He leaned over and deliberately turned one of her pens at an angle askew with all the other implements. “When we finish this conversation, I’m going to stand up and walk out of this room. I won’t stop until I reach the train station. I’ll be across the Channel by tonight.”
Her chest squeezed. She let out a long, slow breath. But he returned her pen to a straight line and leaned back in his chair.
“There are too many things I haven’t told you.” He looked her in the eyes. “But the first thing you should know is that I don’t just want you in my bed for a week or two. I want you forever.”
She felt as if she’d been thrown back against the wall. Her lungs did not seem to be functioning properly. But he’d said it so smoothly that she wasn’t sure she’d heard him right.
“I don’t always take everything I want.” For an instant, a glimmer of a smile passed over his face. “No doubt this attack of morals is temporary on my part. Suffice to say that if I stay much longer, I’ll begin to forget all the reasons I’m terrible for you. Selfishness makes a man lie to himself, and while I have no problem being selfish, you make me want to tell myself the sweetest lies. And while I’ll lie to the entire world, I don’t choose to lie to myself.”
“What sort of lies?” she asked.
His lip curled sardonically. “The worst sort, Miss Marshall. You make me think I could be someone.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No.”
She frowned at him.
“Nobody good. But I believed I was. Once.” His hand shifted to cover his jacket pocket as he spoke. “My family was wealthy. Not so socially exalted that we could do whatever we wished; we stood just high enough to be hampered by every last expectation.”
He’d rarely spoken of his past. Free sat, waiting for him to continue, afraid that if she so much as breathed too loudly, he wouldn’t go on.
But he did. “I was friends with the son of one of my father’s servants. Good friends.” He set his hands—still gloved, she noticed; she’d never seen him take off more than the one glove. “A little unusual, I suppose, but there weren’t many other boys my age about. Normally, such friendships vanish when a boy goes to school.” Edward shrugged. “This one didn’t. When I was seventeen, his father was kicked by a horse in the course of his employment. He fractured four ribs and broke a leg in three places. He wouldn’t have been able to work for months. Rather than granting the man time to recover, my father hired someone new in his place. After twelve years of service.”
Free sucked in a breath.
“Of course I spoke up. It was unjust, and this was my friend being cast out, with an injured father who would have no way to make a living.”
“That was good of you.”
He shook his head. “That was foolish of me. There’s nothing more stupid than telling dangerous truths to a man who controls your life. By that time, I had some fairly unusual political notions.” He smiled vaguely at that. “Reading is dangerous. I thought we could organize a mass response among the tenants, demanding—ah, well. Never mind that. It didn’t go well. The tenants balked, and instead of revolting, they told my father. The end result was that my father realized, after years of ignoring me, that I had developed dangerously plebeian sympathies. So he didn’t just toss my friend and his family out on their collective ear. He had my friend and his brother whipped for attempted rabble rousing. In front of me.” He let out a long breath. “And then he banished me. He had it put about that he was sending me to France to work with the masters. For my art.
“He did send me to France. But he sent me to live with a blacksmith in Strasbourg, not some painter in Paris. He thought I’d get a taste of manual labor, of the life of a regular man, and I’d recant all my beliefs in exchange for a taste of white bread and the comfort of a valet.” That smile twitched up even more. “It didn’t work. For two years, it didn’t work. And then war was declared with Prussia. I asked my father to send a letter of credit so I could return home; he refused. I went to the consulate in Strasbourg before the army arrived, only to find that my family had told them there was an impostor pretending to be me in the environs. I was ejected without assistance.”
Free made an involuntary noise of protest. He had already told her what had followed—have you ever seen plaster dust ignite in the air? He’d hinted at far more.
“So I vowed I’d never go back to them. I had my art, and what is art but the second cousin of forgery? It’s odd—lie about the world long enough, and everything in it stops feeling real. As if I’m nothing but a figment of someone else’s imagination. I don’t dare lie to myself, or I’ll lose touch completely.”
There was a great deal he hadn’t told her. She could tell it from the uneasy shift in his shoulders. “I imagine it wasn’t as easy as knocking off a forgery right away.”
He tensed. “Nothing is ever easy.”