Seducing a Stranger: Goode Girls Book 1 and Victorian Rebels Book 7 (A Goode Girls Romance)

by Kerrigan Byrne

  She clung to him, listening to his words as they rumbled in his chest, grasping onto them like a life preserver thrown to her before she drowned beneath her despair.

  “There, darling.” He pressed his mouth to her brow. “You weep as you like. I have you.”

  Yes. He had her. She was utterly his.

  Could she claim the same tenure?

  “I-I’m not weeping,” she declared, as an order to herself to cease more than anything.

  “Of course not, dear,” he said solicitously.

  “I mean. I d-don’t ever,” she said around hitches of breath. “I’m-I’m not a hysterical p-person. But I can’t seem to s-stop. I—I—” She hiccupped loudly and could feel his smile against her hair.

  “Sweetheart,” he rumbled. “Not only are you going through what is likely the most difficult trial of your life, you’re also with child.” He pulled her back so he could look down at her with infinite tenderness, before brushing at her sodden cheeks with his thumb. “I should not have said that about your family,” he repeated. “I was…aggravated by your distress, that’s all.”

  “You’ve every right to curse them. I’m disenchanted with them as well. Here I thought them almost too righteous, and it turns out the entire lot could be crooked but for the twins.” Her chin wobbled as a new wave of gloom assaulted her enough to push away from him. “God, how you must regret me. I’ve brought such chaos to your orderly life. Surely you wish we’d never—”

  He caught her, pulling her back into the protective circle of his arms, this time having produced a handkerchief. “Stop it,” he ordered against her temple as he pressed little kisses of consolation there. “Don’t think like that.”

  “How can I not when—”

  He distracted her by looping the handkerchief over his finger and tracing the corners of her mouth where the tears had run, then along her jaw, beside her nose, and gently across her cheeks. He feathered cool, wine-scented kisses across her swollen eyelids and against her heated forehead.

  “Would it make you feel better to know my family would put yours to shame?” he asked, injecting a bit of levity into his voice.

  She gave a delicate sniff, and then a heartier one. “A little,” she admitted as he surrendered the handkerchief to her so she could blow her nose. “You’ve never spoken of your family,” she realized, with no little amount of chagrin. She’d never inquired about them. “Where do they live?”

  “They don’t,” he answered in an even, nonchalant tone that asked for no pity. “My mother died not long after our births, and my father drank himself to death a handful of years thereafter, but not before making life miserable for my sister and me.”

  She lifted her chin to look at him, finding his expression distorted by her watery confusion. “You have a sister?”

  “I do. I…did. A twin. Caroline.”

  “A twin,” she breathed, her heart softened by the way he’d said her name, and then skewered by the use of the past tense. She tried to imagine Mercy without Felicity—or vice versa—and her eyes threatened to summon a storm the likes of which they’d not yet seen. “Can you tell me…what happened to her?”

  He looked down at her for a long time, and she met his gaze with silent encouragement. This was like the doors in their home. This was what he’d kept locked away from her, this pain shimmering in his eyes, radiating from his body and fragmenting his soul.

  After an eternity, his lips parted and he revealed to her what she understood he’d not been prepared to impart in the carriage.

  She stood in the circle of his arms as he took a sledgehammer to the shards of her already broken heart. He told her about two children shivering on the cold cobbles, stealing their food and necessary supplies. Of hoping his sister would marry his best mate. Of his desperation and disappointment when she’d turned to the profession of so many to provide for herself what he, an ignorant thief, could not.

  He recounted the violent day of Caroline’s death in vague and broken detail, though whether for her benefit or his, she couldn’t be sure. His eyes remained dry. Distant. As if he recounted the horrible tale of someone else’s sister’s cruel murder.

  Pru was a puddle of emotion again when he ran out of words. The story didn’t even exactly seem over and yet he just…stopped abruptly.

  Much like Caroline’s life had, before it had truly begun.

  This time, when she buried her face against his chest, she plunged her arms around his waist, holding him close to her, wishing to impart all the solace she possibly could.

  He stood still for a moment, stiff and unsure, before heaving out a kept breath, and dropping his cheek to rest on her hair.

  He relaxed against her, allowing her to take some of his weight as they propped each other up, creating a creature of more strength for the sharing of their collective burdens.

  “To think,” she said. “You could have drowned in that pain. Could have let it own you. But you chose to rise, instead, to become this…this miraculous, extraordinary man—”

  Abruptly, he drew back, lifting a finger to press against her lips lest she say anything kinder. His eyes were still shuttered, opaque with uncertainty bordering on anxiety. As if he still hadn’t come to a decision. “I didn’t tell you to gain your sympathy nor your admiration,” he said before casting a furtive glance around the garden, finding only bees noisily eavesdropping on the last blossoms of lavender before autumn stole their bloom.

  “I told you because I want you to know that…you’re not the only one in this marriage with damning secrets.”

  Prudence shook her head, not understanding. “I have no secre—”

  “I killed him.” The confession hung in the air like a cold blade, waiting to slice them apart. “The man who hurt my sister, who looked into her eyes as they dulled and died. I found him, I cut his throat, and watched as his blood soaked my hands.” He released her then, stepping away to show her his rough palms as if the stain remained. “He was a watchmaker, some nobody, who liked to hurt women. Girls. Who thought they deserved it.” His voice broke for a moment, and he looked away, not in agony, but apparent disgust for a human he’d helped out of this world and into the next.

  “Dorian was nabbed for theft that night, which provided me a getaway, and I showed up on Vicar Applewhite’s doorstep. He granted me sanctuary. He washed the blood from my hands, much as I did for you the day I proposed.”

  “My God.” Prudence stood as if her shoes had been welded to the cobbles. Her husband had just confessed a murder to her. The Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard. He’d killed the man who’d raped and murdered his sister in cold blood.

  So why wasn’t she horrified? Or angry? Why did she still want to take him—and that grubby, starving adolescent he’d been—and rock him in her arms until she’d soothed away that pain? Confounded as she was by the truth, it took her a moment to process his next sentence.

  “I revealed this to you as an olive branch,” he said earnestly. “No, a commiseration. We’re not so different, you and me. You see, revenge isn’t only a human trait, but a universal one. Justice is our society’s way to punish crimes, but when there is no justice, it’s natural to seek vengeance—”

  She jerked away from him so violently, his hands were still outstretched as she retreated a few steps to the corner of the garden.

  “Yes, we are different,” she insisted, her trembling intensifying again, but for an entirely different reason than before. “We are absolutely different.”

  He stared at her, his head cocked to the side in almost doglike befuddlement.

  “You avenged your sister’s death, and I do not think I condemn you for that. But I…” She clasped both her hands to her chest. “I did not. I’m innocent of any and all crimes but the one you and I perpetrated together in that garden.”

  She wanted to cry again, but, it seemed, she’d been wrung out of tears. Now, all she had left was a raw and open wound where her heart used to reside, one that ached and stung with every breath.
“The fact that you still think I’m guilty is more disappointing than the condemnation of every paper and person in the whole of the empire. Don’t you see?” She shook her head, knowing that, even now, her husband’s mind, his heart, was closed to her. “I could face all this, every last individual I know and love turning their backs on me, if I could only hope that you believed me.”

  He stepped forward, reaching for her until she held up a hand against him.

  “What I’m telling you, Prudence, is that it doesn’t matter what I believe,” he said fiercely, gesturing with fervent, sharp swipes of his hand. “It doesn’t matter what happened in that room, I’m taking your side. Come what may, you have every tool at my disposal, every cent to my name, and every ounce of my power, influence, and expertise. I will get you out of this, you have my word.”

  “And I thank you for that, but does it not destroy you to do so? Should you not only take up my defense if I am worthy of it? You don’t know that I’m innocent.”

  “And I don’t bloody care!” he roared. “I’m telling you, dammit, that I would do anything for you. Do you understand? I would take responsibility on my own shoulders if I thought it would help. I would bring back the bastard and kill him, myself. I would commit perjury for you, Prudence, hell I’m afraid I’d commit murder if you asked me—”

  “But I wouldn’t. I. Would. Never!” She threw her arms up and turned away from him, pacing toward the fountain, wishing the sound of the water didn’t bring up memories of the night they’d met. “All I ask, is that you find out who killed George and clear my name.”

  She felt him behind her, a looming shadow of conflicted torment. “Why are you angry?” he asked in a hoarse and ragged whisper.

  “Because you don’t trust me,” she told the fountain, unable to look at him. “I’m sorry but you can’t imagine how frustrating that is.”

  “Please,” he beseeched her. “Try to understand, Prudence. I want you. I…am fond of you. Christ, you’re the mother of my child and I believe we’re building something of a life here. But in my line of work, it matters not what you believe. It matters what you can prove. The feelings I have for you would already influence the outcome of any investigation, and that’s a liability I’ve decided to live with.”

  “How altruistic of you.” With his every word, the wound in her heart began to stitch together. Not with a balming comfort, but with glacial sort of frigidity. She’d begun to erect her own fortifications, it seemed, so she didn’t bleed out entirely right here in the middle of the midday meal.

  And still he went on. “Try to appreciate the chance I took becoming your spouse. A woman I’d met only once in a reckless encounter. One with a knife in her hand and the blood of her would-be husband soaking her. Had we never met before. Had we not…” He trailed away with a brutal noise. “I have to look at the evidence, Prudence, and when it’s all laid out in front of me, there is only one conclusion to be drawn from it.”

  “That I’m a murderer.” She spun on him, her fists clenched at her sides. “Is that why you don’t sleep in my bed? Why you lock the door to your rooms and to the nursery? To keep yourself safe from me, your mad, murderer of a wife?”

  He made a helpless gesture as his eyes darted away. “Come now, that isn’t fair. I can’t rightly say…”

  “Then wrongly say!” she spat. “You’re afraid I might, what, sneak into your rooms and murder you in your sleep?”

  “Not afraid, per se. I just felt it necessary to maintain a certain amount of distance.”

  “Ugh!” Picking up her skirts, she fled around the fountain, hurtling herself toward the door. It was all too much. The scandal, his revelations, confessions, hypocrisy, and concessions. Every emotion she’d ever named swirled within her until she felt as though she might detonate into a million plumes of volcanic ash. “I can’t look at you.”

  His footsteps followed her. “Where do you think you are going?”

  “To Trenwyth’s.”

  “Wait.” He seized her wrist, his grip careful but firm. “It’s not safe. I thought we’d agreed you weren’t—”

  “You agreed!” She whirled on him, turning the full force of a mounting rage against him. “You’ve done nothing but make decisions for me since the beginning. And I’ve been so solicitous, haven’t I? Because I needed to be grateful. Because I needed you to trust me. To help me. To save me. Because something awoke in me the night we met, and I fell a little in love with you then. The very moment I landed in your arms.” She swiped at angry new tears as she twisted her wrist out of his grasp.

  “But you’ve taught me that love is not possible without trust, and trust is not possible without proof, so…” She made a frustrated gesture before returning her hands to clench at her sides. “Here we are. I’m leaving now so you can be about your work. Go, Chief Inspector Carlton Morley, go find my measure.”

  “Prudence—” He lifted his hands, but she swept away from his reach.

  “Don’t,” was all she said as she retreated through the door to escape in a hansom.

  He didn’t.

  Chapter 16

  I fell a little in love with you.

  Her words haunted Morley as he followed Pru’s hackney to the Duke of Trenwyth’s spectacular white stone Belgravia mansion, and watched from a discreet distance as she went inside. They plagued him for several restless hours as he endeavored to focus on something, anything else. No amount of training, paperwork, reading, or investigation could silence the admission.

  In love.

  Every document he examined blurred beneath the image of the abysmal wells of pain in her eyes. The wounded expression that’d precipitated her anger. Wounds he’d carelessly, selfishly inflicted.

  What a fool he’d been, having such a conversation after the disaster with the article. She was disconsolate, and he’d been awash in his own recollected grief and loss to handle that moment with the aplomb it had called for. He’d spoken in haste and had said every wrong thing he possibly could have.

  If marriage had a dunce cap, he’d be in the corner for weeks, his nose against the wall.

  Agitated, he attempted any number of pastimes, wishing to calm the need to crawl out of his own skin. Crawl on his knees to her and beg her forgiveness.

  He watched every minute go by, aching for her to return. Wishing she’d not sought comfort elsewhere, but also recognizing her need for a separation from him.

  She was in one of the safest places in the city apart from home, among the wives of the most dangerous and protective men he could think of besides himself.

  An eternal evening gave way to nightfall, and when he could stand it no longer, Morley punched his fists into the sleeves of his jacket, and struck out on foot toward Belgravia, keeping his eye on the traffic for her.

  Trenwyth’s imposing house was ablaze with light as Morley chanced to meet his prodigal best mate striding up the walk for, presumably, the same reason. To escort his Countess home.

  Ash, Lord Southbourne, put his cane to his hat and saluted him with a piratical grin. “Look at us, Morley,” he commiserated with a devilish tone. “As boys, did you ever in a million years dream we’d claim the West End as our neighborhood, casually fetching our high-born wives to take back to our manor houses to swive them like the common perverts we are?”

  “Never in a million years.” Morley couldn’t even bring himself to pretend to enjoy the Earl of Southbourne’s charismatic irreverence. He very much doubted this night would go in that direction with his own high-born wife.

  He didn’t merit it.

  “I saw the papers today, Cutter,” Ash said, sweeping him with an observant look bordering with as much filial concern as the shark-eyed pirate could muster. “How is she? How goes the investigation?”

  Seeing no point in correcting the man regarding his name, Morley lifted his hand to the back of his tense neck and squeezed, trying to summon an answer.

  He was saved from doing so by the doors being nearly yanked from their hinges, r
evealing a frowning Farah Blackwell backlit by enough lanterns to give the impression of a heraldic halo of an archangel.

  Apparently, one on the warpath.

  “Carlton Morley, you incomparable idiot,” she declared, planting her fists on the hips of her violet gown.

  Morley winced. He might have known the women would rally against him.

  It was what he deserved.

  “Oh my,” Ash turned to him, his dark brows crawling up his forehead in surprise, and no little amount of delight. “I’m dying to hear this.”

  “You told your pregnant wife you thought she might try to murder you in your sleep?” she nearly shrieked.

  Ash gasped, pressing his hand to his chest. “Morley!”

  Standing a few steps on the landing beneath where Farah seethed down at him, Morley squinted up, thinking that her words sounded a bit slurred and her eyes over bright.

  “No!” he said reflexively, and then realized he was wrong. “That is, I didn’t deny—”

  “I have never been so disappointed in someone in my entire life,” Farah scolded.

  “I know your husband, Lady Blackwell,” Ash jested. “I very much doubt that.”

  Emitting a cavernous sigh, Morley nodded, intent upon taking his lashes. “Invite me in, Farah, and I’ll make amends.”

  “I think not!” she snapped. “You’ll stand out there where you belong and explain yourself, or you’ll turn right around and go home.”

  “But…” He looked to Ash for help, and found only avid, ill-concealed enjoyment. “This isn’t even your residence. Is Lady Trenwyth in there?”

  She held out her hand against him with the judgement of St. Peter, himself. “You do not want to cross paths with the women in that house right now, Morley, as you are speaking to the only one who feels a modicum of compassion for you at the moment.”

  “Don’t go in there, old boy,” Ash said out of the side of his mouth. “There are plenty of banisters from which to lynch you. Best you run and change your name…again.”

  Shoulders slumping, Morley climbed the last few stairs to stand at least eye level with his accuser. “Let me preface this with the fact that I realize I handled the situation poorly.”