Fool Me Twice by Meredith Duran Page B

words triggered a flood of anger, scalding, directed outward, across the city. Bertram was worth nothing, not even a spare look from a street urchin. A cabinet appointment? Salisbury would have been wiser to appoint a slug. “He is beneath your contempt.”
    Did his fingers briefly pause? She could not say.
    Her anger grew. It made her reckless. “If you don’t like it, get up then! You think this gun is your answer? You have let him do this. You have given Bertram your office.”
    No reply.
    Very well. If he meant to ignore her, then she would speak to her heart’s content. “You don’t even answer letters,” she said. “How odd, how bizarre, how childish is that? Why, how could Salisbury not replace you? You might as well have put his hand into Bertram’s. And now that Bertram has your office, will he make half the use of it that you did? Will he bother to support the laborers, or to think of children in the slums? Will he fight for their schooling? Ha! He won’t care if they never learn their letters. It will make them better peons if they can’t read to save their lives. He cares nothing for the poor—nobody does. You were the only one who did.”
    She fell into a breathless pause, appalled by herself—by how sharply, how boldly, how fluently the speech had spilled from her.
    But then, strangest thought, it came to her that his hair was the color of beaten gold.
    And that made her angry all over again. He did not deserve to look like a fallen angel, or a warrior, either. “ You’ve done this. You’ve given him the post he’ll use to enrich himself and his friends at the Bank of London. Because he never would have had the office had it not been for you deciding to retire from the field!”
    His lashes fell. He stared now at the gun he stroked, as though her speech, which was the truth, affected him not at all.
    She gritted her teeth, boggled, furious. How could this be the same man who had written and delivered somany powerful, breathtaking speeches? Who had waged battle with his colleagues for the sake of the unfortunate—and whose continuous, earnest struggles were so amply documented in the files in the study downstairs?
    Suddenly she was no longer afraid in the least. Let him fondle his gun. What would he do with it? The same as he did with himself: nothing.
    She clambered to her feet. “I thought you lacked bullets,” she said. “But I suppose it would only take one. At this rate, nobody will notice—you’ve driven them all away. England will not notice.”
    He flinched.
    It was enough to drop her back onto her knees, to look into his face more closely. The flat line of his mouth gave her more hope. It was an expression.
    “I lied,” she confessed. “People would notice. I would notice, of course.”
    No reply.
    Frustration bolted through her. But she remained crouched before him for one simple, stupid reason: she could not forget all those pages he had written, the gorgeous meditations on improvement, on virtue—and the profoundly messy speeches, as though he’d made drafts upon drafts, demanding ever more of himself, for the sake of people, strangers, he would never meet, who might benefit from his labor.
    She looked at him now, exhausted and beautiful and locked so deeply inside himself, and some weirdly bittersweet emotion choked her. Was there no way back for him? Did he not realize he’d made the choice to be alone?
    On a desperate stroke of daring, she reached out to touch his face—tipping up his chin, as he had once done to her far less gently. “Look at me,” she said.
    To her shock and triumph, his lashes rose. It gave her a jolt; as they stared at each other, her every breath felt shallower, harder to draw.
    His skin felt warm, rough from his whiskers. He felt human. It was so easy to think of him as a monster—or as a mannequin, too angular, too perfect, to be fashioned from pedestrian flesh.
    But he was only a man. Only and entirely a man. She felt the slight, irregular