Chapter Five
Rule Six:
Never Place Reason Before Love
Laurence had survived knife attacks, broken bones, and men who smiled while deciding where to bury him. None of it had prepared him for watching Persephone clutch that bent little hairpin like proof he’d loved her all along.
When of course he had.
Resigned, he tugged on the shirt she’d tossed to the floor, the linen still warm and deliciously fragrant from her skin, yanked his boots on his bare feet, and muscled into the first coat he grabbed, sight unseen, from his wardrobe.
He raced through the warehouse and onto the street in time to observe his brougham pulling away from the curb at a dangerous clip.
No doubt Tupper had seen the menacing look in Persephone’s eyes, and he’d asked no questions, merely followed orders.
They were scared to their bones of her, each and every one of them.
Bunt materialized from the mist to stand at his side. He was a lumbering lout of a man but bloody nimble on his feet. “Be ready to apologize to yer dying breath,” he said, reaching into his tattered coat pocket and extracting a cheroot the size of a ship’s peg.
Laurence glanced irritably at his servant. “Since when do footmen give advice?”
Bunt took a sucking draw, then let a gray billow rip past his lips. “How should I know? And being a rookery bloke yerself, how should you?”
“Good point,” Laurence murmured, wondering what to do next.
He loved Perce; he’d always loved her.
No matter his certainty that she was going to be cut dead, as she’d called it, every day after they married, he wasn’t letting her go.
He didn’t have a meaningless title, but he had money, oceans of it, and that had to make up for something in this town.
He’d merely been ruminating. Debating their options.
Talking it out in his head. He hadn’t really been about to leave her, not after spending a night in her arms, between her legs, his lips and tongue—and the rest—all over her.
His heart open, fully, for the first time in his life.
She’d done the same, been all over him. It appeared they were well-matched.
He’d been rationalizing his intent, his clear intent, to keep her despite the ruination she was soon to suffer, that was all.
It was mad, perhaps, but he liked to speak through his struggles.
He’d perhaps only wished for Persephone-blasted-Lathbury to admit, for once, that this class difference of theirs was an actual problem.
Couldn’t she have let him have his little outburst and then dragged him back to bed? Let him count the adorable freckles on her nose as he sank inside her.
That would have shut him up instantly.
“I know a shortcut to Clerkenwell your driver don’t. Grew up near there,” Bunt said, chewing on his cheroot. “Might get you to your vexed chit’s lodging first, if we leave sharp. Unaccompanied hackney across the lane there I can borrow for a bit and return quick enough.”
Laurence glanced up and down the street, taking in the typical vendors, children lingering before the chandler’s shop, dockworkers headed home for the evening.
Borrowing a conveyance for an hour or so wasn’t close to the most illegal thing he’d ever done.
And he was perfectly willing to resort to a substantial bribe if they were caught.
“Brilliant plan,” he said, following Bunt to the battered hackney, its door still bearing the ghost of a coat of arms, scraped away beneath mud and old varnish, likely a castoff of some impoverished nobleman.
“Don’t suppose you have a ring stashed away in your pocket for a romantic emergency of this sort?” his footman asked, tossing aside his cheroot before climbing onto the box seat.
Laurence hauled himself beside Bunt, one hand braced on the coach roof.
He wasn’t riding inside as they raced through the streets of London.
As it had been when he was a boy, he still wasn’t the easiest around horses and preferred to supervise their progress.
“I’d love to know where you come by such superb knowledge of women. ”
“Sisters,” Bunt said, as if this told the entire story.
Laurence practiced his apology on the jarring ride.
Bunt had indeed taken several shortcuts through deeply pitted lanes no sane driver would attempt unless forced to.
Though it was difficult to keep his mind on his speech as the vision of Persephone’s body beneath his—legs spread, fingers clawing at his shoulders as he pleasured her, throaty moans slipping from her lips—rolled repeatedly through him.
Her eyes had turned this amazing shade of gray, darker than mist, lighter than smoke, when she came.
He’d never been so intimate with anyone, not with his mind and body involved. His heart, for her and her only. There was simply no comparison.
So, he would be strong. Protect her, while keeping his temper over the social slights he knew were coming under control.
He’d beat society at their own bloody game with intellect, not brawn.
(Muscle had always been Dorsey’s side of the Rookery Rebels.) Laurence would not make it worse for the woman he loved—more than his love was already going to make it.
“Stop,” he instructed Bunt as they passed a cottage with a small garden fronting the pavement.
The flowers were lovely, pinks and yellows and a nice, bold red something.
Bunt eyed the bunch clutched in his fist with no appreciation. “Geraniums. Not roses, mind, but we’re in a hurry, and they ain’t dead.”
Laurence sighed, knowing little about flowers and less about courtship.
He made a mental note to contact the finest florist in London and fill Persephone’s cottage with blossoms. And pay a visit to the jeweler Dorsey used when one of his devotees was cross with him.
He wasn’t letting Persephone go another day without a magnificent gem on her finger, something to make the ton gasp.
He didn’t have family jewels to offer, so his eternal love and the most expensive bauble he could find that matched her perfectly would serve as a start.
Then, he would spend every moment of every day making her happy.
“Well, hell,” Laurence said when they turned onto her street only to find Tupper’s coach already sitting at the curb.
“At least we tried,” Bunt returned in a cheery tone, not realizing Laurence’s future happiness was at stake. “You’ll get marks for effort, laddie.”
Though he was thrilled to see Persephone sitting on the front steps, hands folded neatly in her lap, trying very hard to act composed.
Evidently, she’d been waiting for him, aware an apology was forthcoming, which was half his battle.
She looked a bit bedraggled—her chignon drooping, clothing in order but rumpled—in a way that made memories of the evening before swim through his mind, sending his body on high alert.
She gave the bouquet in his hand a dubious glance as he approached, but accepted the bunch with a soft sniff. “Stolen?”
“Conceivably,” he murmured, settling in beside her on the marble step.
“And the carriage?”
He hummed, wondering if his haste was going to win him points or send him back three steps. “Possibly,” he said, though Bunt racing away with a vigorous salute said the hackney was, indeed, as filched as the flowers.
Persephone pulled a red geranium free and lifted it to her nose. A gentle breeze rolled over them and carried the delicious scent of her to him. “Was this morning, on the rooftop, like those thinking spells you had as a boy? When you needed time to figure out a problem?”
He tilted his head, catching her gaze. She was smiling slightly, trying to master it, and it curved her lips until he struggled not to kiss her. “It was exactly that.”
Hooking her ankle beneath her, her skirt flowing over their legs, she turned to him. Resting her cheek on her fist, her eyes softened to liquid silver before him. “Did you find the solution?”
“Perce, sweetheart,” he whispered, reaching to cradle her cheek.
“We’re the answer. I simply needed to work it out in my mind a bit, to understand that what I knew when I was ten years old is as true today as it was then.
I love you, and I want you. I always have.
It won’t be easy, giving up your other life, but—”
Persephone captured his lips before he could finish, fingers sinking into his hair as she drew him in. “Enough,” she whispered against his lips, nails scoring his scalp.
She was more than enough. She was forever.