Page 65 of A Proposition for the Comte
His ring glinted in the light as they passed a window. So he had found the signet ring at Lackington’s and then come for her.
He moved like a big cat might, sure and fleet-footed, as though the semi-darkness was nothing. She wondered how many times he had done this, rescued someone needy from dire circumstances, killed a man and held a knife in his fist as though to welcome violence. Many, many times she imagined for the dangerous edges of him here were well on display.
Her fingers laced now into his own, and she relished the strength of him as he blew out the candle and discarded it.
‘Thank you.’ Her words came small and whispered and she thought he might bat them away until later but he did not.
‘Thank me when we are safe, sweetheart.’ His lips fastened across her own in a rapid surge of warmth and then let go, the cold reclaiming her.
Sweetheart.She held on to the word turning it over and over until all the translations were tangled.
‘He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not.’
She recited these words as they walked towards a light at the far end of the corridor, part in fright and part in hope. There in the bowels of hell he was her heaven, a man who had risked his life to save her and was still risking it.
The footsteps above were louder, running now, clattering across the floorboards in haste, the shouted words of fury accompanying them. A voice she knew was there, too, her guard at the town house, Tucker.
Aurelian took a pistol from his belt swearing roundly in French as he raced up a set of stairs to one end of the room.
‘If they come, you are to run. There is a wood behind the inn to the west. Go there. Stay low and hide. I will find you.’
‘West?’ Which direction was that. All her faculties were frozen in the fear of what he said.
Her own knife had been lost in the darkness when the man had hit her and she had nothing to help her rescuer with. Leaning over she picked up a heavy silver chalice from a table near the doorway, her fingers clawing around the missile.
This was all her fault. She could not run and leave him to deal with the mayhem, a man who had been sent to patch up the political rifts her husband’s missing gold had caused between two nations.
Harland had always run. Away from responsibility, duty and obligation and any other thing that called him into account for his insatiable greed. Consequences and liability had meant nothing to him and his word was as full of holes as a sponge.
But here was another sort of man, one whose troths were given in integrity and honesty, one who might lose his life for the good instead of for the questionable. Fighting alongside a man like this would be an honour.
They came suddenly and without warning, three men with murder in their eyes and sharp blades. Aurelian pushed her over into a corner, hemmed in by a table on one side and a door on the other, his voice sounding nothing like it did a moment ago when he had spoken to her.
‘Who do you work for?’
The man closest laughed, showing off a set of teeth that were missing many members. ‘Those who object to your interference in a matter that is a very English one.’
‘Cummings, then? And his department?’
The eyes of the other flared and then hardened.
‘Did you know that your bitch here was the one who started it all, the one who stole the first settlement of gold?’
‘I did.’
That brought on a slight shift in the room, an awareness that all was not quite as it seemed.
‘I had also heard that some of the gold had been changed into things that were easier to move. More untraceable if you like.’
The silence allowed Aurelian to continue on.
‘Sapphires. Rubies. Precious jewels.’
He was like an angler with fine bait on his line and dangling it over a small pool containing hungry fish.
The first man bit. ‘Where is it?’
‘Kill Lady Addington and you will never know for she has hidden it.’
