The Duke (20 page)
Authors: Gaelen Foley
The sum was a pittance to a man of his means, but the feather-brained fool deserved his confinement as punishment for his daughter’s suffering. Besides, if he were to spring Hamilton from the Fleet, Belinda might no longer choose to stay with him and, hang it all, he needed her. Needed her to solve the mystery of Lucy’s death. Needed her in his house, sitting at his out-of-tune piano.
When the jailer came back and said the time allowed for their visit was up, Belinda hugged her father good-bye and promised to come again in a couple of days. She asked him if there was anything he needed; old Hamilton said he should be delighted to have more paper and ink. Then he turned to Hawk with an ingenuous gaze.
“It comforts me greatly to know my daughter has a trusty friend in that large world beyond these bars, Your Grace. I’m in your debt.” His artless words of thanks were spoken so disarmingly, Hawk nodded and shook his offered hand.
Turning away from her father Belinda sent Hawk a fleeting look of soul-deep gratitude as she passed him on her way to the cell door. That look made it all worthwhile. Huffing with irritation at his own softheadedness, he pivoted and followed her out of the cell. His now empty-handed footman brought up the rear of their trio as they followed the jailer back the way they had come in.
Now that he had met Hamilton, he could see why Belinda had taken such drastic measures to keep him in the prison’s cleaner, warmer, and healthier upper regions. The old gentleman would not have survived in the crowded and violent mass cells.
Still, he didn’t know what he was going to say to her when they were alone.
A finishing-school teacher?
The only sense he could make of it all was that she must have been teaching at Mrs. Hall’s, waiting for her soldier boy to come home from the war to marry her, had eventually given up on both and decided on a more lucrative career to save her father and herself. Right now he didn’t even want to think about her relationship with Jacinda.
Suddenly they heard the sound of fighting and furious shouts up ahead. As they turned the corner into the next dim echoing corridor, they came upon a brutal scene. The scarred warden whom Hawk had seen downstairs, a grizzly giant of a man with a huge key ring clanging at his waist, had thrown a defiant young male prisoner against the wall. The great brute was dealing out ruthless discipline with his bludgeon.
Hawk put out his hand, stopping Belinda. He knew the warden was only doing his rough and dangerous job, but he certainly didn’t want her to see it.
“Halt, darling.” He swiftly scanned the area with a glance. “Is there another exit?” he began, turning to the guard, but the man was already in motion, running to assist his superior officer.
Then Hawk noticed Belinda.
She was standing in a state of eerie calm, her face pale and expressionless as she stared at the graphic scene of punishment. In the dark corridor she was as pale and silent as a ghost, or an angel hovering by, looking saddened yet detached from it all. Blond tendrils of her hair waved softly in the draft down the corridor.
Hawk clenched his jaw, determined to get her out of here now. He would have to find another way out. He reached for her hand and clasped it.
“Come, darling,” he murmured, but she didn’t move.
“I’m not running from him,” she said, and her voice fell as softly as rose petals over the screams of the prisoner.
Holding on to his hand like a child, she ignored his protest and began walking forward.
There were no cannons firing in her war, no bullets’ blast. The armies that clashed in that moment were within her, fighting as though they would tear her soul apart, but she refused to run. She knew she must stand now, not cowering in the shadow of her powerful protector, but passing, look the monster in the eye and let him see she would no longer fear him. Perhaps he would not even comprehend, but
she
would know she had done it, and that would be enough.
I will not run. I will not run. I will not run, she thought over and over with every step, though the jangling of his keys rasped through her consciousness like broken glass.
It was that sound that rang through her nightmares.
She was afraid—so afraid—and shaking, icy with fear down to her fingertips. But she had risen again after he had torn her down and now she had an ally, his hand in hers.
“Belinda—”
“It’s all right,” she heard herself say distantly, over the rushing of her blood in her ears. God bless Robert, he didn’t understand, but he went with her.
Either the unfortunate prisoner had ceased to give offense or the warden became aware of their slow approach. In any case, he straightened up, moving with lumbering weight, the bludgeon in his hand—hard, cruel, smeared with blood.
And then he turned and looked straight at her.
Bel felt her throat close with panic. Everything moved slowly, like that night in the alley. Time bled to a trickle. She wanted to flee, bolt like a horse for the barn in a thunderstorm. But staunchly, she held her ground—nauseous, shaking, and freezing cold. Her body trembled with hatred, her jaw was clenched so hard that it hurt.
A slight, bestial smile thinned the warden’s mouth and she could see him waiting for her to flinch or to betray what he had done. She did neither. Her stomach twisted in a hard knot, but her face remained impassive. She willed herself to find steely-nerved grit somewhere amid the pain that she had learned to live with. Robert said she had ballast in her hull. She’d remember that.
She advanced.
This surprised the warden, she could tell. His mean-eyed gaze flicked to Robert.
Bel suddenly wondered if she had just led her keeper into danger—but when she looked up at him beside her, she saw Robert deal the man a lordly look of distaste. She smiled faintly in cold satisfaction as it dawned on the warden that she now had a powerful friend.
Protector.
He came from a line of warriors and his name was Knight. Who could best him?
The warden glanced suspiciously at her again, realizing, she supposed, that they were at a stalemate—her silence of his crime in exchange for her father’s safety. Little did he know he needn’t have worried. The thought of Robert or any of her admirers finding out that she had lost her virginity to this ogre filled her with terrorized shame. Fine dresses and haughty airs had fooled them into thinking her such a prize. How she had duped them—she, the frigid courtesan, dirtier and less than a whore. Why, even to Robert, she was merely bait.
Without a word exchanged, her protector and she and the footman passed the crumpled prisoner, the warden, and the guard.
She knew she had won this battle, but the warden took the last jab at her in the form of a snicker that followed her down the corridor. He jangled his keys with jaunty nonchalance, and the sound of it was nearly her undoing.
She released Robert’s hand and walked ahead heedlessly when, at last, she was just a few steps from the arched entrance of the Fleet. Gasping for breath, she pushed through the door. She looked up at the reeling sky, her head woozy, black rings exploding across her field of vision. She felt Robert’s hands steadying her. She clutched his forearm, holding on to him and fighting not to faint. He slipped a supportive arm around her waist.
“Belinda, you look positively ill, are you all right?” His cultured baritone seemed to come to her through a thick wall of glass.
A wave of pain washed through her. God, how she wanted him to reach her—shatter the glass box she had sealed herself into and lift her out of it—and hold her to him, his naked chest to hers, nothing left to hide. But that would never be. Not love. Not for her.
“I’m—fine,” she forced out, pulling away as she slowly regrouped. “Thank you.”
She heard him mutter an order for the footman to go for the coach. He paced on the pavement while she waited in stony silence for the coach to come.
“Belinda, I don’t want you coming back to this hellhole,” he clipped out, giving her a fierce look of command.
Slowly she lowered her head. “Do you think that I want to?”
“Then don’t.”
She hadn’t the strength to argue right now. She had to come back, of course. Her father was in there. For the barest moment it was on the tip of her tongue to simply ask Robert flat out to lend her the money to spring him, but her pride had taken too many blows of late. She was no charity child and his opinion of her was low enough without adding beggary to whoredom.
He paced nearer and stopped a foot or two away, his hands in his pockets. She gathered all of her courage and lifted her chin, coolly meeting his gaze. He studied her keenly. His dark, penetrating eyes seemed to stare right into the morass of her soul.
She couldn’t speak a word or look away.
He shook his head at her, looking exasperated, but his voice was soft. “You should have let me take you out by a different route. You didn’t need to see so much brutality, Belinda.”
She nearly laughed aloud. The innocent. If only he knew. His simple gallant goodness brought tears to her eyes. “My paragon,” she whispered.
“Why do you call me that? It isn’t funny.” He scowled and stepped back from her, looking so stuffy and pompous that she found the strength to smile as the elegant town coach rolled to a halt before them.
They climbed up and she sat beside him, laying her head on his broad shoulder. She knew he was peeved at her, but rather than protesting he shifted to make her more comfortable, putting his arm around her. She closed her eyes, exhausted after her private victory. He had the nicest smell and his arm around her was firm and strong, his hard, muscled shoulder a firm pillow for her head.
You helped me, she thought. You don’t know it, but you gave me the strength to get through it.
“You should listen to me next time,” he grumbled, trying to sound cross.
“I will, darling. Whatever you say,” she whispered with the trace of a smile, thanking God for the man.
Just let me stay with you.
The temperamental English weather had gone unseasonably cold and had unleashed a torrent of rain by the time Hawk stalked out of the House of Lords that night at half past ten, hungry, tired, and grouchy. To make matters worse, he had a deuced headache from arguing through the supper hour with Eldon and Sidmouth and their ultra-Tory cronies, and then he had been too disgusted with their bloodthirsty views to eat.
All the while muddled thoughts of Belinda had churned in his head, troubling and confusing him and weaving themselves in with his starved libido until his brain was one big knot.
Riding home through Westminster he gazed out the window, watching the wind and rain buffet the plane trees as his rocking carriage rolled down the Mall. On a few of the wrought-iron lampposts, the feeble flames had been extinguished, leaving gaps in the lamp row that were as dark as his mulling brain.
This business about Jacinda and Paris and Mrs. Hall’s Academy for Young Ladies—had it been truth or falsity, and could he afford even to care one way or the other?
The thought that a courtesan had been formerly molding the character of his already-headstrong maiden sister appalled him. For Jacinda’s welfare, he had to find out the truth, only he wasn’t sure he wanted to know anything more about Miss Hamilton than he already did.
He was trying, oh, Lord, how he was trying to keep a polite distance between them, not to get involved with her, but he felt himself being dragged helplessly into her orbit as if by some vast, cosmic magnet that women like her wielded and used to enslave rich, titled men like him. It wasn’t bloody fair, that’s what. Frowning out the coach window as the prickling rain blew sideways against the glass, he rubbed his throbbing temples and reviewed what he knew about Miss Belinda Hamilton.
There were troubling gaps in his knowledge. He wondered, for instance, how exactly she had become a courtesan. To have asked would have been shockingly bad form, so he supposed he’d never know unless she offered the information, but that seemed improbable. Unlike every other garrulous female he knew, Miss Hamilton was supremely unforthcoming with facts about herself. She was not telling and he was not asking. And why should he ask her questions about herself? he thought indignantly. There was nothing between them but a practical arrangement, useful to them both.
Yet, as he listened to the rain’s drumming on his coach’s roof, it bothered him to wonder, not for the first time, which of his acquaintances or club mates at White’s had purchased her innocence. Hertford? He was debauched enough—or had she given it freely to that thoughtless soldier boy on his vapid promise of marriage at some future date? he mused as the coach pulled through the gates of Knight House. It is none of your business, Hawk. You don’t care, it doesn’t matter, leave it alone, he said to himself.
Fairly growling in irritation and suppressed lust, he got out and sloshed through the puddles between his halted coach and his front door, half-soaked by the time he stepped into the well-lighted entrance hall. He was barely through the door when Belinda walked toward him from the corridor, graceful and serene.
“Oh, look at you, you poor thing,” she said.