The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)(41)

This little domestic tableau had simply got to his head. That was all. He adored Marian, he had spent a surprisingly pleasant day in this odd house, and his poor brain had tried to do the sums and instead made an error. He’d feel more himself when he was out in the fresh air.

She set the cup of tea before him. “I don’t think I’d care for prison,” she said, settling into the chair he kicked out for her.

“You don’t need to worry about that.”

“You’ll send word right away?”

He wondered what he had said or done to make her misapprehend his intentions. “Marian, I mean to come back immediately and tell you all about it myself. If the news is bad, I’ll have you on a fishing boat instantly. If the news is good, I’ll help you deal with Fanshawe.” Another possibility occurred to him. “Unless you’d prefer that I stay in London. I don’t want to be a bother.”

“Ha! You long to be a bother. You would not, however, succeed in this instance.”

They held one another’s gaze for a long moment, and he had the sense that she knew all his most embarrassing thoughts while keeping her own safely under lock and key. “Good,” he said. “Are there any other errands I can dispatch for you while I’m in town?”

She turned her cup in her hands. “I’d like to know that Eliza and Percy are well.”

“Do you want me to deliver a message to Holland? He’ll want to know that you’re well, too, you know.”

“I don’t know what to say to him.”

He nodded. There wasn’t much one could say in a letter to a man whose father one has shot, however good one’s reasons were. There was nothing Rob could say that Marian didn’t already know. If she didn’t find her own reasons for shooting the duke sufficient to salve her conscience, then Rob couldn’t help with that. Christ, Rob knew better than most that sometimes nothing could salve your conscience. You just had to live with the guilt and find other ways to be the kind of person you wanted to be. “I think Holland would want to hear from you even if you had killed a score of men.”

“Probably. He doesn’t know about my father.”

“He doesn’t?” Rob was too stunned to conceal his surprise.

“He was abroad when Father began to have his funny turns, and when he came back we already had enough to worry about. Besides, he would have thought me a fool for marrying his father to pay my father’s debts.”

Rob experienced an unexpected and altogether unwanted pang of sympathy for Holland. Imagine, returning home to discover that one’s childhood friend has married one’s wicked father. “So, if he didn’t know why you married the duke, did he imagine that it was a love match?”

She swirled the tea in her cup. “No.”

But she had hesitated rather longer than Rob liked. “Was it a love match?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It wasn’t. But I didn’t think I was marrying my enemy, either.” She gave a humorless laugh. “I thought he loved me. And I thought I could do worse than marry a man who loved me, was willing to pay my father’s debts, and didn’t require a proper dowry. I thought I’d have my own household and half a dozen children and that it would be like any other marriage that began on practical grounds.”

“Is that what you would have chosen?”

She gave him an exasperated look. “Who among us gets to choose?”

He prodded her foot with the toe of his boot. “Humor me.”

“Fine. I always supposed I’d marry at some point, but barring that, I thought I’d carry on translating my father’s manuscripts and exercising the horses.”

That still didn’t even begin to answer the question of what she actually wanted. “You wouldn’t have wanted a lover?”

“I had a lover,” she retorted. “More than one, in fact.”

He whistled. “Busy lady.”

“Not at once, you oaf. Neither were any kind of great passion, you understand. But my most recent arrangement was pleasant. Fun,” she added, as if borrowing a word from another language. “She eventually became bored and subsequently fell in love with her sister’s governess, with whom she now shares a cottage in Wiltshire.” Marian sipped her tea. “And then I got married, so it hardly mattered. She deserved better than someone who only wanted a pleasant arrangement, I suppose.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes what you want is a bit of fun. However,” he added, not wanting to think too hard about why he needed to be so clear on that point, “sometimes you want something else. I mean, I’m never in the same place for too long, which has made it difficult to manage anything lasting, but I . . .” He didn’t quite know how to finish that statement without sounding pitiful. “I always think it’s going to be lasting when I fall in love.”

He looked her dead in the eye so there could be no mistaking his meaning. And she didn’t look away. Instead she frowned. “I doubt that. You’re too clever to lie to yourself. You probably only hope that it will be lasting.” She got to her feet and stepped out of the room. “There,” she said when she returned a moment later, waving a sheet of paper in the air to dry. “For Percy.”

“I’ll see that he gets it,” Rob said, folding the paper and tucking it into his coat pocket.