Page 79 of A Duke's Keeper
“He’s called here too, then,” Markus guessed. “It must be him.”
“The Duke of Camine is an honorable gentleman,” Madam said to the stunned occupants of both rooms. “He has called here, offering nothing short of a king’s ransom for his sister’s well-being. Even as he’s been escorted from the club, he’s never once used title, insult, or force to gain the upper hand. If hehad found out about the history between Hawkins’s men and his sister, they’d be rotting in a cell, not dead on the streets.”
Markus paled. “His sister is...” He cleared his throat and leaned back in his chair, most certainly guessing exactly which of Madam’s employees had been attacked.
She’d have some explaining to do when she saw the old man next.
Lucien, who’d been decidedly quiet, gave Madam a hard stare. “You said ‘thatparticulargentleman.’”
Madam stilled, her gaze darting to the mirror and back. “I did.”
“There is another man, then, whom you suspect?”
Madam’s expression smoothed into a blank mask. “Several.” She indicated the piles of files on her desk with a flourish of her hand. “Dozens of men who may hold a grudge against one of my girls.”
Camille didn’t miss the other woman’s misdirection, or her motion using herlefthand. Madam knew something important, something she was refusing to share with her partners, a different gentleman she fostered suspicions of.
“There have been sightings, whispers of a man in black watching from the shadows,” Lucien said.
Camille shivered at the mental image his description conjured, along with a nagging feeling she discarded.
That person from last night had been a phantom, a fear of her own making. Any number of people who stumbled upon a body in the streets would run. The figure she saw could just as easily have been a working man on his way to a morning shift at one of the cotton mills.
Logic interrupted her self-soothing thoughts. The mills were on the other side of the city, and any sailor or merchant would have been abed at such an hour with their days starting with the dawn. The whispers of warning in her mind grew clearer.
She ignored them.
There were plenty of other fair-haired men in London, and wigs continued to hold on to the fashion fringes despite the itchy and indecorous nonsense they provided to society. Some dandy may have stumbled upon the body after an unfortunate separation from friends while on a drunken crawl. Explanations for what she’d seen abounded. Plus, there’d been blood everywhere, enough that even her flawless mind could have been wrong.
But she wasn’t. Camille prided herself on her ability to separate her emotions from her thoughts. Strip away the terror and dread from the memory of that night and the image in her mind became unbearably clear.
And Camille knew the truth.
The man hadn’t been stalking Syd. He’d been stalkingher.
Her throat constricted. She clutched her chest, but the air coming in wasn’t enough. Did she truly believe Renard would kill those men?
No!Her inner voice screamed. She slid to the floor, her face in her hands. Her mind and her heart warred.
Renard wouldn’t hurt anyone.
But he’d gotten into a bloody brawl the first time we met.
He was protecting me.
His angry words hurt you.
But his touch is always gentle.
Men are always gentle until they’re not.
I’d know if he were a killer.
No one suspected your father of anything until it was too late.
Her heart couldn’t deny the last point.
Camille screamed into her hands. It couldn’t be true. The man had apologized, had said how much he wanted their family. Had that all been a lie?
