Escape with A Rogue (13 page)

“Violence changes people,” he said flatly. “I never believed you were as strong about the murders as you appeared, Lady M.” The poker clanged as he set it back against the stone hearth. “You looked so emotionless—so cool and composed in court. But I assumed hatred for me explained the way you would never look at me—”

“I did look at you. Of course, it was when I was quite certain you were not looking at me. I knew you must hate me.”

“I didn’t.”

They had both believed the other was consumed with hatred. “Sit beside me?” she whispered. “As you used to do, in that time before—before everything changed.”

Reluctance showed in the slow way he left the hearth. He had to stoop to walk beneath the ceiling beams. His loose shirt glimmered white in the faint light. His trousers clung low on his hips.
Dishabille
. This must be what people meant when they spoke of the allure of disordered clothes and sleep-rumpled hair.

“You shouldn’t have wasted grief over me.”

“It was not a choice, Jack. Grief is not something you control; it is something you endure. Sometimes I would open my eyes in the morning and see sunlight and think it could prove to be a beautiful day. Then I would remember Sarah and Grace were gone, and you had been hanged. I would think of what Grace’s family endured, and the pain of Sarah’s father, Lord Lindale. When he lost Sarah, Lindale did not open the drapes for weeks. He sat in a dark room. He did marry again a few months after the tragedy. Catherine—Lady Lindale—has been so very good for him.” Her voice wobbled treacherously and her chest grew tight. “H—having the goal to free you from Dartmoor made me forget what it was like to know regret and pain every morning.”

“Maddy, no.” Suddenly, he was at her side on the bed, his strong arm around her, and he drew her head to rest against his chest.

She wasn’t about to cry. If anything, she’d felt the
anger
at it all surging up. But he’d used her family’s pet name for her. Privately, intimately, that was how he saw her.

Her lips brushed his skin at the open throat of his shirt. Softening her mouth, she kissed him there, tasting sweat. Heady with the daring risk of it, she stuck out her tongue and licked him.

She expected protest. She got none. His fingers trailed sensuously over her cheek, then slid down her neck, and she moaned against him. She nipped his skin teasingly. So unsure of what to do, while he seemed to know exactly.

His scent intoxicated her. Musk and smoke. But more than that—the familiar, enticing scent of his skin.

He shifted suddenly, lowering her to the bed. His mouth closed over hers, catching her squawk of surprise. Not of protest. No, she loved this—the press of lips, the play of them, the wetness and heat. She moved her mouth against his hungrily, as though trying to eat him. Silly, but she couldn’t help it. She wanted to devour him. She couldn’t stop.

A warm pressure settled over her breast, making her ache with need between her legs. She lifted against him, moaning desperately, and he cupped her right breast through her nightgown.

Madeline tugged open the ties at the throat of her gown and the neckline sagged. His hand slid into the gaping bodice, slipped under her shift. And stroked her naked breast.

At once, at the brush of a still-cool palm, her nipple leapt upward. That sultry, rumbling purr could not have come from her, could it?

His lips captured hers, his kiss harder, more forceful, as he kneaded her breast. It should hurt—his fingers were rough—but it just made sensation explode in her brain. Tiny fireworks that promised an explosive spectacle to come.

He pinched her nipple and she arched up to him off the bed.

Erotic heat surrounded them both. He bent to her nipple and let his breath flow over her puckered skin. His hair brushed her chin—she had to blow the tickling strands from her lips. “Oh!”

He yanked off his shirt and let it fall to the floor beside them. He lay flat on her, not crushing her, but pressing her into the awkward, inadequate bed. Kissing her breathless.

Her hands fell, weak with desire, onto his surprisingly hot back.
He wants you. Dare to do it. You’ve broken him out of prison, thrown all propriety to the wind.
Touch
the man.

Her fingers found planes of hot, velvety skin, then a harsh network of scars and puckered flesh. Scars ran everywhere over his back. Her heart thundering, she traced them, letting her fingers glide over each one, sure it must be the last, but going lower, finding another.

The cat-o-nine tails. One flick of it and nine lengths of knotted rope would have rained down on Jack’s back. Tears gathered in her eyes. She stroked him harder, embraced him more tightly. He’d been brutalized for something he didn’t do.

She reached the scoop of his lower back, skimmed her palms lower, and touched his derriere.

His thigh pressed up between her legs, rubbing her in her private place. She was on fire. She wanted him to touch her there, like he’d stroked her neck. She
needed
to be stroked . . .

Coolness brushed over her shins—Jack was sliding her nightdress up her legs.

“Jack,” she whispered, because the most terrifying thing seemed to be to speak.

He jerked off her suddenly. At once he was on his feet beside the bed, shaking his head like a wild dog trying to throw off a rope. “Hades, what am I doing?”

Chapter Eight

He had to get outside.

Jack dragged his fingers through his hair hard enough to leave furrows in his skull. He’d been moments from coaxing Lady M.’s legs apart. Moments from making himself
believe
she knew what she was doing, then burying himself in her heat and her luscious, creamy wetness.

Lady Madeline sat up on the sagging bed. Blonde hair poured around her like a gold-leaf halo surrounding a painted Madonna. She held her nightgown to her throat but it hung off one slender ivory shoulder.

Get out, get out.

She arched forward, onto her haunches, looking so damn tempting that a harsher wave of desire slammed over him. His brain ceased to think. Trapped in his trousers, his hard cock bucked against his groin.

He wanted to launch himself back at the bed and make love to her until they couldn’t move.

He’d never pressed his advantage on a woman that way.

“Jack?”

The hesitant uncertainty of her voice went through him like a pistol shot. “Hell, Lady M., you have no idea what I am.” With that, he dragged on his shirt and stalked to the door. He slammed back the bolt, almost snapped the key as he wrenched it to the right, then launched out into the buffeting wind.

His hair streamed back and his shirt was plastered to his sweaty chest. The soft pink of dawn glowed behind the rolling green hills to the east.

The hills rose to the left of him, toward the pile of rocks that was King’s Tor, and sloped down to the right. Grazing sheep and moor ponies kept everything closely cropped. He could see for miles. He didn’t see any redcoats out there hunting for him.

Jack slammed his hand to the wall beside one of the shutters—a surface as solid and unyielding as his prick was. On a groan of frustration, he banged his head against the stone. He’d been in prison for two years, but his hand had served for relief. In London, when he was rich, women had flung themselves at him with the hope of becoming his mistress. He’d spurned their advances without even a flicker of regret.

He had never been such a lustful brute that he’d almost jumped on a woman. Lady Madeline brought out the worst in him.

“Are you trying to batter down my cottage or bludgeon yourself into insensibility?”

At the crisp, feminine voice, he looked to her, his forehead still pressed to the stone.

Lady M.’s hand rested on the door. Her tangled hair flew around her face as though carried by flitting fairies. What a sight she made, holding her cloak over the too-large nightdress that looked as if she’d stolen it off a farmwife’s clothesline.

He expected to see shock, fear, or apprehension in her deep blue eyes. Instead, she looked thoroughly irritated. If she’d been a man, he would have thought the look meant thwarted lust.

“The second, I think,” he said. “Bludgeoning and insensibility.”

“This is madness. Come back inside. For a start, I remember that I was the first to kiss you, at the base of your throat.”

“Let’s not relive it, my lady. It was dangerous enough the first time.”

“Nothing could possibly happen out here. We’d be blown off our feet.”

“Yes, very likely, Lady M.”

“You called me ‘Maddy’ before.”

“Another mistake to toss upon the pyre of my sins. I could claim I was out of my wits, which would be the truth, but I’ve no right to make excuses. I had no right to touch an earl’s daughter.”

She came away from the door. With both cloak and hair whipping about her slender figure, he was reminded of the day she’d watched him from the ridge of the quarry. She’d appeared then like something out of a dream—a beautiful woman drawn to look at the man she loved.

He laughed harshly at the thought.

Lady M. stopped at the sound of his laugh, a yard from where he stood. “Stop berating yourself, Jack, and stop speaking as though I am so exalted you should not be allowed to be in the same county.” She hesitated, twisting her hands. “That is not true. My family behaved contemptibly toward you. I have as many mistakes behind me, I’m sure, as you claim to have.”

“I doubt that very much, my lady.”

“Why not come back inside, where it is safer, and we don’t have to shout over the wind?”

How many times had he watched Lady M. oversee a party at her home, Eversleigh, and behave in exactly the same way? Take a shy and over-mothered debutante’s hand and lure the girl out of her shell? Or stop her own mother before Lady Evershire’s confused speech and jumbled memories became obvious to the guests? Many times he’d seen Lady M.’s quick wit bring her foxed brother, Lord Philip, to a halt before he blurted out the latest dirty song he’d learned at the pub.

He admired her so much.

He stepped away from the wall, aware of less discomfort in his trousers. His erection had begun to subside. Now he was left with a churning sensation of guilt.

Lady M. clasped his wrist, and he let her drag him back into the cottage. She let him go and went at once to the table, where she scooped up a ladle of water from the cistern, and poured it into a battered teakettle.

She did not look at him. No, Lady M. would busy herself while he struggled internally. Jack leaned back against the cool stone wall. Where did he start? At the easiest point, he supposed. “I’m not really a groom.”

Unruffled, she hung the pot over the fire, which she’d stoked to a good blaze. She took the cheese out from its wooden box, along with the bread. With dawn coming, she must be putting together a breakfast before they had to run. “I know that. Grandfather claimed you had committed some kind of crime. It was how he was able to justify allowing you to be sent to prison. What was it that you did, Jack?”

But he was too astounded to answer. “You knew? You kissed me, knowing the truth? You allowed me . . . the liberties I took, knowing it, knowing I’d lied?” Christ, he sounded like a trip-tongued schoolboy. Or worse, like a wound-up prig. “You helped me escape knowing I
belonged
there?”

He could understand the motivation of a woman to help an innocent man. But not this.

“Yes, but I do want to know what you did.”

“I broke most of England’s laws and every one of God’s, for that matter. You do not need to know the details, Lady M.”

“There are many English laws, including one that allows us to shoot a Scotsman on a Sunday, as long as it is only with a bow and arrow. Don’t tell me you shot a church-going Scotsman with a pistol?”

He shifted away from the wall and walked toward her. Not to intimidate, but because she drew him to her somehow, as though she’d yanked an invisible chain.

“I built myself an empire of gaming hells,” he said softly. “I committed crimes I won’t describe.”

Her brows lifted and she took up one of the knives. His heart missed a beat, but she only cut off a piece of the cheese. She held the neat slice out to him.

He took it, because he was offending her with his words and couldn’t bring himself to do it with gesture.

Why did she stay so cool and make her reactions so impossible to read? It was the way he’d always remembered her—ruthlessly in charge. He wanted to know what she was feeling.

She rested the tip of the knife on the table. “From my brother’s exploits, I know a little of London’s underworld. I know magistrates often turn a blind eye to gaming hells. I know Philip is usually terrified when he cannot pay his debts to the men who run those. But you are still innocent of murder—”

Jack put his hand on the edge of the worktable and stepped close enough to her that she had to look up to him. “Enough, Lady M. You don’t have to prove the darker side of life doesn’t frighten you. I owned a dozen gaming hells outright and had a controlling interest in twenty others. I was the kind of man your brother was afraid of.”

She flinched.

There. He’d done it. He’d driven her away. She would not be snuggling in his embrace or kissing his chest any more.

She drove the knife into the fresh Devon cheddar again, then muttered an unladylike
damn
, dropped the blade, and tore off a chunk of cheese. He had only one thought:
She is exquisite.

Lady M. brought the knife down onto the wooden table with the sort of vicious
thunk
that made a man fear for his ballocks. “In truth, I don’t know how I feel about it, Jack. I did believe you were a groom, and I saw your touch with our horses and I thought you were a kind and decent man. Even when Grandfather told me you’d grown up in London’s stews and had committed crimes, I wanted to think you must have been . . . justified. That perhaps you were fighting for your life. Or starving.”

At least she’d laid the knife flat on its blade on the table.

“That was true enough at the beginning, Lady M. Eventually I grew rich enough, and powerful enough, that I didn’t need to break the law. Despite that, I still did. That is the kind of man I am.”