Undeniable Rogue (The Rogues Club Book One)

by Annette Blair

  “What do you say, Doggett? Think we should take the scoundrel inside to see if her grace knows him?”

  “We can’t go scaring her Ladyship, now, can we? But we can put ‘em in the cellar, truss ‘em up right ‘n tight, and wait till Himself comes back.”

  “You are making a terrible mistake,” the watcher said, as he was dragged along, tripping over his accursed leg. “Do you have any idea who I am?”

  “The king of England?” Prissy-man suggested.

  “Nah.” Doggy-breath cackled. “‘E’s the bloody queen.”

  “I happen to be—”

  “Not so bloody sturdy and thick-limbed as you’re s’posed to be, I can tell you that,” Dogwart said, shoving him forward again, forcing the watcher to center his concentration on remaining upright.

  If he fell and cracked his senseless skull, he would be no use to Sabrina or the boys, he thought. And this time he must be. God, he must. “At least go and see if the boys are in the nursery,” he said.

  And the fools laughed again.

  More than an hour later, Gideon dismounted, threw his reins to his stable lad, and made for the house.

  Grandmama had been more than willing to pack up on the instant and take her “sweet daughter-in-law and dear grandbabies,” into Kent with her to protect them, a concession for which Gideon was incredibly grateful.

  Though his wife did not yet know it, she would soon be safe away and in possession of an account with money enough to keep her comfortable. At this point, all he cared about was keeping her and the children safe and cared for. Nothing else mattered.

  He had barely made it into the kitchen when Waredraper and Doggett came racketing down the backstairs, attacking him with frantic, meaningless prattle before he could draw breath.

  “The lads,” Doggett said.

  “’Twas a half hour before we even looked.” Waredraper groaned. “And only then because of that yapping pup. We just don’t know.”

  Gideon raised both brows. “What are you talking about?”

  “Could have rolled ‘em up in the carpet.”

  Doggett shook his head. “Bloke’s a blackguard. He didn’t know for sure.”

  “Then where are the missing carpets?”

  “Stop!” Gideon shouted, a sick feeling churning in his gut. “Tell me first that the lads are not Rafe and Damon.”

  Doggett and Waredraper glanced at each other. Doggett swallowed. “But they are.”

  “What about them?” Gideon snapped.

  Doggett backed up a step. “Gone.”

  “Are you saying you lost my children?” Gideon’s voice rose. “How could that be, when they were in their beds even as I put you on watch?”

  Gideon saw his guard-dogs cower, forced himself into a pretense of calm, and took a deep breath. “You will excuse my outburst. Where do the boys usually hide?”

  “If they are hiding, it is not in this house.”

  “Are you certain?” Gideon asked. “Did you look in the park, across the street, where we hunted cat?”

  “Hunted what?”

  “Across the street, Man. Did you look across the street?”

  Doggett nodded. “We looked.”

  “Everywhere,” Waredraper added.

  Gideon named a dozen places the boys might hide, but his men insisted the boys were in none of them.

  “I will find them, myself, by damn.”

  Waredraper grabbed Gideon’s arm to stop him as he stepped determinedly forward. “Wasting time. Signs of a struggle.”

  That was Gideon’s undoing. A struggle. He could barely breathe. Fear grew in his belly like a canker. Who would do such a thing?

  Veronica was the first person who came to his mind. “What have you told her grace?”

  “Nothing.” Doggett shook his head. “Didn’t want to give her a fright.”

  Gideon released his breath. “Do not. Not yet. Veronica is trying to draw me out. I am certain of it.” Except that he had learned, only that morning on Bow Street, that Veronica was likely more dangerous than any of them suspected.

  “What if her grace looks for them?” Waredraper asked.

  The question stopped Gideon’s scrambling thoughts. “Wait a minute. It is past nine. Why has Sabrina not discovered the boys missing for herself? Are you certain they are not with her?”

  “The babe’s fussing up a storm,” Doggett said. “Spots. Her grace doesn’t want the boys catching it again. Told Minchip to keep—”

  “Minchip!”

  “Hysterical. Knows nothing. They were gone when she woke.”

  Gideon’s heart raced, guilt snapped at his heels. He would have served the boys better if he had stayed, rather than gone. His fault they were missing. His doing. “Have my horse saddled, at once.”

  “Where are you going?” Doggett asked Gideon, as Waredraper left to tend the horse.

  “Lady Veronica Cartwright’s. Keep this … situation quiet, until I return.” He turned to Alice, standing on the far side of the kitchen, her mouth pursed as if she had sucked a hot-house lemon. “Say nothing to your mistress,” Gideon told her. “That is an order.”

  He waited for the maid’s nod before regarding Doggett. “Come with me, while I get my pistols. If I am lucky, I will have the boys back before Sabrina ever realizes they went missing.”

  Gideon loaded his pistols as efficiently as if he were the second in a duel. “After I leave, go for the runners and hurry them up,” he told Doggett. “I went to Bow Street this morning and left a request. They will help when you tell them the situation has worsened.”

  From atop his horse, five minutes later, Gideon regarded his watchdogs. “If you do not hear from me in half an hour, then you must tell her grace. If it comes to that, keep her here at all costs. Do you understand me? I know who is behind this, and I believe the boys are safe. I must believe it.” He nodded before turning his horse. “I will have them back in a trice.” Please God.

  Doggett and Waredraper watched Gideon ride from sight.

  “Blast it,” Doggett said. “You forgot to tell him about the bloke in the cellar.”

  “I forgot?” Waredraper shouted. “Me? I was supposed to tell him?”

  “No matter. You’ll be forgiven. Says he has everything under control.”

  Minutes later, Gideon stormed Veronica’s house without resistance. Obviously, she had neglected to inform her servants that he would no longer be paying their wages. So much the better, under the circumstances.

  He cut through her dressing room, and when her maid both curtseyed and crossed herself, upon seeing him, he knew what he was like to find.

  He did not even try the knob on the bedchamber door, but kicked that portal open.

  The bed’s copulating occupants separated in shock, the both of them cursing like guttersnipes. Veronica’s nameless partner jumped to his feet, then the puny fellow had the audacity to bow. No small insult, given his nude state.

  “I daresay, he is smaller, Ronnie, than you used to prefer.” Realizing the man must be a rookery acquaintance, Gideon was bedeviled into insulting his height, but as a result, all of them regarded his limp little wick, instead.

  God help him, despite all panic and good sense, Gideon laughed.

  The man growled and demanded satisfaction.

  Gideon ignored him. “Give me the boys, Ronnie. If you give them to me now, your perfidy will go no further.” He wanted to tell her what he learned of her treachery this morning, but this was no time to anger her. “Kidnapping is too cruel, even for you.”

  Her lover straightened. “Kidnapped, you say? Well, in that case, I shall let your insult pass, due to the overabundance of anxiety you must be feeling.” The little man pulled on his trousers with haste and turned to the bed. “Good bye, my dear.” He seemed almost to grin, except that his lips remained a slash of firmness. “Thank you. It has been...interesting.” As quick as that, the curious little man was gone.

  Veronica waved him away, even as she regarded Gideon with narrowed e
yes. And like a black widow spider, still hungry for a mate, she threw back her covers, for all the world, as if she were inviting him into her bed.

  “I want my boys,” Gideon said, more disgusted than ever, but determined not to reveal it. “Just give them to me, so I may go.”

  “If you are referring to the children of that slut you married, does this mean that you have misplaced them already? By accident, or by design? I knew you could not stomach raising another man’s get.”

  Gideon wondered when she had become so destructive a woman. His brother had gotten his throat cut in a bordello, the runners recently discovered, and they said it was an establishment Veronica owned.

  She rose from her bed now, employing all the wiles of a temptress, though she fell so far short of the mark, as she stalked toward him, it was all Gideon could do not to reveal how ill her ploy, their very association, made him. He understood, now, the difference between making love and the physical act, itself.

  “You loved me, once,” she said. “Surely you could do so again.”

  “For a time, I bedded you, to our mutual, physical gratification. That time has now passed.”

  Shedding her cunning, like a snake sheds its skin, Veronica Cartwright looked every inch a strumpet, screeching in mortified fury.

  Her fists raised and poised to do damage, she rushed him.

  Gideon stepped from her path.

  She turned and rounded on him. “You are a fool, Gideon St. Goddard. Do you mean to say that you think you care about that whore you married?”

  “She is not a subject I will profane by discussing her with you.”

  The woman who was nothing more to him now than a caricature of depravity, laughed. “The more fool you.” She took up her dressing gown and slipped into it. “I am sorry to be the one to break the news, darling, but you had best resign yourself to having me. Because your harlot of a wife is on her way to save her precious brats even now.”

  Gideon grasped her shoulders. “What do you know?”

  “That he will never let her go, once he has her. And that by the time he is finished with her, you will not want her anymore.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Your grace,” Alice said, entering Sabrina’s bedchamber and holding forward a sealed note. “This has just arrived for you.”

  Sabrina tore open the missive and was trembling before she finished the first line. “Dear God,” she whispered. “He says he has the boys. Alice, go upstairs and fetch the twins, or stay with Julie while I—”

  “They are not there, your grace.”

  Sabrina stepped around her maid. “I will go for them myself, then—”

  “The boys are missing.”

  “No,” Sabrina wailed. “Please no,” but she could tell from the look on her maid’s face that it was true.

  Sabrina wanted to rant, to scream, to blame someone, but she knew she must calm herself or be useless to them. She also knew that the fault was hers.

  She read the note again. It said she must go to Seven Dials, else Damon and Rafferty would be harmed. Worse, he promised, if she did not go alone, they would die. Sabrina sobbed at the very words. She did not need the undisclosed address or signature to know who had taken them or where in the Dials she must go to save them. She did not need his signature to know that the fiend meant every word.

  He, Homer Lowick, had stolen her boys. Dear God; they must be so frightened.

  Sabrina began to search her bedchamber for anything she could fit in her reticule that might serve as a weapon. Then she came to a dead stop, realization dawning. “You knew? Why did no one tell me? Who else knows?”

  Alice hesitated. “Everyone is out looking for them, your grace, even the runners, now.”

  “Does his grace know, too? And kept it from me? Is he searching for them as well?”

  Alice bit her lip. “He is out looking for them, yes.”

  Sabrina moved from panic to fury, then to relief, all in a flash. Perhaps it was best that Gideon was away, else he would try to prevent her from going, or try to go with her, or in her stead, and place the boys in mortal danger. “Will you care for Juliana, Alice, while I go out?”

  “But where—”

  “Do not ask.”

  “Of course, your grace.”

  “Thank you, Alice.” Sabrina picked up Juliana to kiss and snuggle her one last time, then she all but ran down the stairs. She dared not give voice to how long she might be gone, or that she might never return.

  Sick over leaving, afraid she would never see her daughter or her husband again, Sabrina made her surreptitious way toward Oxford Street, avoiding the main roads whenever she could. On Oxford, she gave in to her anxiety and hailed a hack. People were too busy there going about their own business to notice her.

  Inside the hack, head back, eyes closed, she could think of nothing but the danger to her boys. The man in whose hands their fate rested had already committed murder, of that she was certain. She had placed her children in danger by not doing something about Lowick sooner.

  She would never forgive herself.

  At St. Giles High Street, she had to argue with the hack driver, before he would set her down. But despite his dire warnings, Sabrina planned to lose herself among the motley mix of close-set buildings. She did not intend to be followed.

  As the hack drove off, she stood unmoving, alone, and afraid, for perhaps the first time since she came to know Gideon. She had never consciously placed her trust in him. Yet, she did trust him, she came to realize, as she made her way through a nefarious aggregate of humanity, most in need of a wash.

  On Monmouth, near Seven Dials, a grimy urchin, twelve at the most, in stovepipe hat, but no shoes, accosted her, demanding her purse or her virtue.

  Sabrina laughed somewhat hysterically at the ultimatum. “I have neither,” she said, throwing him off his guard. “And Lowick will not want me to be late.”

  As she expected, her assailant stepped back and looked about, as if the demon might jump from the shadows, and Sabrina continued on her way.

  Perhaps she should have told Gideon about Lowick. Except that her husband might now be dead, if she had, for he would surely have tried to rid the world of such a one. At least this way, if something happened to her, Gideon could raise Juliana, the boys, too, if she could manage it, please God.

  In Seven Dials, a dingy neighborhood of costermongers, bird-fanciers, and sellers of old clothes and shoes, a body could go missing just walking down the street. There, heart hammering against her ribs, bold on the outside, shaking on the inside, Sabrina approached a battered front door and stepped gingerly into the house.

  Having fled this place some seven months before, Sabrina knew something of the extravagant layout. Her only hope for Damon and Rafferty was that they, too, remembered, so that when she distracted Lowick, in whatever way she could manage, the boys could get away.

  She hoped she would have a chance to tell them how to get to Gideon from the crypt in the St. Giles in the Fields churchyard, where the old priest-tunnel exited.

  She had only ever told one person about the underground passage, and that man was dead. She should have told Gideon about Lowick, if only so he would know about the tunnel. Except that she did not want Gideon following, Sabrina reminded herself.

  If he came, her husband would die, just as her time here would no longer matter by the time he arrived, for it was entirely possible, that when she and Lowick were finished with each other, either Lowick would be dead, or she would.

  * * *

  Upstairs, Lowick rubbed his hands together, smiled, and studied his bait. Huddled together on a single attic cot, identical-twin boys, in nightshirts and bare feet, sniveled like two peas adrift in a leaky pod.

  Taking them had been too easy to be fun, his men had complained. Lowick was sorry for their lack of sport, though they had had sport enough later, what with that bloody runner breaking down the front door. Served the idiots right, walking down the street with stolen rugs, bold as yo
u please, for all the world to see.

  Lowick was only sorry that he would now have to replace them, and he was furious over the cost of disposing of the bodies. He hoped no one came looking for the missing runner anytime soon.

  Nevertheless, he had Whitcomb’s brats, no matter the nuisance. Besides, he would only keep them around long enough to get him the prize, then he would dispose of them.

  Brian Whitcomb’s woman was all he cared about. That she was now St. Goddard’s would only make his mounting of her that much the sweeter.

  First, he was going to work the money Whitcomb owed him out of her, every shilling, then he was going to make her pay double for the insult St. Goddard had paid him. It was just too bad he would not be able to keep her around for a bit of fun later, but she would be just too hot a property, if St. Goddard lived.

  One of the boys took to sniveling again and Lowick snickered. “Be good and you can make me some brass,” he said. “If St. Goddard won’t pay to have you back—as he can well afford to do—you’ll make a fine pair of chimney sweeps. Might even get me a guinea for a matched set.” Lowick laughed. “Give me trouble and I’ll set you adrift in fact, and there’ll be no boat beneath you, leaky or otherwise.”

  They remembered him, he thought. He could tell from the way their eyes had widened when he’d walked into the room and from the way they clutched each other now. He wondered what else they remembered.

  “How did your slut of a mother get you out of here the last time?” he asked. “Tell me and I’ll let your baby sister go.”

  Rafferty charged him for his groundless taunt, throwing his whole body into the action, but Lowick boxed the cheeky boy’s ears and sent him sprawling to the floor.

  “Papa is going to find you,” Damon spat. “He will find you and beat you.”

  Lowick laughed. “Too late,” he said. “Your Papa hasn’t got it in him, anymore.”

  “Uncle Bryce does.”

  “There’s a new name,” Lowick said. “And who is this fine Uncle of yours?”

  “He is the Duke of Hawksworth,” Damon said. “And very powerful.”

  “Hawksworth. Hawksworth? Didn’t he come to a bad end at Waterloo? Blimey, if you two keep depending on people from the netherworld, you’re going to find yourselves joining ‘em real soon.”