The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(88)
He reached, almost to the point of flailing, and it was Cutter … Carlton? Who took his hand and hauled him to his feet before he and Blackwell settled him into a chair.
Because Lorelai had disappeared.
*
Lorelai blindly stumbled out to the back garden, gulping in breaths of sea air that were exhaled as broken sobs.
She’d never forget the way Ash had said another woman’s name. His eyes had been glossy, his voice reverent. His ever-placid, forbidding features had crumpled with a sentimentality she’d never before witnessed. She’d thought, until now, Ash was incapable of experiencing the depths of such emotion. It was all right, she’d reasoned. She could love enough for the two of them.
What a fool she’d been. Because it wasn’t that he couldn’t feel. It was that he didn’t feel those things for her.
He felt them for Caroline.
If the girl had been half as handsome a woman as Inspector Morley was a man, Lorelai could certainly understand Ash’s love for her.
Catching her reflection in a window renewed the torrent of Lorelai’s tears. What had she to offer a man like him now that her youth had faded, and her hope had waned? Was she only the stonewashed specter of his first love? Had his eyes caught the sight of a familiar girl some twenty years ago, and evoked the forgotten passions he’d cultivated for another?
Did he seek to return for her, to claim her, so intensely because he thought he’d regained some semblance of a love long dead?
The tragedy of it was a thousandfold, for them both.
“Do not weep, lovely,” a deep voice soothed from the shadows. “It will all be over soon.”
She was drawn against a hard, muscled body from behind. A sweet scent cloyed through her senses, and then the earth became sand beneath her feet as she gratefully sank into the beckoning darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Two brothers. Ash stared at the men who’d once been the boys upon whom he relied. Two brothers not of his lineage. What a tangled connection they all made.
He’d remembered nearly everything, and what little he could not, Morley and Blackwell had spent the better part of a morning piecing together for him.
It was exhausting, to say the least, reliving two entire decades in one day.
How incredibly strange that Cutter Morley, the boldest thief in the empire, had, because of the death of his sister, become one of the most powerful men in London. The chief inspector at Scotland Yard.
Ash still couldn’t fathom it.
“Why the name Carlton?” he queried, making a face. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for such a toff moniker.”
Morley shrugged, adopting a rather sheepish smile. “I knew I had to reinvent myself, but as a grief-stricken lad, I hadn’t exactly thought it through. When I showed up looking to enlist in a regiment, I knew that if I were to attain anything in life, I couldn’t be Cutter anymore. When they asked me my name, I panicked, and read Carlton off an advertisement for the Carlton football club.”
“Did you ever see war?” Ash tried to picture the lanky lad he’d known in regimental reds.
“I did,” he answered. “I served in Egypt and Afghanistan. I never lost the designation Dead Eye” He mimed looking down the barrel of a rifle. “I’ve more confirmed kills than any rifleman in the Queen’s Army.”
Blackwell never seemed to cease shaking his head, staring at Morley with one wide, disbelieving eye. “I still can’t seem to think past the part where you were a thief.”
Ash surveyed the reclining assemblage in the parlor. Perhaps three of the most intimidating, powerful, and somber men in the empire, natural enemies in every way, drinking identical snifters of Scotch whisky as they laughed and reminisced about the skills acquired by means of their misspent youths.
“I—suppose this means we have to make peace.” Blackwell extended his hand to Morley, who regarded it like one might a proffered soiled linen. “Oh, come now, Morley. We’ve made a tenuous connection over the years, haven’t we? Dare I say, an armistice of sorts? You have poached my favorite assassin for your own employee.”
“I’ve always maintained criminals make the best coppers.” Morley clapped his hand into Blackwell’s and shook it, firmly. “I suppose since we share a past with this one, we’ll be sharing a future, as well.” He shoved a thumb toward Ash. “Though befriending the notorious Rook would most certainly cost me my job.” The chief inspector glanced toward the door through which Lorelai had disappeared. “There is the trivial matter of the late earl…” A new anger narrowed his eyes to slits of wrath. “Though, after hearing your tale, I can’t say I’m sorry he’s dead.”
It had taken some time, but after Morley and Blackwell had untangled Ash’s memories of his first two decades, he had then filled them in on the subsequent twenty years. Waking up in the grave, being healed by Lorelai, then shanghaied by Mortimer, becoming the Rook. The Claudius Cache. All of it.
Blackwell’s eyes brightened, as though struck by an ingenious idea. “I don’t suppose you can claim your wife’s brother was killed by the Rook and, in turn, you hunted the pirate down and took your revenge…”
A twinge of displeasure twisted inside of him. “You mean … Ash Weatherstoke should kill the Rook?”
Morley gave a rather Gallic shrug. “You’d be a national hero. People would be less likely to consider your past, or investigate the origins of your dukedom.”