The flare in his eyes revealed she’d touched a nerve, though he contained his anger as he walked slowly towards her. Hope wasn’t frightened. She could hear the music and the hubbub of voices quite clearly on the other side of the door.
She stood her ground defiantly as he loomed over her. “Look at you, Hope,” he sneered as he put his hand on her shoulders. She stiffened as he moved them lower, contouring her breasts, waist, and thighs in her clinging, ruched gown, so thoroughly upholstered yet so revealing. His nostrils flared. “Do you think you’d have been so expensively garbed if you’d remained at the vicarage? Your father was ever a disappointment to your mama. She complained endlessly to my own dear mater that she’d married a man of reasonable fortune who’d managed to see it all slip through his fingers.”
Hope breathed through her clenched teeth as she stared up at Wilfred. “My Mama’s love of adornment was a large reason for Papa’s pecuniary difficulties. Papa could refuse her nothing. Yes, her complaints were as endless as her demands for fripperies. Until finally, there was nothing left with which to appease her. My father inherited a fortune and a harpy for a wife, and he was no financier, but he did not kidnap and keep captive unwilling females.”
“Kidnap? Lord, Hope.” His mouth quirked. “You stayed with me for more than a year, but you were not a prisoner. It’s not as if I kept the door locked and you bolted within. You could have left at any time.”
Hope shook her head. She’d been so proud of keeping her emotions in check, but revisiting the time when her life had changed so irrevocably was proving too much. “Where was there for me to go, Wilfred?” Her voice broke. She took a deep breath and regained her composure. She’d had much training at regaining her composure when her dignity and peace of mind were threatened. “After Papa died, when Mama wouldn’t take me back, how could I even get respectable employment when I had no character? And now, having destroyed every hope I ever had for happiness, you want to rub my nose in the dirt. Somehow, you think it’ll make you feel more of a man to have me agree to the grubby arrangement you just put to me—you and Felix. Yet all that business before regarding the promissory note and my character blackened in Felix’s eyes was so your dear sister’s happiness would not be imperilled? You’re a liar, Wilfred. You will never let me near Felix. I’m too dangerous. I might take something away from your sister, and I might take something away from you. So, you want to crush me.”
Unexpectedly, Wilfred gripped her shoulders, bringing her face close to his. His eyes were black with anger. “By God, Hope, but for someone drilled in the noble art of the courtesan, you do not know how to please a man when it is in your interests.”
Hope shrugged herself out of his grip and took up her argument from further along the mantelpiece. “If you wanted my love and respect, you’d have had to have had a modicum of honour, Wilfred. You destroyed every claim to honour when you bundled me into your carriage, took me to your lodgings, and…raped me when I was unconscious. There’s no coming back from that for me.” She trembled with emotion. “Or for you.”
“And is that the story you put about? Do you cast aspersions upon my honour behind my back? Why would people believe a prostitute who’s parted on acrimonious terms with her former lover?”
“You were never my lover, Wilfred. I despised you from when you were a whining child. Felix was the boy I loved, and he turned into the man I loved. But your jealousy got in the way of that. You were determined that if I wouldn’t love you, then I would never have the man I really loved. Isn’t that true?”
Advancing a few steps, he shook her roughly, and her jewelled comb fell out of her hair and skittered across the marble hearth.
“Ever the bully, Wilfred!” Hope whispered as she bent to retrieve it, not prepared for the stinging blow he dealt her on the side of her head. Her knees gave way and she sank to the floor, staring up at him with more fury than fear as she touched her throbbing temple. “And so you hit me where no one can see the evidence of your violence. How manly of you.”
“Bitch!” He hissed, his hands flexing but Hope was ready, wresting herself out of his attempted embrace and landing awkwardly, though her voluminously swathed skirts broke her fall.
“Don’t you touch me again!” she spat. “Ever!”
“Don’t you tell me what I can and can’t do when your wares are available to any man who has the right currency!” Grabbing a hank of her hair, Wilfred pulled her to her feet and dragged her through the withdrawing room towards a door at the far end.
Before Hope could scream, he’d clapped one large, sweating hand over her mouth. “You’re about to realise there comes a point where even the most long-suffering man must defend his honour,” he muttered as he manhandled her out of the room and along a passageway.
He was too strong for her. Hope’s attempts to kick and bite her way to freedom were to no avail, and her first instinct after he thrust her through a door at the end of the passage was to take the deep, sustaining breath she so desperately needed.
Though there was a bed by the window, Wilfred pushed her down on the cold stone hearth, straddling her as he clamped his other hand over her mouth. “You’re about to see how good you had it when you were first under my care.” He sounded both aggrieved and threatening as he pushed his face into hers. “If you’d only known how to treat a man as he deserves, I wouldn’t have to show you who’s the superior being. You always thought it was you, didn’t you, Hope, with your scorn and your ingratitude.”
“The superior being?” Hope sneered on a lungful of air when he removed his hand in response to a sharp nip of her teeth.
“Always the bully, Wilfred.”
“It’s a clever man who knows how to get what he wants, even if that means using his superior strength, Hope,” he grunted, forcing her back to the ground when she struggled to rise, running his hands over her and groping her breasts before clamping her mouth again when she tried to scream.
Hope fought with everything she had, but he was too strong, hiking up her skirts while she lashed out at him, clawing at his face, whimpering for mercy, and then in rage though it was hard to breathe. She thought she’d pass out, and perhaps that was a preferable way to suffer the indignity he intended to inflict upon her.
But when his fingers parted momentarily and a sustaining draught of air filled her lungs, her seeking hands came upon something long, and hard on the ground behind her. Too starved of air to realise what it was, another gulp of oxygen made it clear it might be her only chance to gain the upper hand.
Drawing back her right arm, she brought the fire iron through the air with all of her might, landing a slicing blow against the side of Wilfred’s head.
He released his grasp, yelping with pain, his fury prodded to a fine point before, almost instantly he was looming over her, his mouth a rictus of rage, eyes bloodshot with fury. His hand shot out to seize the poker from her but Hope was too quick. Rolling onto her side, she aimed the point for the region of his eyes, closed her own, and with all of the strength she had left, lunged forwards and upwards.
A moment of silence followed. The world swirled behind her closed eyes in terrible shades of black and red.
Then, upon a terrible cry of agony, Wilfred’s heavy body came down on top of her.
Chapter 14
“I don’t care if she’s preparing to see the Prince of Wales, I just need to know where she is!” Still panting from the exertion of his strenuous walk due to a hackney carriage accident which had made the roads impassable, Felix stood on the front doorstep of Madame Chambon’s Nunnery and stared down the broad-shouldered custodian who’d been brought in as a reinforcement by the young maidservant after she’d failed to send Felix on his way.
“Where Miss ‘Ope ‘appens to be right now is of nobody’s bizness ‘cept her own an’ the gennulman wot’s payin’ fer her.” The beefy fellow wore no jacket, and his muscles bulged beneath his shirt sleeves. He flexed his meaty fists as if he was ready to do business.
Frustrated, Felix raked his hand through his hair, replaced his top hat and turned on his heel. There’d be no satisfaction this night, it seemed.