AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I should have been there.” Adelaide’s words echoed those in his heart, and he turned his attention to her, meeting her brown gaze across the room. There was sadness there, in her eyes. “I made a calculation that they’d be safe once they were married. I stayed here, when I should have followed her.”
“And what,” he replied. “Been taken with them?”
The anger and frustration he felt at his brother’s disappearance would have become panicked rage. Already threatened to become so at the very thought that she might be gone, and he might not know where she was.
“No one would have taken me. Even if I were worth taking—I’ve a blade and I know how to use it.”
There it was again.Even if I were worth taking. As though she weren’t worth everything.
“Goddammit, Adelaide—”
“As much as I would enjoy watching whatever this show is about to become,” Duchess interjected, “we must find Lady Carrington. And her lord, I suppose.”
Around the room, the women got to work, their words coming in quick rhythm, as though they had played thisparticular game a hundred times before. Adelaide began. “Who’s got them? The Bully Boys?”
“That is our guess, yes,” Sesily replied, turning away to search the cupboards. “Is there food?”
Henry shot Adelaide a look at the question, and she waved a hand. “Ignore it. She’s always hungry,” she said before returning to the discussion. “Danny was here.”
“So we heard,” Duchess replied. “He was delivered quite delightfully to Alfie’s warehouse, tied up like a prized hog, alongside a very large brute who Mary asked us to handle.”
“That’s Billy,” Adelaide said. “He stabbed Henry.”
“Ah,” Imogen said, looking to Henry. “Well, he won’t be a problem. He’s on his way to Australia, as I understand it.”
Henry blinked. “Excellent.”
“Danny did report something quite interesting before Alfie gave him a public dressing down, though. Aha!” Sesily spun back to the group, triumphantly holding a tin of sardines aloft. “Apparently, you’re the duke’s mistress.”
Henry shifted at the word, reported from the outside world. From London, via that weasel of a man he should have sent to his maker. He didn’t like the way it sounded, salacious, like what they had done was to be whispered about and traded like gossip, as though she were a stop on the way to something else, that the world considered more valuable.
And he did not like that he had done that to her—put her name and what they had done in the mouths of criminals who made it seem they were in the darkness, when being with Adelaide only ever made him feel like he was in full sun.
Like she was his equal in all ways.
He was about to tell her that. To apologize for the mess he had made, when she spoke. “I’m not.”
“You’re not his mistress?” Imogen clarified.
“I’m not,” Adelaide repeated. “It’s not—”
As a group, the women’s brows rose.
“It certainly looked as though you were...” Imogen waved a hand to indicate the bedroom abovestairs.
“We were,” Adelaide said, the words slightly panicked. “But... we’re not...”
Whatever she was about to say, they absolutelywere, and he didn’t like the suggestion that whatever was happening between them was not forever. If there was not a word for it, they would invent one. Partner. Companion. Love.
He was never letting her go, did she not see that?Shit.He didn’t want it this way. Didn’t want all of London knowing about them before he’d had his chance to convince her to live in the light with him. He didn’t want secrets. Or a mistress, or a secret lover, or whatever half-light she’d offered him. He wantedher. With him. Now. Forever.
And he would do whatever it took to get it.
The words from his father’s letter whispered through him—You may have all that is mine if only you wish it.
All I wish is a future that we might together call ours.
Whatever she wanted. He would give it to her.
