Page 46 of The Duke
“You ever… what?” he finally asked when the silence stretched longer than he was willing to bear.
“Nothing,” she breathed, turning against the door to open it. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to return to my guests.”
Like hell would she escape him with this left unfinished. “You can’t believe you ever what? Kissed me? Saved my life?” he demanded, seizing her arm.
She looked at his hand with sufficient contempt. “I can’t believe I ever welcomed you into my home. In the future I’ll make certain the door is barred to you.”
He released her immediately. “No great loss.”
“To either of us,” she agreed, and escaped into the house.
It took Cole a full minute to find his breath again, and another to gather the strength in his legs. He shook with so many fragmented emotions he couldn’t even begin to identify them.
Imogen Millburn, Lady Anstruther, was more dangerous than he could have ever imagined. For she brought out something in him he’d promised he’d left in that prison cell along with his hand.
That wild, primitive beast. A starving, wolfish creature who wanted to do nothing more than stalk and prowl. To leap and snare. To feast and fuck.
This beast was no duke. He was no man raised with genteel civility, with a care for the expense of things or the consequence of his actions. This beast was no longer dormant within him, but prowling beneath the surface of his skin, wanting to mark his territory.
And he’d found a delectable morsel just now, one he was in danger of acquiring a taste for.
CHAPTERTHIRTEEN
It wasn’t a long walk from Mayfair to Belgravia, but Chief Inspector Carlton Morley went on horseback, his haste due to the brutal murder at the Anstruther manse. The fact that the Anstruther residence abutted the Grecian-style monolithic dwelling that belonged to Britain’s former most prolific assassin, Christopher Argent, didn’t at all set his mind at ease.
Just because Argent worked for Scotland Yard now didn’t mean the man had stopped killing.
Spilling blood became a delicious addiction if one wasn’t careful, Morley reflected.
He should know.
Argent clattered up to the Anstruther gate behind him on his own bay steed. The strident assassin-turned-lawman having fetched him at dawn, a mere hour after Morley had collapsed into bed.
He would like to have claimed that something common like a woman or a troubling case had kept him up into the wee hours of the morning. But he couldn’t. It had, in fact, been the spilling of blood. His new and dangerous addiction. These nocturnal goings-on would put him in an early grave, of that he was certain.
But there was no help for it now. No stopping him.
“You look like the devil used you for his mistress last night.” Argent slid off his bay and tossed the reins to the same footman Morley had. “Have you taken to some new and dangerous vice?”
The observant assassin’s insight was his greatest asset in the investigative field, but Morley cursed it this morning. “If I believed in the devil, I’d think you his bastard, Argent,” Morley quipped.
“A better sire then some I’ve known,” the former assassin replied gravely.
On this they agreed.
“I wouldn’t have stirred you had I not known you’d want to see this.” Argent pulled out a notebook, a standard practice for all investigators. Unless a man could organize his thoughts and recall them as perfectly as Dorian Blackwell, he needed to write them down. “It isn’t every day a countess is found raped and strangled to death in a Belgravia terrace garden.”
“Lady Broadmore was aviscountess,Argent,” Morley corrected, nodding to the constable who held open the gate. “Lady Anstruther is a countess.”
Argent shrugged, scratching at the russet shadow-beard stubbling his hard jaw with a heavy hand. “Never was very good at telling the difference,” he said casually. “Never much cared to learn.”
“You’ll need to learn the law and structures if you want to thrive in this society, Inspector,” Morley assessed. “Scotland Yard isn’t the underworld. Everything must be aboveboard.” Even as he said this, Morley called himself nine kinds of liar. As an inspector, his words represented an absolute truth. As for his nighttime employment… such was not the case. Though, he had to admit, an intimate acquaintance with strictures and laws did help one to break them.
Argent slid him an even look. “Survival is a talent of mine, Morley, or have you forgotten?”
Morley hadn’t forgotten that once, a long time past, Argent had stabbed him and saved his life all in the course of one night. “All I remember is that it is better that we are allies than enemies.”
“Better for whom?” Argent didn’t smile exactly, but his cold blue eyes danced with amusement.
