A Lady by Midnight (Spindle Cove #3)(75)

He nodded. “Worth more than my life’s wages, his boots were. Worth more than my life itself, I’d guess. This was the infantry. Every day, all day—we marched, dug, fought. Come nightfall his boots would be covered in dust, muck, blood, worse. I slaved for hours to make them shine again. So he’d look at them in the morning and know there was something worth saving beneath it all. And when I’d finished with his boots, I still didn’t sleep—not until I’d done the same with mine.

“I wasn’t loyal to the army or England so much as I was loyal to him—or maybe even just to those boots. When he took a bullet to the knee—I couldn’t let him lose that leg, you know. No leg, no boot. Would have been giving up half my purpose in life.” He rubbed his face and stared into the fire. “He’s offered to grant me a commission now.”

“Lord Rycliff has?”

He nodded.

“What an honor, Samuel. Don’t you want it?”

He shook his head. “I’m not made for that. I don’t have Rycliff’s ease with military politics. The open country is where I was best suited, even as a youth. It’s where I belong now. Out in the wilderness, with the creatures that howl and claw and snarl. No social graces necessary.”

There. He’d laid it all out before her. His checkered past, his history of crime and violence. All the reasons he needed to leave England and stay far away from her.

And in response she said the most horrible thing he could imagine.

“Would you take me with you?”

Chapter Nineteen

“Take you with me?” he echoed. “To America?”

Kate nodded. It seemed more than reasonable to her. He’d suffered twenty years of violence and misery to pay the cost of her dreams. She could handle living in a cabin.

His brow furrowed. “No. No.”

As she watched, he rose from the carpet and went to the opposite side of the small room, pulling her gown from the screen where he’d hung it to dry and filling a pressing iron with hot coals.

Well. That wasn’t quite the response she’d been hoping for.

“You can’t leave me,” she said. “The world will only push us back together. Haven’t we learned that much? We’re meant to be with each other.”

“We’re meant to be no such thing. You are the daughter of a marquess. You always were, even then. And I was always a lowborn cur. There’s nothing we have in common. Nothing.”

“Don’t you want me to be happy?”

“Of course I do.”

He spread her frock over the table, carefully layering it between pressing cloths. The muscles of his left arm bunched and flexed as he skimmed the hot iron over fabric, working with care and confidence. She never could have dreamed how arousing this would be—the sight of a massive, shirtless man pressing a gown. All she could think of was those hands roving over her body, warming and smoothing her own frayed edges.

“Katie, I want you to have everything you’re entitled to—wealth, connections, Society. The family you always dreamed of finding. It’s all yours now, and I’ll be damned if I’ll ruin that for you.” He put the iron aside. “You can’t be with someone like me. Look at me. That cousin of yours wouldn’t hire me on as a footman.”

If Thorne was this reluctant already, she wasn’t about to tell him the truth of her inheritance. Not yet. He wouldn’t see it as a convenience, only as one more factor widening the gulf he perceived between them.

Which wasn’t a gulf at all. All that separated them was an imaginary line. But someone must take the first step across it, and Kate knew it would have to be her.

“This is about us, Samuel. No one else.” She drew the blanket about her shoulders and rose to her feet. His stubbornness was a thing to be conquered, and she felt her courage rising. “I’m just me. Just Katie. Your Katie, as you called me once. I know you have feelings for me.”

He set the iron down, agitated. “I’ve told you, time and again, it’s only—”

“Only desire. Yes, I know you’ve told me that. And I know you’re lying to me. Your feelings go much deeper than lust.”

“I feel nothing.” His nostrils flared. He beat his fist against his chest. “Nothing. Do you understand me?”

“I know that’s not tr—”

“Look. These letters.” He pointed to the B.C. marked on the left side of his torso. “Do you know how they make these marks?”

She shook her head no.

“They take a board, about so big.” He measured with his hands. “And on it are protruding nails, forming the shapes of the letters. They press the points of those nails to your skin, and then they give the board a smart whack. With a fist, perhaps. Or maybe a mallet.”

Kate winced. She stepped forward, but he held her off with an open hand.

“And then, when they’ve made all those tiny punctures, they take black powder—you know enough about weaponry to know that it’s corrosive stuff—and rub it in the wounds to make the mark.”

“That must have been torture.”

“I didn’t feel a thing. Just like I didn’t feel these.”

He turned, showing her his back. Kate’s stomach turned as she viewed the lattice of twisted, branching scars that covered his skin.