Free A Seditious Affair by Kj Charles Page A

nonsense about the fire to be used against him or you, but I can’t and I won’t protect you against the consequences of what you have done.”
    “Never asked you to.”
    “As I never asked you to hide my crimes. And yet, so far, you have.”
    “So?” Silas shifted a little. “I told you, I don’t bow to unjust law.”
    “You don’t take thanks well, do you?”
    “I don’t want your thanks.” A snarl of pure pain. “I don’t want your thanks or your protection or your wine or any other damn thing of yours, you sodding, fucking, bastard Tory.” Silas’s chest was heaving, and there was ferocious misery in his dark-ringed mongrel eyes. “What the hell d’you call me here for? You want me to fuck you, is that it? It’ll make you that bit harder when you go to your knees now you know I’m a seditionist?”
    “I think I always knew your views. It’s not as though you hid them. I didn’t ask your name because I didn’t want to find out.”
    Silas snorted. “At least you’re honest there.”
    “I shan’t arrest you,” Dominic went on. “I won’t share any knowledge I have—”
    “Am I supposed to thank you?”
    “Oh, go to the devil, you obstreperous swine. You’re Jack Cade, whom I have wanted to hunt down for a year and more, and I have found you in my bed, damn it, and you expect what of me? That I pretend it makes no difference? Protect you from the course of the law?”
    “I expect you to do your job just as I do mine,” Silas said. “Unless you’re offering me a bargain, of course. Silence for silence, is that it?”
    “No, and you know damned well I’m not. Stop being so awkward.”
    “Very sorry, your lordship.”
    “Are you trying to enrage me?” Dominic breathed deeply, calming himself. “Listen to me. To me, not to what you seem to think I’m going to say. For the sake of—Wednesdays—I don’t propose to use what I know of you or to play a part in in your well-deserved punishment. I am well aware that’s hypocrisy and dereliction of duty and anything else you care to call it. And, heaven help me, if you will take a way out, I will give you one.”
    “A what?”
    “America.” Dominic attempted a smile. It didn’t feel convincing at all, and his eye hurt like the very devil. “Or elsewhere if you prefer. I’ll pay the passage.”
    “You’re offering to get me out of the country?”
    So far had he sunk. “You’re in trouble. Skelton is determined and he’s on your scent. I can’t, won’t prevent him doing his job if you remain in the country. But I can reconcile it with my conscience to remove you, if it means you take your sedition elsewhere.” Somewhere he wouldn’t make trouble, somewhere he wouldn’t be flogged for it. Dominic could feel the memory of ridged skin on his fingertips, the scars that still marked Silas, and he had to be forty at least. Strong, obstinate as hell, but not young, and sooner or later men lost their resilience. The thought of his brute taking the punishment he deserved churned in Dominic’s stomach. “What do you say?”
    “I say, sod you. Born in London, die in London. You’re not getting me to foreign parts.”
    “Don’t be so parochial. America’s a republic. A democracy, even. You’d feel quite at home.”
    “I’m at home now, and I’m not running from my own bloody city with your jackals at my heels, just to ease your path. Go to hell.” Silas’s face was dark with anger. “You want me to piss off to America of all the places, leave my work here, just to get out of your way? Don’t want the inconvenience?”
    “You’ll be damned well inconvenienced when Skelton arrests you!”
    “And until then I’m a free man. I make my own choice, for myself. I. Not lords, not Home Office, not gentlemen, and not whatever you are.”
    “What?” Dominic’s fist clenched. “What did you say to me?”
    “You call yourself a gentleman,” Silas said, very deliberately. “Breaking the law here, bending it there, making