Scandalous Desires (32 page)

“Bye!” Mary said. She crouched in mimic next to Silence and pointed one stubby finger at a small, azure butterfly, sitting on a crocus.

The butterfly startled at Mary’s gesture and floated up, drifting on the breeze, its wings sparkling blue and bright in the late afternoon sunshine.

Silence watched it, enthralled, and then her eyes met Michael’s.

A corner of his mouth cocked up. “Welcome home, m’love.”

M
ICK GAVE A
last tug to his neck cloth and scowled at himself in the small mirror over the dresser. His rooms at Windward House weren’t nearly as ostentatious as those in his palace, but he had kept one thing the same: his bed here was just as big as the one in his palace. He glanced around his rooms. It had taken him years to outfit this hidey-hole, this refuge where no one knew him as Charming Mickey O’Connor, and at first he’d felt foreign in this house. After all, he wore different clothes, used a different accent. He was a different man here. But somehow over the years, that different man had become merely another facet of him. Now he felt nearly as comfortable
wearing Michael Rivers’s staid clothes as he did Mickey O’Connor’s flamboyant costume.

So if revealing his other identity to Silence wasn’t the reason for his present nerves, what was? He’d supped every meal with Silence over the last week. There was no reason then for this missish skittishness.

He cursed and thrust himself away from the mirror. No reason, and yet here he was delaying by playing with a plain neck cloth—he who usually wore silks and velvet!

Mick strode out of his room and down the hall. Bittner had already announced supper and Cook did hate it when he was late. But that was not what made his pace quicken. It was the thought of seeing Silence again. Mick snorted. Oh, he had it bad! Like a lad with peach down on his cheeks with his very first tart.

Except that if Silence were a tart, he’d be much more sure of what to do with her. No, he’d had to go and fall for a respectable lady. A lady with swirling hazel eyes that hid secrets he wanted to spend the rest of his life exploring.

Mick paused outside the dining room to catch his breath. And now he’d brought her to his secret hidey-hole that only Harry, of all his men, knew about. He was exposing himself, he knew. Ah, well, and he couldn’t even regret doing it. She and the babe needed to be hidden while Harry did Mick’s bidding in London and this was the safest place.

With that thought he opened the door to the dining room.

Silence was already inside, sitting primly on the right hand side of the head of the table. She wore a simple blue and white print gown—one that he’d had sent up to her,
for she’d fled her brother-in-law’s house with only the clothes upon her back. It gave him a satisfied feeling to see her in clothes that he’d provided for her and he smiled as he prowled down the length of the room toward her.

She met his gaze steadily though her cheeks stained pink. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d join me, Mr. Rivers.”

He cocked his head. Had he imagined her emphasis on his assumed name? “And leave a lovely lady like yourself alone? I think not.”

“Humph.”

He sat and looked at her. “How is Mary Darling?”

“Fast asleep after playing and having a bath,” she said. “The nursery is lovely.”

“I’m glad you like it.”

“Rose and Annie are obviously practiced nursemaids, and what is even better, they seem to like Mary, and she them.”

He grunted. “It would take a hard heart to turn away from my Mary Darling.”

A smile curved the corners of her lips. “You didn’t seem too enamored of her when you first met.”

“She has a forceful personality, as do I. We just took a bit to get to know one another.”

She eyed him suspiciously. “I think your Irish has mysteriously disappeared from your speech, Mr.
Rivers
.”

No, he’d not imagined the emphasis. He shot her a warning look as Mrs. Bittner entered with a steaming dish.

The housekeeper bustled around the table serving roasted chicken, boiled vegetables, jellies, and fruit. A little maid trailed behind her, acting as acolyte to the service.

“There now,” Mrs. Bittner exclaimed when the table was laden. “Will you be wanting anything else, sir?”

“Thank you, no,” Mick murmured.

The housekeeper nodded in satisfaction and left with the maid.

“Will you have some chicken?” Mick asked as he reached for the dish.

“Yes, please,” she answered quite politely. “Are you in disguise here?”

He ought to have known she wouldn’t let it drop.

He gave her a wing and some breast meat. “Not exactly, but I find it… useful to have a place where I’m not known as the pirate Mickey O’Connor.”

She waited until he’d served himself and then tasted the chicken. “Then you’re a simple English gentleman when you’re at Windward House.”

He nodded. “More or less.”

“And do you really build ships?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“How did I come to be a shipbuilder, do you mean?” He cut into his chicken. “Several years ago I hired Pepper to manage my money. He advised me that it would be wise to invest some of it in a business that wasn’t linked to my pirating.”

“But why shipbuilding?” she asked. “You could’ve chosen anything, couldn’t you?”

“I suppose.” He ate a bite of chicken and chewed as he thought. “I’ve always admired the ships that dock in London. I used to sit and watch them for hours at a time when I was a lad. Shipbuilding seemed a natural business to invest in. Too, there was an established shipbuilder—his business has been in his family for three generations—who was in need of financial backing. That was where I came in.”

“Then the investment has worked well for you?”

He shrugged. “I make nearly as much from the shipbuilding business as I do from pirating.”

She frowned a bit, drank a little of her wine, and set the glass carefully down.

He tensed with foreboding. He expected her to bring up again the topic of him retiring from pirating, but she spoke about something entirely different instead.

“That night when the palace was attacked,” she said, “you told me that you had thrown vitriol in the Vicar of Whitechapel’s face, but you did not tell me why.” She looked up at him, her hazel eyes dark in the candlelight. “Can you tell me now?”

He froze as her question caught him off guard. He’d been expecting the question all this long week, yet she’d chosen to ask it when he’d at last come home. For that at least he supposed he should be grateful.

He took a sip of the wine because his mouth had grown dry. It was a French wine and of an excellent vintage, but it tasted like vinegar in his mouth.

“I was a boy,” he began and then stopped. How could he tell her? This was the most wretched part of his life—the most wretched part of
him
. How could he expose her to it?

She waited, sitting quietly, her back straight, her eyes clear and innocent, and he could only stare at her, the words clogged in his throat.

“Michael?” she whispered at last. “Michael, can you tell me?”

And her voice was like a drought of sweet water relieving his thirst, quenching his pain.

“I was a boy,” he said again, holding her gaze, for it seemed the only way he could speak this terrible evil.
“And me mam and I lived with him, Charlie Grady, the Vicar of Whitechapel, though back then he was only Charlie Grady. He made gin in St. Giles and he sent me mam out to walk the streets at night.”

She didn’t say anything, but her eyes seemed filled with sorrow. Sorrow for him, that innocent boy, long dead now.

“Sometimes she’d bring her customers back with her, but mostly she sold her wares out on the streets, and she never said naught to me about those nights, but once in a while I’d hear her crying…” His voice trailed away and he watched his hand as he fingered his glass.

He hated to think about that time. Mostly he was able to push the memories to the back of his mind. Try to forget them, though he never could. Truth be told he didn’t want to think about it now. But she wanted to know, so for her he’d dredge up this foulness.

He took a drink to rinse the taste of evil from his mouth.

“She would sing to me in the evenings afore she went out, and her voice was sweet and low. She did her best to shield me from him, for he had terrible rages and then he’d beat me. He never liked me much.” He shrugged. That part of his story was common enough in St. Giles. “But when I were thirteen or thereabouts she got sick. It was winter and grain was running low. He couldn’t pay for it, the price had ridden so high, and without the grain he couldn’t make gin. And she—she was too sick to go out at night.”

He paused and the room was very quiet. From without, distantly, they could hear someone laughing in the kitchen.

He looked up at her because he wasn’t a coward and he wouldn’t have her pity him for one. “I was a fair lad, pretty as a girl, and there are those who like such things, you understand?”

Her face had gone marble white, but she held his gaze and nodded her understanding once. No coward either, was his Silence.

“He said he had a taker for me and that I was to do as the man said or he’d beat me until I couldn’t move. Well.” Mick inhaled, still holding those beautiful hazel eyes. “I was an innocent, had never touched a girl in me life, but I knew the kind of thing that would be expected of me. And I knew it wouldn’t be the once. After I’d done it, Charlie would want me to do it again and again until I was naught but a boy whore, despised by all. I wasn’t going to be that thing. We were in his distillery and he had the vitriol in a basin to use for the gin. I knew what it could do, had watched it burn through wood. I took that basin and dashed it in Charlie Grady’s face and then I turned and ran as fast as I could.”

Silence gave a kind of shuddering gasp and spoke. “You had no choice. What he wanted you to do was abominable.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. But me mam never forgave me for it. She spoke but once to me after that.”

“Why?” she cried, the outrage in her voice a balm to his soul. “Why would she take his side against yours?”

“Because,” he said low, “Charlie Grady is me father.”

Michael’s greatest enemy was his father.

Silence lay in bed late that night, sleepless and thinking of the things that Michael had told her over dinner. At the time, when he’d revealed what his father had done to him—had done to the mother Michael so obviously loved—she’d been too stunned, too sickened to ask anything more. They’d finished the dinner in near quiet. Now, as she lay staring sightlessly up at the dark canopy of her bed, questions and thoughts teemed in her mind. How could a mother let anyone, even a child’s father, do such horrible things to a boy? And once the child had
defended himself, how could she take the part of the adult who cared so little for his soul?

She shivered in the dark. So much about Michael was explained by his terrible history. She’d wondered how a man could become so cynical, so devoid of common pity, and now she had her answer. Pity had been seared out of him by his monster of a father. Charlie Grady might bear scars on the outside of his body, but they were nothing to the scars that lay within Michael’s soul.

Yet now she realized there were questions she should’ve asked of him—what had he done all alone at the age of thirteen? What had become of his mother?

Well, she wouldn’t get any sleep tonight wondering and thinking. Silence turned her head and looked at the door that connected her room to Michael’s. A faint light shone under it.

Impulsively, she got up and tiptoed to the door. She pushed it open as quietly as possible. If he were already asleep…