Ruined By The Reckless Viscount. Sophia James
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though, for she had reached out for him, her hands around his neck, trying to contain the damage, his blood between her fingers and her blue eyes sharp with pain.
They had both fallen then, out of the door on to the road, her body wound about his own, like a blanket or a cushion. He had felt the softness of her and the honesty, her hair falling around them in shelter until she had been torn away.
‘God.’ He spoke that out loud. ‘God, help me,’ he added as if in that second and under the darkness of a spring London night he had understood exactly what he should have always known.
Florentia Hale-Burton had tried to help him even after everything he had done to her. After all the hurt and the dogs and the chill and the fear. She had reached out and tried to stem the damage of the shot, placing her own body between him and his assailants and the promise of another assault.
The realisation was staggering.
Roy Warrenden had said she was timid and seldom left Kent so how could he meet her? To thank her. To make certain that she was...recovered?
His life seemed to be going into a vortex swirling around truth. The artist. Roy’s wariness. His wife’s fear. The sister banished to Kent after he had ruined her by his own stupidity.
But first he had to deal with Perkins from the inn at St Katharine Dock, for the ghost of his dead father demanded at least some attention.
Spitting out the pooling blood in his mouth, he stood, waiting for a moment as the dizziness lessened. He was on the right track at least if he was being threatened.
It was a start.
Winterton had agreed to everything Florentia had stipulated save the place to meet.
His note was in her hand, the letter stamped in wax and delivered that very afternoon.
His writing looked as beautiful as he himself was purported to be—a long slanted hand with an air of arrogance in the words alongside a tinge of question.
Dear Mr Rutherford,
I was pleased to receive your letter and would be most interested in your offer. I hope that my visage will indeed do your style a justice.
I would, however, prefer to have the painting completed here at the town house I am renting for the Season in St James’s Square. The light is good and I should enjoy it more than sitting for hours in the gallery of a stranger.
If you could give me by return post the time and day you would like to commence I shall have my carriage sent for you. Warrenden intimated you have been staying with his family on and off. Is this the location you would want to be met?
I look forward to our association on this matter.
Yours sincerely,
James Waverley
He had used neither his title nor his crest. The wax was of a plain sort one could buy for a smaller coin than the scented kind in any of the market places of London.
Not a man inclined to waste, then? Not a man who might lay his cards on the table either, for all to admire.
You should be careful of Winterton, Florentia. Her sister’s words came back. He is not a milksop lord who would be easily duped.
She swallowed. Well, she was not a milksop lady either. The shrieking sharpness inside her had been honed in anger for years and years and her kidnapper was a great part of that. To be thrown off into a netherworld and away from society made one more independent, more resourceful.
The commission of a portrait was a medium to understand Winterton, to weigh up her options, to evaluate which way her dice would roll and what pathway her vengeance might take.
Vengeance?
She had never imagined herself as a vengeful person, even the word made her slightly horrified, but if Lord Winterton was indeed her kidnapper then he had to understand the ramifications of what he had done to her, to her family, to her father in particular who had withdrawn to Albany Manor much changed after his flight north to save her.
Ruination came in a series of degrees, it came in sickness and sleeplessness and in fright. It came in the nights when she would wake in a sweat and wonder what else she could have done to make it different. It came in the mornings when she looked in the mirror to see the fear there lurking in her eyes and the dark sleep-deprived circles beneath them.
Maria had married and was talking of having children, but she herself had faltered, trapped in the horror of her history and hiding from all that it had exposed. She needed to see Winterton privately in order to understand what she might do from now on, what pathway to a better life she would follow.
Forgiveness might bring around absolution. She only hoped she could find such mercy within herself.
* * *
She’d dressed this morning carefully, in Frederick Rutherford’s clothes. She had jammed cloth down into the edges of her cheeks and practised breathing through her mouth so that her voice was more hollow and stuffed up. When she looked at her reflection she could barely remember the frightened woman she had been when she had first donned her disguise before coming to London. She seemed to have grown into the role in every way that mattered and was heartened by such a fact.
Lord Winterton had not seen her for six years and even then in the brevity and tenseness of the whole situation he probably had not observed her closely. These clothes would maintain her anonymity, she was sure of it.
As an added insurance she had placed a small paper knife in her left pocket wrapped in leather and within easy reach.
She knew she would not use it on him, but it was a protection to keep him at bay if all else failed. She would avoid confrontation if she could, but if it was impossible she at least wanted to have a weapon in order to escape.
Her sister knocked on the door and came in, her face set in an expression that told Florentia she was not pleased.
‘I think you should reconsider this whole mad scheme of yours, Flora. This may be the last chance for you to do so for once you are in that carriage—’
Florentia interrupted her. ‘I shall be fine. Winterton is hardly going to jump on a young and sickly artist. He is from society, for goodness sake, and a product of years of manners and propriety.’
This observation did not seem to alleviate her sister’s worries whatsoever, nor her own, in fact, given what had already transpired between them.
‘Manners and propriety are not words that come easily to my mind when I think of Winterton, Flora. I could come with you?’
‘No.’ They had had this conversation a number of times. ‘I do not need you there and from what I have read of the workings of a private commission it would be very odd to take an onlooker.’
‘But the whole thing is odd and you should not be risking the chance of discovery. There might be others there.’
‘He has said there would not be.’
‘He might be able to see through your disguise.’
‘Can you?’
‘Well, no. If I did not know any of this, I would barely recognise you myself.’
‘The painting shall take at the most four mornings. Twelve hours. After that I’ll have a good amount of money for Papa and Mama and me to live on. My reputation with Mr Ward will stay wholly intact as well and so hopefully more sales of work will follow.’
And I will know exactly what I am facing, for better or for worse.
‘I have already said to Papa that I can help, but he won’t accept it.’
‘Because it would be Roy’s money, Maria, and Papa is too proud a man to take it.’
‘Proud