Page 98 of My One and Only Duke
“You’re a duchess,” Althea said. “You can’t fly into the bows over a misunderstanding. Quinn might well be back by supper with some perfectly reasonable explanation for why you can’t find a batch of old letters.”
A wave of weariness hit Jane, which was ridiculous when she’d just spent the better part of an hour napping.
“You don’t believe that, Althea. Now you’re attempting to deceive me as well, deceive me again.”
Going home to Papa would never be an option, but Jane had pin money more than sufficient to establish a household, and she had her pride. She did not want to leave the man she loved, but condoning another betrayal was impossible.
“Beg pardon, Your Grace, your ladyships.” Ivor appeared at the door. “Reverend Winston is in the sitting room and asking to see Her Grace. Shall I have a tea tray sent up?”
The day needed only this. Jane nearly told Ivor to send up an entire meal, but Constance was drumming her fingers against her skirts, tapping each finger eight times, her expression carefully blank.
That was a Wentworth in distress.
Althea had glanced at the clock three times and checked the watch pinned to her bodice twice. Jane would not have been surprised to see Quinn’s sister drop to her knees and crawl out the door—or the window.
Another Wentworth in distress.
“No tea tray, Ivor. And you and Kristoff will attend me. Althea and Constance, we are not finished.”
Though perhaps Jane and Quinn were, assuming he survived his altercation with the Countess of Tipton.
Chapter Twenty-four
The letters in Quinn’s pocket felt as if they weighed twelve stone, something Jane would have understood. These epistles had likely put him in Newgate and put his neck in a noose. Better, as Jane advised, to forgive and forget. To move on and appreciate the joy of marriage to a woman who didn’t live life in anticipation of the next ambush.
Jane Wentworth was the bravest woman Quinn knew, and she was his.
As Quinn strode down the Mayfair walkways, other gentlemen nodded to him. Two ladies he might have recognized from the bank smiled, and, without thinking, he tipped his hat to them. The flower girls all waved to him, and if he weren’t on his way to put a certain countess out of his life once for all, he’d have bought a bouquet from each one.
Ned’s absence also carried a weight, so accustomed had Quinn grown to the lad’s chattering and swearing.
The tow-headed young man following Quinn was yet another weight. He’d appeared intermittently after Quinn’s return from York, his attempts at subtlety only making his presence more obvious.
A country lad, would be Quinn’s guess, agog at London’s size and busyness, but willing to do anything to keep the approval of his mistress. Quinn turned down an alley from which there was no exit. Afternoon sunshine didn’t reach into this corner of Mayfair, though the stench of rotting food did. As a boy, Quinn had considered that odor an omen of good fortune, because where some discarded food rotted, other discarded food might yet be edible.
He didn’t even have to crouch down. He merely took up a lean against a wall beside steps that led to a basement. In somebody’s kitchen, an argument had broken out about missing muffins.
The quarry knew enough to pause at the mouth of the alley, but Quinn had chosen this place carefully. The alley angled around a turn before it came to a dead end, and the unwitting youth took the blind turn at a casual stroll. Quinn stepped out of the shadows and boxed the younger man in.
“Looking for your blue and silver livery?” Quinn asked. “I don’t think you’ll find it here. Perhaps ye might look under her ladyship’s bed.”
The man turned slowly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, sir. Let me pass.” His accent proclaimed him to be a Yorkshireman, as plain as the sheep on the dales.
“I can’t do that, lad,” Quinn said. “You’ve been content to ride my coattails from a polite distance until this week, and now you’re making a pest of yourself. Sooner or later my duchess or my family will notice, and they’ll raise worrying about me to an art form. We can’t have that, now, can we?”
The young man’s gaze darted left and right. If he were clever, he’d also look up. Wash lines, trellises, drainpipes, and balconies all created options when flight was imperative. Instead he held up his fists, protecting his face and angling his stance with scientific precision.
A pugilist, then. God help the lad.
“I’m not afraid of you,” he spat. “Living like a swell, when everybody knows you’re a baseborn gutter whelp who deserved to be hanged.”
Turn the other cheek, Jane said. Such sound advice, though Jane had never told Quinn what to do with his feet.
The old reflexes would never leave him, and that made Quinn almost as happy as the notion of handing the countess’s letters back to their author. He casually—joyfully—snaked out a foot and tripped the budding prizefighter onto his skinny backside.
“Thanks, my boy. I might never get to use that maneuver again, being a swell and all.”
The youth stared up at him, gaze surprised. Then the pain of banging his head on the cobbles set in, and his eyes closed.
