“By God, Merryton, I never thought you capable of rape! I will call the authorities!”
Rape! Merryton?
Grace’s heart stopped beating. And then it started again with a painful jerk. No, no no no no—Merryton? How could she have made such a horrible, wretched mistake? It was impossible, and Grace whirled about to face the man who had driven her to wild desire—
Her heart plummeted to her toes.
She felt ill, could feel the blood rushing from her limbs, and thought she might collapse. She had not coaxed the affable and randy Lord Amherst into a compromising situation as she had planned. She had thrown herself at his brother, Lord Merryton, the most disagreeable man in England.
She had to fix this. “He did not harm me!” she cried, panicking now. There was sacrifice and the real desire to save her sisters, but then there was sheer terror, and this was sheer terror. She could not allow this to happen. It could not! Where in heaven was Amherst?
“Miss, do not speak,” the reverend warned her. “I will not allow him to intimidate you!”
Merryton’s cold green eyes bored through Grace. His face was dark, his expression stormy, and an unpleasantly cold shiver raced through her.
“I take full responsibility,” he said curtly.
“As well you ought!” the reverend said sharply, and stalked forward, holding up his lantern to see Grace. Grace quickly put a hand to her bodice and only then realized a long tangled hank of hair hung over her shoulder.
“Dear God,” the reverend said, his voice hushed, his expression truly horrified. He shifted that look of horror to Merryton. “This will not be borne! You have ruined this young woman, ruined her irrevocably, and for that, you will pay the price! Ladies, please, do see her to safety at once,” he said brusquely. “Take her from this place and send Mr. Botham to me as quickly as you can,” he added, referring to the local magistrate.
One of the ladies pulled the hood of her cloak over Grace’s head.
“There has been no crime,” she tried again. “It was my doing—”
“Quiet!” the reverend bellowed. The sisters shushed her as they flanked her, forcefully ushering her to the door.
Grace stumbled along, her breath short and thin. What a horrible, horrible mistake! She’d done something quite wretched. Worse than wretched! She felt as if she might vomit, and doubled over so that she wouldn’t. She wondered wildly if Amherst would have felt as helpless as she was feeling in that moment if he’d come, if her plan had worked.
“Oh, dear. Take heart, Miss Cabot. The reverend will see to it that man faces justice for what he’s done.”
“He committed no crime!” Grace cried helplessly. “It was I who brought this on him! I lured him.”
“Dearest, it is only natural that you would want to take the blame for your indiscretion, but you mustn’t,” one of the ladies said. “He has used you ill!”
That made no sense to Grace, but they were pulling her out the door and into the abbey courtyard, where dozens were now emerging from the abbey. Several heads swiveled in Grace’s direction—it wasn’t often that one saw two women dragging a third between them—and voices began to rise around them.
“Hurry along, Agnes!” one of the sisters hissed, and Grace was stumbling between them to keep up.
She would never recall how, exactly, she was returned to Cousin Beatrice’s house on Royal Crescent. She could only vaguely recall being there at all when the gentlemen came to speak with her, to ascertain what had happened in that dark tea shop. Grace tried desperately to explain to them that it was her doing, but when pressed to give a reason as to why she would do something so heinous, she could not tell them the truth.
The gentlemen assumed that as she could not adequately explain her reasoning for doing something so horrific because she was lying. She was lying, they carefully explained to her, because she feared Merryton.
Grace did fear Merryton. She’d never heard a kind word said about him. He was known to be aloof and distant and disdainful.
But he did not deserve what she’d done to him.
ONE TWO THREE four five six seven eight.
There were precisely eight steps from the breakfast room to the study, and eight panels of wallpapering in the room. Jeffrey knew this because he counted them every day on those occasions he resided at his townhome in Bath, sometimes several times a day. And yet he couldn’t be entirely certain of the number of steps in the early-morning hours after his spectacular downfall. He kept walking back and forth between the breakfast room and study, counting the steps.
He had to do it; he had to count until he was completely certain, for it was the only thing that could annihilate the image of him thrusting his body into that young woman’s sex.
The vision—unwanted, uninvited, mistakenly placed in his brain—was new to him. Generally, the vulgar and salacious thoughts that tended to plague him every day were of two women pleasuring each other with their tongues and fingers. He couldn’t say why that was, only that he had begun to experience that particular image around his seventeenth year. He’d begun to act on it in his twenty-first year, carefully seeking out the sort of bedmates who were willing to perform for him and with him. But in society, Jeffrey had learned to keep the dark images deep in the corners of his mind, hidden away. Always proper, always a model of propriety, just as his father had taught him to be. When Jeffrey made a concerted effort to banish the images, he was generally successful. They seemed only to emerge when he was very tired or felt the pressure of his title.
His title, the Earl of Merryton, as well as two lesser titles, was the heavy mantle he wore. He was the head of a large family with impressive holdings. He was Jeffrey Donovan, the man everyone assumed to be above scandal and immoral behavior, just like his father before him.
But the truth was that Jeffrey was not above it all. He’d merely found a way to restrain himself.
Until last night.
And now, a new, monstrous image was residing quite firmly in his thoughts and he could not subdue it. Bloody hell, he didn’t even know her name! Cabot, Mrs. Franklin had said. Jeffrey knew no Cabots. He knew nothing about her, except that she had tasted like honey, had felt like silk.
One two three four five six seven eight.
Eight. Eight. Eight.
This thing, this demonic obsession with eight, had invaded Jeffrey so many years ago that he could no longer remember how. But in his sixteenth year, when his father had died and he’d become the earl, responsible for carrying on the family’s name and its impeccable credentials, responsible for being the one above all reproach, the eight had begun to loom in his heart and mind. Like the salacious images, Jeffrey was at a loss to understood how or why it had happened. He thought himself mad, really, particularly as the eight was imperative to him but also torture at the same time.
The necessity for eight in his everyday life had manifested itself when Jeffrey had lain with a woman the first time. How old was he then, eighteen? He’d been seduced—willingly—by an older woman. She had shown him what his body wanted with her hands and her mouth, things he hadn’t realized, had not imagined. Those things seemed incongruent with the lord he was supposed to be, and he had not been able to douse his shame except by counting.
But then, the images, vile and lustful, had come at him, worse than he’d ever imagined. And the eight demon had grabbed him by the throat, choking the life out of him, forcing him to walk on the sharp edge of a blade—think bad thoughts, banish them only with eight. Now, at thirty years of age, Jeffrey knew that to fall off his private blade was to fall into the chaos