“Ghaw, get a load of that!” Wes, the youngest of Darius’s crew exclaimed with a hiss when they finally broke the bloody never-ending tree line.
Darius almost had to rub his eyes. He couldn’t quite believe what he saw. His hand went to his pistol and his men dropped the trees and did the same, all drawing weapons and crouching low.
It was Marcus who spoke first. “How long do you think that scrap of a girl can hold that rifle like that for?”
On the front step of a manor house that was indeed in need of demolition and a rebuild, stood Eliza Penfold. She wasn’t wearing her muffler or coat this time. In her bare hands rested a very powerful hunting rifle as she stared down its barrel at two well-dressed men. Neither man appeared overly worried about the situation but Darius could easily see the tension holding Eliza and that gun.
Snatches of the conversation drifted on the breeze but Darius couldn’t make out what they said or what they argued about over the roar of blood in his ears, only that they argued. He thought he heard Eliza demand they leave. It was all he needed.
“I do believe the lady asked you gentlemen to get off her land,” Darius called as he stood and began his approach, his gun in front of his stomach, his finger on the trigger, adrenaline surging in a most welcome way.
“This doesn’t concern you, friend,” the shorter of the two gentlemen said as he backed two short steps away from the house.
“Any concern of the miss is a concern of ours, friend,” Duncan added as he and his men came to stand on the stoop beside a trembling Eliza. Darius hadn’t noticed how she shook from a distance but it was unmistakable now as he paused at her side.
“We just want the money we came to collect, nothing more.”
Now that Darius stood front on to the men, his blood ran cold and his trigger finger itched when he finally saw the taller one’s face. Shit. Taking a second glance at the other man he was tempted to shoot without question. Fuck.
The tension wound up a notch when the shorter, older man narrowed his gaze in Darius’s direction showing disbelief and something else. Probably anger. Perhaps even a touch of murderous intent. “Jonathan?”
“The one and only,” Darius said, the effort monumental to unwind his grip to salute with his pistol to his forehead, a slight nod, then back to the ready.
It could have all been that simple. From such a close distance, Darius could discharge a bullet. If his aim was true—and he’d make sure it was—half of his father’s malicious face would be splattered on the drive. Darius would have empty pockets but the torment his father had started all those years ago when he’d raped a maid would be over. Just one bullet, he thought, to make up for a lifetime of debauchery and depravity. His finger began to curl.
“You said your name is Darius,” Eliza hissed. Her arms trembled and he wondered if she was deciding to turn the rifle on him. “Are you with them?”
“Never in a million lifetimes.” He said the words with purpose, with sincerity, with a sureness he felt to the bottom of his very soul. He turned back to the two men, still debating murder. “I do believe it’s time for you to leave.”
“Is that how you’d speak to your father after all these years?”
“It is precisely how I’d speak to the spineless cur who had me beaten and thrown onto a random ship going anywhere but here.” Those were the words he’d used that night, the words his half-brother had sniggered at, the words his father had said to a random sailor as coins jingled from one hand to another. They had all known what the young Jonathan’s fate would be when he was discovered and assumed a stowaway—half-dead, weak and hungry.
His grandfather would never know where he went and no one else would ever have been able to confirm his sire’s dirty secret. That he’d fathered a bastard two months before wedding the woman he’d claimed to all of England was the love of his life, the woman who came with one of the biggest dowries in London’s history. If he loved her so much, he wouldn’t have fucked the upstairs maid at the very moment his future wife was being fitted for her wedding gown. That’s how crudely the cook had put it when Darius had been barely six years old.
In every quiet corner, for the first half of his life, his sire had made it well known that Darius was a bastard and if it hadn’t been for the old Earl of Wickham stepping in, Darius would have been drowned at birth. Well, Jonathan would have been and the man, Darius, would never have come into being. He thanked his grandfather for it now. His father, however, he yearned to wipe from existence.
“Should have just killed him,” his half-brother, Harold, muttered beneath his breath.
“Perhaps,” the earl said slowly. It wasn’t what his sire said or meant by the word that chilled Darius, it was the contemplative way his gaze moved from Darius to Eliza and then back again. “What are you doing here?”
Eliza answered before Darius could spit out the lies he’d spent months rehearsing. “He is my new neighbour.”
Shit, shit, shit.
*
Eliza knew almost instantly that she had made a grave mistake. It was written all over Wickham’s face and Darius’s now clean-shaven mouth tightened to a line so white and thin that he almost appeared to have no lips at all. She wished she could turn and face him, demand more of the story, but she already knew
