Jennifer Ashley - The Untamed Mackenzie

He was unnervingly close. Louisa smelled the outdoors on him, the fresh April wind mixed with the scent of coal smoke that clung to the wool of his coat. His words terrified her, because she knew he was right. She knew how it looked—she alone with the bishop, she serving him tea, he dropping dead at her feet. Louisa was a young woman from a scandalous family, and who knew what she might do?

His deep voice rumbled around her, stern and harsh, but Louisa wanted to cling to it, to let the sound comfort her. While he meant to frighten her, he was asking her to trust him with the truth, and with her life. He was right that she had no one else to help her.

She clenched her hands and said the words in a rush. “The Bishop of Hargate told me he would release my family from any obligation to repay him if I married him. Repay him what he’d lost because of my father, I mean. He’d relieve us of that debt and the shame of it, but only if I consented to be his wife.”

Fellows’ eyes became even more focused, frighteningly so. “He told you this in no uncertain terms?”

Louisa nodded. “Oh, he made it very clear.”

Fellows went silent for a few moments. Clouds slid across the sun, thick enough to erase the happy spring sunshine and plunge the sitting room into gloom.

When Fellows spoke again, his voice was quiet. “You know you have just outlined a perfect motive for killing him.”

“Yes, I do realize that.” Louisa swallowed on dryness. “It is one reason I was trying very hard not to tell you.”

“One reason? What is another?”

“The other reason is because it is so very embarrassing.”

Fellows studied her, his eyes still. His left cheekbone bore a deep cut, the blood dried. Black bruises surrounded the cut, the bruises moving up to his temple. The right side of his mouth had taken another cut, and scrapes decorated his cheek. Again, Louisa wanted to reach up and touch his face, to ask if he was all right. She curled her fingers into her palms.

“Did anyone else know the terms of this proposal?” Fellows asked abruptly.

“I have no idea. Mrs. Leigh-Waters knew, or guessed, the bishop would propose to me, but whether she had any hint he would try to blackmail me into accepting, I do not know.”

“Even if she didn’t know, the story will come out sooner or later,” Fellows went on in his matter-of-fact voice. No false comfort for Louisa, just unvarnished truth. “Hargate might have confided in his valet that he planned to coerce you into marrying him, or his solicitor. Or he might have boasted of it loudly at his club or a meeting of his vestry, who knows?”

“Well, I didn’t know until he sprang it on me in the tea tent,” Louisa said. “That’s a point in my favor, is it not? If I’d decided to poison him, I would have had to prepare beforehand. But I had no reason to prepare, because I had no idea what he meant to ask me. Surely that proves my innocence. I would have had to bring the poison with me to the garden party, and I assure you, Inspector, I have no vials of poison about my person.”

“Proves nothing. You might have known about Hargate’s proposal in advance. Servants gossip. Solicitors and vestrymen gossip too. You might have seen yourself pushed into accepting him and decided the only way out of marrying a man who demanded your body in exchange for forgiving your father’s debt was killing him. You could have brought the vial in your pocket or a reticule. Afterward you could have dropped the bottle in the tea tent, or surreptitiously tossed it into the garden as you walked through it, or even hidden it in this room while you waited for me. Or you might have it in your pocket now.”

Louisa’s lips parted as she listened, something cold seeping through her body. His words . . . demanded your body in exchange for forgiving your father’s debt . . . were inelegant, even harsh, but again, he was not sparing her. Truth was often ugly.

“Yes, I might have done any of those things. But I did not. It’s ridiculous.”

“Just show me,” Fellows said.

She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“Show me what you have in your pockets, Louisa. Believe me, if you are arrested and searched, you’ll be treated far less gently at a police station than you will here by me. So show me.”

Louisa’s frock had one pocket, in the skirt, its opening hidden by the peplum of her bodice. She jammed her hand inside and pulled out a handkerchief, a pencil on a ribbon, and a tiny notebook.

“There. That is all.”

Fellows came to her swiftly. He gave her a measuring gaze and then pushed aside her hand and slid his own into her pocket.

Louisa’s breath hitched. The corset cut into her again, and spots danced before her eyes.

Fellows didn’t touch her. She felt the warmth of his hand between skirt and petticoat, the strength of his fingers as they moved in the pocket. She looked up at him and found his hazel eyes focused directly on her.

The look in their depths made her dizzy. This man should be nothing to her—a member of the family her sister had married into, that was all. He was not of her world. He’d been born on the wrong side of the blanket, raised in working-class London, and had taken up the common profession of policeman.

But he’d compelled her from the first time she’d laid eyes on him, at a family gathering at Kilmorgan Castle. Louisa had seen how uncomfortable Fellows had been in a home that might have been his, how silent he’d been, how haunted he’d looked. She’d wanted to cheer him up, to show him that the past didn’t have to mean a thing to the present.

She’d learned Fellows had a biting, deprecating sense of humor, often directed at himself, but he was also happy to direct it at those around him. He had the powerful personality of the Mackenzie men, but one turned in a different direction from theirs. While the brothers had been raised with money and power, Fellows had faced the world in all its ugliness. He’d had no protection but himself.

Now Fellows stood very close to her, and Louisa wanted to kiss him again. The first time she’d done so, she’d told herself she felt sorry for him. But she knew it had been more than that.

It was more than that now. The need to kiss him rose like an uncontrolled fire. It sent Louisa up on her tiptoes in her high-heeled boots, making her lean into him, wanting to feel his strength and his warmth.

Fellows’ eyes started to close, his body coming down to meet hers. The hunger she saw, before his lids hid his eyes, sparked an answering hunger deep inside her.

Louisa drifted into him, welcoming his heat. She felt the touch of his breath, which would be followed by his lips . . .

Then wasn’t. Fellows jerked back, eyes opening, a hard light entering them.

He lifted his hand out of her pocket. Between his broad fingers was a small bottle of cut glass with a little stopper, a tiny amount of liquid inside it.

Louisa, still ensnared by the kiss that hadn’t happened, stared at the bottle uncomprehendingly. “What is that?”

“That is what I am asking you.” Fellows’ voice was harsh.

“I don’t know.” Louisa held up her hands. “It isn’t mine.”

“It was in your pocket.” His gaze grew even colder.

“You must have put it there then. I certainly didn’t.”

“Louisa.” Fellows lifted the small bottle in front of her face. “I need you to explain this to me.”

“I didn’t put it there,” Louisa repeated in desperation. “I cannot help it if you don’t believe me. I don’t even know what it is.”

“It’s a perfume bottle,” Fellows said. “But this is not perfume.”

“I can see that it’s a perfume bottle. How do you know it’s not perfume inside it?”

“Wrong consistency.”

Hysterical laughter tried to bubble up again. “And you’re an expert at what ladies carry in their perfume bottles?”

“I am an expert in the many ways people kill other people and try to cover it up.”

Louisa’s eyes widened. “I’ve told you. I didn’t kill him.”

“Someone is going to a lot of trouble to make it look as though you did. Why?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Louisa nearly shouted. “Perhaps someone did not want Hargate to marry me. Perhaps the poison was meant for me, or it was in the teapot, for us both. Only I didn’t drink it.”

Fellows’ eyes flickered, but he went on remorselessly. “Bit of a gamble, wasn’t it, to pour the poison into the correct cup of tea then put the bottle into your pocket? Who did you see when you went into the tea tent?”

“No one. It was empty. Hargate was already inside by the time I arrived, but no one else. I noticed no one leave—the rest of the guests were outside waiting for the croquet match.”

Fellows shoved the perfume bottle into his pocket. He gazed down at Louisa a moment longer, his brows coming together, then he turned abruptly and walked away from her. He made his way to the window and looked out, every line of his body tight.

His broad back, covered in black, showed his strength. If life had been different, if Fellows’ father had married his mother and the birth had been legitimate, this man would now be a duke.

Fellows turned back. When he spoke, his voice was stern and solid, worthy of any duke’s. “You entered the tea tent and saw someone crawling out the other side.”

Louisa shook her head. “No. I told you. The tent was empty, except for the bishop.”

Fellows walked to her again. “You saw someone—maybe only a glimpse of them—ducking out under the back of the tent. They must have pulled up a stake to loosen the canvas.”

“I . . . ” Louisa trailed off, her mouth drying.

Fellows wanted her to say this, was handing her the script. All she had to do was repeat the words, and he’d write them down.

“I can’t lie,” Louisa said weakly.

“Better to say it to me now than to a judge and jury, after you take the oath. Tell me what you saw, Louisa.”

Louisa bit back a cough. “I thought . . . Yes, I thought I saw someone scrambling out under the other side of the tent.”

“Man or woman?”

“It was too quick. I couldn’t see.”

“Color of their clothing?”

“Dark, I think. But as I say, I couldn’t see.”

Louisa closed her mouth, not wanting to embellish. Keep a lie very simple, her brother-in-law Mac had once told her. The more you invent, the more you have to remember. It’s tricky, lying. That’s why I never do it, myself.

“I couldn’t see,” Louisa finished.

Fellows’ hazel eyes glinted in the room’s dim light. Then he nodded, picked up his notebook from the table, moved back to her, and wrote down the words while she stood a foot away from him.

His fingers were inches from her, his eyes quietly fixed on the paper. His sleeve moved to show the cuff of his shirt, enclosing a strong wrist and forearm. His hands were tanned from the sunshine, the liquid color going back under the linen of the shirt, as though he had the habit of rolling up his sleeves outdoors. His knuckles were scratched, from whatever fight had given his face its cuts and bruises.

Louisa felt his stare. She looked up from her study of his hand to find his gaze on her. Never taking his eyes from Louisa, Fellows closed the notebook and slid it and his pencil into his pocket.

She expected him to say something, anything, to break the tension between them. Or to touch her. They’d shared two kisses, both of them intimate. Louisa could still feel the doorframe at her back from the kiss at Christmas, Fellows’ body the length of hers, his hand on her neck as he scooped her to him.

The silence stretched. Louisa was dismayed by how much she wanted to kiss him again, even after he’d interrogated her. He was the only man she’d ever kissed, the only man she’d ever wanted to.

If she touched his cheek, she’d feel the bristles of his whiskers, the heat of his skin. She could lean to him and indulge herself in another taste of him. The Mackenzie who was not a Mackenzie so fascinated Louisa that she could barely keep her thoughts together when he was in a room with her.

“Louisa.”

Louisa realized she had started to rise to him, and thumped back on her heels. “That’s all I remember.”

“It’s enough. Are you staying in London with Isabella?”

Louisa nodded, feeling giddy. “Yes, for the Season. My mother is in Berkshire with Cameron and Ainsley.” Why she felt she needed to report that, she didn’t know.