Page 29 of A Treacherous Trade
In my state of mind, as fractured as my heart was, I thought I’d find it jaggedly painful to hear about someone falling in love. Because Oscar truly was falling, if not already deeply in love.
And I did.
However, I forced myself to ignore the pain, because I knew that no matter whom Oscar fell for, the relationship was doomed.
We both knew it.
And so, because I loved him, I could pretend that this story he told with such verve had a happy ending.
I wasn’t marvelous at pretending, but Oscar had been right about one thing—this filmy lace covered me from forehead to nose and hid the worry and pity for his future from him as he chattered away like a woodlark.
Looking at myself in the mirror, I saw someone I didn’t recognize. A woman with salacious secrets, ones that were less painful than mine, and more tempting.
Me, a temptress? I could half believe it like this.
Yes, this would work perfectly, I thought. It would be the very thing that could hide me from those who would see the truth.
So that I could find it in the dark.
ChapterSeven
Iwasn’t afraid until the moment I disembarked the hackney at Orchard Lane.
If I’m honest, I was delighted just to be getting out of the house. What with Teagan teething, Mary’s frenetically chipper overcompensation for the noise, and Aunt Nola’s portents of doom, I was ready to beg Croft for a night or two in a cell for escape.
Also, as much as I hated to admit it to myself, seeing Oscar radiant with a new love might have been the worst of it. For which I felt terribly guilty.
I should be glad for him. And I was. But something about that the brilliance of his smile only illuminated the yawning chasm of my loneliness. It dug at wounds still tender with scabs.
At least here at The Orchard, almost no one knew me. I could truly become someone else.
More specifically, Viola Montague. Anome de théâtreof sorts, selected from both my most favorite and least favorite Shakespeare plays.
Or perhaps I meantnome de guerre.
I tried to become Viola as I bustled through the frigid late-winter night, my head hidden in the fur hood of my floor-length coat. Not only against the bite of the wind, but to conceal the scrap of lace across my features from the evening inhabitants of Fleet Street. I’d bought the coat, a full and feminine confection of ermine and midnight-blue velvet, for this very place. Its length and abundance hid the lack of adequate skirts underneath.
I hesitated at the entrance to The Orchard, grappling my anxiety with both hands and some stern inner monologue.
Who was I to do this? What sort of sex and sin would I be subjected to? Could I truly pretend to be immune? Death was one thing, a realm in which I felt comfortable. Well, knowledgeable, at least.
Sex? This was a universe foreign unto me.
Not by choice, exactly, but because I’d spent most of my life in love. In love with a man who’d promised to marry me and spoke in whispers about the love we would make. He’d kissed me often, and passionately. His hands had become familiar with my skin, dawdling in places they ought not to find.
But he’d never ventured inside me with any part of himself. Even though I would have let him. I would have let Aidan do anything he wanted to me.
Maybe because I knew he wouldn’t. Because he respected me as much as he loved me, and that had meant something for so long.
Once I lost him to the church, I’d done my best to move on. Partly because he awakened yearnings within me I’d wanted to explore.
But no other man who’d kissed and groped at me came close to making me feel like Aidan had. To making me want more than what they took without asking… a hand in my bodice or a tongue shoved into my mouth.
And then I’d lost my entire family in one night, and struggled to survive. I didn’t visit those dark months after, but romance had been the furthest thing from my mind.
When Mary invited me to join her in London, she’d given me the price I could charge for my virginity, and it was often more than most people I knew made in an entire year.
And after her blood-soaked tragedy, well… I’d retained my virginity whilst building a business, because it almost seemed like more trouble to find someone to relieve me of it then I wanted to bother with.
