Rules for a Rogue Page 10

“Are you all right, Miss Marsden? Suddenly you’re a bit flushed.”

  “I am well, and I’ll see you next week.” Without letting herself think, Phee did what she hadn’t allowed herself to do in many years. She gave into impulse and darted toward the stairwell.

  The housemaid who’d admitted her called out in the downstairs hallway. “Can I help, miss?”

  “Mr. Ruthven?”

  “He’s set himself up on the rear terrace. Shall I take you?”

  “Just point the way, if you would.”

  The young lady indicated an area toward the back of the house. Phee walked quickly to keep from losing her nerve. Sunlight blinded her as she approached a set of glass-fronted French doors. She pushed through and found Kit lounging at a large wrought-iron table, piles of books and crumpled papers strewn around him. He’d perched his boot heels on the tabletop as he read from a piece of paper, leaning back in a chair that tipped precariously under his bulk.

  When he noticed Phee approaching, he lowered the chair and swung his legs down. Bracing his feet on the ground, he rose to face her.

  Phee kept striding toward him. One kiss and I’ll be done with it. One kiss and I’ll get the man out of my head.

  “Ophe—”

  Before he could finish speaking, she stepped toe to toe with him, reached up to place a hand on each side of his face, and pulled his mouth to hers for a kiss. A shallow, awkward joining of lips at first. But then more. She noticed the warmth of his mouth, the shallow wisp of his breath, how his body tensed at her touch. He let her kiss him rather than returning the gesture.

  She went up on her toes for one more brush against his mouth, and it was over. Phee opened her eyes and took a backward step. Triumph zinged through her. She’d done it! And perhaps, after catching her breath, she would find the spell broken.

  Then, as quick as the thrashing beat of her pulse, her world spun off kilter.

  Kit flattened his hand against her belly. The length of his heated palm spanned the width of her waist. Gripping a handful of her blouse, he tugged her near. Not toe to toe but chest to chest. Thigh to thigh.

  How had she forgotten this? How firm he was against every soft part of her. That the muscled, unyielding plane of his chest made her want to lean, to stop holding herself quite so upright. To press her cheek against his body and hear the reassuring rhythm of his impulsive heart. His arms were broad, as muscled as his shoulders, as if they’d been made to shelter her, strong enough to shield her.

  Sunlight brightened his eyes to verdigris, far more green than brown. Dark stubble accentuated the perfect peaks of his upper lip, and his lower lip trembled a moment before he lowered his head and ran his tongue along the seam of her lips.

  A moan escaped. Not hers, but his. And then those long, thick fingers she’d imagined moments before were on her, skimming tenderly along the edge of her jaw, sinking into the hair at her nape. He stroked behind her ear with his thumb, and she closed her eyes against the spasm of pleasure that ricocheted from her neck down into her belly, and lower, where he’d touched her once before. Only once. A bliss-soaked memory, that night. She would have given him all, but he’d held back.

  Perhaps even then he’d known he was going to leave her.

  “Do you want me to kiss you?” He was tormenting her with his lips against her cheek, nuzzling her skin, offering hot damp brushes of his mouth at the edge of hers.

  Her knees began trembling when he nipped her lower lip.

  “Do you need this as I do?” He traced his fingertip along her lips, and she opened her mouth to taste his skin. “Tell me.”

  A frantic nod was all she could manage before he touched his lips to hers. Phee gasped when his tongue filled her mouth, and then she melted against him. Sinking her fingers into the thick wave of hair curling against his collar, she sifted the silky strands before wrapping her palm around his neck to pull him down, to get him closer.

  In a desperate, heated dance, they pushed and pulled at each other. Quick consuming kisses followed slow, drugging exploration that left them both breathless.

  “I’ve missed you.” There was a ragged catch in his voice, tenderness in his eyes.

  His words chilled her to the bone. Even as he held her wrapped in his arms, all the pleasure of his nearness seeped away.

  Missing Kit had been her preoccupation for years. The ache of his absence had brought her so low; some days it had been difficult to rise from her bed. But there had been Father to care for, and Juliet. She wasn’t that empty echo of herself anymore. Never again would she plunge into those doldrums.

  “I can’t do this.” She tipped her chin up and pushed away from Kit.

  He let her slip from his arms but clasped her wrist. “Can you truly deny what’s between us?”

  “Yes.” When she retreated a step, he released her wrist. “I’ve had years of practice.”

  Kit flinched, then hunched his shoulders and planted his feet wide as if he was bolted to the spot where she’d left him.

  Lifting the front edge of her skirt an inch so that she could stride away from him with as much confidence as she’d approached, Phee forced herself to move. The first step pinched at her heart, the second a little less so. By the time she passed through the French doors, she could breathe again.

  She drew in huge gulps of air to fill her lungs. She cupped a hand over her lips, still swollen from his kisses.

  Kissing Kit was meant to give her control, to allow her to close a door on the past. Instead, she was shaking, perspiring under her gown, struggling to hear beyond the blood thrashing in her ears.

  What if instead of barricading her heart, she’d opened the floodgates?

  Two facts were clear: Giving in to impulse was a disastrous mistake, and if she was ever going to be the poised, practical woman she aspired to be, she could never kiss Kit Ruthven again.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Men may labor in the city, but a true English gentleman lives for the countryside.”

  —THE RUTHVEN RULES FOR YOUNG MEN

  London smelled divine. Smoke and soot and the muck of a thousand horses couldn’t dim Kit’s pleasure at breathing city air again. He relished the bustle of bodies rushing past him as he made his way toward Ruthven Publishing’s offices on Somerset Row. London’s ever-churning hum had always been part of its appeal, yet now something was amiss.

  The city usually offered freedom, license to behave as he wished, to devote himself to his work in the theater and join Grey in exploring London’s diversions. Now, beyond the matter of his father’s business, he couldn’t shake the nagging sense he’d forgotten something back in Briar Heath.

  He swallowed hard at the memory of Ophelia’s kiss.

  Finding a way to stoke that passion in her again dominated his thoughts, even as he stopped on the pavement outside his father’s London office.

  He’d only visited Ruthven Publishing once as a child, when his youthful disinterest in the business and enthusiasm for seeing other sites in London had enraged his father. The old man’s shouts had sent employees scattering, and he’d never brought Kit to the capital again. Based on that single visit, Kit expected to find his father’s style of controlled chaos at the company’s headquarters. What he found instead was perfect order, clerks bent over their work, and a broad-shouldered, officious young man approaching the minute he crossed the threshold.

  “Good morning. How may I assist you, sir?” The businessman’s suit was better tailored than anything Kit owned, and his dark hair fell in an impressive glossy wave over his forehead. Everything about the young man had been polished to a high sheen.

  “Would you direct me to the managing editor or office manager?” Kit glanced around the room full of men clacking away at typewriters and hunched over desks to see if any perked up at his request.

  “He’s one and the same person,” the carefully groomed gentleman informed him. “You don’t have an appointment, I take it.” This was a great affront, judging by the narrowing of the office cle
rk’s steely gaze.

  “I don’t need one.” Kit made calls as impulse dictated or a situation demanded. Planning ahead had never been his way. “I own all of this now.”

  “Mr. Ruthven?” The confident glint in the editor-manager’s pale blue eyes dimmed as his broad shoulders sagged. “Please accept my sincere condolences, sir.” He stuck out a beefy hand. “I am Gabriel Adamson. I manage the London office and oversee the one in Edinburgh.”

  Kit’s eyebrows shot up before he could school his expression. Adamson didn’t look old enough to manage his own shaving razor. “You manage editorial and financial matters yourself?”

  “I do, Mr. Ruthven.” Adamson bristled and squared his shoulders. “And I understand you are an actor.”

  “A playwright.” Kit grinned. Adamson was definitely his father’s apprentice if he thought calling someone an actor was akin to damning them as the worst sort of sinner. “Spare me a few minutes of your time, Mr. Adamson. I need details about the company’s finances and suspect you’re the man with answers.”

  “This way, Mr. Ruthven.” Adamson hesitated just long enough to let Kit know he didn’t take kindly to impromptu meetings. Then he started off at an impressively precise stride for a man of his bulk, leading Kit into a sterile room.

  “Was this my father’s office?” The familiar scent of books and leather permeated the space.

  “No.” Adamson frowned. “He conducted business from home and rarely visited the city in the last few months.”

  The man knew more about his father than he did, and it unnerved Kit more than he expected it to.

  “We hadn’t spoken in many years,” Kit offered by way of explanation, though he didn’t owe Adamson one. He managed to stop short of attempting to justify why he’d avoided his father for years.

  After taking a seat in front of Adamson’s desk, Kit leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I know very little about the business’s finances, but I must if I am going to find a buyer.”

  “A buyer?” Adamson’s clean-shaven jaw tightened, his voice turned sharp and clipped. “You mean to sell Ruthven Publishing?”

  “As soon as I am able. Mr. Croft, my father’s paper-manufacturer crony, may be interested. Do you know anyone who’d wish to buy?” Ten minutes in the tidy, efficiently run publishing office and Kit was ready to bolt. He spared a fond thought for the cramped confines of his London flat and the cluttered little desk in the corner where he’d written most of his plays.

  “No prospects spring readily to mind.” Adamson considered him a moment, fingers steepled under his chin, and then reached for a ledger on the shelf behind his desk. He slid the large account book toward Kit. “The current balance sheet marks the pages for this month’s transactions.”

  Scanning the columns of numbers, Kit realized this was when a methodical nature like Adamson’s came in handy. Though he’d never had occasion to study a financial ledger, he suspected few were as clear and systematized as the one in his hands. He flipped pages to glance back at the balances for the previous months and furrowed his brow.

  “We’re losing money.” He flicked back to the totals from the previous year. “Quite a lot of it.” Suddenly the exceeding confidence of the young man and the busyness of the office seemed pointless.

  “The causes are manifold, Mr. Ruthven, but we shall persevere. As your father would have wished.” The man sounded like a true believer, as convinced of his father’s brilliance as was Vicar Bickham.

  “Tell me those causes. All of them, and what we can do to reverse the situation. Specifically.” The headache he’d been suffering for days began a pounding march along the back of his head. He needed to remind Adamson about paying the Crofts too.

  “Costs rise each year. New publishing ventures spring up monthly, and our list of competitors grows. But it’s sales, sir. Diminishing sales are at the heart of our losses.”

  Kit stared at the shelves behind the man’s perfectly trimmed black hair and spied the entire series of The Ruthven Rules. Every edition, every version, from the original tome to all the variations for young ladies, gentlemen, etc. His father had been determined to leech every penny out of the success of his damned etiquette books.

  “So no one’s buying them anymore? I thought even our monarch kept a copy.”

  “I take it you don’t read the newspapers, Mr. Ruthven.” Adamson attempted something approximating a grin, but there was nothing like pleasure in the slash across his face. Turning to a tidy pile in a wire basket on his desk, he lifted a newspaper off the top and laid it on his desktop in front of Kit.

  “The Etiquette Wars.” Kit read a circled front page headline aloud and skimmed the rest of the piece. The Ruthven Rules had serious competition, it seemed, and currently from Miss Gilroy’s Guidelines for Young Ladies. After reading a bit of the book, Kit understood why. Miss Gilroy’s ideas were fresh, and his father’s were stale.

  “So everyone is writing etiquette books, and Ruthven’s are too dry and outdated to compete.” He could never understand the books’ popularity. Why seek rules to dictate one’s actions? Kit had spent his life wishing to make his own choices.

  “We’ve updated all the volumes in recent years, but competitors continue to ride our coattails. Some even parody The Ruthven Rules. Novelty is appealing for a while, but I trust our etiquette books will stand the test of time.”

  “I see now why my father hired you. You sound just like him.”

  Adamson cast him an icy glare. “Books should carry meaning beyond the stringing together of pretty words. They should teach us lessons. Show us how we might aspire to a fate greater than the circumstances of our birth allow.”

  He suspected Adamson’s loyalty to his father had less to do with etiquette than with being given a chance to succeed at a young age. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Kit.

  “We’re losing money, Mr. Adamson. That is the relevant fact.”

  “Your father was a fine writer, but a—”

  “Terrible manager?”

  “Mr. Ruthven wished to reverse our failing fortunes.” Adamson sat up taller in his chair and folded his hands in front of him. “But some of his choices were—”

  “Ridiculous?”

  “Speculative.” The managing editor leaned forward and braced clenched fists on his desk. “You didn’t respect your father, Mr. Ruthven?”

  “We didn’t know each other very well.” Or perhaps we knew each other too well.

  “May I resettle you in a spare office where you can peruse the ledgers?” Adamson slid a pocket watch from his vest, glancing down at its face. “We’re considering a suit against Wellbeck Publishers. Their author satirized The Rules for Young Ladies, and it’s creating quite a stir. I’m meeting with an editor from Wellbeck’s at the top of the hour.”

  The upstart meant to dismiss him, but Kit was having none of it. “I’ll join your meeting.”

  “There’s no need, Mr. Ruthven.”

  “I insist.” A suit against another publishing house sounded like a drain of funds Ruthven Publishing couldn’t afford, and Adamson seemed the zealous sort who’d turn a molehill into a crusade.

  “Very well.” The young managing editor sighed and stood, pausing to straighten his perfectly arranged jacket. “Do you care for coffee?”

  “Deeply, and as dark as possible.”

  Ophelia peeked at her editor as they walked, attempting to decide which of them was most nervous about the meeting. He was. Definitely. The giddy thrill of being in the city again kept her spirits buoyed, but Mr. Talbot appeared peaked and supremely miserable as they made their way toward the Ruthven Publishing offices.

  For such an excitable man, he moved at a plodding pace, and Phee found it difficult to slow her gait to match. She wanted this meeting over as quickly as possible. With any luck, she’d have time for a wander through Hyde Park before catching her train back home. She’d canceled all of her lessons and appointments for the day. Even the folded task list in her pocket was blessedly s
hort. Perhaps she’d take a later train and spend time at the British Museum.

  She wasn’t avoiding her return. Not precisely. But what harm was there in delaying her departure for a couple of hours? A tall, dark, impossibly broad-shouldered man was back in Briar Heath, no doubt waiting for her to explain why she’d kissed him.

  She refused to dwell on the warmth of Kit’s breath against her face, the familiar taste of him, and the sound of pleasure he made when she pressed her mouth to his. Nor to consider how he’d cradled her cheek the way he used to . . . No. Not thinking about the kiss.

  Relishing this visit to the city was her main objective, just as soon as she got the meeting at Ruthven’s out of the way.

  “I prepared notes as you requested, Mr. Talbot, addressing every issue Ruthven’s raised regarding similarities between my book and theirs.”

  Her editor glanced at her, a tremulous smile twitching under his mustache. “I’m sure you did, Miss Marsden. I have every confidence in your diligence and honesty.” The way his Adam’s apple bobbled as he swallowed convulsively blunted his reassuring words.

  “But you’re still concerned?”

  “Not about the meeting.” He swallowed again, then reached up to tug at his collar. “There is another bit of news I must convey, and I am searching for the best way to go about it.”

  “It’s always better to express that which causes you pain to withhold.” Phee turned her head and smiled, but Mr. Talbot didn’t recognize the line from her book. In fact, he seemed so lost in thought he strode straight past the Ruthven office door.

  “Mr. Talbot?” Phee pointed to the sign above her head. “This is it.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” The tall man ambled back toward her, his brow crinkled, eyes glossy. He took a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry, Miss Marsden, but Mr. Wellbeck has decided to release you from our contract. You may keep the sum already paid to you and any earnings due, of course, but Wellbeck’s will no longer publish Miss Gilroy’s Guidelines.”

  Phee’s stomach dropped as all the air whooshed from her chest. She stared at the pavement, struggling to make sense of Talbot’s rushed confession.