“What do you want?” the man barked.
“Er,” said Reuben. “I’m looking for a Miss Gladys Bell…”
“Who?” The man gaped at him in bafflement. “You’ve got the wrong room. All you drunken bucks… When I was your age—”
The door slammed in Reuben’s face, blocking out the rest of the man’s tirade.
Gladys was gone. He’d taken too long. This time, the hopes his inaction had ruined were his own.
Though he knew it was useless, Reuben begged the proprietor of the inn, the keeper of the lending library, anyone he could think of, for clues as to where she’d gone. No one had an address for her. In fact, a “Miss Bell” had never registered at the inn. Nor was there a Gladys Smith.
With frustration, Reuben summoned his carriage and flung himself inside. Back to London, then. With luck, that was where Gladys had gone as well. Not that he was any more likely to find her in a crowded metropolis than he had been in a small country town.
He spent the hours of the long journey alternating between staring listlessly at the floor and burying his face in his hands. All the things he should have said flooded him now. I’m sorry was top of the list. Along with I’ll never forgive myself and I love you and Please give me a second chance.
No—a third chance. She’d already given him a second one, and he’d bollocksed that up, too.
He’d been so afraid of her rejecting him, that he hadn’t properly expressed that he accepted her. Not as a courtesan—which, as she pointed out, she’d explicitly told him she was no longer—but as a lover. As a friend. As a person.
He had offered to be her protector not because he was any good at protecting her, but because he’d been too scared to admit what he really wanted: Gladys. Forever. As his wife.
He’d known there would be no hope of her agreeing to that arrangement. He was nothing more than a trifling rakehell, whereas she…
Whereas she…
Had said, I’ve never done this before, either.
She wasn’t talking about a financial relationship between mistress and protector. She didn’t want such a thing, or expect him to offer it when she’d already made clear that she had moved on from those days. She’d wanted to pick her own partners, she’d said. To forge her own future.
Which meant, what she’d thought he’d been proposing was…
“Oh, God.” Reuben dropped his face into his hands, his stomach flipping.
She’d thought he was proposing marriage. The thing he should have proposed five years ago when he’d left her reputation in ruins. The thing he should have proposed fifteen hours ago, when she was still naked and happy in his arms.
If it had been a hard sell then, it would be impossible to convince her now.
“You nodcock,” he mumbled into his hands.
She didn’t want his money. She wanted him. And she wanted him to want her.
Instead he had treated her like every other man had done before him. A path Reuben had put her on. A hell he’d had the opportunity to save her from forevermore. And failed to.
He hadn’t just been the villain of the piece five years ago. He was the villain now, too.
“John Coachman!” He knocked on the driver’s connecting panel just as the carriage was entering Mayfair. “I need you to take me to…”
Where? He didn’t even know in which neighborhood Gladys might live. But someone had to. A courtesan operating in fashionable London for half a decade meant commensurately fashionable clients. Someone Reuben knew had to know where to find her.
“To my club,” he ordered, leaning forward on his seat, his limbs vibrating with anticipation. “Make it quick!”
The carriage had barely slowed to turn down the right road, and already Reuben was leaping out onto the pavement, running past the street-sweeper and into the exclusive gentlemen’s club with all the elegance of a runaway bull.
It took over an hour—and a round of rum on Reuben for half the patrons inside—but he soon had the information he needed.
“John,” he shouted as he raced back to the carriage. Rather than waste time climbing inside, Reuben hoisted himself up next to his driver and handed him the address. “No time to waste!”
The truth was, Reuben might have nothing but time to waste. There was no reason to believe Gladys would open her door to him, much less listen to a word he said, or wish to spend another moment in his company.
