Sweet Treason (Entangled Ignite) (3 page)

“I am acting according to my conscience.” He came to his feet, pushed the pistol into his waistband, retrieved the bottle and the apple, and paced in front of her. “A man must fight for what he believes in. How can that be treason?”

How, indeed? She could think of nothing but the fact that she’d never seen muscles move so hypnotically beneath snug broadcloth breeches, and how long it had been since she’d felt so utterly feminine.

Confused by the nature of her own thoughts, she knit her brow. “Should I want to keep any principles at all, I’d best not listen to a word you say. You have the devil’s own tongue.”

The man stopped his pacing to give her a long appraisal. He put his apple aside and pushed the cork back into the bottle. “Damn the luck! Damn the timing!” he muttered in a dark undertone.

“Sir?”

“I’ve been watching you, Rose—the provocative way you sit upon the desk, the tempting glimpses of your leg, your charming smile, and the sweet invitation of your laugh. You dazzle and devastate me with a single glance.”

Stopping in front of her, he blocked her escape from the desk by parting his legs slightly to enclose hers between them. He lifted her to her feet, sliding her against him and gathering her into his arms.

Her heartbeat quickened when she found herself pressed along his firm powerful lines. The sensation was delightful, heady—as if she’d been the one drinking French brandy straight from the bottle. She tilted her head back to look into his face. The heat in his dark eyes spoke clearly of his intentions.

She should never allow him to kiss her. Oh, but what would it matter if she did? If, just this once, she cast caution to the wind? If, for one instant, she could feel what she had forfeit when, six years ago, she’d stepped into her mother’s shoes to accept the responsibility of her sister and Oak Hill Farm.

Her gaze shifted to his full lips hovering above hers, and her stomach fluttered with anticipation. She’d never see this man again—if she lived out the night—and that knowledge made her reckless.

When he recognized her surrender, he smiled and began to lower his mouth to hers. She tried desperately to remain calm, but all her muddled brain would acknowledge was the hard length of his body and the strength of his arms. When his lips touched hers, soft and persuasive, she panicked and turned away, leaving his mouth to graze her cheek.

Cheek to cheek, his breath was heated and humid as his tongue traced the rim of her ear until he reached the lobe. There, he nibbled and tugged just enough to evoke a shudder of pleasure. Everything inside her tightened in anticipation.

“Afraid, sweet Rose?” he whispered. “Of me? Of where this could lead? Or of your own wanting?”

She couldn’t say. Was it not one and the same?

He lowered his head further to leave a path of soft insistent kisses from her earlobe to the well of her shoulder blade. The sensation was like nothing she’d felt before—intimate, urging, almost desperate. Heaven help her, she wanted more. He slipped his hand down her back, molding her against him. The hot, hard bulge pressing against her belly ignited an answering heat in hers. Naughty. Wicked. Exciting…

He asked a question, his voice a deep vibration that reached to her toes. Her very flesh tingled, sending shivers of delight through her. Her breasts ached and became exquisitely tender. She gasped as he drew her even closer, his large hands moving along her spine.

“Yes…,” she sighed, affirming her suspicion that this man’s arms would be heaven.

“Sweet Rose…” His voice was hoarse with desire as he lifted his head to speak as he brushed across her lips. “Are you the most courageous woman I know…or the most reckless?”

Reckless. Unconscionably reckless…

He nudged her robe open with his chin and lowered his mouth to the slope of one aching breast. She caught her breath and choked back another gasp when he captured one tingling crown with his lips and tugged gently. She tangled her fingers through his dark hair to hold him close. The sensation was so foreign, yet so completely delicious, that she wanted it to go on forever. She sighed. “Tell me your…name, sir, that I…may know who my dreams…”

“You mock me?” he growled.

She gave a soft, husky laugh at his pretended outrage.

The deep vibration of his voice against her skin sent shock waves along her spine. “By all that is holy…I must be mad! Were it any night but tonight, I’d sweep this desk clear and take you here and now.”

Emily fervently wished it were any other night. She’d have yielded him anything—
everything
—when he nibbled a greedy path back up her neck and cherished the tender flesh at the hollow of her throat before lifting his head.

He brushed tendrils of hair back from her cheeks with this thumbs. “Now that you’ve seen my face, my only safety—and yours—lies in the fact that you do not know who I am.”

She did not bother to deny his accusation. But betrayal had been the furthest thing from her mind. She caught her breath on a gasp as he slipped his hand up her bare thigh, exposed in the gap of her robe.

She struggled free of his arms and moved away, fighting to regain her composure and recall the true nature of this man.

Blood-red splotches on his shirt sleeve reminded her that this man had murdered someone this very night. She would be fortunate if she escaped with her life. She pushed him away to gather her robe more closely around her. This had to end before she forgot herself again. She was breathless when she spoke. “Your ten minutes are up, sir. If you are a man of your word, you will leave.”

He swept up his cape with a flourish, his dimple deepening as he studied her face. “I shall leave you unharmed, Rose, at least by me, with no more than your oath to keep my presence here secret.”

“You have it,” she vowed, trying to bring her rapidly beating heart under control. Though he could not know it, he was perfectly safe, because betraying him to the soldiers could mean discovery, ruin, and death on the gallows. For
her
.

She said nothing as he went to the window and lifted the sash. When he turned as he sat upon the sill before swinging himself out, he looked as if he might change his mind.

“Bloody damnation!” he sighed. “It’s going to be hell knowing who is living here at Oak Hill. Keep your oath, Rose, lest I come visit you again. If I do, we shall finish this. And more.”

Chapter Three

Humiliating as it was, Emily ventured into Rye to sell the brooch that had been handed down in her family for five generations. She negotiated the respectable sum of five and twenty pounds from the jeweler, along with his vow to keep their transaction confidential. There would be little cash to spare after she paid Mr. Dodge when he arrived.

She joined Bridey at the greengrocer’s when she was done. Bridey’s carrot red curls bobbed around her face as she flirted with the proprietor, Mr. Biddle.

He gave Emily a curious look when she nodded in greeting. “Is your housekeeper under the weather, Miss Nevins?”

“No, Mr. Biddle. Mrs. Bart has gone to nurse her sister in Portsmouth.” She made her selections and filled the basket Bridey held for her—the staples only—flour, salt, and molasses.

“I miss seein’ Miss Lucy and your mother, Miss Nevins. Have they come back from Scotland yet?”

She finished her list and took her purchases to Mr. Biddle to tally. “Mother’s gone,” Emily said, distracted by her chore of counting out her meager change.

“Been and gone, sir,” Bridey covered. “She was home for a few weeks very recently, but a summons from her ailing granny sent her and Miss Lucy right back to Edinburgh. I fear ’twill be a long illness. She’s in a decline, is her granny. Consumption, I think. You know how common it is in the highlands.”

That dratted spy! He had Emily’s nerves completely on edge. If she were not more careful, she would have them all dangling at the end of a rope. She glanced at Bridey in gratitude before making her own reply. “I shall tell her you were asking after her in my next letter, Mr. Biddle. She will be pleased you thought of her.”

Mr. Biddle nodded. “See you next week, miss?”

“Yes. Next week.” Nosy Mr. Biddle was ever in everyone’s business. She frowned as she left the shop and hurried down the lane like a small whirlwind.

As it was, she and Bridey barely had time to catch their breath before Mr. Dodge arrived. Bridey showed him into the library and then found an excuse to busy herself there. She rolled her eyes behind the solicitor’s back as he read the accounts in his dreadfully monotonous drone, and Emily permitted herself a wry smile. Bridey’s dusting of the library during the meeting was no more than an excuse to hear all the news first.

To further complicate her day, she had promised Squire Davis that she would make a fourth at whist that afternoon and stay for supper at Larkspur afterward. Unfortunately, she was in no mood for light conversation. Her head was too filled with thoughts of a dark-visaged man whose smile made her knees weak. She should not have let him kiss her. Surely that would have been less dangerous than what he
had
done.

“Are you listening to me, Miss Nevins?” Mr. Dodge asked suddenly, “Or did you have nothing to say on the point?”

She blinked, trying not to stare at Mr. Dodge’s gray periwig, askew on his egg-shaped head. She’d already paid him for the quarterly taxes and mortgage. Why wouldn’t he leave? “Did you
have
a point, Mr. Dodge?”

The man sat forward in his chair and tapped the surface of the desk with his fingertip for emphasis. “I consider this to be a part of my obligation to your father’s estate. According to the terms of his will, I have protected your assets for your twenty-fourth birthday. I will continue to do so until you are married or reach that age. As your appointed guardian, should anything happen to your mother—and in accord with her letter—I shall see to your introduction. You
did
receive her letter, did you not?”

Her letter? Impossible! Mama would never come home again, let alone write a letter. She’d died nearly five years ago in a fall from her horse. Emily had left their Scottish cousin to care for Lucy while she kept Oak Hill Farm running and sent funds for her sister’s upkeep. If Henry Dodge knew that, he would have seized control of the Nevins girls and the Nevins fortune—thus the man was engaged in a barefaced lie!

She kept her expression unchanged and clasped her folded hands tighter. Every sense she possessed warned her that something peculiar was afoot. “Letter? No, I did not.”

“We must discuss your mother’s wishes.”

“She has not returned from Scotland.”

“I know.”

“You do?” She raised an eyebrow. Mr. Dodge smiled again and she detected something cat-like in the slant of his eyes, something sly, and her blood chilled. “How would you know such a thing?”

“That is the second reason for my visit. Your mother’s letter.”

Oh, the lying villain! She could not be imagining the maliciously triumphant light in his eyes. “Is it, indeed?”

“She has asked me to see to your introduction to society. I have some experience in the matter as my own daughters have been successfully launched, and one has married. I am not without position and influence in town. Add that to your own good name and dowry, and you will have invitations to all the best events. That is why Miranda asked me to assume the duty. Since she is tending her sick grandmother in Edinburgh, she does not know when she will be free to make such arrangements herself.”

Miranda? When had Mr. Dodge ever been on first names with her mother? And her sick grandmother in Edinburgh? How had he heard that particular subterfuge? Ah, Mr. Dodge had an informant in the village. Mr. Biddle, the green grocer, was the only person who had been told the story of a sick grandmother.

“May I see my mother’s letter? I find it difficult to believe she would make such arrangements without consulting me. That is not at all like her.”

Mr. Dodge withdrew a folded sheet of paper from his accounts ledger and pushed it across the desk. There, in flowing script very closely resembling her mother’s writing, was all that Dodge had related. Why, it even went so far as to appoint him her guardian in her mother’s name! She stared at the letter, trying to imagine how he had come by such a document.

Forgery, of course. He would have examples of her mother’s handwriting from before that fateful trip to Scotland. What a bold bluff! She almost admired him for it. She couldn’t refute his claim without producing her mother. He, like she, was lying, and there was nothing she could do to stop him.

“I wonder why Mother never mentioned this to me.” She pushed the forged letter back across the desk to him.

“She desired my consent before approaching you on the matter. I wrote to her by return post, telling her of my willingness, and that I would handle it all. You needn’t trouble your mother with the details.”

“Not trouble her? You cannot be suggesting that I go off to London without so much as a ‘by your leave’ to my mother?” She huffed indignantly, hoping that would be enough to give him second thoughts.

“Since your mother and I have arranged it all, posting a simple letter telling her of your safe arrival in London will be sufficient.”

“And if I do not wish to go?”

“You haven’t a choice, Miss Nevins. Your mother has said you must come. And did you not give me your promise not long ago that you would come to London if your mother bade it?”

“I did not mean this year, sir.” She sat a little straighter and narrowed her eyes. “Or perhaps I will come after Mother returns—this summer.”
This summer, after I have inherited in my own right and you will have no more power over me
.

“Everyone who is anyone will be retired to the country in three months. At your age, Miss Nevins, you have no time to waste.” His cold eyes swept her with a calculated gleam. “As your mother pointed out, you are already dreadfully tardy for a launch. How quickly can you be ready?”

Her age? No time to waste? She blinked, disconcerted that her sham was having no effect at all on the solicitor. “Ready? Ready for what?”

“To leave for London. There is much to be done. Your wardrobe must be brought up-to-date. Introductions made. That sort of thing.”

She deliberated for a moment but could think of no reason to deny him that would not invite closer scrutiny of Oak Hill and its inhabitants. And there was another matter to consider.

The American spy. He’d said he’d be watching. If she went to London, would he come after her?

“I cannot understand this. Mother knows how much there is to do here. The spring plantings…”

“She said she did not wish to argue with you and that she would leave that to me. Miss Nevins, I intend to fulfill my obligation to your father. And your mother.” He looked so righteous that she was momentarily nonplussed.

“You will come with me, Miss Nevins, or I will present a petition to the court to have my trusteeship extended until you do. I mean to see you in London and that you have a proper introduction.”

The trap snapped shut, and Emily’s heart sank. Henry Dodge had just made the one threat that would persuade her without further argument—an extension of his trusteeship. He knew barristers and judges, and he could make a case for her obstruction in doing his duty to the girls and the estate. And once he filed a proceeding, the estate would be frozen, and he would remain trustee until the case was settled. Dear Lord, she would
have
to go. “We will require a week to make preparations and be ready for such a journey.”

“We?”

“I shall bring Miss Sullivan, of course. Mother never permits me to travel without a maid or a companion.” She stood and went to the library door to hold it open for him. “You will understand that I cannot ask you to stay. There are a few inns in Rye that are quite comfortable, I am told. I dislike to rush you, but if the rooms are all taken, the next nearest inn is at Hastings or Romney.

“Now, I have much to do…packing and so forth. We shall be ready a week from today, Mr. Dodge. Until then—” She nearly pushed him out the door. “Will we be traveling by private coach or public?”

“Public—”

“Then I shall have Mr. Bart arrange to send my mare along later.” She closed the door with firm emphasis.

Her back braced against the door, she looked at her maid. “Did you hear, Bridey? What can he possibly be up to?”

Bridey came out of the library and peeked out a window to the front drive as if to assure herself that Mr. Dodge was leaving. She shook her head. “I’m sure I cannot say, miss. You know the man better than I.”

“It cannot be anything good.”

“No, but we have to go, that much is certain.”

Emily went to look over Bridey’s shoulder to watch Mr. Dodge’s coach pull away. “Fie! I must write a letter to Lucy at once, informing her of this horrid development and warning her to stay put until I send for her. Simon will have to look after the manor and the tenants alone. Mary will help as she can. As for me, I shan’t rest easy until I know what Henry Dodge is about.”

“Can you not guess?” Bridey asked as she followed Emily back to the library. “I wonder if…yes, I wonder.”

Emily sat at her desk and pulled a sheet of paper from the drawer, dipped a pen in the inkwell, and began writing a letter to Lucy explaining this new development. “He has been trying to lure me to London for years, Bridey. He has always taken his responsibility to me more seriously than Mother liked. Oh, good heavens! Do you suppose he has found out that Mama is dead? No, that cannot be—if he knew that, he would simply walk in and take over. And I must admit to a raging curiosity. What does that man have up his sleeve? He would never do me any favors unless it meant gain for him, too. Yes, I shall have to go to London to uncover his game.”

Bridey’s head was tilted to one side, and she wore a dazed expression. “Lord! I’ve never seen you so blind to the truth. The man fairly drools when he looks at you, miss.”

The mere thought made her laugh. “Bridey, curb your imagination! Mr. Dodge barely abides me. Five minutes into our meetings and he is shouting. No, he has some other motive, or my name is not Emily Nevins.”

“Well, there’s something not quite right there, or my name’s not Bridey Sullivan. But you are right about one thing,” Bridey said. “We’d best find out what Mr. Dodge is up to before he comes snooping around here or lays hands on Miss Lucy.”

…

Squire Samuel Davis leaned across his desk in earnestness. “Stay right where you are, nephew. This afternoon you’ll finally meet my little friend Emily.”

Looking heavenward, Ryan Sutton was torn between amusement and exasperation as he sank back into his chair. Uncle Samuel was not the least bit subtle. “I know you are fond of her, sir, but your attempts at matchmaking have been rather too obvious. I fear I should hasten back to London before the country lass has her talons into me.”

“I warrant you’ll want more than your
talons
into
her
, lad. And if you let on that I arranged this meeting, Emily will never speak to me again.” Samuel leaned back and shook his head. “Poor little thing never goes to town or has a lick of gaiety.”

“There may be a reason for that, Uncle Samuel. She may not be the gay sort.” Or she may be deucedly ill favored, bad-tempered, dull-witted, or disinterested. None of those things boded well for the afternoon. Ryan wondered if he could think of an excuse his uncle would believe to escape this social obligation. He really did have business waiting.

“She’s bright and gay enough, Ryan. Her laugh could melt ice. And she’d make an excellent wife. She’s oldest of two daughters—her father was killed just after Emily was scarce in her eleventh year. Her mother never remarried—always running off to visit her family in Scotland with little Lucy. Leaves Emily in charge of the place and to fend for herself. The entire fortune and lands will go to her—her husband, I should say. ’Tis no paltry sum. If that devious trustee of hers does not filch it all first, that is. I knew the man well in London, and he is not to be trusted. Wouldn’t put it past him to force her to marry him.”

“There’s more to marriage than a fortune, Uncle.”

“Aye, and you are not the man I thought if you cannot find more than that to keep you by Emily’s side.”

“Then her fortune is not the only attractive thing about your Emily?” Ryan surmised. “How old is she?”