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“Oh gods,” she squeaked.
“My thoughts exactly,” he said, his voice unsteady. Almost surprised. “I don’t feel so well.”
Cat caught him before he stumbled, his weight almost burying her. His face white, his breathing shallow and rapid. She glanced over her shoulder. Geordie was just a few streets away. Had those men . . . had Geordie . . . should she. . . .
“Cat?”
Biting her lip, she turned back. “You’re going to be all right. I’ll get you home, Kilronan,” she murmured as if she spoke to a child.
For a moment, clarity sharpened his unfocused gaze, and a smile twitched the corner of his mouth. “Aidan works well enough.”
Blake fussed around Aidan like an old woman, murmurings of infection and pending death an incessant melody to the bass line throbbing in his side. To be fair, his valet was more at home starching cravats and polishing boots, but his whimpering was beginning to grate.
“Stop your god-awful weeping, and send for the bloody surgeon,” Aidan finally barked.
Blake obeyed, relief at being cast out of the sickroom evident in his rapid withdrawal.
Aidan shifted, wincing against the agony slashing up his rib cage. Tears springing to his eyes. “Great bloody goddamn,” he swore through clenched teeth. “I hope you appreciate this. It hurts like the very devil.”
Cat started with a guilty flush from where she’d been hovering by the doorway, trying to be invisible. “I didn’t think—”
“I heard you slink in? I’m starting to sense your presence. Like an approaching thunderstorm.” He touched a tentative hand to the shiner adorning his right eye, compliments of Smith’s well-aimed shoe. “Next time I’ll step back and let the lightning strike someone else.”
She crossed her arms in a huff. “I saved your life, thank you very much.”
“Yes, but only after I saved yours.”
Her chin came up, her jaw thrust forward. “Your spell casting almost got us both killed.”
She had a point, but damned if he’d admit it. He returned fire. “Well, I wouldn’t have had to cast a spell if you hadn’t run away.”
Her scar stood out white against the creeping stain of her cheeks, her eyes hot as green fire. No telling what thoughts flitted behind that belligerent mask. Finally, “I didn’t ask you to come after me.”
“We had a deal.”
“There’s a difference between a deal and a threat.” She looked away. Turned back, her face rigid with fury and something else . . . something resembling startled bewilderment. Somewhere along the way, he’d not acted according to her plan. “If you’d just let me go—”
“You’d be floating in the Liffey right now.”
That sank beneath her veneer of swagger. She bit off whatever mulish comment she’d been about to make. Instead, ducked her head, shrugging deeper into her jacket. “You’ve no right to keep me here.”
“I have every right.” He inhaled on a sharp breath against the pain. By tomorrow he’d be black, blue, and every shade in between. “Someone’s willing to kill to get their hands on my father’s diary, Cat. I want to know who. And why. We’ll start with who hired you.”
Her gaze shifted to the windows, where a drizzly rain grayed the skies, then settled back on him, the piercing green of her eyes dulled with sorrow. “The man’s name is Smith. Or at least that’s the name he gave Geordie.”
All right. Now they were getting somewhere. “Who’s Geordie?”
She hesitated before finally answering, “A friend. He and I have rooms off Saint Patrick’s Close.”
She pursed her lips, clearly waiting for his appalled reaction to such an arrangement, but he kept his silence. It was nothing to do with him. She was a thief. Why not a light heel as well? But he didn’t really believe it. Her grace held none of the rehearsed air of the practiced courtesan. Too artless. Too unaware.
He watched her stalk his room like a caged animal in those goddamned formfitting trousers.
Too disconcerting.
“They didn’t tell Geordie why they wanted the diary,” she continued, “only that it was worth a fortune, and he’d be paid well. Then at the last, he sprained his ankle and couldn’t manage. I volunteered to go instead.”
Now that he had her talking, he didn’t want to give her time to collect her thoughts. “And you disappeared this morning because?”
