Page 36 of Greed: The Savage
Addien stood motionless, a light tremble wracking her frame, and she had to grit her teeth together to keep them from quivering aloud and giving her away.
He was going to mock her. This time, she wasn’t going to be able to shield herself or her misery from Malric.
“I was late,” she said, “it won’t happen again. You have my word on that.”
He gave a slight lift to his head, encouraging her to follow him. Addien stood there a moment as he took his leave, overcome by a swell of emotion. Something dangerously close to tears filled her throat. She couldn’t be sure as she hadn’t cried in years.
To keep the exchange normal—well, as normal as it could be—Addien didn’t let herself fall back. She quickened her steps to not only reach him, but to make her shorter strides fall in line with his quicker, longer ones the rest of the way to the carriage. Still not a word was spoken. Oh, she waited for what was surely coming. There was absolutely no way he was going to let her off. When they reached one of Dynevor’s carriages, Addien went to let herself inside. She hitched her fancy silk skirts about her ankles and nearly to her knees to climb inside.
Malric held a gloved hand out, staying Addien in her tracks, somehow even more jolted than she’d been by Roy’s revelation. Her breath hitched slightly in her ears and she automatically slipped her ridiculously gloved fingers into his so very briefly and released them immediately, yet the moment was lightning.
Settling herself on the crimson squabs within the carriage, she curled her hands into half crescents upon her lap. Malric exchanged words with the driver, and she was grateful for the time he took to do so. It allowed her to compose herself and try and reorder her scattered thoughts. When he joined her inside the carriage, Addien felt she had done a sufficient job in doing so.
How peculiar that all her focus should remain centered on some silent, soundless exchange with this hard, icy man and not with what Roy had revealed before Malric appeared in the kitchen doorway unannounced.
Eventually, Malric joined her in the carriage, taking up a seat on the opposite bench. His features carved in their usual granite. That way the two of them could return to where they left off yesterday, when Addien had been in the way of their attempts at being intimate. A sour sensation settled in her stomach, leaving her oddly sick. Only because that’s how Addien generally felt about anything related to carnal matters…
“You’ve got all that, Addien?”
Addien snapped her head up and gave a nod.
“Aye,” she said. Surely enough time had passed since she and Malric had departed that she could be permitted to look away and out the window to escape his scrutiny and the remnants of the exchange he’d happened upon earlier.
Addien reached for the velvet curtain, her fingers merely brushing the soft, smooth fabric.
“You make more sense for a fellow like Roy,” Thornwick said out of thin air.
Addien’s spine went shooting up. My God, surely he was not speaking those words in reference to…
“Not that I’m dismissing Magdalene’s beauty,” he went on.
Yes, yes. He was going there. And perhaps she’d been correct in her initial assessment after all. He was cruel.
“What the hell are you rattling on about?” she snapped, her excruciatingly painful humiliation left her fancied fine speech all muddled up and tangled back up with her cockney.
“Roy. My guard.”
Lashing out in the only way she could. Addien turned all of her ire on him.
“Roy ain’t yours. He answers to Dynevor only and belongs to no one. Certainly not you,” she added, looking him up and down with a searing look.
A muscle in his jaw jumped.
“Everyone belongs to someone,” he purred on a harsh, ugly tone, “including your hero himself, Roy. Though from the sounds of it, he will pretty soon belong to the lovely, entrancing minx Magdalene.”
Addien’s body scissored with the cruelty of the barb he’d landed unknowingly into her chest there.
He didn’t disappoint with his cruelty, reminding Addien her instincts had never done her wrong and that went for her assessment of the Marquess of Thornwick.
Addien registered that, at some point, the conveyance had come to a false stop. And still she didn’t speak. She had no clever retort. She had no sharp rejoinder. She had no witty response. She had nothing. He disarmed her completely and in the cruelest way imaginable.
Chapter 10
Bloody Fucking Hell.
What in thunderation had prompted that level of cruelty from Thornwick? Continually, he prided himself on not being the bastard of a bully his father, the duke, was.
Yet something about this woman prompted him to speak with an ugliness he didn’t recognize. It wasn’t that Thornwick was opposed to cruelty when cruelty was deserved. It was a tactic he’d employed at the Home Office with the scum he’d been forced to deal with, and he was all too happy to do so. Nothing brought him greater pleasure than burying men or women who were faithless traitors to the Crown.
