Escape with A Rogue (9 page)

“Jack. I—I had to. He was going to sh—shoot you.”

Reassurance. She needed it. But he hesitated—the last time he had tried to reassure a woman, the consequences had led to three deaths. He eased back from her, to gaze down into massive, horrified eyes. She blinked, fighting tears, and he knew he had to ease her pain. “I know,” he murmured. “You saved my life.”

“Don’t say it as though it’s enough to repay you for what I’ve put you through. Or as though you’re proud. Please—”

Her hands slid up to hold the ragged collar of his shirt. She pressed her body more tightly against his. “Do you think I—I hit him?”

Having her that close set his head reeling. Holding Lady Madeline was like staring at the sun during an eclipse—if he forgot his place, he stood the chance of being blinded.

“He ran too nimbly to be wounded,” he said. “You just scared him off. You were magnificent, but we need to get off the road.” He added the last in a calm tone, not wanting to make her panic. With his hand around her waist, he led her to the field on the opposite side of the road. Bushes gave him a place to draw her for privacy.

Once they were there, screened by leaves, he did the unthinkable—he embraced her again. He ran his hands down her slender back, brushed kisses to the top of her veil.

“Are you all right?” he asked, though it was a stupid question.

She wriggled against him. Her full bosom rubbed against his chest, against his tattered shirt and tensed muscles. She took a shaky breath. “Now. Yes.” Her hand went up to his chin, and she stroked him. Her touch felt like a flame held against his skin.

“Lady M.—” He’d bent to her, swiftly, not aware she had pushed up onto her toes. At the exact instant his head dipped, hers lifted. Their lips collided. One brush of her soft velvety lips was like being struck by lightning.

Two years ago, he’d wanted to kiss her each time she’d come to the Eversleigh stables. During the years he had spent in prison, he would wake with his mouth physically tingling from hungry, imagined kisses. He’d woken up every morning hard as a brick after dreaming about Lady M.—the bewitching woman he couldn’t have.

Now he had her in his arms. Her eyes had shut tight and her lips melted against his. Just the touch of her mouth made him feel like he’d jumped headlong into a wildfire.

He had no right—

But his hands were at her low back, pinning her to him. Her leg slid up and hooked around the backs of his knees, just like in his dream. She broke the kiss long enough to moan, “I want you.” Then she slanted her mouth over his and plunged her tongue into his mouth.

She was like Juliette, Stephen’s wife, but Lady M. was searching for passion to overwhelm fear instead of hurt and loneliness. If he took her too far, he would be a scoundrel, taking advantage of a vulnerable woman. And they were being hunted by the militia—he should be listening for pursuers, not kissing her.

He eased her back. “Enough.”

She blinked. “No.”

The ground crunched somewhere to the right of them, down the road and closer to the prison’s main gate. A man’s disgruntled baritone reached them, muffled by the fog. “Are ye certain ye heard a shot? Ye heard what the captain said. The convicts ran along the leat and made it to the Ockery. They’re going to be making for the Plymouth docks.”

“I heard something. It had to be a shot,” argued a second man. “I’m sure of it.”

Lady M. squeaked—with annoyance, he suspected, not fear.

Jack pulled her behind him. The bushes were not enough of a screen to protect them if the guards prowled this far up the road. He had to hope that if he jumped out, they would ignore Lady M. and go in pursuit of him.

But if he took a ball in the back that left him dead in the road, she would quickly be discovered. What he would have to do was surrender and go back willingly.
That
would distract them.

He crouched and felt the ground. A rock dug into his palm. A risky solution, but the best he had.

“I think you didn’t hear anything at all,” the first man argued.

The other grunted. “Remember the last time them froggies ran from the work group? Blenchley almost shot Corporal Spencer in the head. The ball parted his hair, for Christ’s sake. No point in rushing down into a mess of frantic soldiers to get shot. We might as well search here.”

Whipping his arm as hard as he could, Jack sent the small rock sailing high across the road. Fortune smiled down—the rock struck a boulder down in the field, making a soft
thunk
.

 “I was right,” crowed the second soldier. “There is someone in the field.”

He could see their distinctive redcoats through the fog. One soldier swung cleanly over the farmer’s stone wall on the other side of the road. The second struggled, muttered a few expletives, then fell over.

Jack had to bite back a tense laugh at the performance. Lady M. shuddered against him, and a glance down revealed she’d wanted to laugh too.

“Down there!” shouted one of the men.

Was it the guards’ imaginations, or had they seen the man Lady M. had shot at? Either way, a chase would keep both the guards and their assailant busy.

“Good,” Lady M. said, soft but brisk. “My carriage is beyond the tollhouse. We must hurry.”

Her breast brushed his arm. Warm, abundant curves. So easy just to lift his hand, palm up, and cup all that feminine warmth, after years of celibacy. He’d been celibate for more than the two he’d been in prison.
No.
“Yes, we had better well hurry,” he groaned.

She frowned. “Are you hurt?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking, Lady M.”

“Do you think there might be dogs in pursuit, too?”

“No. They don’t keep dogs at the prison. They have to borrow or hire bloodhounds from the locals.”

“They seem to be woefully unprepared for an escape.”

Lady M. to the core. She would not approve of a poorly run prison any more than she would tolerate disorder in her own house. “That’s a good thing for us. Remember we are on the wrong side of the law right now.”

She stilled against him. He’d spent his life on the wrong side of the law. But apparently, the thought of it now froze Lady Madeline in her tracks.

She was a strong woman of impeccable reputation, the sort for whom revealing an ankle was scandalous behavior. She was risking everything for him. Her reputation. Her freedom. Her life.

She’d almost
shot
a man for him.

Based on a pack of lies he’d told her. What was Lady M. going to do—how was she going to react—when he told her who he really was?

At least she’d spent the ball in her pistol, so she couldn’t use it on him.

“We’ll go to the carriage,” he agreed. “Keep to the side of the road. If I give you a shove, forgive me, but leap over the wall as fast as you can. And hide.”

* * *

It wasn’t possible.

“The carriage is
gone
.” Madeline turned in a slow circle. Perhaps it was there, just hidden behind the impenetrable fog. Could the horses be standing in absolute silence, her driver simply too apprehensive to answer her soft call?

“Oh, do think sense,” she muttered. “You have been duped and dumped.”

At her side, Jack drawled, with unnecessary perception, “I think your vehicle has been stolen, Lady M.”

The trace of wry amusement in his voice irritated her. “Thank you, Jack.” Fisting her right hand, Madeline ground her knuckles against her forehead. They had left the road, crept behind the tollhouse that sat at the boundary of Princetown, and crossed a fog-laden field to get to this spot. Her shin ached from a collision with a granite boulder.

“This is madness!” she cried, as fervently as one could when trying to shout in a whisper. “How could he abandon us this way?

The answer was obvious, but at least Jack did not supply it.
No one could be trusted, of course.

“I paid that man well enough not to betray me. And no—” Jack had given a soft groan, so she swung on him with a glare. “I gave him only three pounds to begin, with the promise of thirty if he helped me. Once he saw you, I intended to bribe him with one hundred pounds—enough to ensure he wasn’t tempted to betray us for the five pounds he’d get for turning you in.”

“You did your research well.”

To what end? Her beautiful plan had evaporated, whereas the damnable fog had not.

Everyone claimed that nothing ever disconcerted her. Everyone had admired her fortitude after the murders of her family’s governess and her sister’s bosom bow, Lady Sarah. They had admired the way she had taken her family in hand. How she’d tried to curb her brother’s wild gaming, had tried every method possible to keep her father from drinking himself to death, had dealt with her mother’s failing memory and increasing madness with patience and kindness.

She knew Jack mustn’t admire her. How could he? The one time it had truly mattered for her to be clever and in control—because she was doing it to free him—she’d failed. Why did her head have to feel like it was full of fog
now
?

“All those questions you must have asked drew attention to you,” Jack said softly. “There’s Tom Delve and now the carriage driver. Lady M., even though you paid them, you’ve put yourself in their power.”

She recoiled. “By betraying me, the driver loses a fortune.”

“Three pounds was enough to get him drunk. And now he has a carriage to sell, taken from a woman not likely to raise the alarm.”

 “What a stupid fool—to be content with just enough for a night’s drinking!”

“Three pounds buys him a lot more than that.”

His pointed comments had to be a sign that anger toward her was still simmering inside him. Jack has always seemed so happy in the stables. He’d told her he loved the freedom of his life—the horses, the sedate routine of his life, the beauty of the estate that sprawled around him. She’d been responsible for caging him up.

He’d let her kiss him, then had pushed her away.

Did he hate her? She could look at his face, but she just couldn’t tell . . .

Her arm still hurt from the pistol shot. She was still
trembling
from it. “That wicked wretch of a driver.”

She felt her spine crumbling and she strode in a circle rather than let her body wobble. Fog seemed to spin around them, mocking her. They could not walk on the road and the moor was a treacherous hell when blanketed by fog.
There’s no escape, except death.
She stopped. “Dear God. What are we to do?”

Strong arms went around her. “Come. You need this.”

Jack held her against him. With the white mist surrounding them, Jack’s face became her world. In the middle of scratchy, dark stubble, his beautiful pink-bronze lips parted. All she had to do was tip up her lips and be swept into hot pleasure again.

Their kiss before had been . . .

His mouth had tasted like . . .

Oh heavens, his mouth had tasted like sin. If Adam had been the one to tempt Eve to fall, he wouldn’t have needed fruit. All he would have needed was a mouth as delicious and earthy and smoky as Jack’s.

But she sensed his tension. His muscled arms were stiff against her, his body rigid. As though he was holding her when he didn’t want to.

Of course he didn’t—

His mouth slanted over hers unexpectedly. She shut her eyes and tried to fall willingly into another heated kiss.

This time in her head, she heard the explosion of her pistol again. Felt the sudden, expected shock to her arm, and knew again that horrible moment of fear and regret when she’d realized she’d sighted down a barrel, and shot at another human being.

Thank heaven her shaking had made the shot go wide. And thank God, all the angels, and every saint, that Jack’s assailant had turned and run rather than force her to draw out one of her lethal blades.

My God, she could have killed him.

We are on the wrong side of this.

She’d been a hair’s breadth away from being a
murderess
. The horror of it was like a bog—it sucked her down so suddenly she almost fell. She pulled away from Jack’s mouth. “
Don’t.
Don’t kiss me again. Don’t
reward
me for almost killing a man.”

Jack clasped her chin and he held her firm, so she could do nothing but meet green eyes—eyes glowing with inner fire.

“He would have shot me—or you, I fear—without hesitation,” Jack said. “You have nothing to blame yourself for. A man who lives a violent life asks for what he gets.”

The cold way he spoke brought panic in a surge. And, inexplicably, anger. “I thought I could do this without breaking a law. What is the point of getting you out, if we commit worse crimes trying to prove you innocent?”

Her voice had risen desperately at the end. It sounded alien, even to her.

“For God’s sake, woman,” he growled, and she could almost taste the frustration exuding from him. “I’ve been trying to tell you this all along. This isn’t the same as planning a masquerade for the ton. We won’t do this without breaking the law, Lady M. I’m out, a crime in itself. And you’ve helped me. We’ve already crossed the line.”

She trembled. He’d bluntly told her from the beginning to get out of this. Yet she’d believed she could do whatever was necessary. Believed her brother’s future, her own peace of mind, and Jack’s
life
were worth any cost. “But it had to be done because no one would listen to the truth. No one would accept that you were wrongfully convicted. Now . . .”

Now it just seemed as though she was wrong. Crimes in the name of innocence were still crimes, after all. How could she clear his name when they had committed crime after crime to set him free?

“What we’ve done was necessary,” she said. “Right in the moral sense. I—I didn’t kill him.”
There has to be a way you can still clear Jack’s name.

His hand cupped her cheek gently. “No, you didn’t.” Beneath his breath, he murmured, “I only wish you hadn’t done any of this for me.”

He did not want her with him. The knowledge drained her strength, but she had no choice now. She forced her voice to sound cool and calm. “Then we have to alter the plan. We cannot walk along the road. We cannot cross the moor now, in the fog.”