Lady Derring Takes a Lover by Julie Anne Long

Author:Julie Anne Long
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-02-26T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

“I’ve missed you, sir,” Massey said. “Your snorts, your grunts, your frowns, your growling commands.”

Tristan obliged Massey by scowling. He carved his sausage. Stabbed a segment and lifted it toward his mouth.

It had been two days since they’d convened.

They were in a pub opposite the livery stables that angled The Grand Palace on the Thames. Tristan told Massey what he’d discovered, which was nothing, essentially, though he supposed it was a discovery after a fashion.

It was noisy with an equal balance of honest workmen and ne’er-do-wells in varying stages of inebriation, and he and Massey had thrown back ales—or pretended to throw them back—and bought ales for other men while they casually slipped questions about The Grand Palace on the Thames into conversation.

“Oh, you don’t want to go there, guv,” several men told him.

Yet no one seemed able to tell them why.

“Everybody knows it,” he was told. This was accompanied by shrugs.

He had the increasing suspicion that someone had, in fact, put the word out that people were not to go there. But why?

He’d sent word for his men to watch the building, and to follow everyone who entered and left The Grand Palace on the Thames.

He’d assigned four others to questioning, as casually and surreptitiously as possible, the locals about the building. Did they know Derring? Had they seen him about? Did they know where they could buy a particularly foul cigar?

He glanced out the window. Carts and carriages and fine glossy horses moved in and out of the livery stable in a satisfying, steady stream. The streets were teeming and busy and loud.

“Are you taking the waters at that boardinghouse, sir? Are they perhaps feeding you a tonic?” Massey asked suddenly.

“Of course not.”

“You look . . . better.”

Tristan stared at him. “I always look well.”

“No, you have a sort of . . . glow.”

“I always glow with health.”

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir. What was I thinking, sir.”

What did Massey see? Tristan knew how he felt. There was something about his nerves of a dropped brass bowl. Ever since that kiss, they continued to jangle and hum. Sounds and sensations landed on him a little too hard. He ought not to have kissed her; he had not planned to kiss her; he could not have stopped himself; it had happened almost without his realizing it. These four utterly disparate facts disturbed him, along with the notion that he wanted, very much, to do much, much more than kiss her.

He suspected she wanted it, too.

Though he had no true idea what Lady Derring was thinking.

And perhaps he could justify it, in the name of duty. Rather than in the name of desperation. He’d thought he’d transmuted desperation into cold determination long ago. But it wasn’t cold determination causing him to stare at his ceiling nights, listening to Delacorte snore.

For the past two nights he’d sat at his table with his book and his brandy in the drawing room while the women did things to fabric with needles and whatnot and murmured pleasantly amongst themselves.

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