Kasey Michaels - The Regency Redgraves - What an Earl Wants / What a Lady Needs / What a Gentleman Desires / What a Hero Dares

“Nothing,” Gideon answered shortly. And then, a few moments later, his shoulders began to shake. “We dropped him.”

Jessica looked at him in the dim light of the false dawn. He was smiling. “You dropped him?”

“It wasn’t all that terrible. We’d tied him up in a sheet, and partway down the stairs Soames lost his grip on his end.”

“Oh, Gideon,” Jessica said, her own lips twitching in amusement. “How…um, how horrible.”

Gideon shrugged as if unconcerned, but the devil had crept into his eyes. “I suppose we could have apologized, but the marquis didn’t seem to mind.”

They were all three of them still laughing as the footman set down the coach steps in Portman Square, Jessica going off into new peals of exhausted mirth when she saw the clearly apprehensive look on the young man’s face. “My goodness, Waters,” she managed to choke out, “you look as if you’ve just seen a dead man.”

At that, she felt herself being swept up into Gideon’s arms as he climbed the steps to the mansion and headed for the stairs. “Bed now, for all of us,” he said, including Kate in this order.

“When do we go back to Cavendish Square?” Kate asked as she actually pulled on the railing to help propel herself up the stairs.

“We don’t. You’re returning to Redgrave Manor.”

“Giddy,” she said, very nearly whined, “don’t make me badger you. You know you’ll give in.”

“Not this time. Good night, Kate.”

Jessica gave the girl a quick wave as Gideon kicked open the door to their bedchamber. Once the door was closed again—and locked again—they both made short work of ridding themselves of their clothes and tumbling into the unmade bed. He kissed her, thanked her and then turned onto his stomach, clearly intending to sleep away what little remained of their wedding night.

Goodness! They were behaving like a long-married couple. Or at least like a long-married couple that had just disposed of a dead marquis.

She lay on her back while he lay on his belly. She lifted her hand and idly began stroking his bare back, more content than she could even imagine. Which, if she were to think about the entirety of her current situation, wouldn’t be very sensible of her. But it seemed sensible enough for now.

“Giddy? Really?” she asked him after a bit.

He mumbled something she probably shouldn’t have heard, and then sighed. “Good night, Jessica.”

She smiled up at the draperies. “Good night. Giddy.”

GIDEON LAID DOWN HIS FORK with extreme precision. Indeed, he’d kept his entire posture under careful control throughout the length of Jessica’s embarrassed recitation of the conversation she and Adam had shared in the modiste’s dressing room. He’d asked no questions. Until now, with her final admission.

“A journal? He was told to keep a journal?”

Jessica nodded, not meeting his eyes. “Or a diary, I suppose. In any event, he called it a journal, yes. But weren’t you listening? Adam’s…keeping a tally . As if the whole thing were some sort of twisted game. Even worse, if that’s possible, our father had been giving him lessons in assassination. You have to talk to him, Gideon. I certainly can’t. As it is, I can barely look at you, just telling you about it.”

“I need to see this journal.”

Jessica put the lie to her last statement as her eyelids flew up, and she stared at him. “Must you? I’d like to see it burnt. The point is, my father was training Adam to be just like him.”

“No, Jessica. The point is, we now know without a doubt the Society remains active. You confirmed it existed five years ago. Adam’s journal tells us it’s still going on. You see, we know they all kept journals, all the way back to the beginning, with my grandfather. Trixie told me about him, about the journals, just yesterday.”

Jessica put a fist to her mouth, closed her eyes. “I thought it was just something my father thought of, rather like keeping score of his kills at the hunt. They…they all wrote down what they did?”

“In great detail,” Gideon said, and then told her what Trixie had seen in his grandfather’s journals.

“Drawings? Charts? Are they all insane?”

Gideon pushed away his plate, his appetite gone. “One would think so. Either that, or terminally naive, considering the members all turned their yearly journals over to my grandfather for this business of verification, so their exalted leader or whatever they called him could verify the information and make the additions to their blasphemous bible. Once they’d done it, turned over a single journal, they were bound to him for life. There was no choice but to continue the practice, year after year.”

“Didn’t they realize what they were doing?”

“You mean, turning over their lives to their leader, their futures? They had to, surely. With those journals, the leader held them hostage to whatever demands he might make on them. And don’t forget, Jessica, there were guests at these so-called ceremonies. One person’s word might not inflict too much damage, but to be able to produce a dozen different journals, all naming the guest, all cataloguing the same depravities? If knowledge translates to power, and it always has, my grandfather, and my father after him, held the reputations of perhaps dozens of important men and, at least in my grandfather’s time, even some women in his hands.”

“And after them, whoever carries on with the Society even now. You think the journals are the reason the members are being killed?”

“I’m not certain if it’s the journals themselves, although I’d certainly want them destroyed if I had written any of them, or had I attended one of their ceremonies and then found out they existed. To have some stupidity I’d engaged in at twenty—”

“Or eighteen,” Jessica interrupted, sighing.

Gideon pushed back his chair and got to his feet. “Or at eighteen, yes. To have that act of idiocy brought back years later, when I was about to marry, or enter Parliament or some other government service? If I were to put my sights on becoming Prime Minister, or take the floor in the House of Lords to argue a position someone else might not care to have brought to a vote. On and on, Jessica. My life wouldn’t be my own. I could be forced to support causes that disgust me, vote against laws I felt proper. I could be forced to hand over copious amounts of money—even kill someone on command. The list of trouble those journals could cause a man is limitless.”

“But what about the leader? Your grandfather, your father, whoever else has served as the leader? The members could just as easily have controlled him, couldn’t they?”

“Try to control the one man who held all the evidence, on all of them? To threaten him, to expose him, would destroy them all. Who threatens the man who holds so many lives in his hand? But we have to consider the other side of this coin, as well. To belong to the Society, to be one of the chosen few—perhaps that prize was worth the rest.”

“And the…ceremonies. They may not want to give those up, either.”

“Your every vice indulged, your every perversion encouraged. Wine, women, opium. A new world order perhaps, with the Society in charge. All powerful persuasions. We’ll talk more about this when we know more.”

“Yes, but where are you going? It’s only eleven o’clock, Gideon. Adam’s still asleep.”

“Then it’s more than time he was awake.” He came around the breakfast table and put his hand on her shoulder. “We’re in this together, aren’t we?”

She looked up at him quizzically. “We are,” she said carefully. “Now why do I feel as if I’m not going to care for whatever you say next?”