If I Fall (18 page)

And that’s when the man’s hand grazed hers.

Her eyes shot up. Searched the dark beyond the curtain (and the door that resided behind it) for the briefest of moments before they found his masked ones.

Eyes that seemed to make a decision, then and there.

And every nerve in her body was suddenly alert with shock. Awareness.

And before she knew it, before she could make a sound, she, and the feather, were pulled from their innocuous places in the hall, into the tight space of a dusty, empty cupboard.

Empty of course, except for him.

“Did anyone see you?” he whispered in a hurry, his voice gruff and low, his hand still on hers. In fact, the only bit of skin of his she could see was his hand. Everything else, his face, his body, was hidden by a massive cloak.

“What?” she asked, bewildered. She must have asked too sharply, because he put a gentle hand up over her mouth.

“Shh…” he admonished, leaning close. She could see then that he had a dark moustache that drooped at the edges, full lips, a strong jaw…

Her eyes quickly returned to his.

“Did anyone see you come in here? Think!”

“I … I don’t think so.” She stuttered, once his warm hand left her mouth. “Who—”

“Good. That just may save your life.” He grunted, and fished in his cloak’s pocket for a moment.

“But who—”

“I’m not the one you need to worry about, Miss Forrester,” he replied.

Sarah’s spine went rigid. “How do you know my name?”

She watched his lips curl into the slightest of smiles. “Everyone knows your name.” Then he shoved a dirty little packet, wrapped up in oilcloth, in her hands. “Take this.”

“What?” she cried. “No!”

“They cannot find it on me. Go back to your seat. I’ll retrieve it from you later.”

Sarah felt as if her brain was going in a thousand different directions at once. What was the packet? How would he get it back from her? Who were “they”?

But none of those sentences were what came out of her mouth. Instead, she was left saying something completely sensible.

“You’re mad. I am going to call a guard.”

A completely sensible sentiment that would prove to be her undoing.

Because as she turned away from him and opened her mouth to cry out, the cloaked figure ruthlessly pulled her back. He caught her against his body and held her there as she struggled. And then, when her eyes met his, she saw in that split second, the decision he made.

It was a ruthless kiss. It quelled any sound that was about to come from her throat, but still she struggled against him. But the more she wiggled, the more she pressed, and the deeper she fell into his embrace.

And suddenly, she was kissing him back.

This was unlike her ex-fiancé’s kisses. Those had been teasing, light. This was power and desperation, his moustache raking against her upper lip, scoring her. His strength seemed to radiate out of the hard planes of his body and sap her of hers, so much so that by the time he pulled back, she was breathless from it.

If he was as shocked as she, he didn’t show it. Instead, he took advantage of her dumb state, pressing the oilcloth packet into her now willing hand, before he gave a tiny salute, and promptly jumped out the small window.

A small squeak emerged from her lips as she scrambled to the window, hoisting herself up over the ledge and peering down. But she could see nothing in the swirling night fog below.

He … whoever he was … was gone.

Jackson Fletcher would be the first person to admit that his plan had not been flawlessly constructed. It was beyond a miracle that things had turned out the way they had. He had been on the verge of calling it off when Sarah had appeared—there was little he could do in that moment but go through with it. He had lured her into the cupboard, befuddled her, and then kissed her senseless.

Although he would have to ruminate on the kissing—and how oddly senseless it had made
him
—at a more fortuitous time. For, in this terribly flawed plan of his, the one thing that could easily be called the most flawed was his escape.

The window of the unused cupboard overlooked a narrow back alley. When Jack had scouted the little space earlier in the week, he had noticed a handy little ledge running about three feet below the window. It led around the northwest corner of the building, where Jack knew there was another window leading to another theatre cupboard, although this one less empty and more filled with mops and brooms. There he
could divest himself of his costume, run to the refreshment table, and be back at the Devlins’ box likely before Sarah was back at the Forresters’. The ledge should have been able to bear his weight.

Should have, being the operative words.

For when he swung himself out onto the ledge, thinking he could maneuver along it and around the corner of the building fast enough so Sarah would think he disappeared into thin air, he instead found his foot catching on a damaged, crumbling spot of the not-as-wide-as-he-thought ledge, and his footing gave way, plunging him (silently, thank God) into the fog below.

Luckily, he’d been only two (well, no more than three) stories up. Unluckily, it would have been enough to break his legs. That is, if he hadn’t (luckily) landed on something that broke his fall.

That
thing
he landed on was a brute of a man, twice his size, who would have likely flicked him away like a crumb on his shirt, if he hadn’t had the misfortune to be taken by surprise from above.

“Murphle Ooof!” Was the muffled exclamation that emerged from underneath Jack’s thick cloak as he struggled to get to his feet. Feet that, miraculously, were not broken. Nor was anything else, as far as he could surmise—although his entire left side was going to be one extended bruise on the morrow. He put a hand to his ribs—intact, but sore. The brute might have broken his fall, but it still hadn’t been a pleasant experience.

“Excuse me, my good man,” Jack began, aiming for joviality, but the wind having been knocked out of him, his voice was harsh and graveled. He hunched down to check on the thankfully still breathing form he’d landed upon, but found him unconscious. Jack looked up, was about to call for help, when he saw just what kind of situation he had landed in.

Other than the man he had landed on, there were two other gentlemen—although by their shabby clothes and general lack of teeth, they bespoke themselves as anything but—both of whom were half the size of the man he had landed on, staring at Jack as if he was an avenging angel. In one of the men’s hand was a short, ugly knife. At the other man’s mercy, was a woman.

She was backed up against the theatre wall, her body pressing into the brick, trying as hard as she could to get away from the men. But she, too, had turned her head to look at the commotion going on at the mouth of the alley.

And suddenly Jack understood. He’d landed in the middle of a band of robbers (or worse) exercising their trade. And purely by accident, he’d taken out the biggest and baddest bandit amongst them.

The overgrown thug he’d landed on groaned unconsciously, his body still prostrate on the ground, but obviously alive. As Jack stood up tall, his cloak swirled about, kicking the dust and fog up in puffs at his feet, making him feel like he was floating in a cloud of the stuff.

Apparently, he wasn’t the only one who thought he was floating, because one of the two smaller, more conscious thugs, dropped his knife from his shaking hand.

“It’s a ghost!” Small Thug One cried, backing away and stumbling over his own feet, falling hard on his rear—but his eyes never leaving Jack’s form.

“N-n-n-n-o!” Small Thug Two stuttered, as Jack took a step closer to them. “A ghost couldn’t take out Big Ned—’tis the Devil hisself!” Then, being either the more superstitious or smarter of the two of them, Small Thug Two released his menacing hold on the woman and skittered over to the alley’s opposite wall, and then ran as if the aforementioned Devil himself was chasing him, past Jack and out into the cold night.

“Hey—wait for me!” Small Thug One cried, pulling himself up off the ground and making similar tracks out into the foggy night.

Jack watched him go with something akin to stunned bemusement—after all, less than a minute ago, he had been in a tiny cupboard kissing Sarah Forrester, and now, he had foiled a robbery—when he turned and found himself wrapped in the embrace of one very thankful and colorful woman.

“Oh, kind sir! You’re an angel, you are! They was coming to take my earnings, which they got no right to. They know I’m one of Billy’s girls—” She was saying, pressing herself into his cloak, her hands going around his back, under that length of fabric.

He pulled her away from him, finding a younger face than
he expected, hidden under the weight of garish face paint. Her gown was equally garish, cheap and shiny in the moonlight that managed to penetrate the fog.

“You should go,” Jack said roughly, as his masked (thank heavens he was still wearing the mask!) eyes found hers.

“But, sir … let me thank you for helping me. I’m awfully good at saying thanks.” She batted her heavy eyes at him—eyes that if Jack was not mistaken, had the sheen of someone who nipped at cheap gin to make it through the night. With her line of work, he couldn’t blame her.

“I’m sure you are”—he smiled kindly—“but you should go. Before Big Ned wakes up.”

That set her to rights, as she gathered her skirts and dipped to a curtsy, and disappeared into the fog beyond the alley.

And now, Jack was merely faced with the conundrum of how to get back inside the theatre, without anyone noticing he had been outside of it.

He couldn’t very well go around to the front of the theatre and use the main entrance. Too many people. Not only that, he needed to get back to the second floor. He couldn’t go home—eventually Sarah’s befuddlement would wear off, and he knew that she was smart enough to be suspicious of any man without an airtight alibi. Therefore, he needed to be exactly where Sarah expected him to be—the Devlins’ box—and nowhere else.

Therefore, there was nowhere to go … but up.

Jack used precious seconds to examine the wall of the theatre. Ragged brick, but not ragged enough. Luckily (and luck was his savior this evening!) there was a drainpipe at the far end of the alley, running up the juncture of the theatre wall’s connection to the building next door. And of course, that ledge at the second floor window.

But if there was one thing Jack could do, it was climb.

On board the
Amorata
, they’d had competitions on the long, boring days at sea, when there was no foul weather or foreign ships to contend with, to see which crew member could climb the rigging of the main sail the fastest. And much to everyone’s surprise, Jack, at sixteen, a new midshipman with long limbs and a gawkily prominent Adam’s Apple, moved faster than any bo’sun or ship’s mate or deckhand in the
history of the challenge. And so, he became the one—even though he was an officer—who would volunteer to climb up to the crow’s nest to deliver the crewman on guard up there his ration of rum, or to unknot a particularly bad tangle of ropes.

Thus he was up on that ledge—the one that had failed him earlier—in a matter of seconds.

Jack was aware of a certain amount of luck helping him this evening. And so, as he maneuvered himself along the ledge around the corner, and into the window of the second, better used cupboard (simply because if he went back to the old one, he chanced Sarah still being there), he sent up a prayer of thanks. He realized that all of it—the cupboard, the befuddlement, the kissing, the falling, the landing, and the climbing back up, had taken somewhere in the vicinity of less than ten minutes.

And so, when he divested himself of his costume, stowing the pants, cloak, and mask in a bundle behind some brooms, and stepped back out into the hallway, it was just in time to hear the bells ring, indicating intermission was ending. He trotted over to the refreshment table, cutting the line of other gentlemen and stealing two glasses of weak Madeira, and briskly moved back toward the Devlin’s box, handing over one of the glasses to Juliana Devlin mere seconds before the curtain went up.

“I’m so sorry it took so long,” he said with a smile. “It seems the last act made everyone quite thirsty.”

Juliana, her eyes on the play in front of them, whispered back. “No need to apologize. But it’s far too late for you to go back to your own seat. You should watch the third act with us, shouldn’t he, Father?”

As her father grunted in assent, Jack raised his own glass to his lips—and felt the liquid get caught in the hairy brush of his false moustache.

Oh, bloody hell! But—yes, luck held him—both Juliana and Mr. Devlin’s eyes were on the play, they had not looked at him too closely when he returned. Quietly, he raised a hand to his lips and quickly,
painfully
, peeled back the moustache. He whimpered in pain.

“Did you say something, Lieutenant?” Juliana turned to look at him finally, a small smile on her lips.

“Just, er, that I would be honored to stay by your side for the next act, Miss Devlin.”

As she blushed, Jack exhaled in blissful relief, his eyes felt at ease to search the other side of the theatre boxes. There, the Comte was escorting Sarah to her seat. But, in her right hand, clutched tightly, was a familiarly shaped packet, badly hidden by the folds of her golden skirt. Yes. He had gotten away with it. Gotten away with it all.