Page 77 of A Deal With a Notorious Devil
“I was seven,” he said. “I was seven years old, and she was just five and twenty.” There was a queer tightness in his chest, an ache he’d not experienced in years. “The day I turned five and twenty, all I could think of was how young I felt. How much of my life was still before me. How much of Mum’s life ought to have been before her.” Somehow, he’d threaded his fingers through hers. He hadn’t even noticed. It was just that her handhad been there, and he’d taken it in his, drawing strength and comfort from the squeeze of her fingers in his. “I ran,” he said. “Found a watchman and dragged him home with me. I was too late to save her, but quick enough to ensure the bastard was caught.”
Phoebe tucked her head against his shoulder. “I’m glad he was brought to justice.”
Chris snorted. “If you can call it that,” he said. “He was hanged. The rope snapped his neck immediately. Dead in an instant. Where is the justice in that? Justice would have been parity, and if I’d been just a little older, I’d have given it to him. I’d have made certain he suffered. Like she did.”Hell. Perhaps his social graces were lacking, but even he knew well enough that it wasn’t done to discuss such things in a lady’s presence. It was just that it was so damned easy to talk to her—not as a lady, but as a person. A friend. A wife.
Violence had been his lot in life from childhood, and now he had dragged her down alongside him into the muck of it. Actions taken decades ago had come back to haunt him, and now Phoebe had suffered for them. She had taken to his lessons in self-defense with good humor and rapt attention, but they should never have been necessary at all. No one should ever have touched her, ever have threatened her.
He would not let it happen again. That healing cut upon her neck would be the very last time anyone ever injured her. And the one who had done it would pay for it a thousand times over. “I can keep you safe,” he said, returning the grip of her fingers in his. “I am going to find Russell, and when I do—”
“I don’t believe I need to know the unsavory details,” Phoebe said hurriedly, looking somewhat sheepish.
“I’ve told you I’m not a good man.”
“Good, I think, is a matter of opinion and perspective,” she said. “In the eyes of the law? Probably you’d be a villain. But tome”—the fingertips of her free hand came up to touch the scabbed-over wound upon her throat, and for just a moment her eyes went hazy and distant as if she were reliving that terrible experience—“to me, you’d be a hero. I trust you to do the wrong thing for the right reason.”
“Don’t get accustomed to it,” he said. “There’s not a lot of heroism in me.”
“A matter of perspective,” she repeated softly. “Will you tell me when—when perhaps I ought to be scanning the newspapers for reports of a particular body found floating in the Thames?” she inquired delicately.
So she would know, he supposed. That shewastruly safe at last. That she could feel secure once more and know that the villain who had accosted her was dead. “Won’t be enough of him left to find,” he said. “But, yes, I’ll tell you.”
And that, he thought, would be enough.
Chapter Twenty Two
Inever thought I would say this,” Emma mused over tea, “but I suppose marriage agrees with you.”
Phoebe blinked, startled by the statement. “Do you think?” she asked. “How so?”
Emma offered a small shrug. “You simply have an air about you that you never have before. Do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you quite so comfortable in your own skin.”
Diana gave a nod of agreement from across the table as she selected a sugar lump with a pair of tongs to drop into her tea cup. “The strain of so many Seasons,” she said, “obviously takes its toll. But you were always so harried, dearest, flitting from one event to the next. I think I began to think of it as your natural state.”
“I never realized how tense you had been, even at tea,” Lydia added as she passed a plate of biscuits across the table. “You’re smiling, dear, and it isn’t that tight-lipped monstrosity you’ve worn in the past.”
“Am I?” Phoebe resisted the urge to touch her face, but she supposed—she supposed there must be some truth to it. Just months ago, her head had always been crammed full of plots and schemes as to how she might avoid attracting any suitors, how to carefully side-step matrimony without irreparably damaging herreputation. And now—
Now she had gotten everything she had ever wanted. In a roundabout fashion, perhaps, but yes—now that shehadmarried and had taken a pronounced step back from the social whirl in which she had spent the better part of a decade embroiled, she was…content. In a way she never had been before. In way she had never expected to be.
“And just look,” Emma said, with a vague wave of her hand. “You’ve turn Kit’s house into a home.”
Phoebe resisted the urge to snort. “I’m afraid not,” she said. “It’s just the public rooms, really. The house is far too large to have filled it already.” But she had been making steady progress at least, though she’d devoted far more of her time to finding books for the library than to acquiring furniture and art to fill the empty rooms.
But it didlooklike a home, a little more every day. And Kit, ever observant, always noticed when he passed something new in the halls or noted some freshly-acquired decoration hanging upon a wall. Sometimes they bickered over color schemes and paper hangings.
Sometimes she suspected he picked at her over some nonsense he didn’t truly care about only so he could proceed to debauch her in some deserted room for the fun of it after he’d ceded the argument in her favor.
“The fare has improved considerably,” Lydia said. “Why, the first time we took tea here, I thought I would crack my teeth upon the biscuits.”
That was because Phoebe had had the kitchen staff trained up properly at last. It hadn’t been too onerous a task—all they had wanted was a little direction and a great number of new recipes.
“Yes, well, the staff has come along nicely,” Phoebe said. “But Kit—” Well, Kit would be Kit. His table manners often leftsomething to be desired, but since he had previously demonstrated that he could be trusted to behave properly when it was absolutely necessary, she’d decided not to remark upon it when he came to dinner with his waistcoat unbuttoned, or sans shoes. Particularly because he was fond of sliding his toes up the inside of her thigh beneath the table when he did. “Kit is irredeemable,” she concluded. “But do you know, I think I like him that way.” A little more beast than gentleman.
“Has there been any resolution of that…other matter?” Diana inquired carefully.
Russell, she meant, Phoebe supposed. She had not told them about the incident herself—hadn’t want to relive it, even to explain what had occurred—but Kit had told Rafe, and Rafe had told Emma, and Emma had told Diana, and Diana had told Lydia, and she suspected the tale would have continued to spread if she had not then sworn them all to utter secrecy. As they shared a similar social circle, inevitably her parents would have heard of it, or her sisters, or her brother. The last thing she wanted was her massive family descending upon her in a frenzy of overprotectiveness.
She wanted only to find her peace again. The one she’d been living within these last months, until that nefarious Russell character had upset it.
