Page 55 of The Duke's Auctioned Virgin
“I noticed.”
“He’s gotten worse since you left. Drinking more. Taking risks. He went after a target in Marseille last month without backup. Nearly got himself killed.” He paused. “He misses you. You are the only person who knows him well.”
Edward thought about the last mission they had gone on together. Two years ago. A warehouse in Calais. George had talked a customs official into opening a locked door using nothing but his smile and a bottle of burgundy, and Edward had been so impressed he had said so aloud.
They had been good together. George knew people. Edward knew threats. George opened doors. Edward walked through them. The combination had served the Crown for a decade.
But somewhere in those twelve years, George had started to enjoy their work for the wrong reasons. Not the service. Not the safety of the realm. But the thrill. The power. The way people looked at him when they knew what he was capable of.
Edward had watched it happen the way one watched a crack spread across a ceiling—slowly, then all at once.
“The real him tried to have an innocent man imprisoned so he could bed his wife,” Edward said flatly. “That is the real him, Peter. I wish it were not.”
Peter said nothing. He looked out the window. London in late afternoon, grey and damp and full of people who did not know that three men in a private room had just drawn lines that could not be undrawn.
“Watch him at the masquerade,” Edward requested. “I don’t trust him near Valeria.”
The sound of her name changed the air. It became softer.
Peter noticed. Edward did not care.
“Watch him, Peter. For me.”
“I will.”
Edward rose from his seat. He needed to get back tonight. No more delays. No more excuses. He had let George hold him here for four days, and every one of those days was a day Valeria spent alone.
“I’ll see ye at the masquerade.”
Peter paused at the door. “Edward, she sounds like a good woman.”
“She is the best woman I have ever known.” Edward was surprised to find that he meant it.
Peter left.
Edward stood alone. George’s empty glass sat on the table, a ring of brandy catching the last of the light.
He will try something at the masquerade. Because losing is the one thing George Turner has never learned to do.
He pulled on his coat. Checked his pistol. Four hours back to Thornhill. Four hours of dark road and the knowledge that the woman he was riding toward had been alone for four days because he had let an old friend convince him to stay.
He would not make that mistake again.
He kicked his horse into a gallop. The London streets gave way to the open road. The air changed. Cleaner. Colder. The smell of coal smoke faded.
He rode through villages closing up for the night, past churches and taverns and houses where candles burned in windows and families sat together at tables and did the ordinary, impossible things he was riding toward.
His father had been one of the Queen’s most trusted councilors. When he and his mother died, Edward was eight, and Nathaniel was twelve. Nathaniel was taken in by a family friend. Edward was not. He had spent two years on the streets of Edinburgh, before the Queen’s men found him and brought him to Court. Nathaniel followed a year later.
The Crown had raised them both, but differently. Nathaniel received an education, a seat in Parliament, and a respectable life. Edward received a pistol, a list of names, and twelve years of rooms he could not talk about.
He rode hard, all the while thinking about Valeria. About the way she looked at him when she thought he was not watching. The careful, assessing look of a woman who was learning a man the way she had learned to survive. Reading him. Cataloging him. Deciding whether to trust him with the parts of herself she had kept hidden for three years.
She was deciding, he could feel it. She had not decided yet. And every day he spent in a room with George instead of at her sidewas a day she spent alone deciding, without him there to show her that the decision was worth making.
CHAPTER 20
Edward had been gone for four days.
