Page 35 of Seducing a Stranger
“Is she blackmailing you or something?” the taciturn detective inquired.
Morley shook his head. “Worse. She’s claiming I impregnated her that night.”
At that, all sense of joviality drained from the room as the enormity of the situation pressed the very air into something heavy and dark.
For all their differences, all four of them had something very much in common.
They’d grown up without paternal care. Their fathers had abandoned them at best and tried to murder them at worst.
“Do you have any reason to believe her?” Dorian asked. “Have you seen proof of her condition or is she simply desperate to save her neck?”
“She hired a prostitute,” Ash said carefully. “So, there’s the possibility the father of her child could have been any number of men.”
Morley thought on that, and then violently rejected that notion, voicing the fear he’d had for some weeks now. “I’m not certain she’d ever truly had a lover before me.”
All the men suddenly seemed uncomfortable, but it was Dorian who said, “Well… I mean… there’s an uncomplicated way to tell.”
“Not… the way we… Holy Christ I don’tknow.” Morley buried his hands in his hair and pulled.
“I’m afraid to ask, and yet I find myself anxious to find out,” Argent said as if this surprised him.
Morley sorely wished he could be anywhere else. He couldn’t very well admit that he was so bloody ravenous that he might not have noticed the physical barrier of her virginity.
That her arms were so sweet. Her body so tight, yet welcoming. Her moans might have been pleasure or pain, but her words were nothing but encouraging.
He proceeded carefully. “She wasn’t…experienced, but neither did I notice a… physical impediment. She wasn’t the shy, wilting flower, obviously, she approached me. But, neither was she a vixen. She’d found out about the Earl of Sutherland’s infidelity and was angry at his selfishness. She wanted a lover of her own.”
He didn’t want to give them more. To say how adorable she’d been. And so damnably desirable he’d been on the verge of orgasm the minute they’d kissed. He’d been beneath her skirts as he feasted her to completion and was unable to tell if she were shocked or expectant. Nervous or experienced.
And yet. He’d known it was her first climax. She’d left no doubt about that.
“She made it sound like her intended was a selfish lover,” he defended himself to no one in particular at this point. “But I can’t say for certain now that she knew this firsthand. And she never went back to Miss Henrietta’s. I paid to be informed the moment she did. So the chances of her hiring another lover are slim.”
Though, if he thought about it… she could entice any man with the crook of her finger.
“Why go through with marriage to the blighter, then, if he was unfaithful?” Ash wondered aloud.
“Strictly speaking, she didn’t,” Argent reminded them over his coffee cup. “She was found with her fingers around the hilt of the dagger that killed him.”
“Red-handed, as it were.” Morley huffed a sigh between his compressed lips. “Why would she do it? Why would she doanyof it?”
Ash shrugged, as if it really was of little consequence. “It’s not for us to understand the mysterious minds of women.”
“Or people in general,” Argent agreed.
“Perhaps she agreed to marry him because she didn’t want her child to grow up a bastard,” Dorian, the bastard born of a ruthless Marquess, put this to them without a hint of his earlier levity.
“It’s a probability.” Morley felt his lip lift above his teeth in a snarl. “Or she wanted my child to be the next Earl of Sutherland.”
“Can you blame her?” Argent had a distinct gift for finding the practicalities in an emotionally charged situation. “This pregnancy makes herlesslikely to kill the man who would lift her out of this bind, not more. She’d have been a pariah to her family and society if the child had been born without the luxury of a name. It’s extraordinary what women will give up for their children…” Argent trailed off, staring at the blank wall.
“Unless Sutherland found out and threatened to destroy her with the secret,” Morley theorized.
“Cutter,” Ash said the name written on no documents and spoken by no one in the world but the unlucky few who’d known him decades ago.
Their eyes met, and suddenly Ash wasn’t a pirate king, or the Rook, but that black-eyed boy. The one with whom he roamed the streets and threw fists and stole food and created impossible futures.
“Congratulations, Cutter.” Ash’s lips lifted into the ghost of a smile, his dark eyes softening to something almost tender. “You’re going to be a father.”
The weight of that word knocked the wind from him. Afather. He’d given up that dream years ago.
“What are you going to do about it?” Dorian, the besotted father of two children gave him perhaps the first look of commiseration he’d ever received from the man.
Morley stood and shouldered past them all, retrieving his jacket from where he’d hung it on the rack. “My job.”
