Page 32 of A Dark and Stormy Knight
“What happened?” Ash asked Morley, after wiping his smile from his lips with the back of his hand.
Morley pressed two fingers to each temple and worked in circles. He was about to regret this, but he needed to confess. To purge the sin that’d been weighing on him for so many weeks.
Because it’d been so long since he’d been so lost.
“Have any of you heard of the Stags of St. James?”
Ash and Argent shook their heads, but Dorian nodded. “Noble women pay fortunes for their sexual services. Madame Regina, who runs my brothel, suggested we recruit a few from Henrietta Thistledown.”
Morley cleared a gather of shame from his throat. “Well, I was out one night, just about three months ago…”
“Being a vigilante?” Dorain asked.
“Investigating,” he corrected.
“No one else investigates with a mask, but do go on.”
Once again, he let that go. “Myinvestigationof some murdered men took me to Miss Henrietta’s, where they’d worked as stags. I was in the garden and Miss Goode sort of…mistook me for…” He couldn’t bring himself to say the bloody word.
Ash’s mouth fell open. “A prostitute?”
“Is she blind?” Dorian’s nose wrinkled as he raked him with a disbelieving glare.
Morley sat back in his chair, cursing himself for saying a damned word to any of them.
It was Argent who leaned forward, his expression fascinated. “And?”
“And…we…” Morley flicked his hand out in a gesture that could have meant anything.
“Holy fucking Christ, you didn’t,” Dorian shook his head as if begging him to deny it and hoping he wouldn’t.
“I need to sit down.” Argent groped for the chair across from his desk and settled his hulking frame into it.
“I need a drink.” Ash went to the sideboard next to the door.
Dorian stayed where he was, staring at Morley. “Youdeflowered a Baron’s daughter, no, a Commissioner’s daughter—your boss’s daughter—before her wedding and gotherto payyoufor it? Christ, Morley, I’ve misjudged you all this time. Color me bloody impressed.”
“Don’t,” Morley warned.
“Oh, don’t be cross.” Dorian waved his leather-gloved hand at him. “I’m certain you did itproperlyandthoroughlyas you do everything else and then made up for it with piles of guilt and self-flagellation and sleepless nights and all that rubbish.”
Morley crossed his arms. “I’m not discussing this with you further.” He never flagellated himself, bastard didn’t know what he was talking about.
Ash stepped forward, a drink in hand. “Don’t heed Dorian. Pearls before swine and all that.”
Dorian feigned outrage. “Speak for yourself,I’mnot the one rolling in the dirt with betrothed debutants.”
They all looked at Morley and lost their battle with mirth.
“I didn’t know who she was at the time,” Morley explained darkly. “Or I’d never have touched her.”
Ash came behind the desk where Morley sat, and put a glass in front of him. He leaned a hip on the edge and poured Morley a healthy snifter from his own decanter before patting him on the shoulder. “I, for one, am delighted,” he said, encouraging him to drink. “You were living like a monk, and let’s be honest, you never were very good with women.”
“A monk?” Dorian scoffed. “I was worried he was a bloody eunuch.”
“Or had a terrible predilection,” Ash added.
“That wouldn’t bother me so much,” Argent cut in, declining a drink with a wave of his hand as he sipped his coffee. “I never trust a man without a dark side.”
