“Hester!” he called, even before he closed it behind him. “Hester?” Only now did he fully face the possibility that she was not yet home. “I got him!”
The words fell on silence.
Then there was a clatter at the top of the stairs and she came running down, feet flying. Her hair was half undone, thick and fair and unruly as always. She hugged him with all her strength, which was considerable, in spite of her slender frame and lack of fashionable curves.
He picked her up and swung her around, kissing her with all the joy and victory he felt, and the sudden upsurge of belief in everything good. Most of all his elation was due to the possibility that she was right to have had faith in him, not just in his skill but in his honor, that core of him that was good and could treasure and hold on to love.
And Phillips’s capture at last meant that Durban was right to have trusted him too, which he realized now had also mattered.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1999 by Anne Perry
Excerpt from Treason at Lisson Grove copyright © 2011 by Anne Perry.
Excerpt from Execution Dock copyright © 2009 by Anne Perry.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-104507
First Mass Market Domestic Edition: September 2000
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-41744-2
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