My Rogue, My Ruin

by Amalie Howard; Angie Morgan

  Mr. Thomson gazed at the lady a beat longer before scribbling in his book again. Archer straightened his back and cleared his throat.

  “Do you have any questions for Lord Dinsmore?” Archer asked, eager to draw the agent’s attention onto another path. Had he known his scheme to get Brynn alone last evening would be sniffed out by a Bow Street Runner, he would have certainly gone about things differently.

  But how could he have foreseen his father’s murder? And now every move of every guest last evening would be put under intense scrutiny.

  “Yes,” Thomson said, shifting his direct gaze to Lord Dinsmore. “I have it that your carriage was set upon by the criminal known as the Masked Marauder two weeks past, on your way to Worthington Abbey.”

  Archer held his breath as Dinsmore tucked his chin and frowned. “That is correct. We were on our way to the duke’s ball. But what does that have to do with what happened last night?”

  “And you were in attendance at the Gainsbridge Masquerade, where another carriage was set upon? This time with violent results,” Thomson said, ignoring the earl’s question.

  “Why, yes, but—”

  “There were many of our set in attendance at both functions,” Archer cut in, apologizing to the earl for his rudeness with a pointed glance. “What of the masked bandit? Do you think he has something to do with this?”

  “Anything is possible at this time. I have just one final question for Lady Findlay,” the agent replied. “Last evening, did you visit the duke’s private rooms?”

  Archer stood, knocking back his chair and drawing all eyes in the room. “Mr. Thomson, that is enough. We are done here.”

  Lord Dinsmore had also risen out of his chair, though a bit slower than Archer. “What do you mean by asking that question, investigator?”

  Mr. Thomson stayed seated, displaying nothing but cool indifference to their objections. “I simply must follow the path of every theory that springs to mind, my lord. I will not soften my questions so they suit the whims of my…betters.” Derision dripped from that last word. “A murder has been committed, and though your set may not enjoy this taste of reality, it is still my duty to supply it.”

  Lord Dinsmore sniffed, clearly taken aback by the agent’s tirade. “Well. You can put your theory regarding my daughter to rest, I assure you.”

  The agent canted his head, acknowledging the statement. He didn’t reply, however. Archer watched Thomson’s expression as Lady Dinsmore got to her feet, Brynn following more slowly. Stone-faced and observant, the man followed Brynn’s movements as she and her parents left the room.

  Archer did not look in Brynn’s direction even though he could feel her eyes upon him. He waited until the Dinsmores had departed before closing the door behind them and letting his tempered anger loose.

  “How is questioning the lady’s virtue relevant to your investigation?” he asked, turning back to the agent.

  Mr. Thomson smiled, though it did not reach his eyes. “She is a suspect.”

  The words ignited something in Archer’s chest. A hot swelling of desire—of need. The need to protect.

  “Lady Briannon Findlay is not a suspect,” he growled.

  Mr. Thomson did not flinch. “That is for me to decide, and I have decided that in a case such as this, everyone is a suspect, Your Grace.”

  Archer bit his tongue. The emphasis the man had placed on “everyone” left no doubt that he himself was considered a suspect as well. It was absurd. Christ, he’d been the one to call in Bow Street in the first place!

  The agent took a small pocketknife from his coat and began to sharpen the tip of his pencil. “I have a few questions for you, if you don’t mind.”

  Archer walked toward the chair Brynn had been sitting in but decided at the last moment to stand. He moved to the window, overlooking the back lawns.

  “Not at all. Ask what you must.”

  Thomson glanced at the pages in his notebook. “Where were you when the men retired to the billiards room after dinner?”

  Though he trained his expression to appear serene, Archer’s mind raced. “I had to attend to some matters of urgent business.”

  “Where? In the house? The duke’s study?”

  “Of course not. I have my own rooms here.”

  Though now, he supposed, all the rooms were his. It hit him for the first time. He was no longer a marquess, but a duke.

  Hell, he had not wanted the title. Especially not in this way.

  “Did you cross paths with the duke?”

  The inquiry agent’s voice brought the room back into focus. “No. I left to speak in the gardens with the stable master regarding one of my mounts.”

  Mr. Thomson raised a hand. “You left a dinner party to attend to urgent business, in the gardens with your stable master, regarding a horse. Do I have that right?”

  Archer frowned. It did, even to his own ears, sound utterly suspicious. But he remained stoic. “Yes. And while I was there, I noticed a light in the duke’s study.”

  “Go on. What happened next?”

  Archer was beginning to dislike the man’s probing, but he held his irritation back. He supposed such thoroughness would help catch the criminal. “We heard the shouts, and I ran inside. I checked the duke’s pulse, and there was none.”

  Archer pulled his timepiece from his pocket. A couple of hours had passed. “I hate to rush you, but I am expecting my sister from Essex shortly. Is there anything else I can answer for you?”

  Mr. Thomson eyed him. “Just one more thing. You and your father fought quite publicly several days past. My notes say that it turned physical.”

  Damnation, where the devil had he heard that? Archer had been present for every interview this morning and not once had the argument from the masquerade been brought up. The inquiry agent had gotten a rather fine head start with the staff, it seemed.

  “It was an unfortunate turn of events,” Archer said, attempting to put a bland facade on the argument. “Fathers and sons will always have disagreements.”

  Mr. Thomson nodded. “It was the same with my father. The man was exacting.”

  Archer didn’t respond, nor did he care.

  Mr. Thomson’s stare centered on Archer as he pulled something from his pocket. “This was found in the pocket of your father’s trousers. It is a note, asking the duke to meet you in the study.”

  Archer froze, staring at the crumpled piece of paper.

  “The footman who delivered the note to the duke in the billiards room last evening said it was found lying, sealed, on a serving tray in the kitchens.”

  Archer picked up the piece of paper, the lightweight linen parchment instantly recognizable. It was indeed his own stationery. Drawn from the stack he kept in the desk in his rooms. One look at the handwriting, however, and his shock turned to fury. It was the same scratchy script that had graced the two previous notes left for Archer. One in Essex, another in the silver salver at Hadley Gardens, and now a third, in the pocket of his father’s corpse.

  “I did not pen this.” Archer dropped the paper. “Or leave it in the kitchen for a footman to deliver, for that matter.”

  He certainly could not come forward about the other notes, both of which had pointed to a secret. Mr. Thomson was already suspicious as it was.

  “I suspected as much,” Thomson said, though his words sounded hollow.

  The agent gathered his notebook and the forged note and tucked his pencil away while Archer’s mind raced. That clever bastard. Whomever it was had intentionally drawn his father from the billiards room and had wanted it to look as if it had been Archer.

  “You should get that hand looked at,” Mr. Thomson said as he got up and walked to the door. Archer glanced down, still distracted by the note. The gauze bandage he’d wrapped around his wound was spotted with fresh crimson spots.

  Archer did not deign to offer a reply. He owed the man no explanation. He followed Thomson to the door and watched with burgeoning unease as Heed escorted the agen
t toward the front of the house.

  It was barely noon, but Archer desperately needed a drink. He left the library and started for the dining room, where the footmen would likely be replacing the white table runner with a long strip of black crepe. Hadley Gardens would be plunged into mourning and paired with the agent’s probing questions, a whiskey or two at noon did not sound so unreasonable.

  His attention fell on the newssheets, ironed flat and crisp by Heed that morning, lying on the sideboard beside the decanter. He scanned the headlines. Just when he thought things couldn’t get any worse—there had been another heinous attack by the Masked Marauder, and this time in town. Yesterday afternoon. It could not be a coincidence.

  Archer considered all three of the strange notes again as he entered the dining room, already draped in black. No desperate thief had broken into the townhouse. Someone had wanted the duke in his study, alone. This was no petty crime. This was premeditated murder. And it had to do with Archer’s secret identity. Nausea stole over him, and he had to lean against the sideboard.

  This was his fault. His father had died because of him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Brynn had not expected to be back at Madame Despain’s so soon. She stood in the center of the back room in a semi-stupor as the modiste’s assistants fitted her with a somber dress, appropriate for the duke’s funeral.

  Her mother and Madame Despain were whispering in the corner, not paying anywhere near as much attention to the fitting as they had the day before when it had been for the golden gown. The whole town was whispering, it seemed. A member of the peerage had been slain in his own home, his guests from that evening all questioned by Bow Street, and the murderer was still at large. Things like this did not happen in London—at least not to the people in Brynn’s part of London.

  She closed her eyes to the mirror’s reflection of the ready-made crepe dress being pinned and tucked by two of Madame Despain’s girls. Fashion did not matter. Everyone would be wearing the same color and cut to the upcoming funeral. What did matter, to Brynn at least, were the terrible questions the Bow Street agent had pressed her with earlier that morning. She closed her eyes as the floor wavered unsteadily.

  “What’s wrong? Are you feeling unwell?”

  Gray touched her hand, his fingers warm in comparison to her icy skin. He had insisted on accompanying them to Bond Street, and Brynn knew it was out of pure concern for her health.

  “As I already told you, I am fine,” she answered, though her throat was tight and it turned her words into a whisper.

  “You were in the same house as a murderer last evening,” he said, the pronouncement drawing widened eyes from the two assistants. They were well trained, however, and continued to pin the cuff on the overly long sleeve. “You are not fine.”

  “Yes, well, I am lucky enough to still be breathing, so I cannot rightfully complain.”

  He tapped the hat in his hand against his leg, his eyes darting around the space usually reserved for women.

  “You should not be in here,” Brynn whispered.

  There were bolts of lace and satin and silk and, she noticed, an open box of some lacy underthings half wrapped in tissue.

  “Do not be ridiculous. I am your brother,” he said stiffly. “And besides that, I am furious. Father told me what that inquiry agent insinuated with his questions.”

  Brynn’s stomach soured. Mr. Thomson had certainly seemed suspicious of her. As if he’d known she had been lying about her hem being mended by a maid. All he needed was the account of the maid in question saying she never mended the torn hem, and never saw Brynn in the sewing room at all, and Brynn would be in scalding water.

  The inquiry agent would assume she had been skulking around Hadley Gardens on her own. Perhaps sneaking into the duke’s study to lie in wait for him.

  It was a disaster. She should never have allowed Archer to lead her into his mother’s sitting room. Or kneel before her and mend her torn hem. Or kiss her.

  “Mr. Thomson was simply doing his job as investigator,” she said, attempting to sound as if she could care less.

  “That or ignite a scandal,” Gray mumbled.

  “There you are, my lady,” one of the assistants said, placing one last pin. She turned her eyes to Gray, who was still brooding. Brynn sighed.

  “Dear brother, this is your cue to exit, as I am about to undress.”

  He snapped to attention, the girls twittering as he bowed and left to wait at the front of the shop. Brynn smiled, the expression feeling so odd and out of place it almost instantly crashed.

  Her mind had been spinning with all the theories the inquiry agent might have been formulating, and as the girls removed her from the black bombazine dress, she couldn’t help but get stuck, yet again, on the one that would not leave her alone.

  It was not that she herself might be implicated in a murder.

  It was that Archer might be.

  He had slipped away from the dinner guests as well and then away from her in the sitting room. He had not said to where he was going, but it had to have been urgent. She had felt the overwhelming desire in his kiss. He had been slowly, but effectively, grinding her resistance and hesitation to a fine pulp with every stroke of his tongue and every touch of his hands. As improper as it had been, and as dangerous, Brynn had not been able to stop him. She had not wanted to. He’d admitted to being the masked bandit, and the confession had made her confused and furious, even as it had inflamed her every sense. If she were being true to herself, it had always been Archer behind the mask.

  Archer was the man she had not been able to stop thinking of. Archer was the one she had, in her most private and reprehensible thoughts, imagined drawing her into a kiss. Archer was the man she had lost her wits over that night in the forest cottage.

  Perhaps that wicked lust had been the reason she’d so quickly believed his assurances that he had not attacked Lord Maynard’s carriage or assaulted his coachman.

  But where had Archer gone after leaving the sitting room?

  As Madame Despain’s girls began to dress her again in the deep green day gown she had arrived in, Brynn thought of the muted shout she’d heard while lost in the hall on her way downstairs. It had been a man’s voice, and the duke’s study had turned out to be rather close to where she had been at that time.

  And then there had been the sound of a woman rushing past the room in which Brynn was hiding, the rustling of skirts, and the distinct sound of crying. Whomever it had been, had been upset. Lady Rochester? She had been gone from the salon when Brynn had finally returned. But her screams upon discovering the duke had come at least five minutes later. Had Lady Rochester delayed them because she had been the one to kill him, and it had taken her that long to gather her senses?

  It was too awful to consider. Brynn felt ashamed even thinking it. But the truth was, someone had done the murder, and the crying woman in the hallway was most definitely a suspect. If only Brynn could tell the inquiry agent about her. But then she’d need to explain what she was doing in that part of the house, and hiding in a room, at that. It would also place her close to the duke’s study—and what if Mr. Thomson didn’t believe her about the crying woman?

  Oh, it was all so disastrous. Her head spun with the chaos of it, making her dizzier and more nauseated than she already had been all morning. By the time the girls had finished lacing and buttoning her, a sharp pain had started in her temple, and her breath was coming short.

  Gray and Mama noticed immediately as she entered the front of the shop.

  “Oh, my darling!” Her mother swooped over and guided Brynn to a long, padded bench seat by the front window, where a mannequin, draped in a fine Parisian gown and holding a parasol, stood on display.

  “It is just a headache,” Brynn insisted, thinking it wise to make no mention of the tightness in her chest. Gray took her arm and sat beside her on the bench.

  “You never could lie worth a damn,” he muttered.

  “Graham, your
language,” Mama hissed with an apologetic glance toward Madame Despain. “Oh, Briannon, this day has been so taxing for us all. We must get you home to rest.”

  She returned to the modiste’s side to finalize the order while Brynn avoided her brother’s searching stare. What was he looking for, some sign that she was about to faint? Well, she would not. Gray would never leave her side if she did, and Brynn could not stay in her room wallowing in her worrisome thoughts for the rest of the day. Just the idea of it made the breath in her throat thicker than air should be.

  Some fresh air would be nice, even if the day was overcast and cool. Through the front window, ladies in fashionable dress and men in crisp, clean suits walked by. Carts and drays and carriages filled the street, horse hooves clapped the cobbles, and somewhere nearby a traffic whistle blew.

  Brynn’s eyes traveled past a pair of children on leading strings being held in check by their caretaker, to a solitary man standing beside a street lamp. He had one shoulder against the iron column and both hands in his pockets, as if he had been standing there for quite some time. She narrowed her eyes and inspected his suit. Brown tweed. Not current, nor in the least bit dashing. The mannequin and the wide-skirted Parisian gown blocked her a little from his view, but it was clear that the man was watching Madame Despain’s shop.

  “You’ve lost more color,” Gray said, standing up and extending his arm. “I’ll escort you to the carriage, and do not even think to refuse.”

  She would have usually made some quip in response, but the man across the street had thoroughly distracted her. If Gray noticed, he likely assumed her silence was due to ill health. As they exited the shop door and stepped onto the sidewalk, the man in the brown tweed took a smooth step behind the lamppost. Had she not spied him from inside the shop, she would have most definitely not noticed his attempt to disappear from view.

  He was watching her. Who was he, another agent from Bow Street?

  Gray helped her into the carriage, her pulse beginning to gallop.