Page 68 of The Duke
Imogen puffed out her cheeks on a beleaguered breath. “Usually… yes. But it’s Sunday. Most the staff has today as a half-day and, since it was quiet, I let them have it all off.” That had been before O’Mara and Rathbone had been called away. She dearly regretted the decision now. “The majority went to church with my mother and sister, I think, this afternoon. And then off to call on friends and family.”
Impeccable timing, she reprimanded herself, as per usual.
Bugger. What am I to do now?How could she keep everyone safe?
She peeled Heather from the door just as a shot rang out, then another, splintering through the wood and miraculously missing them.
“Everyone, upstairs,” she ordered over the screams, once again shoving Heather toward Gwen. “Now.”
The window next to the entry broke, glass erupting like sparks in the light of the gas lamps. Imogen screamed and covered her hair as some of the shards rained down on her.
As the women retreated up the grand staircase, Imogen fled to the left, toward the solarium and the doors to the back garden. She might not be able to run for the police, but she now knew that she happened to have one of the empire’s most dangerous men as a neighbor. She realized this would greatly help his case against her, but she saw no choice but to seek his protection.
“Cheever, go with them!” she cried as the old man puffed along next to her, his fine shoes sliding on the marble floors.
“If you think I’m leaving you to these brigands, my lady, you’re mad.”
There wasn’t a word in the world to describe her relief.
Until she heard the screams.
A second volley of gunshots had Imogen pressing herself against the hallway wall for whatever cover it could provide. She listened in frozen terror to wet and concussive sounds echoing from beyond the broken window.
No one breached it to invade her home, as was surely their purpose in breaking it.
She crept closer, glass crunching beneath her boots.
A masculine scream, cut abruptly short, preceded the shocking appearance of a body flying past the window next to the entry. Imogen could have been mistaken, but it appeared that his neck hung completely limp from his shoulders. As though his spine no longer held it aloft.
Another gunshot caused her to duck and instinctively cover her head. Then came the unmistakable sound of a weapon penetrating flesh. Again and again.
Someoneelsewas out there.
Imogen knew who it was even before he bellowed her name and broke the door open in two powerful kicks.
Cole stilled when his feral eyes found her, roaming every inch as though searching for a wound. The doorway framed him like a portal to purgatory, and he stood like an avenging archangel come to wreak a wrath no less than biblical.
The swells of his powerful chest heaved against the white of his shirtsleeves now blotched and stained with blood. The blade on his prosthesis was extended past the motionless metal fingers, and blood dripped from it into a thick crimson puddle on the marble floor.
The pistol he gripped in his right hand did a sweep of the entry. “Did any of them get in?” He snarled the question, as he strode past her, checking every shadow, searching every nook. “Did they touch you? Are you hurt?”
“No,” Imogen breathed as she made her way to the door on wooden legs. Her wide stone porch had become like a battlefield, the blood of four corpses mingling in a syrupy fall down her steps. Two of them had their throats slit. Another bled from too many stab wounds to count. A neat round hole penetrated the forehead of a man perched like a scarecrow across the banister.
She didn’t even bring herself to look at the dead body in her hedges.
Arms weak with tremors in the aftermath of such an incident, she managed to slowly push both doors closed on the gruesome scene, and gathered her fortitude to face the lethal man behind her.
Their eyes locked, his blazing with an amber fire, hers, no doubt, gathering a defiant storm. She knew what he was thinking, and she hadn’t a single defense against it. His jaw clenched and released and his lips thinned, edged with white.
All Imogen could do as they squared off with each other like duelists was wish he didn’t look so blasted magnificent. Framed by the gentle opulence of her home, his aristocratic features sharpened into something savage. Something not altogether human.
He was stained with the blood of her enemies. He’d justkilledto protect her. Five men.
This changed… everything.
She didn’t know what to do. Who to send for. It was all so utterly appalling.
A soft, rhythmic tap was a metronome in the charged silence, and Imogen looked down to see yet another puddle of blood pooling beneath him on the floor, this one from below a growing red stain high on the sleeve of his good arm.
