The Earl With the Secret Tattoo Read Online Free PDF Page A

yet who would guess?”
    “The man’s an expert at fake retching into his hat,” chuckled Stubing. “Although the
     stone-cold heart is for real, at least when it comes to women. Ain’t it, James?”
    Patrick and Reeves laughed.
    “Indeed,” James muttered into his cup of coffee, and decided to bring the conversation
     back round to Lord Pritchard. He set his cup on a nearby shelf and leaned against
     the wide, rough back of the brick oven.
    His friends didn’t need to know that the warmth emanating from those bricks made him
     long for Eleanor. He’d give anything to hold her close, to feel the heat of her body
     pressed to his, to kiss her and make her his own. “I was just telling them, Patrick,
     that I think we might have caught our man at a weak moment. He’s clearly in debt.
     His daughter’s lamenting the fact that she has to marry Viscount Henly. She says her
     father believes Henly will solve all their money woes.”
    “It makes sense.” Patrick hung his hat and cape on a hook by the door, next to James’s.
    “The top secret leaks these past eight months—they started after that big loss he
     had to Dupree on the green baize.” He looked round at them all. “He’s active again.”
    “Let me kill him,” Stubing said, methodically filling pans with balls of dough, then
     covering them with a cloth. “It would make everything so much easier.”
    “No,” said James. “Lord Kersey told me in no uncertain terms he’d rather Pritchard
     receive public condemnation and suffer in prison, and I agree.”
    “Scandal and prison won’t make up for all the loyal diplomats and agents who died
     because of his greed during the war,” Reeves added quietly.
    “Nothing will bring them back.” James was pensive. “But he craves approval more than
     anything. Being vilified by his peers and the masses, too, would torture him far worse
     than a quick death.”
    “Right,” said Stubing, wiping his hands on his apron. He looked around at the lot
     of them. “We let him live. But we’ve got to get him. Soon. He’s a loose cannon, and
     he needs to be brought down once and for all.”
    James pulled the treasured token with the cat engraved on it out of his pocket and
     held it up. “This talisman’s mate is still out there. We don’t have it, but neither
     does he. He’s not even looking anymore. He made a quick, messy effort to get it, and
     when his thugs failed, he gave up because he didn’t know what it meant. Or perhaps
     he did guess its true importance. What better way to make sure it remains lost than
     to let it stay in the hands of a big, rambling family like the Sherwoods?”
    “Exactly,” said Stubing.
    “But we know what it means,” said Reeves.
    “And God knows we’ve been trying to find it,” Patrick added.
    “It will turn up,” James assured his compatriots, “and when it does, Pritchard’s life
     as he know it will be over.”
    There was a moment’s silence as they all looked at the dull copper circle.
    James blew a few motes of flour off it and put it back into his deepest pocket. “Today
     I’m going to risk talking to the Sherwoods about the robbery. I looked over the old
     reports again, but there’s still nothing that leaps out at me. Lord Westdale never
     mentioned the talisman to the constables. He probably didn’t realize it was what they
     were after.”
    “But we know he had it,” said Reeves.
    A bribed servant in Lord Pritchard’s house had told James so, the same servant who’d
     also informed James that Lord Pritchard had sent the thugs after the two Sherwood
     carriages carrying the six siblings, as well as Lady Eleanor and Lady Clare, to London.
    Stubing sighed. “The servants in the House of Brady, even after all these years, are
     too damned loyal. When I was among them, it was like pulling teeth to get them to
     say anythin’ about the family, much less talk about a talisman that might be tucked
     away in a drawer in the house.”
    “And as