“Dolt,” Barbara said. Her titian head disappeared from the window, and a minute later she was standing on the other side of the scrolled wrought iron gate.
Kendra felt like a guttersnipe beside Barbara’s lush, fashionable form, but she couldn’t dredge up enough energy to feel properly chagrined. She was so tired.
“Let her in, you clodpoll,” Barbara said. She’d never been known for her tact. The gate swung open. “I know just where your brothers are.” Before Kendra knew it, she was following Barbara down the maze of halls that traversed Whitehall’s two thousand rooms. “And your husband along with them.”
“What?” Kendra stopped in her tracks, her heart leaping with relief—until she realized Barbara had to be mistaken.
“You’re married to Amberley, aren’t you?” Barbara pouted as she took Kendra’s arm and hurried her along. “And I wasn’t invited to the wedding. You know how I like a good party.”
“We didn’t have much of a wedding,” Kendra said woodenly. Trick wasn’t here—he was dead in the ground in a graveyard near Newgate.
Coming to a stop, Barbara threw open a magnificent carved and gilded door. Beyond, Kendra saw a splendid sitting room in shades of gold and black. A fire blazed on a marble hearth. King Charles sat in a tufted velvet chair, his head thrown back in laughter. Jason sat in another, laughing along with him.
And reclining on a black satin daybed, a smile curving his lips and a cheroot in one hand, sat Patrick Iain Caldwell.
The scoundrel wasn’t dead.
If she’d had a pistol at her disposal, she’d have rectified that.
EIGHTY
SHE BOLTED past Barbara, retracing her steps through the palace and outside. The hackney was still waiting, and when a hysterical girl begged the driver to take her to a town house, he wasn’t about to disagree.
She hadn’t known it was possible to feel such deep hurt. No matter Trick’s reasons, that he could let her go through all that, allow her to think he was dead…
It was the most unforgivable betrayal she could imagine.
He would never, ever measure up to even the lowest of her expectations. She couldn’t live with such a man—couldn’t live with herself if she accepted such a marriage. Such a lack of basic caring and decency.
Cold anger. It was the safest emotion to feel, the one—the only one—that would protect her from being ripped apart.
She was going to her house, not Trick’s. Caldwell House had never felt like hers, and it never would, any more than Amberley or Duncraven had. When the hackney pulled up in front of the house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, she couldn’t wait to get inside.
As always, Goodwin opened the door. “A bath, please, Goodwin. And pay the hackney driver, if you will.”
Leaving him openmouthed, she barged past, heading for the wide, curving staircase and the comfort of her feminine chamber upstairs. A chamber no man had ever slept in.
Ford was waiting in the entry, seated on one of two matching brocade chairs. He leapt to seize her arm. “Kendra.”
Not wanting to, she stopped and turned to him.
His blue gaze swept her costumed form. “When we arrived at Whitehall and learned from King Charles what had happened, Jason sent me back immediately to let you know your husband was well and would soon be free. But you weren’t here.”
His voice betokened more concern than vexation, but she didn’t have it in her to express sorrow for causing him worry. Not now. She had no space left for any more emotions now.
“I sent six servants out looking—”
Pulling her arm free and turning away from his accusatory eyes, she climbed the graceful stairs, one foot in front of the other, just as she always had.
Her chamber was the same as always, too. A mint-green oasis of familiarity. Nothing in her life had been familiar lately—not her feelings and not her surroundings. Here, in her old room, she could flip back the calendar to last June, when she’d been an innocent girl living her placid, boring life.
Here, in her old room, she could call for a bath and wash away not only the foulness of Newgate, but all her confusing emotions. The first blush of love and the subsequent hurt. The incredible joy of fulfillment, the disappointment and disillusion. All of it—the ups and the downs, and the downs and the ups, and the final descent into that pit of despair.
She’d never appreciated how wonderful her old, predictable life had been.
When the bath was prepared, she peeled off Dulcie’s clothes and sank into the steaming water right up to her chin, ready to recover that lovely, boring life. Who needed a husband? Especially one who felt so little for her that he would lie to escape her and then let her think he was dead and laugh it off like the world’s best joke.
She knew when it was time to give up.
With shaking fingers, she unfastened the clasp on the amber bracelet and let it fall to the carpeted floor. Then she tugged off the plain gold band. When she dropped it, it rolled a few inches from the carpet onto polished wood before landing flat with a tiny plop. Until now, since that fateful day in Cainewood’s little chapel, it had never left her hand.
She hardly noticed her tears dripping into the lavender-scented water. Just as she hardly noticed the knock at the door until it opened.
“Kendra.”
The expression on Trick’s face was achingly apologetic, but she’d been through that before. He wouldn’t fool her ever again.
Sinking deeper into the water, she dashed the tears from her cheeks and narrowed her eyes. “Who let you in here?”
Still dressed in rumpled black velvet and looking more than a little unsteady, he quietly shut the door behind him. His gaze flicked to the amber bracelet, then back to her. “You didn’t mind the last time I walked in on your bath.”
Despite all the anger and hurt, she blushed to remember. “That was before I left you,” she
