The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)

by Cat Sebastian

She felt certain that blackmailers shouldn’t have freckles. It seemed a decidedly unvillainous characteristic.

Marriage: Far More Trouble Than You Might Think would be the title of her treatise.

“You have been busy,” he murmured, thinking of what a waste it was that in all the thousands of love poems written across the ages, nobody had ever thought to catalogue their beloved’s proficiency in crime.

“Marian,” he said, a horrible knowing quality to his voice, “are you jealous?” “Ha! What on earth could I be jealous of? I don’t want you to flirt with me.” “I flirt with you incessantly.” “You flirt with old ladies and inanimate objects.”

He needed to put that smile away before he did some mischief with it.

“If you say anything about the law, I’ll cry from frustration, I really will. Even though I’m bored senseless by Locke and Hobbes, I do know the principles. We were all living in horrible caves and hitting one another with sticks and then we stopped because we agreed to have laws instead. I just don’t particularly care.”

A year of marriage to the duke had taught Marian to take seriously even the idlest of hints made by men who had the power to make good on their threats.

That was always the trouble, wasn’t it? The act of confession took private shame and guilt and made them irrevocable. Once one gave voice to one’s more sordid truths, there was no ignoring them anymore.

“There are twenty rooms. And stalls for a few dozen horses.” “More horses than people?” He shrugged. “I think the people who used to run the place knew which species they preferred.”

“But now I’ve been shot and nobody’s in the mood for speeches. So, listen here, Sir John. I simply don’t have any more patience left. Does anything you’ve seen tonight make you think that I’d hesitate to sneak into your bedroom and smother you in your sleep? Because you don’t look terribly bright but you also don’t seem an utter incompetent.”

Don’t be tedious. Now, we need to cut this short before I ruin your carpet with even more blood.

“I’ll do whatever you need.” “I wasn’t asking for anything.” “I didn’t think you were. But you have it anyway.”

She laughed, bright and happy, and he knew she could see right through him. Her laughter was rare and precious; it was the sound of church bells, the sound of coins dropping into a pocket, and he wanted to save it in a bottle and wear it close to his heart.

In the last two days, she had smiled more than she had in the previous two years, and that was with a gunshot wound. The level of contentment she was experiencing was probably unsafe.

“I insist that we take clients. We cannot be a freewheeling band of felons.” “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Rob said.