Page 44

“I told you, I want to live.” She looked up at him with the widest eyes, and the innocence there proved even more sobering.

“If you visit these streets, you’ll find yourself doing anything but,” he said bluntly. “You’ll find yourself killed… or worse.” Images entered his mind of the danger she’d escaped only by sheer luck, and he dragged an uneven hand through his hair.

“Worse?” she asked, her voice genuinely curious, and his patience snapped once more.

“Yes,” he hissed. “You’ll find yourself backed up against a wall by some fellow who isn’t so patient and isn’t so respectable and who forces himself on you.”

All the color drained from her cheeks, leaving her a stark white. Her trembling fingers came up, and she clawed at her throat.

The brittle set to her shoulders, as if she were one ragged breath away from shattering into a hundred thousand pieces, gutted him.

Good. At last, he’d managed to get through to her.

Only, that didn’t make him feel good.

“Marcia,” he said, the ache in his voice matching the feeling in his chest.

She blinked slowly and then gave her head a shake as if to dislodge the disgusting thought he’d intentionally planted there. She moved her eyes over his face. “You are worried about me.”

“Damned straight I am,” he barked.

Her eyes softened, and she looked at him in a way no one had ever looked at him before. Abject terror clawed at his brain, and all of him recoiled from that emotion.

“The last thing I can afford is having your father and my bloody brother-in-law believing I’ve landed you in trouble.”

Just like that, the spark in her eyes went out. “Oh,” she said, glancing down at her feet. “Of course.”

Of course.

Good, let her believe that lie.

The truth of it was hedidcare about her. He cared about her more than he should. Perhaps because they’d known each other for years. Perhaps because that friendship, as she’d called it, went back to when she’d been a small girl sneaking up on him in her father’s office when all Andrew had wanted was a stiff brandy.

“Marcia,” he implored. “Why are you doing this?”

“I need to, Andrew,” she said quietly, her tones as resolute as the glint in her eyes. They bespoke a woman who had no intention of wavering. “If you won’t help me, then I intend to find someone who will.”

She would. He saw it by the firm set to her shoulders, and by the upward tilt of her chin, and by the fire blazing in her determined eyes.

“I’ll tell your father,” he threatened.

Marcia didn’t miss a beat. “No, you won’t.”

And he wouldn’t.

It was another way in which she knew him, too. And it unnerved the hell out of him that a person did know him enough to know that. It shook him that this young woman, an innocent one at that, did.

“You intend to seek Rothesby’s aid?” he asked warily, silently berating himself for what he intended to do if she persisted, unable to reason himself out of it.

“I do.”

NotI would.

I do.As in she intended to continue her meeting with the duke who waited outside his carriage, baldly watching the exchange between Andrew and Marcia.

He should bloody let her do it.

It wasn’t a bluff.