He gave a short unamused laugh and closed his eyes briefly.
When he opened them again, they were hunted. “I have secured my place in hell because it’s all I think about, Keating.”
It knocked the breath from her.
They stood in fraught silence.
“If you’ll excuse me?” he said politely. Finally. Tersely.
She stood, frozen, as he got into his coat, methodically stacked his books, and gathered his papers.
He swept past her out of the room.
And she waited, breathing in and out for the count of twenty, for him to leave, to be clear of the annex. Before she took herself swiftly back to her room. She’d forgotten the book she came for.
She lowered herself to the bed and pressed her fists against her hot cheeks and then against her chest, because that was where the emotion, the great hot, raging snarl of it, had lodged and now threatened to split her apart.
A mistress. Howcosmopolitan.
She wondered if the whole of the ton knew.
It seemed as though Lady Wisterberg’s gossip had been correct.
No wonder he thought of her as clover. Simple. Innocent. Ignorant.
Well, she wasn’t any of that any longer, she supposed.
He shouldn’t have told me, she thought angrily. He should have lied. He should have gone on being polite and remote. She’d liked her illusions and her ignorance. She’d pressed for truth, because she’d been simple enough to think that the truth was preferable at all times. Even the hard truths, about her father’s failing heart, or her mother’s illness and eventual death, were easier to take on; they were facts of existence and no humans were untouched by those.
She wasn’t prepared to entertain these sorts of moral complexities. Or to so very much miss someone she had known for such a short time—someone who was apparently, as Lady Wisterberg had described, scandalous by the metric of polite society. Even as he was welcome into ballrooms and society, by virtue of being a lord and a politician, and, of course, so absurdly handsome.
So he’d been doing her a charity by keeping his distance.
But how was it that someone who could “ruin” her could also make her life feel immeasurably more vivid? How was it that he stood out from the rest of the world in a sort of stark relief? How was it that she paradoxically felt a strange sort of peace when she stood near him, despite the turmoil he inspired?
Did the admirable things he did offset the scandalous ones, or did one somehow support the other?
And most importantly: he shouldn’t have told her that making love to her was all he thought about.
She felt—sheknew—he’d done that deliberately.
Because when she ought to be dancing with bright-eyed boys who hadn’t yet gotten around to making sexual business arrangements with women they’d met in salons, it was all she was going to be thinking about.
And no doubt he knew it.
The bastard.
Yes, she knew that word.
She wondered what she would do with the power this had conferred upon her.
Chapter Sixteen
“Well, good evening, you old Charred Ruins you. Ha ha!” Lord Coopersmith, a bluff and hearty Whig, handed Kirke a brandy as he maneuvered his way into the library.
“Very amusing.” Kirke sardonically raised the glass to him.
It seemed everyone had read the gossip this morning: