Page 44 of A Dark and Stormy Knight
She might have killed a man in cold blood.
What sort of mother would a woman like that make?
A rueful sound echoed off the damp walls of a dank alley he all but slithered down. The irony of his hypocrisy both irritated and amused him.
The father of this child was Cutter fucking Morley.
And that was both why he’d married her and why he hadn’t touched her. No matter how her shape enticed him. Regardless of how the memories of her creamy thighs and silken intimate flesh tormented him. Despite the urge he had to throw caution to the wind and plunge his hands into her luxuriant hair and trail his mouth over every delectable inch of her—sampling summer berries and soft flesh…
His leather gloves creaked against the tightening of his fists.
He. Couldn’t. Touch. Her. Not until he found out if she’dinnocentblood on her hands.
There were reasons to kill. He kept reminding her of that becauseifshe was found to be guilty, he wanted—he needed—a reason to save her.
Because the life inside her wombwasinnocent. Pure and untainted by the ugliness of this world. Of these streets. And he’d be goddamned if he wouldn’t do everything in his mortal power to keep it that way.
Six months. He had six months to investigate the death of Sutherland and the shipments of illicit substances sweeping the streets.
He felt like a man standing before a tryptic of mirrors, seeing a separate reflection in each. One, the methodical Chief Inspector. The next, a vengeful vigilante. And the third… a boy with a terrible secret and a broken heart.
To reconcile himself. He needed to shatter the third mirror.
Two shades broke from the lamplight of a rotten pub moving toward the alley in between, stealing his focus. Morley trailed them, melting from shadow to shadow like death, himself.
He moved when they moved. Waited when they waited, pressing himself against the corner of a building, listening to their excitement. Catching it with rampant kicks of his heart in his chest as the blue uniform of a London Metropolitan Policeman absorbed the light as he strode toward them, waving a walking stick.
This was what he’d come to see. An exchange of illicit substances. This… was where his trail to the very source began.
Morley waited for the men to pass the Copper his money. He waited until they checked the purity of the substance he handed back to them. He waited until they damned themselves.
Moving slowly, he cracked his fingers and reveled in what was to come. Three criminals. One in his uniform wielding a nightstick.
There would be pain. And he needed the pain. To inflict it. To endure it. To escape.
Yes. He’d put an end to Cutter very soon. But first…he’d use every weapon in his arsenal. He’d cut out the truth if he had to. The sooner the better.
Because as much as he trusted no one, he trusted himself least of all…
To keep his hands off his wife.
Chapter 10
If it was the last thing she ever did, Pru was going to get behind the two locked doors in her house.
She’d been staring at them for a week. Or, rather, they had been staring at her.
They’d a somewhat strange relationship now, she and the doors. They greeted her every day on the way down to breakfast, beckoning to her with their iron latches and symmetrical arches. A cream-colored obsession, they were, and if she didn’t get behind them today, she’d give in to the madness waiting in the periphery of her thoughts. Threatening to engulf her and drag her to perdition.
She couldn’t exactly say why it bothered her so much. Why she spent so long in front of them when there were so many diverting rooms to occupy her. The first floor alone contained the large drawing room, the dining room, and a morning room attached to the well-tended back gardens through which the modest stable and carriage house hunkered in a cozy stone corner. She’d found a small library, in which she rejoiced, connected to her spacious parlor on the second floor, along with a couple handsome unused guest rooms, and her husband’s study.
The third story was where she slept, and only four doors graced the long hall. One was her bedroom and dressing room, obviously, and the other a washroom.
She needn’t the deductive powers of a Scotland Yard detective to suss out that her husband slept behind one of the locked doors.
In theory, at least.
Nighttime was when her body reminded her she carried his child with bouts of vicious nausea. So, when she lay awake staring at the canopy, doing her best to contain the retching, she’d often hear the clip of his shoes on the floorboards as he returned home from occasional nocturnal adventures as the Knight of Shadows.
