All Through the Night (14 page)

She returned his sword to the level of his throat, refusing to back even an inch from him. A fragrance of sleep and musk and something indefinable and stimulating filled her nostrils.

“And where do we go from here?” he asked.

She indicated the chair. “ ‘Ave a seat, Cap.”

“Before a lady? I think not.” He bowed, mocking her yet again.

“I’m no lady. I’m a thief. Your enemy. But tonight you’re mine.”

His gaze sharpened, his face set in lines of intense concentration. Too late she realized she’d spoken without the masking benefits of her father’s accent.

“Sit, damn you!”

He sat, his shrug declaring her small victory a matter of the most banal import. She moved behind him and pressed the barrel of the pistol to the side of his throat.

“ ‘Ands behind yer back, Cap,” she commanded hoarsely, slipping the rope from her shoulder. He submitted and she grasped his crippled hand first, unwillingly noting the painful assemblage of knuckle, tendon, and sinew.

He’d sustained damage. He’d been wounded. God knows how many times, and yet he’d fought on. He’d survived it. More important, more fascinatingly, he’d survived his own actions. If only she could make such a claim. She hesitated.

“I’ll catch you, you know,” he said, turning his head and slanting a vicious look at her.

She noosed his wrist, snapping the rope tight before catching his other wrist and lashing his hands together. She circled back in front of him and raked his trussed figure with an insolent gaze.

It had no noticeable effect on him.

“And now?” he asked.

“Now I play with you, Cap. Like you been playin‘ with me. And you gets to wonder, ’Is this where I buy it? Is this me end?‘ ”

“You won’t kill me.”

“Won’t I?” Her voice was harsh, demanding. “If it comes to choosin‘ between me life and yores, I’ll choose mine, Cap. Have no doubt about it. I done it before. I’ll do the same today.”

“You’ve killed a man?” he asked, watching her carefully.

“Yes!”

“Well, if that’s your intention, please do so quickly. I don’t wish to spend my last minutes trading confessions with a thief and a murderess and a cowardly, masked one at that.” He evinced not a shred of fear, not hauteur or disdain. He simply stated a fact.

“I don’t care what you wants,” she spat out. “I care what
I
want. Don’t you know that about thieves, Cap? They only wants what they can’t have and once they gets it, they only wants more.”

“You don’t want to kill me. You want me to stop hunting you. But I won’t. Not now. And you know it.”

“Shut up!”

He cocked his head, his gaze speculative. “You might have had freedom if only you’d waited a bit longer. But you didn’t. Why?” The question was sharp, intent. “Why, when you must have suspected that you only needed to lay low for a short while longer and I’d be recalled, why did you do this now?”

His words pounded at her, threatened her. “
Because I wanted to!”

“Do you know what I think?” His voice was cool and remote and tempting.

“No.” She jerked the sword up and placed the point against his breast. Ruthlessly she ran the sword tip down his chest until it caught at the end of the nightshirt’s collar. She did not stop there. She sliced through the linen material, exposing the hard ladder of his flank, nipping each rib as she drew the blade down over his corrugated belly to the jut of his hipbone.

She’d found a way to make him stop talking.

His gaze fixed on her face with regal imperiousness. Only the darkness suffusing his throat and jaw betrayed that he felt anything. That and the retribution promised by his soul-eating eyes. They gleamed in the shadows like a wolf’s.

She would not swallow. She would not stop. She’d begun this. She would finish it. And this, after all, is what she wanted, had wanted from the first. This was the reason she was here, no matter what lies she told herself tomorrow. Because this was all she would ever have of him.

And she’d steal it, too. Even against his will. She sliced through the last of his nightshirt.

“Well, now you’ll have to kill me, thief,” he said, his tone conversational, his eyes branding her. “Because I won’t stop until I find you. I won’t stop until I have you. No matter how long it takes me, no matter how far it takes me.”

She dropped the sword. It clattered against the hardwood floor. Her heartbeat thundered in her throat. Deliberately she stepped between his knees.

“Yes,” she said. “But right now,
I
have
you.”

He worked his thumbs into the small easement he’d made in the bonds when she’d strapped his wrists together. A few more minutes and he’d be free. Fury fanned his resolve with a white-hot flame.

He should have called her bluff, but this was not the same woman who plagued his dreams. His thief had changed. She wore desperation like a mantle and walked some thin line of self-control. “Beauty—a deceitful bayte with a deadly hook,” Lyly had written, and so she was.

He’d seen its like before in men who’d pushed their own limits too far and finally left them behind. She had their look. It declared itself in brisk, inelegant movements and in the sweat trickling down her throat and soaking her dark shirt. Her smile cleaved her face with razor sharpness, dying only to be reborn seconds later as if in answer to some taunt only she could hear.

And looking at her, reckless and cursed, he realized they were as mated in spirit as fire and ash. Anne Wilder was a dream, an aspiration, a portrait of what love should be. The thief was his reality.

At their first meeting—perhaps even before, perhaps when she’d challenged him with her cunning and her audacity—he’d taken her like a bullet in the chest. And like that bullet, the right touch could remind one of its potentially fatal presence.

“I have you,” she repeated in that tough little whisper, nudging herself between his thighs in a parody of a lover’s more intimate stance. He could barely make out her features in the darkened room. He heard her breathing and felt her warmth. Awareness skittered over his skin . . .

Abruptly he realized what he had sensed in her from the moment he’d opened his eyes.
Sex.
It rolled off her in waves: carnal, potent, and intense.

He named it and like tinder to a sea of grass, her arousal set him on fire. Swift and hard, his body stiffened with readiness and a familiar, violent longing.

He wanted her. Not her capture or the damn letter. He wanted to be in her with a desire so intense that it felt like need.

“You know what’s so bloody funny, Cap?” She leaned close to him. Her words pattered like warm rain on his mouth.

Her eyes glittered from behind the black mask. He couldn’t speak. He wanted too much. She’d tied him to this chair and forced him to taste his lust as well as his powerlessness. But worse, in a life singular for its lack of illusion, she’d made him cede the one illusion he wanted to believe in. She forced him to cede Anne Wilder.

“I don’t even ‘ave yer bleedin’ letter,” she said, her voice raw, her lips inches from his. “You did this to us for nothing!”

Her mouth came down over his. She clasped the back of his head with one hand and spread the other flat against his chest. Her tongue stroked the seam of his lips with dark, warm intoxication. A river of sensation swept down his body, pooling in his groin. Dear God.

He forgot freedom, forgot revenge in the face of this far greater need. He heaved himself forward, straining against the ropes holding him, seeking a more intimate contact.

She gave it to him. She moaned deep from the back of her throat as his tongue came alive in her mouth. She crumbled between his knees, clutching at his shoulders. Her hands played down over his chest to his stomach, her nails lightly raking his belly and moving lower.

He squeezed his eyes shut. The back of her fingers brushed against his swollen member. He ground his teeth together, refusing to give her the victory of his gasped pleasure, and then her hand closed over him with white-hot delicacy. A sound of pleasure rose from his throat. His neck arched, his hips lifted.

Desire burned to a cinder all of his plots and strategies and tomorrows. One thought drowned him with its imperative: He wanted what she alone offered—she alone of all the women he’d ever known offered: an end to longing.

Whatever price she demanded, he’d pay.

She trembled against his chest while her hands hungrily explored him. He angled his head to kiss her again. Her eyes were closed.

“Open your mouth.” He instructed in a hoarse whisper. “Give to me. Let me—”

She broke free of his kiss and tumbled backward, catching herself with her hands. Her eyes widened. Like a starving man watching a feast snatched from before him, he roared his fury.

She skittered away from him. He flung himself against his bonds, wrenching his arms, following her with fierce determination. She whimpered—sweet sound of abandonment!—and like an addict to the opiate, crept back to him. Her eyes searched his. Her deliciously vulnerable mouth trembled beneath the black silk mask. She settled her hand on his thigh. He ground his teeth in frustration and closed his eyes.

“What do you want?” he demanded. “Whatever the bloody hell you want, just finish this!”

Her gasp jerked him back to reality as no word could have done. He felt the ropes cutting into his wrists, heard his breath laboring like a beast’s, smelled the sweat and musk of his own arousal.

She wasn’t going to satisfy this primitive need. He could see fear rising in her, overtaking her desire.

She needn’t fear him. God, he’d have fallen like a supplicant to his knees for her touch, for her kiss, and her body. Would have—

Too late he realized his admission and recognized what she’d done. He’d have traded all the long years he’d spent fighting for a portion of control, a particle of expiation, just for the chance to rut with her. Damn her!

Savagely, silently, he wrenched against the ropes. He was a boy again, a starving workhouse roach chained by ignorance and desperation to a life of squalid imprisonment. He was a boy hurling abuse on every other tenant of that rotting hell, hating them all but none more than himself for he couldn’t stop fighting. And fighting the inevitable only made the pain worse.

The lashes the workhouse guards had used were nothing to the pain of simple want. He could shut himself off from their brutality. He could use that pain, work it, and learn from it. He’d never learned anything from the pain of wanting but to want more. Until he’d finally damned himself with it.

She bloody well should shrink. She should run. Hide in hell if she could—for what little good it would do her. He’d find her. “Let me go!”

She fumbled on the floor behind her for his sword and found it. She shoved herself to her feet and pointed its tip at his throat. “No.”

The rope scoured his wrists; warm liquid greased the hemp. His blood.

“Stay there!” she commanded, her voice shaking as much as the sword’s madly wobbling tip. She craned her head around, looking for escape.

“Why don’t you make me?” He twisted his crippled hand and yanked it free. He surged upward and the chair crashed to the floor behind him. His ruined nightshirt fell open at his side. Her gaze fell upon his arousal and for an instant her eyes fluttered shut.

He took advantage of that improbable maidenliness. He seized the blade in his hand, ripping his palm open on it. More blood.

She panicked and grasped the hilt with both her hands, trying to wrest it from him. With his free hand he seized the back of her neck and toppled her against him. She fought desperately as he pulled her into his punishing embrace, absorbing each blow.

Anne panted. She could not think. He was too big, too strong, and far too angry. Dear God, she thought hysterically, twisting madly, had she really thought to control him?

Tears coursed down her face as she fought him, but beneath the tears desire, like a ravening animal, still clamored for satisfaction. God help her, it had been so long and never like this: so elemental, so raw.

Some deep-buried part of her not only wanted this struggle and this fight but wanted his victory, wanted the smell of him hot and angry inundating her senses, the slick slide of his belly muscles against her own. His dense masculine form straining above her—

“No!” She went limp. For just an instant his hold loosened on her wrists. She skewed violently and jerked her head up hard beneath his chin. She heard his teeth crack together and wheeled the sword hilt around, smashing it into his temple. He fell back a step. It was room enough. She twisted, sprang free, and raced for the window.

She heard him behind her and then she was through the opening and swinging down past the sill. Her hands flew over the brickwork and found purchase in the crumbling mortar above the frame as her toes scrabbled for the watercourse. Her heart pounded in her temples. Her legs flayed wildly, frantically. She couldn’t find the watercourse.

Her weight began dragging her fingers from the shallow, grout-filled gully. Her feet beat like a chimney-trapped bird against the brick. Her hands cramped. She slipped. Blackness yawned greedily beneath her, pulling her—

Her wrist was seized in a viselike grip.

She stared up. Jack leaned half out of the window, his chest and arms cording with muscle and sinew, his teeth set as he struggled to pull her up. But his hand was slick with his own blood and weakened by the deep gash across the palm. Even as he lifted her she felt his grip loosen. He would drop her thirty feet to the cobbled pavers below.

“Swing me through the window below!” She gasped.

“No!” he grated out.

“Swing me through! Or I’ll die!”

Indecision, pain, and fury writhed across his fierce countenance and then, with a grunt, he leaned farther out. His torso gleamed with sweat in the cold moonlight. His face was rigid with concentration.

He gripped the sill with his good hand and heaved her sideways, pitching her away from the window, using her momentum to swing her out and away from the building. And then she was arcing back in.

The window loomed like a black flat lake of glass. She cried out once and closed her eyes. A thousand prisms exploded about her as she broke through the window and pitched into the room among a fantasia of broken, crystalline shards.

She landed tucked, rolled, and regained her feet as she’d been taught. And then she was through the archway into the dark hallway and running for the front door, her thoughts racing.

She slowed, her pulse thrumming in her throat, her chest heaving with the stimulation of having cheated death—and him. He’d saved her.

Tuning her ears for the inevitability of his chase, she slipped into a dark alcove by the front door. The beat of his footsteps raced down the staircase and past her hiding place. She heard his soft curse as he stopped before the front doorway. The glow of the streetlamps outside attached to his long, hard body.

She stepped silently behind him, filling her eyes with the sight of him: the span of his back, the straight line of his shoulders, the narrow hips, the hard buttocks tapering into long thighs and calves.

She touched the barrel of her pistol to the small of his back. He swung around and she dipped beneath the clenched fist flying above her head. She shoved the gun into his hard abdomen and wrapped her free hand around his neck. Surprise and anger flashed in equal measures across his face.

For the second time that night, she kissed him. She opened her mouth against his hard, chiseled lips and felt him swell against her. With a sound like a growl he crushed her in his embrace and lifted her against him. Heedless of the gun pinioned between their bodies, he propelled her back against the wall. Ravenously he angled his mouth over hers as his hips pinned her to the wall. His shoulders broadened as he bent over her like a falcon above its kill. He enveloped her in his masculinity.

Surrender. He’s won
, she thought, drowning in sensation and need.

“Damn you!” He muttered, the curse lost and furious and hopeless with self-loathing and awful longing.

He wants this,
she thought dizzily.
He hates you. He’ll kill you.

She shoved him away and stumbled back. Still holding the gun on him, she groped behind her for the door handle. He stepped forward.

“No!” Her voice sounded frantic, near to shattering. He stopped.

“I’ll find you wherever you go,” he swore grimly. “However long it takes. You can’t run far enough.”

She bolted. Light and fast as a greyhound coursing over the wet, cold cobbles, she fled. She gained the rooftop and pitched herself recklessly through the night’s mocking stillness, her breath coming in sobs because she knew he was right; she’d never run fast enough or far enough again.