Page 62 of Greed: The Savage
Tintern Abbey where mist cloaked now storied lands.
“I told her of parts of England Diggory’s girls used to speak about,” she murmured softly.
Stowe Gardens, a Grecian Valley masterpiece cultivated by Capability Brown himself.
Addien continued to torment Thornwick with the wishful story she’d painted one cold night in London to keep her friend alive. “I told her, in other parts of the kingdom, there’s hills made not of pavement but grass.” The glimmer in her eyes shifted, a move away from the sorrow to a place where a dream lived. “Not the tiny, weedy, brown tuffs by the docks and waste grounds, but real green-like.”
He’d certainly never thought of them with any wonder, or even at all. Before now.
Addien tipped a look his way. “You got places like that, Thornwick?” Her child-like curiosity was sharper than any censorious jibe could.
Seventy-five thousand noncontiguous acres of land spread over several counties. Villages and hamlets owned outright. Nor did that include the handful of hunting lodges, fortified manors, and regional manors. A London townhouse. A residence in Bath. All passed to him.
“Yes,” he managed to say. “I have places…like that.”
The wistfulness in her gaze cut him clean through.
Addien’s eyes grew sad. “She froze that night.”
In Addien’s arms.
Maybe Dunworthy had put a blade in Thornwick’s blackened heart, and her words drove the final strike. For her telling bored into Thornwick like a spike, deep, sharp, and merciless.
He saw it all. The alley. The girl in her arms. Addien and her dying friend dreaming of a place away from humanity’s cruelest streets.
He’d never had a use for a rogue’s tongue. Thornwick didn’t waste time with niceties and inane talk. He dealt in blunt directness to the point of brutality. He wished for it now. “I’m s—” He broke off. What a fucking rubbish response.
“It is all right,” she said gently. “It was a long time ago.”
She sought to reassure him? The hell he’d allow her to do that.
Thornwick caressed his thumb over a palm of her hand that’d been forced to do too much. “Memories like that do not fade, Addien,” he murmured.
“No,” she assented. “No, they do not.” Addien’s gaze fell to the frigid water.
Now he knew what she saw, what she remembered.
He set his jaw. And by God this day, he’d ensure those dark memories were replaced with new, hotter ones—ones that would scour the cold from her mind.
“Dynevor operates an icehouse,” he said, his voice sliding smoothly into the silken cadence of seduction. “He has men who harvest the ice from a lake.”
Addien wet her lips. “Nobility and their peculiar collections.”
The air between them thickened, the warmth gone, replaced by something sharper, more deliberate.
“As you well know,” he said, “he does everything in the interest of, and only with the thought of, the club in mind.”
“Including the ice?” she asked.
Thornwick turned his attention to her lower wrist. “Oh, yes. Especially…” He stopped.
His gaze locked on the faint imprints of another man’s fingers, stamped into Addien’s soft skin, right where the delicate inseam of her wrist met her hand. Her pulse beat fast. Too fast. The pace not of fear, but wanting.
Her next breathless words confirmed her desire. “Are you trying to think of one?”
“One use?” he said, a silken purr.
More like trying to hold back the beast pacing inside him, straining at its leash, ready to run Dunworthy to ground and finish what he’d begun. Thornwick didn’t meet her gaze; if he did, she’d see the murderous rage within.
