Dangerous Games. Charlotte MedeЧитать онлайн книгу.
possibly provide you with?” she asked with a desperate tilt of her chin.
He pretended to smile, the flash of teeth white in the darkened room. “You have the plans for the Crystal Palace. The architectural plans.”
She jerked as though she’d been struck, his statement taking her in an entirely new and even more dangerous direction. “What of them?” she asked, lowering her voice, rubbing her arms through the soft cashmere of her shawl. “And they are not my plans,” she lied. “They belong to my late husband and are presently unavailable.”
“Are they now?” His eyes, dark and fathomless, glittered with knowledge.
Suddenly, she thought of the guard behind the grillwork of the Salt Tower’s door, and desperately hoped he wouldn’t intervene. Nor, dear God, Bellamy. It would only make matters worse, multiply the complications. She’d made her decision one year ago, lived with it, lived with the blood on her hands.
“It’s irrelevant whether you believe me or not.” She took a step backward until she was only two feet from the window, now stripped of its bars, and she had a wild thought that he meant to throw her over the ledge and onto the cobblestones below.
“This might be the time to tell you that I have a bad temper.” It was as though he could read her fevered mind. For emphasis, he moved in closer, crunching one of her tortoise-shell combs underfoot. A gift from Charles, she thought wildly, irrationally. Now her only choice was to decide between the broadest shoulders she had ever seen and the window. Falling to her death would be preferable to meeting it at his hands.
Moonlight lit his face, throwing into sharp relief the hard plane of a jaw, the strong nose. A small scar sat above his right eyebrow. Backing up one more step, she felt the cold stone ledge through her shawl and dress to her corset and chemise.
She stopped breathing because she could go no farther and because something told her that he knew. He knew.
He smiled again, more chilling than the cold coming off the flagstone floor. “I see we’ve reached an understanding. How fortunate for you and me both.”
She dug her nails into her palms in the vain hope she could keep the truth at bay. But she couldn’t because he wouldn’t let her.
“I will do anything,” she whispered.
“I thought as much,” he said, holding her gaze for the longest moment before nodding a grudging consent. “Yours is a perfectly reasonable response—for a wife who murdered her beloved husband. In cold blood.”
Chapter 5
His skull hurt like a bastard. A thousand sharpened knives carved their way from the inside of his head out. St. Martin passed a heavy hand over his face, aware of the woman pressed up against the heavy stone wall regarding him as though he’d materialized along with the stench of brimstone.
At first he’d thought her plain in her stiff dress, spine pulled up straight like a marionette, her hair tamed into a strict chignon. But now, upon closer inspection and even through the blinding headache, he saw something else entirely.
Beautiful no, unusual yes. The lips too wide and full, the eyes with their elegant brows, clear and all too keen. And she was thin, from what he’d thought he’d felt when he’d hauled her up against him, beneath the myriad stays and crinolines of her mourning garb.
By this point, he’d have expected her to faint dead away. Lord knew, he was close to it, the hammer behind his head continuing its unrelenting blows. But then she was a murderess. And they clearly didn’t succumb to the vapors.
“You were saying,” he said with mocking gallantry, “that I could have anything.”
Still pressed against the stone, she opened her mouth to utter something and then thought otherwise. Her face registered shock and the markings of desperation borne by guilt. About which he knew a great deal, the corrosiveness of its essence, how it could eat away at a life until there was nothing left save a hollowed-out bitterness.
Liberating in its own way, he thought cynically. Once the rubicon had been crossed, acts of duplicity and degeneracy became second nature, the devil as best friend. He wondered whether this was already the case with Mrs. Hampton.
“I find there’s nothing like drama to focus the attention.” Although it was impossible, she edged closer to the wall, the jet beads of her dress scraping against stone. “You seem distinctly uncomfortable given the circumstances. Perhaps we can discuss your options further elsewhere,” he said.
Some color was returning to her face, now as gray as the granite behind her. “Of course. Elsewhere.” The prospect of escape, when there was none.
He didn’t care if his smile reached his eyes. “Your house in Mayfair comes to mind.”
“You know where I live?”
“I know everything there is to know about you.” Particularly the details around her dear, departed husband. The pounding behind his eyes increased, telling him to get the hell out of the Tower and back into the fresh night air. “By way of introduction, my name is St. Martin,” he said, refusing to give into the pain.
Her eyes widened at the information as she attempted to place him and his family in the pantheon of connections that was London. She would glean very little of substance, the barest outlines, as he had made sure that most of his life was lived in the shadows.
“Lord St. Martin,” she said softly, pushing away from the wall at last, as though his aristocratic associations, under the guise of gentlemanly behavior, should make any difference to her sense of safety. Lilly Clarence Hampton could not imagine the worst of it, he thought.
She seemed to be pulling herself together, restoring her sense of equilibrium, challenging a peer of the realm who would, after all, behave with a semblance of honor. The delusion was particularly pitiable.
“Why do you believe I murdered my husband?” In the moonlight, her hair shone a dark gold. She was younger than she’d first appeared, the angle of the light falling across smooth skin only lightly marred with shadows. “Surely you followed the investigation. An intruder entered our home and, upon Mr. Hampton apprehending him, he produced a pistol and…” She paused for a reason or effect, he couldn’t tell.
“And shot him in the chest,” he concluded for her. “Yes, I recall the details of the investigation, including the fact that there were no signs of forced entry, no footprints, and no proverbial smoking revolver.”
Her shawl had slid from her shoulders to her waist, and she gathered it back up around her shoulders, her movements graceful despite her obvious fear. “And you dare to imply that I murdered my husband? And what evidence could you possibly have?”
He casually bent over to pick up first one and then a second of her combs from the floor, slipping them into his vest pocket. “Your reaction a moment ago, for one. As I recall, you said you would do anything. Not the response of an innocent woman.”
“Anything not to relinquish the architectural plans, my lord.” Her lips curled in annoyance. “You have misinterpreted my response.”
“I’m not so sure. And you can jettison the honorific. St. Martin is enough.” More than enough. “What if I told you that I had the pistol. Your pistol, to be exact. In my possession.”
However fine a murderess she might be, she wasn’t an actress. This time she came toward him, fear supplanted by anger. So close that he could see a fine pulse jump at the base of her slender neck barely revealed by a froth of black tulle. “I would say that you are lying,” she said, scarcely a foot separating them. “I would ask you to present me with the evidence, is what I would say.”
She was hardly the dry, brittle widow he’d anticipated. He wondered if Bellamy knew. “With pleasure. And with the full intention of relinquishing it to you in exchange for the architectural plans.”
Her eyes captured his, a stunning, clear blue, and it occurred to him suddenly that