A little glow bloomed in the cockles of Pru’s heart. Here she’d been so ill. So afraid. So incredibly alone, and had all the time in the world to go mad with questions and anxieties over the impending arrival of a child.
She gave the hands around hers a responding squeeze. “Farah,” she tested the name. “I thank you. Truly. Anytime you would like to be so forward, I heartily encourage you.”
“Splendid!” the Countess beamed. “Next week you’re to come with me to the Duchess of Trenwyth’s to meet with our Ladies’ Aid Society. Let’s see, Lorelai, Countess Southbourne will be there. Millie LeCour.”
“The actress?” Pru marveled.
“Yes! She and her beau, Christopher Argent, live next to Trenwyth where Imogen, I mean, Her Grace, resides. Oh, Samantha and Mena are coming in from Scotland. You’ll have to excuse Samantha, as she’s American.” Farah said this as if it explained everything. “The Countess of Cursing, we call her, but once you get to know her you will be as in love with her as we all are. Mena is a delight. Never will you find a warmer Marchioness. In fact, she’ll likely adopt you as she can’t have children and will certainly angle to be godmother to Morley’s child, as she is to all of ours. Devotion is her exper—”
Pru pulled her hands away. So many names, so many titles. It was all so much. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to attend. I…I’m supposed to be in hiding, for lack of a better term. Besides, surely you agree I don’t belong in this society. I’ve no title nor prescience to bring. I’m the second-born daughter to a Baron, is all. I’m merely Chief Inspector Morley’s wife.”
For the first time, Farah’s mouth compressed with displeasure as her eyes gleamed. “My dear, no one is just Morley’s wife. He’s had a hand in everyone’s fate in that room. He’s saved more than lives, he’s saved souls. I mean, there isn’t time to regale you here, but I feel that you should come so we can all tell you the sort of husband you’re blessed with. Morley is and has always been a remarkable man. We’ve all speculated and even schemed to get him a wife. I’m unutterably glad he’s found you.”
Grief threatened to bubble over in her chest in the form of a sob. “If you know of our situation, then you know this is not a love match.”
Farah suddenly became very serious. “May I call you Prudence?”
“Pru, please.”
“Pru… you’ve done what I was certain no woman in the world could do.”
“What’s that?”
“You’ve distracted Carlton Morley from his unimpeachable principles. I think, in time, you’ll come to know what a Sisyphean feat that was.”
Pru shook her head, unable to understand.
Farah seemed to debate something internally, then said, “Morley and I had a working relationship for longer than five years, and a flirtatious companionship. It took him those five years to drum up the nerve to kiss me. You felled him in five minutes! You, my dear, are the temptation he needs. You will force some happiness upon him, I think, and it’s the only way, as he will fight you tooth and nail. But he is the best of men, he deserves every happiness.”
Prudence didn’t allow herself to close her eyes, because every time she did, she saw her husband’s lips on Farah Blackwell’s.
And she desperately wanted to like the woman.
“Why didn’t you marry him?” The question surprised Pru more than it did Farah, it seemed. “I mean, when he asked you. What made you refuse?”
Farah gave a nonchalant shrug, her expression rather wistful. “My heart always belonged to Dorian. It’s as simple as that. He never had a chance. I never once regretted my decision, but I won’t hide from you the fact that I will always be fond of Carlton. That I respect and admire him. Everyone does. Even my husband, who was once on the wrong side of the law. For all Carlton postures, he’s an exceedingly fair and understanding man. He’s not without his own past, you know.”
That intrigued her. “What past?”
Serious conversation preceded boots as the men climbed the stairs, announcing their inevitable invasion of the parlor.
“I will leave that for him to tell you,” Farah said mysteriously.
This time it was Prudence who reached out and clung to Farah’s hand as if it were a lifeline. “I don’t know that he will…I don’t know him at all. I’m so lost. Please, if you have any information. Any insight…I…”
Farah regarded her indecisively. “I promised I will, and I shall impart to you everything I can. Come to us next week. You’ll learn all that we know, I vow—”
It was Blackwell who barged in first. “What ho, wife? We’ve the unfortunate need to leave now to meet my brothers’ train. I’ve brought the second carriage to contain either Ravencroft’s shoulders or Gavin’s ego. I’ll allow them to fight over it.”
Pru gawked at the man. If Blackwell thought Ravencroft large, the man must be a giant.
He bowed to Pru. “It was an unmitigated pleasure to meet you, Lady Morley. Please call upon us for the smallest thing.”
“Thank you.”
Farah gave her another impulsive hug before releasing her with a blustery noise. “The smallest thing. I really mean it.”
They saw themselves out, and took a whirlwind with them.
Prudence watched her husband peer at the empty doorframe as though contemplating the emptiness he found there.
Did he also note the easy way Blackwell put his possessive hand on his wife’s waist? How he walked in deference to her. His every muscle seeming attuned to her movements, her protection, her needs.
Did it make him envious? Or melancholy, like her.
Eventually, he flicked a glance at her as if surprised to still find her there.
“It was very kind of the Countess to come,” she ventured. “She was…very solicitous. Gave me the name of a good doctor.”
He gave the illusion of a nod. “Farah is a good woman,” he said carefully.
As opposed to herself?
Pru stared at him, doing her best not to appreciate how the cut of his vest hugged his narrow waist, flattering the width of his chest and shoulders, the breadth of his back.
A back she’d once clung to in spasms of bliss.
Her fingers curled at the memory.
He was right there. So close to her. She could reach out to him and touch the body that’d once rode her like an untamed stallion, wild and rhythmic and powerful.
His lips had tasted the most secret parts of her. His eyes had burned with lust. His features softened with worship. Tightened with pleasure. Tortured with hunger.
And now?
Nothing. He was so remote. So empty. Bleak.
Where are you? She wanted to shout. To throw things. To rant and rave at him until he bloody cracked the mountain of ice between them. Who are you? What have you done with my lover?
He turned abruptly, as if he’d heard her silent screams. But the question in his eyes quickly flickered out, replaced by that infuriating civility.
“It’s a chilly night,” he said. “I’ve had a bath sent to your room.”
So thoughtful. The ponce. “Thank you,” she gritted out.
He nodded, looked as if he might say something else, and then thought the better of it. “Good evening.”
He left her in her puddle of her own frustrated loneliness, possibly to pine for the woman who’d gotten away.
Chapter 12
Morley let himself into the nursery and shut the door, leaning against it for several breaths.
With all he had on his mind, one simple fact existed in the world, crowding out all others.
His wife bathed only paces away. She’d lowered that soft body into the steaming copper tub and slicked soap across creamy, unblemished, aristocratic skin. Her breasts would lift above the water as she washed her luxuriant hair. Her thighs would relax apart, her hands perhaps finding their way between them to…
The bundle he’d clutched in his hand crumpled beneath the clench of his fist, and the product inside provided a much-ne
eded distraction.
He tore the package open with uncharacteristic lack of ceremony, and went to the rocking chair, crouching to place the intricately carved train engine next to the doll.
He fantasized about the train given locomotion by a chubby little hand. A boy, perhaps. But maybe a girl. He and Caroline had spent hours playing trains with some charity toys they’d found at the church once.
So long as he capitulated to Caroline’s demand that the conductors fell in love with the women they’d rescued from the marauding bandits, then she was a fair hand at the battle, itself. Just as bloodthirsty as any outlaw.
He touched the gold of the doll’s hair and took a moment to keenly miss the girl with whom he’d shared a womb. She’d be an aunt now, probably a mother, too. They’d each be forty in a year, or so he thought. No one had ever told them their precise birthday, but he’d pieced it together as well as he could.
Caroline.
How different the landscape of so many lives would be if she’d lived.
Morley might have still been a rifleman in the army, but it was unlikely he would ever have considered the beat at The London Metropolitan Police.
So many others would have carved a different story in the book of fate if not for the choices he’d made.
Perhaps their lives were arguably better for the path Caroline’s death put him on, but what he never expressed to his friends was that, in his darkest moments, he’d have taken it all away from them just to have her back. To give her the chance at life. To leave him any kind of family.
So he wouldn’t have spent the past twenty odd years so acutely alone.
Perhaps, he’d often reasoned, if she’d been there, he’d not be so bloody broken.
He’d become the man he pretended to be. A better man.
Today, this moment, was the first time he shrank from that thought.
If it had all gone differently, he might have married young. He might have even sired children.
But not this child.
Not whomever quickened within the womb of his lovely wife.
His hand went to his heart to contain an extra little thump at the thought.
Children were born every day. Thousands upon thousands of them. It was no great happening or miracle. But he couldn’t shake the feeling his entire life had led up to this. This child.
If Caroline had lived, this child might never have come to be.
And, for the first time, while he still mourned her loss, he couldn’t bring himself to wish as he had before.
Beset by a complicated amalgamation of regret and love, shame and anticipation, he pushed himself to his feet and set about tidying up the disorderly packing material in the nursery.
It seemed impossible that his wife’s scent lingered even here, but he tasted it in the air. Berries. Sweetest in the late summer. She’d forever remind him of breakfast. His favorite meal until he’d feasted upon her—
Slamming a crate shut, he realized he couldn’t be only a wall away from where she bathed without going mad. He retreated to his study, intent upon getting some work done.
By God. She was in here too. The walls might as well have been smeared with marmalade. She permeated every corner of his thoughts, and now there was nowhere in his house to escape her.
Slumping into his office chair he dropped his head onto his palm and rubbed at a blooming headache. God he was tired again. He’d not slept for longer than three hours for… well, he couldn’t remember how long.
And it didn’t seem that would change in the near future.
Blackwell and he had conceived of a plan to concentrate their investigative efforts on the Wapping docks. His interrogation of the crooked officer the other night had been the first link in a supply line of narcotics, and other smuggled goods, that was more twisted and dangerous than the web of the most venomous spider. Morley, or rather the Knight of Shadows, had been spinning his own webs, beating answers out of countless men. Throwing them to what police he’d known still operated aboveboard.
Or, in some of the cases where he’d been forced to defend himself… throwing their corpses into the river.
All fingers pointed to the Commissioner, Baron Clarence Goode.
His bloody father-in-law.
However, the shipments had dried up entirely. Abruptly, in fact. And because of this, crime wars brewed in the gambling dens and rookeries of the underworld, and Morley couldn’t be certain the city was ready for what was about to hit it.
Or how many casualties the impact would leave behind.
Christ. He was just one man. Who could he trust to—?
A few heavy, staggering sounds reverberated on the ceiling above him before a great, thunderous crash drove him to his feet.
The master bedroom. His wife!
Feeling as though he’d been kicked in the chest by an unruly horse, he took the stairs three at a time, sprinting down the hall until he exploded through the door, shearing the latch.
His very shaken, very nude wife was attempting to pull herself into a sitting position from where she’d sprawled on her back, using a toppled marble table to stabilize her.
He lunged forward. “Don’t move,” he barked in the same commanding voice he’d used on countless criminals.
She’d already frozen when he’d burst in, but his words had the opposite effect, sending her scrambling to find something with which to cover herself. “Oh, bother,” she groaned. “I-I don’t… I’m all right. I just need—need a towel. Please. Please go.”
“Don’t be foolish,” he admonished as he hit his knees next to her, his hands hovering over the slick, lithe lines of her prone form, searching for injuries. “What the bloody hell happened?” he demanded. “Did you hit your head? Is anything broken? Can you move all your limbs? No, never mind, don’t try to move. I’m calling for a doctor. Bart?” he bellowed. “Where the bloody hell is he? Did no one hear you fall hard enough to shake the house? Bart!”
“No!” She seized his shirt when he would have risen with one desperate claw, keeping the other arm ineffectually over her breasts. “I don’t want anyone to see me!”
“If he sees you, I’ll replace his eyes with hot coals. I’m calling him to send him for the doctor.”
“I don’t need a doctor. I am perfectly well, I simply—”
“You don’t get to make that decision, a slip like this is serious, especially in your condition! Must you fall so bloody often? I order you to take more care with your footing!”
He put his hands on both her shoulders to keep her still as she tried again to sit up. His grip slid as her still-slippery limbs flailed in a wild attempt to fight him off.
After a few slick and ineffectual endeavors, he succeeded in pinning her arms at her sides, leaving her gleaming body completely bared to him.
He resolutely examined only her eyes, as he leaned above her. They held no indication of the clouds one noted with a head wound. In fact, they sparked with dark azure tempests that would make Calypso proud.
“I didn’t slip, exactly,” she protested with a mulish expression.
“No? Then tell me how, exactly, you came to be on the floor.”
Long, dark lashes swept down over damp cheeks flushed with heat. “I… finished my bath, stood, and stepped out of the tub to reach for the towel. By the time I had one foot on the ground I was overwhelmed by extreme vertigo and thought to steady myself on the table.” A confused frown pinched between her brow as she looked over at the fallen furniture . “I must have fainted, because the next thing I knew I was on my back staring up at the ceiling.”
“I suspect you’re truly addled if you think anything you just imparted to me makes me feel a modicum of comfort,” he gritted through his teeth. “You and the child must be all right; do you understand me? You lie here. I will get a doctor. And he will examine you thoroughly. That is the end of this ridiculous discussion.”
He would have said more, but all the words had compressed the air out of his lungs, and he couldn’t se
em to fill them. His hands trembled where they shackled her arms and the legs he knelt on felt too unsteady to hold their position for long.
It had been years since his body showed such obvious signs of terror. Maybe since his very first battle when bullets missed him so narrowly, he could hear them sing by his ear.
Lord, but she was a weakness.
Instead of arguing, she lifted her palms to his chest, this time in careful conciliation. Her expression softened, warmed, and something pooled in her eyes that evoked inappropriate memories of the last time he’d held her beneath him.
“I’m not being reckless, you know. I often feel faint after a hot bath, and because our child is possessed of a finicky appetite, I haven’t been eating as I should. Certainly, that’s the cause of this spell.” Her lovely features gathered into a twist of self-effacing mortification. “I dare say I crumpled rather than fell, and landed on my back, not my stomach.”
His heart kicked beneath her hand, and he grappled with fierce and foreign emotion that stole his ability to speak.
“Is it your aim for the doctor to examine me in a shivering, naked puddle on the floor?” she asked with an arch of her brow.
Morley’s jaw slammed shut. Now was not the time to notice her nudity. This was quite possibly a medical crisis.
He refused to glance down at her breasts.
He glanced.
He refused to look.
He looked.
Well he refused to appreciate.
Goddammit.
Lunging to his feet, he snatched the towel from the stand and returned to her, averting his eyes as he covered the more scandalous parts of her before crouching down again. “I’m going to carry you to the bed,” he warned.
“I’m quite capable of—ooph!”
He scooped her from the floor and hauled her against his chest as her bare legs dangled over his arm. The towel covered the front of her, but there was nothing between her skin and his hands as he hauled her to the bed and sat her down gingerly.
“Sir?” Bart called from the end of the hall. “What’s happened?”
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