He had a look at his pocket watch.
There was time to get a hack to St. James’s Square.
There he would pay a visit to an apothecary and ask the questions that had been forming since his chat with Mr. Delacorte in the smoking room.
If he was right about the suspicion he was pursuing, there was a possibility he could keep Ginny safe for the rest of her life. If that was all he would ever be able to offer her, then by God, he was going to bloody well try.
Chapter Seventeen
Ginny took advantage of the four-nights-a-week-in-the-sitting-room rule to hide in her room that night, right after dinner. She wished Marchand were more subtle about staring at her during dinner, but then, she wouldn’t know he was looking at her if she hadn’t been looking at him. She’d, in fact, been dangerously unaware of anyone noticing their mutual fascination.
Dot had loaned herThe Ghost in the Attic.
She didn’t read it.
The turmoil taking place inside her was sufficient drama.
She crawled into bed instead and listened to the wind rattling the window.
There were the things she wanted, and the things she needed. She might have made a list and put them into columns, as she’d done with the clues about Hogarth’s gambling debt, except they swirled like leaves kicked up in a storm. She could not discern one from another.
What she wanted was to know every single thing Marchand could teach her about sex.
But her body begged to differ. Her body insisted this wasnot a want but a need, as surely as hunger was a need.It’s an appetite, he’d once said to her, with something like condescension, outside of Henrietta Parker’s house. He had shown her that desire could bank and bank as though it was leading somewhere very important, somewhere extraordinary. He had shown her it had gradations. This afternoon, he had lit her body on fire and left it smoldering, and obviously he was the only one who could quench it.
What she wanted was not to want him.
But that would mean she never would have met him.
What she wanted was to never have met him.
Because now her life was distinctly before him and after him, no matter what happened.
Her throat was thick.
She rested her forehead on her hands.
What she both wanted and needed was to return to Sussex able to tell Hogarth his debt to the house had been paid, and that they would have at leastsomethingwith which to negotiate marriage settlements for Felicity and Fiona.
What she wanted was to stop being afraid. She wanted onedamnedmoment when she was not afraid. Because fear was sawing away at her being and she had begun to feel as though it was only a matter of time before it snapped completely. She wasn’t certain Marchand truly comprehended this.
And then she told herself that there was a certain symmetry to it. Her family’s recent misfortunate had originated with Gabriel.
Whyshouldn’the also be the path to salvation?
With the four-thousand-pound debt forgiven, she could perhaps negotiate a marriage settlement of two thousandpounds each for Felicity and Fiona, plus a percentage of the anticipated rent of the entailed estate they had inherited, once they found a tenant. It was still paltry. But it wasn’tnothing. It wasn’t insulting. It might be enough to save her sisters’ futures.
But she would still need to explain why the dowry amounts were so low, when the understanding had been so different when their fiancés proposed.
It left nothing forherdowry, of course. That hardly seemed to matter when she didn’t even have a marriage proposal yet. She would survive, somehow.
This was the dangerous run of her thoughts when lust and desperation colluded.
One night out of her entire life.
One night in Gabriel’s bed, and she could get both what she wanted and what she needed.
And surely no one else would be the wiser?