Page 29 of The Duke's Wicked Widow
Nay, ye got yer way, did ye no’? If she’s crabbit about things, remember ye fooked her yesterday.
She would be angry. She didn’tlookangry. She didn’t seem angry.
Instead Ellie was smiling softly, her lips curled up at the corners as she ended the kiss and climbed off him. He had to force his fingers to loosen to let her go.
Fawkes exhaled and dropped his head to the back of the sofa, watching her. She made short work of pulling the skirt back on, then performed some sort of calisthenics to get the blouse turned right way around and pulled on. Her ease in dressing reminded him that she’d come to his flat wearing no underclothes. She’d intended this as a seduction.
He couldn’t bring himself to care. Not sprawled here, in the afterglow of his release, watching all that glorious skin slowly being covered.
Ellie hadn’t spoken at all, but as she gathered her shawl, she turned to Fawkes abruptly. “Come to me? Tomorrow?”
He stirred, not understanding. “What?”
“I—you know I need a pregnancy. Tomorrow evening, will you visit Cumnock House? I will send you word when it is safe, and where.”
Only the way she clutched the shawl hinted at how much the answer mattered to her.
Fawkes swallowed, then dipped his chin. “Send yer message, lass.”
It wasn’t a promise, he told himself.
Her expression cleared, and she bobbed her head once—or perhaps it was an abbreviated curtsey. The thought made him want to laugh, although there was nothing about this scenario which was funny.
Was there?
Long after Ellie had slipped from his home—God, what kind of cad didn’t even offer to walk her to her carriage?Again?—he sat there on the sofa.
His cock softened and his trousers dried to a sticky, uncomfortable state, and still Fawkes sat there.
Staring at nothing, and tasting her on his lips.
Chapter 5
Frowning in concentration,Ellie flipped two pages back in her notebook. This message had been posted inThe Daily Movementon July thirteenth, wasn’t it? Ah, yes, the date was correct.
But.
But the configuration of “GED” looked familiar…
There it was. The message posted June ninth had the same configuration of letters:
GED EDAM SK IKUA MCAMD VESC LQTRRFMJ DAMH VESCKTS EJRTQMJNA. IKJAX MQQEUAR EJ SVK DSXP.
She straightened at her desk and reached for the second notebook, the one with the larger pages where she’d copied out all of the ciphers, and ran her fingertip across the page.
GED…
Yes. There was a third instance of those letters in that order on March twenty-first, and another on September first. There were also quite a few instances of the “AM” combination—was that a diphthong, or a blended sound? And the March message used “DSXP” as well.
In two of these four messages, there was a four-letter word where the letters in the first, second, and fourth position were the same: “SC_S.”
This wasn’t the first time she’d noticed a pattern, and she knew better than to jump out of her bath and run downstairs yelling “Eureka!” She was no Archimedes, but she considered herself good at puzzles…and this one had stumped her.
Now, the word “that” was the most common four-letter word in the English language which started and ended with the same letters…but the fact the third letter in this configuration wasn’t the same meant either this combination of letters wasn’t “that”…or the code was changing…or it wasn’t in English…
Flipping to a blank sheet of paper, she quickly drew up a substitution cipher, using S and C in place of T and H, then cross-referenced them against a random selection of messages, hoping to see some pattern. Hoping a word made sense. Hoping it worked.
But it didn’t work. The messages were all nonsense.
