The Lady's Guard (Sinful Brides Book 3)

by Christi Caldwell

  “I see.” What did she see exactly? Mayhap it was the early morn hour and the shock of Ryker’s earlier revelations, but Niall couldn’t make sense of a goddamned thing. Diana came forward, palm extended once more.

  He eyed it a moment and then folded it in his scarred grip.

  “Thank you,” she said softly. “Thank you for remaining on when you never wished to be here. Even when you didn’t believe there was a threat.” Diana drew her hand back, and he mourned the loss of that touch. “Goodbye, Niall.”

  That was it. Goodbye. One word that spoke of closure and marked his time here done.

  She recovered her rough sketch of St. George’s and placed it in his hands. “It is yours,” she said softly. “A gift.” Her eyes glittered with what might have been sadness. Or was that his own selfish hopes? “To remember me by.”

  As if he could ever forget her. Unnerved by that realization, he looked to the gift she’d bequeathed.

  The soft tread of her footsteps marked her retreat, and panic knocked around his chest. This would be the last he saw her. From then on, there would never be a need for their paths to cross or their lives to intersect.

  Niall strode after her.

  Diana paused, angling her head back.

  “Oi’ll see ya to your chambers,” he said gruffly. One more time.

  She gave him another little smile. “I no longer require help going to my chambers, Niall. I saw to it myself long before you, and I’ll continue on the same way after you’ve gone.”

  And with that, she left.

  Chapter 14

  Diana padded silently down the darkened halls. Her breath came in quick, ragged spurts, and she fought to keep from giving in to the torrent of emotion threatening to drag her under. Hating the pain Niall had known. Hating he’d leave on the morrow, and she’d never again see him. The words shared by Niall had rooted themselves inside her brain and remained there, forever to stay, long after he left here.

  Pain cleaved at her heart. Away from his intense, all-knowing eyes, she gave in to the onslaught of sadness, fury, and regret for all he’d known. And something worse, something that stole her breath and filled every corner of her being—hatred. Hatred for the men who’d forced such evil upon Niall. And with that hatred, there was a bitter resentment for members of the ton who’d been uncaring of the plight of a small boy in the streets—and herself for being guilty of that same charge.

  As she walked, she passed her eyes over the town house, a home she’d taken for granted. Now she looked at it as Niall surely had, taking in the elaborate golden frames. The French malachite box no more than an afterthought upon a painted gilt side table—both pieces extravagant testimonies of wealth and privilege. Shame filled her.

  Diana had always only ever been given the best. She’d lived a lavish, opulent lifestyle as the Duke of Wilkinson’s cherished daughter, free from fear and hunger. Never knowing the evil that dwelled inside a person’s soul. Wholly insulated from the darkness that Niall had been forced to endure. At the age she’d been attending painting sessions and learning the fluid moves of a curtsy, a blade had been thrust into Niall’s hand. He’d forged an existence from nothing and created an empire that sustained men, women, and children. Triumphing in the face of adversity and coming out a man of strength, convictions, and courage. Admiration swelled for all he’d done and who he was.

  Whereas Diana?

  She slowed her steps, pausing beside an Italian Rococo–style mirror. The smooth cut glass reflected back the sad, regretful eyes of a woman who’d allowed herself to be shaped into nothing more than an empty-headed, oblivious miss.

  Your purpose is to be dutiful and obedient.

  That stern lecture delivered countless times by her mother echoed around the chambers of her mind, and with a hard smile, Diana stuck her tongue out, the childlike gesture a small battle against every social lesson.

  She may share her mother’s blood and eventual path to madness, but along the way she would not sell her soul to rank and privilege. A mantle lifted from her shoulders, a sense of being set free, when in other ways she would remain imprisoned. And she found on the whole of this dark night some solace in that. Forcing her gaze away from the mirror, Diana resumed the long march to her chambers.

  Once inside, she closed the door behind her. Then, within the sanctuary of her rooms, she hugged her arms close to her chest and borrowed support from the heavy panel. Found a soothing calm in the cool night air as it caressed her face.

  Night air?

  She paused, lowering her arms slowly to her sides. Her gaze flew to the open window at the opposite end of the room. A gentle breezed tugged at the floral drapes; it set the fabric dancing noisily.

  She wet her lips. It was silly to react so to an open window. There were any number of reasons for it to be open.

  But there were also countless reasons it should not . . .

  Shivers of apprehension fanned along Diana’s spine, and she pushed slowly away from the door. The floorboards groaned, creaking ominously in the quiet. “M-Meredith?” she called, her voice trembling.

  “My lady?”

  Diana cried out and spun toward the dressing room.

  Her maid rushed out. “Forgive me, my lady,” she said, her voice heavy with sleep. The girl buried a yawn in her fingers.

  The tension slipped from Diana’s frame, and she pressed a hand to her racing heart. “No. That is all. I was just . . .” Imagining monsters in the shadows. She grimaced. “That is all. There is no need,” she said, embarrassment making her cheeks go hot.

  Silly nonsense.

  Meredith hurried over to the floor-length crystal doors.

  “That is fine,” Diana called, staying her. “You may leave it. You are relieved for the night,” she said.

  “You’re certain, my lady?” The girl hesitated, and with Diana’s nod, the maid curtsied and took her leave, closing the door softly behind her.

  As soon as she’d left, Diana exhaled slowly through her closed lips. “Do not be a dunderhead,” she whispered. She was proving herself the cowardly miss she’d been accused of being by too many, imagining monsters out of shadows. Lady Penelope’s assailants had been apprehended. Diana stalked over to the window and reached up.

  Then paused. She skimmed her gaze over the walled-in garden at the back of the town house. The full moon flitted in and out from behind the heavy night cloud, periodically casting the overgrown gardens into complete darkness. In a soft whisper of cotton night skirts, Diana sank to her knees and layered her arms to the sill. Dropping her chin atop her folded hands, she stared down.

  How many times as a girl had she sat in this precise spot? Eyes closed, she would kneel at the edge and attempt to label the flowers by the scents that wafted into her rooms. Those gardens had been her mother’s pride and joy, tended to with the care and love a parent might show a child. Diana turned sad eyes to the now unkempt pink rosebush and boxwoods long in need of pruning. There had never been any such love from Diana’s mother—not for her. Not for anyone. The duchess had proven herself incapable of that gentle emotion. Instead, she had filled Diana’s childhood with orders and commands and lessons on propriety. There was never affection or warmth or pride. Until Diana had made her Come Out, and her mother had seen in her a prize to be married off to increase their family’s rank and holdings.

  Her mouth stung with bitterness, and she forcibly brought down the window with a hard, satisfying thunk. Shoving to her feet, Diana turned and gasped.

  A bald, hulking figure grinned slowly. The scent of garlic and ale slapped at her senses.

  She cried out, but he slapped a palm over her mouth, muting the sound. Terror licked at her brain and coursed a path through her. She screamed against the brute stranger’s coarse, gloveless palm, her sounds of help stifled and buried. “Ya ’aven’t made this easy for me, bitch,” he whispered against her ear.

  Her dread spiraled, and Diana bucked and thrashed against his punishing grip. He wrenched her arm behind
her back, and tears sprang to her eyes. She yanked her head back and forth, glancing desperately to the doorway. Niall . . .

  “None o’ that,” he rebuked, giving another tug on her arm that sent tears tumbling down her cheeks. “Moi liege ain’t ’appy with ’ow difficult this has been. Wants to do it for ’isself.” He licked at his lips. “But nuffin was said about not enjoyin’ ya first, princess.”

  Revulsion snaked around her insides, and Diana renewed her struggles. She tore at the flesh of his palm with her teeth, gagging on the metallic taste of his blood as it flooded her mouth.

  He grunted. “You’re going to wish ya hadn’t done that.” The hiss of metal thundered around the room, blending with her strangled, raspy breaths against his hand. A piteous moan seeped from her lips, lost by the weight of his hand. The toothless brute brought his arm back.

  Oh, God. She recoiled, curling into herself. He cuffed her against the side of her head. Stars exploded behind her vision, and the earth dipped and swayed under her feet. Diana struggled through the fog, clinging to her senses, dimly registering him dragging her over toward the connecting door inside her chambers. Her fear doubled with every step he took. The moment he wrestled her from her rooms and home, she was as good as dead.

  Useless tears stung her eyes, blurring her vision. I don’t want to die like this. She renewed her efforts at freedom, dragging her feet hard into the thin Aubusson carpet.

  The hulking brute cursed under his breath and spun quickly. Then, for a brief, miraculous moment, he removed his hand from her mouth. Diana sucked in a panicky breath to scream down the household. That cry ended on a shuddery hiss as he caught her around the throat and drove her back against the wall. Pain radiated along her spine. “Oi said shut your mouth, bitch.” He stuck his face close to hers. “Was Oi not clear?” She struggled to draw in breath, choking and gasping. His unforgiving hold meant to punish and kill. Her lungs burned, as she ineffectually tugged at his corded forearms.

  Her frantically roving eyes collided with a nearby Wedgwood lilac vase. She kicked her legs out at the table. The porcelain piece exploded in the nighttime still.

  And as her attacker loosened his hold on her neck and resumed dragging her from the room, Diana prayed.

  Niall remained amid Diana’s paintings long after she’d left.

  Yes, as Ryker had pointed out earlier in the evening, Niall should be relieved. Penelope’s assailants had been caught, and Niall was now free to return.

  “Get a bloody ’old of yourself,” he mumbled, yanking another cheroot from inside his jacket. Stalking over to a lit sconce, he struck the wrapper and took a healthy pull from it. He was tired. There was no other accounting for this blasted melancholy.

  He should have retired long ago. But Niall had never been a man who’d wanted, needed, or craved sleep. When a person closed his eyes and let down his guard, enemies crept in and rewarded that stolen peace with a knife in the belly—and eternal silence.

  In a few hours, his belongings would be packed, and he’d ride away from the fashionable end of London’s Mayfair District and on to the underbelly where sinners dwelled until their death. Except as Niall quit Diana’s Parlor, as he’d come to think of it, he stole a final look back at that grim capture of St. Giles Street.

  I am going home.

  Wandering the quiet halls, however, he realized it was not long-ago customs and habits that kept sleep at bay—but rather, her. Diana Verney.

  Cheroot in hand, Niall stalked through the Duke of Wilkinson’s corridors with the same methodical steps he took when doing a sweep of the Hell and Sin Club. Only there was no late-night drunken revelry or booming laughter filling these halls.

  Rather, a soft, peaceful quiet Niall had never before known existed.

  And he wasn’t going to miss a goddamned thing about it. None of it.

  Ya fucking liar.

  Bloody hell on Sunday, if he wasn’t going to miss the exasperating chit. He inhaled another lungful of smoke from his cheroot, allowing it to fill him, and then slowly breathed out a small white ring.

  Stalking down the corridor, his footfalls fell silent, muffled by the plush carpet.

  Until his siblings of the street, people had proven themselves to be inconstant, fleeting figures drifting in and out of Niall’s life. People who ended up locked away at Newgate or in the hull of a ship. And those were the unfortunate ones who didn’t find themselves dead for their crimes. As such, he’d not given any thought to the whores or gaming-table workers who’d suddenly quit their posts and moved on to other ventures. People left. People died. Those were the only black and whites of life.

  He perused portrait after portrait of bewigged Verney ancestors, powerful men and women memorialized in paint. Men with long, noble noses and high brows. The same artist may as well have masterfully created each painting through the ages. Slowing his steps, Niall moved down the hall, taking in each of Diana’s stern-faced relations whose flat lips conveyed a disdain for the men and women who’d dare gaze upon them. These were gents who shared the blood of kings and lords, and who’d passed that pure blue blood down to their equally noble children.

  Niall came to a slow stop alongside one gold frame; this painting was at odds with all the others. A regal lady stood frowning and hard-eyed beside a soft-eyed gentleman. His portly form and ruddy cheeks gave him away as the Duke of Wilkinson. He stood in direct juxtaposition to the harsh severity of his wife. It was not, however, that noble couple who held Niall frozen, but rather the widely smiling Diana as she’d been years earlier. The smile on her dimpled cheeks met her twinkling blue eyes, both expertly captured by the artist.

  Niall absently snuffed out his cheroot on the mahogany hall table and abandoned the scrap.

  When he was a boy, Niall had lain on the dirt-stained floor in Diggory’s shanty that had served as a bed. His first thieving partner, Connor, had gone missing, never to return. Not a word, sight, or sound was ever heard from the child, near in age to Niall’s own young years. Niall had stared up at the cracks in the threadbare ceiling with terrified eyes, knowing the truth early on—there was no one who’d either note or care if Niall Marksman suddenly, one day, disappeared.

  In that, Diana wasn’t vastly different from everyone to come before her. She’d required a guard. He’d served in that capacity, and now his tenure here was done. His chest tightened, and Niall forced his gaze away from the painting and resumed the trek abovestairs.

  This weakness was why he was better off gone. Weakness saw a man dead in the streets. Niall needed to return to St. Giles and resurrect those thick walls of hatred he’d built years earlier for all the men, women, and children of Diana Verney’s station.

  He reached the landing. Unbidden, his gaze traveled down the opposite end of the hall to where Diana now slept. Of course, being forced into the lady’s company for the better part of a month, it was only natural that he’d formed a relationship with her.

  A relationship that had him hungering for both the words on her lips and the taste of that satiny, soft, bow-shaped flesh. “You’re a bloody fool,” he muttered, giving his head a hard shake. Lusting after a lady of the haute ton was folly that a man deserved to have his cork drawn for. Acting on that desire, as he had not once, but twice, and dreaming of it every night thereafter, was a treachery that Ryker should happily gut Niall over. With his bloodstained fingers, the last thing Niall had any right to was putting his hands upon Diana Verney.

  Niall started for his rooms—and then froze. The candles sent shadows flitting and dancing on the immaculate ivory carpet. Or rather . . . a largely immaculate carpet. He wheeled slowly around. Not taking his gaze from the faint mark on the floor, Niall stealthily padded over to it. It was the faintest incongruity. Yet in the streets of St. Giles, ignoring an incongruity resulted in fatal mistakes.

  He crouched on his heels and skimmed the back of his knuckles over that fresh stain.

  Lifting his hand close to his eyes, Niall inspected the residual on his fingers. His
pulse pounded hard as he came slowly to his feet and did a sweep of the hallway. He carefully withdrew the pistol from inside his waistband and, with his gun extended, searched around.

  Of its own volition, Niall’s gaze slid down the hall to Diana’s chambers. It was silly. Now he was seeing monsters, just as she had. The mud belonged to a careless servant. A mark that would surely be tended to any moment by a dutiful maid.

  Even so, Niall eyed Diana’s arched doorway a long moment.

  The distant report of shattered glass spilled from within her chambers, springing him to movement. Blood roaring in his ears, Niall sprinted down the hall. There could be any reason for that mark or the breaking glass. And yet, deep inside, a warrior from the street, he knew the truth long before his logical mind accepted it.

  Niall shoved her door open and froze. It was an infinitesimal pause that had cost too many men their lives and Niall too many scars on his body. And yet, until he drew in his last, worthless breath, the horror of this moment would forever remain. An ashen-hued Diana, held in the grips of a hulking bear of a man, looked back at him with the terror that came when a person stared down death and knew that dark fate ultimately prevailed. His heart thudded wildly in his chest.

  The bastard muttered a black curse under his breath and placed the edge of his dagger against her throat.

  Oh, God.

  “Marksman.” The man knew him. “Get in here. Shut the goddamned door. And if ya make a single noise, Oi’ll slash ’er.”

  Diana’s lower lip trembled, but she gave no other outward show. When any other person, regardless of station or lot in life, would have been quaking and crying, she remained stoically silent. How had he ever thought her weak? Moving slowly so as not to spook the man holding her, Niall drew the door closed quietly behind him.

  “Now lock it,” the toothless stranger ordered.

  Lowering his weapon to his side, Niall held up his spare palm calmingly and sank to his haunches. All the while his gaze remained fixed on the hulking brute.