Linda Needham (2 page)

H
oly Christ.

He’d expected a hulking country dolt or a lordly buffoon, a broad-shouldered man, at least as tall as himself. One who stank of shoddy ale and rabid arrogance. He’d expected blustering and blasphemies and blasts of dark threats leveled against him.

But not this, not a superbly fashioned young woman with eyes of clear, crystalline green that set his pulse racing.

Not this study in brazen grace and white-hot defiance standing in his office, glaring at him in her heavy iron manacles and plain cotton flannel.

Not clouds of hair that grabbed the gold out of the lamplight, that tumbled off her shoulders
and down the lightly broidered front of her nightgown.

Her nightgown, for Christ’s sake!

He swung the full force of his astonishment and anger on Summerwell. “What the bloody hell do you mean by this?”

Charles pointed at the woman, trying not to stare openly at the willowy roundness of her hips, at the curve of her slim waist or the rise and fall of her unencumbered breasts.

“I mean nothing at all, sir.” Summerwell shrank back against the door and squeaked out, “Just, well, he’s your…well, that is to say, she’s your prisoner, my lord. Isn’t she?”

“I’m no one’s prisoner, Lord Everingham, least of all yours.” The dazzling woman raised her wrists and clanked the thick iron bands manacling them like a histrionic ghost in a Christmas pantomime. “You’ll unlock these immediately, sir, and let me go!”

He’d like to do just that—to start the damned evening over again. But he couldn’t move, was utterly powerless to think beyond the absurdity of the scene, beyond watching the compelling young woman whose chains rattled accusingly as she took a single step toward him across the polished floor.

“I don’t know who you believe I am, sir, what crime you think I’ve committed, or where you come by the arrogant notion that you can send your barbarians to break into someone’s home
while they are sleeping and arrest them without cause, but I demand that you unshackle me and return me to my family immediately! Else I’ll see the lot of you in jail for kidnapping or worse.”

Worse? He couldn’t imagine worse than this, this cogent, clear-eyed threat to his strategies and his reputation, with her perfectly, gracefully arched brows and soft, thickly sooted lashes.

Charles took an unsteady breath, then stepped back from the woman to empty his head of her befuddling scent. Why had Summerwell brought him this pagan offering instead of Captain Spindleshanks? This goddess gowned for his bed, scented for his deepest pleasure with flowers and pale moonlight.

Bloody hell! “Who the devil are you, madam?”

Her eyes flashed brightly green, setting off little warning flares inside his chest.

“My name is Holliway Finch, Hollie, as I told these louts of yours when they arrested me—in your name, sir—as though I were a common criminal.”

She was as uncommon as any woman he’d ever met, the portrait of self-possessed indignity. A magistrate’s indulged daughter or a mayor’s or, God forbid, a lord’s. He couldn’t muster a single excuse that wouldn’t later be used in a trial against him.

Abduction, plain and simple—by men in his employ.

A maiden ruined, her reputation sullied.

And his own reputation pulverized by the press, unrecoverable this time, given his misspent youth. Spindleshanks would certainly make hay when he learned of it.

Bloody, bleeding hell! He swung back on his bailiff. “What the devil were you thinking, Summerwell? Or were you thinking at all?”

Summerwell shot a glance at the woman in stark horror. “Only to serve the arrest warrant, sir, as you ordered.”

“I ordered you to arrest Captain Spindleshanks,” Charles said slowly, precisely. “You remember: the radical reformer who’s been a blot on the landscape and a plague to me for the last two months. A man, Summerwell. Not a woman.”

Certainly not this one. She was neither swooning with shame nor weeping in terror. She was following his every word, every move, with her discerning eyes, her shoulders squared and proud despite the staggering weight of the shackles on her wrists.

“Well, sir, me and Haskett went directly to the village of Weldon Chase, to the Tuppenny Press. A printing shop it was, just like you said. We found no one else there but the young lady. She was upstairs and so—”

“Bloody hell, Summerwell, if you had found a goat instead, would you have arrested it and brought it too?”

“Of course not, my lord. But—” Summerwell
edged back behind Haskett, who then seemed to shrink behind the woman, who arched her pale, graceful brow and one nicely rounded hip, and cast a searing glare at the pair of them.

Charles wanted to throttle them both with his bare hands.

“Enough. Spindleshanks is probably in Cornwall by now, thanks to your bungling.”

“The fault is yours alone, my lord,” Miss Finch said in a sultry voice that he knew he would remember to the end of his days.

He had a sudden, unnerving feeling that she was a fanciful vapor, moondust and a bit of madness come to torment him. A wayward fairie princess, caught by the castle guards as she escaped down the tower stairs, off to the ball to meet her eager lover.

Unsettled by the notion and by a small but unrelenting awareness that things still weren’t as they seemed, Charles leveled a finger down at her. “You’ll be quiet, madam.”

“I won’t be quiet at all, my lord Everingham. Not now, and certainly not when you return me to my home and family.”

His thoughts scattered like useless bits of glass whenever he chanced a look at her, at the bedclothes wildness of her gold-strewn hair. He felt a burning need to rake his fingers through it, to taste the dusky rose of her mouth and toy with the ribbons that secured the front of her nightgown.

Hell and damnation! A months-long investigation, his reputation at stake, and all he had to show for it was a wide-eyed, iron-shackled, nearly naked young woman, who would surely report the incident to the Home Office. And then to every newspaper in the country.

This was going to take more than the smoothing of a few ruffled feathers.

And yet there was something niggling at him, something that didn’t quite fit. Some path of logic he’d missed and ought to be carefully tracking.

He hated puzzles. And this woman was a puzzle, the worst kind of ambush: incongruous and damnably distracting in her nightgown and her bare feet, in the shackles which he couldn’t quite bring himself to unlock. Because a kind of unexpected danger seemed to lurk in the woman’s freedom, because she was glaring at his every move when she ought to be weeping, because she was intelligent, rebellious.

If it looks like a radical…

But Miss Finch looked nothing at all like a radical. Radicals were large-bellied men, full-bearded, abrasive and pipe-smoking, and arrogant far beyond their station. They were ink-stained publishers and belligerent weavers who reeked of unwashed wool and camphor.

Miss Finch was scented with sunshine. She stood unflinchingly in her cutting silence, a soft crimson tinting her cheeks, her chin perpetually tilted at him.

Besides which, Captain Spindleshanks was tall and broad; he rode like the wind, scampered across midnight rooftops—and he was a man.

Bloody hell, he’d be a year cleaning up this particular mess. Explaining to Mr. Finch, or Mayor Finch, or Colonel Finch that he hadn’t meant to abduct his daughter, his sister, his wife, that he hadn’t sundered her innocence—

“Bloody hell, Summerwell, did you even read the arrest warrant before you executed it?”

“I did do, my lord.”

“Read it again.”

Charles watched Miss Finch as the man fumbled with the paper in his pocket, unfolding it as he cleared his throat, and then read, “‘Wanted for the—’”

“I know the crime, Summerwell. The description. Read the description of Captain Spindle shanks.”

“It says here that he’s ‘about thirty-five years of age, stands six feet or more, has long, dark hair and a beard to match, tends to broadness at the shoulders, and wears a cloak and an ancient tricorn….’” Summerwell’s voice trailed off as he looked up again at the unlikely Miss Finch and then back at Charles.

“Six feet or more, Summerwell. Broad-shouldered. A beard. Black hair.” Summerwell cringed at the litany of his errors. “Seems the Home Office reward is safe enough from you and Haskett tonight.”

“A reward?” The question came from Miss Finch, the throaty lilt of surprise laced with something else. Pride, was it? Adventure?

That was preposterous, of course, but Charles watched her carefully as he answered, still plagued by an indistinct itch he couldn’t name. “The Home Office has posted a generous reward for the arrest and conviction of Captain Spindleshanks.”

She made a small, unconcerned hum in her throat and raised an unconcerned brow. “How much?”

“A hundred pounds.”

“Imagine that.” Then Miss Finch smiled, almost imperceptibly.

Oh, Papa, I have a price on my head!

H
ollie Finch knew that she ought to be utterly terrified by the huge, shadowy man who loomed above her in his crisply elegant linen shirt and finely tailored waistcoat, who smelled of brandy and lime and leather. She knew that she should feel wholly chastened for her carelessness now that she was shackled to her eyebrows and standing in front of the great and legendary earl who was on the brink of bringing her down along with her dreams. But it was all she could do to keep from shouting with joy.

A hundred pounds!

A reckless, undeniable pride caused the fluttering in her stomach and the thumping in her chest. Not Everingham’s fearsome glower, not the compellingly spicy scent of him as he circled
behind her or the fear in his servant’s faces or the chill that scuttled along the floor and brushed at her bare ankles.

It was a sweeping, towering joy, the sort she hadn’t felt in months. Not since before her father died and the world had gone so far awry.

Oh, but this shameful pride would get her into even more trouble than she was in already. The tide was miraculously at bay; the earl thought she was an innocent bystander in his political affairs. With any luck, she’d be long gone before he discovered that Summerwell and Haskett hadn’t made a mistake at all.

That she was Captain Spindleshanks, in the flesh.

In the bare flesh, or nearly so. Dear God, her father would have had her hide if he’d known what she’d been up to. If he hadn’t been killed that day on St. Peter’s Fields. She missed his scolding of her passion.

Patience, girl.

Oh, but Papa, they murdered you.
Like they murdered all the other people who got in their way that day.

Heartlessly. Brutally.

And now the lot of them were going to get away with their abominable crime—the magistrates and the yeomanry, Everingham and his commissioners—while innocents were imprisoned and hanged and transported from their families to the ends of the earth.

Murder sanctioned by Parliament. Flagrant injustice. It must be exposed and put right before Everingham’s commission issued its pack of lies in the guise of truth.

But she could only continue her campaign if she escaped. Her only hope was to stanch her hasty temper and encourage Everingham’s belief that he’d made a huge error in arresting her, that she was indeed an innocent young maiden caught in his evil tentacles.

Though he wasn’t at all the sort of man to make errors or leave them unexplored. And his brow had deepened precipitously in the last few moments, his eyes darkened to a chilly suspicion, sinking her courage.

She stood her ground, though she wanted to run, weighted to the smooth oaken planks by terror and the cool iron shackles around her ankles.

“Describe this print shop to me, Summerwell,” Everingham said, his gaze so breathlessly dangerous that it was impossible to look away. He touched every stitch of her flannel nightgown with his gaze, blazing his intimate way through the inadequate fabric right to her skin, stealing her breath, pausing to stare at her mouth, as though tasting her there, and then back again into her eyes. “The Tuppenny Press.”

Summerwell had slipped deeper into the shadowy room, just beyond Everingham’s reach. “Well, my lord, there was…uh, printing, of
course. And paper. Yes, yes, loads of printed paper everywhere.”

Of course there was; printing was her business. She’d been pushing perilously forward in her campaign to expose Everingham’s corrupt commission before he issued his findings. She’d been careless recently, had probably left a leagues-wide trail of sedition all across the Midlands.

Leave it to Everingham to follow that trail directly to the Tuppenny Press—exactly where her life would end unless she could call upon a spectacular miracle and escape him. The door was open wide behind her, freedom just a step backward between the butler and Haskett, then out into the dim hallway.

But not with Everingham watching so closely, and certainly not when she was encumbered by a clanking chain. Dear God.

“Exactly what sort of printing, Summerwell? Tracts, handbills?”

“Oh, yes, sir. And newspapers and pamphlets and broadsides. Evidence, my lord! Just like this one here that you gave me with the warrant.”

“Show me, Summerwell.”

Summerwell dug down into his jacket pocket and then unfolded a sheet of paper. “Here, my lord.”

Hollie easily recognized the incendiary woodcut that she’d bought from a Manchester engraver: a bloodthirsty yeoman slashing off the head of a young weaver.

Oh, this was a deadly game with but one outcome. She’d accepted the risk from the beginning, when she’d made her first midnight ride, when she started printing her sedition. And when Everingham’s men had awakened her into this nightmare, she’d known she was in great trouble, even in their confusion at finding a woman instead of the man they had been expecting.

“Read it, Summerwell.”

The man’s hands shook as he began: “‘The full and truthful inquiry into the massacre of the unarmed weavers of Manchester, their wives and innocent children, by the yeomanry cavalry, under the direction of…of the evil magistrates…’”

Summerwell trailed off feebly and raised wary, pleading eyes to Everingham.

A terrible fury creased Everingham’s brow, becoming a palpable threat when he shifted his gaze to Hollie. “Go on.”

Summerwell flinched but continued, “‘A truth that has been squelched and corrupted by the infernal designs of the…uh, the…wicked”—Summerwell gulped before he raced through to the end—“Lord Everingham.’”

A cold clot of stillness hung in the room, Everingham’s suspicion keeping Hollie frozen in place with visions of a damp and dreary jail cell, of the gallows, oblivion.

The silence was broken at last by the squeak of
Summerwell’s quiet defense. “Sounded like Spindleshanks to me, sir.”

Everingham took the broadside from Summerwell and dropped it onto the table. “Indeed.”

“Yes, indeed, sir.” Summerwell brightened, approached the table, and lifted a stack of handbills. “We found a lot more ’n that: page after page of this sedition stuff.”

Haskett nodded eagerly at his master. “Hanging on lines downstairs they were, sir, stretched every which way between the rafters. An’ dripping with words from every page. Looked like a bleedin’ laundry room on a Monday afternoon.”

“We were so sure that we’d found Spindleshanks’s shop, we packed up a few boxes and brought ’em back with us.”

Hollie’s heart collapsed and fell into her stomach. So that was the chicanery they’d been up to when they went back inside after they’d shackled her to the wagon seat. Rifling her bedroom, digging around for evidence.

Everingham’s eyes flickered for the briefest moment, a lick of searing flame against her cheek, then he turned his blazing attention from her and moved closer to the paper-cluttered table, the lamp casting deep shadows across his face as he spread his broad hand across one of the stacks of paper.

“Where are these boxes of evidence now, Summerwell?”

Summerwell’s chest rose. “Still waitin’ out in the wagon, my lord.”

This seemed to please Everingham; it tightened a muscle in his jaw that served as a smile.

“Take a close look here, Summerwell: do you recall seeing any of this in the shop?” Everingham gestured at the sea of sedition: her printing shop flayed open, ready to be dissected, every handbill and placard familiar to her and ultimately indicting.

Hollie wanted to rage at Everingham, for the drowning hollowness in her chest, for the echoing memories, for stealing her voice, her words.

“Oh, yes, my lord,” Summerwell said, picking up a handbill. “We found plenty of these, announcing a meeting of handloom weavers in Leeds.”

At Rennick’s mill, only three nights ago. She’d barely escaped with her skin, had nearly lost her cloak and that blasted tricorn and its wig. And now here she was, trapped and about to be exposed, chilled to the bone but fiercely clinging to a familiar point of heat in her heart, a spot of courage and outrage.

Because Everingham had left her alone at the doorway. She took a quarter-step backward, just to see how far she could move away.

Clank
went the blasted chain.

Everingham’s dark eyes found hers sharply from across the room and narrowed as he studied her more deeply. He slid his smoky gaze along her cheekbone and across her mouth, then back to her eyes, questing where he didn’t be
long, with a scorching interest that sifted through her flannel and had nothing to do with sedition or treason or shackles.

“What else, Summerwell?” he finally asked, holding her gaze fast with his own.

“I do remember this piece, sir, though I don’t think we brought it along. ‘The Lancaster Hymn,’ it says. ‘Smuggled out of Lancaster Prison by Captain Spindleshanks to lift the spirits of the victims and innocents of the wicked massacre in St. Peter’s Fields.’” Summerwell jabbed his finger at a large-font block of print, and Everingham turned his attention back to his bailiff.

Just in time, because, dear God, when she’d taken her slow step back, her heel had lifted out of the shackle. The iron band was too large for her foot when she pointed her toes. Freedom! So unexpected and precious it took her breath away.

While Everingham studied her broadsides at his graceful, lordly ease, while Summerwell read aloud from them, and the three other men focused all their attention on the heaping mound of sedition, Hollie carefully, silently worked on ridding herself of the remaining shackle, angling her toes just right.

Clank, chink.

She held her breath as they all looked her way again, Everingham’s piercing, devil’s gaze more suspicious now than ever, as though he could lift the hem of her nightgown with the power of his
thoughts, as though he knew she’d freed herself of one of his iron bands. And that it pleased him.

A wave of fear came roaring through her that she would fail her father if she were thrown into prison now. She was damned either way: running from the law would mean that she could never return to her print shop, could never again publish the
Tuppenny Press
on her father’s beloved Stanhope. But if living underground for the rest of her life was the only way to expose the truth of the massacre that took her father’s life, then so be it.

She deliberately sighed impatiently and shifted her weight to her other hip with another clanking rattle. “You’re trying my patience, Lord Everingham!” she said for good measure.

She felt wickedly prideful, because it was only a matter of time before Everingham would realize that he’d actually had Captain Spindleshanks in his office all along.

And that I got away, my lord.

The man studied her with his impossibly dark gaze, a muscle tightening beneath his clean-shaved jaw, before he finally frowned and returned to his deviltry.

“My lord, there were a couple hundred issues of a newspaper—the
Tuppenny Press
, like the name of the print shop—all bound up neatly, looking like they were ready to be carted off to London.”

Everingham studied the newspaper with care, and Hollie prayed.

Please don’t look up! Not yet.

She held her breath as she finally stepped completely out of the last shackle and stood blessedly free. Her pulse thrummed a deafening rhythm against her ears as she clasped her manacled hands together to keep the short chain between them from rattling.

Just a half-dozen stealthy, sliding steps backward, and she’d be in the darkened hallway. And then out the door and away into the woods.

But the beast looked up and into her eyes, as though he could hear her thoughts and see right down into her heart.

“Leave us, gentlemen,” he said suddenly, gesturing for the others to scatter.

“But, my lord—”

“Now, Summerwell. Deliver the boxes of evidence to my library. That will be all, Bavidge.”

They were alone a moment later, the door closed, the room darker and absolutely silent save for the thundering of her heart. The shadowed corners pressed in as he strode toward her, his mood changed entirely. He’d been a blur of powerful bureaucracy just a few moments ago. Now he was a stalking beast. A beast who wore his fine linen shirt with a dark and dangerous grace, an elegant silk neck cloth and the scents of bay, all the tones and textures of rank and privilege.

He stopped in front of her, an overwhelming
threat as he touched his searing fingertip to her breastbone, an intensely intimate pressure that set her heart spinning and sent her stumbling backward a step. She followed his slow, sinuously possessive gaze down the front of her nightgown, then to the damning tangle of chain and iron bands that now lay piled on the polished floor.

“Clever, Miss Finch.” Everingham swiftly stooped and then dangled her ankle shackles from his finger, with a devilish, falsely admiring lift to his brow. “You were about to run from me. Perhaps I misjudged you.”

His voice was dark and thoroughly personal, curling around the tips of her hair and against her ears, pulsing through her fingertips, threatening dire consequences if she didn’t quickly master her paralyzing fear and prove that she was innocent of his suspicions.

Hollie scooted past him and put a chair between them so that she could think better. “It’s very late, my lord.”

“Indeed.” A solitary, darkly silken word, a test, a challenge. He let it hang between them as his gaze swept across her face in a methodical fashion, ending at her eyes.

“I’m tired—”

“So am I.”

“And I’m not your Captain Spindleshanks fellow.”

He raised a brow slightly, insufferably amused
and more than dangerously suspicious. “Obviously,” he said too mildly.

Obviously! Then he still didn’t suspect the truth. There was hope after all, if she played this right.

“Then, you finally recognize your error—the first step to righting a terrible wrong. Which means that you’ll also understand that I want to go home to my bed, where I belong.” She stuck out her hands, bound by the two D-shaped steel bands and the short length of chain between them. “Unlock me. If you please.”

But he made no move at all. “I don’t please at all, madam. As I don’t please to have anyone running from me.”