Page 21 of Til Death Duke Us Part
“Time to go. The brougham’s waiting out front.” The duke scooped up his hat, and the money, linked their arms and ran. She picked up her skirts to keep pace as he pulled her through the door. “Thank you, thank you! But the mail coach approaches, and I need my wife aboard before it leaves.”
“You are more full of shit than a chamber pot,” she hissed.
“That’s not London at all,” the stranger cried. They had enough distance from the crowd now that the man’s voice was muffled. “I mean, it is, but the flying horses and the gold houses? It’s like a child’s fantasy of London.”
“Run faster,” Morington urged from the corner of his mouth.
She had no choice but to run faster. He was dragging her.
But then she heard it—a discontented rabble rising behind them. The crowd was no doubt looking for pitchforks.
She clutched her skirts higher. “Run faster!”
Through the inn, out the door. The brougham right there. He pitched her up into it then vaulted up himself. The carriage lurched as he urged the horse forward, and they were jolting out of the coaching yard when the first yell went up.
“Will they follow?” she asked over the crash of the wheels against the pebbled road.
“I don’t think so. But just in case. There’s a pistol underneath your seat.”
“No!”
“Yes. Now be ready, dear.”
But she didn’t rummage beneath the seat. She turned and watched the inn disappear behind them. “I don’t think I’ll need it. No one’s coming. We’re safe.” She turned on him, smacked his arm. “What were you thinking?”
“That we needed more coin after I’d paid the innkeeper.”
“Couldn’t you have glamoured a single coin to appear to be more? Given the fake ones to the innkeeper?”
“Unfortunately not. You know how they’re shaped differently?”
“Of course.”
“And how glamours can’t reproduce textures or any other sensory detail?”
“Oh. I see. You can make the coins look one way, but the innkeeper would feel their true value.”
“Precisely.”
She smoothed her sumptuous skirts, still purple, fashionable, and with the look of silk. Though they felt like homespun cotton beneath her palms. “Why didn’t you glamour us invisible or something like that? Why make us run?”
“Quick escape was wisest, but also… I’m damned tired. Invisibility is quite challenging. Harder to make things go away than to make them disappear. And it’s not really making them go away. It’s more like painting them into the background. And if they move an inch, it’s all that work for nothing.”
She studied his profile. Sweat had broken out on his brow, and his cheeks were pale.
“The image of London on the ceiling was overdoing it,” he said.
“London was fine. The flying horses were overdoing it.”
The corner of his mouth hitched up, and he slowed their pace a bit. “When I’m rested, I’ll put on a different visage and change the horse’s appearance and yours too a bit, but for now…” His shoulders slumped and his jaw slackened, and her purple gown disappeared. So did the profile of a man who likely looked like the Earl of Givesly. Replaced by the sharp cheekbones, broken nose, and dirty yellow hair of her duke.
Not her duke.
If only she could hide her blushes as well as he hid everything else. Her hands fisted in her skirts.
Oh yes. The ring.
She held up her hand to remove it, but the slide of cool metal against her skin slid a memory into place—his mouth closing around her digit, his teeth tugging, freeing the ring. She shivered, left the ring. She’d take it off when she was too tired to relive that erotic moment.
