How to Catch a Duke (Rogues to Riches #6) - Grace Burrowes Page 0,16

The second boot was a trifle more closely fitted. She set them both within his reach and took the place beside him.

“Does massage help?”

“Yes, but Miss Abbott, I must forbid—damn it, Abigail. That’s not fair.”

She’d wrapped both hands around his knee and made the same smooth, slow circles he’d used. “That you have a bad knee isn’t fair, and if the knee has become unreliable, the ankle and hip are likely in pain as well. Am I pressing firmly enough?”

He flopped back against the cushions, gaze on the ceiling. “My dragon’s name is Abigail. I’ve been waiting for inspiration to name her, and lo, the appellation fits.”

“You are trying to make me blush. Flattery is pointless, my lord. The joint isn’t quite as it should be, is it?” Not that she was well acquainted with the particulars of a man’s knee bones.

“You have a gift for understatement, Miss Abbott. Allow me to offer a reciprocally understated observation: Ladies do not apply their hands to the persons of ailing gentlemen. Desist, if you please.”

He was protesting for form’s sake, bless him. “You are not ailing. You were injured, long ago. How did it happen?”

He gave her a peevish look. “My father decided in a drunken rage that a boy with a bad leg would be a more effective beggar than one who could scramble out of range of Papa’s fists. He later intimated that stomping the hell out of me was an accident. I was the accident, and his violence toward me was quite intentional.”

Abigail kept her hands moving in slow, steady strokes, though Lord Stephen’s recitation upset her. “I try not to take cases involving children. Such matters can provoke me to an unseemly temper.”

“Abigail, please stop. You need not exercise your temper on my behalf. I had my revenge.”

She ceased massaging his knee but remained on the sofa beside him. “Good. A man such as your father deserves a thorough serving of retribution. That he spent coin on gin instead of providing for his children was his shame, not yours, and that he’d do violence against his own small son…”

Would that she was merely blushing. Instead Abigail felt tears welling. They were not for Lord Stephen, or not exclusively for him. They were for fatigue, and homesickness, old lost love, and all of the children who could not be protected from horrid fates.

“I miss Malcolm.” The stupidest words ever to escape from a woman’s mouth.

“Miss Abbott…Abigail, please don’t cry.” A linen handkerchief so fine as to be translucent dangled before Abigail’s eyes. “You must not cry. I had my revenge. I killed the old devil, so nobody need ever cry for me again.”

She took the handkerchief, which was redolent of his exquisite scent. “You don’t fool me, my lord. Your father needed killing—my Quaker family would disown me for that sentiment—but I killed my mother, and I know taking the life of a parent is a difficult wound for a child to heal regardless of how it happens.”

Chapter Four

As a youth, Stephen had occupied himself with deciding which day had been the worst of his life. The day he’d killed his father had not made the list. The day his father had smashed his knee hadn’t either. At the time, a very young Stephen had shrugged it off as just another beating from old Jack Wentworth. Slower to heal and more painful than others, but all in a day’s suffering.

The day he’d fallen face-first into the grass of Berkeley Square while trying to manage two canes and deliver an ice to a viscount’s blushing daughter was on that list. So was the day Quinn had been marched to the scaffold for a murder he hadn’t committed. What had been Abigail Abbott’s worst day, and why did she weep for the company of an ill-mannered terrier she didn’t even own?

“Did you slip some rat poison into your mother’s gin?” Stephen asked, surely the least genteel question a gentleman had ever asked a lady.

She looked up from his handkerchief. “You laid your father low with rat poison? Very enterprising of you, my lord.”

Nobody had ever referred to Stephen as enterprising in quite those admiring tones. “I was lame, eight years old, and my sisters’ sole protection. Jack was making arrangements to…making arrangements for them I could not countenance. Quinn had gone off somewhere to earn coin, and I had to make do. Quinn was old enough to fend for us, but he lacked the legal authority to take us away from