Chapter 2 #2
Heart beating fast, she looked at their company.
The man, with his black hair pomaded back and sizeable belly straining his garments, put Andromena in mind of the black Dorset hog, she and Oleander dressed in Papa’s Sunday best, and trotted through sermons years earlier.
The exception being in his moth-eaten suit from a good forty to fifty years ago and that he leered at her like he was ready to make her his next meal.
Reflexively, Andromena sidled nearer to Edgar. She crept a hand into his sleeve.
“You have no idea,” Kerr said.
Andromena pinched him through his greatcoat.
“Oi ’ave an idea. She put on quite a show.”
The two unalike men laughed like old chums. The only thing they didn’t do was slap one another on the back.
“Oi can take her off yer ’ands, mate.”
She gasped, and whipped her attention up to Edgar.
The ‘good sir’ had taken to rubbing his obstinate jaw with a thumb and forefinger, appearing as if he gave the offer some real consideration.
“You will do no such thing, my lord,” she said in low, threatening tones.
“Shh, darling.” He patted the hand she had fastened to him. “Gentlemen are discussing business.”
Business?
She thought the feeling inside her chest might be anger—it certainly wasn’t fear.
Except she’d been plenty angry in her life, but nothing came close to the sensation inside that made her want to claw his eyes out and scratch her nails down the untouched portion of his face.
But then, that would only make the lout into even more of a masterpiece ladies went agog over. And that nearly left her blind.
Andromena fought to free her arm from his crook that he’d locked tight around her.
Fire coursed her blood.
“My family will kill you both,” she pledged.
“Pay her no heed. This one believes herself connected to two dukes and a team of earls.”
“Three dukes,” she shouted. “And two earls, and—”
But by this point, they’d descended into a level of hilarity reserved for Drury Lane audiences taking in Twelfth Night.
For all the mind they paid her, she may not have been. The two new acquaintances kept up negotiations, which the viscount finally brought to a conclusion, with Mr. Dorset-Hog ambling off.
“How dare…?”
The shine in his onyx eyes silenced the rest of her diatribe.
“You bloody ungrateful wench. Unless you’d like to invite other potential companions over, you’ll shut your mouth and listen.”
Her eyebrows crept up. The wretch! To think she had nearly been seduced by him in the snow.
“If you were any other lady, I’d happily leave you here to a hard lesson you are in real need of learning. Alas, I don’t have that luxury given my best friend had the ill-fortune of marrying into your mad family.”
“You—”
He slid his gloved palm over her mouth. She bucked and twisted.
“Uh-uh. Remember what I said.”
Damn him.
Her shoulders heaving, she forced herself to stop fighting.
“I see I need to be clearer with you. Very well; walking around these parts in red is your only clever idea this night. All the better to hide the blood you’d be wearing on the inside of your thighs and the dagger in your belly when some drunkard is done with you.”
His words simultaneously made her want to curl up inside him for protection and hide forever and cry.
He finally removed his palm. She couldn’t muster all the insults she’d wanted and intended to hurl.
Tears threatened.
“Now, you’re going to cry?”
He said this as if he found her tedious.
The tears she had in fact been about to cry dried up. “I would never cry for you.”
Fortunately, she was one who lied very convincingly. There had been many times after his treachery on the way to a wedding where she’d wept because of him. Tears of humiliation, rage, and pain.
He laughed.
And that deep, mocking, very…male laugh made her see red. She would not, however, give him any further satisfaction. Andromena waited until he’d gotten himself under control.
“Have I said something to amuse you, Edgar?”
“I had you ready to run away with me.”
A gentleman would never dare point such a thing out. Granted, a proper gentleman would also never try to abduct a lady. She patted his arm. “That was a long time ago.”
“Ah, yes. Five months ago. A veritable lifetime.”
“I was not ready to run away with you.” The only reason she continued speaking calmly was that she knew he wanted to get a rise out of her.
“Though I will grant you, I was na?ve.” A truth.
“I do not resent you.” A lie. “I should thank you for your elucidation.” An exaggeration.
“It helped me prepare for the rogues and rakes I faced.”
He snorted.
“What are you snuffling your big nose for?”
The hard line of his lips grew harder. “My nose isn’t big.”
No, it wasn’t. “Certainly not as big as your pride.”
The big-head would hate having his unfairly godlike handsome looks questioned. And here she’d believed he couldn’t make her smile.
“What of you? I trust you aren’t beating the rogues and rakes away.”
She frowned. “I wouldn’t be so rude as to beat them away, but I also can separate sensual whispers apart from—”
Edgar laughed again.
She wouldn’t indulge him any further. Gathering her skirts wide of him, Andromena resumed her path to Rat’s Castle Tavern.
“You’re going to get yourself killed venturing on your own,” he called after her.
“No, I won’t.” Andromena didn’t break stride. “By your own admission, your friendship with my brother-in-law dictates you protect me, regardless of how much you’d like to see me raped and murdered.”
“I do not want to see you raped and murdered.” The boyish indignation in his tone made her smile.
“My heart is warmed,” she said. “In fact, as I see it,” She paused to check the sign of a particularly rowdy establishment. Smashed glass and shouts penetrated through the ramshackle timbers holding the establishment together. Andromena hastened on; grateful this was not her stop.
The reverberation of Edgar’s grumpy voice came at her heels. “As you see it?”
Andromena picked her way over a fallen figure, sleeping and snoring on the street, and continued. “I needed an escort but could not trust bringing one, lest they tell one of my big, overprotective brothers and cousins.”
“With all the times you’ve slipped out and gotten yourself into trouble, it’s highly doubtful any sane person would consider them overprotective.”
It had taken her a moment, but she had figured the gentleman out. He lived to needle her and insult her family. Knowing that now made it easy not to take his bait.
“But you happening upon me here is the perfect answer to prayers I didn’t know I have,” she said.
“Oh?”
Andromena nodded. “Regardless of how much you would love to leave me here,”
“Beyond love.”
“You cannot. You are forced to see me safely to my location and won’t breathe a word about my doings here.”
“My, how confident you sound.”
“I am. Because if my family finds out you took me to the Rookeries—”
“I did not take you to the Rook—”
“Naturally there will be those among them, likely Lord Culross, who expects you to do right by—”
He strangled on a swallow. “Good God. You bloody shrew.”
“Worry not,” she gave him another smile. “I would insist on ruin before marriage to you.”
“With the way you go running about, it’s only a matter of time before you find the former.”
Andromena’s lips formed a grim line.
She had already found it. Her free spirit had gotten her into a mess.
It’s what had her traipsing around St. Giles.
Between Linnie, only recently beginning to recover from a sea-battle she had been caught in several years earlier, and their cousin, Fleur, newly married to the Duke of Hartwell, who was many months with the duke’s babe—conceived that wicked night out at Lord Rutland’s—they didn’t have to deal with the problems Andromena had caused.
A not-so-small part couldn’t bring herself to confess to bringing on a real scandal—and, unlike her partners in crime, without even a loving husband to show.
An even bigger part would sooner die than admit to Edgar that she was being blackmailed.
Oh, how the indomitable Viscount Kerr would laugh if he knew why she was out and about without so much as a chaperone.
“Will wonders never cease,” he uttered.
She cast a look up at him.
“I’d believed you were incapable of silence, and here you are proving me wrong.”
“Aww, Edgar. With all the ways you’re poking me, I’m beginning to think you like precisely how I use my mouth.”
His visage grew strained; his irises dilated; his nostrils flared.
That strange expression she recognized quite well from a snowy copse, when her hair came down around her…right before he’d launched his seduction.
Her jaw moved. It would take a great deal more than that for her to believe he had any roguish designs upon her.
A chilled breeze glided along the alleyway and scraped ice over her back.
Even as Edgar continued walking on, her steps slowed outside a raucous brick establishment. She peered up at the wood panel rocking and swaying in the wind. A long, narrow-faced man, more chin than body, marked the entrance.
Rat’s Castle.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Andromena jumped.
Like an angry, hulking beast, Edgar slumped his shoulders and stomped back.
“This is—”
“No.”
Frowning, she adopted her best governess voice. “You didn’t allow me to finish, Edgar.”
“Finish.”
“I am meeting someone h—”
“No.”
Andromena crossed her arms and drummed her boot against a slick, raised cobblestone. “I’m not asking.”
“That is fine. That doesn’t mean you’re going inside, either.”
“I’m not?”
“Good girl.”
Tugging her hood back into place, Andromena entered the Rat’s Castle.