The Problem with Seduction - By Emma Locke Page 0,105

his back twice before shifting out of his grip. He put several feet of distance between them, but when he’d smoothed his drab coat and righted his cravat, he looked at Con with a mixture of sympathy and concern. “They moved you out of Giltspur Street Compter faster than I expected. Have you already been examined?”

Con set his hands on the small of his back and regarded the distance between Bart and himself. It felt like miles. If Bart weren’t a barrister, and specifically, his barrister, he wouldn’t even be allowed this private meeting. If Con were convicted, he’d spend years talking to his family through iron grates in the yard. It was a lonely future he daren’t contemplate.

“They took my accounting almost as soon as I was brought in,” Con said, not wanting to recall the events of the evening. Or the events that had brought him to this point. He was still too afraid to look closely at his crime. As if by pretending he hadn’t done wrong—or what the law considered wrong—he could keep himself from being sentenced. “I think they hurried through it because it will make an excellent story for the morning papers. There’s no hope of it being contained, is there?” He didn’t even allow himself to hope it. He was worse than an insolvent down-and-outer. He was a fiend. A felon. Adding a notorious courtesan into the mix only sealed his blackguardedness.

Bart shook his head no. His lips thinned. “You know how the public is. Voracious. Horror-mongering journalists only feed their hunger. I don’t know the whole of it—yet. I’m sure it will make fine fodder for the Times.”

“And every other paper.” Con laughed bitterly.

Bart didn’t smile. “What else has transpired?”

Must there be more? But there was. “After I was interrogated, I was poked and prodded by the surgeon.” Another hollow, hopeless chuckle. “I’m in good health. For now.”

Silence clogged the tiny room. That was his real fear: gaol fever. It had killed their father. Lord Montborne hadn’t even been inside the prison walls at the time. One didn’t have to be; merely standing in the surrounding streets was enough to have a person covered in red spots and languishing with fever in days.

“I’ve come to post bail,” Bart said abruptly, giving Con the first reason to feel better he’d had all night. “They are marking it in the books now. You should be free very soon.”

Con tried to smile but he couldn’t feel the proper level of relief. He would be free of this place, but only for a time. He should be so lucky to be sent back here after the trial. What if they found somewhere even more horrible to take him? What if he ended up in the hulks?

“I thought you’d be happier,” Bart said. “You must have known I’d come. Even if I didn’t have your bail, I’d have found enough for easement of irons.” He glanced at Con’s chains. “They don’t look well on you.”

Con also looked at the thick bands encircling his scuffed boots. As if he’d try to escape. “No?”

Bart didn’t crack his barrister’s façade. “You’re going to have to tell me what happened. I hope to God what the governor told me isn’t true.”

Con went to a tattered green chair and sat heavily on it. Its wooden slats squeaked under his weight. Who knew how many doomed men had sat in just this spot?

He didn’t really want to know. Instead of thinking about it, he told his brother the whole, sordid tale. Of his losses with the mill and the canal. The downtrodden young children who’d been days away from being put out on the streets. His coddling of Darius, though this admission came the hardest.

He closed with his eventual realization that he’d made a commitment to Elizabeth’s son, and indeed had come to think of the boy as his own. That he loved her. Even sitting here in this godforsaken place surrounded by the most heinous of London’s criminal class, doomed to who-knew-what fate, he loved her.

Bart hadn’t taken a seat. He’d paced. His hands were clasped behind his back and he seemed to be deep in thought. “You should marry her.”

Con startled at that. But then he knew. Yes, he should. He needed to. He needed her. He’d been days away from accepting it, himself. And if he were going to spend the rest of his life—or any time at all—confined in a place like this, he needed to be able to