Page 87 of An Inconvenient Duke

“Your wife! She knows. When she finds out that I’ve been murdered, she’ll tell the authorities everything.”

“No, she won’t. You’ve overestimated my little wife’s spine. So easy to control her… All I have to do is threaten to take our daughter away from her, and she won’t whisper one word.”

Oh, Beatrice was so much stronger than he gave her credit for! Dani had come to witness that with her own eyes. Her rescue of the girl tonight proved it.

She shook her head. “And Marcus—he’ll come after you,” she warned in a desperate rasp, “and he won’t stop until you’re dead. If you kill me, he won’t wait to have you tried before he kills you himself.”

“Not if I kill him first.” He tilted the knife back and forth, letting the lamplight reflect menacingly off the blade. “A man so driven out of his mind by finding the body of his beloved, her throat slit open from ear to ear, that no one will think his death anything but a suicide. A pistol shot to his head.”

A sickening pain flashed through her, and she remained on her feet only through sheer will. “No one will believe that! Not from a man like Marcus.” Not from a man whose adult life was baptized in the fires and blood of war. Standing her ground as he advanced again, she raked a disdainful glance over him and shook her head in disappointment. “Such a little man compared to someone like Marcus,” she drawled with open disgust. “You can never begin to measure up to his greatness.”

A growl of rage tore from his throat, and he lunged. Dani screamed—

The warehouse walls burst in around them as the shuttered windows and closed doors smashed open with an earsplitting shattering of wood and glass. Half a dozen men rushed inside, all of them with guns drawn and lanterns blazing, flooding the room with light and the jarring metallic sound of cocking pistols.

Hartsham grabbed Dani by the waist and yanked her back against him, raising the knife to her neck. The blade pressed into her throat, and she gasped with fear.

“Stay back, or I’ll kill her!”

The men halted immediately in their steps, surrounding them on all sides. From the corner of her eye, Dani could see Mrs. Slater and the man in black who held her at knifepoint, then Brandon Pearce, who stood wide-legged with a gun in each hand pointed directly at Hartsham, and to his right—

“Marcus!” Her cry was silenced by the pressure of the knife biting into her throat and making her wince.

His expression coolly inscrutable, Marcus slowly raised his pistol and pointed it at Hartsham. Not one stray emotion crossed his face; not one tremble of uncertainty was visible anywhere in him. Steeliness glinted like ice in his eyes. He stared down the length of his arm to sight the barrel at Hartsham’s head, every inch of him revealing the battle-tested general he was.

“Let her go,” he ordered, his voice impossibly calm.

“No!” Hartsham held her close as he turned in a circle, his gaze darting around the warehouse to hunt desperately for a way to escape but finding none. “Get back, all of you! Or I will slit her throat right now!”

A man at the side of the room signaled to the men, who all took a step backward. Only Marcus remained where he was, standing as immovable as iron.

“Hurt her,” Marcus warned in the same chillingly controlled voice, “and you’re dead where you stand.”

“I’m already dead!” Hartsham gave an unnatural laugh and yanked her roughly against him. “But I can make certain she dies, too.”

With a fierce cry, Dani kicked her foot into Hartsham’s knee. The blow threw him off balance, but the upward arc of the knife blade couldn’t be stopped and clipped her neck. As the blade sliced her skin, she screamed and dropped the lamp. It smashed onto the stone floor at their feet in a burst of glass and flame.

Hartsham cursed and jumped back from the flames. Dani lunged out of his arms and fell onto her hands and knees, gasping for air as her hand flew to her throat.

Marcus dove over her, his shoulder lowered and slamming into Hartsham with the strength of a bull, sending him flying and then landing on the floor with a violent thud. A flurry of punches and kicks as the two men grappled—

Then Marcus shifted his weight back onto his left leg and kicked a swinging hard blow with his right. His heel caught the earl square in the chest, sending him crumpling to the floor. He pounced on top of Hartsham, throwing such hard punches that a groan of exertion came with every fist he plowed into Hartsham’s face and abdomen. Each blow landed with a sickeningly dull thud that had the earl lying nearly lifeless on the stones, yet still the punches came from Marcus in great, ferocious swings.

A new fear shivered through her as she watched him—Marcus was going to beat the man to death.

She scrambled to her feet and ran to him, heedless of the blood that dripped from her neck or the flames that singed at her hem and ignoring Pearce as he rushed forward to stop her. She wouldnotlose him to the darkness, not now that she’d finally found her way into his heart.

“Don’t!” She grabbed his right shoulder to stop the punches, only for him to continue to strike with his left. “Please stop!”

Hartsham lay nearly unconscious beneath Marcus, his bloodied mouth moaning in pain and both eyes already swelling shut. Yet still Marcus punched mercilessly at him with all the strength he possessed, putting his full weight behind every blow.

“Marcus, stop!”

She crawled in front of him, wedging herself between him and Hartsham until he was compelled to stop and sit back on his heels. She grabbed at his hand and cried out at the sight of his knuckles, all bruised and bloodied.

When he tried to wrestle his hand away from her, to move her out of his way so he could continue to beat the man to death, she pressed herself into his arms and placed her palm against his face. She whispered, blinking hard to clear away her tears, “I won’t let you kill him.”

“The bastard deserves it,” he growled, glancing past her to Hartsham as the earl writhed on the floor in an agonized attempt to crawl away.