The Lady's Guard (Sinful Brides Book 3) Read online

  Silence stretched on, punctuated by the ticking clock. Since he’d been a boy of four or five battling an older, bigger lad for the scraps in the street, Niall had never backed down. And yet, not only was Ryker majority proprietor, he was also the man who’d saved Niall’s worthless skin. “We are clear,” he bit out. “I’m returning to the floor.” Niall shoved back his chair, and it scraped noisily along the wood floor.

  “You are relieved for the night.” His brother climbed to his feet.

  “I’m not tired.” He forced those words out in the perfectly cultured tones he’d practiced. The ones he dragged out when he was demonstrating his calm. Those and the fancy garments he donned were the concessions he’d made to the peerage.

  Ryker folded his arms at his chest and studied him through black lashes. “This isn’t about whether you’re tired. Where were you earlier?”

  At that abrupt shift, Niall remained unblinking. Christ. He couldn’t know. “I paid a surprise visit to our liquor supplier.” Their latest one, who’d also begun sending them broken bottles.

  Ryker eyed him for a long while and then nodded slowly. “You’re relieved for the night.”

  A protest sprang to Niall’s lips.

  Ryker leaned forward. “Nor am I asking you to quit your post for the evening. I’m telling you. Your head isn’t clear.”

  It hadn’t been clear since Ryker’s wife had nearly died under Niall’s watch. At that remembered failing, he clenched his jaw. Still, he’d make no apologies for his volatile temper. Not against a fancy toff who’d deserved more than a bloodied nose. “Is that all, my lord?” he asked tauntingly, dragging out the courtesy title that had been bestowed upon the other man for saving the now Duke of Somerset from Diggory.

  Except Ryker, unflappable as he always was, even with marriage, didn’t rise to the bait. He merely inclined his head. “No, that isn’t all. Your temper is creating problems here, Niall. The moment we four entered this hell, we made a pact that this club came before all else,” Ryker continued somberly.

  Niall’s entire body coiled tight, as tension thrummed through him. His brother would call into question his actions at the club?

  “I put this club before all else,” he gritted out. Nothing mattered more than the Hell and Sin. It had become the only home he’d known and the security he’d once thought impossible to attain.

  “No,” Ryker said calmly. “You put our reputation above all else. So much so that you’d defend it, jeopardizing our success.”

  Niall met that quiet pronouncement with a stony silence. His brother may have forgotten key codes of the street, but Niall had not. A man’s word and honor came before everything else. Allowing a person to call that honor into question cut the legs out from under a man with greater lethality than the sharpest blade.

  Tamping down a curse, Niall sketched a mocking bow and started for the door.

  “Niall?”

  He paused and glanced back.

  “You don’t have anything to prove. Mistakes happen.”

  Not in their world. There was no place for mistakes. Nor was Niall’s inability to ferret out who’d infiltrated their club for the better part of a year a mistake. It was a failing. Penelope’s near murder while under his watch was a failing.

  Forcing his head to move in a tight nod, he left the room and made his way through the halls. Niall reached the back of the club and waved off the guard at the exit. Fishing out a cheroot, he touched the tip to a sconce. Niall pushed the door open with his spare hand and stepped outside.

  Setting his back to the building wall, he folded one arm across his chest and proceeded to smoke. He allowed it to fill his lungs and exhaled. The smoke hung in the darkened space.

  Distant shouting and the occasional rumble of carriage wheels—familiar sounds—drove back some of the tension boiling under the surface of his taut frame. This was his world. This was where he was safe. Where he belonged. These streets he’d been born to, where whores, rapists, and murderers ruled and where the weak perished.

  As boys, when Calum and Adair had spoken of a life outside St. Giles, Niall had allowed them that foolish musing. Eventually, however, he’d come to believe it. His lips turned up in a sneer. What a bloody fool he’d been. That veneer of civility may have earned them a successful hell, but it had also marked them as weak to the lords of London’s underbelly. The threats on their club and Ryker’s wife had proven the folly in that facade. You could dress a man in fancy garb and teach him to speak like a gent, but you could never erase whom a man truly was. As such, Niall had dropped his false smile and presented instead the merciless man who’d once killed for coin.

  Men like Calum, Adair, and him didn’t belong anywhere but here. For the danger that dwelled and lurked, these streets were safer because of Niall’s understanding and mastery of them.

  Niall took another pull from his cheroot, and with his gaze did a sweep of the always dangerous alleys. Ultimately, Niall Marksman was a bastard born of the streets and destined to die here.

  And he’d have it no other way.

  Chapter 2

  They said Diana was mad.

  They said evil flowed through her veins, and the only future awaiting her was the halls of Bedlam.

  Never were those whisperings of insanity truer than they were in this moment.

  The carriage door opened, and Diana jumped as the wiry-thin driver jammed his head inside. “Oi said this is your stop.”

  Seated on the torn, threadbare squabs of the hired hack, Diana nervously darted her tongue over her lips. Already? With shaking fingers, she tugged the curtains aside.

  The moon splashed a white glow on the streets of St. Giles. Unpredictable streets. Dangerous ones that no person, especially not a duke’s daughter such as herself, should ever know. And yet, a year ago, she’d witnessed the hellish peril that came in walking these pavements. She lowered the tattered fabric back into place.

  “This isn’t my stop,” she said, deepening her voice. Hers was across the street and three buildings away. Such a distance would not mean much in Mayfair. But this was certainly not Mayfair.

  The driver waved his hand. “Oi said it is, boy.” Boy. Diana dropped her gaze, and heat flooded her cheeks. Apparently her disguise, borrowed from one of the stable lads, had proven far less flimsy than she’d feared. How very different a boy in threadbare garments was treated from a lady in a velvet cloak and deep hood. Giving silent thanks for the cover of darkness, she pulled her cap lower.

  Drawing on the limited—very limited—exposure she’d had, she mimicked the driver’s coarse speech pattern. “Oi ain’t getting out. Ya said ya’d bring me to the Hell and Sin Club.” She stole another look outside and squinted. “And this ain’t it.” On most occasions, she’d have sooner sliced off her fingers than take a jaunt through St. Giles. This, however, was not most occasions. As such, she’d step out into these streets, but on her own terms.

  With a growl, the driver ducked farther inside the carriage. “Ya already paid.”

  First streetwise mistake. Diana cursed her too-late error. Her brother and sister born in the Dials would never commit that folly.

  Diana dug her heels in. “I’m not getting out until you do what you were paid to do.” Society might see her as a pampered duke’s daughter on her way to madness, but she was no coward.

  He reached inside. “Oi said out, or Oi’ll do it for ya. Oi’ve more customers to collect.”

  Diana caught the inside of her cheek between her teeth. The weight of the coin in the pocket of her breeches fairly burned her. To brandish the small fortune before this man would be as wise as taking tea with the Devil.

  “Something wrong with your hearing, boy? Oi said out.”

  “Only thing wrong with either of us is your manners,” she spat. Tamping down a curse, she glared. “Out of me way,” she growled, shoving past him.

  She leapt to the ground and staggered, then quickly righted herself. The driver scrambled back onto his perch and then sprang his
conveyance forward.

  Gasping, she stumbled away from the hack and stepped out into the street. Into the path of a fast-galloping horse.

  Stomach lurching, she jolted sideways and came down hard on the cobblestones. Pain radiated up her hip, and Diana winced. She searched about for another hack, but alas the time for abandoning her plans had passed. She could not have risked putting down onto paper the words that she needed to relay. Yes, she’d crafted this plan, and she’d see it through. Shifting her cap back into place, Diana hopped to her feet. She found the beacon across the street. Awash in candles’ glow, the most notorious gaming hell in London beckoned.

  Her brother’s establishment.

  Or, if one wished to be precise, her half brother.

  Diana, however, had long believed blood was blood, and regardless of how much was shared, the key was that it was shared. He was kin.

  Even if he does despise you . . . even if he wants nothing to do with you.

  That truth had been evidenced in his failure to come ’round, invite her to his wedding, and . . . well, all host of indicators. But she needed him.

  What would her father have done had she gone to him again with fears that someone, intending Diana harm, had entered their home? The same thing he’d done when she’d expressed her worries over the twice-broken axles. He’d have seen those worries as a mark of her madness. A daughter seeing ghosts in the shadows, as he’d said that first and final time they’d spoken of it.

  “Hello, lad. Wanta earn some coinnn.” That slurred offering slashed across her inopportune musings, and she swiveled her head sideways. A gentleman in a sapphire cloak stumbled closer. A feral grin split his face, and his pearl-white teeth gleamed bright.

  Surprise slammed into her. The Earl of Stone? Of course, she knew lords frequented these streets and visited these hells, and yet there was something astounding in his presence here. He was a gentleman who’d once danced attendance on her, but who’d abandoned all pursuits, like so many others, when the truth of her family’s madness came to light. He was . . .

  “Come on, boyyy,” he cajoled, coming closer. He fiddled with the front of his breeches.

  By God, he was attempting to . . . seduce a boy? Fear turned in her belly. Fingers shaking, she pulled the fish knife she’d pilfered from the evening meal out of her boot. With the small but reassuring weight of it in her hand, she neatly sidestepped the earl. Heart crashing against her rib cage, Diana bolted across the street.

  She sprinted over the cobbles, avoiding the throngs of gentlemen making for the club. St. Giles was a place where humanity ceased to exist. That mocking truth echoing around her mind, she made a beeline for the narrow alley between the Hell and Sin Club and a neighboring establishment.

  Was this world any less ruthless than the one she belonged to? Chest heaving, she staggered to a stop. She darted a last look about for a hint of the loathsome Lord Stone. Preferring the unknown demons that lurked down the dark aisle, she ducked between the adjacent buildings.

  With the inky black of the night an eerie shroud, Diana pressed her back against the building and allowed her heart to slow its frantic rhythm. You have done this before . . . visited these streets. And you’re intending to leave London on your own at the end of the Season. Six weeks, to be precise. This should be nothing. Those silent reminders proved futile. After all, she’d once visited this end of London in the very light of day and witnessed firsthand the dangers of it. What greater evil lurked at night? Fueled by that reminder, she crept farther along. The leather soles of her boots muted her footfalls as she continued her trek. Her foot sank in a deep puddle, and the icy chill rang a gasp from her.

  Lifting her foot from the ankle-deep water, she picked her way over the sludge and pressed ahead. This is madness. Of course, that evidential truth merely proved every last whispered word about her true. Whispered words and oftentimes not so quietly spoken tales told of her and her family. Then, it was not every day a duchess ordered the death of her husband’s illegitimate children.

  As such, there was hardly any escape to the claims and worries of Diana’s own sanity. Nonetheless, madness was sometimes merited. This was one of those times.

  From somewhere in the distance, a faint cry went up, followed by the retort of a pistol, and her heart kicked up a frantic rhythm. Diana tightened her grip on the knife in her hand. I am going to die here. Which was rather ironic given that the sole reason for being in these dank streets of St. Giles was to prevent the whole dying business.

  Diana had never been a dramatic sort. She’d had accomplished governesses and nursemaids, all of whom had schooled her on deportment.

  Those lessons had been further ingrained into her by her mother, the Duchess of Wilkinson, when she’d been near. Which hadn’t truly been until Diana was reaching her Come Out and of use in the marriage-making department.

  It was why it took not one, not two, but three attempts before she came to the realization—someone was trying to kill her.

  “You’re going to see the task done for them,” she muttered under her breath. Pressing herself closer to the hard building, she crept farther down the alley. Her foot sank into another puddle, and she winced.

  A shout went up, followed by the rumble of ribald laughter and a slurred exchange between strangers out on the street. Diana bit her lower lip.

  Think of painting and the island of St. George’s and . . . living. Think of living.

  Something scurried across her feet. Gasping, she jumped away from the wall. A faint, raspy breathing filled the alley, and Diana whipped her gaze about just as something jammed against the back of her leg. Terror skittered along her spine, and, wielding her knife before her, she slashed a path forward.

  An immense figure stepped out of the shadows into Diana’s path, tearing a cry from her lips. For all my efforts, I’m going to die here, anyway. The thick shroud of darkness shielded his features. He reached for her, and she cried out. Bringing her arm back, she thrust her knife at him. He swatted her hand. Diana’s blade grazed the side of his leg.

  She may as well have stabbed him with a feather. The massive giant grunted, yanked the knife from her fingers, and tossed it to the ground. Fear held her petrified as that weapon clattered in the empty alley.

  Run.

  Diana turned on her heel, but a powerful arm immediately wrapped around her waist. Had the hulking beast shouted threats and brandished his own weapon, it couldn’t be more terrifying than his absolute silence. “P-please,” she rasped out. Merciless, he drove her stomach against the wall of the building. The force of that movement pushed all the air from her lungs.

  “Who are ya?” he demanded in a guttural Cockney, and through the haze of terror there was a faint familiarity.

  She angled her head back over her shoulder. It had been more than a year since she’d heard that voice, but through her fear, she caught the crooked nose, broken far too many times to ever mark the man as handsome. But it was his eyes that held her motionless. A shade of deep sapphire, so dark they were nearly black. Niall Marksman. The man whose arms she’d run into a year earlier, when she’d sought help for her sister, Helena. In those immediate days and months after his intervention, she’d wondered after the fierce, laconic guard who’d plucked her from harm, until, with the passage of time, it was as though she’d merely dreamt of him and his heroic intervention that day. Surely he remembered—

  He spun her around to face him. Relief assailed her. He recognizes me. She slid her eyes closed. Her relief died a quick death. Niall jammed his forearm against her throat, cutting off airflow. Panic spiraled in her belly. There could be no mistaking he was very much real and very close to ending her.

  The harsh, angular planes of his heavily scarred face set in an unforgiving mask while the vicious scar at the corner of his mouth that ran down to his neck proved him wholly unlike any of the gentlemen who’d once sought to court her.

  The jagged white scar throbbed at the corner of his lips. “Oi asked who ya are, boy
,” he seethed.

  Diana fought to push words out, but his ruthless hold squeezed off all airflow. She scrabbled with an arm that may as well have been carved of granite. Her efforts proved futile. Stars dotted her vision, and he shifted his arm slightly. She sucked in great, gasping breaths.

  “I’ll not ask ya a third time.” His voice emerged as a low growl, better fitting a primitive beast than a mere man. He caught her by the forearms, giving a slight shake, and the pins holding her cap in place loosened, tipping sideways.

  The long, tightly wound braid tumbled down past her shoulders in a damning testament. “L-Lady Diana Verney,” she managed to get out through her ravaged throat, and collapsed against the wall. She sucked air into her aching lungs.

  Incredulity registered in the dark depths of his cobalt eyes.

  A gentleman of the ton would be ashen-faced with horror at nearly ending a duke’s daughter in a St. Giles alley. Then, Niall Marksman was not most men. In one fluid movement, he bent, retrieved her hat, and then straightened. “By God, ya didn’t learn your lesson the first time ya were here?” he growled, jamming the article back on her head.

  Nearly witnessing her sister’s death? Running into a crowded gaming hell and having her reputation then shredded? Yes, she well knew what came in visiting St. Giles. Limbs still shaking with her latest brush with death, she forced her head to move in a semblance of a shake. “I need—”

  “Drop your goddamned voice. Why were ya running?” He was already searching over her shoulder.

  As her terror receded, embarrassment trickled in to take its place. She’d imagined monsters in the shadows. Diana massaged the sore muscles at her throat, loath to admit that mortifying fact. He singed her with a look that demanded answers. “Something startled me.”