Page 52 of The Housebreaker's Assistant
Greer placed his free hand over their joined hands. “Because I care about you too much, Penny,” he said in a breathless whisper, eyes downcast for a moment. He raised them to meet Penny’s gaze. “I’ve always cared about you. From the moment I first saw your cocky face and your wicked smile. Even though I didn’t want those feelings and tried to ignore them, you wouldn’t let me.”
“Naturally,” Penny said with a lopsided grin, though his heart pounded with more serious emotion.
Greer matched his grin for a moment before he, too, turned serious. “I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to you because of this business.” He swallowed, and something close to pleading shone in his eyes. “I’m sorry something like this happened to you already. I would do anything to keep you safe, but if my own demons prevent me?—”
“They won’t,” Penny reassured him, closing his hand over their joined ones as well. “You aren’t that child any longer, and I’m not a defenseless boy either. I would do anything to keep you safe, too, but more importantly, I can tell you that we both feel the same about Lord Fabian. We’re united on that front.”
“We are,” Greer said with a nod.
“We’ll rescue him, and that will be like rescuing ourselves,” Penny said, grinning.
Greer smiled back at him, but only for a moment. “How?” he asked, not as an abstraction, but as a genuine inquiry about how they moved forward. “We know that there is very little time before Underhill comes to collect the man. We know Lord Fabian’s room in the tower is guarded. And we may have just lost a convenient place near the castle to hide.”
Penny frowned. Greer was right. Being caught by the farmer wasn’t just a mild fright. It could prove to be a major inconvenience. Especially if the farmer spread the word about two men of dubious moral character roaming the area.
“We’re not going to discover any solutions idling our time away here,” he said, letting go of Greer’s hands and backtracking to pick up his case. “I’d suggest we go back to the village and think about how we plan to flee from the castle with Lord Fabian and find our way to the nearest train station, but we might not have time for that.”
“We need another village,” Greer said with a sigh, following Penny and picking up his own case. “Or a fishman’s hovel at least. Something tells me it won’t be easy to revisit the places we’ve already been. Not after Bob caught us.”
Penny smiled at the idea. “Could we escape by sea?” he asked, pointing for Greer to walk across the meadow toward the sea with him instead of back along the path toward the village. “Is there anything like a fishing village near here?”
“I’ve no idea,” Greer said. “All we can do is look.”
That was what they did. They headed through thick grass and sandy slopes, walking directly west toward the sound and scent of the waves. Neither of them said anything. Penny was lost in his thoughts and certain Greer was mired in his own.
He didn’t care that Greer was still haunted by his father and the abuse he’d received years ago. He felt strangely free from his own demons, now that he’d confessed them, too. Everyone who made it out of childhood had scars and wounds they carried withthem. It was simply the nature of the world. The trick was to use those scars and to learn from the wounds so that they might help other people.
Which was precisely what they were doing.
They reached a sandy strip of beach interspersed with rocky outcroppings and caves midway through the morning. The vastness of the sea and the emptiness of the beach left Penny feeling deeply unsettled.
“London streets I can manage,” he said, raising a hand to his forehead and glancing up and down the shoreline. “This is terrifying.”
Greer grunted a laugh that Penny took to mean agreement. “I don’t see any fishing villages,” he said.
“Perhaps that way?” Penny asked, pointing to the north. Trebarral Castle was visible in the distance.
Greer widened his eyes and stared at him. “You want to go back toward the castle in the middle of the day, when they already know who we are, and with the possibility that our friend Bob might return to the castle to alert them to our presence in the area?”
When it was put that way….
But no, even though Greer painted those things as problems, Penny suddenly saw them as possibilities.
“Would the farmer really return to the castle today only to warn them about two men fucking in his hayloft?” he asked. “After he already made a delivery yesterday?”
Greer tilted his head to the side consideringly.
“The masters of the castle might be villains, but I found the servants to be quite nice,” Penny went on. “They might remember me fondly from yesterday. I’m sure by the time we reach there, I could come up with an excuse for our presence, if we’re even noted. If we appear to be there merely to enjoy thesun and the waves, they might not consider for a moment why we’re really there.”
“You’re relying on too many possibilities and coincidences,” Greer said with a frown.
“I am,” Penny agreed. “But do we have time for anything else?”
Greer huffed out a breath and ran a hand over the bottom half of his face. Finally, he admitted, “No.”
“And who knows?” Penny said, starting down the beach toward the castle. “There might be a boat there, one the servants or masters of the castle use for amusement or fishing, that we can borrow when the time is right.”
“You want to steal a boat to sail away with Lord Fabian in the middle of the night?” Greer asked.
