Angel Rogue (17 page)

"Won't be the first."

Giles surveyed the other man's bulk. "I shouldn't think so. You're a boxer, aren't you?"

"Used to be. The name's Ned Simmons, but I fought as the Cockney Killer." Looking pleased, he swallowed the brandy with one gulp. "You ever see any of me matches?"

"Sorry, I don't follow boxing, but a friend of mine won a good sum on you once." Giles cast his mind back. "For defeating the Game Chicken in nineteen rounds, I believe."

"Twentyone rounds. Aye, 'twas the best mill of me life."

"It must have taken several men to beat you tonight."

The comment was a mistake. Simmons erupted with oaths and excuses, the gist of which was that he had been defeated unfairly. Giles listened with only moderate interest until the words "yallerheaded fancy man" caught his attention.

Concealing his sudden interest, Giles said, 'This blond man must have been a strapping fellow."

Simmons hesitated, visibly wondering whether to admit an unflattering truth. "Kind of a skinny cove, actually, and talked like a swell," he said grudgingly. "Wouldn't have thought 'e could fight the way 'e did. Even so, 'e couldn't 'ave taken me if 'e 'adn't jumped me from behind, and if 'is wench 'adn't been pointing a pistol at me."

Giles repressed a smile. Robin and the Sheltered Innocent must have been along this road very recently, and it sounded as if the latter bore some resemblance to her formidable aunt. "How did they come to attack you?"

Simmons's face went blank as an oyster. "Can't say more. Confidential business."

Giles was debating whether to offer a bribe for more information when a horse whickered outside.

Simmons peered out the window. "It's me 'orse! Bloody bastard probably couldn't ride. 'Ope 'e broke 'is neck when the nag threw 'im."

The marquess had never seen a horse that could throw his brother, much less a tired hack like this one. Robin must have turned the beast loose. Thank God he wasn't adding horse theft to his other crimes.

What the
devil
had Robin gotten himself mixed up in?

The horse was caught and tethered to the back of the carriage, and they proceeded to the next town, Worksop. Simmons fell silent, leaving Giles to his speculations. At a guess, the Londoner was the man Lord Collingwood had sent after his niece. Rather a rough sort to charge with escorting a gently bred female, though the more Giles heard about Maxima Collins, the more he doubted her gentility.

Obviously Lady Ross hadn't yet found the fugitives. With luck, Giles would reach them first. When he did, he was going to have a great many questions for his wayward younger brother.

At Simmons's request, Giles left him at an inn that was little better than a hedge tavern. He himself stayed at the best inn Worksop had to offer. It fell well short of the standards of Wolverhampton, but at least the sheets were clean.

When he fell asleep, his dreams were not of the runaways and potential scandals, but of Lady Ross. She really was a rather splendid Amazon.

Simmons had worked in this part of the country before, and within an hour of reaching Worksop he had purchased another pistol and recruited several men to aid him in his pursuit.

Later, as he held a piece of raw beef to his black eye and gulped pints of local ale, he thought about the blond swell who had jumped him from behind. Collingwood wouldn't like it if his precious niece was harmed, but there was nothing to prevent Simmons from breaking her fancy man in half.

As he drank his ale and brooded, he planned what he would do when he met the slick bastard in a fair fight.

They walked for nearly an hour before finding a sufficiently isolated shed. If they had stayed in their original camp, Maxie would have stewed some vegetables and ham together, but under the circumstances, they settled for bread and cheese.

After they finished, Robin leaned back against the hay, his pale hair silvered by the moonlight that washed in through a high, narrow window. "I think it's time for you to explain what is going on. Is the road to London going to be filled with large gentlemen who want to abduct you?"

Though Maxie was not used to confiding in anyone, she owed Robin an explanation. He was far too skilled at lies and casual theft, she didn't know his real name, and he was almost certainly some kind of swindler, but he had helped when she needed it.

She reached up to release her hair for the second time that evening. "I'm not quite sure what is going on. I don't even know where to begin. What do you want to know?"

"Whatever you are willing to tell me," he said gently.

Suddenly she wanted to reveal everything, about her strange background and how she came to be an alien in England. "My father, Maximus Collins, was a younger son of what is called a 'good family.' His expectations were not great to begin with, and he quickly wasted them in gaming and dissipation."

She smiled wryly. "My grandfather decided that Max was a useless, expensive nuisance, which was probably true. He offered to settle the debts if Max would remove himself from England. Max had no choice but to agree. I expect that bailiffs were about to overtake him. He decided to go to America."

Rain was beginning to patter on the roof. She burrowed deeper in the hay and wrapped her cloak around her shoulders, wishing it were thicker. "My father wasn't a bad man, merely rather casual about things like money and propriety. He quite liked the New World, because it is less rigid in its ways. Max stayed in Virginia for a time, then wandered north."

"After a spell in New York, he made the mistake of trying a winter journey from Albany to Montreal. He almost died in a blizzard, but was rescued by an Indian, a Mohawk hunter. Max ended up spending the rest of the winter at the hunter's longhouse. That's where he met my mother."

She paused, wondering what Robin's reaction would be to the knowledge that she was a halfbreed. Such an ugly word, halfbreed, more American than English.

His voice revealing only interest, without a shred of distaste, Robin commented, "The Mohawks are one of the Six Nations of the Iroquois confederacy, aren't they?"

"Yes," she said, surprised and pleased at his knowledge. "The Mohawks were Keepers of the Eastern Door, defending the Nations from the Algonquian tribes of New England. Four of the six tribes live mostly in Canada now, because they were loyal to the British during the American Revolution. But at least my mother's people survive with their pride and traditions. Not like the Indians of New England, who were virtually destroyed by disease and war."

"It's not a pretty story," Robin said quietly. "From what I've read, the Indians were a strong, healthy, generous people when the Europeans first came. They gave us corn, medicines, and land. We gave them smallpox, typhus, measles, cholera, and God knows what else. Sometimes bullets." He hesitated, then asked, "Do you hate us too much?"

No one had ever asked her that, or guessed at the buried anger she felt on behalf of her mother's people. Oddly, Robin's perception eased some of that anger. "How could I, without hating myself? After all, I am half English. More than half, I suppose, since I spent less time with my Mohawk kin. They accepted me with more warmth than my English relations did."

She shivered with a chill that came from inside. Even among her mother's clan, she had not truly belonged.

Hearing the faint chatter of her teeth, Robin moved over and put his arms around her. She tensed, not wanting passion, then relaxed when she realized that he was only offering comfort.

With one hand stroking her back, he murmured, "Families can be the very devil."

"Can't they just?" Her head rested against his shoulder, and slowly his warmth and nearness dispelled her chill. She felt so much at home in Robin's arms.

Too much so. Reminding herself that the last thing she needed was a man as charming and heedless as her father, she straightened and took up the story again. "My mother was young and restless, interested in the world beyond the longhouse. In spite of the vast differences, she and my father fell in love."

"They were both rebelling against the lives they were born to," Robin observed. "That would be a strong bond."

"I think you're right. It didn't hurt that my mother was very beautiful, and my father quite dashing. When spring came, Max asked her to come away with him, and she did. I was born a year later. We lived most of the time in Massachusetts, but every summer we would visit the longhouse. My mother wanted me to know the language and ways of her people."

"Did your father go with you?"

"Yes, he got on famously with my mother's kin. Indians are a poetic people, and love stories and games and laughter. My father could quote poetry by the yard, in English and French and Greek. He spoke the Mohawk language well, too." She laughed a little. "Lord, that man could talk. I remember him holding the whole longhouse spellbound as he recited the
Odyssey
. Now that I've read it myself, I know that he translated it rather freely, but it was still a magnificent tale."

Her smile faded. "There were two other babies that died soon after birth. My mother died herself when I was ten. Her family offered to take me, but my father refused. He'd never found a steady job that suited him, so after Mama died he became a book peddler and took me with him on his journeys."

"So you grew up traveling. Did you enjoy the life?"

"Most of the time." Maxie turned around so that her back nested against Robin's chest. "Books and education are revered in America. Since many of the farms and villages are very isolated, we were always welcome wherever we went."

Her voice became dry. "Too welcome, sometimes. Indian social customs are very different from European ones, and unmarried women have a degree of freedom that is often considered wantonness by European standards. There were always men interested in testing the virtue of a halfbreed like me."

His arms tightened protectively. "No wonder you learned to be so wary."

"It was necessary—if I'd told Max about such things, he might have killed someone. Or more likely been killed himself—he was a talker, not a fighter." Before today, she would have said the same about Robin, but no longer. "I'm not ashamed of the ways of my mother's people. Why shouldn't women have the same freedom before marriage that men do? But the choice had to be mine, not something forced on me by a drunken backwoodsman who assumed that I was a woman of easy virtue."