with his departing words. “Wait for us, Morley. Don’t let your fury endanger her life. I made that mistake once and Millie paid for it with blood.”
Morley leapt onto his horse and reached down to pull Honoria up behind him.
“I didn’t know she was with child,” Honoria said into his ear. “Is it…George’s?”
“It’s mine,” he growled, gathering up his reins. “Now, I’m going to ride like hell,” he warned. “Can you hold on?”
“Like hell is the only way we Goode Girls ride,” she said, her voice flinty with an admirable strength.
Morley spurred his horse out into the square, astonishing society matrons and bustling errand staff as he went.
Where was his rage? What emotion lived in him now?
Fury was often hot. A constant companion of masculine brutality he assumed every man carried within him.
But not now. This emotion was stark. Unutterably bleak. An icy chill that echoed through a vast yawning abyss opening in his chest. This was what caused men to summon demons and sacrifice virgins. This rage. This power. This need to crush and consume. This desperate hope to stop all things beyond his control if only to protect that which was most precious.
Men like Argent. They owned their darkness. They wore it on their skin. He’d always had to hide his behind a badge of gold. Or a black mask. He had to pretend the darkness wasn’t there. Waiting. Breeding. Growing.
His was patient fury. A glowing ember of ever-present wrath.
And now, that fury was about to be unleashed.
Chapter 19
Prudence wondered if the fact that she carried a child made her more or less likely to survive her brother-in-law’s madness.
It was the most awful thing she’d ever had to contemplate.
He’d shoved her in the corner of a long warehouse with a labyrinth of wooden crates haphazardly strewn about the moldy stone floor. Crates he and his four comrades were now frantically prying apart with crowbars, flinging the lids, and diving into as if they might contain the holy grail.
The afternoon was grey, but abundant windows filtered light into the two-story warehouse that was little more than an open floor free of landings or offices. One wide wooden gate would open right onto the docks where steam-powered boats unloaded their goods for storage and dissemination out of the wide bay facing Water Street. From the skeleton of a silo taking up nearly the entire street-side entrance and the strange, layered architecture of the roof, Prudence thought maybe this had once been a place to store grain or flour.
Impossible to tell now.
She’d suffered the bulk of her paralyzing panic in the carriage, where William had shoved a pistol in her face and screamed at the driver to ride on. Her saving grace was that he had done a horrible job of tying her wrists and ankles.
Thank God.
Taking advantage of their distraction, she worked frantically on the bonds. The ones at her hands were loosening, of that she had no doubt, she just had to keep at it.
It was the only thing that gave her hope. The one reason she kept a tenuous hold on her sanity.
Because once she was free, she’d have to figure out her next step…
How to get past five men with pistols tucked into vest holsters or waistbands when she had no weapon at all.
One thing at a time.
At least he wouldn’t get away with it, she thought. If the worst happened…her husband would miss her at dinner, and he’d come looking. He’d know who had her.
Morley…a well of longing surged inside with such visceral desperation, it escaped on a sob.
William straightened from another fruitless search, slicking his thinning hair back from a sweating brow as he speared her with a pinched glare. A gentleman of leisure like him was unused to such strenuous exertion. Especially one as soft and bloated as he.
“Your fucking husband,” he sniped, as if reading where her thoughts had just been lingering. “Gave the order for old Goode to send me abroad without so much as a by-your-leave. Just to save your narrow hide.” Thin lips parted in a leer so chock-full of disgust, she could barely look at him. “What did he think, that I would take orders from him? A nobody?”
She wanted to tell him that her husband wasn’t a nobody. That he was more advantageous a spouse than a dozen viscounts or even a hundred dukes.
She held her temper, for the sake of her child.
“He thought you’d help your family in crisis,” she said evenly, trying to keep him calm.