Unraveled (Turner, #3)

“It’s like this: I can’t put you out of my mind.”


She’d not been expecting that. Her eyes widened. To tell the truth, he hadn’t expected to start that way, either.

“I think of you in my free moments,” he said. The words came faster. “I think of you in moments that ought to be taken up by work. It’s affecting my judgment—witness what happened with Robbie yesterday. I keep thinking of what I could do for you. No—I must be perfectly frank—what I want to do to you.”

She hadn’t moved. But at that, she wet her lips with her tongue. “To be clear,” she said, “when you talk about what you want to do, you are talking about kissing me. You are not talking about throwing me in gaol.”

“To be clear,” Smite countered, “I am talking about having you as my mistress. About having you in every way possible.”

She didn’t slap his face or shriek in horror. Instead, she shook her head. “Then the answer is no. I’ve already said so. There’s too much risk for me.”

Ghost brought back the stick and dropped it once more. Smite ignored the dog. “I’m not proposing a one-time liaison. You’ll have a house. Servants. New clothing.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, Lord Justice, you do know how to woo a woman. Tell me more.”

“Precisely,” he agreed. “I’m not given to effusive sentiment. I’m not good at it, and you mustn’t expect it. It’s best we start as we mean to go on. I don’t need false protestations of love. I ask only for fidelity for the term of the arrangement and basic honesty.”

“And what is the term of the arrangement you’re proposing?”

“One month.” His pulse was beating more erratically than it ought. This was business—simple business. Not something to care about. No reason to watch her so carefully, to wonder what that flicker of her eyelashes might mean. No reason at all. He bent and retrieved Ghost’s stick, to avoid looking in her eyes, and hurled it as far as he could. “In addition to what I mentioned before,” he added, “I’ll pay you a thousand pounds.”

That got him an incredulous look. “One thousand pounds. Are you joking? Or are you mad?”

He’d decided on a few hundred last night. He wasn’t sure where the new, vastly inflated number had come from. Perhaps because he feared that she might refuse two hundred.

“Neither,” he said repressively.

“You drive a worse bargain than my friend Jeremy.” She put her hand to her head. “I beg your pardon for not immediately snapping up the offer. My financial understanding stretches to shillings and pence in the quantities of ones and tens. I have never heard the word ‘thousand’ anywhere near the word ‘pounds.’ I am having difficulty comprehending what you mean. You had seemed a sensible man, but you cannot be one. That’s an absurd amount for just that one thing.”

“Yes,” he snapped. “This entire endeavor is absurd. I don’t know why I asked you to come, or why I could scarcely breathe this morning until I saw you. The only thing I know for certain is that I want more than one thing from you. I want forty or fifty. Most of all, I want this: when we are through, I want to be certain that I will not leave you in danger. This way, I’ll know that you’ll never find your way into my courtroom again—neither you nor Robbie—and I’ll never have to compromise my judgment. I want you to be safe. I can’t purchase that for a few pounds and a minute against a wall.”

She was watching him. The bright green of her eyes bored into his. She raised one eyebrow at that, and he almost thought she might be laughing at him. But instead, she said, “That’s four things you want. What are the other forty-something?”

He reached out and took her hand. She was wearing knit gloves; they thinned at the fingertips. He rolled the fabric off her hand, slowly, and then pressed his hand into hers. She stared down at their entwined fingers, and then looked up at him.

“There’s really only the one other thing,” he heard himself say. “But I imagine I’ll want it more than once.”

Her hand twitched in his.

“Also,” he said, “to be quite truthful—I chose a thousand pounds because I don’t want to risk the possibility of your saying no.”

She gave him a little smile—as if she’d realized what he’d just said. He had the money, the power. And he’d practically admitted that she had him in the palm of her hand. She could have asked for two thousand pounds, and he’d have agreed. Ten.

But instead, she pulled back from him. Her nails trailed along the skin of his hand. “I have my own conditions,” she said.

“Yes?”

“You can have my body. You can have my fidelity. You can even have my honesty—” this, with a little wayward smile “—but there is one thing you cannot ever buy from me, not with any coin you have.”

“Oh?”

“You can’t buy my affection.”