Page 76 of Heartbreaker

She didn’t need protection. And still, he needed to protect her.

The thought clarified in the darkness, and the door to the room splintered open, slamming back into the wall with the force of a heavy boot.

And then, there was noneedingto protect her; there was only doing it.

Adelaide shot up from her slumber, the bedclothes falling to her waist, and Henry shouted, “Stay!” even as he was out of the bed, already reaching for his blade.

“Oh, there’s no way I’m doing that,” she said as he stepped up onto the bed and crossing it, leaping down at its foot to face the intruders, putting himself between them and her.

In the lantern light from the hallway beyond, Henry could make out two of them, one tall and slim, the other big and broad and stinking of ale—recognizable by his slow lumber. It was the brute from below. “Ah, Billy,” Henry said as he came forward. “You should have stayed gone.”

“I won’t be bested by a toff, I won’t,” Billy said, his ham-sized fists raised in the shadows. “And it just so happens that this here man needed my ’elp bringing you down to size.”

Henry looked to the other man, standing back, in the shadows... and recognized him. The rider from the road. Who had slowed. Leered like a proper predator, as though he’d known what he was hunting... and had found it.

Good of him to make it easy for Henry to take him out, too.

A flint struck behind them and a candle flared to life. Billy’s eyes went wide as he looked to Adelaide, his meaty lips curving in a disgusting smile. “I didn’t expect the view, I’ll say. Yerwifedon’t look like much when she’s wearin’ clothes.”

And that was all Henry needed to hear. “It is clearyoudidn’tlearn your lesson,” he said with cold certainty. “The one where you treat women with respect.”

Billy looked to him. “I’ll treat ’em with respect when they ain’t bare-assed. Turns out even a lady can look a whore.”

And when he turned his leering gaze back on Adelaide, Henry’s mind went blank, and he knocked Billy back with a sharp, wicked blow. The other man cried out, stumbling in the wake of it, but Henry gave him no quarter. “You—don’t—look—at her,” he said, cold fury in the words, each one punctuated with another jab, another advance. “You don’tthinkof her.”

He delivered a final blow and the brute went down again, out cold. Before Clayborn could consider his handiwork, however, something rattled on the bedside table behind him. A candlestick, a pitcher of water, he’d never know. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it, and when he spun around to face it without hesitation, he knew why.

He’d made a mistake. While he’d been exacting his vengeance on a man too prideful and genuinely too stupid to be of real danger, the other man—the silent one, the one he would soon discover was far more dangerous—had gone for Adelaide.

And instead of screaming for help as one would expect, she faced him, tall and straight-spined, as though she were a warrior in full armor and not draped in a bedsheet that threatened to tumble to the floor.

She was naked. He’d stripped her bare and taken her to bed, ignoring the fact that he’d made them an enemy below. Ignoring the fact that a handful of hours earlier, he’d leapt from a fast-moving carriage, an action that had left him worse for wear.

They should have dressed before they slept, but he’d wanted to feel her skin against his, all while believing that he could keep her safe from whatever might come their way. And in his selfishness—in his hubris—he’d put her in danger.

He lunged toward them, but stilled when he took in the whole scene.

Draped in nothing but a bedsheet, looking for all the world like a goddess, Adelaide held a sharp silver blade to her would-be attacker’s neck.

When she spoke, it was with the calm ease of someone who had certainly threatened a throat cutting before. “Don’t come any closer, Duke. I wouldn’t want my hand to slip.”

He stilled, considering the situation. “I haven’t decided how I feel about your hand slipping, honestly. I should have taken care of him on the road.”

She didn’t look to him—good girl, stay focused on your enemy—but she did smile at the other man. “The duke suggests I kill you, Danny. What do you think about that?”

The man called Danny answered with ease, as though he didn’t have a blade to his throat. “You ain’t never had it in you, Addie.”

And there, in the familiarity of the diminutive, Henry realized the two did not just recognize each other; they had a history.

He stayed rigid, watching the play of emotions over her face. Frustration. Disappointment. Anger. And something else. Something like shame. Henry clenched a fist at his side, barely feeling the sting of the welts there for his rage at the man for making Adelaide feel anything like shame.

Danny, several inches taller and easily two stone heavier than she, spread his arms wide and lifted his chin, baring his neck boldly, as though they were downstairs drinking ale, rather than here in the dark, with a blade to his throat. “It don’t matter what you call yourself now that you run with Mayfair, you’ll always be Lambeth, Addie Trumbull.” He leveled Clayborn with a combative stare. “Even when yer tuppin’ a duke.” He grinned. “But maybe he likes it down in the gutter like toffs often do.”

That was when Henry decided he was going to destroy this man.

“Alright, Danny, so you found me. Now what?”

She knew she was being chased? Why in hell was she being chased? And by this... lizard?

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