An Honorable Deception (The Imposters #3)

Chapter 5

FIVE

17 August 191O Fairfax Tower Near Alnwick, Northumberland

Lavinia stood on the balcony as the morning light turned from blue to gold, resting her arms on the railing, which was in need of a good whitewashing, and hoping the house’s shadows still concealed her as she watched the solo performance underway on the trapeze in the courtyard.

Not that she hadn’t seen one of Yates’s performances before, but when she watched six years ago, she was on a bench in that courtyard, whooping and shouting at each trick. She hadn’t seen one since then. And he hadn’t looked then, at seventeen, quite like he did now.

It was no doubt unseemly to watch the way his muscles flexed or to admire how many of them were revealed by the sleeveless black ensemble he wore. But Mother had been the one to care about what was or wasn’t seemly. And why? So she could live a lie.

It made Lavinia even more determined to lean here and watch every last twist and leap and spin. And then, when he was finished, she’d go down and join him in the stables, just because it would have made Mother scowl at the very suggestion.

It made her all the gladder to know that these friends of hers—the ones who had consented to share their most serious secret with her—had put her in a room on this side of the house, where she could see the acrobatics training. Lady Alethia, on the other hand, had been given a room on the far side of the house, where her view would only be of the lawns, when she could even get up to view them. She might see a zebra pulling the lawnmower, which would raise a few questions, but she’d only need to be given the usual explanation about the Caesars taking over some household chores in return for their room and board on the estate.

The story Lavinia had believed. She had thought, too, that the other staff had left in objection to the presence of the Romani family ... and why had she thought it? Had they planted that thought? Had her mother perhaps mused of it? She ought to have known better. The staff had loved the Caesars as much as she had as a girl.

No, the real problem was that Lavinia had spent too many years thinking of nothing and no one but herself. It hadn’t been intentional. It had simply been all she’d had energy for. When Marigold visited, she would ask her questions, but it had felt a bit like playacting. She’d been too weak to work up either enthusiasm or concern. She remembered loving them all—Mama, Papa, Marigold, Genie, her friends from school—but they’d seemed more shadow puppets than real people.

No. She had seemed more a shadow puppet than a real person.

“No more.” She whispered it toward the trapeze, knowing Yates would never hear it over the creaking, and it certainly wouldn’t travel through the next window down, which belonged to Marigold and Sir Merritt’s suite of rooms. She had purpose now, even if it was borrowed. Something to focus on other than her own health or her mother’s deceptions or whether she could ever make herself trust any of the strangers in the London ballrooms enough to marry one of them.

Yates hung from the trapeze bar with his hands, and she watched as he swung up to the apex, let go, and flipped so many times she couldn’t count the revolutions before his feet landed in the sawdust and sand of the arena floor. His knees bent to absorb the shock, then straightened, his arms coming up in a perfect Y , despite the fact that there was no audience to clap for him.

So she clapped for him, adding a verbal cheer too. If it awoke Marigold, her friend would forgive her.

Yates looked up, the same grin on his face that he’d worn the first time the Caesars let him on the trapeze. Not a bit of embarrassment at being watched when he hadn’t realized he was, no self-consciousness over the state of undress he was in, not the least bit ashamed of loving something no earl ever should.

How free he was. How resolutely himself. How she’d envied him all their lives for that.

He ran for the side of the courtyard, and she craned over the railing to see what he was doing. Her mouth fell open when she realized he was scaling the wall, quick as a spider, using only the spaces between the stones as hand and footholds. Before she could even gasp out a breath, he was there, leaning on the opposite side of the railing like his feet were on solid ground as hers were, rather than dangling in midair, held in place only by the tips of his bare toes.

He was still grinning like an eight-year-old. “Morning, my lady.”

“My lord.” It was so ridiculous that she returned to lounging there too, a foot away from him, knowing her own smile was probably as informal as his—and quite glad she’d slipped into a simple day dress upon waking and hadn’t wandered out in her dressing gown. “When did you learn to climb walls?”

“Well, you know. Tools of the trade.” His attempt at a shrug was a bit lacking, giving that his arms and shoulders were rather busy with holding up his not-inconsiderable weight. “Did Marigold outfit you with proper attire yet? Ready for your first trip to the gymnasium?”

She refrained from wrinkling her nose—barely. “Don’t I get tea first? Porridge?”

“After.” He leaned back, hands still gripping the railing but arms extended straight. If he was trying to make her gasp again, she refused to grant him the pleasure. “Though we make it ourselves. Drina will be coming out for her own turn on the equipment.”

He was trying to shock her. And honestly, he was succeeding. Whoever heard of an earl who made his own breakfast? And yet, if ever one would, it was Yates, so she simply nodded and stood straight. “Excellent. I was telling Papa last week that I’d like to learn to be more self-sufficient.” Of course, she’d meant only that she needed to learn how to better care for the household accounts and give instructions to the servants—lessons that had grown rusty since her illness—so that she could stay at home while he was in Town from time to time.

“Five minutes. In the gymnasium. Or I come searching for you.”

She gave her cheekiest grin. “If I really need to escape you, I’ll hide behind a chair again.” She hadn’t admitted to anyone that she’d fallen asleep in that corner, feeling safer, somehow, than she had in ages.

He sent her a playful scowl, and then his head vanished again, along with the bronzed, bulky arms. She wanted to lean over and watch him descend, but five minutes wasn’t that much time to change from her dress into Marigold’s leotard, trousers, and blouse, and walk all the way to the newest Fairfax outbuilding, finished right before the last earl’s untimely death.

And gracious, but she might need the whole five minutes in order to convince the tight fabric to slip over her hips and up her torso. How did Marigold stand this thing? It was even worse than a corset—not cinched so tight, but it clung everywhere , and had Lavinia not been unable to eat much in the last several years, she never would have been able to get it over her curves.

A look in the mirror, and she squealed, face flushing. She knew for a fact that Marigold had once practiced wearing only this thing and her stockings. How could she stand it? Granted, her audience had merely been her brother and father and the Caesars, but still. It revealed far more than a corset and bloomers and chemise did, and Lavinia was more than a little glad her friend had passed along the trousers and blouse too.

The trousers were more like Indian-style pajamas than trousers proper, but they were comfortable, and they would allow for free movement. The blouse was loose, thin cotton. Her next look in the mirror only earned a shake of her head, anyway.

If Mother had ever seen her in trousers—but Mother wasn’t here to be horrified.

“I like them,” she said to the mirror. And if the light in her eyes was spite more than truth, her reflection forgave her. She hurried from the room, down the stairs, and back out into the morning.

The back door stuck horribly, but she employed her hip to convince it to open and then again to convince it to close.

Yates was still waiting on the path toward the gymnasium, a new grin on his face. “What a lovely ensemble, my lady. You’re certain to earn a place in G. M. Parker’s next column with such trendsetting fashions.”

Lavinia snorted a laugh and strode forward to meet him. “So what exactly do you think I can do in this gymnasium of yours? You know well I was always a dunce at tumbling.”

Yates sighed and made a tsk ing sound. “You’re lucky we suffered your company at all.”

She was, at that. Her days spent with the Fairfaxes had been the sunniest of her childhood—even before she’d realized everything was a lie. But she wasn’t about to say so.

Instead, she batted her lashes and said, “Should we invite Genie Ballantine to our morning exercise too, Yates ?” She used the same exaggerated inflection that Genie had once employed any time she said his name, just to watch his wince.

He didn’t disappoint her. “Isn’t she engaged to what’s-his-name now? That ship-building expert fellow? She won’t want to be bothered with us.”

“It’s so adorable that you think she wouldn’t drop Mr. Durst in a second if you crooked your finger.” Eugenia Ballantine, daughter of the most prosperous shipping magnate in the region—whose brother was now dead, thanks to Mother’s scheming—had been enamored with Yates for years.

Yates held his hand up before him, bending each finger in turn as if they were a mechanism he’d never used before. “I didn’t know my fingers had such power. I shall have to guard that most diligently, lest I have every young lady in England swooning at my feet when I think I’m only hailing a cab.”

She snorted another laugh. “You probably ought to be careful of that in general, Lord Strongman. You’re already the subject of plenty of female tittering.”

And if he ever grinned like that at the masses of eligible young ladies, heaven help them all. “Am I now? And what is this tittering about? My impossibly good looks? My unfailing charm? Oh, I know—my capuchin monkey.”

More laughter filled her throat, making her realize that she hadn’t spent nearly enough time at Marigold and Yates’s house this Season. No one else ever made her laugh so much . . . and she’d needed it. Missed it. She hadn’t known it until now.

“I daresay if those pretty young things knew they’d be competing with Penelope for your heart, they’d declare defeat and sulk in a corner.” She looked over her shoulder, half expecting the monkey to come hooting her way toward them, having heard her name. But no, all was still quiet in the stables. No chattering monkey in evidence, no roaring lion, no slinking snow leopard.

Yates’s smile skewed a bit, went sardonic. “ I daresay if they saw this place and knew the state of the estate, they’d lift their pretty little noses and scoff me out of London.”

“Hardly.” Lavinia turned around, walking backward a few paces so she could look out over the Fairfax lands. The beautiful house of golden stone needed some work, yes. The expansive landscaping had been reduced to its bare minimum near the house and tumbled into absolute, stunning wilderness toward the North Sea that made up one of the estate’s borders. And she knew for a fact there were only two aging horses in the stable stalls—the others were filled with retired circus animals. But there was magic here. And sometimes she thought there was a bit of it in its new young lord too—if she were in the mood to believe in fairy tales. Which she was, a bit, this morning.

“Don’t you know, Yates? All you need is a rich young bride to set it to rights. That’s what gentlemen do. So if you need help identifying those ladies with the largest inheritances and dowries...” She lifted her brows.

He flashed her a cheeky grin. “I believe you top that list, Vinny. Are you proposing?”

She faced forward again. “Don’t tempt me. There is a definite allure to a man whose secrets I already know—and which are noble instead of dark.”

He splayed a hand over his heart, exaggerated hurt on his face. “You think me so boring as that? I’ll have you know that I’m secretly a pirate. A dark knight. A...”

“Circus clown, you mean.” She let her next step close the distance between them so that she could bump her shoulder into his. Well, into his arm. Once upon time their shoulders had been level, but those days had long since fled. Then again, once upon a time he’d have been reduced to stuttering and flushing at the mere suggestion of marrying her.

A strange twang went through her chest. When they were seventeen, before she’d fallen ill, he’d looked at her with adoration. She’d made certain he understood that nothing could come of it.

Last year, when she’d finally rejoined society, she’d been relieved that Yates had got over his old infatuation. He treated her like he did his sister and Gemma. They were friends, family, and that was all she’d wanted from him, despite the fact that she had fine eyesight and hadn’t failed to notice that the preceding five years had somehow turned him into one of the most exquisite male specimens to be found. Her goal had still been to quickly find a suitable husband and get away from the tensions mounting in the Hemming household.

But then it had come crashing down. Her mother, a traitor. Her father, brokenhearted and mourning the wife who was not the woman he’d thought he’d married. How could Lavinia ever take that same risk? Know that she was marrying a truly good man and not one with a list of wretched secrets?

And now Marigold’s whispered words of “gossip” about the men paying Lavinia court made sense. She wasn’t sharing what she heard—she was sharing what she’d learned through her investigations. Which made the future look even more depressing.

She slanted a look up at Yates as he opened the gymnasium door for her. It smelled of sweat and leather and hot metal, but she tried not to grimace at the assault to her senses. “Pirate or otherwise, though, half the ladies in London would give their eye teeth to switch places with me right now, I daresay. Just to see you flex your muscles.”

He rolled his eyes. Which was odd. He knew he’d chiseled himself a physique worthy of the Greek gods. He turned the knob for the lights and pointed to a shelf full of ... stuff. That looked like it ought to belong to a medieval torture chamber. “Right. I flex my muscles, and they sneer and tell me I look like a common laborer.”

The words rang some distant, discomfiting bell. She came to a halt beside a mad scientist’s bench, adorned with rods and bars and horrifyingly large weights, and stared at his back. “Did I say that?”

And did he still remember her saying that? Was it what made him stride forward, away from her, with such determination?

He pulled a coil of something from one of the shelves and tossed it her way. Only when it landed at her feet and she saw the handles fitted to either end did she identify it as a skipping rope. “Perhaps you ought to do me the kindness of forgetting every insulting thing I said when I was a foolish girl who thought I knew anything about anything. I didn’t.”

He chose another skipping rope for himself and strode her way again, a smile teasing the corners of his mouth once more, lighting the depths of his eyes. “Is that your way of saying you like to watch me flex my muscles now?”

It was the fact that he flirted so easily, with nary a blush nor a stammer, that made her absolutely certain he didn’t care a whit what she thought of him now.

Another stupid twang. But she mustered a grin of her own. “It’s one of my new favorite pastimes. That’s why I really agreed to this training, you know. To watch you.”

“Good. Perhaps it’ll distract you from the torture.” He pointed at the rope again. “I assume you remember how to use that, my lady of laziness?”

No doubt her attempt at a withering glare was somewhat ruined by how awkwardly she held the handles after crouching to pick it up. “Illness is hardly laziness.”

“An excuse that ended a year ago.” He positioned his own rope—longer than hers by a good bit—in his hands and stationed himself across from her, out of swinging range. “See if you can keep up.”

She couldn’t. Oh, the old skill did come back to her after a moment, and she even smiled as she remembered the many happy hours of childhood spent with a skipping rope, a bright spring day, and the laughter of friends. For a few minutes, it was fun.

Then her muscles grew tighter and heavier. Her breath went from normal to labored and then to ragged. And the blighted man only sped up and introduced a twist on every other jump.

Eight-year-old Lavinia had done that same move countless times. Twenty-three-year-old Lavinia let her rope go still and tried dragging in a long breath. “You win.”

He shook his head without breaking pace. “It’s not a competition. Though if it were, of course I’d win. I’ve been training for years.”

Her calves were on fire. Waving a hand at him, she said, “And what a great job you’ve been doing. Keep it up. I’ll sit down for a minute.”

But the rhythmic sound of his rope hitting the ground came to a sudden stop. “Perfect. Sit there at the weights bench. I’ll get a bar ready for you.”

Marigold had it right the other day—he was a mad. “You do not intend to make me lift your nasty weights.”

“Mine? No.” He flashed her another grin, this one decidedly impish as he passed her by. “Nor even Marigold’s yet. But I daresay you can manage the bar itself. It’s only thirty-five pounds.”

She blinked at him, but the image didn’t change. He still strode toward that bench and moved to the bar with its ridiculously large weights on either end. How much did that thing weigh currently, as he had it set up now? About a ton by her estimation. Give or take. “You don’t honestly lift that, do you?”

“I do.” Not so much as a note of bragging in his voice, because it was likely so commonplace to him. “I have to, if I mean to toss Marigold about—I mean, usually. Not now . For some bizarre reason, Merritt has forbidden me from any such tricks these days.”

“Boggling.” She planted her hands on her hips. At least her pulse was slowly returning to normal. “And I’m going to have to ask you to prove it before you take those weights off for me.”

He cast her a knowing look. “You’re trying to postpone your own attempt.”

Obviously. “No, I’m going to borrow a page from Gemma’s book and compose a description of your rippling biceps for my friends back in London while I watch you.”

“Biceps don’t ripple, silly girl—they bulge.” But he straddled the bench, lay back, and positioned his hands on the bar. “Actually, watching me first is a good idea. Forgetting ridiculous adjectives, note my form. How I position my hands, and the angle my elbows need to be at when the bar is at rest. We’ll lower it for you. When I straighten my arms, I need to be able to clear the bar of its holder.” He demonstrated.

Her eyes bulged along with his biceps. He lifted the iron like it was a wooden dowel. “Be still my heart. I think I am going to propose. I’ll even abandon my claims about not trusting such fleeting feelings as love and declare my undying devotion.”

He ignored her. “Now, a proper bench press involves lowering the bar toward your chest, keeping your arms angled like so. Do you see?”

She saw, all right. He lowered the bar to his chest, then lifted it again, keeping his arms steady and sure. “You’re not even breaking a sweat.”

“Oh, I will. As will you.” That impish grin again. “We’ll do ten repetitions, then switch to another muscle group, then come back.” He let the bar clang back into its place and sat up. “We’ll need to do this weight training to strengthen your muscles, but we must pay especial attention to your heart. Things like skipping rope, running, jumping jacks, and the like will help with that.”

Her face must have betrayed more than her distaste—it must have showed her fear.

She hadn’t done more than walk the distance from the Hemmings’ London house to the Fairfaxes’ in five years. She would run a few steps now and then, but even thirty seconds was enough to leave her breathless. Enough to make her heart thud so painfully she was sure it would give up and fail.

Yates stood, moved toward her, and clasped her shoulders in his hands. They were warm, steady. Strong. “I won’t let you hurt yourself, Lavinia. I promise you. We’re going to start small and work up to more. It will be strenuous, but I won’t push you harder than your body can go.”

How could he know what her body could do though? She shook her head. “This is a bad idea. Perhaps I should admit that ... that I’m not cut out for this. I’m not like you and Marigold, I’m not ... I’m not Imposters material. That’s obvious, isn’t it? You saw the shock on Gemma’s and Graham’s faces.”

She expected that quick grin again. The one that dismissed her claim and plowed ahead. Instead, his face stayed serious, and he even dipped his head to her level. “This isn’t about the Imposters—it’s about you . About your health. No one wants to see you bedridden again. No one wants to wonder if your heart is strong enough to keep you alive for another day, another week, another month. You have to help it. Build it. Strengthen it.”

It wasn’t what her physician had said. He preached nothing but rest, rest, rest. And perhaps that had been right, for those years. But now? Resting didn’t make her any stronger. Maybe Yates was right that only work could do that.

Even so, she could still see the dubious look that Gemma and Graham Wharton had exchanged the other evening over dinner, when Yates had announced she was joining the team. They didn’t just doubt that she could do it; they doubted Yates’s wisdom in allowing her to try. Their looks had said they thought he was ruining the whole enterprise by bringing her in.

Anger prickled, shifting into determination. She would prove them wrong. She would prove her own fear wrong.

Yates must have seen it in her face. He smiled, rubbed his hands down and up her arms once, and then stepped away. “That’s my girl.”

Her lips tugged up. “That’s what you say to Penelope.”

“And soon you’ll be just as lithe and graceful. Come. Sit.” He motioned toward the bench. “Like I did. You get yourself in position while I take care of the bars.”

“You know, most women wouldn’t appreciate being compared to a monkey.”

“Only the ones who didn’t know Penelope and the great esteem in which I hold her.” He moved to the bar and began sliding the disks off the end—one from the left, one from the right, and then back again. “After training and breakfast, you can begin your first real Imposters work.”

Her pulse kicked up again, though she couldn’t blame it on exercise this time. “Lady Alethia?”

He nodded. “Marigold’s role is to watch our client—learn whatever she can about them. She can still help with that now, but you should be there too. To learn her techniques and develop your own. Befriend her.”

Her brows furrowed. “Befriend her only for the job? Isn’t that duplicitous?”

His brows arched. “Having a purpose for making a friend makes them no less true. Marigold only got to know Merritt because he was the client, and look how that turned out.”

She granted it with a grin. “I see your point. And it’s no more duplicitous, I suppose, than any other society gathering. We are always sounding people out, at first. Learning if their families will mesh with ours, seeing if our beliefs agree, and so on.”

“Exactly so. But when you discover a true friend, rare as that may be, they become just that, regardless of the circumstances. There—bar is empty. Lie back now.”

Lavinia obeyed, but her mind was only half on the process of setting the height—though she did laugh at how her arms shook under the meager weight of the bare bar. He must think her an absolutely weakling! And she was.

But that would change. She would change. She’d do something worthwhile.

And it would start that very morning. She would make a friend—and thereby find a way to help her.