His instincts never failed him. Something was wrong. Desperately, terribly wrong.
This was not the bloody welcome he had expected. Unless he was mistaken, there was guilt on every one of their damned faces. Suspicion began to rise.
“Have you nothing to say?” he demanded. “Any of you?”
He’d never known them to hold their tongues. A right vocal lot, the Winter siblings.
“We knew you were with Sutton,” Dom said.
What the bloody hell?
He listed on his feet, feeling as if he had taken another blow in addition to the ones Jasper Sutton had landed earlier. Surely his brothers had not known he was being kept at The Sinner’s Palace, being fed lies by Jasper and Caro Sutton.
Caro.
His heart gave a pang at the thought of her. She had looked as broken as he had felt this morning, but he had forced himself to walk away. She had deceived him, betrayed him.Hell, she had allowed him to ask her to be his wife, to make love to her, and she had never once told him the truth. There was no excuse for what she had done. She was every bit as heartless and cold as her brother.
“How?” he forced out, his voice hoarse.
Disbelieving.
“Sutton came to Dom,” Devil said grimly, stalking forward and catching Gavin in a brotherly hug. “You remembereverythingnow?”
“Aye.” Gavin extricated himself from Devil’s embrace, only to be caught up in a series of awkward hugs. First Dom, then Blade.
“We are happy to have you back among us, brother,” Dom said. “Who else knows you are here?”
He thought for a moment. “The guardsman at the door. A few others I passed on my way here. The widow Crawford, who called to me when I descended from the hack which brought me here.”
“Sutton sent you here in a hack?” Devil demanded.
“Damn it all to hell,” Blade muttered. “This cannot be good. Widow Crawford has the loosest tongue in the East End.”
Gavin was more confused than ever. More confused, even, than he had been when he had opened his eyes to find the woman he had naively believed to be his guardian angel hovering over him. He could almost conjure her here and now—her delicate, lavender scent, her full, sensual lips, those wide, hazel eyes and that gleaming auburn hair.
Hell.
Would there ever come a day when he would not want her? When he would not love her? It had been hours, and all he wanted was to race back to her side, to find a way to forget the trespasses she had committed against him.
His overburdened mind, which had been thumping ever since he had arisen that morning to his fully restored memories and which had been pounding mercilessly ever since his bout of fisticuffs with Jasper Sutton, throbbed even more.
“Why did Sutton come to you?” he demanded, trying to make sense of the jagged bits of information he had received thus far.
“He wanted to preserve the truce,” Dom said. “I asked him to keep you there until we felt it safe for you to return.”
He shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“You remember that someone attacked Demon outside Lady Fortune?” Devil asked, frowning. “Do you not?”
“Aye, whoever was after his wine merchant,” Gavin said, recalling the day he had visited Demon at Lady Fortune in the wake of the incident.
“We don’t think that’s the way it happened,” Blade told him. “Ambrose Stokes came to Dom after you’d disappeared, claiming someone had been trying to put a price on your head for weeks. He said what happened to Demon had been a mistake. The men hired for the task mistook Demon for you. They killed the wine merchant because he was going to raise a cry, but they didn’t finish the job with Demon because after they knocked him on the napper, they got a look at his face and realized he was not you. Davy found him and raised the cry, chasing them off.”
“Stokes told me the bastards who attacked Demon came to him asking for aid, but that he declined,” Dom added. “They must have acquired more muscle and followed you after you had gotten soused with Demon. They attacked you when you were returning home and then left you for dead outside The Sinner’s Palace to try to pin the blame on the Suttons.”
Ambrose Stokes was a notorious mercenary known for solving any problem for the right amount of coin. He was a vicious man. Gavin wouldn’t trust him as far as he could throw him. Still, hehadrecalled the memory of five men attacking him at once.
“And how much money did Stokes want in return for his information?” Gavin asked, distrustful of the bastard.
