Her Deceptive Duke (Wicked Husbands Book 4)

by Scarlett Scott

  “Didn’t ask no questions. Coin is coin when ye’re needin’ it.” The lad paused, and his every mannerism suggested he told the truth. His gaze did not falter or dart about, but held firm. “M’sister is in jail and I need ‘er out. A nob offered me ‘alf the money for the job aforehand and ‘alf when the deed was done.”

  Kit absorbed the information. It sounded like a familiar practice, nothing out of the ordinary. But how could he connect the man who’d hired the lad to Georgiana’s father? “This nob, can you describe him?”

  “Dark ‘aired, mean-eyed, and ‘ad a brogue but said he ‘ailed from New York. Said there was plenty more where that came from back ‘ome when he gave me the quid. That ‘e worked for a rich bird, and she were in love wiff ‘im.”

  New York made sense—it was close to being the connection to Georgiana’s father he needed. But the rich bird threw him. The man who’d hired the lad to commit murder worked for a wealthy woman? It hardly made sense. And then there was the troubling matter of the brogue. “His accent. Was it Irish?”

  “Couldn’t say. Odd sounding, not as like I’ve ‘eard before.”

  Kit and Ludlow exchanged a glance. This accent business was a troublesome development, as it rather muddied the waters. If there was a chance that the person responsible for the attacks made against Georgiana was somehow related to the vicious factions of Fenians he’d infiltrated…

  “Where were you to meet this supposed nob after committing the heinous deed?” Ludlow demanded, keeping the pistol trained to the lad’s head.

  “In the alleyway behind Charrington’s,” the boy responded, naming a well-known East End alehouse. “Immediately after coming from me task ‘ere.”

  Kit raised a brow at Ludlow, sure they were thinking the same thing. It was more than likely that the lad would have met his own end in the darkened alley behind Charrington’s, bleeding out into the cobbles, rather than collecting the rest of his blood money. At least they now had a place to begin, however.

  “Sounds like we’re going to Charrington’s,” Kit announced grimly. “Ludlow, take our friend here elsewhere while I dress, if you please.”

  Ludlow’s lip curled, but he inclined his head. “Any false moves, and I’m still putting a bullet in you,” he warned the lad on their way out of the chamber.

  Kit threw off the bedclothes and dressed himself with all haste, careful to arm himself with a pistol, two knives, and his cane. Doubtless, the small blade contained within its end might prove useful on a night such as this.

  “The little bugger is going to run,” the not-butler predicted an hour later as they waited together in the darkness behind the bustling alehouse.

  They had left Leeds House under the watchful eye of additional guards provided by Carlisle, with two men stationed at Georgiana’s door and three on the perimeter just below her chamber. The sleeping guard who had enabled the lad to slip in a library window had been relieved of his task with a bloodied nose for his lack of concern for his duty. By some miracle, Georgiana had not been awakened by the household’s sudden midnight commotion—he had checked on her himself—and he intended to keep her undisturbed and unafraid. He had every intention of vanquishing this foe before she even knew it existed.

  “If he does flee, he won’t get his bloody money,” Kit whispered back. He had made certain to withhold every farthing from the lad until this evening’s farce had had been delivered of its final curtain call.

  “He’s got half the bounty he was promised for his devil’s bargain with Her Grace’s father. If he were smart, he’d run with the coin in his pocket and flee straight to the countryside.” Ludlow’s tone was sour. “You ought to have allowed me to ruffle his feathers.”

  “I do not understand your penchant for the avian,” Kit grumbled, irritated with the man and yet somehow also amused. Reluctantly, he acknowledged to himself that were it not for the cheeky bastard’s obvious love for his own wife, Kit would actually like him. “Moreover, I have the distinct impression that your notion of ruffling feathers would equate to breaking off a damned wing or a beak instead.”

  It was true. The mountain was uncivilized, his affinity for violence apparent. And yet his wife spoke of the devil as if he were the gentlest lamb. It was painfully clear that Ludlow was as tender as a ravenous bear.

  But any jealousy burning in Kit’s gut over his duchess’s allegiance to the not-butler fizzled when at long last, a tall figure clad in black, wearing a hat that shielded his features, approached the lad. They were not near enough to discern the dialogue between the two, so Kit motioned for Ludlow to follow him as he inched nearer.

  With painstaking torpidity, they moved closer until the tall man’s voice could be heard over the din of the nightlife that thrived all around them.

  “…need confirmation before you can earn the rest of what was promised. Naturally, I cannot merely take you at your word that the deed is done.” There was no mistaking the lilt in that voice. Kit had infiltrated the most mercurial and dangerous circles of Irish Americans in New York for half a year’s time. He recognized the accent of an Irishman who’d lived a number of years on the opposite end of the Atlantic the same way he knew the reflection in the looking glass was his.

  What an interesting, troubling twist that presented.

  “Oi stabbed ‘er in the ‘eart. Bled like a pig all over ever’thing,” boasted the lad. “Just as ye asked. Now I wants what’s owed t’me.”

  Kit’s hands clenched into fists at his sides at the words. Even as he knew that Georgiana was unharmed and sleeping peacefully under heavy guard at Leeds House, he longed to tear someone limb from limb. He would begin with the bastard who had hired the street urchin to murder his wife.

  Only Ludlow’s staying hand at his elbow restrained him from tearing forth into the darkness and launching himself at that shadowy figure. His fists ached with the need to bury themselves in the son-of-a-bitch’s teeth.

  “You’ll get what’s owed to you,” the figure promised in a dark tone that almost echoed Kit’s thoughts. He withdrew a gun from his jacket and pointed it at the lad, cocking it. “You should not have been greedy. But you were, and now you’ll have to pay the price.”

  “Bloody hell,” Ludlow muttered at his side. “We must strike.”

  They had formulated a battle plan. Gripping his cane in one hand and a pistol in the other, he moved forward in unison with Ludlow. He was running purely on instinct now, his mind overtaking his body. There was no place for weakness or pain. There was only necessity. A need to act.

  Now.

  The lad and the tall man spun to face them. Kit read the fear in the lad’s wide eyes in the moment before impact. For a beat, as he launched himself forward, time seemed to suspend, moving with sickening torpidity.

  A pistol report rang through the air. The sound of a bullet finding its home in flesh—undeniable and all too familiar—struck him. His body connected with the lad’s and they went crashing down. Pain speared his thigh at the impact, but he was able to move himself at the last moment so that the healthy side of his body bore most of the brunt of the force.

  Gritting his teeth, he raised his head to find that Ludlow had taken down the other man as well. Both were alarmingly still. The man’s pistol had been raised, cocked, ready to shoot. There was the distinct possibility that, as capable as he no doubt was, Ludlow had not managed to shoot first.

  “Ludlow,” he rasped as he rolled from the lad and forced his protesting body into a standing position.

  The not-butler shifted, and Kit knew a relief so fast and furious that it rather irritated him, even in that instant of supreme solemnity. Ludlow hauled himself up from the ground as well, blinking as he stared down at the supine figure who lay motionless on the cobbles. Further inspection revealed a bullet wound in his head, oozing blood.

  In the dim light, Kit stepped forward, his gaze traveling over the man’s face, hoping for an answering flare of recognition and finding none. This man—the dead man—was not anyone
he had ever crossed paths with before.

  He stared at the not-butler then, frustration surging through him in the next instant, following the relief that he was alive and not the one lying face up in the alley. “You killed him.”

  Ludlow’s gaze was unrelenting. “It was him or us. There was no choice.”

  “You could have bloody well shot him elsewhere. The hand, for instance,” Kit argued on a wave of anger. “I wanted answers, and now we will have the damned constables blazing down upon us.”

  “Constables?” The lad spoke for the first time since the scuffle, bringing Kit’s gaze back to him. He was pale, wide-eyed. “I don’t want no trouble. You nobs’re all bloody fucking mad.”

  Kit extracted the lad’s reward from his jacket, thrusting the notes into his chest. “Your payment. It ought to be more than enough to help your sister’s plight. If you know anything else, if you hear anything else, and if anyone ever again approaches you with a proposition to harm the Duchess of Leeds again, you will seek me out, or you will suffer the consequences. You know where to find me. Are we clear?”

  The lad blinked, his fingers closing over the money before he shoved it inside his tattered jacket. He nodded, his complexion pale, and there was not a doubt in Kit’s mind that the string bean before him could not have murdered one of Her Grace’s Lilliputians, let alone her.

  Without a word, the lad ran into the night, proving the not-butler right after all.

  A new sort of commotion had sprung up from the alehouse and surrounding streets, cries and hollering, a cacophony of horses and tack, of raucous female laughter, of male shouts.

  “Here now, there was a shot fired! Do we have any witnesses?”

  The strident tone of a lone policeman echoed to them.

  A fresh sense of urgency hitting him square in the chest, Kit turned back to the not-butler, only to find Ludlow riffling through the corpse’s pockets, searching for…valuables? Notes? Clues?

  Kit was sure he didn’t want to know. “Damn it, Ludlow, we need to move.”

  Ludlow took the corpse’s pistol and tucked it inside his jacket, moving with a methodical precision that suggested this was not the first time he had removed personal items from the body of a dead man. A man he had just killed, even if it had been a defensive killing made to protect them all.

  “This is our only opportunity for answers,” the not-butler said calmly, making a sound of approval as he extracted some correspondence and secreted that in his jacket as well. “He has no rings or other ornamentation and not a guinea on his person. This bastard came here to kill tonight. No question.”

  Shouts grew nearer, lights dancing on the brick of the building.

  “Who goes there?”

  “Ludlow, we must leave. There is not a moment to spare.”

  Ludlow stood, and together, they bled back into the darkness from which they had emerged. As they returned to their waiting carriage, Kit found himself facing several unwanted truths. First, he and the not-butler made a damned good team. Second, he respected the not-butler far more than he ever could have imagined. Third, that the threats facing Georgiana were all too real, and he would give anything—his limbs, his sight, his life, whatever required of him—to protect her.

  The way he felt for her would not fade as he had wished. It would not be ignored or deterred. It was there, a beating, breathing thing with a life of its own, pulsing beneath the edge of every moment. Threatening to tear him apart as much as it promised to lift him up.

  Despite the years of his training, he could not deny that tonight had rattled him. For a moment, the smell of the gunpowder and the bark of the pistol, the unforgettable sound of the bullet meeting its mark…it all took him back to the day he’d been ambushed. To the sound of feet surrounding him, the reverberation of guns, the acrid scent of fired weapons. The bitter smell of blood.

  But not even those flashbacks had been enough to curdle his gut and disarm him with a pervasive sense of fear. Seated in the comfortable confines of his carriage, amidst the scent of freshly waxed Moroccan leather, what terrified him the most was the fact that Georgiana was in definitive danger.

  And it was entirely possible that the danger had been of his own making. That he had led evil, danger, and darkness to her door. Somehow, he would have to do everything in his power to slay every demon that would attempt to take her from him.

  For now that he had her, he could not bear to let her go.

  Ever.

  hen are you going to tell me what is amiss, Georgiana?”

  Georgiana started from her morose contemplation of her teacup and glanced up at her dearest friend Daisy, the Duchess of Trent. A fellow American heiress who had entered a marriage of convenience with an English aristocrat, she was as golden as an angel, strikingly lovely, with a heart as wide as the Mississippi river and a fierce loyalty streak to match. She and Georgiana had bonded quickly and easily, and theirs was a friendship Georgiana would forever cherish.

  But despite the sisterhood they’d formed, she still wasn’t certain she wished to unburden all the troubles lying heavy upon her yet, especially that she had one more to add to it after the correspondence she’d received today from Uncle George’s lawyer. In just two years’ time, her father and stepmother had misspent the entire fortune left to her father by his brother.

  Mrs. Dumont appears to have squandered a vast sum…the home on 5th Avenue has been stripped of anything of value by creditors… It is my duty to inform you that Mr. Dumont has requested access to the separate funds held in trust for your future heirs…

  The letter had been five pages in length, detailed, and shocking. She still was not sure which surprised her more, that her stepmother and father had swept through the immense sums of money at their disposal with such haste or that her father would attempt to fleece her unborn children without her knowledge.

  The unwanted revelations, coupled with her equally unwanted reaction to her husband, left her at sixes and sevens. Her mind was a confused jumble, her emotions the equivalent of a shipwreck that had been dashed upon rocky shoals. She’d spent the past several days alternating between hiding from her husband, sneaking about Leeds House to catch a furtive glimpse of him, and consuming enough of Cook’s raspberry tarts that today’s emerald and cream silk felt a hair’s breadth too tight in the bodice.

  Last night, she had fallen asleep on the floor of the dog chamber, only to wake at dawn to Alice’s sloppy, sodden kisses, her back sore in muscles she hadn’t known existed. She’d been covered in fur and slobber when she stumbled to her chamber like a sleepwalker.

  Yes, things (and she) were horridly…messy. Not that Georgiana wished to admit any of that to her glorious, elegant friend who looked as if she’d had a full night’s rest, ethereally radiant in her purple silk Worth. Her delicate condition had just begun to show in the form of a slightly thicker midsection, but she was as beautiful as ever, with a perpetual aura of happiness surrounding her.

  Georgiana attempted a bright smile. “Nothing is amiss, dearest. I am positively thrilled that Leeds has returned home to London. I could not be happier.”

  Daisy raised a brow, looking unimpressed. “Darling, you were glaring at your tea as if you were contemplating assassinating it, and you haven’t touched one of chef’s chocolate biscuits.”

  Drat her friend for being too observant. When she had seized upon Daisy’s invitation as a means to escape from Kit and continue the much-needed distance she sought between them, she had failed to ponder all the ramifications. “My tea is too hot.”

  “It has been sitting for at least half an hour,” Daisy pointed out.

  “Forgive me,” she improvised. “I meant to say it was too tepid.”

  “What of the biscuits then? No one can resist them. I myself have tucked away three, and even Sebastian, who is quite exacting about his desserts, says they are one of the best things he has ever eaten aside from…other desserts,” her friend finished lamely, her cheeks flaming.

  Here was yet a
nother problem she ought to have considered before taking tea with Daisy. She and the Duke of Trent were madly in love with each other. She did not wish to hear about what the Duke of Trent did with his mouth in general, though specifically as it pertained to her friend. And she had a feeling that the flush on Daisy’s cheekbones meant that the Duke of Trent preferred his wife to the biscuits, which, while as it ought to be, was something that left her embarrassed and envious.

  Not to mention a trifle queasy.

  She gave her friend a tight smile. “While I am gratified on your behalf to hear about Trent’s appreciation of other desserts, it also makes me want to cast up my accounts all over the cocoa biscuits.”

  Daisy’s color remained high. “I have no idea what you’re implying. I simply forgot which dessert Sebastian had used as a comparison. And please do refrain from vomiting on my cocoa biscuits as it would be an egregious waste of them, and I’m certain I have room for at least three more.”

  “Three more?” It was Georgiana’s turn to raise a brow. “You ordinarily eat like a bird. How in heaven’s name could you possibly consume six cocoa biscuits in one sitting?”

  Daisy flashed a smile and took a sip of her tea. “I find I have an increased appetite these days.”

  “Yes, I suppose being with child will do that.” She stifled an unworthy twinge of jealousy at her friend’s lovesick euphoria. It wasn’t as if she wanted to have a child with Kit. Why should she be covetous of her dearest friend’s contentment?

  Because I’m falling in love with my husband.

  The realization was as sudden as it was unwanted.

  She dismissed it and reached for a chocolate biscuit, stuffing half the confection in her mouth at once. It was a shocking exhibition of horrible manners, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She chewed, swallowed, shoved the remaining half in her mouth all over again.