A Wicked Conceit by Anna Huber (best young adult book series txt) 📗

much trouble since he accosted us on the street seven weeks prior. No doubt he’d discovered we’d attended the play at the Theatre Royal and had something to say on the matter.

“Have Bree and Anderley returned yet?” I asked him.

“No, my lady.”

I wasn’t surprised by this, though my aching back wished differently. “Send them up to the drawing room when they do. And will you have tea brought up,” I added, smothering a yawn with my hand.

His shrewd gaze softened. “Of course, my lady.”

“Thank you, Jeffers.”

Gage pressed a hand to the small of my back, guiding me up the stairs to the drawing room at the front of our town house. A fire had already been laid in the hearth, casting flickering shadows over the wallpaper patterned with delicate yellow twining roses and the sage green and daffodil upholstered furnishings. I sank into the walnut settee, sliding a pillow behind my back to help alleviate some of the pressure.

“The chairs at the theater are not very comfortable, are they?” Gage asked sympathetically.

“They’re torture,” I confirmed. At least for a woman in my condition. By the end of the play, I’d nearly given up and stood in the back of the box. Only the knowledge that such a move would have been seen by the other audience members as an indication of my agitation had kept me in place.

He sat beside me, urging me to turn and sit forward, and then began to knead my lower back. “Here, darling?”

I groaned in relief. “Yes.” For a few moments I ignored Bonnie Brock’s letter and gave myself over to the bliss of having my tired, aching muscles rolled and rubbed. “I will tell you one thing,” I said, draping my arms around my abdomen. “This child likes music every bit as much as his or her cousins.”

“Oh?” Gage murmured as I leaned my head back against his shoulder.

“Every time the orchestra began to play, he started to pummel my insides like he was performing one of those Russian Cossack dances we saw at the Adelphi in London.”

He chuckled, his breath warm on my ear.

“You can laugh. I’m the one getting my internal organs beaten to a pulp.”

He wrapped his arms around me, placing his palms flat on my rounded stomach below mine. “Now, see here, little one,” he chastised, pressing lightly into the skin. “Be kind to your mother. I know it must be getting rather tight in there. But you’ve only got a few more weeks to go. So let’s be a good little chap.”

As if to protest this, the baby suddenly lashed out with a firm kick. We laughed.

“You’re going to have to work on your tone of authority or this baby is going to run roughshod all over you,” I teased.

A rap on the doorframe signaled Jeffers’s return with the tea tray, and I settled back against the pillow as Gage volunteered to pour out. I paused to examine the seal on Bonnie Brock’s letter, noting again that it was stamped with the crest of Clan Kincaid—a castle with an arm rising out of it and brandishing a sword. The words This I’ll Defend arched across the bottom. Not for the first time I wondered whether he’d stolen the signet ring that made this mark from the laird of the Kincaid clan or if someone from his mother’s family had given it to him.

I broke open the seal and unfolded the missive to reveal the words written in Bonnie Brock’s neat hand. As always, he was brief to the point of rudeness, his letters formed with an arrogant slant.

Enjoy the play? We need to talk. Queen Street Gardens. Tomorrow. Sunset. Bring Gage if you must.

I frowned, trading Gage the paper for my cup of tea. I sipped while he perused the contents with a scowl.

“That man is like a canker.”

“Yes, and a particularly irksome one, at that.”

He dropped the letter on the table. “I wonder if he’s seen any of the plays about him.”

“I have to assume he has, simply from natural curiosity. After all, the characters based on us only appear in the third act, and we couldn’t resist discovering for ourselves how we were portrayed.”

“True,” he conceded.

We could pretend all we liked that we’d attended the play purely as a matter of research—as we still hadn’t uncovered who the anonymous author of the book was or who was the source of their information on Bonnie Brock—but the fact of the matter was that plain old curiosity had also been a strong motivating factor. We had also finally convinced the publisher to meet with us the following day, and it behooved us to be armed with as much information as possible before doing so. Not that I anticipated him being willing to share such a closely guarded and lucrative secret, but perhaps he would let something useful slip.

“In truth, I enjoyed the play more than the book,” I admitted after taking another sip of tea. “The story arc was much more . . . satisfying.”

Gage arched his eyebrows. “That’s because there was one.”

I turned to gaze into the crackling hearth. “The book was rather a hodgepodge of anecdotes, wasn’t it? Some true, some not.”

“It was insightful of the playwright to recognize this and shape it into a genuine narrative. That’s what made it so much better.”

The elements had all been there. They just needed the finesse of a real storyteller to mold them into an elegant curve. The play’s narrative had shown that Bonnie Brock’s driving desire was to try to regain the security he had known in childhood before his mother had died and he was wrongfully imprisoned. To make himself and, by extension, his family untouchable. That his sister—his only true family—had then been abducted, and he’d required help from outsiders to rescue her, had served as his moment of crisis. So that in the end, he realizes that even though he runs the largest gang in Edinburgh and is arguably one of the city’s most powerful men, he