Page 80 of A Deal With a Notorious Devil
“As I thought,” he huffed, and the sliver of a grin lingering at the corner of his mouth raised her hackles. He’d back her toward a corner, and she hadn’t realized it. And he got the better of her once more as he feinted right, and then caught her when she tried to flee around him. “You can defend yourself,” he allowed, manacling her wrist in the grip of his fingers. “But you shouldn’t have to. Think on it for a moment. You haven’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks. You’re suffering nightmares most nights. You don’t feel safe in your own home.”
“And you think evicting me from it will somehow help?” How was she meant to sleep alone? How was she meant to sleep at all, when she would be worrying over whether or not she would ever see him again?
“For Christ’s sake, Phoebe, you’re not being evicted. It won’t be a long stay.”
It would be interminable. Mama and Papa would be full of questions. The rest of her family was wont to reel in and out of the house without so much as a note of warning. And worst of all—there would be no one there beside her in bed at night. No one to rouse her out of an inescapable nightmare should she happen to suffer one.
“I need a clear head,” Kit said ruthlessly, and she knew that there would be no budging him from this. “I need you somewhere secure, somewhere safe. Somewhere I won’t have to worry about you.”
Somewhere he wouldn’t have to think of her at all, morelikely. “I hadn’t realized my presence was so injurious to your state of mind,” she said stiffly. “Far be it from me to inflict it upon you further.”
“Damn it all, Phoebe. That’s not what I meant.” The glowing embers in the hearth lit his eyes with an unholy light; flame bordered by glacial blue frost. “I’d send you to China if that was what it took to keep you safe. Best you resign yourself to it. Now come back to bed.”
She wrenched her arm free of his hold with such a violent motion that, absent the stability the cane would have provided, she nearly unbalanced him. “Go to hell,” she spat, turning on her heel to flee for the door.
“Phoebe?Phoebe!” There was a harsh curse from somewhere behind her, but he couldn’t hobble fast enough to catch her. She didn’t care. He could go to the devil. And she—
She swallowed back the anguished sound that wanted to escape from her throat as she burst into her room and slammed the door closed behind her, giving the key a vicious twist in the lock.
She would be going home to her parents, it seemed.
Chapter Twenty Three
Could a turtle be said to glare? Chris couldn’t be certain, but Hieronymus seemed to be doing a passable impression of one nonetheless. He’d rejected the cabbage leaf and dandelion both that Chris had offered to him in favor of scuttling about the grass beneath the stone bench, as if he were in search of his favored companion, pausing every so often to cant his head up in what Chris could only assume was meant to be an excoriating expression.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Chris muttered beneath his breath. “Do you think I don’t miss her as well?”
Three days had passed, and though he’d given Russell every opportunity to ambush him within his office in Cheapside, the wretched bastard had not taken the bait. Perhaps he’d scented the trap after all. Chris had nothing but a few knickknacks left to remove, and then the window of opportunity he’d afforded himself—afforded Russell—would close.
He’d sent Phoebe off for nothing, and now it was beginning to look as if she might have to remain exiled a while longer. And the worst of it was that the whole damned Toogood family had closed ranks around her, which was unbearably wearisome of them. Each evening he’d headed next door after a lonely dinner in the hopes of seeing her for just a few moments. Each eveninghe’d been refused at the door by the stalwart butler, Baxter, who had stoically informed him that Phoebe was not receiving.
Notreceiving. Her own damned husband!
So instead he’d come out to the garden to sit and wait by their shared wall, in the apparently futile hope that she might find her way out as well. But she hadn’t. Minutes had ticked by into hours in utter silence, and he’d never heard so much as the faintest footfall upon the stone path next door.
He oughtn’t to have been surprised. She’d locked her door against him that last night, and hadn’t said so much as a single word to him when he’d escorted her over to her parents’ the next morning. His wife, it seemed, was capable of nursing a grudge with unassailable determination. He could almost admire it. Would have done, if it hadn’t been directed at him.
Somewhere just on the other side of the wall, she was no doubt tucked up into her bed, while he—he was consigned to sitting on a stone bench like a lovelorn fool until he’d lost feeling in his buttocks, waiting on a woman who was too stubborn even to pop out for a midnight chat. Who likely didn’t even know he was waiting on her.
Who might not care, even if she did.Hell.
A tap on his foot. Hieronymus stood there upon the toe of his boot, peering up at him in his silent turtle way. Glaring. Chris leaned down and scooped him up, watched his little legs kick in the air. “I know,” he said, holding out the cabbage leaf once more in an effort to tempt him to eat. “But you’ve got to do it. Phoebe will be displeased if you’ve wasted away in her absence. If you die, she’ll probably have to get a cat or some such creature.” He hadn’t the faintest idea of where he might source another turtle, and he didn’t think Phoebe thought Hieronymus could be so easily replaced, besides.
Resentfully, Hieronymus bit into the leaf at last, and Chris sighed. Phoebe had turned his garden resident into a petsomehow. And now the creature sulked over the loss of her company.
Perhaps he was guilty of sulking just a bit himself. It was just that he missed her. At least half a dozen times today he’d found himself unconsciously seeking her out, winding through the rooms she most frequently occupied in the hopes of finding her curled up somewhere with a book, or taking tea, or rearranging furniture and objects d’art to suit her vision of what their house ought to be.
And then he’d remembered that he’d had to send her away. It didn’t matter that it had been for her own safety.
He was miserable without her. It was as simple—and as complicated—as that. She’d become a fixture of his life, and sending her back to her parents had felt rather like losing a limb. Or like she’d carved out a piece of him to take with her.
His heart, most likely.
Though God alone knew whether or not she would want it.
∞∞∞
Kit had been talking to the turtle. It had been impossible to hear what he’d said, exactly, since the breeze rustling through the trees had drowned out the sound, but it had been somehow charming, nonetheless, to watch him from her parents’ balcony, holding her cheek in her hand as she braced one elbow upon the balustrade and peered down into the neighboring garden.
