Page 87 of The Duke
“I’m afraid I don’t follow.” Morley tugged at his white tie and high collar. “What significance does the man’s first name have to do with the case?”
“It has everything to do with it.” Cole could no longer stand still, no longer could he be in this house, this room. He needed to act. He needed to follow this mystery through to its end, and he had a good idea where that would be. “When I was in Lady Anstruther’s garden earlier the same night that Lady Broadmore was killed, she mistook me for someone else in the darkness. She called me by his name, hisfirstname.”
“Oh?” Morley’s light brows crawled up his forehead. “And that name was…”
Cole had a distinct notion that the clever detective already knew, but he wanted verbal confirmation, and so he gave it to him with all the gravity of the giant stone of dread sinking into his gut.
“She called meJeremy.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO
If Cole had learned anything from his time as a spy, it was this: A secretalwayswanted to be discovered.
He didn’t know how long he stood in Imogen’s garden lifting his face to the sky. Long enough for Argent and Millie to help her into bed and stand vigil for a while. He listened to them consult with O’Mara and Rathbone before returning to their own home.
He evaded their patrol, waiting for his thoughts to coalesce into some semblance of a plan, and then scatter to the cosmos, as random as the placement of the stars.
As he let a chilly summer breeze tousle his hair, he took deep, centering breaths and thought about how odd he found it that people had always attempted to find meaning in the night sky. To connect the position of the celestial bodies and turn them into what they wanted—what theyneededto find when they looked to the stars. A fallen hero. A delineative creature. In many cases, a god or goddess.
Cole knew the constellations. He could name and identify many of them from several parts of the world. But, in truth, he’d never found what the astronomers and philosophers had. Could never truly identify the huntsman, Orion, in his handful of anemic stars, nor did he see Castor or Pollux in the twin belts of Gemini. They’d been men, legends at best. Perhaps only myths created by ancient bards. Not lines drawn by primeval theologists, immortalized in the eternal beyond. If those mythical men ever lived, then they’d surely died, and they’d gone the way of all creatures.
From the time he was young, Cole realized he’d not possessed the capacity for romantic fancy. He could not draw the lines he needed to find the miraculous divine in the everyday. He understood truths that many rejected. That perspective most often designated righteousness. That most of the constructs of society were imaginary, invisible, especially to those in Orion’s position. Past the sky, above the moon. If the hunter was real, were he immortalized there in the night sky as his mythology dictated, he could look down and see nothing of what men fought and killed each other over.
For country borders were merely lines on a map, not on the earth. And currency was little more than an agreed-upon idea, a value assigned to pretty minerals. An economy represented an intricate web of interests, of production and consumption, and seemed to always be destined to eventually collapse.
Because every society, every civilization, seemed to want to reject one simple and evident truth. That man for all his forward progression was still, in his being, no better than a beast. Driven by primal instincts and powerful, universal hungers. Try as he might to blame his primitive carnality on various and sundry underworld demons throughout the ages, Cole believed that a man’s wicked will was solely his own.
However, as he’d nursed his rather nihilistic view, buttressing it with dark life experiences, he’d begun to realize he’d overlooked one very important thing in his estimation of mankind…
Women.
A creature of a different sort, one fabricated from innumerable paradoxes. Both potent and persecuted. Made of equal parts fear and fairness. Wit and wisdom.
Of strength and secrets.
Certainly they had instincts and deviances of their own, but they existed generally above the cruel and bestial egocentricity of their sexual counterparts. They were constructed of kindness, of altruism, of ethics and understandings not normally possessed by men. Especially men like himself.
Imogen, he predicted, had more secrets than most. Secrets meant to be discovered, ones that would have meaning for them both.
Cole took one last look around the garden, a place he now thought of as synonymous with Imogen. The place from which she’d first captured his attention, then his lips, and eventually, his heart.
It had taken a long time for him to learn to climb after his injury, but his spelunking expedition to the Americas had been invaluable. Discarding his jacket to the bench they’d shared only days ago, he gripped the trellis with his good hand, and began to ascend.
The hook on the palm of his prosthesis attached to the harness around his torso did little better than anchor him in place as he made upward progress with his three other limbs. But he managed with almost his previous stealth. Once the second-floor balcony was in reach, he leaped over, catching the entirety of his weight with one hand. He gritted his teeth as the stitches in his shoulder strained and threatened to rip. With a foul curse and a surge of strength, he maneuvered his hook to sink into the wood railing once he steadied himself. Finding purchase with his feet, he vaulted the railing and landed in a soft crouch in the shadows of the balcony.
The first-floor locks were many and secure. The second-story doors and windows, however, were often protected with nothing better than a hook-latch.
Depressing the lever inside his prosthesis, Cole thrilled to the metallic slide of the thin blade. Carefully, he fitted it in between the balcony doors, and lifted until it released the latch with a satisfying click.
That accomplished, he retracted the blade and opened the door, entering her house as a shadow might, without notice.
He’d done this before, an infinite number of times, but never with his pulse thundering. Never with his mind so occupied.
Or his heart so vested.
How could Ginny and Imogen be connected by one young, inexperienced game-maker? Certainly, there was more than one Jeremy in the world, but the coincidence was simply too strong to ignore. A prostitute and a woman who dedicated her life to saving them… it wasn’t much of a leap to assume that they might have known each other.
Or shared acquaintances at the very least.
