No Good Duke Goes Unpunished (The Rules of Scoundrels #3)(87)

“I should kill you anyway.”

Knight smirked. “But you won’t. I saved your life, boy. Without me, you’d be drunk and half-mad with the pox, if any one of half a dozen hell owners hadn’t dumped you in the Thames themselves. Without me, you’d be dead or living dead. You owe me even without my having your pretty plaything in my clutches. You were useless. Weak. Unworthy. And I gave you an exit.”

The words sent a chill through Cross, their truth undeniable.

Knight removed a handkerchief from his pocket, dabbed at his lip, checking to see if there was blood. “You have me to thank for all this. Your entire empire. And the tragedy of it is that you’re too honorable to ignore it. Instead, you owe me.”

He shook his head, even as he knew the words were true. “Not this.”

“Of course this,” Knight scoffed. “It’s time you realize that aristocrats or not, money or not, fancy French chef or not, I’ve been down this road before you, and I’ll always know the terrain better than you. You can’t beat me.

“I hear Duncan West is here. I wonder if the lady will make Wednesday’s Scandal Sheet?” At Cross’s flashing gaze, Knight pointed to Maggie, who stared back at the two of them with shock and confusion in her eyes. “You marry my girl, or I ruin yours. That’s the game.”

Your girl. The words echoed through him, part taunt, part hunger. All truth.

For much of his life, Cross had been known for his ability to see all possible outcomes of a situation. He could look at a spread of cards and predict the next flop. He could see the next punch in a bare-knuckle boxing match. He could plot a dozen moves forward on a chess board.

He wondered if Pippa played chess.

He pushed the thought aside. There would be no more thinking of Philippa Marbury. No more touching her. His fingers itched at that, desperate for more of the contact they’d been denied for so long. He’d only been able to touch her for a heartbeat.

He’d ached for her since the second he left her tonight. Since before that.

And he knew, with the keen knowledge of one who had been so long in control of his desires, that he would ache for her for an eternity.

But he would take the ache to save her.

For once in his sorry, worthless life, he would save someone he cared for.

I should not have believed in you.

Pippa’s words from earlier echoed through him, taunting him.

He would save her.

“Maggie’s not a bad hand, Cross. She’ll make you pretty heirs.”

Cross lifted his gaze to follow Knight’s meaning, meeting Maggie’s eyes, recognizing the shock and disappointment there. She didn’t want to marry him any more than he wanted to marry her. He leveled her with a serious look. “Your father is mad.”

“I’m beginning to see that myself,” she replied, and Cross thought that if the situation had been different, he’d have smiled at that.

But the situation was not different.

There was only one course of action.

He approached Knight’s daughter—nineteen years old with mediocre French—dropped to one knee in front of her and said, “I’m afraid I haven’t a choice.”

He had lost so many. This time, he would save one.

The most important one.

Maggie nodded once. “It seems, my lord, that in that, at least, we have a great deal in common.”

Unshed tears shimmered in her brown eyes, and Cross wished he could say something else. Something that would make her feel better about the whole situation. But the truth was, Meghan Margaret Knight believed him a coldhearted man who ran a den of iniquity and made his money on sin. She believed that he consorted with ruffians and prostitutes and scoundrels the likes of her father, and that a marriage to him—once blessed—would be the result of blackmail and coercion, and nothing remotely fonder.

Meghan Margaret Knight, who had not known him for the better part of an hour, already knew more of his truths than Philippa Marbury ever had.

So, instead of comforting her, he lifted one of her gloved hands from where it clutched the green fabric of her skirts, held it in his firm grasp, and said, “Miss Knight, would you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”

Pippa was enjoying herself immensely.

She might have spent much of the last weeks unimpressed by the poorly lit, library-quiet main floor of The Fallen Angel, but tonight, she finally understood its appeal. By night, the club filled with light and sound and a long, languorous lick of sin that Pippa could never have imagined if she were not here, now, witnessing it.

Night breathed life into this great stone building, darkness somehow plunging the room into bright, bold light—a whirl of color and sound and thrill that Pippa drank in with heady excitement.

She stood at the center of the main floor of the club, surrounded by masked revelers: men in their dark suits, boldly colored waistcoats their nod to the evening festivities; women in their silks and satins, dresses designed to showcase skin and scandal.

Giving herself up to the movement of the crowd, Pippa allowed them to carry her from one side of the room, where she’d escaped Temple’s chaperone, to the center of the revelry, past piquet and roulette and hazard, and throngs of laughing, masked beauties and their handsome counterparts. She knew better, of course—knew that each of these bodies had flaws, likely significant ones—but somehow, masked, they seemed more than the sum of their parts.