Escape with A Rogue (10 page)

“Not without Beausoleil, no.”

She felt her forehead crinkle in a frown. “The blond man from the market?”

“He knows the moors. But where in the blazes he ran to, I don’t know. Even if I could find him, I doubt anyone could safely traverse the boggy moors in this fog.”

She tamped down fear before it crawled back up her throat. “We need another plan.”

“At this point, Lady M., it does not have to be ‘we.’ You can still—”

“My cottage,” she interrupted. “Of course. I haven’t got the fine clothes anymore—they are with the damnable man who stole the carriage.” It felt good—surprisingly good—to curse. Perhaps that was why men did it so freely. “But that fiend has no idea where I have been staying, so he cannot lead the guards to us. The cottage would be perfectly safe. I have the farmer’s clothes there that I brought to the market. We can spend the night there, with warmth and shelter.”

“Spend the night? You must be joking.”

By throwing herself into her plan, she could forget she was with a man who likely wished she were a thousand miles away. Arguing with Jack made it easy to think of nothing but bending him to her will. More correctly, to the best choice, as opposed to allowing him to make some dangerous decision based on the need to protect her. Or, she thought unhappily, on the desire to gain distance from her.

“See sense, Jack. It is our only option. If the guards find the cottage, we will be disguised. There will be no reason to assume we are anything but a married couple who has lived for years in Rundlestone.”

“A small cottage, is it?”

She continued briskly, “One room with a small barn for the animals attached to the end of it. But quite warm and comfortable.”

“One bed?”

“Well, yes. I did say there was only one room.” Unease ruffled in her stomach. Did he mean to take her to her cottage and then run, leaving her alone in her one bed? “No matter what happens in the morning, you must spend the night in the cottage. For food. And rest. And because there is nowhere you can go tonight.”

“Of course, Eve,” he muttered, startling her. His mind had been following the same thoughts of Adam and Eve and temptation. “I will do anything you ask. As long as you promise to do as I
say
.”

Chapter Six

Jack clasped her hand and Madeline struggled to match his break-neck pace over rough, barely visible ground. Gorse snagged at her skirts. The wild moorland ponies and the sheep had eaten everything else, leaving the prickly shrub to mass along the paths and tracks. Her boots barely protected her ankles as she slid on granite rocks that erupted everywhere, but she managed to stay up with Jack and kept her balance.

The warmth of his skin teased her through her thin leather gloves. She tugged at his hand. “You should let me lead.”

“You’re safer with me up front.”

“I am the one who knows where the cottage is.”

He shrugged and kept walking. “Then tell me which way to go. Wouldn’t you rather I be the one to smash my shins or fall in a hole?”

Her heart felt heavy and tight. “I would have thought you felt I deserved such punishment—for putting you in prison.”

“You told the truth of what you saw. I’d never condemn you for that.”

His words were kind but his voice was ice cold. He stopped abruptly, a shadow in the mist, and she had to walk right up to him to see his eyes. “Let’s make one thing clear, Lady M. I see one way to protect you. If the guards catch us, we have to make them believe I’ve taken you hostage. So I walk in the lead. I drag you along, and if we’re caught, I will make it look like you’re my prisoner. Do you understand?”

The man she remembered from two years ago—the gentle charmer who had talked to her while he tended to the horses—was gone. In his place was a man determined to set the rules. A man determined to keep paying the price for
her
mistake. “I am
not
your prisoner,” she argued. “Right now, I am armed and you are not. You are more my prisoner than I am yours.”

“You are my
prisoner
. End of discussion.”

“It is not. How can I pretend to be your hostage? It will get you shot—” But she glimpsed a squat stone building behind gnarled, lichen-covered trees. They had reached her cottage.

She jerked her key from her pocket and pushed past him. “You are wrong, Jack Travers. I know I can have you exonerated.” A lump sat firmly in her throat. She shoved the key into the padlock hanging on the rusty hasp and turned it. The wretched thing did not want to move—it was sticking in the damp.

A half-glance behind revealed he was watching her, his mouth curved in a hard, bitter smile—her heart clenched to see it.

“After I broke out of prison? I’m innocent of those murders, but no court in the land would say I’m innocent of escaping prison.”

Tears stung Madeline’s eyes. “But you were wrongfully convicted. How can it be an unlawful escape when you should not even have been in prison? I would have had you released but for the pig-headed refusal of the magistrates to see sense.”

“There are men transported for stealing food to keep their children from starving. The law isn’t necessarily moral, Lady M.”

Why was he not willing to fight? Why didn’t he care about his life? She swallowed hard but one errant tear leaked from the corner of her eye. At least in the fog, Jack wouldn’t see it. She would not let anyone see her cry.

She hated watching him behave this way—as though he deserved punishment. She was so ashamed of her family. So wildly furious for allowing herself to be so easily led to believe something that was not true. She had been so quick to discount Jack, so ready to judge him on what Grandfather had told her he was and not who she had found him to be.

Madeline bit her lip, pulling desperately on the stupid padlock. Perhaps the magistrates might have released him if she’d presented
all
the evidence to them. But she hadn’t done that. She had not revealed everything she knew.

She had been as bad as Grandfather. Too terrified that her brother Philip would be arrested, and the nightmare would happen all over again—this time to her brother.

If she had any courage at all, she would tell Jack the truth. She would explain she was not willing to give up the crucial piece of evidence that could have spared him prison. She’d rather break him out of gaol than do it.

Jack strode past her, grumbling, and she caught one rough, angry sentence
—you’re a bloody son of a bitch, Travers
. But he gently drew her hands from the lock and she gaped at the change on his face, the transformation from harshness to tenderness. He pulled the lock open, then stepped back, leaving it dangling. She hurried forward to the door of her cottage, but Jack walked away from her, vanishing into the mist.

Panic clawed at her. She tried to fight it, to push it back down deep inside, where she wouldn’t feel it. “Where are you going? You cannot just walk off into the fog.”
No, you cannot go until I can make this right.

On a sharp sigh, Jack came back to her. She stood there like a ninny, with her hand on the rusty door handle.

He braced his arm against the door so he could lean toward her, speak softly and be heard. “I want to scout around the cottage, ensure there is no one out there. I need to get a sense of what the surroundings are like.”

She stilled. She’d called out to him, loudly, thinking they were far enough away to be safe. But what if there was someone out there in the fog? What if some of the soldiers had come this far? “Perhaps you should put on a disguise before doing that. Then you would look like a moorman taking stock of his land or searching for lost animals. I have more clothes for you in the cottage.” She spoke briskly.

Jack shook his head, as though bemused. She couldn’t see the humor in this at all.

“In this fog, my lady, no one will see me coming.”

“But they could hear. Oh, do have sense, Jack Travers. A disguise would be prudent.”

“And would take too much time.”

She shoved open the door. “If you run off to try to keep me safe, I will hunt you down. I’ve committed a crime, too. We are in this together now, whether you like it or not.”

She turned her back to him. On a small table inside, she’d left a candle and a flint. She struck a light, then turned to look out the door. Jack was gone, her advice on a disguise ignored.

The fire in the grate had long gone out, and the chill of the fog was already settling into the stones of the cottage. Madeline clutched her candle and shut the door, though she hated shutting Jack out. She moved to the hearth to rebuild a blaze.

We are in this together.
They were, even if—or perhaps she meant even
when
—Jack found out the truth of what she’d hidden and hated her for it with every fiber of his being.

* * *

“Godspeed, men,” Jack murmured, repeating Beau’s words. He wiped his jaw, brushing off the damp mist that clung to his stubble. From this side of the cottage, he could see the valley that sloped down to the prison. The mist swallowed up the light of the prison’s lamps. An eerie silence had settled. There were no wolves to howl; they’d long been hunted out of existence. If there was still a commotion at the prison as the guards searched, the sound didn’t reach this far.

Around him, lost in soupy fog, the moor stretched out—treacherous, ominous, still. Had Beau, Simon, and the others safely escaped?

He hoped they had made it. Especially Simon. Whether he had betrayed them or not, the lad was only seventeen. Simon had been scared witless, waiting for the day he would finally meet the hangman’s noose for a crime of treason he swore he’d never committed.

Was it possible, by running as he had—in the opposite direction to most of the escapees—he and Lady M. had gotten away? If Black, Wycliffe, and Simon had made it past the Ockery, the soldiers might assume any missing men were heading to Plymouth.

Unless they had caught Beausoleil already and now knew that at least one man had chosen the insane course of heading northeast toward the bogs. That would lead the guards toward him and his stubborn savior.

Jack turned and strode back toward Lady M.’s cottage. It sat on the rocky ridge that led from the prison into the village of Rundlestone. The road threaded past the cottage, about fifty yards to the left. A dark valley dropped away on the right. Light glowed around the moss-stained wood shutters that barricaded the two windows of the cottage and glimmered out from the simple stone barn attached to the back.

He passed across the small yard and long-forgotten garden that fronted the house, the mist licking at his waist and legs. He paused at the closed door and raked back his damp hair, but a lock of it sprang forward to poke him in the eye.

Nothing he could do would make up for unkempt hair, a lanky, starved body, and rotting clothing.

He braced himself. He hadn’t seen the inside of the cottage yet, but he could picture it. It would be a place of refuge, intended only for a man—or a family—who lived off the land.

Which meant it was mainly shelter for a bed.

A disguise would be prudent,
Lady Madeline had coolly advised.

Spending a night alone with her, in a small cottage filled almost entirely by the bed?
Not
prudent.

Jack’s lips lifted in a rueful smile. Two years ago, he’d wanted to prove he could become a better man. Now was his chance. Squaring his shoulders, he pushed open the cottage door—and then stood stupefied on the threshold.

Lady Madeline had been in the cottage a mere twenty minutes, but a fire now crackled merrily in the hearth, and a lamp threw off both sweet-scented smoke and light. A delectable aroma wafted out of the door to greet him and make his stomach clench with desire.

Astounded, Jack ducked his head to cross the threshold. He’d no idea Lady M. could start a fire or knew how to cook. She ruled a great household—she ordered all others to do her bidding.

Yet she stood at a simple wood worktable dressed once more in her country gown, her hair caught up beneath a cap. Two piles of potatoes flanked her—one brown and dirty, the other peeled.

The scene of domesticity made his heart ache. Lady M.’s cottage was starkly primitive, but right now it gave him a welcoming sensation of home that he’d never known before. Never in the grotty, stinking flash house where he’d grown up. Not even in his grand London townhouse, built on the money from his gaming hells and racehorses.

 “It is to be stew. I kept some things here in case we needed a place to hide.” With the small paring knife, Lady M. pointed to the one bed that sat in the corner and a neat stack of clothing on it. “Those are for you. There is some water—I can warm it and put it in a basin.”

As she spoke, she held a potato and bit into her lower lip as she took off a slice with the knife. He closed the door behind him and slid the iron deadbolt home with a grunt of self-recrimination.

She had not done all this for him. She’d done it for the man he’d pretended to be—the gentle, charming, good-natured groom who had a magical touch with horses. The man she thought had been wrongfully punished.

“There was no lock at first, of course,” she said, as cool and collected as he had ever seen her on the estate. But she took care to watch her fingers as she cut her vegetables into chunks. “But I had to be safe.”

“You’ve made it very secure. But you must have been uncomfortable.”

She half-turned, giving him a glimpse of a tendril of blond hair and the smooth curve of her cheek. Freckles blossomed there, where they never had before. Playing the country maid, she hadn’t used a parasol.

It seemed stupid to let that trouble him, but it did. “Let me, my lady. I’m more accustomed to cooking.”

“I’ve fended for myself for a fortnight, Jack. There’s cheese and bread, as well as the stew.”

He nodded but moved behind her. She leaned over her table again, handling a carrot now with hesitant care, as though she was about to take off a limb. The tang of cut onions stung his eyes but didn’t entirely blot out her richly feminine smell. Her neck, smooth and graceful, was so close he could readily bend down and breathe more perfume.