Chapter 1 #2
Culross fell in ‘love’—or as Kerr referred to it, ‘in such lust a man forgets common sense’—for the one he’d snatched—with the then bride-to-be, Meghan McQuoid-Smith.
That day, Kerr drew the short straw—He’d landed himself the very same chit who was going to give him the final push into all-out insanity. He’d just not imagined all the ways that mission (and decision) would be the bane of his existence.
“Got you.” Andromena gripped a small piece of paper like a little white flag, waving it about and summoning sinners out of the shadows—himself, naturally excluded.
A fresh wind kicked up and blew the page from her hold.
She cried out, sending out another siren’s call to the degenerates lurking at the corners: come get me. I’m here to be ruined.
Of a certainty, the chit skipping down the sewage-slick stones of St. Giles clearly sought out her own downfall—both literally and figuratively.
After Culross’s union with the McQuoids, Kerr’s responsibilities were since extended to include the brainless McQuoid kin.
His immediate assignment: get the girl home with her virtue intact and avoid being seen with her. Even though the scandal would complicate his ties to her brother-in-law, Kerr wouldn’t be coerced into marriage by any woman.
An emaciated figure, his clothes caked in ash and his smoke-stained face a map of soot, emerged from his stoop. He took one look at Kerr’s war-battered face and bolted down the adjacent lampblack alley.
Kerr gritted his teeth.
The wench didn’t realize ruin in the Rookeries wouldn’t come with a wedding ring on her finger and a rakish lord for a husband, but with a rapid rip-her-skirts-up and stick a dirty prick inside her type of ruin.
Two paces in front of him, Kerr caught a shadow’s flicker. Before the next bold fiend in shabby wool made a play for the painfully witless wench, Kerr curled his gloved fist around the sapskull’s windpipe for two seconds.
The drunkard hit the ground hard enough that half-drunken whores shoved their shutters open, peered out, and snickered.
Kerr stepped over the prone body and continued on. The commotion he made was not, however, loud enough to slow the steps of the senseless chit, who, like a dog after its own tail, continued chasing her feet.
Or perhaps it was.
She paused, looking left and then right.
With more mutterings announcing her arrival, Miss Smith shoved her wool-lined mantel all the way off.
The clouds parted for the full May moon and cast an aura over her enormous crown of blonde-brown curls; in these parts, those glossy tresses, a treasure in their own right, were worth a fortune apart from the scrap of ill-protected flesh between its owner’s legs.
A sot, sleeping inside the shadows, caught the apple-blossom scent she’d coated herself in. Like a drunken Adam out for a taste of the forbidden fruit, he faltered forward and quickly met Kerr’s elbow to the face. He buckled like a sack of oats.
A humming Miss Smith, not even three paces away, paid no notice; she gave it instead to the wrinkled sheet she stuffed inside her pocket. Off she went back on her nighttime jaunt through the Rookeries.
By the time it was all said and done, the wench had walked herself through Ivy Lane and came out to Dyott Street; Kerr had littered the dank, uneven cobblestones with half a dozen bodies of the careless so that the rest of the shadow dwellers, brainless, drugged, and drunken despots, proved to have a half-brain more than the henwit.
(A charming, beautiful one, but a henwit all the same.) Her encroachers learned two lessons this night: never tangle with the forsaken.
And the lady belonged to him—for tonight, and tonight only.
Not for the same reasons the other dogs trotted after her, like they were following a bitch in heat.
Kerr would rather commit himself to Bedlam than have any dealings—let alone ones sexual in nature—with the megrim-inducing miss.
Nor did his resolve to avoid romantic entanglements come from his loyalty to Culross.
It was her mindless chatter. Why, she would likely ramble on about ribbons and sing pitchy Scottish folksongs the whole while a man bedded her.
Duty kept him there, watching over her until he could turn her over safe and sound.
Her jaunty steps grew slower and meandering; as if she was the one who’d consumed a bottle of the Devil’s Den’s finest spirits, she zigzagged between dilapidated establishments.
Paused and peered at the crude sign of a cage house.
Then the words slapped in paint on a timber-framed flash house.
A gin mill. Then a windowless cellar. A lodging house.
Out came that white scrap.
While she surveyed that page like she perused a formal dinner party menu, only considering which choice of harm she’d prefer to face, Kerr shoved his left elbow into another sot’s temple.
Wind blew through the streets; somewhere a stray released a single forlorn wail.
Culross’s sister-in-law finally snapped her head up.
The dog penetrated her obliviousness?
Before she turned to face him, Kerr had her in an alley, spun around, with her face just a fraction from a red brick wall.
She screamed.
No, not a scream. Bucking like a filly fighting being broken, she let fly a shriek that left his ears with the ringing that followed a cannonball’s blast.
Wincing, he gritted his teeth.
“Helllllllp!”
“Help?” he laughed coarsely. The innocent chit needed to learn there wasn’t any rescue coming in these parts.
That when a person—man or woman—entered the Rookeries, they walked onto the Devil’s playground.
Stations didn’t matter to the soulless. Anyone and everyone was fair game.
He owed her no favors, but he’d do her this one, this night, for Culross and his loyalty to Culross alone.
Andromena jerked wildly against his hold. “You clunch cod’s head!”
With a gentle though firm grip on the feisty young chit, Kerr allowed her to shout as loudly as her lungs permitted. To his amusement, she delivered a stream of impeccably articulate curses.
His levity drove the shrew’s voice into a shrill crescendo.
She panted and gasped. Her shallow breaths puffed white clouds into the freezing air. “Bloody noddy, nocky b-boy.”