Page 78 of A Deal With a Notorious Devil
“Kit’s not said anything on that front,” Phoebe said, with a slow shake of her head. She’d told him she didn’t want the details, and when she had spoken the words to him, they had been the truth. She’d thought it would be best not to know.
She’d been wrong. It was awful to live with the certainty that he was concealing things from her. To protect her, no doubt, and to honor her wishes. A few times she had delicately asked, but he had sidestepped her questions with a practiced ease. Some days he spent hours at a time locked within his study with Brooks, though she had never heard anything more than the mutedmurmur of voices from within.
Some days he left the house for hours at a time and came home a bit bloodied, though she suspected little of it, if any, was his own. She’d been loath to ask if whatever bit of violence in which he’d indulged had been for business or pleasure. Or perhaps a little of both.
“But he would tell you,” Lydia said, her brows drawing together, “if there was something he thought you ought to know. Wouldn’t he?”
He would. She was certain he would. It was just that she suspected what she would want to know and what he thought she ought to know vastly differed.
“I think so,” she said. “If there were something I ought to be concerned about.” He’d not said anything about her rare outings, other than to remind her to bring along a footman and to take both the stiletto she’d stolen and the tiny muff pistol he’d purchased for her. “It’s just that it’s clear that he’s up to something. And he’s become rather fanatical about teaching me to brawl.”
“I beg your pardon,” Diana said, with a flurry of blinks behind the lenses of her spectacles. “Tobrawl?”
“To defend myself, I mean to say,” Phoebe said. “It’s rather undignified,” she admitted with a sheepish shrug, “and I’ll confess I’m not much good at it. He’s a terrible taskmaster, besides, and he wields an unfair advantage with that cane.” Twice last time he’d rapped her firmly on the bottom with it and once more she had had her knees knocked out from beneath her before she’d realized she had been meant to wrest the cane away from him.
“How…unusual.” Lydia stared in open astonishment. “I imagine he’s rather proficient at it himself. I suppose he’d have to be, wouldn’t he? I mean to say, he’s got something of a reputation.”
That was a bit of an understatement, and Phoebe had to bite her lower lip against the defense that wanted to erupt.He isn’t like that, she supposed she had meant to say, but it wouldn’t have been quite the truth. He was very much like that, indeed. It just wasn’t all he was.
“Ah,” Emma said, somewhat abashed. “I’d not say the rumors are exaggerated, per se. But there is more to him than what they would imply. It would be easy to judge him on the standards upon which we were raised—”
“But Kit was not raised upon those standards,” Phoebe said. By his account, his mother had been a good and decent woman, forced by circumstances into a harsher and less forgiving life than that which she ought to have had. And he had been so young when she had died—horribly, tragically. That incident had left an indelible impression upon his forming sense of morality, which had then only become eroded further when he had fallen in with a gang of child thieves under the cruel mastery of a kidsman.
“Just so,” Emma said. “He’s not devoid of morality, truly, but instead possessed of a rather strict set of his own morals. They do not always—or even usually—align with my own, but he always acts according to his conscience.”
Yes; he did. The wrong thing for the right reasons. The ends justifying the means. A man capable of murder without a qualm, without suffering even the slightest pangs of conscience over the ending of a life. Capable of easily making difficult decisions, where another might have hesitated.
Perhaps a more decent woman would have been alarmed by the thought of it. Then again, perhaps Phoebe was just a little more morally flexibleherself than a lady of her station ought to be.
“He’s not a bad man,” Emma said, and she reached out to lay her hand over Phoebe’s. “Or at least, he isn’tallbad. I didn’texpect that he would ever marry, but, Phoebe, I am so glad it was you. I think perhaps you are capable of understanding him—appreciating him—in a way that few others could manage.”
She did. Of course she did. Kit would never be reformed, never made over into someone whom polite society would find acceptable.But she thought…she thought he was exactly as he was meant to be. Exactly how she wanted him.
Exactly how she—oh,fucking hell.
Exactly how she loved him.
∞∞∞
“I can’t believe ye stabbed me,” Chris grumbled as he pressed a clean cloth to the wound Phoebe had recently inflicted.
“I didn’t mean to!” she wailed for perhaps the sixth time, wringing her hands in distress. “And besides, you oughtn’t to have sneaked up upon me.”
“Weren’t my fault ye was woolgathering.” To all accounts, she’d been browsing the bookshelves in the library, but he’d called her name several times without garnering a response, and so he’d touched her shoulder to attract her attention. He simply hadn’t expected her to draw her blade quite so quickly. She’d never managed such a swift response before. “Got to commend ye for it, though,” he acknowledged resentfully. “Ye surprised me. That’s not easily done.”
She’d tucked the sheath of the stiletto into the bodice of her gown, between her breasts; a clever concealment. There were few other places where a blade could be both hiddenandeasily accessible. She might’ve strapped it to her thigh instead, but that would have required rummaging beneath skirts and petticoatsto retrieve it.
“I really am sorry,” she said—again—and by the glint of her eyes he suspected she was significantly more distressed by the mishap than even he had been. And he’d been the one who had gotten himself stabbed.
“Phoebe,” he said, striving to modulate his voice through the pain in his side. “It’s all right. Really. I’ve had worse.” And he had. Of course it had damn wellhurt, but not so much as a gunshot. And she’d pulled her swing at the last second—a bit too late to avoid stabbing him altogether, but enough that only the very tip of the blade had gored him. He’d bled a great deal, but it was already slowing. “Truly, the worst of it is going to be enduring Haddington’s complaints about the shirt.” Probably the valet could patch a split on a seam, but the slice of a knife straight through the fabric would no doubt make the shirt fit only for the rag heap.
Perversely, the assurance he’d meant to offer only seemed to add to her distress. “What if it should become infected?” she said fretfully, turning in a tight circle to resume her fractious pacing.
“Then it becomes infected, and you can bet your arse I’ll malinger about it.” With his free hand, he patted the seat beside him on the couch. “Sit,” he said. “Your pacing is making me dizzy. If you want to make yourself useful, you can come and rub my knee for me. It aches something awful.”
“Perhaps it wouldn’t,” she said tightly as she turned toward him once more, “if you spent less time walking about on it.” But at least the brief flare of anger in her eyes had burned away the tears he’d feared she would shed.
“Don’t be a scold,” he chided. “Come; you’ve gored me. Rubbing my knee is the least you could do.”
