“But, sir, she’s confessed to a murder.”
“I haven’t killed anyone,” Leo told the officer, shivering again. “It was the only way I could get you to contact the Yard.”
“Sergeant,” Jasper barked. He didn’t need to say anything more. The sergeant found the key and unlocked the cell door, its hinges groaning as he swung it wide.
Leo hadn’t taken two steps out before Jasper gripped her arms. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head, but again, her teeth had started to chatter.
“You’re freezing.” He spun to glare at the sergeant. “Is this how you treat your prisoners? By throwing them into a cold cell and leaving them to catch their death?”
Leo touched Jasper’s elbow. “As much as I’d enjoy listening to you scold the sergeant, I’d much rather go home.”
Jasper kept his arm around her as he pushed past the stunned policeman, now appropriately cowed, and swiftly led her from the station.
“I’ll have him sacked,” he growled as he punted the front door open. A hansom cab waited at the curb in the street, and Jasper hastened them toward it.
Leo let out a laugh, though it shook in her throat. “I’m not sure he deserves that. In retrospect, a drenched woman hurrying into his station, demanding Scotland Yard be contacted had to be the most outlandish thing he’d seen in a long time.”
Once settled in the cab, Jasper removed his suit jacket and draped it over her shoulders. “I don’t care; I’m still having him sacked.”
“You’re not angry with him,” Leo pointed out, the warmth of his jacket penetrating her skin and seeping into her muscles. She nearly groaned from the comfort of it. “You’re angry with the masked men from the benefit dinner.”
The cabbie, seated high on the driver’s bench behind the enclosed cab, had started his horses forward toward the river. The blue light of dawn was just barely beginning to push out the night.
Seated on the single bench beside her, his arm still around her shoulders to provide another source of heat, Jasper grimaced. “Tell me what happened.”
“They let me off in Battersea Park. They kept their masks on the whole time, but there are some things I observed that might help you in your search for them. For instance, the man who took me, the tall one, he’s left-handed?—”
Jasper swore under his breath, startling her into silence. “None of that matters right now. Christ, Leo. They could have killed you. I thought…these last few hours…” He shook his head, frustration brimming. And something else: fear. “I thought for certain your body would be found in a ditch somewhere.”
Hunkered under his jacket, growing warmer by the second, she laid her palm on his chest. “I’m all right, Jasper.”
He looked at her again, the tension along his jaw still jumping. “You weren’t…” He hesitated. “Interfered with?”
His voice was a rasp, as if he could barely bring himself to say it. Leo understood his question and the reason he’d asked it. Five men had abducted her. While alone with them in the coach, the notion had streamed through her mind too.
She shook her head. “I’m unharmed, I promise.”
He exhaled again, the sound a bit shaky, and nodded. Leo had known that he’d be worried, and from his perspective, it made sense for him to have feared the worst had happened to her.
He scrubbed his cheek, appearing exhausted. “I’ll bring you home. We don’t have to discuss anything more until tomorrow after you’ve rested.”
“Kid gloves aren’t necessary.” Her shivering had subsided, and she felt safe, nestled as she was under Jasper’s coat and his arm. It was an intimate position, and it brought forward the memory of their kiss. As well as the distance they’d each kept since.
“I’d rather speak of it now,” she said, wanting to focus on the crime at hand.
He assented with a nod.
“What I don’t understand,” she began, “is why that man would so callously murder Mrs. Seabright but then keep his word to let me go when no one followed them.”
“Mrs. Seabright,” Jasper said, as if the name was unknown to him.
“I saw her name placard,” Leo explained, then wondered, “What happened after I left?”
He grunted. “You mean after you were abducted.”
“All right, yes, abducted,” she said, though she didn’t want him to dwell on it. She didn’t wish to either. “What happened?”
