“Check the storage . . .” His words trailed off, as his gaze landed on the open doorway at the end of the corridor.
“What is it?” Calum followed Ryker’s stare.
There were any number of reasons his chamber doors could be open. But life had beat into him all the reasons to be wary of seeming incongruities. Calum called to him again. Ignoring Calum, with his heart pounding in his ears, Ryker raced down the hall and skidded to a halt, outside his room, catching himself on the doorjamb. “Penelope?” he called sharply.
His gaze reflexively swept the cluttered space. White garments littered the furniture. The coverlet lay smoothed and untouched on the bed. Empty. His gut clenched in vicious, agonizing knots as he spun on his heel. “Penelope?” he thundered, and with each door he tossed open, madness took on a life within him.
It was irrational to believe she was not here. Where else would she be at this hour?
Calum tossed the doors open on the other side of the hall. His silence more telling and damning than any open accusations or charges. From the day he’d met her, Calum had insisted Ryker dole out the essential lessons on survival.
And Ryker had been more focused on making love to Penelope’s mouth and body than preparing her for a life in St. Giles.
He froze. The storage room . . . Of course. Ryker raced to the room and hurled the door open. “Penelope?” he called. How was his voice so steady? He did a quick search of the darkened space; the floral scent of her and the memory of her cries of surrender were all that lingered here.
His eyes fell on the forgotten handkerchief he’d used to clean her before he’d stormed off to see to the brawl on his gaming floors. Ryker dropped to his haunches and rescued the stained fabric. His fingers curled tight around the scrap, and he promptly stuffed it inside his jacket. Nausea turned in his belly. Oh, God.
Panic funneled through him, battering logic and rational thought and leaving in its place gripping terror. He groaned.
Footsteps sounded at the front of the room, and he swiveled to where Calum stood. The other man gave a negating shake. Hope died.
He passed a hand over his eyes. “It was a diversion,” he whispered. A bloody diversion. A clever ploy to distract every single member in the club, including the untouchable Ryker Black himself. It was the simplest streetwise trick. His stomach heaved. Christ. I’m going to be ill. She’d been in his care for less than two nights and she’d come to harm because of his failings.
“I’m sure there is an explanation.” Calum’s gruff tone lacked any depth of conviction.
With a long, slow growl born from a place where evil dwelled, Ryker stalked from the room. He increased his stride, making his way back down the corridor.
Calum close at his heels, Ryker pounded down the steps. Mayhap his trouble-seeking bride had defied his orders and visited the floors. He weaved between the employees hard at work cleaning and searched every corner of the club.
Gone.
She may as well have been an imagined, fleeting dream.
His breath rasped loudly, earning curious looks from several servants. “Niall!” he bellowed for his brother.
From across the club, Niall paused in the middle of a conversation with Adair. An unspoken look passed between them, and then the other man was sprinting across the hell.
“My wife is missing.” How did he manage to speak in those cool, unaffected tones when panic was battering at him? “Who was seeing to security at the private suites?”
Niall paled and shook his head. “It was madness. Confusion. Oi needed everyone.”
He grabbed the other man by his lapels and shook him. “You do not leave the goddamn private suites unattended,” he hissed, and releasing him abruptly, he glanced frantically about. For it was done. It was a costly mistake on his part, Niall’s, and every other proprietor in the hell.
Calum and Niall proceeded to quietly plot and plan while Ryker’s world ratcheted down about him. I am useless . . . What has she done to me that I am incapable of thinking of anything but her . . . Her smile. Her pure, honest laugh in a world that was everything false.
A guard at the front of the club pulled the door open, and a familiar pair stepped inside the entrance.
The air left him in a whoosh. Penelope on the arm of her brother passed a wide-eyed gaze over the room.
Relief, purer and more enlivening than the air he breathed, filled his lungs. She was here. His eyes slid closed, and he sent a prayer of thanks skyward to a God he’d long ceased to believe in. When he opened them, cold logic gripped him once more.
Did the lady have a pea for a brain? Would she be so bloody risky, so bloody careless, with her life? Insidious thoughts slid in like a fast-growing cancer. Of Penelope on the streets, with her gown about her waist, while the street roughs passed a lady around for their amusements. Penelope with a slit throat. A low, torturous groan climbed his throat. He opened his eyes.
“By God in hell, you had better have a reason for leaving this club, madam.” His roar bounced off the walls, wringing in its wake a damning, shocked silence.
“You are not remaining here,” Jonathan gritted out.
Yes, well, given the shards of broken glass and splintered wood sprawled about the empty club, coupled with Ryker’s primal shout, she could see the reservations in leaving her here.
If she hadn’t known the tenderness of her husband’s touch just that afternoon, then she might feel the same fear as Jonathan. Alas, she’d known his touch and witnessed a man who protected those charged to his care. Such a man would never lift a hand to harm her. There were, however, differing kinds of pain.
Another sharp pain stabbed at her breast. As he stalked through the club, jumping over broken chairs in his haste to get to her, she brought her shoulders back.
“I want you to come with me,” Jonathan murmured in hushed tones for her ears alone.
“I am not leaving, Jonathan,” she said from the side of her mouth. “This is my life. I will not run from it.” Her decision had been made several days earlier inside her brother’s office.
“Where in bloody hell ’ave you been?” Ryker thundered, as he came to a stop. Questions tumbled to the surface about the marks upon his person and the disrepair of the club. And she hated herself for being a pathetic creature who, even with his betrayal, ached with the pain of his suffering.
Jonathan took a step forward, but Penelope put a staying hand on his arm.
A thick, unyielding quiet blanketed the room, as a sea of gazes swung to the trio at the front of the battered club. Ryker’s jaw worked, and he shifted, presenting the other man with his shoulder. “I asked—”
“Oh, I heard you,” she said tightly. “But let us be clear, Mr. Black.” She took a step toward him. “I’ll not be a prisoner in my own home; nor will I be made to answer questions like a recalcitrant child.” Turning to her brother, she leaned up on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. “I am tired. I will be fine,” she lied. She lied because she could not send him from this place knowing the regret that filled every corner of her being.
“Penny,” he pleaded, his voice hoarsened with emotion. “Do not . . .”
She quelled him with a look and cast a final glance at her husband. “If you’ll excuse me.” Head high, Penelope started past her immobile husband and began her march through the club, fixing on the sea of questions as to what had transpired here, because it was easier to focus on that than the gaping mouths and rounded eyes of the workers. Or the fury pouring from her husband’s frame. And the depth of his betrayal.
She picked her way toward an overturned table, stretching her leg to make her way over the broken mahogany piece. Her gaze caught on Clara.
Penelope stumbled and shot a hand out. Outraged hurt blazed through her, debilitating in its hold.
Yanking her stare away from the woman, Penelope quickened her step. What a bloody fool I am. For the first time in her eighteen, almost nineteen, years, she found herself grateful for the lessons in deportment that allo
wed her an otherwise flawless exit. She started her climb up the dark stairway, her chest tight, silently praying her husband would not follow.
With the current state of his club, Ryker had far greater matters to attend to than a wife he did not want. Given the love he had for the hell, it would certainly take precedence over her.
“Where are you going?”
At that sharp demand, she continued her ascent. “I’m going to my rooms.” Let that be enough to turn him on his way. Let him go see to his bloody club. Fury fueled her hurried steps and she embraced that anger because it kept her strong. It kept her from being the pathetic fool who’d whistled a merry tune while her husband sent his mistress to serve as his wife’s lady’s maid.
“I don’t want you to go out without being accompanied by a guard. Do you know the danger you put yourself in?” By the harsh, raspy quality of his breathing, one could almost believe he cared.
Penelope stopped and spun about so quickly, Ryker nearly collided with her. She lifted a finger to him. “Perhaps I was not clear, Lord Chatham,” she seethed, and at his scowl, she took an unholy delight in taunting him with the title he so hated. “I’ll not be lectured to. My mother had no success with it. Nor did my brother. Nor my seven governesses. And two elder sisters.” Penelope jabbed a finger in his hard chest, wincing. Must he possess the strength of one carved in stone? It only added to her annoyance, rapidly spinning out of control. “The sooner you learn that I’ll not be ordered about, the easier we’ll get on here.”
Shock filled his eyes, and with that insignificant triumph, she pressed the handle of their bedroom door and entered. Taking advantage of her husband standing motionless, with his mouth slightly parted, she closed the door and turned the lock.
With the oak panel between them, she let the tension drain from her body. Throat working, she leaned against the door, borrowing strength from it, and closed her eyes.
Damn him.
The rattle of the door handle brought her eyes flying open.
Then . . . “Did you lock me out?” With the shock in Ryker’s gravelly tone, she may as well have announced her plans to overthrow the Queen.
Reaching inside her reticule, she pulled out the damning note.
“Penelope Pippa Black, you don’t have a goddamn brain in your head,” he boomed, pounding on the door. While he continued to bellow and curse, she read each word again, even though she’d already read them so many times they’d been committed to memory. “Open this goddamn door.”
She ignored him and trailed the tip of her fingertips over those words. Why would someone place this note on her bed? Had it been Clara? In her hurt and anger with Ryker taking a wife, did the other woman wish Penelope to know? He pounded the door with such ferocity it shook at her back.
“Penelope . . .” She braced for his bellowing commands. “Please, open the door.”
Penelope intended to ignore his blustering orders, intended to march over to her bed and promptly ignore the information that had been given her until she was ready to calmly and rationally speak to him of it. Except . . .
Please. A man like Ryker Black who commanded all and expected blind obedience was not a man who’d put entreaties to anyone. But he had. For her.
She turned, unlocked the door, and pulled it open.
Ryker stumbled forward, knocking into her with such force the note slipped from her hands and sailed to the floor, as he took her down. In one swift movement, he shifted them so she landed atop him. Their chests heaved in a like dance of outrage, anger, and frustration. “Do not ever . . .” She stitched her brows into a single, angry line. She’d not take his bossing or bullying. He had the good grace to flush. Who knew a man like Ryker Black was capable of it? “Why did you lock me out?” he grunted.
Penelope shoved up and put much-needed distance between them. She retrieved that damnable page and held it out. “This arrived,” she said quietly. It shook in her hands, and she steadied her arm.
He flicked wary eyes over the note. “What is that?” he demanded, a familiar gruffness in his words.
“It is a letter.”
Ryker shot a glance over his shoulder at the still-open doorway. “I need to—”
Moving in a quick flurry of skirts, Penelope rushed to the door, closed it, and laid her back against it. He’d have to bodily move her if he wished to leave now. “You followed me here, Ryker,” she said softly. “You nearly battered my door down. You’re not leaving until we discuss the contents of this note.”
Chapter 17
Dearest Fezzimore,
There is no greater pleasure than reading. It allows me to focus on something other than my sisters bickering and teasing.
Penny
Age 12
Not even ten minutes ago, Ryker had been consumed with a need to find his wife. He’d silently vowed to keep her shut away and close himself from the world, if it would keep her safe.
Now his feet twitched with the need to escape from her and her questioning. Aware of her probing eyes, burning intently into his face, Ryker’s body coiled tight.
She expected something. Required it. “You received a letter,” he repeated dumbly; even as she nodded, his palms grew moist, and a hated familiar heat scorched his neck. He folded his arms at his chest. “And I gather this letter has something to do with me?”
Her brows dipped, and she matched his pose.
“From whom?” he snapped, hating that the key to her flight this day was contained within the riddle of written words he would never, ever be able to puzzle through.
Penelope shook the sheet in her long, elegant fingers. “Take it.”
The sharpish quality of those insistent words set off a familiar cloying panic. “You want me to read your private correspondence, madam?” he sneered, that ever-present self-loathing making him lash out. Even as he knew he was a bastard for it.
He’d always been a bastard—in every way. He’d sold his soul on the streets to survive; nothing good remained. And it only spiraled his disgust with himself.
“Take it,” she repeated, her tone sharp. The ivory vellum trembled in her hand, but she swiftly steadied it. And for the first time since they’d met in the gardens, he allowed himself to accept something he’d never believed possible about a lady of the nobility. He admired her. For her diminutive size and often tremulous voice, the lady was fearless in ways most grown men of his acquaintance were not.
She cleared her throat and pressed the note toward him once more.
Oh, God. And he, undaunted Ryker Black, a man feared by all, wanted to cast up his accounts when she forced that hated page in his hands.
A loud buzzing filled his ears, and he was the same young man seated before the tutors he’d hired for all his siblings. Unable to make sense of the words. Humiliation and frustration warring for supremacy, with self-hatred prevailing. He forced his gaze down and stared unblinking at the folded scrap.
A hungering to know just what was on this page filled him with a greater need than when he was a boy in the streets, his belly growling for food.
“Well?” she demanded.
Ryker forced himself into movement. He turned quickly and dropped the sheet atop the side table stacked with gowns. “I expect since you’re here now, you may as well explain what’s upset you so much that you’d run off into the streets of St. Giles without the benefit of a guard.” The words rumbled in his chest, rousing thoughts of the terror and horror that had come in discovering her gone. It was safer to hold her to blame for the turbulent hell she’d put him through than the questions she put to him now. Safer.
She planted her arms akimbo. “Read. The. Note.”
He scrubbed his hands over his face. “Will you not just say what it is that you’ve come to say?” Did that desperate plea belong to him?
Penelope stalked forward and planted her hands on the edge of the cluttered table. “You married me,” she said in slow, even tones. “And I am not s-so innocent . . .” A spasm contorted her face, and she d
rew in a slow breath. “To believe one such as you”—one such as me?—“was capable of feeling love or affection for me. Or even liking me, for that matter.” She seemed to add that last part as more an afterthought to herself.
Is that what she believed? Then, you’ve not given her much reason to think anything to the contrary. “Oi like you,” he said gruffly, staggered by the truth. He liked her very much. In a distracting way, where she drove him mad one moment and made him smile the next.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice drier than a crisp autumn leaf. Anger snapped in her eyes. “But though I do not expect to ever have your heart . . .” A man would have to be in possession of that organ to give it over to another. “I expect, at the very least, to be respected.”
“I respect you.” He’d disdained men and women like her since he’d been a boy . . . but with her devotion to her sister, and her fearlessness, she’d proved herself singularly unlike any of those self-centered peers.
“Do you?” she shot back, jerking her chin toward the note.
A log shifted in the hearth, setting off a quiet explosion of sparks and hisses.
He’d hated himself so many times in the course of his life. The day he’d killed his first man, it hadn’t mattered that the old bastard had charged at his then nine-year-old self with a blade, attempting to divest him of the coins he’d filched days earlier. He’d hated himself for failing to rescue Helena before Diggory subjected her to the same torture Ryker had himself known. How odd that in this moment, with his wife’s eyes radiating hurt, he should feel that same self-contempt.
“Read it,” she demanded again.
Unfolding the note, Ryker drew a slow breath and proceeded to skim the page. The smooth, even hand was the refined lettering of one who’d had all the proper tutors. Unlike Adair’s, Calum’s, and Niall’s sloppy, illegible scrawl. He moved his gaze across the page, in the expected movement. There was a heaviness to the hand—not the graceful, delicate lines slashed on a page by his sister Helena. His skin pricked with the sensation of her unwavering stare on him.
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