What Happens in Piccadilly - Chasity Bowlin Page 0,82

bitch dead!”

Winn didn’t have a chance to ask any further questions. The gutter gave then, separating from the house entirely. The pair of them slid toward edge, the burlier man going over first. Winn managed to snag the cornice of the building where the gutter had attached. He hung there, the other man clinging to him. They were three stories up. Not so very high, but certainly high enough that the fall would do damage and possibly result in death.

“Don’t let me fall,” the man said. “I can get word to her. I can send for him and he’ll lead you right to her!”

Winn moved one booted foot toward the building, finding a toehold there on the intricate masonry that wrapped the upper floor of the house, while the man who’d tried to kill Calliope only moments earlier still clung to his leg. With one foot perched there, one arm hooked around the heavy stone cornice, he reached one hand down to the man, “Give me your hand!”

The man wouldn’t let go. At that point, he’d closed his eyes and was simply praying incoherently. And then Winn felt the man slipping.

“Give me your hand! Now, man!”

There was no response. The man’s grip began to fail. And then he was simply gone, sailing silently to the stones below without ever opening his eyes.

Winn heard the thud as he hit, saw the spreading crimson stain on the stones below. And then his footmen were there. One ran through the garden gate of the house and into the kitchens. Within seconds, servants were rushing about inside, opening windows all along the upper floor. With a decided lack of grace, a pair of maids and a sturdy kitchen girl helped him into the house through the window just below him.

He collapsed on the floor, sweating, bleeding, breathless… but alive. Very much alive, unlike the man who’d attempted to take Calliope St. James’ life. And one thing that man had said stood out to Winn. The man had been hired by an intermediary to be sure, but the mastermind of the whole plot had been referred to as she. The Dowager Duchess of Averston.

Chapter Nineteen

C allie was beside herself. Winn had returned home, assisted in by some footmen. Following them up the stairs, she entered his chamber just as his valet began removing his soiled coat and waistcoat. The man clucked over the damaged and stained fabrics as though they were priceless artifacts, even as he left his injured employer to struggle out of his ruined shirt on his own.

“They’re clothes!” she snapped. “I would think you’d be more concerned about the man who’d been wearing them!”

Chastened, the valet took the garments and fled. Footmen were helping Winn onto the bed and he was waving them away. “I’m not so gravely injured as I appear, Miss St. James. I’m simply too old for hand to hand combat and trying to hold the added and considerable weight of a grown and somewhat stocky fellow as we dangled off the edge of a house three stories up.”

Her throat went dry and she felt her heart stutter in her chest. While she’d been aware that he was disrobing, being confronted with the reality of his bare chest was not something she’d been prepared for. Forcing herself to deal with only the most pressing matters at hand and not her own maidenly sensibilities, Callie focused her gaze on the ugly wound in his side. There was a great deal of blood, some of it already dried, making it impossible to determine the severity of the wound at a glance. “You were hanging over the edge of the roof?”

He flexed his hands, the scrapes and bruises on them obvious even from a distance. “From the gutter to be precise, but yes.”

“And where is this man now?”

He looked up at her then, his expression stoic but still quite revealing. “He’s dead, Calliope. I tried to save him… I offered him my hand, but he wouldn’t take it.”

Dead. Which meant that Winn had been terribly close to the same fate himself. “What if you’d fallen as well?”

“But I didn’t,” he said firmly. “I’ve lost a bit of flesh and a small amount of blood—”

“A small amount? This is hardly insignificant!” She gestured toward blood smeared on his side.

“Well, it’s hardly life threatening either,” he said, and even as he said it, he placed one hand over the wound as if to show that it didn’t hurt. The gesture was wasted as he