“Four days,” he agreed, unexpectedly. “What else?”
“I require my own studio at your house, and your word that I may continue painting.”
“Done.”
“And I shall ask my father to put a trust fund in my name.”
He looked bemused rather than offended. “You won’t find me tightfisted, if that’s your worry,” he said. “And your father and I agreed on two thousand a year in pin money.”
Two thousand! Admittedly, a hefty sum for her incidental expenses.
“I shall ask him regardless,” she resolved when she had recovered her voice.
The scarred corner of Blackstone’s mouth quirked. “Very well.”
He could of course hinder her from accessing the money, but she had been interested in his reaction. It was satisfactory enough, she supposed. She rose, so he rose, too.
“I should like to shake hands on the conditions,” she said, expecting him to finally lose his patience, but he didn’t—he offered his hand. A trap—his palm engulfed hers, and the warm confidence of his grip made her weak in the knees. She glanced up at him shyly. “Is there nothing you should like to know about me?”
He retained his businesslike expression. “I know all I need to know,” he said.
He didn’t care to know about her, then. Meanwhile, she had asked all the questions and still felt she knew nothing.
On impulse, she leaned in. “Tell me something no one else knows about you.”
The cold depths of his eyes went very still. “I already have,” he then said.
“You have?”
He nodded. “My name.”
“Lucian?”
“Yes.”
Disturbing. Her gaze dropped to the floor, defeated at last. Then Blackstone shocked her again by raising his hand to her face and tipping up her chin with his thumb. A nervous sensation fluttered in her belly when their gazes locked. He looked as though he meant to say something, but instead, he was watching her closely while he brushed the backs of his knuckles over the curve of her jaw, then over the softness of her throat beneath. It was a liberty a lover or a husband would take, the kind of caress that left confusing heat in its wake, and her breathing quickened. He had to feel her treacherously galloping pulse against his fingers.
He dropped his hand. “Harriet,” he murmured. “I think we’ll suit just fine.”
She hadn’t a fraction of his optimism, and when the doors opened and her mother and Flossie marched back in, she couldn’t help but think that this was how Persephone would be dragged into the underworld in 1880s London: not screaming, not twisting wildly, but painfully composed while Hades wore a velvet jacket.
Chapter 9
A line by Trollope crossed Lucian’s mind while he walked away from Greenfield’s fine town house: “There seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable.” Since the early seventies, a growing number of common men had been accruing wealth beyond measure with well-placed investments and a lucky hand at trading. It provoked envy and suspicion from the peerage and the working classes alike since the brutal financial crisis of ’57 was still on people’s minds, and enough crooks continued to build investment schemes that left them either rich or, more likely, ruined alongside the countless poor sods whose savings they had lost. The few who successfully secured their fortunes planted their flags in the hearts of old-money strongholds: Belgravia, St. James’s, the Cots-wolds. Such injuries to the rigid British social hierarchy inspired authors to churn out novels featuring newly monied men as The Villain. Wealth, it seemed, was morally above reproach only when it was made on the backs of other people tilling one’s long-inherited lands. Being a reprehensible self-made man himself, Lucian knew there was some truth to the moralizing—when he strode through any of his splendid houses, where Bohemian crystal sparkled alongside gilded fittings and polished ebony wood, he felt no shame. Whenever he stretched out on a clean, soft mattress after a good meal, he regretted none of the things he had done to become filthy rich. But contrary to Trollope’s concerns, Lucian had never reframed his misdeeds. He remembered all the violence and theft, blackmail and fraud, he had committed during the early years and knew it exactly for what it was. He simply couldn’t find it in him to care, not when so many pigs stood there lazily feasting at the trough thanks to a simple accident of birth.
He had never, however, stolen a woman. That was wholly of the old world. His ancestors might have secured a bride that way when the clans had still gleefully raided one another’s cattle herds. Of course, they would have taken their equals for a spouse. He had snared himself a Sassenach princess. He should be reveling in cold satisfaction, he realized as he passed the weathered redbrick fa?ade of old St. James’s Palace, but he wasn’t. At the back of his mind buzzed the fact that he was soon to be a married man. He would have a wife to provide for. Judging by her wan face and requirements list—pretty hands! hot chocolate!—his intended felt rotten about the prospect of becoming that wife. Shouldn’t have played with fire, then, if she didn’t want to get burned.