Unclaimed (Turner #2)(64)
A walking trip. Nothing to do but move and talk with his brothers. He’d not have to see a thing that reminded him of Jessica for close to a week. Mark smiled. Why, by the time he got back to London, he would have forgotten Jessica entirely.
THE HEADLINE on the London paper read: Sir Mark: Seduced?!
Jessica could read the words from across the square. The post-boy was already mobbed by a crowd, eager to fork over their coins for this news—and this was only the first issue to be printed. In a week or two, she would be able to collect the remainder of her earnings from Nigel Parret, and she could leave London. What she would do thereafter, she didn’t yet know.
But she had one last piece of business to conduct. She ducked into the taproom where she’d seen Sir Mark for the first time. She had put off this interview as long as she could. She needed to tell George Weston what she should have told him months ago. She needed to tell him to go to the devil.
He was waiting for her at a table in the back. He wasn’t unpleasant to look at—brown hair, brown eyes and an indistinct nose. Still, as she smoothed her skirts away and sat down before him, her teeth gritted. Every inch of her skin remembered what he’d done, recalled it in a visceral way that she could not forget. She felt faintly nauseous. The very air around him felt like a punch to the stomach.
Not that he had ever hit her. If anyone had asked, she wouldn’t have said that he was a bad man. He went to church service regularly. Back when he’d been her protector, he’d even been…well, she couldn’t call him kind. But he’d never beaten her. Up until the end, she would have said that he seemed like a decent fellow.
But he’d set a bounty on Mark’s head in an attempt to ruin the man’s reputation. And there was the matter of what he’d done to her. He wasn’t bad. Still, she could never forgive him, and now that she knew what a good man was, she could recall precisely how awful he’d made her feel. She’d been steeling herself to endure his presence ever since she’d made the appointment.
He smiled as she sat. “Congratulations, Jess. I knew you could do it—you just needed a little prodding on my part.”
Jess again. Mark had called her Jessica. As if she were a full person, not a truncated portion of one. “That’s a bit premature, don’t you think? I’ve not yet given you my report.”
“I can guess.” His smile stretched out, lazy, sure of itself. “Today, the first installment of a fallen woman’s account appeared in the London Social Mirror. It’s titled, ‘The Seduction of Sir Mark.’ The afternoon edition of every paper has picked up the refrain. I’m not an idiot, Jess. Well done. Everyone is already talking. And serializing the story? That was brilliant. Nobody will ever forget this. When Lefevre retires, I’ll take his place.”
Jessica thought of Mark’s ring. It hung on a chain from her neck. What would he do, if she showed it to him? “I admit, I don’t understand the ambition. You never struck me as one who cared about the poor.”
He shrugged. “What, and pass up the chance to determine which of my acquaintances can harness the product of the workhouses? The Commission decides who gets the contracts for the food, the blankets. They decide what the workhouse produces, and who benefits from it. A man who has that kind of power can get a great many favors. And it will undoubtedly serve as a stepping-stone to other, greater, callings.”
Jessica felt her lip curl a little.
“The opportunity would have been wasted on Sir Mark,” Weston said. “He has no head for politics or organization—just philosophy and ethics. You’ve not just done me a favor—you’ve done a favor to all of England.”
Jessica shook her head. “You are still making a great many assumptions. I came here because—”
He smiled at her indulgently. “I know why you came. You always did want to make sure the details were squared away. Here.” He pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and slid it across the table. “You’ve earned it.”
She waited until he pulled his hand away before she looked at the paper. It was a bank draft. She hadn’t come here to take his money. She’d come here to denounce him.
But that was before she’d seen that he’d made the cheque out in the amount of three hundred pounds. She tasted bitter charcoal. She lifted her eyes to him. “How odd. We agreed on fifteen hundred.”
He gave her a negligent smile. “Come, Jess. You know I’m not overly wealthy. Besides, I’ve a reputation to maintain—I can’t be throwing all my free capital into whores, no matter what sort of benefits they offer me.”
Jessica tapped her fingers against the paper. “I don’t see how the state of your funds is any concern of mine. I certainly don’t care about your reputation. We had a deal, you and I. It was spelled out. Quite clearly.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked. “Take me to court? You know that our little bargain is quite unenforceable.” He leaned across the table, his hand reaching to brush against the side of her cheek. “If you want to earn the rest, you know how you can get it.”
She slapped his hand away. “Why would you suppose that you could motivate me to enter into one contract with you by reneging on another?”
He didn’t say anything, simply shaking his head.
It wasn’t as if it was the first time he’d done this to her. She’d had a contract with him before—she’d insisted on it. And when it had come down to it, he’d broken that one, too—splintered it clean in half, nearly killing her in the process. He wasn’t a bad man. He was just…an unthinking pinchpenny. He’d put his pocketbook before his obligations once before. She shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d done so again.