Page 65 of The Lady Plays with Fire

He stopped with the table between them and tossed something onto it. She glanced down to see a copy of the last issue of the magazine, open to her column.

“I told you everything,” he said. His voice was ragged, raw. “You might at least have mentioned this.”

“As if you didn’t already know,” she replied with a glare. “Why couldn’t you be satisfied with taking down the rich and powerful in your plays, those who could stand to be knocked down a peg? But no—you couldn’t bear to be criticized. You said you wanted Perpetua to get close to Briggs, to lure him in. It’s clear to me now, however, just who stabs whom in the end. Well, do your worst.” She spun on one heel, deliberately turning her back to him as she prepared to leave. “I’m not afraid of you.”

Out of the corner of one eye, she saw his hand shoot out—to stay her, she thought. She expected to feel his iron grip on her arm.

But his fingertips settled light as a feather on the pulse point throbbing at the base of her throat. “You’re a liar.”

It wasn’t fear that made her heart race, however. His fingers slipped along the sharp angle of her collarbone, sparking in her a most unwelcome memory of their shared passion only days before and eliciting from him a soft groan.

When he spoke again, his voice was thick with a mixture of regret and longing. “And I’m a fool.”

With gentle but inexorable pressure on her shoulder, he turned her to face him, and she made no effort to resist.

“I didn’t tell you,” she said, “because I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“Hurt me?” he scoffed, though pain gleamed in his eyes like unshed tears. If anything, the crack in his mask had widened in the days since she had seen him. But he seemed determined to cling to whatever protection the remaining fragments afforded. “All that I’ve been through, all that I’ve suffered, and you thought one review—one anonymous reviewer—could hurt me?”

“Yes,” she insisted in a voice hardly above a whisper. “And I’m sorry.”

He shoved the table aside and pulled her into his arms.

“How did you find out?” she asked against the soft wool of his coat, dragging in a lungful of his intoxicating scent.

“I put my secretary to investigating the identity of Miss on Scene several weeks ago. I intended to invite her to the opening performance of The Poison Pen. I wish . . .”

Chastened, she nodded her understanding. “You wish I had been the one to tell you the truth.”

“Nay,” he corrected, “I wish I’d never made such a ridiculous demand of him. Or that Keynes weren’t such a persistent man.”

Her answering laugh might have been mistaken for a sniffle. “I wanted to tell you at the cottage. But once I finally understood the reason you wrote in such anger—and I realized the state you must have been in when you read my review, so soon after your brother’s death—I feared if I revealed I was Miss on Scene, you would only push me away. And I couldn’t bear that. So I convinced myself that since you’d already had a change of heart about The Poison Pen, it was better for me to say nothing. I decided, rather than giving you my secret”—she paused, chewing on the inside of her lip—“I would give you myself instead.”

“Julia . . .” he half scolded, half sighed against her hair, the warmth of his breath making her scalp tingle.

“Oh, Graham. I understand why you’re upset with me, and I know pain makes people do terrible things.” She lifted her chin just enough to look into his face. “But I also know you’re a better man than this. Please, don’t use the play to ruin Mrs. Goode and the others. Say what you like of me, just spare the magazine.”

A wrinkle of confusion darted across his brow. “Are you referring to the ending?”

She extricated herself from his embrace, opened her reticule, and held out the letter. “I’m referring to this.”

He read it through, and his frown deepened. “What is this?” He turned the paper over, but of course it bore no direction, having been sealed inside the other note. “How did you come by it?”

“On Saturday morning, each of us—the editor of the Magazine for Misses and every young lady who writes for it—received your letter—”

“My letter?” He snapped his wrist, making the paper rattle. “This isn’t my hand.”

“Well, R.B.’s letter, then.” Still, he looked uncomprehending. “Didn’t you—? I, er—I assumed you had disguised your writing to protect your identity.”

“Why would I do such a thing when you already knew the truth?”

A new sense of alarm jolted through her. She’d wanted to deny it could be Graham, but everything had seemed to be against him, everyone had been so certain . . .

If he had not written it, then who?

“Perhaps your secretary?” she suggested, even as she recalled the man’s precise copperplate from the letter he’d sent about the ticket to Lord Dunstane’s box.

Graham’s expression hovered somewhere between amusement and affront. “Keynes issue threats? Certainly not.”