To Rescue or Ravish? (6 page)

“When?”

“I dunno. Years ago.” In a coaxing voice, Bird added, “Time to talk about you, darling.” They emerged into the passage. Matt stood in the doorway, looking out into the night.

In the lamplight, Bird’s leer was positively greasy. “What’s my drawing going to say about you?”

“Something horrid, no doubt.” Not that she found it in her heart to care.

“I’d rather not do you any more harm than necessary,” Bird said. “Don’t get me wrong—I’m not a good man, but I value my skin.”

Arabella glanced at Matt, but his utter stillness told her nothing. She scowled at Bird. “For God’s sake, stop jesting about murder and explain yourself.”

Matt whirled, making an impatient sound. “Believe it or not, he wants the truth.”

“The truth about what?”

“I already told you,” Matt said. “He wants to know what you’re going to do now. If he tells the truth about you, people are more likely to believe what he implies about your uncle and Sir Reginald.”

“That’s right,” Bird said. “And you want them to believe what I imply, don’t you?”

“As long as it makes them out to be utter villains,” she said.

“That’s the spirit,” Bird said. “As for the truth about you, darling—the thing is, it’s got to be verifiable truth, and if you can come out of this looking virtuous, so much the better.”

She huffed. How unlikely that was! “Why?”

“Because the better you look, the worse they do,” Matt said, frowning at her. “It all has to do with contrast.”

“I can’t come out of this looking virtuous,” Arabella said. “There are at least a dozen witnesses that I went with you to your rooms.”

“They don’t count,” Bird said. “They’re a disreputable lot, and they take a dim view of virtue. They don’t care what you have or haven’t done.”

“It’s the nobs that count,” Matt said.

“Must you use that word?” Arabella said. In spite of being gentry-born himself, he’d always derided the upper classes. She’d thought it merely a reaction to his father, who cultivated his richer parishioners and paid little attention to the poor, but this sounded like something far more fundamental…and he’d never before applied the derision to her.

Oh,
no
. He hadn’t only heard about the suitors. He’d heard that she mistreated her servants, too. It couldn’t get more ironic, but once again, she couldn’t explain herself without revealing why she’d avoided marriage. Far better to stick to her reputation as a cold, temperamental witch.

“And apart from the nobs, other supposedly reputable people,” Matt said, his sarcasm making her cringe. “If you go to my mother, who is genuinely respectable, you’ll come out lilies and roses. She’s gently bred and a clergyman’s widow. Can’t get much more virtuous than that.”

“I can’t possibly go to your mother, not after tonight.”

“Of course you can,” Bird said. “Mrs. Worcester’s a great gun. She even puts up with me.”

“My mother will be delighted to see you again,” Matt said. “In any event, you don’t have a choice.”

This was mortification piled upon mortification, but unfortunately Matt was right. She had no place else to go. Mr. Brownley wouldn’t force her to sign the marriage settlements, but his was a bachelor household, so he couldn’t take her in.

“The wind has died down,” Matt said. “We may as well walk.” He opened the door. “You needn’t be frightened. People know me hereabouts, so we’re safe enough on the streets.”

“I’m not afraid.” Arabella gathered her cloak about her and went out, followed by Bird.

“Knew his mother well, did you?” Bird was the nosiest person Arabella had ever met.

“Matt and I were childhood friends,” she said glumly.

“Not merely friends, though.” He took her silence for assent and gestured dramatically. “Young lovers parted by cruel fate, but reunited in a daring rescue! That’s a better story than taking refuge with a respectable widow. People much prefer a stirring romance.”

“But it’s not true,” Matt said, closing the tavern door.

“Once you two are over your little tiff, it will be,” Bird said.

“It’s not a tiff,” Arabella snapped.

“Definitely not,” said Matt.

Bird narrowed his eyes. He shook a fist at Matt. “It was you!
You
stole my engraving.”

Matt shrugged.

Bird gave a crack of laughter. “You owe me, Worcester. A romance it is.” He waved a hand and strode away, whistling.

“What it is,” Matt said, “is a misunderstanding. I apologise, Bella. What I said was unforgivable. We both gave in to an attraction for a former lover, but that’s all it was.” Together, they crossed the street and headed north. “It won’t happen again.”

Never again
. She was
not
going to burst into tears. “He’s going to lie about us.” Any story would be preferable to the one Bird had chosen. “Can’t you stop him?”

“I’d rather not. A sensational story like this means a great deal to Bird.”

“Which engraving was he talking about?” she asked.

“He drew a caricature of you several months ago. I stole the engraving before he could have any prints made.” He shrugged. “It was a bad likeness, because he’d never seen you except at a distance, but you would have been mortified by it regardless. Fortunately, he got distracted by a juicy scandal and never redid it.”

“Thank you,” she said. “That was exceptionally kind of you.”

“He won’t go too far with this one. He values his friendship with me, and I can tell he likes you. You’re nothing like he expected.” After a silence broken only by the night sounds of London, he added, “And you were right. No one will believe you’re interested in me.”

That’s because they’re idiots.
She bit her lip hard, waiting until she could control her voice. “What did Bird mean about you living in the street?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Just talk.”

“I don’t believe you,” Bella said.

“Nothing worth talking about, then. It was years ago, and it doesn’t matter anymore.”

They turned a corner, passing a couple of grubby-looking men in a doorway. Matt exchanged cordial greetings with them, so Bella murmured, “Good evening,” as well. When they’d passed out of earshot, she said, “It matters to me. You’ve changed, Matt. You’re not the same as before.”

“Nor are you. We all change over the course of time.”

“I have
not
changed,” she said, but his skeptical lift of the brows told her he didn’t believe it.

She’d had enough. “Very well then, answer me this—one night seven years ago, we became lovers. The next day you left our village, never to return. Why did you abandon me?”

* * *

“Abandon you? I did no such thing.”

“You left, Matt. After that night, you left Surrey and never once returned.” Her voice thickened. “How do you suppose I felt?”

He didn’t know what to say. He’d worried about her, but he’d been so busy surviving he’d had no leisure to think of much else.

“If you regretted what we’d done, why didn’t you just say so?” she said. “You needn’t have run away.”

“I didn’t run away.” Bella’s hood had fallen back, and her spun-gold hair was coming out of its pins. It had been much later, when he’d had a decent place to sleep and fewer nightmares, that he’d dreamt of running his fingers through that hair, of tickling her breasts with its silkiness.

Had she dreamed of him, too? She was holding back tears; he was sure of it. “My father learned that I’d been playing at cards and dice. You know what he was like—he had a veritable hatred of gambling. He went into a violent rage, put me on the stage to London without a penny to my name and told me never to return. I was barely given time to bid my mother farewell. If she hadn’t managed to slip a guinea into my shoe, I might well have starved.”

“How could he do that to his own son?”

“Pride,” Matt said. He’d thought this through long ago. “He was a clergyman, and therefore his son must be an example to others. Once I was out of the way, he had no cause to fear that I would embarrass him, particularly with his richer parishioners, the ones that mattered most to him.”

“The nobs,” she said softly.

“Mama pleaded with him to allow me to at least keep in touch. Bella, I couldn’t risk seeing you. If I’d sneaked back to the village or even written to you, word would have reached my father, and he would have forbidden Mama and me to correspond. I couldn’t do that to her.”

“Of course not,” Bella said with the ready sympathy she’d always had as a child. Perhaps she hadn’t changed so very much.

But what about the tales he’d heard about her? They couldn’t all be lies.

“So that’s when you were on the streets, but not for long,” Bella said. “Your mother said that you had work with an East India merchant.”

He hesitated. He could lie to her and end this conversation now. In all the years of striving and planning, of hoping he might win her back some day, he’d been determined—absolutely—that she would never find out what he’d done and who he’d become.

He could give her a small piece of the truth. “No, that was a lie meant to reassure my mother. Everything turned out all right in the end, though, so you needn’t scowl at me like that.”

“How long were you on the streets?”

“A month or two at most, and I found sufficient shelter most nights.” This was a gross exaggeration, but she didn’t need to hear how he’d been robbed and beaten and survived the first few weeks through sheer luck.

“What happened after that? What kind of work did you do? How did you buy the tavern?”

Still, he hesitated. “It happened years ago, and much of it is unsuitable for a lady’s ears.”

She halted, glaring up at him in the night, her hair falling down her shoulders again. “What’s
wrong
with you? You never worried about my ‘lady’s ears’ when we were children.”

“Oh, very well.” Knowing Bella, she would pester him until she got her way. Might as well try to keep it light. “I started out with the obvious—became a thief. I hadn’t a notion how to pick pockets, not having been brought up to the trade.”

“You
picked pockets?
”

He shook his head. “Too hazardous, but I made a reasonably competent footpad.” He waited for her to shrink from him in shock.

She latched onto his arm and clung. “Good God, Matt! What if you’d been caught?”

“Well, I wasn’t.” He patted her hand and began walking again, praying she would continue to hold onto him. “Sometimes it was fun, particularly if I happened across a rich bastard who deserved a bit of punishment.”

She didn’t say anything to that. He hesitated again. No, she needed to understand. “You’ve never lived amongst the lower classes. You don’t know what they suffer at the hands of their so-called betters.”

“I know a little,” she said. “I know how much our servants dislike working for Uncle Wilbur.”

But not for her? By what he’d heard, she’d become a veritable termagant.

“I don’t know what I’ll do if I have to go to the Continent,” she said. “I won’t be able to take more than one of them with me. I should hate to lose my maid—we get on very comfortably—but I can’t desert Chalmers, our butler, because he’s elderly and would be destitute without me. And Ralph, my footman, is getting on in years, too.” She sighed. “I shall figure something out. What did you do after being a footpad?”

His mind was in such disarray that it took him several seconds to respond. “I found myself a partner and became a burglar for a couple of years.”

“You broke into people’s houses?” She clutched his arm tighter. “You could have been hanged!”

“Not likely if one plans things properly,” he said. “Why aren’t you berating me for resorting to crime?”

“I assume you didn’t have much choice,” she said.

“That’s how it seemed at the time.”

“I would never blame you for doing what you had to in order to survive,” she said.

She did understand. The more she spoke, the more he couldn’t reconcile this Bella with the one he’d heard about in recent years.

“As soon as I could afford it, I turned respectable and gambled for a living,” he said. “By then my father was dead.”

In the light of a streetlamp, he caught the glimmer of tears. “Oh, Matt.” Her voice caught. “You must have been so lonely. It must have been so hard.”

“Yes, but it doesn’t matter now.” A whole new vista of loneliness spread before him—or maybe not. “Eventually I had the money to buy my mother a house in town. She moved in just a month ago.”

For a while they walked in silence, Bella still clinging to his arm. Memories of Bella in mischief, Bella putting on an act, Bella stubbornly hiding her grief at her mother’s death behind an indifferent front…all tumbled into his mind. Maybe he did still know her after all. Maybe, just maybe, she’d had a reason for becoming so cold and aloof.

Not for the cruelty to servants, though… What reason could she have for that? He would have to think about it.

First things first: why was she so determined not to marry? Hope surged inside him, powerful and terrifying. He wasn’t going to lose her again, not without putting up a fight. For a man who’d executed flawless burglaries and won a fortune at cards, he was showing a remarkable lack of brilliance when it came to love. He needed to make a plan and follow it.

Step one: recover from the misfortunes of the past. “Not only did I not abandon you, I begged my mother to keep an eye on you in case I’d gotten you with child.”

She stared, clearly horrified. “You told your
mother
about us?”

“What choice did I have? Someone had to make sure you were all right. I had nightmares that you were pregnant and they wouldn’t let me near you.” He shrugged. “Which they probably wouldn’t have.” Might as well confess to all his folly. “I even made grand plans to abduct you if the worst happened.”

“Truly?” Her lips trembled into a smile. He wanted to sweep her off her feet and kiss her silly, but first he needed the truth. Knowing Bella, she wouldn’t surrender it easily.

“Yes, truly, but Mama wrote and reassured me that you were well and not increasing, thank God.”

Step two: get her riled up until she lost her composure. “You had such a good, safe life, a doting father, plenty of money. Unless I’d gotten you with child, everything was perfectly fine.”