Dear Lord Ashford,
You are the most infuriating person I have ever met. Fine. To hell with propriety. I will be in St. James’s Park at half-past midnight this evening. The corner near Westminster Abbey.
Come or do not come, as you like.
You are not actually Beelzebub, you know, despite what the gossip rags say. You will not catch fire if you accept someone’s offer of help.
Matilda Halifax
Chapter 4
This time, Christian thought, he was actually going to kill her.
He urged his horse forward into another circle around the easternmost corner of St. James’s Park. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning. She was either late or already dead in a ditch somewhere, and truly, the emotion that tangled in his chest at the latter thought was disturbing.
He did not evenlikeher. She was forward and provocative. Her missives were peremptory. She was ludicrously young.
At some point during their correspondence, he’d started to look up her age in Debrett’s and then—briefly concerned that his edition was so old that she would not even beinit—he’d slammed the thing closed before he got toWfor the Earl of Warren.
Seven minutes later, by his pocket watch, he’d cracked and checked anyway.
She was thirteen years younger than he was. And why he had immediately done that mental arithmetic, he was not prepared to contemplate.
When there had been a three-day gap between her letters, he had—
No.No.He had not missed them.
There was no connection between the absence of Matilda’s letters and his inexplicable reentrance into London society. He had not been to atonsocial event—other than Denham’s rout—in nearly a decade. He could not say why he had suddenly decided to accept an invitation to a dinner party.
He had not hoped she would be there. He had not looked for her. He hadnot.
She hadn’t been there anyway. Only her twin, Margo, dressed in pink and twice as freckled as Matilda, laughing uproariously with a handful of young bucks Christian was too old to recognize.
Though the twins looked similar, he had known at once that the one at the party wasn’t Matilda. Matilda was cooler, quieter. Her smile—when she smiled—would be earned. It would be a gift.
Good God, he was losing his mind. He needed to go back to Bamburgh.
That would be the very next thing he would do, after he found Matilda in St. James’s Park, murdered her, and then saw her safely back to her house in Mayfair.
When he finally caught sight of her red hair in the moonlight, relief and indignation blossomed inside him in equal measure. He swung down from his horse and left it placidly nibbling grass as he stalked toward her.
“You are late,” he bit out. “And reckless and probably deranged.”
She was wearing a heavy cloak, her fingers wrapped up in the wool as she held it closed in front of her. “I beg your pardon?” Her voice was low, almost husky. A night voice.
Despite himself, he reached out and caught her shoulder, tugging her off the path and behind a stand of trees where they would be invisible to any curious passersby. He did not want her reputation to be further damaged, because he was a sap-skulled block.
“This is the most incomprehensible place and time to meet,” he said. “It is late. It is dark. You gave me practically no direction. I might have ridden around looking for you half the night whilst you were set upon by footpads and left for dead.”
“And would you have come, had I suggested we meet on Regent Street for tea?”
“Of course not, you daft woman. I—”
And then suddenly it came clear to him. She had proposed this dangerous location, this absurd hour, to provoke him into meeting with her. To make him turn up, entirely against his will, out of concern for her welfare.
He did not know if he was more disturbed or more impressed by her cunning.
She untangled her fingers from her cloak and gestured behind her. “You need not have worried about me. I brought two grooms and a footman. I do appreciate your concern.”
