hoarse and gravelly. Malcom drew in a shuddery breath and began again. “As a boy, I was always running off, seeking and finding mischief, and before I would go, she’d take my hand and . . . squeeze it as you did as she said:
‘I love thee, I love but thee
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold
And the stars grow old.’”
His eyes slid closed. “She’d say it whenever we parted, and when she tucked me into bed.” Then his words came quickly. As if he feared in not speaking them, he might lose them and the memory he held dear. “She would press my hand in time to the rhythm of that sonnet. B-because . . .” His voice wavered, and Verity closed her other palm over their joined hands. “‘Because my h-heart beats for you. It always has and it always will, and even after it ceases to beat, my love will live on in you.’” A ragged sob tore from him, and he clung to her fingers, clenching tight.
Tears clogged her throat and blurred her eyes, and Verity just held Malcom. Lying against his chest, she allowed him to weep with the pain of all he’d lost and the memory that had at last come to him. His body shook and trembled from the force of his emotion. Verity held him all the while, with time meaning nothing, and then his crying stopped.
She pressed a kiss to the corner of his temple, and squeezed his hand several more times in that rhythmic beat, and willed him to feel the love she carried for him.
Chapter 28
THE LONDONER
THE MEETING!
Lord Maxwell was seen breaking down the front door of the Baron Bolingbroke. Society was agog, and now salivating for details on the fight that undoubtedly erupted between the Lost Heir and his nemesis, Lord B.
M. Fairpoint
Over the course of his life, Malcom had sought—and attained—revenge on more enemies than he could remember or count.
Never, however, going into battle had he felt this. Bloodlust pumped through him, primal and raw. It heated his veins and coursed through him, spreading a venomous poison where only one word took shape: destroy. This upcoming meeting didn’t have to do with territory or right of ownership or the simple primitive need to exert control and display dominance.
This was about her—Verity, and what had almost befallen her.
Not bothering with a knocker like any civilized guest would, Malcom pounded hard at the modest panel. The heavy oak rattled, and he pounded all the harder.
But he wasn’t going anywhere. This meeting had been ordained following the attack on Verity at Hatchards. Nay, if he were being honest with himself, it had been ordained long before that. Back when he’d been a boy smuggled from his family’s Kent estate in a burlap sack, taken for dead, and passed off like trash.
And now he was back, reclaiming his past life.
That brought him up short with his knock, and he froze, his fist halfway to the oak panel.
Could he?
Forget moving amongst the world in daylight. Could Malcom move amongst the peerage? Polite Society, which he still wanted no part of. He was a man trapped in an “in-between” in which he’d never truly belong. Neither the sewers nor the fanciest end of London.
But the possibility of a future he saw, it wasn’t a place.
It was with her . . .
It was with Verity.
He wanted to be wherever she was. It’s why for the first time ever, he’d wanted not to be scouring for treasure but instead at Hatchards with her.
Home was wherever Verity was.
I love her . . .
Malcom shot a hand out, catching the stair rail, managing to keep himself upright. Christ. It was a prayer from him, a man who’d never been religious, and yet that was all he was capable of. He loved her. He’d loved her since he’d stumbled upon her in his sewers, a tart-mouthed spitfire challenging him at every turn as if she’d forever dwelled in those tunnels and set herself up as queen.
With their every exchange, he’d lost more and more scraps of a heart he’d not known he possessed: Verity, as she’d doled out chess lessons. Verity, as she’d gone toe-to-toe with him to defend two old toshers. Just Verity. It would only ever be Verity.
And she was the reason he was here even now.
Steadied once more, Malcom let his fist fly with a thunderous boom that rose above the din of the early-morn Mayfair traffic.
And then the door was