A Lily Among Thorns(13)
“How on earth did you end up at Mme Deveraux’s?” he asked, finally.
“I slept with the footman,” she told him, angrily conscious of her own failure.
“And your father kicked you out?” He shot a sharp, frowning glance at the door Lord Blackthorne had just walked out of.
There, he was doing it already. Trying to make her an abused innocent, searching for the heart of gold among her brass. “No, I left,” she said with a false, brilliant smile. “I became a whore to spite him.” It was about half true. She had left to go after Harry, the footman; she’d intended to marry him. Harry, however, had had no such intention. When she’d gone to the address he’d given her, he hadn’t been there, and his friends had refused to give her any information about his whereabouts at all.
She’d been starving by the time Mme Deveraux’s procurer approached her in the street. But it hadn’t only been desperation; she had signed her contract with a flourish, feeling hot and triumphant at the thought of what her father would say. She’d been an idiot.
Solomon didn’t say anything; he looked as if he saw through the smile. He was doing it again, seeing her, and she hated it. She was afraid of what he would see—and worse, that he wouldn’t like it. “I bought back my contract with your money,” she told him. “But I didn’t stop. I was the most expensive whore in London for a year, and no matter how high my rates were, there was always someone willing to offer more. I couldn’t have done it without you. How do you feel about that?”
He swallowed. “Lady—” He stopped, evidently realizing how stupid it was to speak formally after the conversation they’d just had. “Serena, I don’t know what you want me to say.”
She didn’t either. “I suppose I want you to know what to say.” Stupid, but true. “Fit for Bedlam, aren’t I?”
Black fear rose, then, from where it had been waiting. Her father could do it. He could really do it, and no sweet drunk boy would save her from that. Why now? He’d left her alone for years. She’d thought she was free of him, and instead he was like some deus ex machina who could walk in and out of her life whenever he pleased, handing down ultimatums and commands with no forewarning and no hope of escape.
She pressed her fist to her mouth. “I—I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, quite calmly, and left the room.
Solomon woke at eight o’clock, not at all refreshed. Serena, he knew, must be already awake and dealing with business, and he wanted to see how she was. He wanted to see her. Within twenty minutes he was dressed and hurrying down the back corridor to her office.
In his haste, he ran straight into a tall man in obviously Parisian tailoring. Annoyed at his own gracelessness—but making a mental note to experiment further with gilt thread and pocketflap shapes—he apologized and tried to move past.
To his surprise, the stranger’s dark eyes lit up and he embraced Solomon enthusiastically, talking in rapid French. “Thierry! Comme ça me fait plaisir de te revoir! Mais où est-ce que t’es parti, hein? Je m’inquiétais tant quand t’as disparu—”
Solomon disengaged himself and stood stock-still. Once, he’d been used to this—being approached by people he didn’t know and called by a name that wasn’t his. When Elijah was alive, it had usually annoyed him and sometimes entertained him enormously. Now it did neither.
Shortly after Elijah died, someone who hadn’t known yet had mistaken Solomon for his twin, and he’d gone along with it for a joke the way he sometimes had before, thinking—God, he’d been stupid—thinking that it might make him feel better. After five sentences he’d gone outside and been sick.
“Mais pourquoi tu ne réponds pas? T’es pas heureux de me voir?”
“I—I’m sorry, I don’t speak French.”
The man frowned, laughed, and ran his fingers through his dark hair, making it stand straight up. “You do not speak French!” he said in lightly accented English. “Thierry, you are teasing me! And me, I did not even know you speak English! Tiens, do not pretend not to know me any longer. I am not so sure I can bear it.”
He wanted to snap at the man, to tell him to go away and stop making Solomon feel like this. “I’m sorry, but it’s true,” he said gently. “You must have been a friend of my brother’s.”
The man stilled in a way that reminded Solomon a little of Serena. “Your brother?”