Anstruther listened without interruption. Only his mustache twitched as he made little tsking sounds of distress from time to time.
Imogen didn’t weep until she reached the part where she’d planned to steal from him. To take his money and meet Isobel on her way to school, slipping her the coin before she disappeared, hoping to find anonymity somewhere. Here the tears flowed freely. Tears of shame, of sorrow, and of helplessness.
He was quiet a moment after she’d finished her tale, and she couldn’t bring herself to look at him. Imogen couldn’t say why, exactly, but she’d left Trenwyth out of her story. She said nothing about the night with him. About the connection they’d had before he returned an ill and changed man.
She knew that if she took that regret out to examine it, she’d disgrace herself past all repair.
“What time is it?” Lord Anstruther queried softly.
Imogen blinked up, dashing at her cheeks. “My lord?”
“It’s either very late or very early, which is it?” He gestured to the pocket watch on the bedside table and she handed to him.
“Very early,” he muttered, and then turned to capture her gaze with his. “You listen to me, Miss Pritchard, you have a choice of two kinds.”
Imogen swallowed, but remained silent.
“I will give you that bag with all the money it contains and send you on your way right now, but I warn you that you won’t get very far.”
The kindness of his offer both humbled and startled her. She stared at him for a moment in dumb amazement. “What—what’s the second option?” She was almost afraid to ask.
His mustache lifted in a mischievous smile. “That you marry me, of course.”
CHAPTER NINE
London, May 1879, Nearly Two Years Later
Cole wanted to take the steel-spring blade he’d attached to the inside of his prosthesis and shove it through Liam Mackenzie’s brawny neck. Not because the Marquess of Ravencroft was his enemy. It was simply that every word from his former commanding officer’s mouth dripped like acid into the dark, empty void where his heart had once been.
“I’m telling ye, Trenwyth, it’s like she never existed.” The dark Scotsman helped himself to some Scotch from his own distillery kept in a crystal decanter on the sideboard of Cole’s private study. “If I didna know ye better, were ye not so relentless, I’d think her naught more than a dream. Some figment of fantasy ye’d conjured to keep yerself sane in that piece of hell.”
Cole turned away and released the top few buttons of his shirt, not wanting the monstrously large marquess to see him choking on his disappointment.
Where are you, Ginny?
“She’s starting to seem like a ghost,” he confessed. “I’ve lived a lifetime in the three years since she and I…” Drifting to the study window, he pulled back the drapes and braced his right forearm against the pane, avoiding his reflection.
“It’s been so long,” Ravencroft murmured gruffly. “Why do ye torture yerself still by persisting in this hopeless search?”
“Perhaps I’ve become accustomed to torture.” His eyes refused to focus on the tableau in front of him, instead gazing into the murky, blood-soaked images of the past. “That prison. That hell. She provided me a piece of heaven there. She occupied that place in my mind that they couldn’t get to. That they couldn’t take from me. She’s there still, but even I’m beginning to fear that she was a delusion. A construct. Something … someone I needed at the time, but never truly existed.”
Reaching for her was like trying to grasp at the sea with his bare hand.
“I’ve spent so long searching for her, and yet I fear that I’d pass her in the street and not recognize her.”
Ginny. A beautiful, raven-haired specter. Her features blurred until he only possessed the descriptive words, but not the image. Obscured by drink, darkness, and the passing of too many days, his memory of her lived everywhere but in his eyes. He could recall how astonishingly small she’d felt beneath his hands. Little more than flesh and bone. Her skin the color of moonlight and softer than Indian cashmere. Her eyes had been huge in her thin, delicate features. Anytime he tried, Cole could conjure the kindness he’d found in their depths, the hesitant desire, the fear and the fondness. So why not their color? She’d been wearing so much makeup that night …
He remembered the sweet tremble of her voice, hardly above a gentle whisper, and yet threaded with conviction and compassion. How he craved that now. That quiet place inside she’d taken him. He’d never known peace like that before, and certainly not since.
A loud crash from outside stole his attention, and he looked in time to see his loathsome neighbor in her garden, screeching like a madwoman and shaking her skirts as she ducked and danced. An easel, canvas, and chair rocked from where they’d been upended in her panicked frenzy. She let out another inhuman squeal, half call for help, half war cry as she snatched a rolled-up paper of some kind and began wildly striking the air with it.
Peace, it seemed, was to be eternally denied him. Most especially with her living next door.
What the devil was she doing? Battling some insidious insect, no doubt, Cole surmised with a bemused grunt. He found himself rooting for the bug, so strong was his dislike of the woman.
“Well, the lass is nowhere to be found on this island, I can tell ye that.” Ravencroft let out a heavy breath. “Probably not on the Continent either. We’ve searched Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, all the places a woman of her … industry might seek her fortune.”
“We?” Cole glanced over his shoulder, his eyebrow lifted.
The man they’d christened the Demon Highlander gave what might have been called a guilty shrug. “I have an … associate with more connections in that world than I. I’ve enlisted his aid.”
“An … associate?” Cole echoed.
“He’s someone I trust. The Earl of Northwalk.”
“You mean Dorian Blackwell, the Blackheart of Ben More?” Trenwyth corrected tightly. “And here I’d thought you smarter than to trust the most notorious criminal in the empire. Just because he’s managed to snag the Townsend heiress no more makes him an earl than stepping in the mud makes me an urchin.”
Case in point, Lady Anstruther out there among her tea roses, lavender, and forget-me-nots. A countess by all rights, but resembling nothing close to a lady.
“Blackwell has more noble blood than ye’d think,” the Scotsman muttered.
Turning away from the stormy look on Ravencroft’s hard features, Cole noted that the woman had succeeded in swatting the abhorrent swarming creature to the ground, and was now grinding it into the stone path with the heel of her boot.
His mother would have been mortified to share a property line with such a disgrace. He was merely annoyed.
“I went back to the Bare Kitten when I returned from the Americas recently,” Cole continued. He’d searched for Ginny through logbooks at Ellis Island, New York, where many immigrants landed, and continued his search far into the interior. He’d searched for himself too, but came up empty-handed in both regards. “The old proprietor, Ezio del Toro, seems to have retired back to Sicily. The barkeep, a Mr. Carson, owns the place now, though how a lad that young—and apparently witless—could afford it is beyond me. He worked alongside Ginny for a few months, and barely remembers her name, let alone where she lived or who her people were.”