The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)(79)

“Look,” Marian said, pausing long enough to let Rob knot the kerchief, “I wanted to make sure Fanshawe knew that he couldn’t get away with what he had done.”

“Rich people get away with things like that all the time! Do you plan on robbing them all?”

Marian wheeled on him. “Only some of them. Same as you.”

“Oh Christ.”

“You were right,” she said, continuing to walk. “It was rather fun.”

“Oh Christ. You’re going to do this again.”

“Not all the time. I’m a busy woman.”

This struck Rob as inordinately hilarious and he let out a burst of laughter.

“Oh, you’ve lost your mind,” Marian said tartly as she climbed the steps of Clare House. “It was bound to happen. All the signs were there.”

And thus Rob entered the front door of his ancestral home for the first, and hopefully the last, time.





Chapter 37




“You realize he’s still going to tell everyone what you did,” Rob said while attempting to clean Marian’s wound—which was entirely negligible, truly a glorified scratch, thank you very much.

“Of course he will,” said Marian, wincing as he poured some gin over the wound. “That business about the card game—he cheated, by the way, and one of your mother’s girls saw it happen—was just to make him think I wanted him to keep it a secret. A card game,” she repeated scornfully. “Imagine caring about who cheats at cards. Imagine not cheating at cards. Percy and I always cheat. How boring it must be otherwise. Anyway, he’s going to say that I demanded that he return the amount he charged my father in excess of our agreement as well as a couple of old maps and some translations I completed as a child, and that he subsequently shot me. Most people will think that he’s making a mountain out of a molehill, but after I give the same treatment to a few other gentlemen, I daresay the point will get across.”

“The point?” He opened a jar of salve that he had found in the kitchen.

“That if anyone chooses to ride roughshod over people who have no recourse, I plan to do something about it.”

“You’re not worried about, oh, I don’t know, being caught and hanged?”

“Robert, darling. I plan to be more discreet in the future. This time it would have been pointless. I couldn’t very well go to him and demand that he return the items he stole from my father if he didn’t know who I was.”

“Naturally,” Rob said faintly. With the pad of one finger, he gently spread ointment on the wound. Now that hurt, there was no denying it. But the pain felt irrelevant; she was almost euphoric with her success. The dose of laudanum and willow bark Rob had advised was certainly not harming matters, either, she supposed.

“You could have been killed,” he said.

“As I said, in the future I’ll be more cautious.”

“I can’t stand it, Marian.” He wrapped a piece of linen around her arm a few times and tied it off but didn’t take his hand away. He really was very good at tending to wounds, which figured.

“You spent years risking your life. You’ve been shot and stabbed and I don’t even know what else. You can’t hold me to a different standard.” Marian held her breath. She knew that Rob wouldn’t like this, which was partly why she hadn’t told him of her plan beforehand. But he had to understand why she wanted to do this, why she needed to do this, and that her reasons for risking her safety weren’t any less important than his own reasons had been for all those years. “I want you to be safe all the time,” she went on, “and I know you want the same for me. But that isn’t who we are.”

“When I was risking my neck, it was because I was angry and sad and grieving, Marian. My life had been taken away and so had Kit’s. I wanted revenge.”

“I’m angry, too, Rob.” She didn’t know what she would do if he didn’t understand. She didn’t want to say this next part out loud, she didn’t even want to admit it to herself, but it was important. It was perhaps the only secret she had kept from him. “I’m angry and sad and grieving.”

For a moment he looked at her searchingly, and then he sighed. “Of course you are, darling.” He held her close, careful though not to jostle her arm. “I’ll do whatever you need.”

“I wasn’t asking for anything.”

“I didn’t think you were. But you have it anyway.”

And she knew he meant it. She knew, by now, that not only was he serious, but that he wanted to give her anything she needed. She wanted to say no, to insist that she didn’t need anything from him, that she didn’t ever want to trust anyone or need anyone.

“You already do trust me,” he said, as if he understood the direction of her thoughts. “I think you’ve trusted me for weeks. After you shot the duke, you came to me, Marian. You came to the one place where you might find me.”

She couldn’t deny it. She hadn’t been thinking clearly that night, but some part of her knew who she could rely on—and it was a thief, a blackmailer, the person who had set out to upend her life.

All she could do was nod against his shoulder, and then he was kissing her, hard and fervent. She kissed him back and he groaned. She glanced down at his breeches.