The Sins of Lord Lockwood (Rules for the Reckless #6)(6)

“I will not pay for that,” came a woman’s voice from the doorway.

The gaslights seemed to flicker. His heart missed a beat. Liam found himself abruptly nauseated, mouth dry.

“Are you all right?” asked the courtesan, her eyes wide with concern.

A mirror hung on the wall beyond her. Liam did not let himself focus on it. He would not like what he saw. These were not feelings he could feel.

His mouth still held the semblance of a smile. He widened that smile as he pivoted from one redhead toward the other.

She filled the doorway completely. She was taller than he remembered, her jaw squarer. Her lips were full, wide, sneering. He had remembered the feel of them better than the look.

Ah, but this drug was wicked. It caused her to intensify into impossible vividness, a vision in copper and green and cream. In all the lands he had crossed to come home, there had been no shade like her eyes: leaves were not vibrant enough, grass was too dark. Her hair was blazingly bright, the color of freshly polished pennies. The world behind her was breaking apart, swimming in little colored dots, like schools of fish.

“You should not be here,” he said to her. God above, not now. Sober would serve them both better.

Her smile gutted him. He had forgotten the trick of that smile—how it could spark a light inside a man that made him feel untethered from the earth, or gut him more deeply than a blade. “And you should be in hell,” she said. “Alas, few of us end up where we belong.”





CHAPTER TWO




Three years and eight months made a great deal of difference. In that space of time, Anna had cut romance out of her heart completely. She could look across the room now at what was, objectively, a very handsome man, his chiseled lips turning into a slight and impenetrable smile, and feel nothing but irritation.

He looked older. His gold-brown hair remained thick, his body still tall and leanly fashioned. But new crow’s-feet bracketed his eyes. Wherever he’d adventured, he’d squinted at the sights. And the look in his eyes . . .

His eyes had always dazzled her. The color of dark honey, of fine Scottish whisky, they had glimmered across rooms at her, caused her breath to come short. But they looked flat now, empty. They watched her with the inhuman, steady focus of a wolf.

The scarlet-haired woman was gawking. Anna spoke crisply. “We have business to discuss.”

He appeared at last to recollect himself. Straightening, he offered her a bow that was too deep to be anything but mockery. “Won’t you join us?” he said with a sweep of his hand toward the sofa he’d just vacated.

For a moment, she remained stock-still, stinging beneath a wave of realization:

He was not ashamed.

He was not embarrassed.

He did not even seem surprised to see her, much less glad.

In reply, she turned and strode for the exit.

Moments later, he passed her, moving with a swiftness that belied his earlier loss of balance. “Follow me,” he said casually over his shoulder.

From this angle, she could see that he’d fleshed out through the shoulders, put on bulk to suit a stevedore. He moved with swinging, athletic strides, and the crowd parted before him, crowing and cheering his passage.

Was he trying to outrun her? He’d be disappointed: she walked for two hours each day, and rode for two more besides. He was not the only one with muscle.

He led her out of the gallery through a hidden door that opened into a gaming room. The leather-paneled cave reeked of stale tobacco. A raffish young man with auburn hair and freckles was sleeping atop the snooker table, a cue draped across his belly.

She folded her arms and waited. It took Lockwood a good shove to wake the interloper. The youngster sat up, blinking sleepily, then set aside the cue and scratched his head. Bits of cue chalk scattered from his hair onto the green nap of the table.

“Party’s over, Wilkins,” said her husband.

“Right,” said the boy, then staggered to his feet and lurched out.

She hugged herself more tightly. “Who are these people?” A sad and pathetic lot, to be sure! “Are you running a hostel for the soused?”

Lockwood laughed—a strange sound, unsteady and abruptly over. “Oh, that’s good.” Leaning back against the closed door, he closed one eye and squinted at her. “If you had written ahead of your visit, I might have gathered a company more to your taste.”

Was he drunk? “That would require you to understand my tastes, and your knowledge on that count is outdated.”

He nodded amiably. “Been a while.”

Her disbelief felt almost hysterical. “You’ve been in London for eight months now. Eight months! You might have written. But I suppose that would have ruined the fun!”

He lifted a dark brow. “Fun?”

She would not yell. She took a long breath. “I discovered your return through a newspaper headline. Fun is one way to put it.” An unconscionable and shameless dereliction of your marital duties was another.

But she would not say that, either. She had not come to shriek and rail at him; that would suggest she cared.

“Ah, I . . .” He threw a distracted glance toward the wall, from which came a thump as somebody on the other side presumably kicked it. “I thought you would be on the island.”

If he was drunk, he did not sound it. She’d forgotten the arrogant tenor of his mannerisms, the irksome cut-glass precision of his accent—all still fully intact. “So I was.”