Taking the Earl (Heiress Games Book 3) Read online

  Instead, she held onto his gaze and said, “Do you want me to leave?”

  He took a breath. “I would never ask you to.”

  “You look like you want to ask me.”

  His short laugh sounded tortured. “Bloody hell, Lucy. Don’t tempt me.”

  His accent slipped. She heard a hint of the docks — of a life she couldn’t understand.

  A life he didn’t want her to know about.

  “What if I want to tempt you?” she said slowly.

  He stepped back as though the question was a threat. “Don’t. You know, in your heart of hearts, that you can’t have me and Maidenstone both.”

  “I can if you’re the earl.”

  “It’s time to admit that it’s a fantasy,” Max said.

  “But I saw the Bible,” she said. “Your ancestor was legitimate. We can prove it.”

  Max shook his head impatiently. “Papers don’t matter in the end. Hard to claim an earldom if Ferguson and Thorington throw their weight against me.”

  “They won’t,” Lucy responded. “If the investigation proves your claim, Ferguson will support it.”

  “Will he?” Max started to pace, his steps more agitated than she’d ever seen him. “And what if I’m the earl but my past actions disqualify me? Will he support me if he thinks I’m unsuitable?”

  Lucy wanted to reassure him. But there was nothing she could say that was entirely true. Not when everyone in her life had told her that morning that she probably shouldn’t trust him.

  So she sat on the daybed, clearing space so he could keep pacing. When he showed no sign of slowing, she said, carefully, quietly, “Why do you think you’re unsuitable?”

  That brought him to a halt. “I’ve never heard that tone from you before,” he said.

  “What tone?”

  “The tone that says you don’t really want to know. I thought you wanted to know everything.”

  He joined her on the daybed. She leaned against his shoulder — somehow taking comfort in him, even though he was the most uncertain part of her life. “I don’t think I want to know,” she whispered. “But now you know why I have to think of more than just myself.”

  He put his arm around her. They sat for a minute in silence, with the stream gurgling in the distance and birds chirping from their hidden branches. She wasn’t a princess in a fairy tale, but this moment — the moment before the fall — felt enchanted.

  Then he kissed her head. Even through her bonnet she could feel the goodbye.

  “I shouldn’t tell you,” he said. “I also have to think of more than myself. My family depends on me.”

  “Are your secrets worse than mine?” she asked.

  He laughed. “Definitely worse.”

  She sucked in a breath. But she didn’t pull away. “Tell me, Max.”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “I do. And I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Don’t agree to that until you know what you’re promising,” he warned.

  Lucy pulled away from him so that she could watch his face. She needed to read the reactions there — but she also wanted him to see that she was as serious as she could be about the vow she was making. “I won’t tell. I’m not stupid enough to say that your past can’t possibly change how I feel about you. But that doesn’t mean I’ll betray you.”

  “That’s not very romantic,” he said. She felt more relief than she would have guessed to hear some of his old teasing return to his voice. “Aren’t you supposed to say that nothing could change how you feel?”

  “Of course,” she said. “But now that you’ve met Julia, you can probably guess why I don’t have the most romantic notions.”

  His eyes darkened. “You deserve better than whatever happened to you.”

  “I deserve exactly what I got. If anything, it should have been worse. Julia makes up for a lot of it.”

  “Where’s her father?” he asked.

  “He died before she was born.”

  Max nodded sagely. “I knew you would kill any man who wronged you.”

  She laughed. For a moment, they could have been joking about anything — strangely, it felt like flirting to pretend that she had the heart of a murderess. “Don’t mistake me — I thought about it. But I caught the man kissing Octavia less than a week after the last time I’d slept with him, which made me realize he never intended to follow through on our ‘secret engagement.’ I told Octavia’s brother, Julian called the man out, and their duel was the end for both of them. Octavia was the one whose reputation was ruined. I’d left London before I knew I was pregnant. Grandfather and I agreed to hush it up — easy enough to do, as long as I don’t leave Maidenstone with her.”

  It wasn’t a funny story, but she was able to say it lightly now. Julian and Chapman’s deaths had happened four years earlier. Enough time had passed that the initial trauma had subsided. Most days, she was able to be grateful for Julia without thinking too much about what had happened.

  But for Max, the news was new. He didn’t speak after her confession.

  “I’ve shocked you,” she finally said.

  He shook his head. “Surprised me. But I’m not shocked.”

  “Really? Not shocked that I have a daughter?” It felt so good to say it out loud — to acknowledge Julia with someone who mattered.

  Max shook his head again. “Shock implies judgment. I can’t judge you for doing anything you must do to keep Julia safe.”

  “Then you know I won’t judge you either,” she said.

  He didn’t take the bait — didn’t immediately offer his secrets to her. In some ways, she still didn’t want to know anything about his past — or, at least, anything that would prove her family right for questioning his background.

  But she couldn’t stay ignorant forever. The only option left was the direct approach. “What have you done for your family, Max?”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  He looked into Lucy’s eyes. He saw everything he’d ever wanted there. Hope. Trust. Desire. Compassion.

  Love, if he let himself call it that.

  He couldn’t call it that.

  She would hate him if she knew that he’d come to steal everything. If she knew that she shouldn’t look at him with that amount of trust. If she knew that Durrant was exactly the kind of enemy who would destroy her and Julia.

  She’d asked him earlier whether he would take a wife and children on the run with him. He’d meant it when he had said that he wouldn’t put himself in that position.

  But when she looked at him like that, he was tempted to keep her. Or, if he couldn’t do that, tempted to tell her the truth. He owed it to her. He’d never met anyone else who was willing to share her deepest secrets without prying his out of him first.

  He couldn’t let himself be tempted. He and his siblings had agreed to leave. He couldn’t ruin it all at the eleventh hour by telling Lucy that they were criminals.

  But somehow he knew he would regret it forever if he lied to her now.

  He took a breath. Then another. And then, in a voice that sounded tortured even to his ears, he said, “I haven’t been entirely truthful about my family.”

  Her hope didn’t dim. She grinned instead. “I would imagine that’s an understatement. Go on.”

  He had no idea where to start. He owed her something — something that would explain to her later why he’d done what he was about to do.

  “You don’t have a flask of whisky hidden under your skirts, do you?” he asked.

  Her grin turned saucy. “You’re welcome to look, but you won’t find whisky.”

  Laughing hurt, but he did it anyway. “Later, if you’ll still have me.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Stop thinking you’ll scare me away,” she said, her frustration slipping through. “Take it from someone who just revealed her biggest secret — you may feel better for it.”

  “Discussing feelings ain’t exactly popular in the East End,” he said, dropping into his old accent to tes
t the waters.

  Her eye twitched. He suspected that she barely stopped herself from rolling her eyes again. “The ton doesn’t encourage honesty either. Stop prevaricating. Perhaps you can start by telling me one thing that’s true?”

  One truth. Something he hadn’t told her — something he’d buried deep enough to protect it from being accidentally unearthed.

  “When I was twelve, my father died,” he started.

  “I know that,” Lucy said.

  “Do you want to hear the rest?” he asked drily.

  She made a show of putting her hands over her mouth.

  He took one of them away — but he didn’t let go. Somehow, it soothed him to hold on to her fingers, even though they both wore gloves. “When I was twelve, my father died,” he began again. “But before he died, he’d filled my head with all sorts of nonsense — how we were descended from earls and kings. How we were destined for greatness. He’d poured all his money into sending me to school. The headmaster was unfailing in his efforts to make me a gentleman. He didn’t hesitate to beat my accent out of me.”

  Lucy frowned. “That’s horrible.”

  “I would’ve said ‘orrible, not horrible,” he said, with a mirthless smile. “But if you think that’s horrible, you won’t want to hear the rest.”

  She turned her hand in his so that she was holding his fingers — so that she could squeeze them reassuringly. “Let it out, Max.”

  He took a breath. He hadn’t thought of school in years. There’d been other, bigger disasters in the years that followed. The occasional birching in the headmaster’s office was nothing compared to Durrant.

  Durrant. Every monster paled in comparison to him.

  But he had to say everything as dispassionately as possible or he wouldn’t be able to finish. “School ended after Papa died. Workhouses don’t care much for educating poor orphans — or at least mine didn’t. We’re better suited for picking rags or sweeping chimneys.”

  “You were in a workhouse? Was there no family to take you in?”

  “One of my mother’s cousins took Cressida and….” He cut himself off before mentioning Atticus, taking a breath. It wasn’t hard to pretend that some emotion had overcome him, rather than that he’d almost said Atticus’s name. The memory of their cousin Margaret collecting Cressida and Atticus still haunted him. “She wanted a daughter, she said. She wanted a child she could raise, not a ‘half-grown whelp who might cause trouble.’”

  It was a direct quote. It was also the worst rejection on top of a series of rejections he’d suffered in the week after his father’s death — all the fancy houses who wouldn’t listen when he showed up at their servants’ entrances begging for their bills to be paid. The creditors who wouldn’t give him or his siblings even a few days to mourn in private. The men who’d come to clear out their rented lodgings, taking all the furniture and trinkets that had belonged to their dead parents.

  He could only salvage five buttons, cut from his father’s favorite coat before they buried him in it and given to each sibling as a memento of what they’d lost. By the time their cousin Margaret had arrived in London, the children were huddled in an empty set of rooms, subsisting on food their neighbors couldn’t afford to keep providing.

  “She abandoned you?” Lucy asked sharply.

  Max shrugged. “At least she took Cress. I couldn’t have kept Cressida alive in the workhouse.”

  Not to mention Atticus, who was only two when their father had died. It was his birth that had killed their mother. He’d been sickly at first — it was a miracle he’d lived to adulthood.

  Max needed to remember that. He couldn’t get sucked into the sympathetic horror that Lucy was giving him. Her sympathy would likely disappear as soon as she learned the rest.

  “She should have taken you,” Lucy said. “What an awful woman.”

  Max snorted. “Easy for you to say. You could take in a hundred orphans without having to worry about feeding and clothing them.”

  “That may be,” she said, with a bit of a flush. “You do like to point out that my life was easier than yours.”

  He’d said it without even thinking of how it would sound to her. He squeezed her hand. “I don’t hate you for being rich.”

  The look she gave him said this, of all things, was one statement she didn’t believe. “We can discuss that another time. And anyway, you’ll hate me less when you have money too. What happened after your cousin took Cressida?”

  “The usual story. I went to the workhouse. It was…grim.”

  He couldn’t tell her the worst of it — that he and Titus had been separated from Antonia almost immediately. He was able to sneak messages to her initially, but within a month she’d been sent out to work as a servant in someone’s house. She had only been ten, but working was supposed to be better than staying at the workhouse.

  From the little Antonia had told him after their reunion, he guessed it had been much worse.

  “How long were you there?” Lucy asked.

  “Only a few months. I would have starved to death if I’d stayed there.”

  It hadn’t helped that he’d spent those first months giving half his meals to Titus. Titus had never complained or asked questions. But he’d followed Max around like a wraith, not willing to let Max out of his sight for an instant.

  Images flooded him — scraps of memories he’d tried so hard to exorcise. The same soup, day after day, and if he got a bit of meat he tipped it into Titus’s bowl. Titus scratching, always scratching, as the lice crawled in their bedclothes. Max had held onto his father’s button in the dark and prayed as hard as he could that someone would come to rescue them.

  But Max wasn’t a lost heir. All the dreams his father had told him were fairy tales, nothing more. No one came. No one cared.

  Eventually, he’d realized that he would have to save himself.

  Lucy stroked his hand in silent sympathy. He looked down at her fingers. Her kid glove was pristine. Under it, her skin would be perfect — never exposed to wash basins full of lye, never required to haul coal up and down stairs.

  He didn’t resent her for that. If anything, he was suddenly ashamed of himself. She’d never suffered physically as he had. But she’d lost her parents as well. She’d had the courage to tell him about Julia. She still lived, every day, with the consequences of old choices and others’ mistakes.

  “Is there anything else you want to know?” he asked. “The rest of it isn’t much more pleasant.”

  He almost hoped that she would drop it — but he knew better than to expect that his hopes would be answered. She looked at him, entirely sympathetic, but entirely unwavering. “I want to know everything. No matter how dark you think it is.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Lucy tried to stay stoic. She remembered how her grandfather had handled himself when she’d told him that she was pregnant — he’d been calm, even joyful. She’d been afraid that he would toss her out of the house. His initial reaction had made all the difference in the world.

  She sensed that Max needed the same from her. If she reacted too strongly or expressed any judgment over what had happened to him, he would bolt.

  But she wanted to slap his cousin Margaret. She wanted to flog the people in charge of the workhouse. She’d never supported pillories or public executions, but she suddenly saw the appeal.

  She tried to keep those reactions off her face. Max held her hand as though it was the only reason he was still there. She guessed there was more that he wasn’t telling her. But there was such a fine line between trying to help him and fulfilling her own greedy curiosity.

  And also such a fine line between letting him stay silent and finding out whether his secrets could harm Julia or herself.

  He obviously didn’t want to keep talking. She squeezed his hand again, willing him to stay with her rather than letting his memories overwhelm him.

  He looked down at where their hands were joined. Then he looked up and met her eyes. “Th
e first thing I stole was a loaf of bread.”

  He said it as though he’d stolen the Holy Grail.

  She didn’t know how to reassure him. “You were twelve and hungry,” she said carefully. “That’s not such a terrible crime.”

  “It is if you’re the baker,” he said.

  “Were you caught?”

  “Not at first. I still had the suit of clothes I’d worn to school, so I didn’t look as ragamuffin as the kids who wore the workhouse uniform. Street vendors didn’t watch me as closely as they did the others. But then I got greedy.”

  “What was greedy? Two loaves of bread?” she quipped.

  He didn’t laugh. “Coin purses.”

  He paused, waiting for her to be shocked. She squeezed his hand. “What was the money for?”

  “I had this harebrained idea that I could buy back my father’s tea shop and bring my family back together.”

  Her heart broke. But if she gave him too much sympathy now, he might not be able to finish. Eventually, he said, “Everything worked for a few months. I scraped together a few coins. I had no bloody idea what I was doing, but I have a knack for finding easy marks. The easiest were at public hangings. No one watches their purses when the bodies drop.”

  “Sensible,” she murmured.

  He pulled his hand away. “You’re taking this too well,” he said. “I was a thief, Lucy.”

  “You were twelve,” she retorted. “I’m happy you survived no matter how you did it.”

  He left the bench in an explosive burst of energy. He was always so calm, but whatever was inside him could no longer be contained. As he paced, she felt like a surgeon observing a patient, clueless as to whether her remedies would cure him or kill him.

  When he still didn’t speak, she finally said, “You said everything worked for a few months. What happened next?”

  “My confidence grew. I looked for better marks. Started looking at houses to steal from — jewels and silver are worth more than coin purses. But it was only a matter of time before I was caught.”

  She found herself clenching her hands into fists. She could almost see the boy he had been, too proud to beg but too desperate to stay at the workhouse. It was a wonder he’d survived. If he’d been caught stealing, the punishments would have been severe.