This Wicked Gift (Carhart 0.5)

“No need? You said that everything worthwhile had a price. You were wrong. You are absolutely and without question the most completely misinformed man in all of creation. Everything really worth having,” she said, “is free.”

“Free?”

“Given,” she said, “without expectation of return.” And she looked up at him, a fierce light in her eyes. “I wanted to show you.”

That clear trust in her eyes was unbroken yet. He’d taken her virginity. How had she managed to keep her innocence?

“I have no notion what love is,” he told her, almost in a panic. “None at all.”

She picked up her cloak and shook it out. It flared about her shoulders and then fell, obscuring in thick wool the figure he had seen in such heartbreaking detail mere minutes before. “Well,” she said. “Perhaps one day you’ll figure it out.”

And like that, she slipped past him. He listened, unmoving, as she stepped down the stairs and out of his life.

Chapter Three

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Lavinia slowly climbed the stairs to the family rooms above the lending library. She ached all over, a vital, restless throb that twinged in every muscle.

“Lavinia?” Her father’s weak call came from across the way. “Is that you?”

“Yes, Papa.” She took off her cloak and hung it on a peg by the door. Half boots followed. “I went out on a…constitutional after service. I’ll freshen up and join you shortly.”

She ducked into her own room.

As far as the basics went, her small chamber was not so different from William’s. The walls were whitewashed, the furniture plain and simple, and almost identical to his: washstand, bed, chair and a chest of drawers. Lavinia crossed to the other side of the room and poured water from a pitcher into the basin. As she washed, she examined her reflection in the mirror.

She knew what she was supposed to see. This was the face of a girl who’d been ruined. A woman of easy virtue.

The face that peeked back at her looked exactly the same as the one she’d seen in the mirror this morning. There was no giant proclamation writ across her forehead, denouncing her as unchaste. Her eyes did not glow a diabolical red. They weren’t even demonically pink. And her body still felt as though it belonged to her—sore, yes, and tingling in ways that she’d never before experienced—but still hers. Perhaps more so.

He didn’t love her.

Well. So? The reckless infatuation she’d felt hours before had been transmuted into something far more complex and…and cobwebby. She wasn’t sure if the emotion that lodged deep in her gut was love. It felt more like longing. Maybe it had always been longing. In the year since he’d first started coming to their library, he’d looked at her. Until recently, however, he’d always looked away.

It had been an unpleasant surprise when he’d put his proposition to her so baldly—and so badly. But it hadn’t taken her long to understand why he’d chosen to approach her in such a fundamentally uncouth manner. She’d realized with an unbearable certainty that he was deeply unhappy.

In generalities, her room was not so different from William’s. But the specifics… There were nineteen years of memories stored in this room. A blue knit shawl, a gift from her father, draped over one side of her chest of drawers. A lopsided painting of daisies, a present James had given her two years ago, hung next to the mirror. A pine box on her nightstand contained all of Lavinia’s jewelry—a gold chain and her late mother’s wedding ring. These were not mere things, of course; they were memories, physical embodiments of the nineteen years that Lavinia had lived. They were proof that people loved her. Her brother had similar items in his room—a stone he’d picked up years ago on the beach in Brighton, the pearl pendant he’d inherited from his mother, to one day give his wife, and the penknife Lavinia had scrimped to buy him.

Where did William keep his memories? There had been nothing—not so much as a pressed flower—in his quarters. Not a single physical item indicated that he passed through life in contact with others. He must hold his memories entirely inside him.

It seemed a dreadfully lonesome place to keep them.

Things had emotional heft. Lavinia did not imagine a man avoided all mementos because he had been blessed with an inordinate number of good memories. That William had felt compelled to resort to blackmail, when she’d been so giddily inclined to him, said rather more about the light in which he saw himself than how he saw her. For all the harshness of his words, he’d touched her as if he worshipped her. He’d caressed her and held her and brought her to a pleasure that still had her limbs trembling. He might claim to have had no notion of love, but he’d not approached her as if her touches were credits on a balance sheet.

“Vinny?” James swung her door open without so much as a knock.

Luckily, the same absorption that led James to ignore Lavinia’s privacy meant he did not notice her dress was overwrinkled. He did not look in her eyes and see the telltale glow that lit them.

“Vinny,” he said again, “have you taken care of my note yet? Because I could—I mean, I should help.”

And how could she answer? She hadn’t taken care of his note. But James wouldn’t have to worry about the matter ever again. As for William…

Lavinia pasted a false smile across her lips. “You have nothing to worry about,” she said. “It’s all taken care of. He’s all taken care of.”

Or he would be soon.

IT SEEMED INCONCEIVABLE TO WILLIAM that life should continue on as usual the morning after he’d damned himself. The night passed nonetheless. The London streets a few blocks over awoke and rumbled as a hundred sellers prepared for market. Not only did the clock continue on schedule, but—as if fate itself were laughing up its sleeve at him—they marched inexorably on to Monday morning.

Monday. After he’d betrayed all finer points of civilization, nothing so trivial as a Monday morning should have been allowed to exist. And yet Monday persisted.

When William stepped on the streets, he shrank into the shoulders of his coat and pulled his hat over his eyes. But as he walked down Peter Street, nobody raised the hue and cry. No cries of “Stop! Despoiler of women!” followed his steps. Yesterday he’d snared an innocent woman in his bed by the foulest of means. Today nobody even gave him a second glance.

Up until the moment when William arrived at the gray Portland stone building where he worked, just opposite Chancery Lane, the day seemed a Monday much like every other Monday that had come before: gray, dreary and unfortunately necessary. But as soon as William opened the door to the office, he knew that this was not going to be an ordinary Monday.

It was going to be worse. Everyone, from Mr. Dunning, the manager, to Jimmy, the courier boy, sat stiffly. There were no jokes, no exchanged conversations. David Holder, one of William’s fellow clerks, inclined his head ever so slightly to the left.

There stood his employer. The elderly Marquess of Blakely was solid and ever so slightly stooped with age. If one were boasting in a tavern, the man might have seemed the most respectable master, the sort that any employee would feel proud to serve. When William had first arrived, he’d spun a fantasy in which his keen mind and meticulous work made him indispensable to the marquess. In his dreamworld, he’d been granted promotions, advances in wages. He’d won the respect of everyone around him.

That dream had been exceedingly short in duration. It had lasted a week from the day he was hired—until he’d met the man.

The old marquess was a tyrant. In his mind, he didn’t employ servants; he grudgingly shelled out money for minions. The marquess didn’t merely demand the obeisance and courtesy due his station; he required groveling. And, every so often, instead of raising a man up for skill and dedication, he chose an employee and delved into his work until he found an error—and no worker, however conscientious, was ever perfect—and then let the man loose. William and his fellow servants went to work every day swallowing fear for breakfast.

Fear did not sit well on a b

elly and heart as empty as William’s was today. He stood frozen in the old marquess’s gray-browed sights.

“Ah.” Old as he was, the marquess’s gaze did not waver, not in the slightest. It was William who dropped his eyes, of course, bobbing his head in hated obeisance. He fumbled hastily with his hat, pulling it from his head. For a long while the elderly lord simply stared at him. William wasn’t sure if he should offer the insult of turning his back so he could hang up his hat, or if he must stand icebound in place, headgear uncomfortably clutched in his hands.

The marquess turned his head, looking at William side on. With that shock of graying hair, the pose reminded William of some dirty-white bird of prey. The image wouldn’t have bothered him quite so much if William hadn’t felt like so much worm to the other man’s raptor.

His lordship glanced away, and William gulped air in relief. But instead of moving his attention to another man, the marquess simply pulled a watch from his pocket.

“Whoever you are,” he announced, “you’re a minute late to your seat.”

I wouldn’t have been had you not glowered at me. But William held his tongue. He couldn’t afford to lose his position. “I apologize, my lord. It won’t happen again.”

“No, it won’t.” The marquess gave the words a rather more sinister complexion. “Blight, is it?”

“Actually, it’s White, my lord. William White.”

He should not have offered correction. Lord Blakely’s eyes narrowed.

“Ah, yes. Bill Blight.”