January 1880
The front door closed with a slam, and I finally allowed myself to dissolve into tears.
How had I let it come to this? Me, the girl who used to fight the dock boys in Liverpool, the girl who had not once but twice faced down the bull in my uncle’s pen back in Ireland?
It wasn’t enough that I’d been slowly goaded into this trap by the board of the shipping company I’d inherited from my father. But I’d also given the leader of the board, that troll of a man, the ability to make me cry. That itself was worse than the way he’d forced himself on me. If I could have endured it stoically, maybe I wouldn’t mind.
Well, I would. But it wouldn’t poison my dignity as well as my body.
I used my skirt to scrub at my tongue and the insides of my cheeks, ignoring the tears running down my face, which turned instantly cold against my skin in the chilly room.
I cried even harder as I remembered for the ten thousandth time that I had no options. I’d never known a woman to successfully report a man taking advantage of her when the man was as wealthy and powerful as the leader of my company’s board. Especially with my…unconventional…reputation, I worried it would be all too easy for Mr. Cunningham to convince a court of law that my testimony was not to be trusted. And I couldn’t fight back in any other way, verbally or physically, or he would see to it that I lost my company.
And I couldn’t talk to anybody about it. By now I’d kept the secret of Cunningham’s shadow over my life for so long that I didn’t know how to un-keep it. Just imagining the look on Helene’s face or Adela’s…and how could I tell any of the men and not have them look differently at me? Like I was Molly O’Flaherty, a victim, instead of Molly O’Flaherty, a red-headed, fiery-tempered heiress?
Besides, I wasn’t sure that Julian or Silas wouldn’t kill him, and I didn’t need that complication right now.
No, I would just have to endure. As I had since I was fourteen.
I had practically rubbed the inside of my mouth raw, but I still couldn’t un-taste what had been forced in there, and now my mouth simply tasted like silk as well as the bitter taste of Cunningham’s penis, and what was the point? He’d defiled me before and he would again, and I had no choice if I wanted to keep my company. That’s just the way it was.
I slid off my chair onto the freezing floor, finally giving in to the deep urge to actually sob, which I did. I pressed my cheek to the cold wood and cried and cried, my whole body shaking, my breathing so fast and shallow that I felt dizzy and light-headed and I didn’t care. I wanted to pass out, I wanted unconsciousness, because when I was unconscious, this didn’t exist. It wasn’t real. The only real things were dreams of steely ocean waves and rocky beaches and a dark-haired man I knew so well…
A dark-haired man I’d been avoiding.
And it was not the man everybody thought I was in love with. It was someone else. Someone I knew just as well. Someone with blue eyes and an easy grin and a big—
There was a knock at the door and I stiffened, knowing my butler would be there to answer it, which meant he would walk past the front parlor, where I was currently a puddle of rumpled silk and tears. I sat up, wiping furiously at my eyes but unable to stop the actual crying, and then the horrible thought struck me that it might be Cunningham, back for more, and he would see me crying and know how much power he had over me. I gulped in a huge breath and forced myself to hold it, scrubbing at my face with my dress and trying to stand up, and then the front door opened, even though the butler was nowhere in sight, and someone stepped through and I kept holding my breath, be strong be strong be strong—
Silas Cecil-Coke stepped into the hallway, casually shucking his woolen coat and draping it over his arm, and he was humming under his breath as he turned and saw me. Silas. My heart split open with relief and also with so much shame, that he of all people should see me like this, that he of all people should bear witness to my weakness. My breath left my body in a jagged exhale and with it went my self-control; my tears returned with triple the force and I buried my face in my hands, desperate to hide all this messiness from him. All my messiness.
“Molly?” I heard him ask, voice laced with concern and surprise. Quick footsteps, and then I felt him drop to his knees next to me, his hands in their cold gloves pulling at mine.
“Sweetheart. Look at me,” he murmured.
I couldn’t stop crying, so I just shook my head, the small movement making me dizzy again, because I couldn’t get enough air and I didn’t even want to try to get enough air. What was the point?
He gently peeled back my hands and then the cool leather of his gloves pressed against my flushed cheeks and my feverish forehead. “Darling Molly,” he whispered. “My Molly. What is it?”
His words were too tender and too kind, the starkest possible contrast to what Cunningham had just done to me, and some foolish part of my mind hissed that I didn’t deserve his lovely words, that if he knew what I’d just done, then he’d drop his hands in disgust and walk away. I sobbed even harder at this thought, the truth of it curling tendrils around me, into me, into my very soul.
You don’t deserve him. And either way, he wouldn’t want you if he found out…
“No, darling, I didn’t mean to make you cry harder,” Silas shushed, gathering me close. My face was pressed against the clean-smelling fabric of his morning jacket, my body cradled between his hard thighs, and he began to rock me back and forth. “You can tell me, lovely. Whatever it is, you can tell me.”
I shook my head again, the finely spun wool of his clothes abrading my cheeks as I did. I couldn’t tell Silas. I mean, I couldn’t tell anyone, but especially not him. Not after this last summer when I’d realized that the strange tightness in my chest whenever I thought of him, my preference for him and him alone when our friends played together, the surprising distance of the jealousy I felt toward Ivy Leavold—now Ivy Markham—when all these years, I’d assumed I was in love with Julian. It had all come to head when Silas and I had fucked on Julian’s parlor floor after introducing Ivy to our version of Blindman’s Bluff. I’d wanted to use him to show everybody that I didn’t care about Ivy, that I didn’t care about the obvious attachment Jules felt toward her, but in the middle of it all, I’d looked down at Silas, at his adoring blue eyes and his dimpled smile and wide shoulders, and it finally started to make sense. Somehow along the way, somewhere in our decade of friendship, I’d fallen in love with Silas. And I had no way to process that revelation; I’d thought that I’d loved Julian—everyone thought that. But what I felt for Silas was so much deeper, so much subtler, so much sweeter, and it scared me. I’d never felt that way about anyone before, ever.
I’d done my absolute best to avoid him ever since that moment.
