The Rogue Who Rescued Her

by Christi Caldwell

  God, how he missed her. Missing her was a physical ache that was with him until he managed to sleep and then was first to greet him when he awoke the next morn. And he missed her son. He, Graham Whitworth, rake beyond redemption, should find himself mourning the loss of a young child who, not long ago, had been just a stranger.

  He glanced around at the company he kept now… again… the company he’d always kept. The thirty like dissolute lords and gentlemen who didn’t have anything of true value and so stayed here.

  Surrounded by strangers and acquaintances, and in some cases, friends, yet managing to be alone at the same time.

  From the corner of his eye, he caught the approach of a redheaded beauty. She moved with a seductive sway to her hips that sent her scanty satin skirts clinging to her lush thighs.

  A damned redhead. A bloody ginger-haired beauty should be the one to approach him this day.

  He tamped down the need to laugh at the irony and hilarity of it all.

  “Hello, my lord,” she purred. Snaking her arms around him, she captured Graham in a makeshift embrace.

  He stiffened.

  “You are in need of company, my lord,” the beauty purred against his ear. She flicked her tongue out, toying with that shell. The faint hint of musk on her mingled with the heavy rosewater she’d used, and it stung Graham’s nostrils.

  Any other time, he would have taken her. He would have allowed her to lead him off to her rooms and lost himself inside her until the mindless sex brought release and temporary oblivion. But her hair didn’t have the burnt hues of rust and a summer’s sunset wrapped with sunrise. Her smile was false and not the dimpled one that belonged to another.

  Forcing a lazy grin, Graham neatly disentangled her vinelike hold on him and freed himself. “Afraid another time, love. I—” From across the room, he caught the approach of a figure striding purposefully through the crowd, on a direct path toward Graham.

  At least two decades older than most of the other patrons presently in attendance, he stood out among them.

  Lord Edward Helling stopped at Graham’s table. With a slight disapproving frown, he took in the whore at Graham’s side.

  His superior didn’t wait until she’d sashayed off before speaking. “I’m here at your father’s request.”

  He stiffened. “My father?” he repeated in measured tones.

  Waving off a servant, Lord Edward pulled out his own chair and, uninvited, claimed himself a seat. “Both your parents have appealed to me to see if I might convince you to return for the holidays.”

  Graham took another drink. “That is a definitive no,” he said, setting his glass down with a thunk.

  “Very well.” Lord Edward tugged his gloves off, beat the brown leather articles together. “Your father’s… interference with a certain… lady was unrelated.” Unrelated to Graham’s work with the Home Office. That had been the question he’d demanded answers to.

  “Of course it was,” he said bitterly. His ducal father could and would ferret out secrets with the skill of any man who served in the Home Office.

  “He didn’t approve of the lady,” Lord Edward murmured, his lips barely moving. “That was the reason.”

  Didn’t approve? How could anyone not admire and approve of a woman of Martha’s convictions and strength and courage? God, he despised his father and all of Polite Society. “He can go hang,” he said through tight lips.

  “Your father and familial attention, however, is not the whole reason I am here.” Graham stilled. “I have word on your assignment.”

  This was a business meeting, then. So where was the excitement that should come with official Crown business? Where was the anticipation he’d felt the last time he’d met with Lord Edward?

  Lord Edward slid a note across the table. It was addressed in his father’s hand, with the seal belonging to the Duke of Sutton, and yet, as he broke that crimson seal and read… The contents were entirely related to other matters. It was a forgery to facilitate the secrecy and maintain some justification of why the two would be meeting. As Lord Edward was godfather to Graham’s brother, Society would be content with the illusion. Invariably, they never looked closer and saw any more than what was on the surface.

  Graham sat a little straighter.

  The bulleted details were not about his next case.

  Martha.

  He locked on that name. Hers.

  “Your… instincts proved correct.”

  “My instincts,” he echoed, entirely fixed on the letter.

  “Regarding your suspicions about her well-being.” Lord Edward picked up the empty glass and poured himself a drink.

  Graham’s heart slowed and then took off at a gallop. Restraint. Always restraint. He frantically scanned the note.

  “With care,” Lord Edward warned, and Graham slowed his movements. Except, with that cryptic warning quietly delivered in the middle of a damned gaming hell, Graham was one step from madness.

  Lord Edward lifted his snifter and spoke, shielding his mouth. “We have reason to believe there might be some threat to the lady’s safety.”

  Panic threatened to swarm him. Oh, God. “Has she been hurt?” he asked hoarsely. I should have been there. I should have been with her. He had no right to her, of course. No right to watch after her or her son.

  “Drink,” the other man said through the humming in Graham’s ears. There could be no mistaking his superior’s statement as anything more than a command for Graham to gather control of his emotions.

  Graham made himself lift his glass, sip, swallow, and then repeated the movement several times.

  “Someone shared her secret around High Town, and now Lord Exeter received a missive informing him that they know his wife’s secret.” His wife’s secret was also… Martha’s.

  The air hissed from between his teeth. Someone threatened to expose her past. For what purpose? The answer of the immediate suspects—Waters’ legitimate family—no longer made sense. They would have been set on maintaining the façade of respectability. “Their contention is with Exeter.”

  “But Miss Donaldson could also be at risk. We’re removing her from Luton,” Lord Edward was saying. “Keeping her in London so she is close.”

  That penetrated the haze. “What?” he blurted.

  She would be here… in London. Close to him, but also close to all the places she’d longed to be. As soon as that thought slid in, reality came following swiftly on its heels.

  “Her threat isn’t greater being here… near Exeter’s family?”

  “I suspect if there is, in fact, a threat, she is at greater risk alone in the countryside. London is largely empty for the holiday season. The gossip will be less. Our hope is that we secure her and her situation soon, while the ton is away at their country properties. And after that…”

  “After that?” he prodded.

  Lord Edward shrugged. “We will secure work for the lady. Those details are still being worked through.”

  That was to be her fate still. Work.

  “She has… agreed to come to London, then?” This place she’d always wanted to see.

  I wanted to sketch in Hyde Park. I’ve read of the Serpentine and the queen’s gardens and imagined what it would be to paint those visions.

  Lord Edward shook his head, but Graham saw the hesitation. “Neither is she, however, at this point aware that she may be in any peril. I’ve an agent who has been scouring High Town and all of Luton in the event there is any threat.”

  “And… if she comes to London?” he asked in even tones. She’d be near him, and yet, they would still be divided by his betrayal and her hatred of him. “Who will be assigned to her?”

  “There is first the matter of securing her agreement.”

  “But if she agrees?” he asked impatiently, wanting the damned name. Needing to know which bloody member of the Brethren would be close to her when Graham wanted it to be him and only him. And despite every code of loyalty to his fellow members that he’d s
worn, Graham wanted to bloody with his bare hands the one who ultimately found himself close to her and her son.

  “That is actually the reason I’m here,” Lord Edward murmured. “There is some concern, given the organization’s failure to fulfill the promises made to her, that Miss Donaldson might be reluctant to trust us.”

  “As she should,” he said coolly. Martha and her children had been betrayed by everyone who should have loved and cared for them. And I failed her, too. In lying to her and keeping that lie alive—she’d been correct in her charge—Graham was no different.

  “I do not disagree with you. Several members and I have discussed the lady’s circumstances. We’ve decided based on your familiarity with the boy and widow and, more importantly, their familiarity with you, it would be wisest to have you speak with her.”

  “You think I can convince her?”

  “We have hope that you can.”

  I never said goodbye to anyone in parting again. I fared them well and gave them my best, but never my goodbye.

  His superior might be skilled, but he was delusional if he believed that Graham could help. “Impossible.”

  “I hope not. You’ll be accompanied by another. He is waiting for you now.”

  They took Graham’s role in this as a certainty. “She has no wish to see me.”

  “That’s neither here nor there,” Lord Edward said crisply, drawing on his gloves. “Fix whatever hurt feelings you left and convince her that this is in the best interest for both her and her child. At which point, you will be assigned as her guard.” The older man finished off his drink and then climbed to his feet and started across the room.

  Graham stared after him for a moment. His pulse thudded sickeningly, with both dread and an excitement he had no right feeling.

  If Martha agreed to come to London, he would be the one with her.

  Again.

  For the first time since she’d tossed him out, his belongings neatly packed, the agony lifted. With a calm he didn’t feel, Graham followed behind Lord Edward. They didn’t again speak until they’d gathered their cloaks and waited beside Lord Edward’s carriage.

  And all earlier joy was replaced by logic. “She’ll not agree to this.” Any of it.

  “I believe she will.”

  The other man spoke with a confidence that could come only from age, and there was a naïveté that dismissed Martha’s hurt sense of betrayal.

  Lord Edward tossed an arm around him. “Despite being duped by you”—Graham gritted his teeth. True though that might be, Graham had been acting on behalf of the Crown—“and her hurt feelings,” the other man went on, “she will ultimately agree to accompany us because of her son.”

  Yes, she’d given everything to her three children. She might hate him and resist the idea of joining Graham in London, or having anything at all to do with him, but where Frederick, Creda, and Iris were all concerned, she’d put them before even her own hurts.

  It would be the hollowest of victories.

  And yet, as Graham and Lord Exeter, another of his superiors, set off for High Town soon after, that hollowest of victories also brought with it something else—hope.

  Chapter 19

  Martha no longer slept.

  She hadn’t since she’d been hunted in the copse and had her door burned with that hated, hateful word.

  Each night, she lay abed with her fingers in reach of Papa’s gun, alternating her stare between the door and the window.

  Waiting with a sick anticipation for when someone launched another attack upon her or her household. Or worse, her son. Until sheer exhaustion overtook her and brought her eyes shut for a brief rest that was never easy.

  As she lay there in the dead of night, she’d come to appreciate how the sounds of a quiet house and the elements outside conjured monsters.

  The unexplainable settling of hardwood floors that, after forty years, should be without those errant creaks and groans. Or the scrape of a branch against a lead windowpane that set an imagination to believing fingers were tapping. Waiting for the break of the glass and the unimaginable that would come after.

  Never once had she worried while Graham was here.

  There’d been a peace and sense of safety that she’d never truly known.

  All the while, with that trust in him, she’d failed to see that he was the one she should have been worried about. He, the greatest of thieves, for he’d stolen her foolish heart, and all on a lie.

  Was he even now courting the lady from whom he’d been running? Perhaps he’d returned to his ducal family for their house party, and he and the handpicked lady had discovered together that they were truly a match for each other. Like some blasted romantic novel she’d once favored, back when she’d believed a woman could know that gift and had dreamed of it for herself.

  Rolling onto her back, Martha stared overhead at the cracked plaster ceiling in desperate need of new paint. The small fire in her hearth cast a soft light upon it, holding her transfixed.

  Martha closed her left eye, and that faulty portion of the ceiling drifted out of focus. She alternated, opening her left and closing her right, and there it was again, the five-inch imperfection.

  If one just closed an eye, it disappeared, and one was able to believe the illusion. Forget the flaws. Forget him.

  As if taunting her for even daring to think that a possibility, the naval bag in the corner drew her focus.

  She should have tossed it behind him that day. And yet, through the tears and her son’s shouts, she’d failed to realize that sack had been left behind. She’d dragged it to her room and left it there.

  Abandoning all hope of sleep, Martha swung her legs over the side of her bed and stood. She shivered at the cold that touched her bare feet. Hurrying to the bag, Martha dropped to a knee beside it.

  That day, his father’s man-of-affairs had come when Graham had been off—for what purpose? Martha reached inside the bag… and then froze as her fingers collided with cool leather.

  Her heart shifting strangely in her chest, she drew out the small pair of black boots. For Frederick.

  Tears stuck in her throat, and she forced herself to swallow around that emotion. That was what he’d been doing, then. She reached in once more, drawing out another pair. Larger, designed for a woman. For her.

  Rap.

  The pair slipped from her hands, landing with a sickeningly loud thump. Her heart knocked against her breast as she angled her head toward the frosted windowpane.

  Rap.

  Oh, God. There it was again.

  Her body broke out in a sweat, and rushing back to the bed, she retrieved her gun. You’re being foolish. You hear the same sounds every evening, and every evening it is fine. The sun still rises on the morn and then goes down at the same early evening hour.

  Gathering up her wrapper, she hurriedly donned the garment, and sidestepping the loose floorboards, Martha tiptoed over to her son’s rooms.

  Peeking inside, she found his little frame burrowed under his threadbare blanket. She searched the small space and then brought his door shut.

  Rap.

  No good had ever come from any visitor to this household, and a visitor late at night could only portend peril. Holding her gun out, Martha made herself move toward the intermittent knocking.

  Before her courage deserted her, she yanked the door open, her gun pointed—and her mind went black. It had been more than a year since she’d seen him. The moon played off his silver-streaked temples. He was darkly clad, with a somber set to his features. Martha might as well have drawn him back from that dark day.

  “Miss Donaldson,” he greeted.

  “You,” she said flatly.

  “May I—?”

  She straightened her arm, leveling her gun at the middle of his chest. “Get out.”

  “I need to speak to you.”

  Speak to her? “Do you think me mad? Or just foolish, as I was when we last met,” she spat. “I said go. There is nothing I have to say
to you.” And no reason he should be here… unless… An idea slipped in, and her gaze went over to the damning marks burned into her door. He followed her stare. “It’s you,” she breathed, and he shifted all his focus back to Martha. “You want to harm me.” How many times would she be the fool?

  “I have no intentions of harming you,” he murmured in the calming baritone she’d been a fool to believe.

  Martha gnashed her teeth. “Liar.”

  He reached for the front of his cloak, and she moved her gun back and forth in warning. Lord Exeter went motionless.

  “Why… why… you seek to silence me.” It all made sense. Her mind whirred with the realization. She’d been fine left alone to live as long as no one knew she existed. “You want to be sure your wife isn’t touched by the scandal of my being alive.”

  His brow dipped. “Have you come to any harm?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know,” she sneered. “Or that you’ve ever cared.” No one did. Not about her and her son. Every last man was a self-serving opportunist. They didn’t care about anyone other than themselves and their wants.

  “You’re wrong, Miss Donaldson. My intentions have only ever been to help you.”

  “Is this helping me?” she rasped, pointing her weapon at the damning letters emblazoned upon her door. Struggling for a semblance of calm, she steadied her arm. “For a brief time, I believed you intended to help.” When he’d come and offered to send her daughters to a school where they could live untouched and unsullied. “No more. Now, go.”

  He remained in the doorway, as immobile as a damned mountain. “If you want me to leave—”

  “I do.”

  “But not until you hear me out. I have reason to believe, based on information I’ve come by and now because of what you’ve confirmed”—he flicked his gaze to the scarred door—“that you might be in danger. As well as your son.”

  It’s a trap…

  “It is not a trap,” he said softly.

  “I didn’t speak.” That retort emerged sharp to her own ears.

  “No, but I know what you’re thinking, Miss Donaldson. Please. A moment, and if after you hear me out, you ask me to leave, I will.”