“Enough. It’s Mayfair in broad daylight.” Bourne grabbed West’s shoulder and stayed his blow. “Get in the damn carriage. You’re shocking the ladies.”
Sure enough, there were two young women across the street in their pretty outdoor finery, eyes wide, mouths agape at the utterly unprecedented scene. West removed his handkerchief, pressing it to his nose to discover that he was bleeding. The brute had excellent aim. The other man’s eye was swelling shut, which gave West a modicum of pride. Removing his hat, West slapped the man on the back and turned him to face the ladies. “Good morning, ladies.”
He was impressed that the women’s eyes did not escape their sockets, particularly when his companion bowed and said, “Lovely mornin’.”
“Christ,” Bourne said from inside the carriage, and West returned his attention to the matter at hand. He released his opponent, and lifted himself into the carriage, placing himself across from the marquess, who opened his mouth to speak.
“No,” West said, anger having turned to fury. “I don’t give a damn why you are here. I don’t give a damn what you want or what you think or what you have to say. I am through with the lot of you—managing me, following me, negotiating with me. Fucking manipulating me.”
West registered the calm in Bourne’s gaze, as though he were not surprised by the words. “If I did not wish for you to know you were being followed, I assure you, you would not know.”
Duncan cut him a look. “No doubt you believe that.”
“Tremley is a monster,” Bourne said. “Whatever you plan to do with the information you have on him—whatever you’ve told him—he’s a monster. And as a friend—”
West sliced a hand through the air. “Don’t. Don’t call yourself my friend. You and Temple and Cross and your fucking owner have called me a friend too many times meaning too little of it.”
Bourne’s brows lifted. “Our owner? I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Then perhaps you ought to release yourself from Chase’s apron strings and make a name for yourself on your own.”
Bourne whistled, long and low. “You are angry, aren’t you.”
“I’m merely disgusted by you people.”
“We people?”
Bourne knew well enough to whom Duncan referred. “Aristocrats who think the world bends to their whim.”
“Well, when you have the money and power we have, the world does bend to your whim,” Bourne said. “But this isn’t about us, is it?”
West narrowed his gaze. “You don’t have a single idea what this is about.”
“I do, though. I think it’s about a woman.”
A vision flashed, the woman to whom Bourne referred. Half sin, half salvation, equally as beholden to the men of The Fallen Angel. To their leader. So beholden to him that she did not have room for West.
Not that it mattered.
He met the marquess’s gaze. “You deserve a thrashing.”
“And you think you’re the man to give it to me?”
He was. He was the only man in London who could give it to him. He was tired of being manipulated and used with complete disregard.
“I think I’m the man to end you all,” he said, the words cold and dark and unsettling in the quiet.
End them and save her.
Bourne stilled. “That sounds like a threat.”
“I don’t make threats,” Duncan took hold of the door handle and opened the door.
“Now I know it’s about her.”
Duncan turned back, resisting the urge to take out his anger on the marquess. To do to him what he wished to do to Chase—the mysterious, unknowable Chase.
Instead, he said, “It’s not a threat. Tell that to Chase.”
Chapter 15
. . . Our favorite Lady was seen eating lemon ice from Merkson’s Sweets with Miss P— earlier this week. It seemed not to concern either flaxen-haired beauty that the weather was far too cold for lemon ice. It should be added that a source close to Merkson’s reports that a certain Baroness will be stocking lemon ice at her next ball . . .
. . . London’s finest casino continues to indebt gentlemen with little sense and less money, apparently. We have it on good authority that several aristocrats will be offering land in exchange for loans this spring, and we pity their poor, put upon wives . . .
The News of London, May 4, 1833
“Cross says that you’ve selected a husband.”
Georgiana did not look up from her place by the fireplace in the owners’ suite, where she pretended to be enthralled in a pile of documents requiring her attention. “I have.”
“Are you planning to tell us who it is?”
In The Fallen Angel and the lower club the founders owned, seventeen members owed more than they could repay from their cash coffers, which meant that she and the other partners needed to decide what they were willing to accept in lieu of money. This was not a small project, nor was it to be taken lightly. But there was no possible way a woman could work with her business partners’ wives collected about her.