Page 56 of Winter's Waltz
One taste of passion with Max had not been enough.
It would never be enough.
“We needn’t get leg-shackled then,” Peter suggested. “I’ll be your man. I’ll be more man than ’is lordship could ever be.”
Almost as if Peter’s snarled insult had conjured him, a flurry of footfalls outside the kitchens heralded the arrival of intruders just before the Marquess of Sundenbury crossed the threshold, with Jasper Sutton behind him.
And they were not alone. There was a sullen stranger, wrists bound, face battered as if he had been at the mercy of some flying fists, at the end of Sutton’s pistol.
“Gen,” Max said, striding toward her.
Her name had never sounded so lovely as it did in his deep baritone and the crisp, clean accent she had come to adore. He was dressed bang up to the mark, looking as if he’d just walked from a ball into her kitchens. And mayhap he had. When he had been at Lady Fortune, he had dressed far more simply. Tonight, he looked every inch the nobleman and ducal heir he was.
Her heart clenched painfully in her chest.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him, hating herself for the way her voice emerged, for the longing hidden within its depths.
“Aye, what’re you doing ’ere?” Peter demanded, positioning himself between Gen and Max as if he were her protector.
Gen didn’t need a protector, and she didn’t care for Peter’s suddenly possessive air when it came to her. She sidestepped him.
“Odd you should ask,” Max drawled, “as you are one of the primary reasons for my presence here.”
“Me?” Peter scowled.
“You,” Jasper Sutton said, nudging his captive with the barrels of his flintlock. “Tell Gen Winter what you told us, Wilmore.”
Wilmore?
She took note of the man’s split lip. “Ruben Wilmore?”
“Aye,” he acknowledged, piercing her with a glare, though one of his eyes was swollen.
“Get that dirty dog out of ’ere,” Peter spat, stalking forward with fists clenched.
“If there’s any dirty dog here, it’s you, Peter Moore,” Wilmore charged.
Gen went cold, then hot with burgeoning outrage, then cold again as realization dawned on her. Ruben Wilmore was the man Sutton suspected of the attacks. And he knew Peter by name.
She turned to one of her oldest friends, and the sorrow she read in his face made her heart feel as if it had just been cast to the deepest depths of the sea. “Peter.”
“He and Wilmore are behind the attacks on Lady Fortune,” Max told her.
“That they are.” Jasper Sutton delivered a particularly vicious jab to Wilmore’s ribs that had the man grunting in pain. “Right amount of persuasion, and Wilmore here sang like a fucking bird. Didn’t help he’d been running his mouth at The Sinner’s Palace, telling everyone he could that he was getting his revenge on the Winters and earning pretty blunt for it, too.”
“Your brother’s the one what got mine killed,” Wilmore shouted at her. “You deserve to suffer. All you bleedin’ Winters do.”
Betrayal was like a knife, cutting through her as she stared at Peter, a man she had trusted. “You went to him, didn’t you?”
Peter hung his head. “I ain’t proud of what I done, Gen. I know it was wrong, but when ’isnabs here started sniffing after you, I wanted to see ’im gone. I knew it was a matter of time before you was ’urt.”
She shook her head, grief almost making her tongue immobile. “The way you hurt me, Peter? By setting fire to my kitchens, stealing my wine and my ledgers…”
It all made sense now. The letter implicating Max. The fact that Arthur had only caused a fuss the night of the fire when he’d smelled the smoke and that he’d been locked in the larder. She had never understood why her fiercely protective hound would not have barked at a trespasser.
But now she did. Because Arthur knew Peter, and because Peter had made certain Arthur would be somewhere within the hell that he could not cause a disturbance.
“It weren’t me what did those things, Gen,” Peter said. “Wilmore did.”
