Page 104 of Immortal Rose

My brow furrowed at that unexpected bit of information until I realized that was the point—he was trying to distract me now, if not from what had just happened, then from the midnight streets around us and what might emerge from them.

“Is that your favorite identity?” I asked.

Hearing the strain in my voice, Foxcourt slowed our pace, keeping his gaze alert. “No. That would be Felix Gully, the cheesemonger. I feasted like a king for weeks.”

I gave a breathless laugh as we finally reached the thoroughfare—Knight Street. I knew where we were now. Only a fifteen-minute walk south of the Brickbats, give or take a few minutes, depending on the sorts of characters lurking about.

Foxcourt made a soft noise of triumph as he spotted a hackney making its way toward us, waving it down.

“I’ll find the man who followed us,” he told me. “He will never do so again.”

“Have you ever simply gone with grace just once in your life?” I asked, almost amused.

“Certainly,” he said over the clatter of horse hooves. “What’s more graceful than reducing your foe’s existence to a delicate scattering of ashes?”

Dratted man, making me laugh in a moment like this.

“To your boardinghouse, then?” he asked as the coach came to a restless stop beside us.

I nodded, feeling my nerves dance at the prospect of taking him there. Mrs. Piedmont did not allow male visitors. She also fined us if we returned past midnight and woke her, the greedy old bat. He would wait out on the street. He needn’t see the room at all.

“Eighteen Crescent Street,” he told the coachman before I could. Seeing the man begin to protest, he added, with a small smile, “The north side of Crescent.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Hugh knew they were approaching the Brickbats by the first jaw-rattling dip in the cobbled streets. The hackney coach rocked wildly as the quality of the road crumbled beneath the wheels like a piece of stale bread.

Beside him, Viola gripped the door to steady herself, the pale expanse of her arm freed from its cloak, inviting him to remember the silken feel of that skin beneath his fingertips.

As if he’d been able to think of any other bloody thing.

His hand tightened into a fist in his lap, trying to dispel it, but the sensation of her refused to be driven out, twining with memory and smoldering desire.

He never should have allowed her to come tonight. Glenmoor’s warehouse had been largely empty of men, and he’d had no trouble slipping into the office. The distraction she and Reddy—damn him—had provided had given him more time, yes, but it had drawn the worst sort of attention to her.

It had been a wild, animal terror he’d felt when he’d discovered them gone and the ship cleared of all but a single man to keep watch. The intensity of it had been stunning, as if his own life were being ripped from him.

And Hugh was not a man accustomed or inclined to being stunned.

That strangling sensation hadn’t eased, not even a hair, until he clapped eyes on her face in the pub, aglow with candlelight and the satisfaction of felling a man twice her size. She’d been blissfully unaware of the wandering eyes of the nearby men, the way those gazes had devoured her.

A primitive flare of possessiveness, as unwelcome as it was unseemly, had seen him come close to leaping up from the table to circle it like a rabid hound, biting and snapping at the men who had dared to inch closer.

God—protectiveness, not possessiveness. He fought the urge to bang his head against the side of the hack, hoping to knock some sense back into himself. He was more exhausted than he’d believed, clearly.

Viola Lockwood was his responsibility, and a rather frustratingly willful one at that. That was the beginning and end of it. Any other claim would be met with hostility from her corner.

And it would be inappropriate. Antithetical to everything his uncle had taught him. He’d already given in to the temptation of drinking tonight; he couldn’t risk another slip of Uncle Giles’s code.

For God’s sake, he wasn’t a boy anymore; there was no reason to feel so bloody nervous around her.

Hugh passed a rueful hand over his face, his body shuddering as the carriage rattled over the deteriorating road. He stared out the window, only to find he could see her lovely profile reflected in the glass.

Look at me. The silent plea passed through him. Look at me.

He needed . . . His jaw clenched. What he needed was something cold to douse himself with, to scrub the last hour from his memory.

There’d been something so carefree about the evening despite its thousands of risks—there’d been a lightness to her, a parting of the hatred that had clouded her heart. Her throaty little laughs and easy smile for him—they had made it all too easy to imagine her stretched languidly beneath him, those same lips kiss-swollen, her eyes fixed only on him as he moved above her.