When a Rogue Meets His Match - Elizabeth Hoyt Page 0,163

sliver of time. Regret lanced through him, sharp enough to make him feel slightly ill.

“King—”

“She didn’t kill Marstowe, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Did you kill him?” Ashland’s breath misted in the cold air.

“No.” Also true.

“Do you know where he—”

“Stop asking questions you neither need nor want answers to,” King snapped.

The duke fell silent.

“I’m sorry.” King leaned on his walking stick, the point spearing some remnants of frostbitten vegetation. “That was uncalled for.”

“You’re angry. Would you care to tell me why?”

“I’m not angry.” Another truth. He was bereft. Miserable. Alone. “And it doesn’t matter. Forgive my lack of civility.”

The duke tipped his head, his expression merely thoughtful. “You’ve always done that.”

“Done what? Lost my composure?” King pinched the bridge of his nose with his gloved fingers.

“Protected me.”

King’s hand dropped, an ache stirring in his chest. Adeline had once called him a protector. And he had sneered at her.

“I haven’t done anything of the sort,” he said harshly.

“You did it in Bedlam. Bore the worst of the cruelty to spare me the same. Kept me alive on the streets of London in those first years after we escaped.”

“That’s not—”

“I’m not done,” Ashland interrupted. “You’ve shielded me from the truth of what happened the night you saved my life. Credible deniability, you called it, and you’re doing it again right now. Protecting me by keeping secrets.”

“Perhaps,” King said. He didn’t have the will to argue the point.

“But she knew everything, didn’t she?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your assassin. She knew all your secrets. The secrets in your past that you have never even told me.”

King gripped the silver handle of his walking stick, the leather of his gloves stretching uncomfortably taut across his knuckles. The hoofbeats of a lone horse on the cobblestones beyond the churchyard echoed through the stillness of the night and then faded. “Yes,” he finally allowed.

“She saw you, then. All of you. The man behind this myth you’ve so carefully curated. And she didn’t run.” The duke stepped in front of him. “She didn’t run so you sent her away.”

“You have no idea of what you speak.” King’s free hand curled into a fist. “You have no right to—”

“And you didn’t send her away to protect her,” Ashland pressed on, ignoring him. “You sent her away to protect yourself.”

The ache in King’s chest intensified into something more unnerving.

“You are a great many things, King, but I never took you for a coward.”

“Watch yourself,” King snarled. “Before you say something you regret.”

The duke appeared unmoved. “Tell me, did you fall in love with her?”

“What sort of question is that?” He despised how defensive he sounded.

“The only one that matters.”

King stared at the man still standing before him.

“You’re going to have to choose the moments you want to define you,” Ashland said, and there was a hard edge to his voice that King had never heard before. “The ones in the past or the ones yet to come. You deserve happiness, but you must choose it.”

“I—”

“Yer purse or yer life!” A rough voice cut off whatever King might have said. At the same time he became aware of the muzzle of a pistol pressed against his lower back.

A movement behind Ashland betrayed another thief, this one no doubt holding a similar weapon on the duke. King’s jaw slackened. Goddammit, this was intolerable. His distraction had kept him from noticing these two fools approaching, and his inattention had left him and Ashland exposed.

King shifted, the anger that had been absent earlier suddenly rising with a potency that made him light-headed. It was bad enough that these cretins should dare accost him here, in a place he considered sacred. But the anger directed at himself was something else altogether.

He’d been standing in this churchyard drowning in regrets and self-pity because he’d been a coward. Ashland had been right. King had let the woman who saw him, who completed him and who was his equal in every way that mattered, walk away. No, not walk away. He had cast her away because he couldn’t bring himself to admit that in the end, she had been right too. She did make him vulnerable and afraid.

But she had not made him weak. At his side, she had only made him stronger.

“I said, yer purse or yer life,” the thief repeated, and this time there was a wild note of desperation in his demand. He jammed the pistol into King’s back again. “I’ll shoot you right here, don’t think I won’t.”

His accomplice, just visible over Ashland’s shoulder, nodded vehemently,