“Can’t do that. You don’t work for me.” He pinched the fabric of her skirt between thumb and forefinger, rubbing it, thinking. “I’ll kick him out. Once he’s at some other hotel, your snooping will not impact me.” A lie, that. He’d be worried about her. Each moment he was unsure where she was and what she was doing would be a knife in his gut. “Besides, blackguards are not allowed in my hotel. They are not allowed to hurt the people you love.”
She cupped his cheek. “He will spread rumors about the Hestia then, too.” Isabella slumped. “That gossip would be enough to dam the tide of guests here, to stop it entirely.”
“You’re saying that if you win, I lose.”
Her hand slipped away from his cheek, and her gaze slipped away from his.
Isabella should never have slumped shoulders. “Tell me what Mr. Haws has against your brother. Perhaps I can help in some other way. I’m quite a cunning fellow. I’m certain I can think of a different solution.” He kissed her temple. “We’ll find it together. Just as we’re securing the Blue Sheep together.”
After a pause of silence, she said, “Mr. Haws is blackmailing him. He has a letter that belongs to my family. With some compromising information in it. Your guest is pressing my brother to marry his daughter. Or he’ll send the letter to a newspaper, carefully selected, I’m sure, because of my family’s influence on certain broadsheets.”
She’d given a bit of herself away there. Her brother was perhaps a politician, serving in the House of Commons. Or he owned a newspaper or two. He was a plain man, then, like Rowan. A man who would not reject him at the very least. Whatever this letter contained…
Hell. Aletter. A letter from Mr. Haws. Rowan slammed his eyes closed. He knew where the damn thing was. He’d held it. Haws had put it right into Rowan’s hand, and he’d slipped it into the iron floor safe hidden three doors away. He’d wondered why an old, fading letter needed such security. He knew now. It wasn’t parchment and ink to Haws. It was his daughter’s future.
Another clue about Isabella—her brother must be quite eligible. Or he owned something Haws wanted a stake in.
Hell. He squeezed Isabella more tightly, wanting to reveal the series of locks and buttons that would unlock the iron safe so nearby. He could not do that. The owner of Hotel Hestia could never open his safe to steal from his guests. No matter how much he wanted to.
“How much time does your brother have?” he asked. There had to be another way.
“My sister, the one you met last night—Imogen—has betrothed herself to a family friend to delay my brother’s engagement in favor of her own wedding. It is the most, I think, anyone can sacrifice to save him. They wed next month. After that, Samuel will have to announce the betrothal—” Her voice cracked, and she curled against him. “I havetried. I have tried so very hard to help him, to save him. But”—she thumped a tiny fist against his chest with surprising strength—“I have failed.” Another thump, her knuckles shining sharp and white, bone aching, skin screaming.
He rubbed them, tried to soothe them, soothe her. “Shh. You haven’t failed.Shh.” She cried harder. The only thing that might stop her tears, he could give her. But he could not.
She sat up and pushed away, her eyes wet and bleak. “You do not understand. My parents adored one another. If your mother was your father’s pulse, my mother was my father’s everything. And she felt the same. The very first time I heard of the idea of romance, of being in love, I remember thinking, oh, I know what that is. I thought everyone had it. It was the color of my childhood, and it did not die with my parents.” She flattened her palms against his chest. “I know you understand this because I can see in how you speak of your parents their love did not die with them either.”
A hot coal of emotion climbed his throat, and he clung to her more tightly.
Her hands fisted, bunching silk, wrinkling his waistcoat. “Because they loved each other so well and held us safe in that love, we all survived. In our own ways and own times, and we have waited. To find a love like they had. Prudence, Lottie, Annie…” Her face softened, drifted toward a smile. “They are loved so well. But Samuel never will be.”
The deluge had started with a single tear, then two, and now she hid her face in his chest as she wept loud and long.
And he held her, arms crossing over her back, his heart willing her to give him her pain. He curled over and around her, hid his face in her neck, rubbing his hand up and down her slender back. Slender? Fragile today, like a willow wand, easily snapped.
Not in his presence. He’d snap a man’s spine before he let more pain enter her body.
He could help her. Dangerous, insistent idea. More insistent—this all-consuming need to protect her, to defend her, and care for her. It wasn't what he felt toward a possession or a partnership, toward Hestia or the admiral and Aunt Lavinia. It was different. The proclamations his mind made, the ones that rose deep from his chest, were very much like those his father had made for his mother, like those the admiral made for Lavinia.
He was in love. He wanted to give her everything.
Hecouldn’t.
The letter…
When she hiccupped herself, finally, into silence, she sat up straight. “I apologize. I—”
“No.” He brushed hair away from her face. “You needed that.” Such a simple sentence, but his voice wavered. Likely, because he could not stop what he was about to do. “When my mother died, my father was at sea. She’d been on her way home at night. A pickpocket with a knife took her life when she would not give him the meager pence she’d had in her pocket. I was alone that night, alone until the next day when a neighbor came by. The sun was so bright that morning I had to squint to see her face. She told me they’d found my mother’s body.” Her hand on his neck, tender. It helped him continue, “I cried… I don’t know how long. I cried alone, huddled in a corner of the room where we lived.”
“How old were you?”
“Ten. And when my father returned, he discovered the neighborhad been talking with a master sweep about taking me on. I was small, wiry. And she could not afford to fill my belly.”
“No!”
“My father saved me from a climbing boy’s fate, took me to sea. Then he died, too, tossed overboard during a storm. I’d been locked up tight and safe in the captain’s quarters. When the captain told me, the sun was bright, as if all the world were cheery and gay. It seemed to slice through the captain’s windows particularly to blind me. I cried again. This time the captain held me. I was twelve, and he let me cry, saying nothing.” He stroked a hand down her spine. “I am honored to be able to do the same for you.”
He'd do more for her.
