Page 39 of A Scottish Bride for the Duke (Scottish Duchesses #1)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“ S o,” Adrian said slowly. “Moreton approached you to put an end to his brother.”

It took Adrian a week of searching, but eventually his efforts paid off. With news of the duchess retiring to Brighton for some sea air relieving him of his societal duties, he was free to pursue the matter of Moreton with more freedom.

And pursue he did.

He had originally believed the “bandits” who had killed Moreton’s brother were Scottish, but new information revealed they were London born and based. Moreton had most likely approached the leader of one of the East End gangs.

That was the individual in front of him. A fellow by the name of Jack “Gutter” Briggs. A sly, sharp man with a patched coat and quick fingers.

Briggs swaggered into Adrian’s study like he belonged there.

He didn’t.

Adrian leaned back in his chair, gaze heavy-lidded, expression unreadable. He let the silence stretch, let Briggs fidget under the weight of it.

A lesser man might have shifted, might have spoken first. Briggs wasn’t a lesser man—he was a rat, but a clever one.

Adrian finally spoke. “Lord Moreton approached you to put an end to his brother.”

Briggs blinked. “Never heard of him.”

A smirk ghosted over Adrian’s lips. “Interesting.” He pulled out a small, ornate object from his drawer and placed it on his desk. “That’s my butler’s pocket watch. You lifted it within five minutes of entering my home. Which tells me you’re still as sloppy as you are arrogant.”

Briggs stiffened. His hand twitched toward his coat, but Adrian merely tilted his head.

“How did you?—”

“You’re not the only one around with light fingers.”

Briggs hesitated, then let his hand fall away.

“Now, back to business.” Adrian stood, pacing toward the window.

“See, I had a chat with a few of your old acquaintances. Turns out you’ve been a busy man.

Black-market dealings, stolen goods, the odd street execution.

” He turned back, smile ice-cold. “I could have the Bow Street Runners here in an hour.”

Briggs’s bravado wavered.

“So,” Adrian continued smoothly, “let us try again. Moreton approached you to put an end to his brother.”

Briggs exhaled sharply. “Didn’t know his name. Just knew he was a flash cull.” His fingers flexed, resisting the urge to pick at the frayed hem of his sleeve. “But yeah, I did it. Shot the wheels off his carriage. Didn’t have a chance in hell of making it out alive.”

Cold. Callous. Precisely the qualities that had allowed this individual to survive for this long. And, of course, for Moreton to ensure his brother died and he profited from it.

“I see,” he said, drawing the word out. “Then what happened?”

The man shrugged. “Don’t know. Never asked. Not my business.”

Adrian reached into his study drawer and pulled out a bag jingling with coins. “How much did he pay you for the murder?”

“Now that’s not a nice term for it.” Briggs’s nose wrinkled. “I prefer the word business .”

Adrian let the authority in his tone ring through. “How much?”

“Two hundred.”

Adrian weighed the bag in his hand. It grieved him to pay such a man such a sum, but he would do anything so long as it caught Moreton good and proper.

“This is four,” he said. “Give me evidence against Moreton, and you can have the other four.”

Briggs narrowed his eyes. “Eight hundred, now.”

“And how do I know you’ll follow through instead of taking the money and running?” Adrian dropped the bag on his desk, where it landed with a heavy chink , and leaned over it. “I am not a fool, much as I am sure you’d like to paint me as one.”

“I never said anything about?—”

“You’ll have the full amount on completion. Give me the evidence, and I’ll give you the money.” He smiled thinly. “You need have no worries that I would cheat you out of it. I have no need to keep it.”

Briggs’s lip curled at such an overt and arrogant brag, but Adrian didn’t have the energy or the desire to care about the opinion of a man who had proven himself to be a murderer of the worst degree.

A hired hand. A man who cared so little for honor, he would not have picked it up off the floor if he’d found it lying there.

If he could have done, Adrian would have had nothing more to do with him.

Unfortunately, for Isobel’s sake, and for the sake of removing Moreton from the world at large, that would prove impossible.

At least for now.

“And I’m supposed to take you at your word?” Briggs demanded. “Putting meself on the line and for what?”

“The lure of eight hundred pounds,” Adrian said sharply.

“Moreton will have nothing to say about the matter, because I will use the evidence you provide to put him away forever. And I have no intention of revealing your actions to any magistrates.” Adrian sat back down.

“And I rather suspect you’d escape even if they did attempt to lock you up. ”

Briggs’s eyes gleamed. “I’ve got my contacts.”

“As I suspected. So, in truth, you have very little to lose from our arrangement. And I have no reason not to pay you for work well done. In fact, I suspect you could cause me significant inconvenience if I weren’t to pay you.”

He looked at the other man, sitting in his chair as though he owned it—and Adrian suspected he had come by very little in his life honestly.

“Tell me, Mr. Briggs, have you been to Scotland?”

“Might’ve done.” Briggs stuck a finger down the side of his neck, loosening his collar. “Don’t know why it’s any business of yours.”

Adrian remembered what Isobel had told him—the things she had overheard.

Moreton had been facing up to someone who wanted more money.

Blackmail. And having met Briggs for himself, Adrian could well believe the man capable of both traveling to Scotland in order to blackmail a lord, and thinking himself untouchable enough to blackmail.

No doubt he did have contacts. But Adrian was a duke.

“Let me make myself clear,” he said, leaning over the desk and facing up to Briggs, who watched him with more of that sly intelligence. “You may blackmail whoever else you like in your life.

“I do not care what you do with your time, other than when it pertains to me. I will pay you for your assistance, but if you even consider trying to bleed me dry, then you will see just what power I wield. You may have contacts, but a whisper in the ear of the right people, and I can have you strung up by dawn. Remember that.”

Briggs swallowed slowly, no doubt assessing how to take the threat.

Then he gave a cocky grin. “As you say, Your Grace. I wouldn’t dream of doing you dirty. All my business with you is above board. You have my word.”

Adrian eyed the hand the man extended to him and after a second’s hesitation, grasped it tightly enough. Briggs’s eyes widened.

“Good,” he said, low and threatening. “See to it you don’t disappoint me.” He released the other man and wiped his hand on a handkerchief. “Now where shall we meet for this exchange?”

“By the Thames, Your Grace, if it pleases you.”

Adrian eyed the man, then shrugged. “It pleases me well enough.”

Briggs gave him an address, which Adrian scrawled onto a piece of paper. Then he had his butler escort the man off the premises, warning Briggs not to remove anything from his person.

Then Adrian sank into his chair and rubbed his temples.

Everything was coming to a head. Moreton’s iniquity would soon be exposed, and if he was not hanged for his crimes, he would certainly be deported. This nightmare would finally be at an end, and he would have triumphed, just as he’d expected.

So why did he feel so empty?

He didn’t understand it. He ought to be thrilled with the way things were going. Or at least relieved that everything would soon have the resolution it deserved.

Soon, he would have Isobel back.

He stared at the door as though she’d come bounding through with some observation, or just sheer delight at the way things were going. She always wore her emotions on her sleeve; it was so easy to tell how she felt at any given moment. And at this, he knew, she would be ecstatic.

Yet she wasn’t here. And she wouldn’t know about it all until she returned, by which point the moment would have passed.

And she would still be angry with him.

He groaned, leaning back in his chair. This affliction had not eased with the physical distance between them. If anything, it had worsened. He found himself expecting to see her in every room, and missing her when she wasn’t there.

He missed the brightness of her laugh, and the gleam in her eyes. He missed the sharpness in her voice and that damn accent that set her apart from the rest of the refined nobles in London.

And he hated that he missed her. This was weakness, and it was infiltrating every part of his life.

She ought to be nothing to him—a woman he had married out of necessity only.

A mistake, almost. With all the danger she had brought to them both, he could very easily call it a mistake, and almost believe it himself.

Except he’d had her in his arms, and he’d never wanted her to leave. Even though he knew it was the most sensible thing for the both of them.

“Excuse me, Your Grace.”

Adrian glanced at his butler. “Yes?”

“Are you quite certain this associate is to be trusted?”

He gave a bitter laugh and tossed some brandy back.

Not wine—wine made him think of the way Isobel had drank during that final dinner together, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright with anger.

Anger, and something else when he had taken her to her bedchamber, and it had taken all his might to not push her back on the bed and sink between her thighs.

“No,” he said, wishing he could purge all thoughts of her from his brain. “He is most definitely not to be trusted.”

“But you’re trusting him regardless?”

“I am doing what I must to protect what’s mine.”

“Very good, Your Grace.” The man bowed and left the room, and Adrian scowled at the door.

At the chair Isobel had once sat in, curled up and reading.

He glowered at every part of the room. He was doing what he had to protect what was his, but he couldn’t be certain that she would be his at the end of it all this.

And that hurt him more than he wanted it to.

It transpired living in the country was decidedly boring.

Isobel skimmed her fingers over the flowers in the garden as she hummed to herself.

While she did, technically, have the full run of the place, Adrian had neglected to mention there were guards stationed all around the property.

Discreet, of course, but present, nonetheless.

And if she were ever to ride out, it was clear one would accompany her.

She tipped her head back to the fresh air and the sky. She understood, at least on some level, why Adrian was doing this. What he wanted to achieve, and why he thought these measures were necessary.

Men always had been foolish.

Her mother had told her to be patient with the man as though that was the only thing standing between her and a happy marriage.

But she refused to sit back and be patient when he required more than that.

The thing that Adrian refused to confront was this: she was his wife. His partner. She had brought this trouble and strife to his life—the danger had followed her—and she would not allow herself to sit back and allow him to face it all himself.

She’d thought, when he’d sent her away, that she could. That being away from him was better than watching as their marriage fell apart around their ears. But now she knew better. Now she knew, beyond any doubt, that she could not endure it if anything happened to him.

So, she would fight.

And the best way to do that was with her husband by her side—reluctantly or not.

She was not sure what had brought her to this decision. The unhappiness of this house, perhaps. The understanding it gave her of Adrian.

Or perhaps it was just waking in an empty bed and realizing how much she missed him. When a woman fell in love with a man, it was her right and her duty to do what she could to reach him, even when he felt unreachable.

That was why, after she let her fingers trail across the petals, she walked idly around the side of the house.

There was one person on her side—a stable boy she had befriended on her very first day. Now, he approached her with a saddled horse in one hand.

A man’s saddle, just as she had used in Scotland.

She was not one of those ladies who could not endure the thought of spreading her legs over a horse’s back, as though there was something improper about the notion.

One could not jump with as much stability if one was perched sidesaddle.

“Thank you,” she whispered, accepting the reins, then accepting his help onto the horse. “I will never tell.”

“Good luck, Your Grace.”

She reached down to tousle his sandy hair. “Thank you, Tommy. But I shall be just fine.”

Then, she dug her heels into the horse’s side and trotted out through the gate that ringed the gardens.

The wider estate beckoned, and she urged her mount into a canter, then a gallop.

The wind streamed through her hair, and she felt alive for the first time since she’d left London.

It was time to find her husband, reclaim her power, and take what she was due.