Undeniable Rogue (The Rogues Club Book One)

by Annette Blair

  Lowick leaned in close. “In this life, best you remember who can help you and who cannot.” He pointed to himself. “Me,” Lowick said, “I am the only man who can help you now.” Then he screamed in rage and twisted around as if to grab something.

  “Mama, Mama,” the boys shouted when they saw her.

  Lowick choked her with an arm, and while her boys beat against him, he forced her hand, into the air, the hand with the bloody scissors she had stabbed into his shoulder. When he bent back her wrist, Sabrina screamed, in pain and frustration, and dropped them.

  With a curse, Lowick kicked the sharp-edged cutters under a chest of drawers, then he picked her up and carried her, kicking, toward the staircase.

  Remaining silent, so as not to terrify her boys any more than they already were, Sabrina managed to drop her reticule before Lowick carried her down the stairs.

  * * *

  At Stanthorpe Place, Gideon called Sabrina’s name as he ran up the stairs and into her bedchamber, all the while praying that Veronica’s insane tale was false. When he failed to find Sabrina in either bedchamber, he went up to the nursery.

  There, he found Alice walking Juliana, the babe red-faced and screaming. “Sabrina?” he asked, but his heartbeat had already trebled, for he knew that Sabrina would not leave her sick baby, unless she had a compelling reason to do so.

  Gideon felt as if he had stepped off the edge of the world and dropped into hell. Veronica’s tale could very well be true.

  Fighting a knot of emotion stronger than any he had ever encountered, scared enough to break under the weight of his fear, Gideon regarded the maid. “Where is your mistress?”

  “I read her note,” Alice wailed, as if she expected him to cuff her for her impertinence.

  “What?” Still breathing hard, Gideon searched the nursery with his gaze, for a clue, something, to lead him to the boys, while he also tried to make sense of the maid’s words above the din of his daughter’s fretting.

  Alice bounced Julie. “I sent Doggett to see if he could find her,” she said. “It is so bad a place, after all, and I hoped he could tell you, but he is not back. And the man in the cellar has been making ever so much noise. I am afraid he will break free and murder us all.”

  Frustrated and anxious as Gideon was to set off and make everything right again, he needed to hear what Alice knew, so he took Juliana to quiet her. “Tell me now, Alice.”

  When the maid’s discourse became disjointed, Gideon set her gently back on the simple path, until she began to make sense. Then he perceived that Veronica had been correct. Panic set in and he gave her the baby back.

  When Alice pulled a note from her apron pocket and offered it, Gideon gaped at her for not presenting it sooner, but he said nothing and read it. Then he cursed as he crumpled it, tossed it to the floor, and was on his way out the door again.

  Alice placed the baby in a cradle. Then she bent down to pick up the crushed note, and as she regarded it, she remembered the man Waredraper was guarding. “Wait!” she called. “What about the man in the cellar?” But when she got to the top of the stairs, Gideon was long gone, and the very man she feared was on his way up.

  “Where is Sabrina?” he shouted, his cane smacking each step as he climbed. “Where is your mistress?”

  Alice backed up a step.

  “It is all right,” Waredraper said, coming up behind him. “I am convinced he is a friend.”

  Alice extended her trembling hand to reveal the crumpled note.

  The man who had been locked in the cellar snatched it from her, and Alice screamed and ran back to the nursery to lock herself and the baby inside.

  * * *

  Gideon found Doggett hurrying down Oxford Street, halfway between Stanthorpe Place and one of the worst sections of London.

  Gideon hauled the man up on his horse. “Did you find her?”

  “Seven Dials. I know the house. I was just—”

  They rode hell for leather toward Seven Dials.

  Down the street from the house Doggett indicated, Gideon pulled his pistols from his greatcoat. “Take my horse and go for the runners. Where the bloody devil have they been, anyway?”

  “Out searching for the boys, but I’ll bring them here,” Doggett said. “You be careful, your grace. That Lowick’s a bad one.”

  “Describe him to me.”

  “Like you said, short, sturdy and barrel-chested, but I never made the connection. Not till I came here.”

  Gideon cursed and moved forward.

  Getting inside the house was easy, almost too easy, Gideon thought as he stepped into a setting that became eerie for its contradiction of lavishness amid London’s squalor.

  The sound of weeping lead Gideon down a set of dank stone stairs and into a dim, milled-stone cellar. There, huddled together beside a massive door, closed against them, sat his barefooted boys in their nightclothes, Rafe clutching Sabrina’s reticule.

  Pistol in hand, Gideon held a finger to his lips, so that when he advanced and they looked up and saw him, they did not announce his presence. Nevertheless, they shouted “Papa,” when they saw him, though not as loudly as they might have, as they launched themselves into his arms.

  “Where is Mama?” Gideon whispered, accepting hugs, kissing heads, wishing he could hug them back, except that he must keep his pistols at the ready and clear of the boys at the same time.

  “The little man is hurting her,” Rafe said. “And I want to hurt him back, Papa.”

  Rafe’s words fired Gideon’s hunger for vengeance. “I shall deal with him for you, son, but first, I want you to go upstairs and wait just inside the front door for the runners. And when they arrive, I want you to direct them down here. Go ahead now, so I can get your Mama and bring her safe up to you.”

  Gideon’s attention focused suddenly on what he could not see, on the opposite side of the massive door, the more-frantic tone of Sabrina’s weeping, and the heightened fervor of the man’s cursing.

  He tried the knob while he watched the boys climb the stairs, but he did not aim his pistols or try to force the door until they were out of sight. When he did try, the blasted portal would not budge. Gideon swore, looked about him, and unearthed a downed beam which he used as a battering ram.

  On the second try, the door gave with a splintering crack and flew open to smack the stone wall. Across the room, the struggling heap on the bed separated into a man launching himself off...Sabrina.

  The bastard was still dressed, praise be, his face and arms were raked bloody, and blood soaked his shoulder. Gideon cocked his pistols, aimed one at Lowick’s heart, the other much lower.

  Gideon’s gaze strayed to Sabrina, pushing down her skirts, shivering to the point of chattering teeth, looking at him as if she could not bear the sight of him. “Sabrina?”

  His distraction allowed for a pistol to be cocked. Lowick’s.

  “Go ahead,” Gideon said, refocusing, facing down Lowick’s gun. “But I will send you to hell before me.”

  Lowick grinned and shifted his aim toward Sabrina.

  Gideon lowered his pistols.

  A knife sliced the air, buried itself in Lowick’s thigh, and as the fiend roared his rage, he re-directed his aim toward Rafe, coming up beside Gideon.

  “He was going to shoot Mama!”

  Gideon knocked Rafe down, covered him, and caught Lowick’s shot.

  Sabrina screamed. Rafe’s name. Gideon’s. A good sign, Gideon thought, as he rolled off the boy, ignoring the pain, thinking he needed to look for his pistols.

  He shook off a sudden dizziness to focus on Sabrina, holding Rafe. His wife. His. So close, yet too far away to touch. She knelt over him, then, one minute regarding his bloody side with anguish, the next fixated on the doorway.

  Damon stood framed there. Veronica stood behind him, her hands on his shoulders, narrowing her gaze on Sabrina. “This could have been avoided, my dear, and your boys might have survived you, if you had just stepped into my carriage that morning or
even accepted the services of the midwife I took the trouble to send.”

  Gideon called himself a hundred times a fool. “Ronnie,” he said. “Let Sabrina and the children go. Let my man take them home.”

  “I care less than nothing for the brats. I want only to remove the harlot you were coerced into marrying.” She gave him a fanatical smile. “So you may come back to me.”

  “I saved your life once,” Gideon said to her now. “Give me my family’s lives in return, and you may have mine to end, or to keep.”

  “No,” Lowick said, holding Gideon’s pistols.

  Sabrina began to weep, even as a thundering filled the chamber, vibrating the floor beneath them, as if the end of the world had come.

  One of the cut stones in the floor shuddered until it disappeared, leaving a hole through which a strange man rose, abetted by a second—Waredraper.

  Fast as the first man appeared, he dropped and rolled, knocking Lowick off his feet.

  Waredraper tackled Veronica, freeing Damon.

  Ignoring the burn in his side, Gideon sought his pistols, but they were caught in the fight between Waredraper and Veronica, a near thing, until Waredraper ended on top, Veronica screaming and kicking beneath him. From his perch, the old man grinned. “Ain’t as old or as stupid as I thought I was. Good thing I let my friend, here, talk me into this.”

  “Who put the knife in this one?” the friend asked, his familiar voice catching Gideon’s attention, Sabrina’s.

  “I did,” Rafe said. “Found it in Mama’s reticule.”

  The man yanked the knife from Lowick’s thigh to hold at his throat, ignoring his string of curses. “That’s my Rapscallion.”

  Sabrina gasped.

  “Hawksworth?” Gideon asked. If not for the voice, he would not have thought it possible, the stranger was so different, yet he had used Hawk’s pet name for Rafe. “Hawksworth?” he asked again, with more hope.

  “I told you to protect her, damn it,” Hawksworth shouted in fury. “How the devil could you let this happen, Stanthorpe?”

  Fury eclipsed hope. “I thought I was protecting her from indigence,” Gideon snapped. “Neither of you bothered to tell me that I was supposed to be protecting her from Satan, himself.”

  Gideon and Hawksworth looked at Sabrina, clutching her boys, being clutched by them, and weeping into their arms, and neither had the heart to hold her accountable for her foolhardy omission.

  Silently, they bound Lowick and Veronica.

  When they were done, Gideon regarded his wife. “Sabrina, are you all right?” But she would not look at him, and Gideon was cut to the quick by her aversion and rejection.

  Lowick sneered. “You are agreeable with having my leftovers, then, your grace? Oh, I forgot, you already have had them, for I had the slattern before you. As I had her again today, make no mistake.”

  Despite the ache in his side, Gideon took great pleasure in cutting his knuckles on the man’s jaw.

  Hawksworth sat back against the wall with a half-smile on his face and closed his eyes.

  Gideon thought his old friend looked as if all the fight had left him. He was pale, and the scars on his face only now registered. But Gideon could not keep his attention from Sabrina, there, beside him, bending over him, binding the wound in his side.

  Safe. Sabrina was safe. The boys were safe.

  Inhaling her fresh lilac scent, Gideon touched her hair as she tended him. He stroked her cheek with his fingertip, all the while begging silently for her to look at him. But she did not, and in the end, he was forced to close his eyes against the pain of having the wound bound.

  When Sabrina finished and pain subsided, Gideon opened his eyes, only to find her in Hawksworth’s arms.

  All the blood seemed to drain from him.

  The event he wanted to rejoice over, his good friend’s return from the dead, now made him ill, for it meant the loss of all Gideon had come to care for.

  Hawksworth was alive. Alive and holding Sabrina as if he would never let her go. As she held Hawksworth, the man she loved, running her hands over the scars on his “poor, beautiful face” and weeping in his arms, thanking God that he did not die, after all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  As Gideon watched Hawksworth and Sabrina together, he knew that he had lost her to the only man she had ever loved. Even Damon and Rafferty, the boys he had come to think of as his, were being crushed in Hawksworth’s embrace. They called him Uncle Bryce and said they had recognized him watching the house, and they knew he would save them.

  Soon, even Juliana, Gideon’s bright little star, would be lost to him as well.

  Like a man in a trance, Gideon watched Doggett arrive with the runners, and pull Lowick and Veronica to their feet. Before they got Lowick out the door, the bastard turned to Sabrina. “You ruined me with your whoring ways. This is your doing.”

  And on his wife’s face, Gideon saw only an unbearable and haunted sadness, as she turned from his silent entreaty and leaned into her lover’s waiting arms.

  Gideon’s eyes met Veronica’s, and she read his anguish, and started to laugh. He could hear her demented laughter all the way up the stairs.

  In that moment, Gideon wanted to do murder. Lowick and Veronica, first, just for the satisfaction of it. Then Sabrina’s first husband and, perhaps, her father, if only he could.

  And last, Gideon would do in Hawksworth, the friend who had given him heaven and took it away again.

  He watched Sabrina stand and show concern, not for him, but for Hawksworth. She helped his old friend to rise, offering herself as his crutch, and they made to leave together.

  Almost as an afterthought, she turned to him, but rather than look at him, she regarded the bloody bandage against his side. “Thank you for saving Rafe,” she said, as if she were speaking to a stranger. “It is a flesh wound but wait for the doctor. We will have him sent to you.” With that, she turned and walked from his life.

  Gideon saw the boys hesitate and look from him to their mother and back.

  Sabrina called them sharply, and they sent a last anguished look in his direction.

  Gideon smiled and nodded. “Listen to your mother,” he said. And they did.

  It was over, then.

  We will have the doctor sent, she had said. Already, in his wife’s mind, she and Hawksworth were together again.

  * * *

  When Sabrina, Hawksworth, and the boys, arrived back at Stanthorpe Place, she ordered refreshment for Hawksworth and went up to the nursery to comfort and settle the boys.

  They were tired and cranky. They did not understand why they had left their Papa behind.

  Once she took them away from Stanthorpe Place for good, which she must do, Sabrina realized that her own sons might never speak to her again. But what choice did she have? She would not remain to wait for her husband’s disgust, his eventual hate, to destroy them all.

  Sabrina found Alice and Miss Minchip in the nursery with Juliana, so she fed and cuddled her baby girl, and thanked Alice, before she went back downstairs to say goodbye to Hawksworth.

  She needed to pack herself and the children up and leave Stanthorpe Place as quickly as she could.

  If she were lucky, they could be gone before Gideon returned.

  A sob escaped her at the thought.

  * * *

  “My bachelor accommodation at Stephens Hotel on Bond Street is not fit for you and the boys,” Hawksworth said when she revealed her plan to leave. “But you can go to my townhouse. It is for sale, I have learned, but still mine, I believe. Alexandra is not there, I understand, though she would welcome you, if she were. If you truly wish to leave Stanthorpe,” Hawksworth qualified. “Which is not what I have been hearing.”

  “What do you perceive you have been hearing?”

  “That you have no choice but to leave, except that you look as if you would just as soon stay.” He smiled grimly. “Not to mention the way Stanthorpe looked when we left him. Why did we abandon him, like that,
by the way? And after he saved Rafe’s life?”

  “What do you mean about the way Gideon looked?”

  “Broken, is the way he appeared to me, as if he had lost his best friend … or his only love.”

  Another sob escaped her, and Sabrina turned away. “Ah, Hawk, what did you do to me, giving me to him, of all men?”

  “Why? What do you find so bad in Stanthorpe?” Hawksworth turned Sabrina’s gaze back toward him with a finger to her chin. “Can you not bear to look at my scars, Sabrina? Or can you not look me in the eye and say you do not love your husband?”

  Sabrina raised her chin. “It is your scars,” she lied, and then she wept in earnest, because he had winked, even as she said it. But despite his attempt at levity, she had had a glimpse of the agony deep inside him. She took to crying in earnest then, and Hawksworth held her in his arms as she did. If she could not bear the destruction of her dearest friend’s legendary perfection, how then could he?

  Sabrina wept for them both, for her children’s loss of a father, for Gideon, himself, and for her, because she would love and mourn Gideon, forever. Hawksworth, she suspected, wept as well, and they consoled each other.

  Gideon stepped into the foyer, with Doggett and Waredraper, and found his wife and her lover thus, clutching each other as if they would never let go. They were so wrapped up in their quiet embrace, Gideon brooded, that they did not even notice her invalid husband’s tardy return.

  Gideon slapped Hawksworth briskly on the back, as he passed. “Hello, old friend. Make yourself at home. Anything I can get for you? Ah yes. I almost forgot. ’Tis my wife, you want...and have.”

  Waredraper and Doggett went directly upstairs.

  Gideon stepped into his study, but remained inside the door watching Sabrina and Hawk. “I am fine,” he said. “Thank you for asking. As you said, it is only a flesh wound.” He shut the door with a decided slam.

  Sabrina shed a new bout of tears before she stepped from Hawksworth’s arms and wiped the moisture from her eyes. “Do you see what he thinks of me?”