Chapter One
Rule Two:
Never Search for the Girl in the Woman
Laurence was jittery, his mind far from the ledgers spread across his cousin’s desk.
Something was off this morning, a charge in the air or some damned thing.
Maybe it was the storm dragging grimy streaks down the office’s windowpanes or the distant roll of thunder shaking the door on its hinges.
Scrubbing at the back of his neck, he got up to prowl the small space.
Two months ago, they’d relocated the Rookery Rebels’ administrative headquarters from Spitalfields to more proper environs on Lombard Street, just down from Bland the tiny scar cutting through her eyebrow from when she’d fallen off a horse; the crooked smile; those lips (which he’d tried not to notice at the last), all there in a more curvaceous, slightly taller package.
He didn’t catch her eyes because her face was downturned, but he recalled them well enough: luminous, the shade of a shilling held to candlelight.
There was also no mistaking the staggering wave of emotion that nearly took him under.
He’d not been this close to her—a mere five feet—in twelve, no, thirteen years.
There’d been two instances, one not long after he left Yorkshire, when he’d almost raced after her into a shop on Bond Street; another, at the fucking opera, a winter or ten later, when he’d simply felt a dull ache like one would where an appendage used to be.
Though he’d gotten into a drunken brawl later that night, proving how much he secretly missed her and how real that wound was.
However, this situation provided no means of escape. She needed rescuing, once a foolish fantasy. She’d been the first person to care about him—sometimes he feared the only—and…
Oh, hell, he decided and shoved two men aside to get to her. Whatever came after “and” didn’t really matter now, did it? The chasm between had become an abyss.
When he reached her, Laurence made the impulsive decision to act as her footman, though he was dressed closer to how her father might be.
He likely used the same tailor—they all did—and she was almost as infamous as him, it seemed, so he had to do something to get her out of there.
Already, her sleeve was ripped and dangling from its seam, her silly little bonnet askew.
Around her, the crowd pressed in on all sides, a wild crush of damp silk, raised voices, and books thrust into the air.
Some wanted her signature, calling her brilliant, daring, bold.
Others looked ready to flay her alive for the same offense, demanding to know how much of it was true, what else she knew.
“Sign mine!” one woman shrieked, while a red-faced man barked, “You ought to be ashamed, madam.” Another waved a copy over his head as if it were evidence in a trial.
Persephone looked less like an author at a publication event than a woman about to be torn apart by the very people who’d made her a sensation.
“My lady, the carriage is just down the way,” Laurence said, slipping into his childhood accent instead of the polished inflection he’d worked ruthlessly to perfect.
His heart gave a kick—an unwelcome jolt—when Persephone turned, a bit breathless but otherwise calm, and regarded him as she would a domestic escort and not the boy she’d begged to be her forever friend. “Of course,” she said, her dewy silver eyes nothing less than the glory he remembered.
On the way down the street, the storm soaking them through, with him shoving bodies aside by brute force and her whacking the occasional bystander with her parasol, he guessed they were a sight.
When they reached his carriage, he all but tossed her inside without a hint of finesse, gave his driver her father’s address, then climbed in behind her.
Reaching up, irritated and not entirely certain why, Laurence pounded on the roof to alert them to move before anyone scrambled in behind him trying to get to her.