Epilogue
ST. JOHN’S WOOD
Two weeks had passed since the rain-slicked Oxford road, since the lead ball had almost taken him.
Two weeks of agonizing, suffocating confinement inside St. John’s Wood, watching London’s most elusive midnight avenger transform into a restless, brooding patient who pouted and guilted his wife into ices and Cocoa despite the doctor’s fervent orders.
Blinking against the gold afternoon light, Emma surfaced from a sleep she’d not meant to fall into. She had taken the bedside chair after luncheon with a book of verse in her lap, meaning only to sit with him a while. Somewhere between one stanza and the next, her cheek had slipped to the coverlet.
With a crick in her neck, she lifted to stretch it away but went very still.
Vincent lay where she’d settled him that morning, sunk against the bolster, the linen binding pale where his nightshirt had fallen open.
She let her gaze wander him the way she rarely let herself these past weeks.
The inky waves of his hair spilled black against the white pillow, mussed from too many days abed. The hard, proud slant of his cheekbones and the jaw gone shadowed and dark with stubble made him look like a felled god.
Below his open collar lay the broad chest she’d stitched and sponged and wept over in the small hours of the night and the dark hair scattered down past the bandage and vanished beneath the sheet at his hips, where his arousal bloomed…
When she eventually dragged up her eyes, he’d caught her looking with a devilish smirk.
Oh dear… how long has he been watching?
“You ought to have woken me,” she blushed, her words husky.
Vincent’s hand dragged up, slow with the pull it cost his ribs, and his knuckles grazed her cheek. “And lose the only view worth having in this wretched room? Not a chance, pet.”
The graze sent heat licking down her throat. She caught his hand to still it, but he turned it and pressed his thumb to her lower lip until it parted, and the dark want in his gaze set her pulse pounding low.
That look undid her every time.
“You keep drifting from me,” he murmured, reading her with terrifying ease. “Where to?”
“I… I keep going back to that road,” Emma whispered, completely unable to meet his eyes. “I shut my eyes, and I’m… I’m kneeling in the mud all over again. You won’t wake, no matter what I do…
“You stepped in front of that pistol for James. You barely even knew my brother, yet you put yourself between him and a bullet without hesitating. I still cannot make heads or tails of you, Vincent.”
Vincent didn’t blink. Shuffling to prop himself back onto the pillows with some pain, he murmured, “But he is your brother.” As though it were the simplest of explanations in the world.
Curling a finger beneath her chin, he raised her eyes to his, “And I would do it again, Emma. I love you too much to allow hardship to enter your life again.”
“But-but what if you—”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” He smiled comfortingly, then winced as he reached for her waist. “Awake. And I’ve spent fifteen cursed days flat on my back thinking of nothing but getting my hands on my wife.”
The words slid hot down her spine. “And you will wait fifteen days longer if you keep speaking like that,” Emma laughed into her tears. “You’re meant to be mending.”
“Come here and mend me yourself,” he chuckled raspily. His hand slid to her nape, fingers threading her hair, drawing her down by inches.
“Vincent—your ribs—”
“Mind them, then.” His mouth grazed the corner of hers. “And nothing else.”
She meant to be careful. Truly. But then his lips caught hers, and the last thread of restraint snapped. She kissed him deep, his tongue sweeping past her lips until her head swam, and the familiar taste of him flooded through her; warm, dark, and faintly laced with the bitter willow-bark draught.
Emma pressed her palm flat against his chest, her heart slamming violently against her ribs as she felt his own pulse hammer under her fingers. Meanwhile, his hand dragged up the curve of her waist, and she sank over him, careful of the binding even as everything between her thighs went molten.
His palm closed over her breast through the thin muslin, and she gasped into his mouth.
He kneaded slow, his thumb circling the stiffened peak until a broken sound tore out of her and her fingers curled into the bare warmth of his shoulder.
He was all heat and want beneath her, and every careful intention she’d carried to this bedside burned to nothing.
“Emma,” he rasped against her throat, teeth dragging down the tender line of it, “the things I would do for you…”
His thin voice reminded her of the stitches, the wound, the hundred things that could go wrong.
She wrenched back, both palms flat to the unhurt span of his chest. “We can’t,” she breathed but stayed close, her forehead resting against his as they both breathed hard. “You’ll tear the wound, and then where will we be?”
A groan ground out of him and his head fell back against the bolster. “You are a cruel woman, duchess.”
“I’m a sensible one.” She pressed a kiss to the corner of his jaw and made herself rise, smoothing her rumpled skirts with hands that wouldn’t quite steady. “And we have half the people we love arriving by dusk.”
Vincent let out a low, defeated groan against the pillows. “Must we have the whole of England round for dinner tonight?”
“Vincent.” At the door she glanced back, her cheeks still aflame, and let him see her smile. “Mend quickly, my love. And I might just make the waiting worth your while.”
“You have that look about you again,” Charlotte noted while plucking a sprig of clover from the verge. “The one that says your duke kept you up half the night with his pacing.”
“His limping, you mean,” Emma corrected with a sigh. “Dr. Fraser swore he’d be right as rain in a week, and here we are at past a fortnight, and the man still cannot climb the stairs without grumbling like a bear with a sore paw.”
“A bear with a sore paw, on his land of forty thousand acres and an income of eighty thousand a year,” Charlotte said dryly. “Forgive me if I don’t weep into my handkerchief.”
Emma bit back a laugh. The St. John’s Wood lands rolled out before them, green and glistening from the morning’s drizzle, the elms along the far line still dripping.
It was a far cry from the cramped little house in Bloomsbury, with its fraying rugs and the chicken coop she’d tended with her own two hands.
And to think I once swore I’d sooner wed a chimney sweep than that man.
“You didn’t answer me, you know,” Charlotte pressed on, twirling the clover. “About the papers.”
Emma stiffened despite herself. “What about them?”
“Oh, don’t play the green girl with me. The Phantom of the Great Wen, unmasked at last,” Charlotte recited, arching a brow. “Half of London swears it is your husband. The other half says it is a Bow Street fabrication to sell broadsheets. So… which is it?”
Pursing her lips, Emma stared resolutely ahead. “I’m sure I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking of.”
“Hm. And I’m sure you are the worst liar in all of England,” Charlotte chuckled. “Your ears have gone redder than a beetroot!”
“Lottie!”
“I shan’t breathe a word, you goose. I never have.” Sobering, her friend bumped her shoulder gently. “Though I confess I’m glad for you that he’s hung up the ghoulish mask, whatever the truth of it. A husband who scales rooftops at midnight makes for a very nervous wife.”
“He is done with all that,” Emma said quietly, and the relief of it still felt new on her tongue.
“He’s given it over to Earl Blackhill. Keaton means to see the men who harmed his family answer for their crimes the proper way—through the courts and the magistrate, not over some balustrade in the dead of night. ”
At the mention of the earl, a most peculiar thing happened. Charlotte, who had a retort for every occasion since the cradle, suddenly found the clover in her hand to be a thing of profound fascination.
“The Earl of Blackhill…” she repeated, far too airily.
“The very same. He’s to dine with us tonight, in fact.” Emma slid her a sly look. “A touch late, on account of some deposition or other, but he is coming.”
“How nice for him,” Charlotte mumbled to the clover.
Oh, this is too good. Emma resolved to wring every drop of amusement from it before the night was through.
“Now, where on earth has Hattie got to?” she wondered aloud, casting about the empty lawn. “She vowed on Fitzgerald’s life she’d come at noon to terrorize my dinner arrangements.”
“I daresay she’ll arrive when she arrives,” Charlotte shrugged, with a curious little smile that Emma had no time to puzzle over.
For just then, the rattle of wheels carried up the lane, and a hired carriage came bouncing along the boundary. Before the wheels had scarcely stilled, the door flew open and a froth of primrose muslin came tumbling out, ribbons flying.
“Emma!” Harriet cried, very nearly pitching face-first into the grass as a sleek black pup bolted past her skirts. “Fitzgerald, you wicked thing!—oh, do let him run, the lawns are simply divine! Emma, you never told me it was paradise out here!”
“Hattie!” Emma laughed, catching her friend in a loving embrace. “You’ll catch your death tumbling about like that.”
Behind her, a second figure climbed down from the carriage and turned to wave at the other occupant inside.
It was James—though he stood differently now, his shoulders square, his bottle-green coat brushed and his cravat tied in a knot that listed only a little to the left and was, beyond all doubt, his own handiwork.
“Grandmother says her old bones won’t survive the walk,” he announced proudly, “so she’ll ride up to the house. But Hattie and I are going to walk it. We like to walk.”
Emma blinked. “Hattie and I?” she echoed faintly.