Page 56 of To Tame the Wild Rake
“Your sister is dead these four weeks, you fool, and serve you right. You betrayed me.”
“I did everything you said. You said she was safe. You said you wouldn’t hurt her.”
“Safe at the bottom of the Thames. Beyond hurt, Mullins. But she hurt plenty before she died.” And he threw back his head and laughed.
Mullins hurled himself on his tormentor, ignoring another bullet as it slammed into him. He knocked Wharton from the chair, and they rolled around in the hall, onto and over the device.
Aldridge moved around them, trying to get a clear shot, and then Thomas shot into the hall, followed by Jamir. Thomas dived for the device and dragged it out of the reach of the combatants. Jamir met Aldridge’s raised eyebrows with a sheepish smile. “We gave the doorman a message for my father and the kagan,” he explained. “Thomas thought he might be needed.”
Thomas was on his feet again, the device abandoned. “Get out!” he shouted. “The mechanism is jammed. I can’t open it to get to the fuse and I think the flint has sparked.”
Aldridge didn’t hesitate. He grabbed a boy by each arm and pushed them ahead of him through the door. Out on the street, his footmen were arriving, and beyond them came a phalanx of Winshire’s riders, with Winshire himself in the lead, a son on either side.
“Get back!” Aldridge yelled. “It’s about to blow up!”
The sound of the explosion covered his last words. He shoved the two boys to the ground and hurled himself on top of them. Then something hit his head from behind, and darkness fell.
Anthony had only been knocked out for a matter of seconds, Nate said, but Charlotte had seen the bruises and cuts peppering his back. He’d saved Thomas and Jamir from more than a bruise or two, covering them with his own body as masonry and glass rained down on them. And, so Nate said, his riding coat had mostly saved him.
He’d been carried back to Uncle James’s house, complaining bitterly about not being allowed to walk and demanding to be taken home, but subsided when Charlotte had scolded him. “You will stay here for the night, and you will let me look after you, Anthony. You have a wedding to attend in the morning, remember.”
Uncle James made not a murmur about her spending the night in Anthony’s bedroom, but he sent her maid to sit with them. Clarke slept in the corner, a curb on amorous congress that Anthony declared entirely unnecessary, since he was too sore to do all the wicked things he had been planning ever since Charlotte accepted his proposal.
He then proceeded to detail them in a low voice, punctuated with several drugging kisses and caresses that set her wishing even more fervently for his return to full health. He had the power, even wounded as he was, to make her almost forget they had an audience. Except that Clarke had begun a set of transparently false snores and was keeping her eyes studiously shut.
“Clarke is awake,” she whispered to Anthony.
The scoundrel replied, soft voiced, “Does that mean you do not want me to do this? Or this?”
Can one squeal in a whisper? Apparently so. She slapped the offending hand. “Behave!” she hissed.
“Do I have to?” he whined, like a small child, then spoiled the effect with a yawn. “I’m not tired,” he grumbled, which was a patent untruth, and so she told him.
He pulled her head down until her ear was close to his lips. Even so, his words were so quiet she had to strain to hear them. “I am afraid I will wake up alone, Cherry, and it will all have been a dream. You won’t make me be a duke all by myself, will you?”
Anthony’s hidden vulnerability had always melted her heart, but never so much as now, when he let slip the mask he wore to tell her how much he needed her. “Go to sleep, Anthony my love. I will be here when you wake up, and it will be our wedding day.”
As it was, he slept for no more than an hour, and then they talked again, softly so as not to disturb Clarke. He explained the tiny nuggets of truth in Wharton’s lies about him.
Prue had once borne his daughter, but Anthony had not known of Antonia’s existence until shortly before he and Cherry met, and by that time, she and David had met and fallen in love.
Jonathan and Prue had been kidnapped by Wharton, but Anthony was to blame only for buying Jonathan a ticket on a ship bound for the Mediterranean; one that happened to be owned by Wharton and the other criminals in a ring that stole and traded people.
And there had indeed been a circus performer, still was—as far as Anthony knew. She had put on a convincing performance in which the Rose of Frampton died in a riding accident in full view of half the ton, while watched by Baron Overton and his new bride, the real Rose.
In return, Cherry told him of her dreams before the incident, and admitted he was about to fulfil them. But she did not plan to give up the new dreams she had embraced since the incident. “Can I set up schools on our estates, Anthony?”
“I have already done so, Cherry darling, but you shall be in charge of them all and will change anything you don’t like.”
He slept again. Charlotte lay down beside him and slept too, and woke somewhat refreshed and incredibly aroused to find him caressing her breasts.
Clarke slept through it all.Clarke deserves a raise.
They breakfasted together, then Anthony’s valet arrived, with everything he needed to dress for his wedding, and with a package that Anthony said he had sent for. “Wharton had Mullins intercept it,” he explained to Charlotte. “If it is what Wharton claimed it to be, I had better read it this morning.”
“I shall leave you to it, then,” Charlotte suggested. “Clarke will be waiting for me.”
Anthony did not look up from his letter, but held out his hand and pulled her to his side. “Read with me?” he asked, and tilted the paper so she could do so.
