made no sense to Grace, but they were pulling her out the door and into the abbey courtyard, where dozens were now emerging from the abbey. Several heads swiveled in Grace’s direction—it wasn’t often that one saw two women dragging a third between them—and voices began to rise around them.
“Hurry along, Agnes!” one of the sisters hissed, and Grace was stumbling between them to keep up.
She would never recall how, exactly, she was returned to Cousin Beatrice’s house on Royal Crescent. She could only vaguely recall being there at all when the gentlemen came to speak with her, to ascertain what had happened in that dark tea shop. Grace tried desperately to explain to them that it was her doing, but when pressed to give a reason as to why she would do something so heinous, she could not tell them the truth.
The gentlemen assumed that as she could not adequately explain her reasoning for doing something so horrific because she was lying. She was lying, they carefully explained to her, because she feared Merryton.
Grace did fear Merryton. She’d never heard a kind word said about him. He was known to be aloof and distant and disdainful.
But he did not deserve what she’d done to him.
ONE TWO THREE four five six seven eight.
There were precisely eight steps from the breakfast room to the study, and eight panels of wallpapering in the room. Jeffrey knew this because he counted them every day on those occasions he resided at his townhome in Bath, sometimes several times a day. And yet he couldn’t be entirely certain of the number of steps in the early-morning hours after his spectacular downfall. He kept walking back and forth between the breakfast room and study, counting the steps.
He had to do it; he had to count until he was completely certain, for it was the only thing that could annihilate the image of him thrusting his body into that young woman’s sex.
The vision—unwanted, uninvited, mistakenly placed in his brain—was new to him. Generally, the vulgar and salacious thoughts that tended to plague him every day were of two women pleasuring each other with their tongues and fingers. He couldn’t say why that was, only that he had begun to experience that particular image around his seventeenth year. He’d begun to act on it in his twenty-first year, carefully seeking out the sort of bedmates who were willing to perform for him and with him. But in society, Jeffrey had learned to keep the dark images deep in the corners of his mind, hidden away. Always proper, always a model of propriety, just as his father had taught him to be. When Jeffrey made a concerted effort to banish the images, he was generally successful. They seemed only to emerge when he was very tired or felt the pressure of his title.
His title, the Earl of Merryton, as well as two lesser titles, was the heavy mantle he wore. He was the head of a large family with impressive holdings. He was Jeffrey Donovan, the man everyone assumed to be above scandal and immoral behavior, just like his father before him.
But the truth was that Jeffrey was not above it all. He’d merely found a way to restrain himself.
Until last night.
And now, a new, monstrous image was residing quite firmly in his thoughts and he could not subdue it. Bloody hell, he didn’t even know her name! Cabot, Mrs. Franklin had said. Jeffrey knew no Cabots. He knew nothing about her, except that she had tasted like honey, had felt like silk.
One two three four five six seven eight.
Eight. Eight. Eight.
This thing, this demonic obsession with eight, had invaded Jeffrey so many years ago that he could no longer remember how. But in his sixteenth year, when his father had died and he’d become the earl, responsible for carrying on the family’s name and its impeccable credentials, responsible for being the one above all reproach, the eight had begun to loom in his heart and mind. Like the salacious images, Jeffrey was at a loss to understood how or why it had happened. He thought himself mad, really, particularly as the eight was imperative to him but also torture at the same time.
The necessity for eight in his everyday life had manifested itself when Jeffrey had lain with a woman the first time. How old was he then, eighteen? He’d been seduced—willingly—by an older woman. She had shown him what his body wanted with her hands and her mouth, things he hadn’t realized, had not imagined. Those things seemed incongruent with the lord he was supposed to be, and he had not been able to douse his shame except by counting.
But then, the images, vile and lustful, had come at him, worse than he’d ever imagined. And the eight demon had grabbed him by the throat, choking the life out of him, forcing him to walk on the sharp edge of a blade—think bad thoughts, banish them only with eight. Now, at thirty years of age, Jeffrey knew that to fall off his private blade was to fall into the chaos of his thoughts, to obsess about women’s bodies and sexual plunder and the number eight.
He had learned to control it, to keep it quite under wraps. He rarely made mistakes.
Rarely.
And yet, he’d made a colossal one last night.
He had his brother to blame, damn him. John Donovan, the Viscount Amherst, was the bane of Jeffrey’s existence. It seemed John strove to make every mistake he could. He’d been unapologetically involved in one scandal after another. From the time he’d reached his majority, he’d racked up gambling debts that he could not repay, leaving Jeffrey to deal with them from the family’s coffers. He would not settle on a woman and make an offer, and instead preferred to dally with every debutante who happened to drift in his path, creating scandal in London and among some of the finest families in the Quality.
John was the reason Jeffrey was presently in Bath. He’d heard John was here, and he’d come to speak to him. Because he’d also heard things from his sister, Sylvia. Sylvia was at her home near the border of Scotland with two small children. Jeffrey hadn’t seen her in some time as her children were too young to travel, but she kept in touch through correspondence. In her last letter, she’d reported hearing that John had run up some gambling debts and owed more than one gentleman in London, including a prominent viscount.
The news had angered Jeffrey. More than once, he’d begged John to consider an occupation, anything to keep him from trouble and ruin. He would very much like to see John accept a naval commission. He was more than happy to arrange it for his brother. He just had to make John see the benefit in it, to get his brother to agree that he ought to leave England and all her vices until he could put his life to rights. To settle on a woman who would give him heirs and for God’s sake, beget those heirs.
And then, last evening, when Jeffrey had given into the insistence of his friend, Dr. Linford, to accompany him and his wife to hear the Russian soprano, he had seen the young woman with the golden hair leave the concert at the abbey. He’d watched as John had followed only moments later, and his blood had heated with his rage. There was his brother, following after a woman for the whole world to see and titter about.
Jeffrey had walked out into the abbey courtyard and looked around for his brother. He was nowhere to be seen, and Jeffrey had turned to go back into the abbey when he noticed a movement, a slip of color, against the darkened window of the tearoom.
That was when he noticed the door was slightly ajar.
Jeffrey had counted eighty steps to the door. The tea shop was dark, and he could hear no sounds within. But in looking
