My Fair Marchioness (Scandalous Affairs Book 3) Christi Caldwell (popular books of all time txt) 📖

the letter, she read the words there, ones she’d already committed to memory.

Dearest Adairia,

You have been gone years from our lives, but you’ve not truly been gone. You have a home here, with me, your aunt. You were so very loved and beloved. There has been a void with your absence. I implore you to come home and claim your rightful place as the earl’s daughter and a duke and duchess’s niece that you are. The world awaits. I await.

Ever yours,

The Duchess of Arlington

Numb inside, Julia trailed her fingers along the words upon the page that were the most faded, indicating another fingertip had run most frequently over them.

You were so very loved and beloved. There has been a void with your absence.

That would have been the part that her whimsical, fanciful, head-in-the-clouds Adairia would have focused first and foremost upon. Not about claiming her rightful place. Not about being an earl’s daughter or a duke’s niece. Rather, she’d focused on the romantic words of a relative who missed her and wanted her back.

Hugging her arms around her middle, Julia inadvertently crushed the note in her hand. She immediately relaxed her palm, sparing the page that had given her friend such hope, this only real piece she had that belonged to Adairia.

Nay, that was why she couldn’t go. She’d encouraged Adairia to give up that dream and stay here. And if she’d gone, she would have been safe. At least for a while. Who knew? Perhaps she could have fulfilled a dream that this duchess had, and in so doing, she could have found a place of security and happiness among the ranks of the princes and princesses she’d always imagined belonging to.

Her entire being aching at the loss, a loss that was her fault, Julia rolled onto her side. Her hood flopped, and she lay with her cheek upon the dirt and stone floor. Rocks bit painfully into her face, and she welcomed the sting of pain for the distraction it provided from the agony of Adairia’s death. Reaching inside her cloak, she fished out the heavy purse she’d been given by the gent in the streets. How excited and relieved Adairia would have been. Not when all the money that fine lord had given Julia couldn’t bring her sister back.

Noisy footfalls sounded outside, the clumsy sounds hinting at a drunken man unstable on his feet.

Unblinking, Julia stared at the narrow one-foot-by-one-foot window that revealed a pair of tattered trousers on a man outside.

Then those trousers disappeared from sight, and the handle of her door jiggled.

This was whom he’d sent for her? A drunken, slurring lout?

With a sigh, Julia stared overhead at the cracked plaster ceiling.

Just let it happen.

Get it over with.

Rand Graham knew her to be as disloyal as Adairia and deserving of a swift end for it. They wouldn’t rest until she was offed.

And she shouldn’t rest in peace as long as Adairia was gone.

Graham’s henchman fought with the handle once more. “Oi know ye’re in there. Open the door. Wouldn’t be locked if ye wasn’t.”

Well, that was a surprisingly cognizant conclusion, given his inebriated state.

“Open up so Oi can get this done with.”

Get this done with.

As in kill her.

And perhaps rape her first. That was, after all, the way of the streets. The gang leaders, and the men who answered to them, brought as much suffering as they could to the unlucky ones on the receiving end of their wrath.

Muttering and cursing to himself, the stranger finally abandoned the handle. A moment later, his legs reappeared in the window.

He dropped down on his knees, and resting his palms on the ground, he pressed his face against the panel.

Adairia had insisted upon keeping their window clean. To let the light in, she’d always said.

Leering eyes met hers, and the moment that bloodshot gaze landed on her, a smile split the bearded stranger’s face, revealing a mouth bare of all teeth but for the front four, brittle and yellow and surely to fall from his rotted mouth soon.

He waved. “Let me in, Princess. Wait… that was the other one.” He chortled, his corpulent frame shaking like he’d told the most hilarious jest and not as though he’d spoken about Adairia. “Sent to have a talk with ye,” he called. “An’ give ye a gift, too.” He cupped himself between the legs.

Her teeth chattered, and while he proceeded to cajole her into letting him inside, Julia let her gaze slip to the elegant scrawl and the fine, fancy words written there. It was likely a trap. There was, as she’d said to Adairia, little chance that any of this was real and that when she got there, she’d be met by one of Rand Graham’s many brutes. That it was nothing more than a trap.

I deserve the same fate.

“Now, open up now… because Oi’m startin’ to get angry…”

She didn’t deserve to run and hide, and yet… God help her. She wasn’t ready to go. Certainly not like this, curled up on the floor like a beaten dog.

Fueled by a sudden and selfish determination to live, Julia stuffed the purse inside her cloak and scrambled to her feet; the heavy cloak fell in a whoosh about her ankles. She stuffed the suddenly even more precious page inside her dress and fetched the fireplace poker.

Brandishing it close, she hovered at the side of the door. “Get the hell out of here,” she called.

“Ye’re as brave as yer friend was stupid. Or maybe ye’re just stupid, too.” He guffawed, and then he heaved his broad frame into the panel, shaking the wood.

She drew in a shaky breath and let him continue to batter the panel. Then, swiftly turning the lock, she yanked the door open.

The man cried out, his forward momentum sending him