“Two.”
“Pardon?”
“Two men. John died just after we’d escaped but there was another man at the beginning, remember?”
“My god, I’d forgotten him completely!” Michael stiffened in embarrassment and stood in a rush. “Damn it!”
“We’d exchanged names in the pitch dark and barely sat down before they dragged him out! It’s not as if we had any time to bond with the fellow…”
“That’s no excuse!” Michael kicked the desk and grimaced at the pain.
Rowan held up a hand as if to stop him, but didn’t approach his friend. “Hell, it happened so quickly. They took him out never to return. Darius said the guard muttered something about a bird for execution and we knew—”
“They were going to kill him. Some kind of example probably to entertain the locals.” Michael ran a hand through his thick hair. “Sterling.”
“Sterling,” Rowan repeated. “Sterling…what was his last name again?”
“Porter, wasn’t it? Yes, it was Sterling Porter.” Michael’s hands fisted at his sides. “Damn it! How could I have blocked the man from reckoning?”
He walked back over to the windows to stare down at the street below.
How was that possible?
Hell, I’ve been so caught up in everything. In survival and then in escaping, in getting back to England and keeping them all safe from Jackals and prophecies, knife wielding assassins, poisoners and burning buildings…
But to have forgotten one of our own? Even if we only knew him for an hour, it doesn’t seem right. It’s as if I’ve allowed him to be die twice…
“You’re wallowing in guilt over there, Rutherford.”
“Are you a mind reader now, Doctor West?”
“Michael, please. We couldn’t see our fingers in front of our faces for the first stretch. We never saw his face and there wasn’t a lot of conversation to be had. He was gone before we’d even had time to accept what was happening and we all pushed him from our minds to avoid thinking of the worst.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Probably?” Rowan shook his head. “Hell, I’d forgotten him, too! It was Darius who corrected me when I said something of it a few days ago; about how lucky we were all six of us to overcome so much. So you’re not alone in this, Michael.”
“Sterling Porter.” Michael set his drink down and rebuttoned his coat. “No, I am not alone, but I have something to do.”
“What do you intend?”
“To track down his family and offer my condolences.” Michael squared his shoulders. “It won’t be much but at least they’ll know where he fell.”
“Not today, Michael. It’s Darius’s wedding day,” Rowan said quietly.
Michael held his breath, wanting to argue, wanting to tell his friend that he ached to escape the confines of the house and not sit by in awkward isolation at the celebration. But Rowan was right.
“Of course. Time enough afterward.” Michael let out a long sigh. “We should get back downstairs. I don’t want to miss the wedding toasts and the send off.”
But I’ll be on it before nightfall no matter what and begin the search for his family.
There’s been enough waiting.
It’s time to take action.
“It’s a lovely menu, Mrs. Dorsett,” Grace said quietly as she handed the paper back to the cook. “Thank you.”
“As you wish.” Mrs. Dorsett’s expression remained stony and Grace did her best to ignore it. She’d been running her brother’s household for nearly seven years but her gentle nature didn’t lend itself to authority. In the first year, she’d once begged her older brother to release Mrs. Dorsett but he’d laughed at her childish request and merely pointed out that he liked the woman’s cooking. And then he’d added that until she had proven to be as invaluable as the cook, she would need to accept the charitable nature of her position.
She’d learned her lesson and never complained again.
She’d acquired a steadier hand and uncovered the real reason for Mrs. Dorsett’s foothold. It was her brother’s need to keep up social appearances by employing a cook—even if that servant had the education and bearing of a badger. Appearances were everything.
Our father’s lesson to my brother, I fear. Though I wonder what lesson I took from all those years of invisibility...
Her brother had brought her to London at seventeen years of age after their father had remarried and indicated that he had no place for another woman in the house. His new wife was the widow of a country squire and had no desire to share her position with another woman—even the quiet and odd daughter of her new lord and master. The flimsy excuse that Grace could find a rich husband in Town had been accepted without argument. No one really believed that Grace was going to take London by storm without a title, dowry or any chance at a debut but no one had spoken up when they’d packed her off to the city with her meager belongings.
Of course, if any of them had bothered to ask, she’d have assured them that she had no desire to marry. Grace hated nearly every aspect of the confined and careful life of an English woman; but she knew better than to reveal it. As Mrs. Dorsett retreated, she began to write all the weekly expenses into the house’s journal in her neat careful hand. She knew to the half-penny where the budgets were allocated. Over time, she had added a woman’s touch and turned a dreary dark house into a light, cheerful and elegant home.
Once the ledger was up to date, she set the accounts aside and took a deep breath of relief. She fingered the buttons of her blouse’s high collar at her throat and leaned back in her chair. The house was in order, the chores in hand, the menu set and she had the afternoon to herself and a few precious hours to do exactly as she wished.
A few precious hours to escape…
A new story she’d been working on with savage pirates and an underwater kingdom beckoned her back to the pages she’d hidden away. She’d been up until two in the morning wrestling with krakens and trying to decide if her heroine’s prayers for rescue should be answered in this installment, or the next chapter.
Grace eagerly unlocked the large hidden drawer underneath the rose painted surface of her ladies desk and pulled out the well worn leather bound notebook that was her one secret source of solace in the world.
Respectable ladies did not write nonsensical stories and outrageous tales for the working class. Respectable women did not entertain naked tribes of cannibals and leagues of wizards in their heads. Respectable women had no notions of murders and mysteries and would turn their noses up at the very suggestion that there was entertainment to be had with harrowing encounters with dashing highwaymen or in the discovery of secret societies of vampyres.
Yet Grace did not write tame poetry or weak prose. Her soul’s fabric was not suited to dainty fairy tales. And no one who knew her had any idea…
Her older brother simply thought her a strange creature with no gift for social situations and Grace had allowed it. After all, it meant that her interior landscape was her very own to manage and it allowed her to plot her path out of the stifling cage she occupied. So long as her brother believed she was only scribbling away in some kind of girlish journal, Grace was free to do as she wished.
She pulled out the linen wrist covers she’d made to protect her sleeves from getting ink stains and settled in with a sigh of blissful surrender, dipping her favorite pen into a heavy glass inkwell at the ready.
Their tridents gleamed in the silvery depths as they cut off Captain Martin’s escape. “Poseidon will have your bones to atone for this trespass!” cried the—
Grace’s hand froze when the jarring sound of the front door’s bell rang out.
She had to bite her lip to keep from crying out in disappointment at the interruption but there was nothing to be done for it. It was a small house and the crisp click of Mrs. Dorsett’s heels on the wooden floors downstairs as she moved to answer the door was unmistakable.
Grace held her breath for a moment, hoping that whoever it was, might have business that the ever-efficient Mrs. Dorsett could manage without spoiling the—
“Right this way, sir.” Mrs. Dorsett’s sharp voice carried up the stairs through the floors and Grace’s head tipped back with a sigh as she relinquished the breath she’d been holding. But disappointment at the interruption was almost immediately replaced by a stronger emotion.
Shock.
A male caller? Did she say ‘sir’?
The low rumble of a man’s voice in reply to Mrs. Dorsett made her sit up a little straighter, her curiosity completely piqued. Grace put away her tools and her writing as quick as a cat, locking her things away and made a rushed inventory of the sitting room to make sure that it was presentable.
She stood, her nerves jangling, and smoothed out her skirts just in time as Mrs. Dorsett rapped on the door and then opened it before Grace could answer her.
“A man to see you,” Mrs. Dorsett stated flatly and then turned before she’d even shown the gentleman in, as if the intrusion of a visitor was her least concern, much less the rituals it might require or the impropriety of leaving her mistress alone with a strange man.
Grace bit her lip to keep from groaning aloud at the bungled social niceties but the sight of the tallest man she had ever seen ducking under the doorframe to enter her sitting room ended her ability to protest.
Indeed the sight of a very handsome and very large man in a simple dark suit with his hands gripping his hat in front of him shyly dwarfing her ended every intelligent impulse or thought she had hoped to have to make up for Mrs. Dorsett’s failings.
Dear God. He’s so…impossible!
“I was not expecting any callers, sir.” She swallowed and prayed as hard as she ever had in her life that the heat she felt in her cheeks was miraculously invisible. For here was not only an unexpected male caller but one that not even her own overworked imagination could have conjured. Thick black curls streaked with white in a salt and pepper effect offset the beauty of rugged masculine features, a square jaw and the gentle light of his eyes. Despite the white touches in his dark hair, he was not old but a man in his prime. He was broad and lean and appeared as solid and unyielding as any bronze statue in a park—except this chiseled wonder was standing in her sitting room. She curtsied slightly, at a loss for how one proceeded when demigods came to call. “I am Grace Porter.”
“You’re…” His voice trailed off, his expression reflecting genuine misery as his hat suffered from his white-knuckled hold in its brim. Pale grey blue eyes the color of a winter sky darted from hers as he took in the room. “I should have thought this through past the front door,” he said softly.
Grace blinked. “Is it a visit or a tactical siege?”
It was his turn to look at her in surprise. “A visit, I hope.” He replied as if asking if such a thing were acceptable.
Her next impression was that the man was undoubtedly the shyest human in the British Isles with the set of his shoulders and tentative stance. Why he looks like he’s getting ready to run from a fire breathing dragon! Grace warmed to the knowledge, courage flooding through her. “Then I should tell you that you are welcome. Would you care to take a seat?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think I should.”
“It is the first step of a social visit,” she offered. “Sitting. Or so I’m led to believe…”
He shook his head again, openly eyeing the delicate legs of the chairs, all carved to resemble bamboo and birds. “It may be but I don’t think your furniture will survive the attempt.”
Grace tried to see the room from his vantage point. It did look a bit dainty. “Perhaps it’s a wicked custom to give a woman’s dull life a bit of humor to see gentlemen attempting to navigate through our gauntlets of glass trinkets and silk pillows.”
“That sounds like a frighteningly real possibility,” he replied. “Please pardon my manners,” he said, his cheeks reddening. “I am…ill-suited to…drawing rooms on my best days but this visit is particularly challenging. It’s a lovely room but I won’t linger long.”
Grace’s stomach fluttered with butterflies at the effect of his presence. This is ridiculous and if I don’t stop staring at him, he’ll declare me an idiot and there’s an end to it. “I’ll accept the compliment and the brevity of your intended stay, if only to try to save your hat.” She bit her lower lip. “I’m sure it’s stopped breathing by now if you care to release it.”
He smiled shyly and relaxed his grip slightly on his cap. “There. A life spared.”
“Well, that’s one thing set right. But I’m probably the one to apologize for a lack of manners.” She straightened her back, doing her best to compose herself and channel a more serene countenance. “I have the habit myself of speaking first without thinking although I don’t recommend it to anyone for its consequences. But let’s ignore the rules and stand, shall we? Even so, you’ll need to provide your name if we’re to make another start. Don’t you think so?”
He nodded, becoming instantly more somber. “I am Michael Rutherford. I…I met your brother, Sterling, in India.”
Grace nodded, pleased that he was in the right house after all but mortified anew at her candor with an associate of her brother. Sterling hated wit in a woman and had complained more than once that she had the decorum of a dairymaid. Then again, she didn’t expect her brother to allow him to call again so it hardly mattered. “Oh! Well, I’m afraid, Sterling’s not here. I don’t expect him home until the evening, Mr. Rutherford.”
“What?”
Something in the way Mr. Rutherford asked the question made her heart skip a beat. He hadn’t asked it as if he wasn’t sure of his hearing. Instead he was suddenly looking at her as if her sanity were in doubt.
“He’s at his office at the Company, near the East India Trading Docks. There was a shipment from the Congo that required his attention, he said. Are you unwell, Mr. Rutherford?”
He barely moved, his reply soft and careful. “Sterling Porter. Is at his office.”
“He is.” She clasped her hands together, unwilling to let trembling fingers betray how unsettling it was to be at the center of Michael Rutherford’s keen study.
“Your brother. Your brother who was in Bengal in 1857 is in London. Your brother, Sterling.”
“As I said. But Sterling speaks so rarely of his time in India that…” Grace caught her breath. “I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear that an acquaintance stopped by to—“
“No!” Mr. Rutherford blurted out, only to hold up a hand as if to make amends. “I mean, I would rather surprise him, if I can. It was—such an amazing experience and I know he has fond memories of our time together. Please, don’t tell him I called.”
“Don’t tell him?” Grace put a hand against her heart, taken with the unexpected turns in the conversation. “What a perfectly mysterious thing to ask!”
“No great mystery, I assure you.” His gaze never left hers and Grace tipped her head to one side to study the puzzle he presented. He appeared as sincere as a vicar on Sunday but there was something stern and desperate in his face. And the writer in her was enrapt at the idea that he was caught in some heroic conundrum.
“Please, Miss Porter.”
It was the way he said “please” that did it. Grace had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling at the impossible bubble of rebellion rising up from her toes. A man she did not know was asking her to conspire to keep secrets from her brother and despite all logic, she couldn’t think of a single reason to say no. “He hates surprises.”
Mr. Rutherford held his ground. “Most men do.”
She smiled at the wicked admission of their conspiracy. “Very well. If as you say, there is a bond between you, then I wouldn’t wish to be the one to spoil your reunion.”
“You are too kind, Miss Porter.” He took a firm step backward and then bowed awkwardly, his eyes never leaving her face. “May I call here again?”
; Her mouth fell open in shock. “You could if…” It was a lovely bit of irony. Normally, it would be Sterling who would forbid it but since the call was a secret and Mr. Rutherford only wished to return to surprise her brother—there was no chance for a refusal. Grace managed to nod mutely in assent.
“Thank you.” He straightened and turned without another word, ducking out the doorway and showing himself out of the house with quiet footsteps on the stairs.
Grace stood where he’d left her until she heard the front door open and close as he exited to the street outside and then she sat back down at her desk a few seconds before her knees turned to rubber.
I should make Captain Martin a good deal taller, I think…
CHAPTER TWO
Michael Rutherford was running.
He’d been so relieved and surprised when his Bow Street runner had quickly uncovered a London address for Mr. Sterling Porter and indicated that his sister was in residence. He’d rushed over there, sure of finding some version of a plain spinster with black crepe-draped portraits of her dead brother in the front hall. He’d braced himself to deliver the grim confirmation of a man’s passing and wasted no time in stopping off cards or making appointments.
After all, social graces weren’t his forté.
But now…
Michael moved away from the house as quickly as he could, every instinct warning him that the last thing he wanted was to be caught in the open if Sterling returned home early.
Sterling Porter was alive.
Which meant one thing.
Sterling Porter was the Jackal.
Damn. Damn. Damn.
It all made sense but he’d never seen it coming. Only a man who’d been there would have had knowledge of what they’d taken but the dark—something as primal as the dark had kept them from him all this time. He’d never seen the faces of the Jaded and he’d left them there too quickly to learn much about them. Probably because he hadn’t expected them to survive, much less return to England with the treasure that Sterling must have been after all along.
Desire Wears Diamonds Page 3
