Page 28 of The Duke
Reaching for her was like trying to grasp at the sea with his bare hand.
“I’ve spent so long searching for her, and yet I fear that I’d pass her in the street and not recognize her.”
Ginny. A beautiful, raven-haired specter. Her features blurred until he only possessed the descriptive words, but not the image. Obscured by drink, darkness, and the passing of too many days, his memory of her lived everywhere but in his eyes. He could recall how astonishingly small she’d felt beneath his hands. Little more than flesh and bone. Her skin the color of moonlight and softer than Indian cashmere. Her eyes had been huge in her thin, delicate features. Anytime he tried, Cole could conjure the kindness he’d found in their depths, the hesitant desire, the fear and the fondness. So why not their color? She’d been wearing so much makeup that night…
He remembered the sweet tremble of her voice, hardly above a gentle whisper, and yet threaded with conviction and compassion. How he craved that now. That quiet place inside she’d taken him. He’d never known peace like that before, and certainly not since.
A loud crash from outside stole his attention, and he looked in time to see his loathsome neighbor in her garden, screeching like a madwoman and shaking her skirts as she ducked and danced. An easel, canvas, and chair rocked from where they’d been upended in her panicked frenzy. She let out another inhuman squeal, half call for help, half war cry as she snatched a rolled-up paper of some kind and began wildly striking the air with it.
Peace, it seemed, was to be eternally denied him. Most especially withherliving next door.
What the devil was she doing? Battling some insidious insect, no doubt, Cole surmised with a bemused grunt. He found himself rooting for the bug, so strong was his dislike of the woman.
“Well, the lass is nowhere to be found on this island, I can tell ye that.” Ravencroft let out a heavy breath. “Probably not on the Continent either. We’ve searched Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, all the places a woman of her… industry might seek her fortune.”
“We?” Cole glanced over his shoulder, his eyebrow lifted.
The man they’d christened the Demon Highlander gave what might have been called a guilty shrug. “I have an… associate with more connections in that world than I. I’ve enlisted his aid.”
“An… associate?” Cole echoed.
“He’s someone I trust. The Earl of Northwalk.”
“You mean Dorian Blackwell, the Blackheart of Ben More?” Trenwyth corrected tightly. “And here I’d thought you smarter than to trust the most notorious criminal in the empire. Just because he’s managed to snag the Townsend heiress no more makes him an earl than stepping in the mud makes me an urchin.”
Case in point, Lady Anstruther out there among her tea roses, lavender, and forget-me-nots. A countess by all rights, but resembling nothing close to a lady.
“Blackwell has more noble blood than ye’d think,” the Scotsman muttered.
Turning away from the stormy look on Ravencroft’s hard features, Cole noted that the woman had succeeded in swatting the abhorrent swarming creature to the ground, and was now grinding it into the stone path with the heel of her boot.
His mother would have been mortified to share a property line with such a disgrace. He was merely annoyed.
“I went back to the Bare Kitten when I returned from the Americas recently,” Cole continued. He’d searched for Ginny through logbooks at Ellis Island, New York, where many immigrants landed, and continued his search far into the interior. He’d searched for himself too, but came up empty-handed in both regards. “The old proprietor, Ezio del Toro, seems to have retired back to Sicily. The barkeep, a Mr. Carson, owns the place now, though how a lad that young—and apparently witless—could afford it is beyond me. He worked alongside Ginny for a few months, and barely remembers her name, let alone where she lived or who her people were.”
“I’m still not convinced that del Toro bastard didna lie to us when he said he never knew her last name,” Ravencroft speculated. “He was a shifty tub of lard if I ever met one. I always thought he knew more than he let on.”
The laird’s words reflected Cole’s own suspicions. He had gone to the Bare Kitten the moment he was well enough to walk again. Del Toro had pretended not to remember Ginny at first, and then when he was caught out, confessed that he’d hired her not too long ago. He’d subsequently let her go because she’d attacked a customer. Though which customer, he couldn’t recall.
Not for the first time, Cole had wished he’d killed the greasy man right then and there. It would be no less than he deserved. Usually men didn’t lie to him, not when he had his good hand wrapped around their throats and the sharp metal of his hidden wrist-blade at their sacs. But back when he’d confronted the pimp and game-maker, he’d been barely released from the hospital. Weak, frail, and desperate.
What if del Toro had lied to him? What if the man had more guile than Cole had credited him with? What if… he’d kept Ginny for himself? Taken her to Sicily, perhaps.
The very idea made Cole’s skin crawl and his stomach clench. Every lead had gone cold, and the woman he’d pined for these past three years had simply vanished into the London mists.
“Perhaps your associate, Blackwell, has contacts in Sicily, and could find del Toro for me. I think it might bare new leads, interrogating him once more.”
“After this long, Trenwyth, the odds of finding her are approaching nil. Not one of the whores who worked with her stayed at the Bare Kitten. None of them remembered much about her either,” Ravencroft said carefully as he drew up behind him. “Och, I’m not accustomed to speaking to the back of a man’s head, Yer Grace,” he chided. “Are ye admiring yer own reflection in that window, or have ye found something that’s better to look at than my brutish face?”
“Neither.” Trenwyth opened the drapes further to share the view. “I was simply watching my insipid neighbor make as much of a disaster of trying to paint as she does of everything else.”
Ravencroft peered over his shoulder past the hedgerows that hid a stone and iron fence, on the other side of which the Countess Anstruther had wrestled her canvas and easel back into place. She currently settled herself into her uprighted chair, spreading a stained apron over her blindingly pink skirts.
The marquess gave a low whistle. “Well now, that’s a bonny view ye have there.”
“Her?” Cole snorted. “Hardly.She’s nothing more than a grasping opportunist that can afford a garish wardrobe.”
“She’s not wearing much of that wardrobe now.” Ravencroft chuckled. “Ye canna say ye hadna noticed.”
