She was somewhat steadier now, although smudged and disheveled no doubt from the fight she had put up. Her hair was a wild tangle down her back and there was an ugly bruise on her cheek. But she was alive and safe.
“Miss?”
She pointed through the chaos of firemen, a water wagon, and the tangle of hoses and other wagons to the figure of someone who made his way through the snarl of people and debris in the street.
He moved slowly, favoring his side, features smudged with soot, that mane of dark hair wild about his head in the wind from the fire. And those dark eyes…
I gathered up my skirt and ran to him.
We very nearly both went down as I reached Brodie, desperate to make certain it was in fact him.
It was, an arm going round me and pulling me against him. He winced but he was alive. Very much alive.
Oh, bloody hell! I thought as more tears came.
“Ye’re all right?” It was barely more than a whisper.
I nodded, my throat suddenly tight. Damn bloody Scot!
“Yes!” I finally managed.
He nodded. “Aye.”
“No…!” I held on to him. “I mean the answer is yes!”
I thought my life was laid out before me. I had my novels and my travels. I made my own choices and decisions, and right in the middle of it was this somewhat bruised and smudged Scot!
“Do ye mean it took a damn explosion and verra nearly gettin’ meself killed for ye to say it?”
There was just one word of course...
“It occurred to me that life would certainly be quite dull if you did manage to get yourself killed.” I realized that was several more than just one.
He winced and swore again.
“Yes,” I repeated.
He kissed me, there in the street, smudged, bruised and battered, and quite shamelessly.
I could have sworn my toes curled…
Seventeen
Brodie shiftedin the chair across from Sir Avery Stanton of the Special Services Agency, against the pain.
He was fairly certain that he’d broken at least one rib in that struggle during the fire, and there was the burn on his hand. Minor, he thought, compared to the other losses.
The man was Laughton’s son, they now knew, some twenty odd years old, but with the mind of a child. Both innocent and dangerous, in the things he had experienced at the hands of others, including those at the Wimbledon Club and then in the way the young man had been used by his sister to take revenge. Weak and infirm, it seemed that their father was not part of the daughter’s scheme.
It might never be known how much Laughton knew of what his daughter had done— the other deaths she was responsible for.
It seemed that he had tried to stop her the night before by the bruises about his neck.
Revenge.
As Brodie knew only too well, it could be a brutal task master, and often left others, including the one who would take it, another victim. Once set on the course, there was no going back. It could only end badly, and it had for the Laughtons.
That night at the photographer’s studio had been the end of it for Paul Laughton, his son, and daughter. They had all perished in the fire that engulfed the studio.
