My Lady's Choosing: An Interactive Romance Novel(51)
His tone and words are the metaphorical bucket of water you needed. “What?”
“My entire cell was killed!” He grabs you by the shoulders, his dark eyes like those of a cornered animal. “All of them, within the space of a week, on several separate missions! Each time, the French were ready and waiting for us. They picked us off one by one like stray dogs. And I—I was the only one who made it out alive, for I had gotten so drunk mourning for the woman I loved that I missed the appointed time of my mission!”
You stare at him, eyes wide in horror.
“Don’t you see?! Someone must have sold British secrets for them to have known exactly where we were. And after much investigation I realized who the mole must be!”
“No,” you whisper.
“Yes,” he says, shaking you slightly. “It could only be one man. Captain Angus MacTaggart.”
Uh-oh. Turn to this page.
You again turn on your heel to give that insolent man one last piece of your mind—but instead you crash straight into a hot, hungry, well-dressed body. You blush. Of course he would see reason. A smile spreads across your lips as you look up and into the handsome, welcoming face of—
“Cad?” you say, incredulous.
For there, in all his rakishly handsome glory, is Rafe Caddington. He has the good looks and cynicism of the world’s finest dandy and the eyes of the world’s hungriest wolf. His smirk gives you ideas, which your other ideas must threaten with a stern talking-to in order to keep them in line.
“Why, when the madam said to have a look around and choose the woman of my heart’s desire, she really meant it.” His voice is as painfully luscious as a bite of rich trifle, and his hands run over you with as much relish as his gaze.
“Unhand me, sir! I am not your plaything, just as the rightful Granvilles are not your playthings!” You wrest your breast from his groping, gloved fingers. “I am merely in this house of ill repute to confirm that your repute is the illest of them all.”
“It most certainly is,” he growls, using his rock-hard thighs to trap you against a large Grecian urn inscribed with the filthiest of odes.
You knee him. Hard. He gasps, but grips you tight about the shoulders.
“I take pleasure in pain. And I take what I want! Wealth! My name! YOU!” His cry is savage, hungry, and cut short by a yank to his fashionably unkempt mane.
“You will stop taking this instant, you leech!” It is none other than Benedict. He cuts his eyes at Cad, then throws a tenderer gaze to you. “Please forgive my cruelty,” he whispers. “I have been brutish to you because I am brutish to myself. I didn’t think I would ever need worry about love, or desire, and you have swept into my life like a wildfire, making me suddenly concerned for the safety of things I took for granted. The safety of my solitude. The safety of the way things are. I see now that there is nothing safe in being so miserably unhappy that I am willing to let my life be colorless and cold without…you.”
“Cad launches a fusillade of watercress sandwiches at Benedict before clocking him with the fine silver tray they were laid upon.”
A thousand emotions and desires cross your mind at once, and you struggle to come up with a quip that could express them all.
“Oh, darling, let me save you the trouble,” Benedict says, and he drops Cad long enough to draw your face to his and bury your mouth in a kiss that would be everlasting—if Cad didn’t interrupt it by tackling him.
“Damn my eyes!” he yells. “The mighty son of Lord and Lady Granville, heir to everything he has never earned, kissing a common maid in a whorehouse like the bastard he truly is!” Cad’s eyes and voice are charred with jealousy.
“Oh, come now!” Benedict says, deflecting Cad’s next punch and throwing his own. “You’ve done worse in whorehouses!”
“You dare mock me!” Cad launches a fusillade of watercress sandwiches at Benedict before clocking him with the fine silver tray they were laid upon.
“Please!” Benedict sneers, breaking a candle from its elegant pewter taper to use as a death baton. “I mock everyone!”
“Your name! Your fortune! Your station, your love”—Cad manages to sneer at Benedict and spit on you at the same time—“will do you no good where you’re going, man. No one’s life is respected, noble or no, when it is over!” Cad raises the sandwich tray high above him, murder in his eyes, emptiness in his heart, watercress sandwiches on the floor.
“Cad, no!” you scream.
“Slattern, yes!” he screams back.
Can Cad be reasoned with? If so, turn to this page.
Or is he nothing but a lecherous weasel who needs to be taken down immediately in as violent a manner as possible? If so, turn to this page.
Before anything can be said or done, the handsome postman nods at you, shuts the carriage door, and climbs into the driver’s seat. You are rumbling off to your date with destiny without another moment’s hesitation.
You try to sleep, but your mind races with thoughts—thoughts that may belong to you or to the wild night, you are not sure. Just as you are wondering how a man could be so monstrous as to inspire such a repulsed, repressed curiosity throughout the ton, your carriage lurches to a stop. A beast in the distance keens into the violet, moonlit sky. Your heart thrums. When you took your meal at the Slaughtered Lamb, there was much talk about a barghest creature the locals swore haunted the moors around Hopesend Manor. Can this far-off call be the demon dog’s heartless cry, as it stalks the night for prey?