Page 9 of Lie Down With a Lyon (The Lyon’s Den)

“I am.” Truth had always served him better than lies. Today’s events proved it.

She sat still, without shock or anger. Indeed, she considered him as if she studied a painting…or a puzzle. “I am sure you wish to explain. But do it later.” She bit off her words, fury turning her cheeks bright pink. “Now…at this moment, I want to know what you intend to do with me.”

His mind picked over the imperfect picture he’d tried to create since he’d saved her. Bits of that had pierced him like shards of glass from ruined cathedral windows.

But the carriage rounded in front of the George Inn in Southwark, and Dáire climbed out when his man opened his door. He looked at his watch. His man should have arrived already. But no one was in the courtyard. Dáire checked inside. No luck there.

He had no choice but to tell the inn’s messenger boy that he would await a reply from his man at the Grey Ghost Inn along the Old Kent Road until noon.

At eleven fifteen, they took the turn into the carriageway at that famous Kentish inn.

“We’ll refresh ourselves a few minutes here as we change conveyances,” he told her as he handed her down into the cobbles. “We’ll also get more supplies for our journey.”

“We change? Why?” She seemed not so much contrary now as inquisitive.

“If anyone in the churchyard recognized me or mine, my regular carriage or groom, I want us suddenly to have disappeared.”

“You do think of everything.”

“I try.” He smiled, liking this attitude of hers better than her peevishness.

“I assume this means you have a plan for us.”

“I do.” He led her across the cobbles into the pub. “We go south toward the coast.”

“You wish to sail?” she quipped.

“No.” His lips curved upward, but it was no true smile.

“You wish to fish?”

“Ha! No.”

“Ah, then. You want to go sea bathing.”

With you? Without so much as a chemise clinging to you? I should be so lucky. “Of course. Good for your health.”

“So I’ve heard,” she said with a certain snideness. “I cannot.”

“No?” He’d draw her out. To keep the conversation pleasant, he’d follow along. He led her to a table in the far corner of the busy tavern and settled her into a chair before he took the opposite one, hoping to show her how calm and rational he’d become. “Why not?”

“I’m not to shock my lungs. A childhood malady that can reoccur.” Her visage tightened with the memory. “Also my mother…”

“What about her?”

“She died from the chill of a rainstorm.”

“Well then,” he said, his sympathy for her loss greater than she would ever know. The loss of a mother was no small despair. “No sea bathing for you.”

The tavern girl appeared, and Dáire asked for a quick luncheon of cold meats and bread, plus apples or pears from their cellars. “I’d like to fill my hamper.”

“Traveling, are ye?” the girl asked with a sashay of her hips. She liked his looks and would probe the possibility he liked hers, regardless of his female companion.

“Aye,” he told her, polite but dismissive. “Going west.” If Rivers tracked them here, he had to leave false word of where they went.

The girl, discouraged, sighed, took their order for cider and ale, then left.

Blanche gathered herself, looking uncertain. “You’ve not planned much of this, have you?”

“I’ve had no plan at all.” He winced. “That is my failure here, as well as—”

Her brows rose. She wished to find a way into his troubled mind, did she? “As well as what?”

He took in her lovely face. Unsmiling. Anger at the edges of her lips. Distrust at the corners of her eyes. How could he tell her how he had failed his own rules? He was ashamed of how he had ignored them. Be nimble. Be thorough. Be honest. He’d not been fair to her. Not nimble but scattered, clumsy in the matter of her protection. And thorough? No, he’d failed to expect the unexpected—her father’s ruthlessness. And honest? Hell no! He’d not been honest with her from the start. He was no Mr. Dillon. He was no shopkeeper in Richmond. The only thing that had been honest and true was his desire for her and that kiss. “I had no plan. All of what happened was a surprise to you and me. We go south because few will look for us there.”

“You are so certain?”

“I am. I never go south. So if anyone wishes to hunt for me, they’ll go to Dover or Ipswich.”

“Why there?”

“I have friends there. Friends in the same work.”

“Dear me,” she said, feigning distress. “More fixers! Who knew?”

“I’m trying to make up for the lack of a plan.” He folded his arms. “Bear with me.”

She looked at him as if she would never turn her eyes away. Whatever she searched for either astonished her or set her back teeth to grinding. “I want to go home, O’Neill.”

“Dáire.”

She thinned her lips. “My stepmother will lose her mind with fear. My father will want to wring your neck.”

He swung his head back and forth. “Both your stepmother and your father will assume I have taken you for revenge or ransom. When no note comes stating that desire…”

She scowled. “Do you have a bone to pick with my father?”

“None…lately.”

“But there is an old rivalry between you?”

“Rivalry, no. Animosity, some. He does not like my presence in what he calls his territory. He fears I will try to fix someone’s problem someday and bring him down. I am a thorn in his side. A man who fixes people’s problems and may one day take on a job that changes the way your father works.”

“Is that not what Bow Street does?” She sat back as the tavern girl brought their mugs of cider and ale.

Dáire lifted his pewter mug to her in toast. “But does Bow Street have the power to fix every problem it finds?”

She took a long drink, then pressed her lips together. “True. So you are not out for revenge, not in it for compensation. What, then, is this…this escapade ?”

She would have him declare it? He would! “To save you from a life of despair at the hands of a rogue.”

She leaned over the table, and for a moment, she was so angry that she curled her lip at him. “Oh, that is so rich. To marry, I would have had some respectability in the small circle of my own in London.”

“If!” He shot up a finger. “If you had married Mercer!”

“Aye. So now? Now, I will be labeled the woman ruined by a scoundrel. Taken against her will with God knows what forced upon her. Enclosed with a man in his carriage and taken to his hideaway. Ruined! Untouchable!”

“You can return to London. Scandal dies down. Always.”

“So says a man who does not live or die by the ton ’s rules. I have friends. Or rather, I had them before I was carried away like booty of war. Now I have nothing.”

Dáire felt like an idiot, but he had one card left to play. “And how well would they cling to you if Mercer turned out to be less of a man than you or even I thought possible?”

She took offense. “What do you mean?”

“Some rumors say that Mercer beat one of his mistresses.”

Alarm had her gray eyes going wide. “Tell me the details.”

“He’s had, over the years, four.”

“Go on.”

“He was twenty-one. New at sponsoring a woman. She was nineteen, pretty, but frail and sickly. She often showed up at her mother’s or her sister’s house with bruises. When she was four months with child, she went to her mother’s one night, badly beaten. Some say she told her mother she’d suffered a boot to her belly. She lost the babe and her life.”

Blanche sucked in air, folded her arms against the horror she’d just heard, and downed her cider. “How many repeat this tale?”

“Only the lady’s mother. Only right after her daughter’s death.”

“So she could have been bought off.”

He nodded. “Or she made up the tale and wished to make some money off Mercer’s father. We do not know.”

Their quick meal was eaten in silence. When she finished, she asked for the ladies’ convenience and off she went toward the back.

As Dáire waited, he heard a rider came barreling into the carriage yard. The man ran into the inn and searched for Dáire. Within minutes, Dáire had his hands full of two missives.

“One to me with directions,” he explained to her when she returned. “Another to the caretakers in case Carlisle’s other messenger does not arrive before we do.” He grinned, happy and relieved they had some refuge.

They traveled along the Old Kent Road in silence for the next few hours. At another carriage inn, they took a few minutes for ale and cider and a walkabout to stretch their legs. Here, he hired a new carriage for them.

Blanche had to applaud her captor’s taste in carriages, as well as his obvious ability to pay for the best, because this next one was a landau of stunning proportions. A green lacquer that rivaled the deep verdant density of an English forest, the coach had such sumptuous padding and well-hung springs that she floated on air.

A nice compensation, the extreme comfort slayed her anger. Soothing her outrage at him, she decided to see if she might begin to see her way out of this predicament.

She focused on the passing landscape and counted the results of this fiasco he’d created. Her marriage arranged by Mrs. Dove-Lyon was ruined. Any marriage to any man was now out of the realm of possibility. She faced a life alone, with two friends only, Grace Mansfield and Susana Edmunds. Certainly she would remain a spinster, without children or many friends to celebrate or comfort her. She would have to become a new and different creature.

Fingers to her lips, she suppressed a sob. Would she have to take a new name? A new home? Create new aspirations?

She had money. Not much. A little more than two thousand, all of it from her business profits. If Grace now wished nothing to do with her, given the scandal, she would create a new business. Not in Richmond. But…somewhere. Other towns needed registries that stood up for servants’ rights of good wages, days off, and humane treatment.

All of that was for a distant future.

Her objective must begin with plans to escape Mr. O’Neill. Hide away where her father could not find her. And begin to build her new life.