Three Nights with a Scoundrel (Stud Club #3)(63)

Chapter Sixteen

Julian ordered the hack driver to return to the assembly rooms, and be quick. He was back on the same street corner where he’d met Lily in less than ten minutes’ time.

Incredible. Had that entire blissful interlude really lasted less than ten minutes? He would make the memory last a lifetime. Her hot, sweet words sliding over his neck. The heady scent of her body, an intoxicating blend of citron and rosemary and feminine musk. Her fingertips, gliding along his …

Not now, he told himself. Not now.

The pistol he’d dropped was, as expected, gone. Vanished into the night—or rather, into the hand of some lucky passerby. Something that valuable and shiny wouldn’t lie about unclaimed on a London street corner for more than a minute or two. Down the street, carriages were jostling for space, preparing to accommodate the departing guests. The immediate vicinity, however, was quiet and deserted.

So here he was. Alone, unarmed, and late for his appointment with Death. What happened now?

He stood there for a few minutes, just waiting to see if anything would occur.

When it didn’t, he started to walk.

He walked back to his house along his usual route, ambling down the streets and avenues. He was honestly surprised when he arrived before the modest Bloomsbury façade unchallenged. He then sat on his front stoop for a good quarter-hour. Try as he might to keep his attention sharp and scan the darkness for threats, his thoughts kept returning to Lily.

For Christ’s sake, he was a marked man.

But even a marked man was a man, and he was a man irrevocably marked by Lily, branded by her touch. The way she’d moaned for him …

Why hadn’t he called for the hack driver to circle the block? Another minute, and he could have had her coming again. He could have experienced the strength of her climax from the inside, felt her womanly flesh grasp his fingers tight. Her breathy cries, combined with the light touch of her fingers—all together, it probably would have brought him off, too. His loins stirred, just at the thought.

Not now, he told himself. Not now.

He rose, brushed off his trousers, and started to walk again.

He walked back to Mayfair, back toward the neighborhood of the assembly rooms, this time working a serpentine route down smaller streets and back alleys. Aside from the occasional sleeping beggar, some early carts on their way to market, and a few passing cabs, he met with no one.

And he found himself back on the same damn corner, still alone and undisturbed.

He walked some more. Through the straggling whores still haunting Covent Garden, by the cheap gin houses in the rookery of St. Giles, passing back along the Strand. He walked streets he normally wouldn’t walk alone at night, for any reason. No one in his right mind would. But he walked them anyway, daring his unknown enemies to strike. Or if those enemies eluded him, simply tempting fate.

The hours passed. His feet went from sore to aching to numb in his boots. But Julian kept walking.

He found himself in St. James’s Park at the first glimmer of daybreak, in the meadow that was the site of so many illegal, infamous duels. Here, in this field, a gentleman’s honor could be redeemed by the firing of a single shot into the air. Julian had never understood it. Duels seldom amounted to more than a show of false courage. One ball sent whizzing skyward, and everyone went home mollified. England’s “best” men were preserved to live another day, clutch their gold more tightly to their br**sts, and get more children on their wives and chambermaids. Sounded rather nice, didn’t it?

But no one came to duel with Julian, and he’d lost his pistol anyhow. He would find no satisfaction here.

He could find satisfaction with Lily, a sly voice inside him whispered.

Not now, he told it. Not now.

So he walked some more, pondering other things. What did it mean, when a man planned his own funeral and no one came?

Lily and Morland had insisted from the beginning that Leo’s murder was a senseless, random act. Could it be that they were right? Perhaps he’d missed his opportunity due to Lily’s interruption, or he’d simply failed to lure his enemy to action. But the other possibility was equally strong: that there was no enemy to lure. No would-be murderer, at any rate.

It would have been easier to accept, if he didn’t want to believe it so damn much.

Julian didn’t have his destination in mind—rather, it seemed to draw him like a lodestone. Before he knew it, he was there—in Whitechapel, navigating a cramped district stacked high with warehouses until he stood in the alley where Leo had died. He’d walked here at night, several times. It was full daylight now, and the place looked narrow and dirty, not threatening. It smelled of filth and rotting fish.

Julian stared around him, wondering what the hell he was doing. He’d come to pay respects to Leo, he supposed, but any respect was wasted here. Leo had mercifully left this place behind, in body and spirit. Julian should do the same.

So he turned north and walked to Spitalfields. He traveled against the flow of the working poor, who streamed en masse toward better neighborhoods, on their way to work as scullery maids, chimney sweeps, rat catchers, and the like. Perhaps he would meet with one of his errand boys if he looked sharp.

The bells of Christ Church greeted him, ringing in the new day with familiar peals. Welcome home, he could imagine them to say. He’d spent his first nine years of life within earshot of these bells.

For the first time in decades, he entered the church. The devout were at their morning prayers, and Julian had no wish to disturb them. He lingered at the rear. Tilting his head to view the arcade, he was transported back to his boyhood, when these soaring arches and stately white columns made this the grandest building he could imagine ever being permitted inside.