Page 89 of A Relentless Rake

“Then blame me because I won’t let you put yourself in danger,” he said instead. He gently touched the ugly bruise on her cheek, and his chest tightened with regret. “Again.”

He leaned down to kiss her, with more tenderness than he’d ever felt for a woman before, as if trying to pour his soul inside her with that small kiss and somehow make her understand how much he cared about her.

Yet she put her hand on his chest and pulled away.

Sitting back, he expected her to continue to argue with him. Instead, intense emotion lit her eyes, and the hand that rested on his chest curled its fingers into his waistcoat.

“Alec,” she whispered. Her voice pulsated with hope and excitement. “I have an idea…”

Twenty-Three

The hackney stopped in the deserted city street, and the driver pounded on the roof. “We’re here.”

Olivia’s heart lurched into her throat. It was time for the trap to be sprung.

Unfortunately, she was the bait.

Taking a deep breath, she opened the door and stepped to the ground. She pushed back the hood of her cape to look up at the buildings overhanging the narrow street ahead where the carriage couldn’t squeeze through to take her any closer to her destination. It had to stop here. So did any visible protection she had. She didn’t dare look around in the darkness for any sign of the men who had followed her, out of fear of who else might be watching her.

Tonight, she had to play her part to perfection.

“Wait here for me,” she instructed the jarvey as she held a coin toward him. “I’ll pay you twice that to take me home.”

“I’ll be waitin’ right ’ere,” he assured her with a tip of his tall hat.

She began to shake as she walked away from the carriage and into the dark alley, following along the same path she’d traveled the night she met Alec. That was the same night her life changed forever. She silently prayed that her life wouldn’tendhere, too.

As she walked through the shadows, Olivia held her breath. Over the low tolling of a church bell striking midnight, she heard the faint echo of her footfalls against the cobblestones and, in the distance, the fading beat of horse hooves and shouts of drunken men. The clank of buoys in the river and an odd ship’s bell marked that the Thames flowed nearby—another reminder that she was walking through the most dangerous, darkest part of London.

Fear churned in her stomach, yet she had no choice but to go on in order to save Henry. If there was any hope of capturing the men responsible for the Admiralty Club bombing, it had to be through her. Scepter’s men expected her to deliver the calculations, and she knew they’d be waiting.

The sheaf of papers she’d slipped up her sleeve scratched against her arm with every step she took. She’d spent all afternoon working the calculations while Alec and Captain Reed finalized their own plans for tonight, but she’d worked the equations wrong. Instead of noting where the building’s structure was weakest, she marked the strongest places. If all went well tonight, these plans would never reach Scepter’s hands. But if they did, she wanted to make certain that they couldn’t be used to murder innocent people. She might not be able to stop them from placing the bombs, but perhaps she could minimize the damage.

More—if Alec and Captain Reed couldn’t find Henry tonight, she knew Scepter would force her brother to look over her work, so she’d placed a warning to him in her calculations. To anyone who wasn’t a mathematician, her equations would look real, with algebraic orders using the common letter symbols of N, E, Y, H, and R found in any schoolboy’s mathematics primer. But her brother would see her secret message and know she hadn’t given up on finding him…H-E-N-R-Y.

The alley was pitch-black. The buildings were too close together even for the scant crescent moon to light her way, and no candlelight glowed from the windows, all of which were shuttered or boarded up. Her stomach roiled so fiercely that her hand darted to her belly to physically press down her growing nausea. Was she doing the right thing? Was she saving Henry’s life by doing this, or simply putting both their lives at risk?

Alec and Captain Reed were following her unseen through the shadows. They’d been with her from the moment she’d first stepped out of the school and into the hired hackney. She wanted to take comfort in that but couldn’t, not when the city around her was so dark and ominous. Neither was she put at ease by Alec’s warnings…Deliver the papers, draw out the men responsible, and we’ll take it from there. Do not leave our sight.Alec and Captain Reed would swoop in and capture the men, and Olivia would flee back to the waiting hackney and home, where she was supposed to spend a long and worried night under the protection of Home Office guards until it was all over.Thatdidn’t bring her comfort either.

Yet she walked on, determined.

A movement in the shadows startled her. She froze midstep with a gasp as a lean figure emerged from the darkness.

Another messenger boy, but this one was several years older than Phillip—and far larger. As he drew nearer, a hard scowl emerged on his young face that would have fit a man decades older. Something about the way he held his shoulders and clenched his fists at his sides told her that he’d hurt people before, perhaps even murdered them, and that he wouldn’t hesitate to hurt her.

He pointed down the dark alley. “This way.”

“Where are we going?”

“This way!”

He grabbed her arm and shoved her forward.

She staggered along beside him. When they reached a building halfway down the alley, he pushed open a small wooden door. The loud creak of rusty hinges echoed like a scream, and she shuddered. Solid darkness greeted her beyond the doorframe.

“Inside,” he ordered.

Absolutely not!Fear swept over her like a burning fire, and she dug her heels into the hard-packed dirt and refused to budge. “I’m supposed to deliver these papers in exchange for my brother.” She pulled them from her sleeve and held them up. “So tell the man who wants them that I’m here and to come out to receive them. And to bring my brother with him.” She held the pages back to keep them away from his grasp and lifted her chin in challenge. “No Henry, no pages.”