Jillian Hunter - The Wicked Duke Takes a Wife

“I think he’s telling the truth,” Lady Powlis said, looking as if she were going to be sick, whether from Jack’s story or his smell, Harriet did not know.

She did know, however, that she’d never felt so relieved to see anyone as when suddenly the duke entered the room, the look of unmasked emotion on his face the stuff of fainting damsels and impossible dreams. His eyes dropped to the pistol she was holding at her side. She shook her head. His aunt started to cry.

“It’s all right,” Harriet said, swallowing over a knot in her throat. “But there’s no time to waste. This man-my father-thinks he knows where Edlyn is.”

He nodded tersely. His gaze holding hers, he strode past Jack and motioned from the window. Harriet noticed a man across the street, another appearing on the corner. There could have been a hundred armed guards about the place. It was Griffin’s presence that made her feel safe. She had known other gentlemen willing to overlook her imperfections, to offer themselves as her protector. But she had never met a man who needed her to protect him as desperately as he did.

He took the two dueling pistols Harriet had hidden behind the teapot, tucking one into his belt and handing the other to her father. “Can you take me to the house where you saw her?”

“I could, but someone’s gotta be on the bridge, just in case.”

Harriet had to turn away for a moment. She had seen the surprise on her father’s face at the implicit trust that Griffin had given him. She thought then of her mother, of how Jack would talk about her when he got drunk, and how he cursed the world for taking her when he’d have gladly gone in her place.

She had never considered that she might have been a product of love and that there had been goodness in Jack Gardner before he became the brutal man she remembered. Who would have guessed he’d turn hero at the last hour?

He put his hand out to hers. “I’ve been think-in’-”

She blinked.

“-you could always see better than anyone in the dark, ’arry. We could watch each other’s backs, just like in the good-”

“Absolutely not,” Griffin and Primrose said in unison.

“In fact,” the duke added, “I am having two of Sir Daniel’s men posted inside this house while I’m gone.”

Jack shifted his feet. “Let’s ’ope they do a better job guarding the ladies than they did of keepin’ me out.”

Harriet vented a sigh. “I have never felt this utterly useless before.”

“Now you know how a woman of my capacity feels when she begins to grow old,” Lady Powlis murmured, misty-eyed again.

Griffin caught Harriet under her elbow and drew her against him for a last word of caution, if not an embrace. “Be good. Don’t give Sir Daniel another reason to arrest you.”

“I love you, Griffin,” she whispered.

He broke away, gesturing for Jack to follow. Harriet stood, offering Lady Powlis reassurances she wished to believe herself. She had always dreaded the day that Griffin would meet her father. Her mind had played out many humiliating scenarios. She had not once, however, imagined the pair of them forming an alliance that would fill her with pride.

Given a good tide, a waterman could ferry his customers from London to Gravesend in a matter of hours. From this port in Kent, one could secure a ship to France or vanish into any number of quiet villages. Even as twilight fell, the River Thames pulsed through England like a vital artery.

At Grim Jack’s urging, Griffin had abandoned his carriage on a stone bridge clogged with the traffic of carts and coaches carrying city merchants home. He had no choice but to trust Harriet’s sire, a confidence he realized that Jack did not necessarily share.

Without warning, Jack halted in a hidden alley that led to the waterfront. On the damp steps below, street vendors cried their wares and bargemen exchanged ribald insults that echoed in the air.

“I’m not takin’ another step, duke or not, until you answer me one thing.”

Griffin cursed. “Yes, the reward is yours.”

“I don’t mean that.” Jack paused as a low whistle came from a corner behind them. “I want to know that you’ll take care of me daughter.”

“I’m going to marry her.”

Jack grinned in disbelief. “Aye, then. Best of bloody luck to you both. Come on.”

“Jack!” a woman’s voice exclaimed from the door of the chophouse they hurried past. “Bless my soul, I knew you wasn’t dead.”

A minute later Jack tipped an off-duty waterman for the usage of his small wharf. Griffin thanked God that he had spoken with Sir Daniel’s men before venturing on this quest.

They waited on the wharf forever. They waited until Griffin was convinced that this was the last place in London that he would find his niece. How many barges traveled the river at any given time? How many secret stairs served as launching places for illicit deeds that only the river would ever know?

He had taken the word of a criminal, a professional liar, a father who still gave his grown daughter nightmares. She had escaped evil. Griffin had walked openly into its arms.

He pulled his pocket watch from his waistcoat. “It’s almost seven,” he said under his breath.

Grim Jack glanced appraisingly at his rather battered timepiece.

A small flat-bottomed barge drifted toward the adjacent dock. Griffin stared absently at the three passengers hurrying down the pier. A gentleman carrying a portmanteau, his wife nudging a slender hooded figure who might have been an invalid or-

She turned her head. He couldn’t make out her face. But he’d known her from the day she appeared like a changeling on the castle drawbridge. He had carried her on his shoulders and caught her when she tired of swinging from the chandelier. He thought she called his name. The woman at her side raised a pistol to Edlyn’s head.

His mind froze. Jack shoved him aside and Griffin shoved him right back, shouting out the one word of warning that he knew Edlyn would understand.

“Drop!”

Four shots erupted, two from the cabin of a shallop drifting by, another from a boarded-up window in the deserted tenement that overlooked the wharf. The fourth came from his own gun.

Rosalie Porter fell in her final performance, her male accomplice crumbling in her shadow. And Edlyn dropped with the death-defying grace of her former self, only to be surrounded by more bodyguards than Griffin could begin to number.

“Oh, God,” he said, aware of footsteps pounding down the pier and a jubilant shout from the captain of the shallop. And… surely that was not the Boscastle battle cry, resounding from the cabin of the shallop that had floated by? “Jack Gardner, I will seek your pardon if it costs me a dukedom. And if any man brings evidence against you-”

He turned.

Grim Jack was gone, and so was the enameled pocket watch and gold-link chain that had been attached to Griffin’s waistcoat pocket. The mate to his dueling pistol, however, lay at his feet.

He carried Edlyn back to his carriage on the bridge, escorted by an entourage of well-wishers, mudlarks, and river policemen. She was crying against his neck, and nothing he said could have stopped her.

“You’re all right, Edlyn. It’s over. It’s done. If they hurt you… well, that will never happen again. We’ll be together. It’s going to be fine now.”

He could have sworn that his first footman, Trenton, was fighting tears himself as he opened the carriage door. “I want to tell you something,” Edlyn whispered, her hands knotted around his neck. “I was on the turret when my father took that jump. I knew it was an accident, and I didn’t tell. I let everyone blame you, Uncle Griff. I saw that it wasn’t your fault, and I never told. I wanted to find my mother, and no one helped me.”

He nodded. “We shall search for her together.”

He deposited her on the seat. He knew that Edlyn expected him to be angry at what she had confessed. But he could not find it in him. He should also have known that the woman who had seen him at his worst, and loved him anyway, would be waiting in the carriage. And that he wanted her, needed her, to be there.

“Thunder all you like,” Harriet said, gripping Edlyn to her with one hand, the other grasping the cuff of his coat. “I’ve heard it all before, duke.”

“Doubtless you shall hear it for a long time to come.”

She stroked Edlyn’s hair. “My heart stopped when I saw you both standing on the pier and heard that gunfire.”

He bent his head to kiss her. “Is it beating now?” he asked, lacing his fingers through hers.

“Harder, I fear, than I can stand.”

His thumb sculpted the fine bones of her face. “Then I shall take it into my safekeeping so that nothing can ever threaten it again. I am yours, Harriet. And you are mine.”

The Duke of Glenmorgan got arrested on the night before his wedding.

He’d considered refusing when two of his Boscastle cousins, Lords Drake and Devon, appeared on his doorstep that evening and innocently announced that, as he would be taking a wife tomorrow, they would escort him for a last night on the Town.

He shrugged. Why not? Harriet, Aunt Primrose, and Edlyn had been whisked off in an impressive coach-and-six by a bewigged driver and a haughty assembly of footmen, who closed the carriage door before Harriet could blow her betrothed a kiss. The ladies would spend the night at Lady Sedgecroft’s Park Lane mansion, discussing… he didn’t know. The mysteries of the marriage bed? That Primrose should have an opinion on such matters chilled his blood. As long as it did not involve raising an Egyptian pharaoh from the dressing closet, he assumed he would be able to deal with it.