Trial by Desire (Carhart #2)

“It was basically as I laid it out.” Precisely as he’d said, except so much more.

By the small puff of air she expelled, she knew it, too.

“Oh, very well. If you must know.” He rubbed one hand against his wrist. “I left out this—they didn’t just throw me in the sump. They bound me, wrists and ankles, and blindfolded me. I didn’t know where we were going, what they had planned. When they threw me into what was essentially a lake of human waste, I had no notion what was coming. The liquid closed over my head, and trussed up as I was, I couldn’t swim. I couldn’t do much more than wriggle futilely.” He’d woken up for months afterward, with that memory of bonds cutting his flesh. Thankfully, his mind seemed to have expelled the worst of the memory.

“How did they dare?” She looked at him in shock. “How did you escape?”

“They’d tied a rope to my feet. After about a minute, they just dragged me out, and I came, flopping like a fish. They intended to humiliate me, not hurt me. I have never felt so helpless in my life.”

She was looking at him with something akin to pity. Christ. He didn’t want her to feel sorry for him.

“Don’t look at me like that.” The words came out rather more sharply than he’d intended. “It was quite possibly the best thing that could have happened to me. I spent a great deal of time out on the ocean, in that boat. Under that sun. It didn’t just burn away my skin. It burned away my most timid parts. I needed to look that part of myself in the eye and reject it. The experience built substance.”

More than he would ever tell her. She didn’t need to know precisely how weak he’d been at the time—and how close he’d come to crumpling. All she needed to know was that he’d survived.

“What sort of substance?” she asked.

“The sort that brought me home to you,” he replied shortly. “The sort that made me brave enough to venture into naval battles and opium dens alike.”

“The kind that made you sleep in bitter cold?” she asked.

He nodded, jerkily, and she subsided into a frown.

He had no wish to tell her the entirety of what had transpired out there on the lake. She didn’t need to know how close he’d come, how dark that final darkness had truly been. She’d seen enough for her to understand what had happened to him without understanding precisely what sort of person it had happened to.

He’d tamed his dragon. He wouldn’t leave Kate. And that was all she needed to know.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

SOME THINGS truly hadn’t changed in the years since Ned had left London. One of those things was the dimly lit gaming hall that stood in a disreputable portion of town. From the doorway, Ned could hear the crack of dice bouncing on green baize. Smoke permeated the air of the room, so thick he could imagine it spilling out into the night air and meeting the fog bank in a swirl of cloud.

He’d spent much of the day traveling back to town, but this particular encounter with the gaming tables could not be put off.

His quarry—five fellows who no doubt called themselves gentlemen—sat in a corner, clutching cards. They might well have been playing loo again. The only thing that had changed in the intervening years was that while Ned had been growing muscle, his erstwhile friends had gone to fat.

Any other man in his position might have challenged them to a duel. But there was little honor in slaying a quintet of oversize drunkards, and besides, Ned’s method of dealing with the problem promised to be more amusing. Real heroes, after all, tamed their dragons.

Ned stepped into the room. As he made his way around tables littered with jugs of cheap wine, he fingered the silky bit of fabric he’d purloined earlier. They didn’t see him approach, so caught up were they in their game. They didn’t even catch his shadow—multifaceted, from the many lamps—falling across their table. It was loo, and by the pile of papers on the table, play was deep.

Once, Ned had been as oblivious as these men. He had been so desperate to drown his past in spirits that he had tried to wager away his future on the deal of a card. Thank God he had stopped.

Lord Ellison—a onetime friend of his—crowed in triumph as he laid his final card. “I win!” he gloated. The others murmured congratulations. Another man shook his head in disgust—and then stopped, seeing Ned. He peered at him through eyes made bleary with spirits.

“Carhart?” Alfred Dennis asked slowly. “Is that you? I heard you had returned.” He blinked a few times, as if trying to make sense of Ned’s appearance. One rusty mental process must not have been entirely dissolved in alcohol, because he brightened. “I say, are you joining us?”

He reached for a chair and made an attempt to pull it up to the table.