Page 86 of A Dark and Stormy Knight
Men like Argent. They owned their darkness. They wore it on their skin. He’d always had to hide his behind a badge of gold. Or a black mask. He had to pretend the darkness wasn’t there. Waiting. Breeding. Growing.
His was patient fury. A glowing ember of ever-present wrath.
And now, that fury was about to be unleashed.
Chapter 19
Prudence wondered if the fact that she carried a child made her more or less likely to survive her brother-in-law’s madness.
It was the most awful thing she’d ever had to contemplate.
He’d shoved her in the corner of a long warehouse with a labyrinth of wooden crates haphazardly strewn about the moldy stone floor. Crates he and his four comrades were now frantically prying apart with crowbars, flinging the lids, and diving into as if they might contain the holy grail.
The afternoon was grey, but abundant windows filtered light into the two-story warehouse that was little more than an open floor free of landings or offices. One wide wooden gate would open right onto the docks where steam-powered boats unloaded their goods for storage and dissemination out of the wide bay facing Water Street. From the skeleton of a silo taking up nearly the entire street-side entrance and the strange, layered architecture of the roof, Prudence thought maybe this had once been a place to store grain or flour.
Impossible to tell now.
She’d suffered the bulk of her paralyzing panic in the carriage, where William had shoved a pistol in her face and screamed at the driver to ride on. Her saving grace was that he had done a horrible job of tying her wrists and ankles.
Thank God.
Taking advantage of their distraction, she worked frantically on the bonds. The ones at her hands were loosening, of that she had no doubt, she just had to keep at it.
It was the only thing that gave her hope. The one reason she kept a tenuous hold on her sanity.
Because once she was free, she’d have to figure out her next step…
How to get past five men with pistols tucked into vest holsters or waistbands when she had no weapon at all.
One thing at a time.
At least he wouldn’t get away with it, she thought. If the worst happened…her husband would miss her at dinner, and he’d come looking. He’dknowwho had her.
Morley…a well of longing surged inside with such visceral desperation, it escaped on a sob.
William straightened from another fruitless search, slicking his thinning hair back from a sweating brow as he speared her with a pinched glare. A gentleman of leisure like him was unused to such strenuous exertion. Especially one as soft and bloated as he.
“Your fucking husband,” he sniped, as if reading where her thoughts had just been lingering. “Gave the order for old Goode to send me abroad without so much as a by-your-leave. Just to save your narrow hide.” Thin lips parted in a leer so chock-full of disgust, she could barely look at him. “What did he think, that I would take orders from him? Anobody?”
She wanted to tell him that her husband wasn’t a nobody. That he was more advantageous a spouse than a dozen viscounts or even a hundred dukes.
She held her temper, for the sake of her child.
“He thought you’d help your family in crisis,” she said evenly, trying to keep him calm. “William, if this is about Geor—”
“Thisfamily, so uppity for such low rank.” He shook his head and began to wedge his crowbar into the next waist-high crate. “I’ve done my part for this family, merely by elevating it from the slums of mediocrity.”
He threw his body weight down on the crowbar and tipped the lid aside before wading into the shavings of protective packaging. “Why do they even allow Barons to keep titles, anyhow?” he said as though muttering to himself. “They’re hardly needed these days, it’s not the Middle Ages. And your father, debasing himself with this shipping venture to make his fortunes, only to remain so miserly with his stipends.” His lip curled in disgust. “A tighter bankbook doesn’t exist in Christendom.Where is it!” In a shocking explosion of temper, he pushed over an entire crate. Prudence cringed away as it splintered, spilling an array of silks that unspooled in a riot of color.
“What are you looking for?” she asked, hoping to keep him talking as the knot at her right handfinallygave enough for her to slip through it, rendering the other one useless.
Still, she kept her hands behind her back.
“Payment for the risk I took,” he snarled. “Payback! I’ve a barge waiting at the end of the dock, and we’ll be out to sea before we’re missed with a crate full of cash.”
“If this is about money…”
“Of course, it’s about money!” he roared “Every bloody thing is about money these days. Birth and titles and blue blood mean nothing anymore in this churning, blasphemous machine that is our nation now. What happened to the nobility?”
