Chapter 17 #2
“I can explain, Edgar.”
“Try.” Please.
“I don’t know where to s-start.”
“At the beginning,” he snapped. “Now, madam!”
That always did the trick. Rapid fury blared to life in her eyes. She spit. She cursed. She kicked her adorable toes at him. And when he laughed, she hurled more names—hurled slippers and whatever googads hung from her bonnet.
Today marked the exception. She did none of those things.
Her sad eyes knocked Kerr off-balance.
“I’ve done something terrible, Edgar.”
His sense of unease grew. “Do you mean aside from theft?”
“I was going to tell you,” she said on a whisper.
Where was her spirit? Her fight? “Tell me what?”
He shook them at her.
“By being with me, you are in danger,” she cried.
Kerr opened his mouth then closed it. He’d forgotten certain peculiarities about the McQuoid-Smith families, on account there were just so damned many to keep track of.
The family’s penchant for grand productions had been one he deliberately forgot.
Their performance of Castle Specter had been more than enough for Kerr.
Kerr put forth an impressive effort to block their love of the farce.
“Are you listening?” Andromena stomped over to her bag. “Here. See for yourself! Someone, has threatened to harm you and my family, and I will not let it happen.”
Kerr took this to mean that someone was blackmailing her, something he confirmed moments later in a note.
After note. After note, to be exact. With each one, a white-hot rage rooted deep within him.
He like a caged beast, with an all-consuming, blistering need to kill, longing for freedom—and about to find it.
When Kerr finished, he continued to stare at the inked words.
It was better this way; safer that he take a moment for both of them.
When he trusted himself to speak, Kerr very deliberately, folded each blackmail note back along their very defined creases.
That illusion of calm he allowed himself, broke.
That wear in the paper told the story of Andromena folding and unfolding, again and again, reading.
Alone. Pain hit him like an anchor in the belly.
This was why she spent the week avoiding him. The one who had been controlling her had stolen the only true sunshine from Kerr’s life. His jaw twitched. Even worse, that fiend had manipulated Andromena, made her live in fear, and kept her from Kerr.
“Edgar?”
“Shh.”
Wisely, she complied.
Scrubbing a hand along his chin, he paced to each window of her bedroom, scanning the overgrowth for the threat out there.
Somewhere there was the man who wanted her—wanted her badly enough to kill.
He had made her work for him and humiliated her.
Used her own actions against her. No one brought her low.
For that—for all of that, the man would pay.
Trembling, Kerr fought two competing urges: the need shake her and kissing her senseless.
“This was your takeaway?” he asked, as calm as he could manage, given the words he’d just read. “That I’m in danger.”
“Edgar, I will not let anything happen—”
His efforts failed him. “My God, woman,” he hissed. “How do you still not realize? My life is nothing without you. I will protect you. I will kill for you. I will die for you.”
Andromena’s lips trembled. “Oh, Edgar. I don’t want you to do any of those things, because my life is—”
Outside, there came the whinny of a horse.
Kerr held a hand up.
Andromena had already gone silent.
Positioned at the edge of the window, while Andromena retrieved a pair of breeches from decades past and drew a lawn shirt over them, Kerr peered out into the yard.
And then, he found him, because this wasn’t a man who was hiding.
The man could have been forty or sixty. In a canary-yellow tailcoat, with a cascading cravat of purple silk, he strolled up the cottage path, twirling his serpent-headed cane as he went, as though he could have been on a stroll down North Bond Street.
He topped off his garish ensemble with a tall beaver top-hat.
From the corner of his eye, he caught Andromena near his shoulder. He gave her a look.
She shook her head.
She didn’t know the gentleman.
The gentleman began to sing.
“At the song of my Lady’s lace
Which a Derbyshire lady took ill
Quoth she to her neighbor Grace,
’Tis immodest! Immodest, I cannot sit still…”
“Not a gentleman that one,” Andromena muttered.
God, love her. Only Andromena McQuoid-Smith could crack quips in the face of peril.
Once the man reached the bottom of Andromena’s window, he doffed his hat. “My dearest, Miss Smith,” he called up, with a flourishing bow. “I am here straight from London with glad tidings.”
A frozen knot settled in his chest.
Why hadn’t he gotten her out of here faster?
Kerr took Andromena’s shoulder. “Go,” he mouthed.
She shook her head.
“First, the dowry.”
Her dowry?
That caught both their attention.
“Come, Miss Smith, you are a lady. You do know what a dowry is.” More fighter than gentleman, the man could have been pulled from the wharves.
Each word that he spoke was a clue that brought them closer to an answer.
“Your bridegroom could have chosen a much finer lady. But you have intrigued him.” He chortled. “Yer dowry did.”
He would not let her near this madman.
Kerr placed his lips next to her ear. Even when he spoke, he knew the futility. “I need you to hide.”
She kicked him. “Did you just tell me to hide?”
“Ask?”
“Edgar,” she whispered, gripping his face briefly in her hands. “You showed me I’m more capable than my family credits me for. This man threatened the lives of all those I love.” Her eyes blazed like a phoenix sprung from the ashes. “You.”
Kerr had never loved this woman, or any person, as much as he loved her now in this moment; her eyes ablaze. All he wanted was for her to be safe, but what she wanted, what she asked for, was some control when she had been without.
“Distract him for me, darling,” Kerr whispered.
Their lips met. There was an urgency, a desperation.
They wrenched away as one, and cast another glance down.
Andromena leaned out. “I’m afraid I do not know whom I have the pleasure of speaking with, Mister…? I trust a gentleman of your high standing as a surname.”
The well-dressed street tough preened. “Mr. Diggory. We are all disciples of Mr. Diggory.”
Kerr eyed his shot.
“Hmm.” Andromena tapped her bottom lip. “I have thought about it, and I have decided to decline Mr. Diggory’s offer of marriage respectfully.”
The man broke out into a cheroot-roughened cough. He spat to the overgrown hedges. “We all a bit of the Devil in us, don’t we? And you’re going to have a bit more of him into you this night.”
“I have not met this Mr. Diggory.” Andromena carried on the conversation with the derelict as they chatted over tea and shortbread. “As such, I’m disinclined to join him in matrimony.”
All the while she kept up the conversation, Kerr squinted and aimed.
“He knows you.” He hocked a spit again. “That’s all ye need to know. We best be leaving. He’s already enough put out with ye. The way you’ve been fast and loose with Lord Kerr.”
It’s a distraction. His pulse hammered. They know I’m here. The bastard below was putting on a show; he was using her—all over again.
Kerr’s every nerve, beat of his heart, and thought in his head, tunneled to a single point.
Every moment up until now had been leading Kerr this: when he’d tumbled over the cliff off Ermine Street. New Bond Street. New Bond Street, again.
Horse hooves thundering closer brought him roaring to the now.
“Get down!” he cried, a moment before the sharp report of a gunshot split the air.
Kerr’s lifeblood surged with a roar. He launched himself at Andromena, the exact moment the door burst open. His chest heaving, Kerr took the fall and rolled her under him, shielding her with his body.
Pistol unsheathed, he aimed at the thickset man at the entrance. Shock flared on a face marked with coals, scars, and ash. Then, the hulking brute pitched face first into the planks.
It was over.