AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Gregory!”
He shrugged as he walked to the door. “Your conscience will get the better of you. You know that it will.”
“What if I promise—”
“Sorry.” One corner of his mouth stretched into a not quite apologetic expression. “I won’t believe you.”
He took one last look at her before he left. And he had to smile, which seemed ludicrous, given that he had one hour to neutralize the blackmail threat against Lucy’s family and extract her from her marriage. During her wedding reception.
By comparison, moving heaven and earth seemed a far better prospect.
But when he turned to Lucy, and saw her sitting there, on the floor, she looked . . .
Like herself again.
“Gregory,” she said, “you cannot leave me here. What if someone finds you and removes you from the house? Who will know I am here? And what if . . . and what if . . . and then what if . . .”
He smiled, enjoying her officiousness too much to actually listen to her words. She was definitely herself again.
“When this is all over,” he said, “I shall bring you a sandwich.”
That stopped her short. “A sandwich? A sandwich?”
He twisted the doorknob but didn’t yet pull. “You want a sandwich, don’t you? You always want a sandwich.”
“You’ve gone mad,” she said.
He couldn’t believe she’d only just come to the conclusion. “Don’t yell,” he warned.
“You know I can’t,” she muttered.
It was true. The last thing she wanted was to be found. If Gregory was not successful, she would need to be able to slip back into the party with as little fuss as possible.
“Goodbye, Lucy,” he said. “I love you.”
She looked up. And she whispered, “One hour. Do you really think you can do it?”
He nodded. It was what she needed to see, and it was what he needed to pretend.
And as he closed the door behind him, he could have sworn he heard her murmur, “Good luck.”
He paused for one deep breath before heading for the stairs. He was going to need more than luck; he was going to need a bloody miracle.
The odds were against him. The odds were extremely against him. But Gregory had always been one to cheer for the underdog. And if there was any sense of justice in the world, any existential fairness floating through the air . . . If Do unto others offered any sort of payback, surely he was due.
Love existed.
He knew that it did. And he would be damned if it did not exist for him.
Gregory’s first stop was Lucy’s bedchamber, on the second floor. He couldn’t very well stroll into the ballroom and request an audience with one of the guests, but he thought there was a chance that someone had noticed Lucy’s absence and gone off looking for her. God willing it would be someone sympathetic to their cause, someone who actually cared about Lucy’s happiness.
But when Gregory slipped inside the room, all was exactly as he’d left it. “Damn,” he muttered, striding back to the door. Now he was going to have to figure out how to speak to her brother—or Haselby, he supposed—without attracting attention.
He placed his hand on the knob and yanked, but the weight of the door was all wrong, and Gregory wasn’t certain which happened first—the feminine shriek of surprise or the soft, warm body tumbling into his.
“You!”
“You!” he said in return. “Thank God.”
