He laughed reluctantly. “There’s a looking glass somewhere in this lurid chamber. You only have to employ it to confirm your beauty.”

“Beauty now, am I?” She dropped her head on his shoulder. “If you think so, your grace.” She drew her fingers through her hair. “We have to let Sir Daniel know.”

He swallowed dryly. Her hair glinted in the dark, and he was in her bed. “I’m leaving any moment to tell him. Are my legs on the floor yet?”

“You’d better be careful you-know-who doesn’t catch you sneaking out of this room.”

His gaze wandered over her. She was brushing her fingers through her hair like a self-conscious siren. It was a common female act that aroused him. But when Harriet did it with that come-hither smile of hers, his blood came to a boil. “It’s the end of the week,” he mused. “Do you remember what was meant to happen?”

“Of course I do,” she whispered, her fingers falling still. “And I’ve found myself a position, by the way, so you don’t have to bother. I realize that you’ve been preoccupied, but I took the initiative.”

“What position?” he asked, bending over her.

“I thought I might go to Cornwall.”

“What?”

She managed a weak nod. “To a place called Lizard’s Point.”

“What in the name of God?”

“Well, it’s got stormy seas and shipwrecks. It seemed like an ideal place to recover from regret.”

He smiled slowly. “Perhaps we can both go there soon.”

“You don’t understand,” she said in hesitation, making most of it up as she went. “I am going to offer my services as a governess to some brooding widower. He-”

“-won’t live long, either.”

“-will be withdrawn and temperamental. He might leave me alone to raise his children. But then again, he might just sneak into my chamber one night and take advantage of my fallen status.”

He laughed. “He’ll have a hard time doing that with me in your bed.”

“Get out,” she said suddenly, pushing her hands against his chest.

“I was going to wait,” he said, catching her hands in his. “But now I’m persuaded that planning a wedding will be more of a pleasant distraction for Primrose than anything inappropriate.”

“Whose wedding?” she demanded, her face white in a veil of flowing flame-red hair.

“Frankenstein’s creation and his mate,” he answered dryly. “Give me some credit for scruples, Harriet. I would hardly be sitting in your bed with my aunt liable to burst in at any time. This room, as you know, has no lock. And you must also have known that I would never have held your hand in public had I not harbored honorable intentions.”

She glanced away.

“I have gone so far as to obtain a special license for our wedding. What do you think of that?”

He saw the smile she tried unsuccessfully to suppress.

“You-” He pulled her up from the bed. “You knew. How?” He demanded. “When?”

She started to laugh. “I found out only tonight, I swear it. I didn’t mean to go prying in your desk, but when I saw the special license sitting between those vulgar pictures of us, I just knew.”

“Well, that takes the surprise out of a proposal, doesn’t it?”

She framed his face in her hands and kissed him until he was laughing, too. “Does Primrose know as well?” he asked gruffly.

“No,” she whispered, her eyes glistening with mischief. “But I have a sense she won’t be entirely surprised herself.”

He held her in silence for only another moment more. “I’d wed you today if our house weren’t in crisis.”

“A duke can’t just get married without involving his family.” She eased from his arms. “Go on before we are caught. Sir Daniel will find out if that name means anything.”

She was right.

He had to catch the detective before another day went by.

Chapter Thirty-two

The woman’s screams tore right through Grim Jack Gardner’s vitals. He must be dead this time. Only a creature from hell could shriek to raise a body from its resting place. Which made him wonder what sort of coffin he had been laid in. He sniffed, his nostrils quivering in offense.

Criminy, the indignity he had been done-buried in a bleedin’ wheelbarrow, under a shroud of fetid straw, soggy turnips, and God only knew what else.

A miserable drizzling mist fell from above.

The screaming had stopped, but not before his gaze lifted to the white face in the attic window of the alley lodging house. The angel of death was beckoning him with her hand.

He shook his head, mouthing an apology for having to miss their appointment. If Mistress Hades wanted Jack that badly, she’d have to chase him down like everyone else.

In the blink of an eye she disappeared. Vanished, as if she’d decided his soul wasn’t worth the price of pursuit.

Perhaps she had been an angel of mercy. It was about time someone up above showed Grim Jack a little understanding. Whatever she was, he had no intention of waiting for her in a wheelbarrow.

He lurched to his feet and stumbled into the dark. Where was he? He thought he recognized an apothecary shop. There was a sign on the door.

Five Hundred Pounds

REWARD

FOR THE APPREHENSION

OF THE

MONSTER

Jack squinted to read the finer print before giving up and tearing the damned thing down to stick inside his begrimed coat. “Five ’undred pounds,” he mused. “Who’d ’ave thought it?” He could turn himself in, bribe ten magistrates and near every gaoler in Newgate, and still come out with enough cash to retire. He might have a bit of change for the grandson Grim Jack had been forbidden to visit. Or he could drink himself to death, a task half done according to the surgeon who had stitched him up like a spinster’s corset after his last run-in with the wrong end of a blade.

God, he ached. He stank. And he was still unconvinced he wasn’t wandering the crooked streets of hell. He had to have a drink. But he decided that the death angel in the window was as real as the voices wafting from the tavern from which he had been tossed by Nick Rydell a month or so ago.

He crossed the street as a whore came out from the pub with a drunken gent weaving circles around her. He ducked into a shadowed doorway of a harness shop before he could be noticed. The fog began to lift from his head, and as it did he realized with a sense of disappointment that no one in their right mind would pay a duke’s ransom to have his rotten carcass returned.

A duke’s ransom.

There was another poster.

Whitechapel, April 1818

WHEREAS AN ABDUCTION

Has Been Made of a

YOUNG LADY

FROM THE PRIVATE ACADEMY

IN WHICH SHE RESIDED

Pain shot through his eyes. His body shook with such violence that the words on the poster pranced up and down like puppets in a Punchinello show. Abduction? Private academy?

Damned if his own traitorous daughter hadn’t been working in a fancy school the last he’d heard of her. She was clever, Grim Jack’s girl, and even though she’d turned her back on her family, the day anyone abducted his little Harriet-who looked so like her dead mother, Jack couldn’t stand the sight of her-was the day he’d rise out of his grave and take revenge.

If not that fine reward.

There was no question of a proper wedding, not until Edlyn was found. No one had the heart for a celebration under these circumstances. But the news might help his aunt forget their troubles for a while.