“Hargate wasn’t a fly. He was a pompous git from what I hear, and he proposed to you. From the way Mr. Franklin looked at you, he’s happy the bishop is no longer around to be his rival.”
“That is ridiculous . . . ” But Gil had made it clear tonight he wanted to speak to Louisa about more than friendship. Perhaps not so ridiculous, but Gil? “I still don’t think Gil capable of murdering anyone,” she said, certain. “And in any case, we weren’t asking for a summation of the case in minute detail. We only wanted to know if you’d discovered anything important.”
Fellows looked down at her in angry silence, resembling a Highland warrior even more out here in the dark. Louisa’s imagination made the tailored coat and ivory waistcoat become a linen shirt and great kilt wrapped around his shoulders; the glint of his watch chain blurred into the hilt of a dirk. He was powerful, strong, nothing tame about him. At any moment, he’d snatch her up and carry her off, a Highlander stealing himself a bride.
Louisa jumped when he reached out and seized her wrist. Reality and fantasy melded, and her heart pounded.
“Come with me,” he said, voice hard. “If you want to understand why I can’t give you the simple answers you want, come with me, and I’ll show you.”
He didn’t wait for her to debate. Fellows pulled Louisa out of the passage and to the street, April wind rushing at them as they emerged into the wider avenue. Louisa could have protested, jerked away, run back to the safety of the assembly rooms. But she didn’t. She let Fellows hold her, Louisa following her Highlander into the dark.
Fellows gave a sharp whistle through his teeth. A hansom cab a little way away jerked forward, the horse’s hooves clopping as the carriage came toward them. Fellows had obviously already planned his escape.
He opened the door and all but shoved Louisa into the cab. She didn’t have her wrap, but she had no desire to rush back inside to fetch it. The night was warm enough, Fellows might change his mind if he had to wait, and Louisa wanted very much to run off with him, wherever he was taking her.
Fellows gave the driver a direction she didn’t hear then climbed in beside her.
Louisa knew she had to be mad, leaving with him without a word, but with Lloyd warm beside her, his animation exciting her, she wanted to go. Whatever damage Louisa did by her flight, she’d repair it in the morning. No looking back.
Fellows took hold of her wrist again, as though he feared she might climb out the other side of the hansom and run if he didn’t. As the horse started, Fellows slid his clasp down to her hand, and their fingers twined. The pulse of it raced from hands to Louisa’s heart.
The cab listed abruptly. Louisa let out a squeak in alarm as another man wrenched open the carriage door and heaved himself in, landing next to Louisa in the one-seated cab. He was another Highland warrior, this one exuberant and young. He settled himself in the small space, forcing Louisa closer to Fellows, and told the startled driver to keep going.
“Saw you leave,” Daniel said, flashing his grin at both of them. “Couldn’t let you rush off without a chaperone, now could I?”
Chapter Eleven
The offices of Scotland Yard were quiet and echoing at night, though not deserted. Constables went in and out from the ground floor on their duties. Detectives used the calm of night to work on cases or for writing up the paperwork that went with them. Talk had been ongoing about moving the cramped police offices to a larger building to be erected near the Victoria Embankment, where a new opera house had been started then abandoned years ago. Fellows had been hearing about this theoretical move for a long time—he wondered if he’d still be alive when it happened.
The few men on the ground floor glanced at Fellows in curiosity when he walked inside in his formal kilt and suit, escorting a young lady in a fancy ball gown and a younger man in kilt and coat. That is, the constables stared until Fellows gave them a look that made them scramble back to their duties.
Fellows had shown Daniel Scotland Yard before. Being a curious lad, he’d turned up not long after Fellows’ identity had been revealed to the Mackenzies and demanded a tour. He’d wanted to know everything about the workings of the Metropolitan Police, thinking to perhaps become a detective himself. After the tour, Daniel told Fellows he’d changed his mind—he’d rather be an inventor. But maybe Scotland Yard would be purchasing some of his inventions in time, he’d said.
Daniel gazed about him in as much curiosity tonight, and Louisa looked interested as well. She was completely out of place here in her cream and green bustle gown, diamonds in her red hair, but she looked about without fear.
They had to walk up the two flights of stairs to Fellows’ office. Louisa shivered—it was always either too cold or too hot in this blasted building. Before Fellows could turn back and offer her his coat, Daniel had slid his from his shoulders and wrapped it around Louisa. Daniel threw Fellows an apologetic look, but Fellows didn’t comment.
He led them into his office. The small room held two desks, one for himself and one for Sergeant Pierce, with a cubbyhole for Constable Dobbs. The constable dealt with the bulk of the menial work, such as sending telegrams and messages, typing up handwriting notes, pigeonholing papers or fetching them, and keeping his chief inspector and sergeant supplied with coffee and tea, and in the case of Sergeant Pierce, thin cigarettes. The smell of stale smoke clung to the rooms, though the charwoman had cleared out the bowls of ash and spent butts hours ago.
The top of Fellows’ desk was bare. Every night before he left, Fellows shoved all the files and papers he was currently working with into the deep drawers. The drawers looked like a jumbled mess, but Fellows knew precisely where each item was.
He fished up the bulkiest stack, gestured for Louisa to sit at his desk, and dropped the papers onto the desk’s flat surface.
Louisa took the seat and looked at the tall file in front of her. “My.”
Fellows started fanning out the stacks of papers. “My notes on the suspect interviews,” he said, touching a pile covered with his painstaking handwriting. “These are Pierce’s notes. This is the pathology report on Hargate, and the reports on the tea, the cups, the pot, the plates, the pastries. Photographs of the tent, inside and out. This is the second set of witness interviews; this, notes of my search of Hargate’s flat and my interview with his parents. Every single detail typed up here.” Fellows put a blunt finger on sheets of paper crowded with typewritten characters.
Louisa stared at it all uncomprehendingly. Dobbs’ typing left something to be desired—there were overstrikes, bad erasure marks, and penciled-in words everywhere. Hardly surprising that Louisa gazed at the report in perplexity.
“You can see why I couldn’t make a detailed account of my progress,” Fellows said. “Mostly because I don’t know what my progress is. The truth is somewhere in that mess. If I go over it another fifty times or so, I might find some clear thread to pull.”
Fellows had expected Daniel to give him suggestions, if he didn’t just start reading the entire report right there, but when Fellows turned to look for Daniel, he found that the young man had gone. Where, Fellows couldn’t imagine. He might have smelled the smoke and longed for a cheroot, he might have spied someone he knew—Daniel seemed to know everyone in London, upper-, middle-, or working– class—or he might have decided that Fellows needed a discreet chat with Louisa. No matter what his motive, Fellows and Louisa were now alone.
Louisa touched one of the pages. “You’ll find it. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Look at a jumble no one else understands and discover a clear pattern?”
That was exactly what he did, but this time, Fellows was finding the way murky. “You have much faith in me.”
“I’ve heard about your cases from Hart. He’s very interested in what you do. You find people, you solve crimes that no one else is able to.” Louisa looked up at him, her eyes full of confidence. “You’ll solve this one. That was what I w
as trying to tell you before you dragged me away so precipitously from my sister’s supper ball.” Her smile returned, the warm one she’d bestowed on Fellows a few times in the past. He remembered every single instance. “If anyone saw us go, my reputation will be in tatters—even more than it already is.”
“You’ll not be ruined,” Fellows said. “I’ll make sure of it.”
“Because Daniel is with us? True, I wager he’ll spin a tale that he and I begged you to show us the inner workings of Scotland Yard until you capitulated.” She shrugged, pretending nonchalance, though her shoulders were stiff. “It is all in the family, after all.”
“We’re not family,” Fellows said abruptly.
Louisa shook her head, which made the diamonds glitter in the room’s stark gaslight. “Indeed, we are, which is Isabella’s fault. I never thought I’d find myself with five somewhat overbearing brothers and one energetic grown-up nephew, but when Isabella married Mac, that is what I got. I do like it, most of the time.”
“You and I are not brother and sister.” Fellows’ words came out harsh and flat.
“Well, no, not by blood.” Louisa smiled again, that heartbreaking, beautiful smile. "We have shared a kiss or two, after all."
He was going to die. Louisa sat in his office chair, decorating the room as nothing ever had, smiling her sweet little smile. She didn’t belong here, and yet she brightened the space like a beacon.
“A kiss or two,” Fellows said. “Is that how you think of them?” While he dreamed of them in the nighttime and woke up hot, sweaty, and hard. He had to stifle his groans so he wouldn’t disturb the neighbors.
Louisa’s smile wavered. “I imagined that was how you thought of them. The silly kisses of a silly girl.”
Fellows came around the desk and stood over her, his breath hurting him. “I’m not like Daniel,” he said, voice still grating. “Or your Mr. Franklin. Or those stuffed asses at the ball with lust in their eyes as they watched you dance. I wanted to pound the faces of every one of those bastards for looking at you like that.”
Louisa blinked in surprise. “What are you talking about? They looked at me in disgust. Everyone believes I poisoned Hargate.”
“And the idea that you might be a murderess excited them. Every male there wanted you, Louisa; I watched them want you. That’s another reason I took you away from there tonight, another reason I urged you to stay home until this is over.”
They stared at each other. Louisa’s eyes were a beautiful green, slightly moist with tears she refused to let form. The men tonight had wanted her, Fellows had seen. Not only was she lovely in her froth of a ball gown, that black ribbon around her throat, the taint of the murder made her even more seductive. The same taint also took away some of the stigma for touching her—she was not the sweet innocent her set had thought her, or so they now believed. If they debauched her, it would be Louisa’s fault, not theirs.
Fellows had to protect her from that. At the same time, he knew he was a hypocrite, because he wanted her as much as had any man there. Fellows didn’t only dream of Louisa in the night, he dreamed of her every waking minute.
He couldn’t stop thinking about her soft red lips in the kisses they’d shared. He couldn’t cease imagining how her mouth would feel on other parts of him, especially the one that was hard under his kilt even now. He wanted to kiss every inch of her body, taste her skin, inhale her scent.
When he lay awake in his bed of nights, his imagination put Louisa in the room with him, she casually undressing with her back to him. She’d slowly strip off her gown, then what was under the gown, letting each piece of clothing loosen and fall. When she was clad only in her corset, her red hair rippling down her back, she’d look over her shoulder and give him her lovely smile.
Fellows made a noise in his throat. He could reach for her right now. She was alone with him, vulnerable. He could do anything to her, and nothing that came to his mind at the moment was honorable.
“Do you believe the same as they do?” Louisa was asking. “That I’m fast?” She let out a small sigh and another shiver. “I’m very afraid they might be right.”
She waited for his answer worriedly, as though what Fellows’ thought mattered to her very much. The cameo at her throat beckoned him to lean down to lick her there. “Louisa, you’re an innocent.” He had to remember that. “Of that there is no doubt.”
Louisa rose, her breath lifting her too-low décolletage in a dangerous way. “Then why do I think about kissing you every time I see you? I should be at my sister’s ball, hoping one of the gentlemen I dance with will propose to me and solve my troubles. Instead, I ran off with you the moment you beckoned. Whenever I see you, I know I don’t want duty and properness—I want the wicked things my brothers-in-law whisper to my sisters-in-law when they think I don’t hear them. I want to do those things with you, not with the young men I was raised to expect to marry. Please, explain to me how I can be so innocent with those desires in my head.”
Oh God. Fellows’ body tightened. He wasn’t good with words, was much better at chasing down criminals and then beating them until they stayed down. Words weren’t his gift—persistence and his fists were. And now the woman he craved was asking him to explain away the basic animal instinct that burned inside him.
He cleared his throat. “Have you acted on these thoughts, either with me or other gentlemen?”
“No, of course not . . .”
“Then you are an innocent. You have no idea of the full of it.”
“But I want to know.” Louisa put her hand on his where it rested on the desk. “I want to know all these things. With you.”
The world stopped. The flash of Louisa undressing, smiling at him over her shoulder, came to Fellows again, with force. He couldn’t say anything, not even her name. Louisa. The beautiful, sweet word. She wanted him. What he desired, what he craved—she wanted it too.
Louisa nodded, her diamonds flashing again. “You see? I am a wanton. At least, I am where you are concerned. And I have no idea what to do about it.”
Fellows had plenty of ideas. And he couldn’t act on any of them, not without being as insidious as the most vicious criminals he’d chased to ground.
Louisa was alone with him, in his power, innocent, no matter what she claimed. She knew nothing of life, not in all the ugliness he’d lived through. And she was telling him she wanted to give that innocence to him.
So much heat washed through his veins that Fellows thought he’d fall. But cold followed hard upon the heat. Louisa trusted him. She had no idea what a man like Fellows was capable of. He could take her right here, to hell with virtue and respectability, and she wouldn’t be able to stop him. She trusted him because he was now one of the Mackenzies, acknowledged as the half brother of her sister’s husband. All in the family, she’d said.
But Fellows wasn’t like the Mackenzies—he was worse than any of them. For all the brothers’ hardness and ruthlessness, Hart, Cam, Mac, and even Ian had a modicum of polish. Fancy schools and university, money, influential friends, and the right circles, had given them a bit of a gloss.
Fellows had lived in squalor, his mother working harder than any woman should have to keep him fed. Catherine had stayed late into the night at the taverns, working her feet off for impatient tavern keepers, putting up with men trying to corner her. Fellows knew she’d let some of them corner her, for money, when she needed it. And he’d never blamed her for it.
The tamer Mackenzies had never had to watch their mother try not to cry as she counted out her coin for the night and realized it wouldn’t be enough. Hart hadn’t fed off tavern scraps grudgingly given, hadn’t had to watch his mother work harder and harder for less and less as her prettiness faded. Fellows had determined, the day he’d been accepted as a police constable, that his mother would never have to work again. And he’d fulfilled that vow.
Louisa knew nothing
of these hardships, and Fellows would do everything in his power to make sure she never did.
He could frighten her away from him. Make her go running back to the safety of Mac and Isabella’s home, lock the door, stay there. He abruptly slid his hand to the back of her head, twisted her face up to his, and crushed his lips over her mouth.
Louisa gasped, lips parting. Fellows tasted the sweet and tart of the lemonade she’d drunk, brought to her by the insipid Mr. Franklin. The thought of Franklin made Fellows angry. He dragged Louisa closer, fingers tangling in her satin-smooth curls, the kiss turning hard.
She made a little sound, and he knew he was bruising her, but he didn’t care. He meant to frighten her, meant her to jerk away and flee him.
She didn’t flee. Louisa was warmer than the room, the heat of her mouth searing. Daniel’s coat, still around her shoulders, smelled of cheroots, but her fragrance was all Fellows heeded.
He scooped his arm under her legs, easing her up onto the wooden desk. Perfect. Louisa sat on its edge, looking up at him, lips red with his kisses. Fellows cradled her head in his hands and kissed her again, deeper and fuller, locking her in place.
He jumped when her slipper brushed his leg. The point of her heel touched his wool socks then the bare of his thigh beneath the kilt. The little scratch of the heel jolted his need into a rampant fire.
Louisa was supposed to be frightened. She was supposed to fight away from him, shout at him that he should never dare take such a liberty. She should instruct him to never touch her, never to speak to her again. But Louisa’s answering kiss was as frenzied as his. Her slipper went up and up, her leg wrapping his and holding on.
One swift thrust on the desk, and she’d be his forever. But this was wrong. Fellows should savor her, in a bed, perhaps in an elegant hotel on soft sheets. Louisa deserved that. But the desk was here, the room dark and empty, his yearning for her climbing.
Fellows forced his mouth from hers. Louisa looked up at him in need, her eyes half closed, her lips red, parted, swollen. Her body was soft, hands curled around the lapels of his coat.
The Untamed Mackenzie (Mackenzies Series) Page 11
