Ten Things I Hate About the Duke - Loretta Chase Page 0,36
Ashmont swept a deadly combination of fury and joy and maybe the breath of the devil.
He turned slowly and smiled. In a low, mild voice everybody who knew him would recognize, in the same way they’d recognize the smile, he said, “Who said that?”
The audience shifted two steps back.
“Who said that?” Ashmont repeated, still smiling. “I should like for him to stand in front of me, instead of hiding in a crowd, and say it again.”
Suddenly, everybody nearby found another place to be.
The demon flung itself back into its cave.
“Well, that was convenient,” he said, turning back to Miss Pomfret. “The trouble with places like this is, no damned privacy.”
“What I don’t need with you,” she said in a low, hard voice, “is privacy.”
“I only wanted to say—”
“I don’t care,” she said. “This is a game to you, I know. I’m not playing. And may I point out, that if I were to stab you to death in front of all these witnesses, I should be applauded. They would carry away your corpse and clean up the blood and say it was an accident.”
“Your imagination,” he said, dropping his voice again, but not in the dangerous Come-Here-and-Let-Me-Break-Your-Face-for-You way. “Lively.”
“Go away. And take him with you.”
“You gave me a point,” he said, dropping his voice lower still.
“You’re about to lose it.”
“You can’t take it back.”
“I gave it. I can take it back.”
“But that wouldn’t be sporting.”
“Is it sporting to come to a charitable event, exploiting a street child, merely to disrupt the proceedings?”
“You call it exploiting,” he said. “I call it gainful employment. I found him hanging about outside my house as Morris and I were leaving.” The greatest stroke of good luck, he’d thought. “I hired the brat only to keep him busy with something that didn’t involve housebreaking or pickpocketing. You ought to commend me for saving him from the gallows for ten minutes—which is about as much time as anybody can hope for in his case. If you think that crown you gave him will go for a bath—”
“I don’t care what he does with it,” she said. “I only hope larger and nastier boys don’t steal his riches. I hope nobody cuts his throat. Still, he’s cleverer than most, and he didn’t live this long on the streets by being careless.”
She knew the boy. How in blazes did she know him? Ashmont had met him on the day Olympia ran away. Jonesy had been loitering with a gang of other ragged children at a hackney stand in the Kensington High Street. He’d helped them search for the missing bride, then abruptly vanished while they were at Battersea Bridge.
“The constables will think he’s stolen the things,” Ashmont said. “They’ll see him running from here and grab him long before he gets to whatever rookery he holes up in. He’ll end up at the Great Marlborough Street police office, is my guess. Maybe Bow Street, if he’s fast. Either way, I’ll have to go to the bother of bailing him out. But that’ll take a while. We’ve plenty of time. Never mind about him. You keep changing the subject.”
“You and I don’t have a subject,” she said.
“First of all, what I should have said—before that ignoramus interrupted—was Diana,” he said. “Not Venus, but Diana the Huntress, driving her chariot—”
“I must say, that was one of the more comical sights I’ve seen in some time,” came a familiar voice behind him. “Your grand entrance with the ragamuffin.”
Ashmont turned. There was the familiar sardonic expression. There were the hooded eyes that made ladies’ hearts go thumpity-thump—ladies, that is, attracted to the tall, dark, dangerous type. “Blackwood,” he said.
They had parted on very bad terms a week ago, and Ashmont hadn’t seen him since.
“But more comical still,” Blackwood said, “was watching the little beast flee, as though the hounds of hell were after him.”
“He fled far worse than that,” Miss Pomfret said. “I told him to get a bath.”
Blackwood smiled. “Smartly done, Miss Pomfret. You are done with Ashmont as well, I hope? He wears an expression that tells me you’ve demanded some brain work of him.”
“As little as possible. I know he isn’t used to it.”
“Indeed not. He needs to be brought along by slow degrees. Fever could result otherwise. With your permission, I shall bear him away. His accomplice, too, if only Morris would stop gaping at Miss Hyacinth in that stupid manner and pay up.”
Miss Pomfret beamed at Blackwood, quite as though he had singlehandedly killed Scylla, Charybdis, and