Seducing a Stranger: Goode Girls Book 1 and Victorian Rebels Book 7 (A Goode Girls Romance)

by Kerrigan Byrne

  “But…she’s my sister. Surely you can appreciate the importance of that. You put your life on the line for people every day.” She kept her voice even, soft, appreciating the volatility simmering through the heavy musculature of his shoulders and arms, heaving his chest into swells of uneven breaths. “Every night,” she added meaningfully.

  “I’m well aware of my hypocrisy, Prudence,” he snapped. “But it doesn’t fucking matter. You can’t—I won’t bloody—God! I’m not built for this.” He paced three steps away, and then returned as if ricocheting off an invisible wall.

  His words lanced through her, and she went taut with fear, grateful for the wall behind her, holding her up. “For…for what?” she asked in a watery breath, wondering if everything was about to change.

  If she was about to lose him.

  “For loving you, goddammit,” he said with an almost savage antipathy. “I have to fight the image of that bastard’s gun against your temple every time I close my eyes. For the rest of my damnable life. I have to relive the agony of possibly losing you. Of losing both of you.”

  “Oh…” she breathed, her heart giving a few extra thumps.

  “It’ll drive me mad,” he ranted. “This unholy, unhealthy need I have to bask in your presence. This possession—no—this obsession. How am I supposed to run London’s entire police force when I’m so consumed by you?”

  “I—”

  He wasn’t finished by half. “I’m tempted to haul you to work with me and throw you in the cell, just so I can be certain of your safety. What sort of lunatic does that make me? Do you think that I could have survived this had it turned out differently?” He gestured to himself with sharp, wild arms. “And all of this right after last night. Right when I have everything I want in my grasp, everything. If he’d have—” His voice broke and he covered it with a rough sort of growl. “I swear, I’ve never felt fear like that before, Prudence. I’ve had you for a blink of time in my life, and yet, I’d have eaten a bullet before facing the rest of my years without you.” He turned to her, his face mottled and the tips of his ears red as he nigh trembled with unspent emotion. “Now,” he demanded. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  Prudence wondered if he could see the radiance in her heart shining through her eyes. If he knew how every word of his dressing-down had fallen like a Byronic poem on her ears. She wondered if she could ever have anything to say that could mean so much, because all she could come up with was, “I—I love you, too.”

  He blinked, his features gone perfectly blank.

  Then, he seized her in a lightning fast motion, buried his hands in her dark hair, and slanted his mouth over hers, kissing her with a desperate ferocity.

  Prudence surrendered to the kiss instantly. She understood now, what his coldness out on the docks had meant. The reason he wouldn’t look at her.

  He had to make sure everything was taken care of before the fissures in his composure cracked, and then shattered. He’d just killed five men with five bullets. He’d climbed a three-story warehouse and, stealthily as a cat, he’d put his deadeye to use.

  When the warmth between them kindled into heat, he tore his mouth away, apparently aware of their surroundings.

  He put his forehead on hers and they shared desperate breaths as he smoothed his hands down her arms to her waist, splaying his palms on her middle. “I shouldn’t have admonished you,” he admitted in a voice laced with regret. “Especially not after the trauma you’ve had. Christ, all I want is to wipe this day from your memory. To erase the bruise forming on your cheek. To coddle and cosset you. It’s damned unsettling.” His brow wrinkled with chagrin.

  She nudged him with her nose. “I want to remember this day forever. I will look back on this as the day you saved my life and freed my sister from the clutches of an evil man.” She smiled, winding her arms around his neck as she clutched him close. “I’ll remember this as the day you said you loved me.”

  His arms stole around her, bringing her fully against him, as if he couldn’t hold her close enough for his liking. “I promise you, Prudence, I’ll say it every day for the rest of our lives together.”

  Though she was still weak-limbed from the panic and strain of her ordeal, she thrilled with a sense of fulfillment and belonging. As if his love strengthened her, lacing threads of steel in the silken feminine fabric of her being. Nothing would tear them apart. Not lies nor doubt. Not villains nor adversaries nor their own wounded hearts.

  Drawing back, she looked up into his dear, dear face, and thought she might have seen something of the same sentiment lurking in the silver-blue brilliance of his gaze.

  “Did you hear?” she asked, hope and pain catching in her throat. “Did you hear William confess to George’s murder? And to the Stags of St. James?”

  “I did, sweetheart.” He flicked his gaze to the side, shadows reclaiming some of his brilliance. “I could grovel at your feet for a decade and it wouldn’t assuage my guilt.”

  She reached up and traced the fine divot in his chin with a fingertip. “I would say it’s not necessary,” she shrugged. “But if groveling is what will placate your conscience, far be it for me to stop you.”

  He huffed the ghost of a chuckle against her hair as his arms tightened. “All right, my little minx of a wife…I’ll admit I’m new to groveling. How does one go about it?”

  She took a full minute to pretend to consider. Not to punish him, per se, but to enjoy the circle of his protective embrace. To feel their heartbeats synchronize as she pressed her head against his strong shoulder. To nest in the one place she’d truly felt alive. And at home.

  From the first night she’d given herself to him, a stranger.

  “I imagine foot rubs are excellent groveling techniques,” she ventured.

  “I imagine you’re right.”

  “And long Sunday mornings in bed.”

  “Now,” he tutted. “That’s a reward, not a punishment.”

  “I suppose, groveling is neither of our strong suits.” She buried a smile in his shirt. “I want to reward you.”

  “You are my greatest prize,” he said, stiffening a little as the chaos of emergency sirens and the clattering of horse hooves against the planks shook the docks beneath their feet.

  She pulled from his embrace with a weary sigh, drawing her hand down his arm to lace her fingers with his. “This life of yours, it will always be thus, I gather.” She gestured to the warehouse full of chaos, the advancing lawmen, the curious milling crowds. “Whether you’re the Chief Inspector or the Knight of Shadows.”

  His eyes glimmered with concern, a frown pinching his brow as he looked toward the approaching tide as if he would send them away. “You deserve more than—”

  She turned him to face her. “If I’d have you promise me anything, it’s this. I know you are a hero to many, but you are only husband to me. I will not be your mistress while the law is your wife, and your children will not be bastards. I cannot live in an empty house and sleep in an empty bed and love a man who has been drained empty by the demands of this city.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “That being said, I’m proud of what you do,” she soothed. “Of who you are, and I’d not change that. I will send you out that door every day. But you must come home to me. I must hold you and love you and make love to you. You must eat properly, and rest appropriately, and find a bloody hobby, do you understand? Something that wastes time, but you enjoy for no reason.”

  His smile tilted over to a perplexed grimace. “A hobby?”

  She just shook her head. “We’ll have that row later.”

  He seemed to accept this with a Gallic sort of sobriety as he turned toward the streets. “I can send Farah and the ladies to come get you. You don’t have to face all this.”

  The offer was tempting, but she shook her head, looping her arm through his. “We’ll face it all together.”

  Just like they would everything from now on.

  As a family.
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br />   Epilogue

  Four Months Later

  Morley lounged in bed with his cheek against his wife’s creamy shoulder, gazing down at the mountain of her belly. He was only half listening as she, stretched on her back and naked beneath the sheets, read a Knight of Shadows penny dreadful aloud, stopping to giggle at a particularly unbelievable passage.

  This Knight of Shadows business was certainly getting out of hand, but luckily, he’d recruited a few promising men to take up the occasional mantle. It was interesting to hear the conflicting reports of criminals and civilians alike who’d a chance meeting. Sometimes he was average height, lean, fair-haired and agile. Other times, a dark-skinned mountain of a man, able to meld with the shadows. He was a youth, or mature. Spoke with an exotic accent, an Irish one, or his own on Tuesdays and every other Friday.

  He’d kept his word and it hadn’t been difficult for a moment. Their quiet nights together soothed his soul and excited everything that made him a man.

  They made ceaseless love in increasingly creative positions, as her stomach became an impediment. Then they’d talk, or laugh, or read until one of them, usually her, drifted to sleep.

  Tonight, she seemed unusually restless and uncomfortable, so they’d mounted pillows beneath her knees and he’d promised to suffer while she amused herself with one of the new rash of novels written about his exploits.

  Rain tapped on the windows, casting the shadows of rivulets upon the bed. The optical effect lulled him as did the lively rendition of his wife’s voice.

  “Oh, dear,” she mocked. “The Knight of Shadows is about to sweep the damsel onto the rooftops and debauch her! Listen to this…”

  He levered up, clasping his hands on both sides of her belly as if it had sprouted ears. “I beg you to spare innocent ears,” he teased. “That can hardly be appropriate!”

  She threw the book at him, missing on purpose. “Neither are the things you say when you’re making love to me.”

  He cast her a chastised, wretched look. “Touché.” Leaning down, he gathered the sheets away from her breast, and then swept them down her belly so he could lay his ear against it and close his eyes.

  He loved to listen for the little one, and tonight a slight nudge pushed back against the pressure of his cheek.

  His breath caught, and Pru’s did, as well, her hand reaching down to sift and stroke the strands of his hair.

  “I was thinking…” she murmured dreamily. “If one of them is a girl…we could name her Caroline. Or does that cause you pain?”

  He opened his eyes, an ache bloomed in his chest both bitter and exquisitely sweet. “It hurts to remember, but it would be worse to forget,” he told her honestly.

  Honesty had become their default communication, and because of it, they flourished.

  “Her loss has become a part of me. I’ll never forget her. But she is a part of the past I can reconcile. With this. With you. And I’d love to give her name to our child. To allow her the childhood she never had…”

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” she gifted him a beatific smile, and his heart glowed.

  Then stalled.

  “Wait.” He sat up and looked down into her eyes with a frantically pulsating heart. “Did you just say them…?”

  Her face shone up at him, incandescent with maternal pride.

  “I must have done,” she said, pulling him back to collapse against her in bewildered amazement. “Because we’re having twins.”

  Sneak Peek: Courting Trouble

  A Goode Girls Romance

  Chapter 1

  London, November, 1879

  Titus Conleith had often fantasized about seeing Honoria Goode naked.

  He’d been in an excruciating kind of love with her since he was a lad of ten. Now that he was undoubtedly a man at fourteen, his love had shifted.

  Matured, he dared wager.

  What he felt for her was a soft sort of reverence, a kind of awe-struck incredulity at the sight of her each day. It was simply hard to believe a creature like her existed. That she moved about on this earth. In the house in which he lived.

  That she was two years his senior at sixteen years of age was irrelevant, as was the fact that she stood three inches above him, more in her lace boots with the delicate heels. It mattered not that there existed no reality in which he could even approach her. That he could dare address her.

  The idea of being with her in any capacity was so far beyond comprehension, it didn’t bear consideration. He was the boy-of-all-work for her father, Clarence Goode, the Baron of Cresthaven’s, household. Lower, even, than the chambermaid. He swept chimneys and fetched things, mucked stables and cleaned up after dogs who ate better than he did.

  When he and Honoria shared a room, he was beneath her feet, sometimes quite literally. One of his favorite memories was perhaps a year prior when she’d needed to mount her horse in a paddock and no mounting block could be found. Titus had been called to lace his hands together so Honoria might use them as a step up into her saddle.

  He’d seen the top of her boot that day, and a flash of the lily-white stocking over her calf as he’d presumed to slide her foot into the stirrup.

  It was the first time she’d truly looked at him. The first time their eyes locked, as the sun had haloed around her midnight curls like one of those chipped, expensive paintings of the Madonna that hung in the Baron’s gallery.

  In that moment, her features had been just as full of grace.

  “You’re bleeding,” she’d remarked, flicking her gaze to a shallow wound on the flesh of his palm where a splinter on a shovel handle had gouged deep enough to draw blood. Her boot had ground a bit of dirt into the wound.

  And he’d barely felt the pain.

  Titus had balled his fist and hid it behind his back, lowering his gaze. “Inn’t nothing, Miss.”

  Reaching into her pocket, she’d drawn out a pressed white handkerchief and dangled it in front of him. “I didn’t see it, or I’d not have—”

  “Honoria!” her mother had reprimanded, eyeing him reprovingly as she trotted her own mare between them, obliging him to leap back lest he be trampled. “To dawdle with them is an unkindness, as you oblige them to interaction they are not trained for, and take them away from their work. Really, you know better.”

  Honoria hadn’t said a word, nor did she look back as she’d obediently cantered away at the side of her mother.

  But he’d retrieved her handkerchief from where it’d floated to the ground in her wake.

  From that day on, it was her image painted on the backs of his eyelids when he closed them at night. Even when the scent of rosewater had faded from his treasure.

  Today, two of the three maids in the household had been too ill to work, and so the harried housekeeper tasked Titus with hauling the kindling into the east wing of the Mayfair Manse to lay and light the fires before the family roused.

  He’d lit the master’s first, then the mistress’s, and had skipped Honoria’s room for the nursery where the seven-year-old twins, Mercy and Felicity slept.

  Felicity hadn’t been sleeping, as she’d been huddled in bed, her golden head bent over a book as she squinted in the early morning gloom. The sweet-natured girl had given him a shy little wave as he tiptoed in and lit her a warm fire.

  Against the mores of propriety, she’d thanked him in a whisper, and blushed when he’d given her a two-fingered salute before shutting the door behind him with a barely audible click. After tending to the hearths of the governess and the second-eldest Goode sister, Prudence, Titus finally found himself at Honoria’s door.

  He peered about the hall guiltily before admonishing himself for being ridiculous.

  He was supposed to be here. It wouldn’t do to squander this stroke of luck and not take any opportunity he could to be near her.

  Alone.

  Balancing the burden of kindling against his side with one arm, he reached for the latch of her doorway, then paused, examining his hands with disgust. H
e flexed knuckles stained black from shoveling and hauling coal into the burner of the huge stove that heated steam for the first two floors of the estate. Filth from the stables and the gardens embedded beneath his fingernails and settled in the creases and calluses of his palm.

  A familiar mortification welled within his chest as he smoothed the hand over his shirt, hoping to buff some of the dirt off like an apple before trying the latch and peering around the door.

  Titus loved that—unlike the rest of her family—Honoria slept with all her drapes tied open and the window nearest the honeysuckle vines cracked to allow the scent of the gardens to waft inside. It didn’t seem to matter the season or the weather, he’d look up to her window to find it thusly open.

  Sometimes he would sing while he worked outside. If he were lucky, the sound would draw her to the window, or at least he fancied it did, when she gazed out over the gardens.

  Like the sun, he couldn’t look at her for too long.

  And she barely ever glanced at him.

  Titus told himself if she closed the casement against the sound, he’d never utter another note.

  But she hadn’t.

  It was as if she couldn’t bear to be completely shut in. As if she couldn’t bring herself to draw the drapes and close out the world.

  On this morning, the November chill matched the slate grey of the pre-dawn skies visible through her corner windows. Fingers of ice stole through his vest and thin shirt, prompting him to hurry and warm the room for her.

  Shivering inside, he held his breath as he eased the door closed behind him, taking extra care against waking her as she’d been drawn and quiet for a few days and often complained of headaches.

  In the dimness, she was little more than a slim outline beneath a mountain of arabesque silk bedclothes curled with her back to him. Her braid an inky swath against the clean white pillow.