Page 22 of Seduced by a Scoundrel (The Spinster Society #3)

W hen Keir tucked Sybil against his chest, she punched him so hard in the ear that it rang painfully, and then hissed at him when she finally recognized him. “You will blow my cover.” She blinked at the hunting rifle tucked under his arm. “That was you ?” She shook her head and smacked his chest. “Put me down before someone sees.”

He hadn’t even realized he had hauled her clear off the ground. He only wanted her safe. He set her down. Reluctantly. Every instinct insisted he toss her over his shoulder and run for safety.

They had spoken her name inside that room. Unacceptable. While she had been inside not three feet away, a dead man at her feet.

He began to sweat despite the frigid bite of the wind.

He would have shot into the room earlier, but there was no clear vantage point, no way to know for sure that he would not accidentally hit Sybil in the uncertainty after the man had choked on his own blood. These men were clearly unpredictable.

“Keir?”

“Can we get away from the apartments full of men who want to hurt you? I might start sweating blood soon.”

“I’d forgotten how dramatic you are.” She said it lightly, but her teeth were chattering.

“Sybil.”

“I don’t know a Sybil. I am Lord Algernon Singleton.”

“Algernon,” he echoed, fighting a smile. She could always do this to him, tie him up in tangles and still make him want to smile. Particularly as he knew it would help her more than the kind of raging he desperately wanted to give in to. “That’s a terrible name.”

“My mother gave it to me!” She exclaimed with false offense.

“I’ve met your mother. She has much better taste than that.”

Sybil muttered something under her breath, but at least she was moving away from the dangerous apartment. He would shoot them all if he had to, but it seemed a bit messy. And Sybil might object. But only because she might want to do the shooting herself.

“Can you walk faster?” he asked.

“Not without drawing attention to myself.”

He swore. “I have a carriage at the end of the walk.” Luckily, it was not far at all.

And yet still too far.

Of course.

Because nothing was simple with Sybil.

And he loved that about her. He was going to have to learn several more forms of combat just to keep up.

He was almost cheerful about it until there was the sound of a footstep. Just a scuff.

He shoved Sybil toward the carriage, using his wide back to block anyone who might have her in their sights. He had no idea if those men suspected her or if they were all running blind after the shot he fired.

He just knew he had not fired the second shot. The one that clipped the walkway behind them in a spray of cobbles and ice.

“Time to go,” he said, and all but tossed Sybil into the carriage. He swung the rifle back up.

“Don’t shoot Peony!” Sybil hung out of the doorway. “She’s on the rooftop to your left.”

He glanced up to see the other woman running along the roofline, slipping once, regaining her footing, and sliding down a drainpipe. She landed like an acrobat from Astley’s Amphitheatre.

These women really were terrifying.

“Get in,” he ordered Peony, all but tossing her inside as well. She yelped, landing on Sybil. He shut the door and banged the roof. His coachman, Arthur, having already experienced the chaos that was Sybil, pulled into traffic as quickly as he could.

Keir sat back and tried to convince his heart that it no longer needed to be lodged inside his throat. Sybil was safe. Peony, bless her soul, was also safe, pistol in hand. “Someone was following you,” she said. “I think.”

“You think?”

“I felt it was prudent to shoot at him just in case.”

Keir wondered if she would get the wrong idea if he bought her flowers. Many of them.

“Is that a warming brick?” she asked Sybil. “Share it, you ingrate—I’m more than half frozen from lying on the roof.”

Sybil moved over. “Why were you on the roof? I thought you had set up in the apartment across the walk?”

“I did, but the occupant came home early. With two women. And another gentleman. It was a bit crowded.”

“They were probably too busy to notice you.”

“I decided not to take that chance. There are some things I cannot unsee.”

They sounded unbothered by the evening’s event, although Keir knew that to be untrue. Sybil’s fingers were tangled together, knuckles white. He himself was so on edge that it was a wonder his back teeth had not cracked from the clenching of his jaw.

Sybil pulled off her mask and lifted her eyebrows at him. How did she manage to make an ordinary hat and frock coat look so dashing? “You shot him.”

“I did not like the sound of your name in his mouth.” His jaw clenched again.

“So you shot him in the foot?”

“I would have shot him in the chest, but I did not have the right angle.”

“I didn’t have any angle at all,” Peony grumbled.

“Well, you shot that bloke who was following me, so thank you both.”

Peony just shrugged, more interested in the rifle leaning against Keir’s knee. “Is that a Baker’s Pattern rifle?”

“Yes, it is.”

“With the rifling grooves?”

“Yes.”

She pointed to her double-barrel flintlock. “I can shoot twice with this without reloading, but it does not quite have the same accuracy. I’ve read Baker’s alteration means that the rifle can shoot farther than any other gun!”

“Oh, here we go.” Sybil grinned. “Now you’ve done it.”

Peony turned to her. “Thomas Plunkett shot a French general at six hundred paces during the war, I’ll have you know.”

“Who?”

“He was a rifleman, Sybil. Honestly.”

Keir was not sure how they had gone from secret societies, murder, and shooting people, at one of London’s most fashionable addresses, to this. He handed Peony the rifle. “Take it. It’s yours.”

Her eyes shone. She grabbed it. “Really?” She clearly had no intention of giving it back.

“Really.”

“Thank you.” She clutched it to her chest, running her fingers along the proof mark shaped like a crown on the barrel. “She’s beautiful.”

“She’s poking me.”

“Then move. Did you get anything useful from that lot in there?”

“They stabbed a man right in front of me,” Sybil said. “They are worse than we thought. But they all wore masks and cloaks. They were only familiar in the way anyone of the ton is familiar. But I did get this!” She waved a piece of paper. “A list of their next victims, which I intend to—”

Sybil went silent.

Keir frowned at her, then followed her frozen, horrified gaze.

Fire reached into the sky outside the window as the carriage rolled to a halt, painting it red and orange. They now knew exactly why Pierce and the others had not shown.

Spinster House was burning.