Adam Chevestrer was living without consequences. Why, aristocratic families had even paid him to serve as a stud, imagine!
Then and there, Lucy decided now was the time for Adam to experience the consequences.
“This is a fine collection,” she said, snapping the back case in place on one watch.
“Thank you, Luce. Now, if you just come over—”
She wasn’t attending. Instead, she was opening her new reticule determinedly. In went the key to his bedroom. He watched her, unsure of how to respond.
With her eyes on his, she plucked the first pocket watch from its velvet bed and dropped it in her bag.
“Lucy…” he breathed.
She held his gaze, then snapped the back case on another of the fine watches.
“What are you doing, Lucy?”
Dropping the second watch into her bag, she let it clink against the other before responding.
“You have so many. Four pocket watches with hidden jewels for one man. I would like half.”
Her heart beat so loudly she thought it might shake the walls of that room filled with Adam’s beautiful things. At any moment, he would be within his rights to call the constable and have her arrested for theft. But she knew he wouldn’t do that to her. He wouldn’t hurt her, at least not because she took his treasures right before his eyes. The pain he inflicted was of a different variety.
And how could she say that what she wanted wasn’t a watch or even those interior gems, but a way to drive a stiletto in this untouchable man who would otherwise never experience a consequence for what he’d done? She could hardly explain the impulse to herself.
“But those are mine,” he intoned. “You can’t just take things. You’re in service, you know that.”
Oh, that rankled. Of course she was in service, for fuck’s sake. And laws of morality extended to all but the highest tiers of society; Adam thought he’d entered that echelon. He was wrong.
Lucy placed her gloved hand on a third watch.
“Luce, is this because of what happened outside the closet?” He was now moving his hands as he talked. He’d thought to plow over his Covent Garden roots? She’d bring up those weeds yet.
In went the third pocket watch.
“Lucy, I’m sorry! I should have controlled my cock and not come inside. It’s just that I was a stud so long—”
He wanted to blame his actions on seeding women professionally?
Clink. The fourth and final watch hit the interior of her bag with the others. Lucy turned to take in the rest of the dressing room. Her work wasn’t finished.
“But I worked hard for those,” he railed, following behind her as she stuffed so many of his monogrammed handkerchiefs into her reticule that it wouldn’t close.
Satisfied and unwilling to walk out of his townhouse with men’s shirts in her arms, Lucy turned to him.
“Taking things of value to you is the only way you’ll learn,” she said sternly.
She was on thin ice. But for once, she wanted a moralistic novel to end with a fallen woman getting revenge rather than dying in a pile of rags, in a cold attic. If she couldn’t find such atale already published, she’d write one herself — all over Adam Chevestrer’s life.
“Fuck, Lucy,” Adam growled, adjusting his cock in those fine trousers. “I don’t know why, but you’ve got me so hot.”
She wanted to hit him with the bag. He was getting hard over her efforts to extract justice?
“I’ll give you more. Anything. Just let me in that cunny again. I promise I’ll pull out this time.”
Lucy groaned and spun on her heel. In her confusion, she went deeper into his dressing room and jerked on two cupboards before spinning around.
Then she paused and realized what she’d seen. Lucy walked back as if in a trance, all signs of panic gone. She opened the door.
