Page 29

A t some point, minutes or hours or centuries later, Abe regained his senses.

He winced at the necessity of opening his eyes, of moving his body at all away from the lovely soft warmth of Millie Yardley’s entangled limbs. It was a crime that he felt he had to, of course, and it would only be for a couple of minutes, but he still damned and damned again the universe for it.

He was careful. Quiet.

He put a pillow under her head, smiling gently to himself as he stroked her damp brown curls, some still half pinned to her head. He covered her with his favorite quilt, tucking it around her curled-up body, and kissed the sharp line of her cheek.

Tomorrow, he thought, his sheets would smell like fresh pears, just like she did.

He only needed to do a few essential things. To douse the candles downstairs. To lock the door. And to start a small fire in the sitting room to dry her clothes, which he had to hunt for around his room like easter eggs.

Because that disarray was also his fault, it only made him smile again.

He prowled around the house naked, rapidly handling his checklist of tasks. If Freddy were to come back at this moment and catch him slithering around in the nude like some perverse bandit, well, then so be it.

He’d rather that than miss even a minute of being in bed with her again.

The last thing he did was crack open the moonlit window next to the pillows, letting the sweet, cool breeze from the aftermath of that first summer shower whirl its way into the room. It gave him more cause to huddle under the blankets with her, to pull her close and keep her warm.

And he fought sleep, because sleep would mean missing this. Missing precious, golden seconds of it.

When she stirred a little, rolling over and blinking up at him sleepily, he thought, with no small amount of guilt, that it was the volume of his thoughts that had disturbed her.

He dropped a lingering kiss on her brow, using this opportunity to divest her of those sharp little pins in her hair. He’d never seen it down, and it was wet and tangled from the combination of the rain and his fervor.

She let him, watching him with a soft, bemused smile on her face, as though she couldn’t quite comprehend both what they’d done and what the aftermath looked like. She looked like she had expected something far louder and less pleasant than this pocket of warmth and gentle touch.

“What did it mean, that thing you said?” she murmured, fingertips finding his chest. “Go…go furry …”

He paused, looking down at her in surprise. “When did I say that?”

“When I …” She paused, lowering her lashes with a curve of her lips, a sharpening of the apples of her cheeks. “When I sat on the bed,” she decided, though she clearly meant when I took off the last of my clothes.

“Oh.” He chuckled, working out one final, stubborn pin with the tips of his fingernails. “It was … a prayer.”

“A prayer?”

“More or less,” he replied, getting the pin free and tossing it away.

She narrowed her eyes, tilting her face up in the moonlight. “Did you get what you prayed for?”

“I did not,” he replied fondly, laughing in earnest now. “It means God help me . God had already lost all power opposite you, Millie Yardley.”

“Oh,” she said, looking not only appeased but happy with herself. “That’s quite blasphemous, Abe.”

“If you’re going to sin, you might as well do it right,” he returned immediately, pulling her closer. “I’ve no regrets.”

“Regrets?” she repeated, stifling a little yawn. “I hadn’t even considered them.”

He paused, using his fingers to try to gently pull the knots from her curls, to arrange them soft and perfect on her bare, pale shoulders. “Do you feel … all right?”

“What? Yes?” she said in a sleepy mumble.

He frowned again. He hadn’t taken any precautions, he realized, in those final moments. “No, I mean—” He cut himself off, making a noise of impatience with his own stupidity. “Do you feel …”

She pushed back a little, meeting his eyes. “What?”

He felt himself growing hot. If he’d been wearing a collar, it would be steaming. “Do you feel pregnant?”

She stared at him, a big wall of silence inflating between them like a balloon. And he held his breath right up until she started laughing, dropping her head back on his chest and letting it shake through her body.

“It doesn’t work like that, Abe,” she finally managed to say, swallowing hiccups of amusement.

It was, he realized, the second time he’d sent her into hysterics today with his own foolishness. He should feel resentful about that, maybe. But instead, he was just happy to be present to hear her laugh.

He was, he thought somberly, completely and utterly broken for this woman.

“I suppose I might be,” she amended after she’d caught her breath, “but it takes a lot longer to know.”

“You don’t seem disturbed by the prospect,” he observed with a kind of wonder.

She considered that, chewing on her lip. “I don’t, do I? I suppose after everything that happened today, it’s not worth considering unless it actually becomes a reality. And even if it is one, I wouldn’t call the prospect distressing, though I know it should be.”

“I was irresponsible,” he told her, low and accepting of his place in it. “I know better.”

“We were irresponsible,” she corrected. “And we had earned it, I think.”

He paused in his work of combing out her hair, his fingers caught in a hammock of tresses. “Does that mean you forgive me? For what happened earlier?”

“Yes,” she said immediately. “Yes, I’ve realized in short order that I probably would have done the same. And things kept getting more and more mad, Abe, like the universe was personally demonstrating to me how little it mattered that you live with Freddy bloody Hightower.”

He stared at her a little too long after that. “What happened?” he finally asked, when it was clear she wasn’t going to just volunteer the insanity that led her to think Freddy was a small matter. “Something clearly happened.”

“So much happened, Abe, that I don’t even know how to begin to explain.” She sighed, shaking her head against his chest. “I suppose I should say first that I found the jewel thief.”

He was so surprised that his body startled a little. “What? And you sent Freddy off to get him, did you?”

“Her,” she corrected, perhaps a little bit too smug about the fact that the criminal shared her sex. “And no, he’s not off to arrest her; he’s off to help her escape. Them, actually. It was two women.”

Abe could only blink, his powers of speech momentarily in flux.

She sighed. “I’m not supposed to tell you because Dot thinks you’ll haul off and murder someone. You! I’ve never seen you so much as flick a gnat. I know you punched a magister once, but … I don’t know, Abe, that doesn’t sound like you, like the man I know.”

He hesitated, that warmth creeping back up his neck again.

“I did do that,” he said quietly. “You don’t remember the first time we ever saw each other, do you?

Because I was ready to murder someone that day.

I wanted to find Freddy and pull every golden hair out of his head as painfully as possible. ”

She scoffed, like she couldn’t believe it.

It made him laugh, even if it shouldn’t have.

“The wedding,” he prompted. “Freddy had escaped my escort from that jail on the Continent. He’d drugged me, stolen my ring, and taken off. Don’t you remember, I accidentally said something about waiting for my chance to go outside and rip him out of the carriage.”

She blinked, pushing back and drawing her brows together. “Oh, yes!” she realized. “You idiot! You sent Claire into labor.”

He laughed again, watching that long-ago storm cloud conjure a few final wisps of thunder around her lovely head. “You were staring daggers into my soul,” he recalled fondly, “and how could I not have known right then that you were the one for me?”

“Because nothing says romance like irritation,” she replied snippily, only making him grin wider.

“My sweet Millie,” he sighed, releasing her hair from his fingers in favor of stroking her cheeks. “Who would I be murdering tonight, should you tell me the truth? I promise there is nothing in this world that is going to take me from sharing a bed with you tonight. Nothing. You can tell me.”

She stared at him, looking a little at a loss. “Well,” she managed, “good.”

And then she smiled at him, shaking her head and relaxing into her story.

“It’s just a nobleman, no one you know, who did a horrible thing.

He’s a terrible father, and his daughter started stealing jewelry from balls and tea parties and social visits in an effort to escape him.

She eventually enlisted help, but it has all spiraled out of control.

And the twisted choices of fate have somehow deigned to involve me. ”

“And Freddy,” Abe said, clearly still confused.

“That was Ember’s idea. If anyone knows how to smuggle two wanted women out of Britain and onto the Continent, well …”

Abe snorted in offense. “Well, yes. Freddy knows how to do that, but I could have done it too!”

She nodded, patting the hand that sat on her cheek. “I know that, darling. It’s only that the girl’s father had beaten the accomplice so violently, and Dot insisted that such a thing would disrupt your better angels.”

He sucked in air. Both because she’d called him darling like that, like it was natural, and because of what had been said directly after.

“She was probably right,” he forced himself to say, acknowledging the way his blood heated at even this sterile description of the thing.

“Was she?” Millie sounded surprised. She watched him for a moment, across the span of his pillows, her dark lashes framing those big eyes in the dark. “Why did you punch that magistrate, Abe?”

Abe grimaced, shame scratching at his ribs. He rolled onto his back with a sigh, staring up at the ceiling. “Because he was a bastard,” he said, hating his own flippancy even as the words left him. “Because he deserved it.”

“I believe you,” she said after a moment. “But that isn’t really an answer, is it?”

He grunted in acknowledgement, casting a glance at her to the side, in the corner of his eyes. “No, it isn’t. But I also don’t want you to see me like that, to think of me like that.”

“Like what?” she asked, inching closer to him, crawling onto his chest so that she could see his face. “Like a man who sometimes loses his temper?”

“I don’t, though,” he protested, squeezing his eyes shut. “I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve lost myself like that. It isn’t who I am.”

“All right,” she said gently. “You don’t have to tell me. I understand.”

That was unacceptable, of course. The only thing worse than being caught on one of Millie’s barbed hooks of observation was being released from it and plopped back into the water to swim away.

“It wasn’t just one thing,” he told her, forcing himself to open his eyes and meet hers directly.

“Do you know magistrates don’t have to be or do anything in particular to become what they are?

They aren’t barristers or judges or even enforcers.

Half the time they’re just well-connected toffs with more free time than they need who get drafted up by their High Society comrades to levy judgements down on people.

A lot of them don’t even bother doing it at the courthouse, they just make us all come to their houses for legal proceedings. Did you know that?”

“I … suppose I did,” she said, wrinkling up her nose. “Though I never thought about it like that.”

He grimaced. “Wealth overrides everything, and this particular man is so beyond incompetent, so completely convinced that he is ordained to pass judgement because he had the good sense to be born on a velvet pillow. I don’t even remember what the final straw was, just that he deserved far more than a single punch to the face. ”

She was quiet for a breath, likely imagining it. Then, “Did you do it in court? Tell me you did it in court.”

He gasped. “Millie!”

“What?!” she returned, looking a little angry herself.

He laughed, a strained, unexpected tear of amusement from his chest. “Yes,” he admitted. “In summary judgement.”

She grinned at him, her even little teeth catching the moonlight. “Good.”

He shook his head, that warmth in his blood heating in a completely different way now. He reached up to coil some of her hair around his finger, giving it a little tug.

“You were just chiding us for being irresponsible,” he reminded her. “Reckless, even.”

She lifted her brows. “Was I?”

He nodded, slowly, intentionally. “You were,” he confirmed.

“And?” she prompted, a little breathless, her lips parting ever so slightly.

He groaned, his skin prickling to life. He rolled her onto her back, looming over her with a wolfishness that boiled just below his veins.

“And now,” he continued gruffly, “all I can think is this: Reckless once? Reckless many, many times? The outcome is the same, isn’t it?”

Her breath caught, her soft form wriggling slightly beneath him. “Oh,” was all she said, low and breathy.

He moved against her, grinning in satisfaction before he caught her mouth again with his. “I’m glad you agree,” he said against her lips.

And then he was reckless. Many, many times.