Lady X's Cowboy (26 page)

“Do you know what I’d do next?” Olivia asked, breath shallow as she gazed up at him through short, black lashes.

“What’s that, darlin’?”

“This.”  With surprising strength she reached up and took hold of his shoulders, then pulled him down on top of her.  Her task was made easier by his complete lack of resistance.  He settled immediately between her opened legs, and almost chuckled as he felt her hand grasp and position him at her entrance.  Then he didn’t feel much like laughing as her hips rose to meet his, and with a sharp hiss of breath, he slid into her.  They might have been carrying on all night, but she was still glove-tight and hot. 

They both became delirious, moving together, around and inside.  Her heart knocked against his own.  He wanted to go as far into her as he could, so deep that boundaries lost meaning and they weren’t two people any more but something else, something new entirely.  So he plunged in, again and again, searching, seeking.  And it felt so damned good.  He thought he’d surely die of it, which, to his mind, wasn’t such a bad way to go.

He could feel it, as sure as sliding down the bank of a flood-swollen river to be washed away below.  Olivia was becoming dangerously precious to him.  Someone he was starting to believe he couldn’t live without.

“Will, please,” she cried into his shoulder, “I want you so much.”

“Sweet Olivia,” he groaned, “I’m yours.  Only yours.”

She tensed around him, then gripped him hard, over and over, finding fulfillment with a sharp cry.  He was right behind her, release like a bullet, and he shouted her name.  There was so much he wanted to say to her, but couldn’t, and so he let the simple shape of her name hold everything he felt.  Such a small word, so elegant and refined, now weighted with his own wandering soul.

Chapter Fifteen

Urgent knocking on the bedroom door woke them both.  At first, Olivia didn’t know what to make of the sound.  It penetrated a deep, dreamless sleep—the first she had enjoyed in a long time.  Which made sense, given the fact that she had made love all night with a man at least four years her junior, a man with a boundless sexual appetite that was satisfied only when she had sleepily insisted that she was completely worn out.  She didn’t even have time to suggest to Will that he return to his own room to prevent speculation.  She was asleep before the words left her mouth.

Groggy, disoriented, she heard the insistent knocking as if lying at the bottom of a lake.  Eventually, she opened her eyes and looked around.  Her room was filled with bright sunlight and appeared as though a tornado had recently passed through it.  Knickknacks were scattered on the floor, several chairs had been overturned and there were telltale heaps of clothing strewn about.  Turning her head, she saw Will stretched out beside her in the bed, sprawled on his stomach in an attitude of oblivious satiety.  The sheets were bunched around his waist, appearing snowy next to the dark bronze of his taut skin. 

She could have spent a good half an hour simply looking at Will in her bed, a sleeping wolf, handsome and dangerous.  The tenderness he was capable of made her breath catch in her throat just remembering it.  She could almost believe at times last night that there was more to this thing between them than simple attraction—the way he said her name, touched her, just looked at her.  And her own heart had been so perilously exposed, vulnerable.  She had burned for him, yes, could even feel desire stirring now, but there was that something else that was binding her to him in a way she wasn’t prepared for.

Nor could she think on it now.  There was that awful, relentless knocking.

“Please, madam,” Mordon said through the door, “it is most urgent you rise.  Mr. Huntworth is downstairs.”

Any vestiges of lethargy were immediately shaken off.  Olivia sat up in bed.  “I’ll be down in ten minutes,” she called.

“Shall I send Sarah up to help you dress?”

Olivia glanced over at Will, whose aqua eyes were now open and regarding her alertly.  They were both quite naked.

“No, I will manage on my own,” she answered. 

Mordon’s footsteps died away as she got out of bed.  Pulling on her drawers and chemise, she tried to calm her racing mind.  She felt herself begin to fracture again, all sense of unity from last night lost.  Mr. Huntworth never came to her house, unless...

“There’s trouble,” Will said behind her.

She whirled around and saw him stepping into his trousers.  The sight of him unclothed in broad daylight made her already racing heart leap.  It still astonished her that one man could be so solidly built, so well-muscled he put classical art to shame, and that he had desired her was nothing short of miraculous.

“I’m certain Pryce or his man Maddox have struck again,” she said.  She contemplated her corset, and the idea of squeezing into it was unbearable.  Instead, she located a starched, stiffened camisole she wore for days at home and slipped her arms into it.  Her fingers stumbled over the buttons, but she managed to get it on properly.  A small bustle and two petticoats followed.

“I should’ve stayed at the brewery last night,” Will said darkly.  He also dressed, putting on his shirt and hoisting his braces onto his shoulders, but she saw the way his gaze lingered on her as she ran around her bedroom in search of clothing. 

“I hired extra men to do that.”  She selected a shirtwaist and long, gored skirt; Olivia had no time for Regent Street fashion.  As she faced her mirror, she saw that her face betrayed exactly what she had been doing last night.  Her lips were swollen and red, her cheeks lightly abraded from Will’s stubble, her eyes slumberous despite her agitation.  Perhaps by the time she reached Greywell’s, it would be less noticeable.  Until then, there would be no help for it.  Surely the servants knew already.

Will appeared behind her in the glass as she roughly dragged a brush through her hair.

“Liv,” he said lowly.

She stopped in mid-brush, meeting his eyes in the mirror.  They were clear and serious.

“You want me to clear out?” he asked.

She set down the brush and turned around.  She knew what he was offering.  Leave before the word could circulate about them, and absent himself from her presence if she found him embarrassing, a reminder of her iniquity.  She looked at him steadily, and was struck again how Will surpassed simple definition.  He was pure physicality, but he was exceptionally intelligent and perceptive, more so than any other man she had known, and protective of her.

“I want you to stay,” she answered levelly.

He smiled a little, as if he had been expecting her to say just that, but not believing her all the same.  “You don’t have to be polite.  Tell me to go, and I’m gone.  I’ll find someplace near the brewery and keep helpin’ out there.”

She placed her hand on his rough, tense jaw.  “I am not being polite.  I want you here.”

“There’ll be trouble.”

“If there is any trouble, there is no place I need you more than beside me.”

His grin, the one that ignited her up from the inside, spread across his face and onto hers.  “Darlin’, anythin’ you want.”

They leaned into each other and kissed quickly, causing tiny flames to lick along her spine.  Her adventure far surpassed anything the fictitious Lorna Jane could ever achieve.

“Madam,” Mordon said again at the door, “please come quickly.  Mr. Huntworth is growing exceptionally agitated.”

“One more minute, Mordon, and I’ll be down.”

Olivia watched Will tuck in his shirt as she pinned up her hair and slipped on a short-waisted jacket.  She had been given an opportunity to end their affair before serious damage could be done, but she had chosen not to.  She told herself it was because she needed Will close at hand to help her counter Pryce’s threat, but that wasn’t the complete truth.

Without trying, Will had laid claim to most of her heart, and she wanted, against reason, to give it to him, no matter the cost. 

Despite the hideously early hour, George Pryce was in a wonderful mood.  He couldn’t help whistling to himself as he ambled back along Park Lane to his house on Upper Brook Street.  He strolled around a few bakery wagons and even nodded a courteous how-do-you-do to a passing bobby, who recognized him immediately and blustered out a “Good day, Mr. Pryce,” before he walked on.

Oh, it really was a fine morning.  Pryce took the front steps of his house two at a time, and even smiled at the astonished butler before giving him his hat, coat and gloves.  He then made his way into the dining room to have a cup of coffee and read over the paper, blissfully content.

His eyes scanned the sporting news, but his mind was still back with Maddox at the Notting Dale stockyards.  Pryce’s mood was too high to even register anger at being forced to meet his mercenary at such a filthy, stench-ridden location.  But Maddox insisted that such places were the safest, since no one of Pryce’s acquaintance would ever venture to such disgusting and disreputable spots.

“So it’s done, then?” Pryce had asked Maddox over the awful squeals of the pigs.

Maddox nodded.  “I carried out my plan exactly.  Lady Xavier won’t be brewing any more beer.  Greywell’s is finished.”

He could barely suppress his delight.  “What about the American?” 

Surveying the pigs being driven to market, Maddox shrugged.  “I’ll manage him.”

Though it wasn’t exactly what Pryce wanted, he was still marvelously thrilled.  That happiness lasted all the way back to his Mayfair home, where, in a clean, sweet-smelling dining room, he finally reveled in his triumph.  No one said no to George Pryce, and, by God, he had proven it.  She would be ruined, at last, and then he could finally turn his attention to something new.  There had to be hundreds of prospects to claim his interest, and his mind spun thinking of novel playthings. 

“What’s so amusing, George?” his father asked, poking his head in the dining room.  “I could hear you laughing all the way at the top of the stairs.”

“Nothing, Father,” he answered.  He made himself calm down.  “Just pleased about the cricket scores.”

Frowning, Henry Pryce disappeared from the doorway.  No doubt he thought his youngest son the veriest wastrel, exulting over something as inconsequential as cricket.  But even his father’s disapproval couldn’t diminish Pryce’s good humor.  All he had to do now was sit back and watch the death throes of Lady Xavier’s prized brewery.

“What happened?” Olivia asked as she and Will hurried into the Greywell’s office.  Huntworth had left to get back to the brewery on his own; they hadn’t spoken much on the way to the brewery from Princes Square.  Olivia had been quiet and tense, chewing on her bottom lip like it was jerky and staring out the window.  All the same, she had reached out across the carriage and taken his hand, squeezing it tight.

She wanted him to stay.  He didn’t know if he was being blessed or cursed by this, pretending for a little while longer that they somehow had a chance together, that a gap as wide as the Rio Grande didn’t separate them.  All he let himself think about was that she didn’t want him to leave her just yet, and that was fine enough for now.

And if she let go of his hand when the Greywell’s gates come into view, that was to be expected, even though it made his chest ache a bit.

As they entered the office, he saw immediately that one of the men she had hired to stand guard was sitting in a chair, being attended to by a doctor.  The man’s eye was swollen shut.  He held a bloodied cloth to the back of his head.

“I didn’t even see ‘im,” the guard was saying.  “I were makin’ me rounds, just checked in with Frank an’ gotten the all clear.  And then, wham, I were knocked out cold.”  He grimaced.  “Next thing I knew, Frank and the other boys were standin’ ‘round me and sayin’ to get the doctor.  Nobody saw nothin’.”

“How is he?” Olivia asked the doctor.

The older man frowned.  “He took a nasty blow to the head, could be a concussion.  I’ll want to observe him for the next day or two.  He was lucky—the hit could have killed him if it had been just a bit to the side.”

“I reckon whoever clocked him knew that,” Will said.

Olivia looked at him, alarmed.  “Maddox?”

“Yep.”

“He got in, but to do what?”  She turned to Huntworth.  “Have you conducted a search of the premises?”

The manager nodded.  “We couldn’t find anything.”

“We’ll look again,” Will said.  “Maddox didn’t bust in here just to hit this man over the head.”

So they broke into teams, all the employees of Greywell’s, searching from one end of the brewery to the other.  Almost nobody spoke, instead examining the smallest detail to catch whatever tampering Maddox had done.  It took almost two hours, during which all production had to be stopped. 

“This is going to cost me a fortune in business,” Olivia said to him as they stopped near the well.

“Can’t take any chances, though,” he said grimly.  He put his hands on his hips, brushing his duster back.

She nodded, then stared hard at his hip.  “You’re armed.”

Will also looked at his Colt, which he had strapped on just before they left.  The polished handle gleamed in the pale light coming in from the windows.  “I didn’t think I’d be needin’ this in England.”  He glanced back up at her.  “You look like you’re starin’ at a rattler.”

“But you’re wearing the rattlesnake,” she said.  Her brow was lined as she continued to stare.  “It’s yours to use.  If you wanted someone dead, there isn’t much that can stop you now.  That makes things very different.”

Will pulled his duster closed.  He saw himself in her eyes—he wasn’t the cowpuncher anymore, but a gunslinger.  The kind of man who could deal out death like a hand of poker.  “I know.  I can feel it.  I haven’t worn my six-shooter in a while.  It can change a man.”

“I don’t want you to be like Maddox,” she said, troubled.

“I ain’t him.  I don’t kill for money.”

She looked stricken.  “Nothing seems real, anymore.  Guns, kidnapping, sabotage.  It hardly seems the thing of civilized London.  More like...”