“He’ll be all right.” His subtle emphasis suggested that his reassurance didn’t extend to her well-being.
Her eyes fastened on his face, her blue-violet gaze sharpening…then she shivered delicately. Crossing her arms, she rubbed her palms up and down her upper arms, as if she truly were cold…but the library was pleasantly warm.
He inwardly frowned but kept the expression from his face. She wasn’t just unsettled; she was in shock but doing her damnedest to hide it.
A sound at the door had him turning; seeing Gasthorpe carrying a tray, he waved him in. Waiting while Gasthorpe solicitously laid the tray on a table close by Phoebe’s chair, he grasped the moments while she and the club’s majordomo consulted on who would pour and the need for sugar lumps to deal with the unsettling tilt and swing of his emotions, a sudden upsurge of concern for her swamping his violent feelings of just a few seconds before.
“My lord?”
Gasthorpe’s voice drew him back; seeing the majordomo holding the teapot aloft, he shook his head. “No—I’ll take a brandy.”
He had a strong suspicion he was going to need fortification to get through the coming discussion without either misstepping and failing to learn all he now knew he absolutely had to know, or worse, queering his pitch irretrievably with Phoebe.
Watching her sip her tea, he let his concern for her wash through him, not fighting or trying to suppress it but letting it spread, sink in, and so gradually subside. Leaving his earlier, underlying feelings still standing, still turbulent, powerful and remarkably strong, a roiling, surging clashing sea swirling beneath his tightly reined temper.
Not just coloring his temper but giving it an edge quite unlike any he’d experienced before.
A clink of crystal reached him, then Gasthorpe appeared by his elbow, proffering a glass half-filled with amber liquid. He took it and nodded a dismissal. Gasthorpe bowed and withdrew.
He sipped, watched Phoebe cradle her cup between her hands and gaze at the fire. What he felt—for her, about her—wasn’t familiar. He wasn’t even sure why he felt as he did. But given that she now meant this much to him, given their ever-deepening, soon-to-be-consummated sexual connection, given that he wanted her as his wife not just because it was a logical decision but one defined and driven by something far more powerful than reason—given, therefore, that he would have to learn to deal with her, a being he definitely didn’t completely comprehend—given all that, then exercising all due caution was assuredly the path of the wise.
She swallowed, then drew a deep, fractionally shaky breath, and held it—and he felt, once again, the ground shift beneath his emotional feet.
As if he were standing on quicksand, from both his point of view and hers.
“What, exactly, is the business of the Athena Agency?” He kept the words uninflected, let nothing more than even-tempered curiosity color them.
She studied him for an instant, then coolly replied, “That’s none of your concern.”
He held her gaze, let a moment tick by, then calmly stated, “Think again.”
When she merely arched a brow, unimpressed, and said nothing, he took another sip of brandy, then evenly said, “Correct me if I’m wrong. You—through the agency—have been assisting female servants to escape from their employment, presumably when they become the target of unwanted advances from their male employers, or males associated with their employers. You’ve been using the income from the fortune you inherited from your great-aunt first to establish and subsequently to support the agency. You own the building the agency is housed in, but Mr. and Mrs. Birtles and a Mr. Loftus Coates are the named principals of the business.”
Her face registered not just shock but another emotion that quickly resolved into outrage. “How did you learn all that?”
“I checked.” Even now he was amazed, prey to a combination of surprise, fascination, and frank admiration that she had not only conceived the notion but had engineered it, given it life, and, as far
as he could tell, successfully run the business for years.
Spine rigid, she’d narrowed her eyes at him. “Checked how?” Then understanding dawned. Her jaw dropped; for an instant she was speechless. “You…you used your…your contacts to investigate my finances?”
Her rising tone was a warning, one he ignored. He nodded.
Fury sparked, lighting her eyes, her whole countenance. “How dare you!”
Spots of color rose to her cheeks; she all but vibrated with righteous indignation. The reckless sea of emotions he was holding down surged in response to the accusation in her eyes; it would be easy, so satisfying, to let them erupt, but…
“Phoebe…” Outwardly unperturbed, he held her gaze, then quietly stated the bald truth, “When it comes to you, to matters involving you, matters that in any way might prove dangerous to you, there’s little I wouldn’t dare.”
Phoebe heard the ring of abject honesty in his words. Inwardly aghast, battling to conceal it, she read the unsettling, disconcerting, ineradicable truth in his eyes.
Not only did he know, incontrovertibly beyond any hope of her disguising the truth, far too much—far more than was safe—but being him, the type of man he was, he would never let such “matters” rest.
And, damn!—she’d brought this down on her own head! She’d encouraged him to engage in a liaison with her—without having thought it through. Without having recalled, not until now when she was faced with the inevitable outcome, that gentlemen like him had a tendency to assume responsibility for the women in their lives.
In a blink, she jettisoned any idea of him turning a blind eye, of her convincing him—no matter what she said or how long she argued, no matter any distraction or inducement she might offer—to simply walk away and let things be. Let her and the agency carry on as before.
But…there had to be a way. If he was a wall blocking her, there had to be some way around him—over or under or past.