Page 59 of Courting Trouble
“Upon that, you can rely,” Titus vowed, grappling back both wrath and worry in an effort to summon the strength to discover whatever horror might await them inside. “Where is the security they hired?”
“I was wondering that myself.” Blackwell, a man fond of wearing long jackets even in the summer, had any number of weapons hidden on him at any given time. Whether he currently palmed a knife or a pistol remained to be seen. “Tell me you have a firearm in that bag, Doctor.”
“Trust me,” Titus said darkly. “I’ve instruments in here that would cause you nightmares.”
“Good. Let us hope we don’t need them.”
“There’s nowhere to climb,” Morley grumbled, his head tilted back to survey the drooping, dangerously sloped roof of the structure. “And no windows low enough to get to.”
“The front door it is, then.” Titus lifted his boot and kicked the door. The latch shattered and wood splintered as the thing exploded inward on rusted hinges.
They advanced into the gloom of the warehouse, Titus at their head, using the darkness on the street side to their advantage.
What he saw confounded him enough to freeze his feet to the floor.
The warehouse was an empty void of packed earth and mold. The air stirred with a sharp bite of pitch. Tired beams held aloft sagging rafters and a second-floor walkway was missing more boards than it boasted. A handful of shipping crates clustered at the top of a ramp that led out to the water, if freight wanted to be loaded onto smaller crafts.
A lone lantern perched on a crate and haloed three slim women, who stood abreast on the platform behind an open chest. Clad in dark colors as they were, the Goode sisters might have been hovering over a child’s coffin rather than a gleaming fortune.
Titus’s heart came alive at the sight of Nora, standing between her fair sisters like a midnight angel. He devoured her with his gaze, his vision blurred with exhaustion and unbridled emotion.
He released her name on a relieved breath, breaking into a jog toward her.
She shook her head, the warning in her wide eyes piercing him with caution the moment before a lone man melted from the shadows beneath the landing.
He maneuvered in front of the women and the chest with the deceptively sleek insouciance of a snake. But Titus could see that this serpent was coiled, ready to strike at the slightest provocation. He was neither bulky nor slight, tall nor short. Though his proportions were hidden beneath, an exquisitely tailored blue suit suggested at imposing strength and ideal ratios. Dark hair gleamed almost blue in the lantern light, and a diamond winked from one ear.
Titus’s fist curled around his club in readiness. Though the man appeared unarmed and unaccompanied, he knew a predator when he saw one.
This particular predator had the raw-boned, sharp-jawed elegance that would have suited the archangel for which he was named.
Raphael Sauvageau.
“The Black Heart of Ben More.” The gangster bowed at the waist, adopting a smile that was dangerously close to a sneer. “It is an incomparable honor. I have been an ardent pupil of yours for many years.” Though his English was perfect, his measured voice was tinged with the suggestion of a French accent.
Dorian snorted from where he stood at Titus’s left shoulder, also deceptively calm as a panther about to spring. “I’d give you terrible marks. Look at you, you’re here alone with no army at your back. You’re obviously going to die.”
“I’d rather no one die today,” Morley said, belying the rifle he’d tucked into his shoulder.
Dorian expressed a sigh of consternation, adjusting his eye patch. “You’ve always beensucha boor, Morley. I can’t fathom how we’ve become allies.”
The chief inspector ignored him. “Where are the security officers hired to protect these women?”
“He told them to go home!” Mercy gestured to the gangster, her features a mask of ardent disbelief. “We broughtfiveuseless armed brutes with us, but he somehow arrived here first. When he introduced himself and told our guards to go…well they just…left.”
“They’d doubtless heard of me.” Raphael Sauvageau’s laughing, tawny eyes locked with Titus, and something like recognition flared there. “Youare the dangerous one, Doctor,” he murmured as if to himself. “One of these women belongs to you.” He circled the girls, making a great show of inspecting them, not as a man, but as a beast might his next meal. “The question is, which? The bespectacled bluestocking, the mouthy minx, or…” He stopped in front of Nora, whose features remained carefully blank, her composure born of years of living with volatility. “Ah yes, the benighted beauty.”
“If you touch her—” Titus lunged forward, but Dorian caught his shoulder.
“I haven’t, and I don’t intend to.” Sauvageau put up his hands in a gesture of mock surrender as Morley drew a bead. “There’s no need for all of that. It is only my brother, Gabriel, and me. We mean no one harm.”
Another man stepped from behind the stacked crates to take up sentinel behind the women. He wore a long coat over shoulders half again as wide as his brother’s, and a curious hood that shielded his features from view. He said nothing. He didn’t need to. The way he loomed over the women spoke terrifying volumes.
Raphael kept his tone conversational, genial even. “We only needed the two of us to load our gold into the cart and we will be on our way.”
“Horseshit,” Dorian spat. “Surely your savages are close by.”
“Fauves, not savages.” Raphael’s eyes gleamed with a dangerous ire. “We are untamed but elegant beasts. We aren’t like the brutes and bullies here. We are teaching men to find their own sovereignty. To create their own class in a system that would repress them.”
