the message had been, it had done nothing to improve his mood. “If this is about the investigation—”

&nbs
p; “It’s not.” Lawrence turned to the men now arrayed in front of him and set about questioning them minutely. He had been at it for three quarters of an hour when Tuesday, exasperated, interrupted. “This is pointless, my lord. They did not see or hear anything. They would not. I told you, he is invisible.”

  “No one is invisible,” Lawrence pushed out through his clenched jaw. “We know what he looks like.”

  “Do we?”

  “Don’t we?”

  “Do you see that?” She pointed to the wreck of her bed. “That is a message. He was not trying to kill me. He wanted us to know that he is not afraid of us. And I want to know why.” She paused, then voiced the fear that had been dogging her since the previous day. “I am beginning to wonder if he tricked us. If he purposely left all that evidence of his appearance at the crime scene to make us look for someone as unlike himself as possible.”

  “What do you propose we do then? Look only for right-handed men without brown hair who doesn’t limp?” Lawrence demanded curtly. “Besides, if his intention was to mislead us about his appearance, why shoot at our witness, the man who could confirm how he looked? Wouldn’t he want us to hear from Albert Marston?”

  “I suppose so.” Her agreement was half-hearted. “I just have this sense that we are missing something.”

  “You were the one who found all the damn evidence of the Secret Admirer’s existence that we’ve been going on in the first place.”

  “Do you think I have forgotten that for a second?”

  The pain in her voice, the first real pain he had heard, sliced through Lawrence’s anger and suspicion. How had he not considered what she must be feeling? Her husband dead, her bed destroyed, a killer stalking her, an investigation hinging on her observations, and, so far, going nowhere. He crossed to her, took her arm, and pulled her toward the door.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Come with me.”

  His tone dismissed any chance of protest. He led her out of the studio, into the main hall and up the stairs. The sound of yet another concert floated past them, but Lawrence did not pause. He wanted to find a quiet place to talk to her. He continued up another flight, went to the nearest door, flung it open, and motioned her inside.

  He saw her hesitate but he went in ahead, pulling her behind him. His men had been all over her house, but he himself had seen only Sir Dennis’s apartment, her studio, and the entry hall. While those were large, the room they were now in was like a little jewel box. The walls and ceiling were gilded and exotic vines and flowers had been painted over them. Butterflies and dragonflies flitted between the leaves of the plants, and an enormous tree with glossy green leaves covered half the ceiling. A leopard peeked between the fronds of a fern in one corner, and a unicorn’s horn showed from behind the painted tree trunk. Through Tuesday’s incredible artistry, the room had been transformed into a magical garden. And unlike most of the other rooms in the house, Lawrence saw it still contained a few pieces of furniture.

  Pushed into a corner were a wooden chair, a small table, a three-stepped ladder, and a very small bed, just the size of an infant, the kind one would find—

  “In a nursery,” he said aloud. “This was going to be your nursery.”

  Tuesday stood with her fingers on the handle of the closed door, her back to him. She nodded. Then she faced him. “Why did you bring me in here?”

  Lawrence wanted to apologize. Wanted to tell her that he knew. Wanted to say that he thought her paintings were wonderful. That he thought she was wonderful. Wanted to admit—“Lady Arlington, you have to stop this.” He spoke more harshly than he had intended.

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop doubting yourself and your judgment. You were the only person who saw any of that evidence at the scene of Curtis’s murder.”

  “But what if I was wrong? Your men have been looking for over a day and found nothing. What if he doesn’t exist? What if I have misled everyone?”

  “Your information is the only lead we have to finding the Secret Admirer. We have to trust it. It’s not useful to second-guess yourself like this.”

  She did not say anything, just moved away from him, trailing the fingers of her left hand along the wall. She stopped in front of a shimmering dragonfly.

  Lawrence followed her. “While you are at it, you should stop boxing up your feelings. Your husband has been killed. Your bed was brutally attacked. Most women in your situation would be lying down somewhere with cool cloths on their foreheads being waited on.”

  “CeCe is lying down.”

  “It is not good for you to be so stoic.”

  She reached out and lovingly traced the contour of the dragonfly’s wings with her pinkie. The gesture made Lawrence’s knees tingle. She asked without looking at him, “Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a dragonfly? To be able to go in any direction you wanted? To be so beautiful?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  Her eyes swept the room and she said in a flat voice, “I’m afraid you do not know the first thing about what is good for me, Lord Pickering.”

  “Very well. Then your acting this way is not good for my men. They are all half in love with you and hearing you so dispirited is destroying their morale.”

  “That is rot.”

  “Look, we need everyone to concentrate if we are going to catch the Secret Admir—”

  She stiffened. “Please. Please stop calling him that.”

  Lawrence said, quietly, “I thought that was what you called him.”

  “No. CeCe came up with the name. I went along with it at first, but now I know it’s wrong. He doesn’t admire me.”

  “He certainly seems to.”

  Lawrence was not prepared for her expression when she turned toward him. There was pain etched in every perfect feature. “He is not my secret admirer,” she insisted. “He does not admire me. There is nothing to admire and he knows it better than anyone because he knew about all of them.”

  “All of whom?”

  She squared her shoulders. “All the men who did not want me. All the men who were momentarily blinded but soon saw the truth. The men who—” she made herself say the word, “—rejected me. The men who knew that I’m not worth anything.”

  “What are you talking about Tuesday?”

  “I should have told you before, as soon as we knew but—” she stopped and swallowed hard. “All the men who were killed? All the others? They were all engaged to me once.”

  Lawrence stared at her.

  She nodded. She knew what he was seeing. She could feel the letters “Rejected” as if they were inscribed on her forehead. “They proposed to me but then, right after our engagement, they broke it off and married someone else. Someone more suitable. More lovely. More interesting. More charming. Someone better than me.”

  She saw anger in Lawrence’s eyes and rushed to add, “I know it looks like I was covering it up, and you will probably now think that I was responsible for the murders, but I’m not. The reason I did not tell you before was because—” she took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then she said, fast, “The reason I didn’t tell you was because I was embarrassed. I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want you to think about me—that way. At least not yet.”

  Lawrence could not find the words to tell her how much he believed her, and how much it pained him. He only managed to say, “Thank you. For telling me.”

  She gave a small, cold laugh at his tone. “You are welcome. But now do you see? Now do you understand? You tell me not to be stoic, but what do you want? What exactly would you have me feel, Lord Pickering? Rejected? Abandoned? Four fiancées broke their engagements with me because I couldn’t hold their attention. Curtis only married me because we did it quickly, before he could change his mind. And then he left, too. Do you know why?”

  Lawrence did not want to know.

  “My husband left me because I was a terrible wife and a terrible sc
rew. I don’t want to remember that, but somehow I can’t forget it. Forget any of it. What I want, more than anything, is to be numb.”

  Lawrence surprised them both by saying, “No you don’t.”

  She stopped rubbing her right wrist and gazed at him. “How do you know?”

  “Believe me. That is not a way to live.”

  There was a pause and then she asked, “Isn’t it working out for you?”

  Lawrence was stunned. “Do you ever not say what you are thinking, Lady Arlington?”

  “Do you ever not change the subject when someone asks you a personal question, Mr. Pickering?”

  “This is not about me.”

  Not about how he no longer bothered to drink because it had no effect on him. Not about how until the day before he hadn’t felt hungry or thirsty or cold in over two years. Not about how he constantly reminded himself of the words—monster, filthy, low-life, vile—that Constantia Grosgrain, his former mistress, had used to describe him at their last encounter, to remind himself of the glorious freedom, freedom from caring, they’d given him. Not about how he wanted to holler at anyone who called him a hero. Not about how his smile felt like it was a mask, his emotions like they were gaudy theatrical props to be picked up and shown around, then dropped into storage. “This is not about me at all,” he repeated forcefully.

  “Why not?” she asked, looking not at but into him with those gray-green storm cloud eyes. “Why am I the only one to confess? Why can’t we talk about the way you live your life, too?”

  Yes, Lawrence my friend. Why not?

  Lawrence took a step closer to her. He again experienced what he had in the coach when they kissed, the sense of disorientation, of confusion, but with a strange center of serenity. He took both her wrists in his hand and looked at the right one. It was slightly crooked.

  Behind her he saw the chair, the crib, the ladder. Short, only three steps up, but still tall enough to reach the highest point in the room.

  She had not fallen.