The Perils of Pleasure (3 page)

Sweet merciful God
.

The sudden free surge of blood through his arms was a stabbing agony.

He squeezed his eyes closed to isolate himself with the pain; he breathed through it in swift bursts, sweat beading his forehead, his teeth clamped on the inside of his lip. Still she worked away at the ropes behind him.

As the pain evolved into something like fi ery needles as his muscles and skin became reacquainted with cir
culation, Colin opened his eyes, willing the outlines of things in the dark room into clarity.

Two thick rectangular pillars of splintering wood were strung with valances of cobwebs. A million par
ticles of dust gyrated in a single narrow beam of light slanting into the room from . . . ? Ah, there it was, a window—wooden crates stacked up to obscure all but about two inches worth of filthy glass. Barrels squatted in the shadows.

So they were in a cellar of sorts.

Questions crowded the exits of his mind.
Who? Where? Why?
All seemed equally important yet mean
ingless in light of one single, astounding fact: he was still alive.

And then his mouth parted and a single, arid, aston
ishing word escaped:

“Louisa.”

Well. He was abashed.

The woman behind him paused in the business of untying him.

“No. I fear I’m not ‘Louisa.’” Ironic amusement in the words. “But as our acquaintance shall be short-lived, it hardly matters what you call me.”

Colin went still, absorbing the timbre of her voice as if it contained decipherable secrets. It had depth
and maturity, refinement, a husky edge that pleased. It betrayed no emotion—unless, that is, one considered amused irony emotion—and he detected no note of allegiance. The detachment and brisk confi dence in it would have, in fact, done justice to any man.

Colin could not recall a single woman ever regarding him with anything so neutral as
detachment
.

It suddenly seemed important to ascertain whether she was pretty, in the same way it was necessary to know whether a man was armed.

He heard the soft rush of her skirts as she stood; ex
perimentally, he wagged his elbows: they were free. He could feel every inch of his arms now. But when he tried to
move
his arms apart . . . he discovered she’d looped one of the cords through the bindings on his wrists.

In short, he remained tied to the back of the chair.

And this was another clue that his freedom might have come at a cost.

Fortunately, he’d paid the hangman a shilling to make sure his bindings were loose.

The woman shifted to the left of him now, and his eyes tracked her.

Pretty,
was his first optimistic assessment, though she was scarcely more than a chiaroscuro sketch in this dim room. Slim, quick, deft.

He surreptitiously twisted his wrist in an attempt to free it; he was thinner now, not to mention dexterous. The wrist slid from its bindings.

“Who are you?” His ravaged, nearly soundless voice appalled him.

The woman paused, then took two strides toward a barrel and reached for the jar sitting atop it, crossing the narrow beam of sun as she did, crossing out of it again.

Ah. Not pretty,
he revised with regret. The harsh light revealed sharp angles in her face, and . . . too much forehead. Something stern about the jaw, too, perhaps?

He continued with the business of freeing his wrists.

Madeleine Greenway turned back to the cargo she’d been paid to liberate, otherwise known as the infamous Colin Eversea, the Satan from Sussex. She saw no ev
idence of actual horns, but then again, it was rather dark in here.

“Who I am is another thing we can add to the list of things that don’t matter, Mr. Eversea, as our acquain
tance shall be—”

“Short,” he interrupted curtly, in that raw scrape of a voice. “So you’ve said. Why—”

She thrust the jar of water beneath his chin. “Drink. I fear I haven’t any answers for you, so you may as well save your strength. You’ll have answers soon enough.”

His famed features were difficult to distinguish in the darkness, and nothing about him radiated any par
ticular danger. What Madeleine saw was a lean, broad-shouldered man sitting bayonet-straight in his chair as though posture was a force of habit. The fit of his fi ne coat, surprisingly, wasn’t flawless; no doubt it was looser on him now than when he’d entered prison. Sweat-darkened ringlets clung to his temples and forehead.

He cast a baleful pair of pale eyes up at her and sniffed at the jar she presented.
Interesting
. It was precisely what she would have done in these circum
stances. Not a complete fool, then, Mr. Eversea, even if he stabbed a man to death in a brawl and had the great idiocy to actually be
caught
.

“It’s water,” she told him shortly. “
Only
water.”

Colin Eversea fixed her with those light eyes for a speaking second longer, then gave a curt nod. She tipped the jar, and his throat moved, greedily taking the water in. After a moment his widened eyes told her to stop tip
ping, and she pulled the jar away from his lips.

He swallowed hard; his chest rose and fell in two deep steadying breaths.

And then: “I would ask that you untie me.”

It was a demand disguised as a polite request. Funny, that. Given his circumstances.

“And
I’ve
been asked to leave you tied.” Madeleine didn’t trouble to hide her amusement. She knew Colin Eversea had been born a gentleman, and she could hear it in the low elegance of his every consonant and vowel, see it in the very angle of his head and set of his shoul
ders. He could probably no more control the arrogance in his voice than he could the color of his eyes.

She slid the round watch she kept in her sleeve down to her palm and held it up to that narrow beam of light, squinting at Roman numerals. She’d planned to linger here only long enough to ensure that Colin Eversea was safely delivered and duly bound. She would then leave for the Tiger’s Nest by two o’clock to collect her fi nal payment of 150 pounds from Croker—less Croker’s percentage, of course—and he’d been given strict in
structions not to inform her anonymous employer of Colin Eversea’s whereabouts until half past one this afternoon.

By the time her anonymous employer arrived here in this carefully chosen basement of an abandoned, burnt-out, Seven Dials inn, she would be gone.

What became of Colin Eversea after that was none of her concern.

Planning this mad, triumphant rescue had absorbed
her days and haunted her nights for two weeks. The next few minutes would be the very longest in her life.

But soon she would be on a ship, a speck plowing through the Atlantic Ocean, and some weeks after that she would land, tiny and anonymous as a seed, on American soil, and grow her life all over again from the ground up. Papers awaited her signature in a solicitor’s office in a part of London she could never afford to live in, and a farm—and the new life she’d planned for so long—awaited her in the state of Virginia.

As long as she provided the rest of the money. And that she would do this afternoon.

“Who
asked you to leave me tied?” She heard him shifting in his chair.

Eight minutes
. She wished he would stop talking.

“Patience, Mr. Eversea, and your questions will be answered apace.”

Madeleine so seldom had an opportunity to use the word ‘apace,’” and she was rather pleased with the sound of it. She supposed there were
some
advantages to conversations with gentlemen.

She reached for a broom she’d propped next to the barrels near the window. That window was about three feet wide and perhaps a bit more than a foot tall, and she’d artfully streaked it with dirt at intervals over the past week. It opened out onto a narrow, fetid little alley popular with whores and gin-addled drunks, and Mad
eleine had made certain that barrels meant to catch rain were lined in front of it, too, obscuring it, and at the moment they were brimming with stagnant water and God only knew what else.

In short, as far as the world was concerned, the window didn’t exist.

She’d methodically scraped away at the outside of
the wood frame with a sharp file, and now, with a tug on the brittle old ropes attached to it, she could pull the window intact right out of the wall. She’d stacked crates up to it to create a staircase that would take her weight. And that’s how she intended to leave: out the window, merging swiftly and anonymously into the St. Giles crowds, allowing the tide of them to push her toward Croker and her new life.

She reached for a broom, but behind her the chair creaked; she turned her head swiftly just as Colin Eversea was turning his toward her. Her narrowed eyes met his bright pale ones in that sliver of sunbeam.

He went oddly motionless then, as if the very act of turning had winded him.

Beautiful
.

Colin knew this definitively at last, and it made no sense, given the algebra of her features. It was some
thing his gut told him, rather than his eyes. And some
how the impression was so singular and total he needed a moment of stillness to absorb it.

And then the woman used a broom handle to slide the crate over the window, and they were in total darkness.

Just as he worked his wrists free from the last of his bindings. He touched one hand to the other, surrepti
tiously, one old friend greeting another.

He heard a soft metallic clank—the sound of the handle of a lamp being lifted—followed by the strike of a fl int, and then a feeble light fl ickered and pulsed into the room. The small lamp propped on the barrel illu
minated a circle just large enough to encompass himself and her, and only just lit the things beyond that circle, including the stairway.

She’d palmed the watch again and had just begun to hold it up to the lamp to review the time when the sound of a key rattled in the lock.

The woman whipped toward it so quickly, Colin felt the breeze of her skirts.

She went very still. Her surprise was palpable, and he could very nearly hear the hum of her mind as she reassessed her circumstances. Since her movements had thus far been obviously timed and precise and planned, this troubled him.

Though he still hadn’t the faintest idea if she were friend or foe.

He froze as the doorknob turned and the door opened. Slowly, inexorably, with the slightest of creaks. In came an expanding wedge of sunlight, a gust of air . . . and a single footstep.

There was a brief pause.

And then another footstep as their visitor committed to entering the room.

The door began to creak shut under its own weight, but their visitor stopped it with a foot; they heard the soft, dull thud of an inserted boot. The rectangle of light remaining at the entrance threw a bulky, cloaked, and hatted shadow against the wall.

The short hairs on the back of Colin’s neck rose. He tensed the muscles of his thighs and slowly, slowly, began to rise from the chair, which mercifully didn’t creak at all. The woman didn’t turn toward him; her eyes were fixed on the doorway.

“Greenway?” The shadow spoke. Hoarse and bari
tone. A disguised voice, Colin would have guessed.

The woman said nothing, but Colin heard a whisper of sound. His eyes sought the source: he glanced down and saw her hands moving subtly in her skirts.

“Madeleine Greenway?” The hoarse voice seemed to need clarifi cation.

The woman’s uncertainty froze her. Nevertheless, at last:

“Mission accomplished.” Her voice was low and steady.

The shadow shifted slightly, as Colin suspected it would. It had needed only to properly locate Madeleine to carry out its mission.

And Colin threw his body at her legs just as the pistol exploded.

nm

he went down hard just as a sickening crunch of wood told them the ball had struck the pillar just feet away from them. Splinters sprayed like shrapnel; Colin threw his palms over his face, felt thin spikes of wood strike off his hands and shoulders. Something metallic skittered across the floor. He uncovered his eyes and saw on the dusty floorboards the unmistak
able outline of a pistol.

Of
course
she would have a pistol. She must have dropped it when he’d thrown her to the fl oor.

Madeleine Greenway had rolled onto her side and was propped on one elbow, her hand outstretched for the pistol. But his arms were longer. He stretched and closed his hand over it—a decent stick, this one, and
where
in God’s name had she hidden it on her person?— rolled onto his stomach, unlocked it—

Only to find the crack of light rapidly vanishing as the heavy door swung shut hard.

They were alone again.

“Who else has a damned key?” he rasped.

“Give my stick to me,” Greenway—if that indeed was her name—hissed.

That was gratitude for you.

“Are you hurt?” he pressed, still struggling for breath. “Are you—”

“Give that stick to me
right
—”

“Christ,” he said, and pushed himself upright in
stead, ignoring her. He kept the pistol trained on her, half dragged himself to the chair and lifted it in one hand, fully intending to jam it as quickly as possible be
neath the doorknob at the top of the stairs. He had no intention of allowing her to leave until he had answers.

But God help him—that modest flight loomed like a mountain. His legs were still relearning to walk with
out shackles.

Although fury might have helped propel him up.

“Wait!”

She had pushed herself to her feet. It occurred to him that it had hardly been gentlemanly of him to leave her to accomplish that on her own, but then again, he also sensed the rules of chivalry didn’t quite apply under these circumstances, given that this particular lady was demanding the return of her pistol—oh, correction, her
stick
—and given that he hadn’t the slightest idea what she might do with him now. Someone had tried to kill her.

He wondered what incentive she now had to allow
him
to live.

“Cover me,” she said tightly. “
I’ll
do it. And faster,” she added unnecessarily.

“Do what?” he demanded, angry now. A test. He’d aimed her pistol right between her breasts.

“The door. That’s what you were about to do, was it not? Jam the door?”

A charged and complicated second followed. Did he trust her? No. Would she bolt out the door once up the
stairs? Unlikely, given that someone who had just come through it had tried to kill her. Would he shoot her if she tried? She had no way of knowing, but he had just saved her life. Doubtless she would assume he wasn’t eager to kill her.

So he nodded. After all, he was the one with the pistol. Unless she had another hidden on her person.

She limped a little as she passed him—carefully beyond his immediate reach—and cast an unreadable glance up at him. But she swung the chair up in both hands easily enough and shook off the limp as she took the stairs, rapidly despite her skirts. Strong, for a small woman.

Then again, he’d heard madwomen possessed un
common strength.

He kept the pistol trained on the door and on her, but because he was Colin Eversea and he did it like breathing—the admiring of women—he couldn’t help but admire the line of her spine as she made her way up the stairs. There was something marvelous about the brisk grace with which she did everything.

She expertly wedged the back of the chair under the doorknob. And then, to his awe, she jammed the lock, too—by thrusting her own key hard into it. So she was no amateur at . . . at . . .

Whatever
in God’s name this was.

Who
was
this woman?

When she was on her way down the stairs once more, Colin obeyed an impulse. He examined the stick; handsome thing, ornately decorated with nacre over a grip that looked like polished walnut. Brass fi ttings. He locked the pistol and checked the pan. It was indeed loaded.

On impulse, on suspicion, he sniffed the powder.

And then handed the stick back to her.

“You can have your stick, Miss Greenway. Your powder is bad. You never would have got off a shot.”

Madeleine briefly stared at the pistol as though her favorite pet had turned snarling on her. She recovered swiftly and took it gingerly from Colin Eversea, her mind spinning. She couldn’t speak.

“Who the devil are you, madam?” Colin Eversea’s voice was low and furious.

“Madeleine Greenway,” she said faintly. “I believe you heard the man.” It was difficult to speak over the clamor in her mind.
Who
had just tried to kill her?

And then a sudden realization set her world on end: she wasn’t entirely certain she would know bad powder from good. She was brilliant, she could shoot the heart out of a target, but if Eversea was right . . .

She was a fraud. Because she was a woman, and didn’t know good powder from bad, and she hadn’t no
ticed Colin Eversea’s bindings were loose enough for him to free himself.

“
What
are you, madam? What is the meaning of this?”

“I was hired to rescue you, Mr. Eversea. And some
one just tried to kill me. It all seems rather obvious to me.” Her answers were curt and distant. She
wished
he would stop talking. It was noise to her.

She needed to leave now.

Because she needed to have a little
word
with Mr. Croker.

“
Obvious
? Who hired you? Did my family hire you?”

He sounded baffled and incensed. Well, that made two of them.

“I don’t know who hired me, Mr. Eversea. I never do. The transactions begin with my broker.”

“The
transactions
?”

“Yes. With Mr. Croker,” she clarifi ed impatiently.

“Croker the Broker?” And now Colin Eversea sounded bewildered and a little incredulous.

She hadn’t the patience or time for this. “Mr. Ever-sea, I wish I could say it had been a
pleasure
, but it’s urgent that I leave now. If you’ll ex—”

“Who arranged for Croker the Broker to hire you? Are you telling me it
wasn’t
my family?”

“Your family was never mentioned to me.” She said this in a rush and took two steps backward. She didn’t owe him any information. She was, in fact, sorry she’d said anything at all.

“Then
who
?” He demanded. “And who wanted to leave me
tied
?”

She’d said too much. “
Mr.
Ever—”

“Help me, Miss Greenway. Take me to Croker. I need to talk to him.”

“Mr. Ever—”

“I killed no one,” he said curtly.

“I don’t care—”

“I . . . killed . . .
no
. . .
one
.”

The words neatly cleaved her sentence.

Madeleine stared back at him. His face was still partly in shadow. Anger, or fear, or weakness—he’d been in prison for a few months, after all—made his breathing audible.

Panic had begun to amplify her own sense or urgency. Colin Eversea could be a martyr; he could be Satan’s minion. She simply didn’t care. She resented the need to consider Colin Eversea at all. He’d been cargo she was paid to liberate, and the portal to her future, and for a few minutes he’d been her greatest triumph.

And now her future was unraveling and she was pen
niless and he was nothing but a burden.

She would find answers more quickly on her own.

“I killed no one, Miss Greenway.” His tone was qui
eter now, his control regained, but the words were still taut. “I believe someone made Horace Peele disappear, because someone
wanted
me to hang. And now it seems someone wants me to live . . . but on their terms. I want answers. I need your help.”

Madeleine was distantly amused that the bloody man hadn’t yet said please. Yet he seemed genuinely be
wildered and righteously furious, and weary, and . . .

He’s too thin
.

The traitorous thought crept in beneath the panic from some other slumbering place within her, and she knew that once she had thoughts like those, Colin Ever-sea would become a person to her, and this she could simply not afford.

“I’m sorry, but you’re as weak as a kitten, Mr. Eversea.”

There might have been a kernel of apology in her soft scorn, but as soon as she uttered the last word, she whipped around for the window to leave him to his fate.

She’d scarcely taken one step when her body was jerked backward.

In less time than it took to gasp, she was unable to move at all.

A heartbeat’s worth of disorientation later Madeleine understood what had happened: Colin Eversea had managed to snap out his hand, seize her arms, and twist her around to face him. Magically, the angle at which he held her—her arms bent upward so her fi sts nearly met her chin—immobilized her all but completely.

He now stood scarcely an inch away from her, so close she could feel the heat of his body. With it rose a slightly dank odor, which must have been hiding in the folds of his beautiful, limp coat.
Eau de Newgate
.

There was nothing at all gentlemanly about his grip.

Too curious, and frankly, too certain of herself to be truly afraid, Madeleine tilted her head back. In the lamplight his Newgate pallor made his eyes brilliant, nearly feverish, and now she could see they were an un
usual shade, more green than blue, but not decisively either color. She’d seen that color just once before: in the sky just before a thunderstorm. They were set deep above strong cheekbones, and dark hollows of sleep
lessness curved beneath. The pallid light outlined the slightly too-pronounced bones of his face, the broad planes and elegant hollows, that bold nose. A long face, but it suited him. Long lashes, too.

This last absurd observation floated across her awareness, welcome as a gnat.

She mentally batted it away, freed herself with some difficulty from his gaze and frowned faintly down at the large hand encircling her arm.

It had been a breathtakingly quick maneuver. How on earth would
he
have known how to—

“War,” he said with grim humor, surprising her by answering that unspoken question “And three older brothers who taught me to fi ght.”

In the brief, silent stalemate that followed, Eversea’s grip eased not at all, and a pye man’s enthusiastic bellow, the very sound of optimism, came to them through the walls. One could always count on a hanging to stimu
late appetites, even if the hanging never actually took place.

The world outside was clearly beginning to right itself.

For a dizzying moment Madeleine felt as if she ex
isted outside of time. Regardless of the outcome of this moment, whether she or Colin Eversea lived beyond today, London would go on as usual, closing over the hole they’d left the way a river fills in the dimple left by a skipped stone.

“Impressive, I grant you, Mr. Eversea,” she said qui
etly. She’d decided to appeal to his sense of chivalry, even as her heart beat in time with the precious sec
onds she was losing. “But I’m still stronger than you are at the moment. I assure you I shall be safer without you. And as you are a gentleman, I would ask that you unhand me and leave me to go.”

“I saved your life.” It wasn’t a petulant statement. It sounded like the curt resumption of a negotiation by someone who suddenly found himself with the upper hand.