Anne Stuart (2 page)

“
Ah,” said Killoran, still bored, “there’s a young lady involved. Tell me, child, is she unsuitable? The daughter of a dairymaid, perhaps?”

“
Miss Pottle is from one of the finest Northumberland families!” Nathaniel said furiously. “How dare you!”

“
You will discover, after a few weeks in my company, that I dare just about anything,” Killoran murmured. “And you will be spending several weeks in my company, won’t you?”

“
Unless you send me back early.”

Killoran’s smile was far from reassuring. “I see. I was wondering whether your monumental ill manners were the result of ignorance or design. Obviously you were hoping I’d be so appalled by your rudeness that I’d send you packing. You forget, I’m an Irishman living in England. I’m quite used to rudeness and insults.”

Nathaniel was temporarily at a loss for words. Killoran accepted that fact with gratitude.

“
In the meantime,” he continued before Nathaniel could gather together his prodigious powers of speech, “I’m going to lie down. Heroic emotions before dinner give me the headache. I intend to bespeak me a bedchamber for a few hours, and you can sit here and nurse your grudges. I believe there’s a mail coach heading north within the next few hours. If I come back downstairs and find you gone, I will assume your duty to your father proved unbearable.” He tilted his head to one side, surveying the young man silently. “If you stay,” he added gently, “you may discover that you lose all interest in the divine Miss Pottle.”

“
It doesn’t matter,” Nathaniel said in a sulky voice. “She’s lost all interest in me.”

“
Has she, now? Women are ever fickle. In that case, you might as well remain in London and drown your sorrows. There are any number of pleasing women in town, most of them with much pleasanter names.”

“
How dare you!” Nathaniel exclaimed.

“
You already said that,” Killoran pointed out in a deceptively mild voice. “Don’t be tiresome, my boy. Leave or stay, it’s up to you. I’ll be ready to drive back to town as soon as the horses are rested.”

“
Damn you,” Nathaniel snarled, but it was in a low voice. There was a limit to the young man’s bravado, after all.

Killoran smiled sweetly. “Indeed.”

The bedchamber mine host provided for him was damp, the linen unaired; the fire smoked, and the noise was appalling. Killoran was beyond objecting. He had tossed himself down on the lumpy bed with a complete disregard for his elegant clothes, unfastened his tormenting queued hair, and closed his eyes. The rain was coming down in earnest now, and the bedchamber was far from warm. The windows rattled in their casements, determined breezes swept through the room, and Killoran’s mood did not improve. One hour of sleep, that was all he asked. Just enough to take the edge off the miserable pounding in his skull.

The voices in the next room were muffled, angry. He heard a thump, and a cry that was cut off abruptly.

Another man might have evinced some level of curiosity. Not Killoran. He had seen enough in his life to be particularly disinterested in the violent doings of others. It sounded as if someone had just met his demise, violently. He could only hope things would now quiet down.

He was just drifting off into a pleasant, wine-benumbed slumber when a shrill scream sent him leaping off the bed. Whatever semblance of a good mood he’d possessed, and there’d been precious little, had vanished. He strode to the door, slammed it open, and advanced down the hall, in the direction of the witless screaming.

All was silent now. The door stood open to a private bedroom, and there were only two inhabitants. One was a bedraggled, bloodstained, and astonishingly lovely young female.

The other, at her feet, was quite dead. And so it was that he found himself at the Pear and Partridge, on the outskirts of London, embroiled in a cold-blooded murder.

Things, he thought faintly, were definitely looking up.

“
Are you going to swoon?”

The voice was cool, ironic, with the faintest trace of a lilt. It was enough to gain Emma’s attention. She looked toward the door, to the man lounging there, surveying her with a bored air.

He was a startling figure, dressed in deep black satin, with ruffles of lace trailing down his cuffs. His waistcoat was embroidered with silver, his breeches were black satin as well; his clocked hose were shot with silver. He had no need of the diamond-encrusted high heels on his shoes to add to his already intimidating height, nor to show off the graceful curve of his leg. His hair was midnight black, falling loose on his shoulders, and his eyes were green, cold, amused.

“
I don’t think so,” she said, finding her voice from somewhere. She wanted to wipe the blood off her hands, but the only possible spot she could find was her full skirts, and that would only make things worse. She wasn’t used to men. Cousin Miriam kept the house almost cloistered, a fact which Emma had accepted without argument. She didn’t see many men, and she’d certainly never seen one like this.

“
Because if you are,” the elegant man continued, moving into the room and closing the door very quietly behind him, “I suggest you take a step or two back so that you don’t fall on the corpse.”

Emma swallowed. “I’m not going to swoon,” she said with a fair degree of certainty. “I might throw up, though.”

He didn’t appear alarmed at the notion. “Surely not,” he murmured. “If you’ve survived this much, you won’t succumb to such paltry behavior. I presume you killed him. Why?”

“
I... I...”

“
Not that it’s any of my business,” he added casually, skirting Horace’s body. The smallsword lay on the floor beside him, and the man picked it up. “But I do confess to a bit of curiosity. Logic impels me to assume you’re a doxy, set on robbing one of your customers. Frankly,” he said, glancing at her as he hefted the weapon, “you don’t have the look of a doxy. The clothes are wrong. And there’s something about your eyes as well. I could be mistaken, though. Are you?”

“
No.”

“
Pity,” he murmured, letting his green eyes slide down her disheveled body. “You could make a fortune.”

She already had a fortune, inherited from her father’s manufactories. Not that it would do her a speck of good. “He was trying to rape me.”

Again that long, assessing, intimate look. “I can sympathize with the temptation,” he said, half to himself. “Still, he’s paid for his crime. Do you know the fellow?”

“
He was my uncle. And guardian.”

“
How delicious,” the man said with a faint, heartless laugh. “Do you have an aunt as well?”

“
A cousin. His daughter. She doesn’t like me very much.”

“
I don’t expect her affection is about to increase.”

“
It’s not likely to matter. They’ll hang me.”

He tilted his head to one side, watching her. The mane of black curls was disconcerting—the few men allowed in the house in Crouch End wore their hair tied back in queues, or powdered and bewigged. The loose curtain of hair was somehow disturbing, intimate.

The haphazard elegance of his clothes was equally unsettling. Emma was used to men who dressed conservatively and properly. Men of sober habits and dour demeanor, who kept their vices behind closed doors.

This man was slightly drunk. He was surveying the scene of a murder with a combination of faint curiosity and amusement, and her sense of unreality grew.

“
That would be a great shame,” he said. “Such a pretty little neck.” He sighed. “I suppose I’ll have to do something about it.”

Emma could hear the thunder of footsteps approaching, the babble of voices. The maid’s high-pitched squeal rose above the rest, her voice carrying through the closed door. “She was standing there covered with blood, as cool as you please!” the woman shrieked. “I saw her. She killed the poor old gentleman, stabbed him through the heart, I swear...”

Emma barely saw the man move. He strode past her, graceful, swift, and pushed open the door. A crowd of people gathered there, wide-eyed, bloodthirsty.

“
I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” he announced in a cool, arrogant voice. He still held the smallsword in one hand, and he swung it with a negligent air. Blood still clung to it, and Emma had to control her stomach with sheer force of effort. “I’m afraid I killed him.”

“
Lord Killoran!” the innkeeper exclaimed, horrified. “Were it a duel?”

“
I’d hardly stab the man in cold blood, now, would I, Bavers?” he said. “The man was deranged. He attacked this young lady, and when I came to her rescue, he tried to kill me. I had no choice.”

Bavers stared at him, clearly astonished. “You rescued her?”

“
From the brutish hands of her father,” he said.

“
Uncle,” Emma corrected him unhelpfully.

“
Ah, yes. We didn’t have time for proper introductions.”

“
Lord Killoran, you can’t just walk into one of my rooms and spit a guest,” Bavers said in a reproachful voice.

“
He didn’t seem inclined to meet me outside. The floor will come clean, if you don’t leave his moldering corpse for too long.”

A necessary, Emma thought longingly. A few short moments of privacy to cast up her accounts, and she’d face her fate with all the grace she could muster.

Except that fate seemed to have been spared her, due to the lazy ministrations of this glittering stranger.

“
There’ll need to be an inquest,” Bavers warned.

The man referred to as Lord Killoran leaned forward, and the heavy coin that passed between his pale, elegant fingers and the landlord’s rougher ones took care of matters quite nicely. “I’m sure I can count on you to see to things.” He glanced up, toward the doorway. “I think we’d best be on our way, Nathaniel. This inn is far from peaceful.”

And without another glance at either her or the corpse of her uncle, he walked out of the room.

The other witnesses followed, no longer interested in something as mundane as a dead man, and the landlord was alone with Emma.

He bit into the gold coin, then grunted with a fair amount of satisfaction. He looked up at Emma. “You there,” he said, his earlier deference vanishing. “We don’t need your sort here. I heard what his lordship said, and I don’t believe a word of it. Lord Killoran wouldn’t lift a finger to save his own mother. Be off with you, doxy.”

He was the second person in a matter of minutes to assume she was a whore, though Lord Killoran had at least been polite enough to ask. “If you’ll have the horses put to…,” she said faintly, watching as the landlord knelt in the blood, going through her uncle’s pockets with a singular lack of squeamishness. He came up empty.

“
I’m keeping the horses,” he said. “Something’s owed me for dealing with all this. They aren’t yours, anyway—they’re this poor, dead gentleman’s—and I’d be remiss in my duty if I let you take them without so much as a by-your-leave.”

Frustration made her curl her hands into fists. She had no money—her cousin Miriam had always seen to that. She was alone, penniless, with no one to turn to for help, least of all her family. She considered this for a moment, feeling an unlikely surge of hope.

Destitution was one side of the coin. Freedom was the other. No one to touch her, pinch her, hurt her. No one to watch her, questioning her every move. To force her to spend hours on her knees, recounting nonexistent sins. In Miriam DeWinter’s stern household, Emma had had little opportunity for sinning and no temptation to do so whatsoever.

Suddenly she was free. She could simply walk out the door and not a soul would stop her. The thought was absolutely terrifying.

Before the greedy innkeeper could change his mind, she ran into the hallway, racing down the narrow stairs, not daring to slow her pace for fear that reaction and reality would set in. She would escape, disappear into the city, and no one would ever find her. She would be safe from Cousin Miriam; she would be happy. And then she looked down at the blood staining her hands and shivered.

Killoran stood alone in the private room, staring into the fire, a glass of brandy in his hand. Nathaniel had been sent to make certain the horses were put to with all possible dispatch. Apparently he’d decided to keep Killoran company a bit longer. Killoran viewed that prospect with a jaundiced air but he was too weary at the moment to bestir himself and send the young hothead home.

The young woman upstairs was far more interesting, and he was requiring a surprising amount of self-denial to keep from taking her with them. Not that he had a great deal of experience in self-denial, but something told him the young woman would be more trouble than she was worth.

For one thing, she was quite astonishingly beautiful. Not at all in the common style, she was possessed of a thick mane of impossibly flame-colored hair, a tall, lush body of dangerous voluptuousness, and the warm, honey-colored eyes of a complete innocent. That red hair called to him, a siren lure, but he assumed it was only nostalgia and misplaced sentiment. Not that he’d ever been known to possess those two qualities.

She reminded him of another redhead, long dead, albeit a more subdued one. The creature upstairs, despite her shocked eyes, was far from demure. The blood on her hands only added to her allure.

Ah, but innocent females could be very dangerous indeed, and it wasn’t anything as mundane as his worthless hide Killoran was concerned about. He’d had virgins before, and knew just how uncomfortable that could be. They tended to imagine themselves in love, and when they discovered their seducer was a man who simply didn’t believe in love—didn’t believe in much of anything at all, for that matter—they grew furious, subjecting one to tears, rage, bitter protests, and the like. All for the sake of clumsy, untried sex.

No, he would leave this fascinating, murderous virgin alone. He wouldn’t even offer her a ride back to London in his carriage—there was a limit, after all, to his self-control, and she was quite the most tempting female he’d seen in years. With luck, he’d never set eyes on her again.