Wicked Becomes You(80)

A half hour’s journey lay before them on smooth, new roads. They might well arrive at the casino before Barrington’s men discovered their master. Then the task would be to discover a clever place to hide until morning, when the trains would start running again.

He hadn’t a cent on him and he doubted Gwen did, either. Their letters of credit, made out in their true names, were hidden in their room. And one did not carry coins at a house party without raising eyebrows.

Fleeing in the night like hares from hounds. Her face would be bruising, soon. The only place I’d have a use for you is in bed. He was a fool.

Gwen gave a very convincing giggle—a reply to some joke that Alex had missed. Don’t laugh, he wanted to tell her. She had thrown her right leg atop his left knee upon boarding. She played her role beautifully, and he did not want her next to him. He wanted her as far away from him as possible. The opposite side of the earth. Be safe. Why the hell had she come with him? She had not one lick of sense in her head.

Into Alex’s right side pressed the soft gut of a Spanish gentleman—de Cruz was his name. Shifting on the bench, Alex felt a telltale bulge in the inside pocket of the man’s jacket. “Look there,” he said, putting his finger to the window by de Cruz’s face. “Glorious moon.”

De Cruz looked, surrendering a twenty-franc coin for the privilege.

“It is so amusing,” Signora Rizzardi was opining, “to see the truth of the casino, as compared to those dreadful little notices that the churchmen post at Nice.” She had an elegant bone structure that lent her hazel eyes a faint slant; she put this slant to work in the teasing look she cast Alex. He kissed his fingertips in reply. Mechanical gesture. She fluttered her lashes. “Have you ever read those notices, Mr. de Grey? No? Oh, they are awful; I cannot bear to describe them!”

“Please do,” Gwen said. Her tone was bright; nobody else would notice the rigidly erect posture of her spine, the tension in her shoulders. She had worn a backboard for six years. Whenever she felt uncertain, small or threatened or afraid, her posture was impossibly, painfully perfect. These things he knew about her—things which Gwen did not even suspect he knew—were innumerable. For a man that had understood her so little, Richard had loved her fiercely and talked of her often. And Alex had encouraged him—subtly, continuously. Over the years, what hadn’t he wanted to know?

“No, no, Miss Goodrick! And I recommend you do not look for them. Oh . . . very well. They are lists of recent suicides, men supposedly broken at Monte Carlo’s tables, but you mustn’t believe half of the names. These priests make up the tales to scare people.”

“They do?” Gwen pressed her fingertips to her lips with the appropriate show of shock. She is learning not to gape: so Richard had said. Such are the lessons a lady must learn in lieu of Latin. Her governess warns her she will swallow flies by accident.

Why had he collected these pieces of information? For years, he had collected them; he had tried again and again to force the fragments safely into a picture, the pastel debutante, the standard drawing-room watercolor. But he had never managed to fit them together. And so he had carried them as so many souvenirs—as warnings, as reminders, of how easy it would be, if he did not take care, to fall into the comfortable, easy catatonia inhabited by unimaginative men. And then at some point the souvenirs had shifted in his hands and come to show him the life he might have had, had he been the sort of man she required. But he’d not been able to be that man; he had not wanted to become that sort of man; and this was the certainty that had pulled him back aboard ship—the mantra to which he had listened, as he had watched Southampton retreat, again, for another six months, another season, another year.

“Perhaps they are lies,” the Spaniard said to Francesca Rizzardi. “But I think there must be some truth to these lists, as well.”

“Indeed? But no,” the signora said. “How would such indigents gain entrance to Monte Carlo without the card of admission?”

Gwen sat next to him right now, a warm, breathing presence, her bravery unflagging, as obvious and evident as the smile she wore. And it was a strange and almost unconquerable need in him, like the need to draw air into his lungs, to pull her closer. To hold her still. But he was always the one to leave, because there seemed to be no other choice. To stay would be to lose himself.

His mind turned again to the coast, the receding shoreline. Had she been harmed tonight, no distance ever would have taken him far enough away to find himself again.

“Perhaps they are not indigents to start,” said de Cruz. “Play-fever is real, you know. I have seen it. It can empty the deepest of pockets.”