Page 55 of Courting Trouble
“Come on, man.” Dorian hauled him to his feet. “Let’s get you home to bed.”
“I don’t sleep in my bed. It smells like roses.”
He missed the glance his compatriots shared because he felt a perfectly good brood coming upon him.
“I’m—I should have stopped her.” He swayed, looking for his hat before Morley shoved the thing into his hands. “I should have just trussed her up and thrown her in my carriage and run away to Italy. But who does that kind of thing?”
“Only the best of men,” Dorian said cheekily. “So, I cannot argue the point.”
Morley reached in his pockets and left a generous several coins on the bar. “Prudence says Lady Woodhaven is as bereft as you are. She hasn’t accepted any kind of proposal. Not officially. There’s still time to fight for her, you know.”
His still, cold heart began to beat at the prospect, thrumming and stalling as if it’d forgotten how. “I’d fight the entire world for her… if she’d let me.”
A youngish man with an air of danger and an overconfident swagger came toward them. Titus braced for trouble, but the lad merely handed a folded note to Blackwell, tipped his hat at the gratuity he received, and melted back into the London night.
Dorian opened the note and read quickly, his lips compressing into a tight line.
“What is it?” Morley asked, suddenly alert.
“It would seem we’re going to Sheerness,” he said.
“But that’s…hours downriver,” Titus protested, stumbling out onto cobbles shining in the pallid gaslight from a recent rain.
“Which is fortunate for you, because you’ll need to sober up on the way.” Dorian whistled and motioned to where his carriage waited idly a block down. “It would seem your errant lady love has hired an entire handful of personal safety guards to conduct her and her two sisters there tonight rather than wait for the train. Can you imagine why?”
Titus’s heart kicked up plenty now, his hands and feet blanching cold while his ears burned, and his lungs tightened. “A town at the mouth of the Thames? I can’t begin to guess—”
He broke away, as logic threaded through his whisky-soaked thoughts. He knew her. Even though they’d spent so much of their lives apart. He still knew her. Knew what drove her decisions and desires. She wanted to make amends. To free her sisters from her tainted reputation, possibly by untainting it.
“What is in Sheerness?” he demanded.
Dorian shrugged, searching his near perfect memory. “Oh, a few hotels, an estuary, a fishing and shipping port, mostly.”
“Shipping, you say?” Morley clipped, cutting a look across to Titus as Dorian’s carriage pulled to the curb. “If they’re after what I think they are, let’s hope they took a bloody army with them, because they’re going to need it.”
“Why do you say that?” Titus asked. “I thought she was no longer being followed.”
The Chief Inspector glanced through the darkened streets as if searching for a tail. “If Blackwell knows where she’s gone, there’s a good chance Sauvageau does, as well. The messenger network in this city might be fast and reliable, but serves any master with coin. They know no such thing as loyalty.”
Blackwell nodded grimly as he called the footman down from his carriage. “Tell Farah I’ll be home in the morning… we have wild beasts to hunt tonight.”
That Afternoon of
Though her shoulder was healing nicely, the rest of Nora remained one jagged, bleeding wound. And only one doctor in the world could hope to stitch her back together.
She’d eaten more crow in the past couple of weeks than she’d prepared to, and suffered a multitude of indignities. The worst of which was clearing what was left of her things from the home that would be occupied by Adrian McKendrick, the new Viscount Woodhaven.
It wasn’t that she was at all attached to the home she’d shared with William. Merely that she was convinced that by the time she married the son of a duke, she’d not have a shred of dignity to offer anyone.
It was worth it, she kept reminding herself. To once again secure Titus’s future, along with—
A loud crash from below broke her reverie, and she called down the stairs to where Mercy and Felicity argued in the parlor. “Is everything all right?”
“It’s splendid!” Mercy sang back. “Nothing amiss down here!”
“A vase tipped.” Felicity emerged from the parlor to the hall where Nora could see her from the second floor. She was holding two larger shards of pottery and wearing a chagrined expression. “We were packing the library when a spirited debate over the superiority of romances or mysteries turned into a fencing match with the fireplace implements. Mercy cut her hand.”
“Don’t be cross!” Mercy’s plea sounded more like a command, though she still hid out of view.
