Games of Pleasure (23 page)

He met her eager, starstruck gaze. “What traveling players?”

“You know! ‘When mine eyes did see Olivia first . . .' Um—oh, I remember!—‘that instant was I turned into a hart, and my desires, like cruel and . . . and fell wild dogs, pursue me ever since. How now! What news of her?' That's from
Twelfth Night
. I saw it performed a few weeks ago at Miller's Barn. That duke was called Orsino.”

“This man was alone, you say, and on horseback?”

“Aye, and I did think that part odd. You never saw such a fine chestnut, sir. She was all fire and flash. Lovely! That mare was almost enough to make me think that maybe he was a real lord, after all.”

“Yet no one was with him? A woman? Or perhaps a boy?”

“No, sir, but he bought enough food, and he took his time picking it out, as if he had someone besides his own self that he wanted to please.”

“Ah!” Mr. Lorrimer said. “Did he, then? Well, I've also someone besides myself who's cooling his equally noble heels not ten miles from here, who'll be very pleased indeed to hear this.”

“Then you'll take the bread and the mutton pies, sir?”

“I'll take a kiss, if you like.”

She struggled and tried to kick him in the shins as he kissed her. He bit her lip, then laughed down at her angry face, before he swung into his saddle. The baker's daughter scrubbed away tears and shouted a curse after him as he rode away.

Mr. Lorrimer laughed again. Quarry almost found. Purse almost secured. And then there was the little matter of the hanging.

 

 

HIS arms flung wide on the grass, Ryder slept like the dead, though he smiled like an angel bestowing a blessing. He barely stirred as Miracle tidied his clothes. He only groaned a little in his sleep when she kissed his mouth one last time, then he turned over to pillow his face in his jacket. Her mad knight errant was relaxed at last, lost in the deep slumber of abandonment.

She washed in the stream, then untied her pony to lead him back through the willows. Beauty tossed her head as Jim left, but fortunately the tired mare did not whinny.

Miracle's heart felt heavy enough to break, but she also knew a little free-floating anger. At Ryder, because all men were, in the end, so easy to manipulate—even her knight errant? Or at herself, because she only knew one way to be—and that was to steal the virtue from a good man, or outwit the vice of a bad one?

Whatever romantic fancies Ryder thought that he believed, surely now she had destroyed them. She had told him the truth about her birth. She had reestablished the truth about their only possible relationship.

Without looking back she rode fast along the lane that they'd left just over an hour before, then branched off on another path. If she was going to lose him—if she was going to bury Jim's telltale hoofprints among a mass of others—she must either find a large drove of cattle, or risk the turnpike.

Miracle emerged not more than ten minutes later onto a sizable road, probably not the main toll road, since no carriages were in sight, but obviously fairly heavily traveled. She turned her pony's head to the north and trotted on. A handful of walkers and the driver of a wagon examined her, a few exchanged pleasantries as she passed, but no one molested her. The other travelers on the road simply assumed that a woman traveling unaccompanied on horseback must be local.

Yet the pony, though tough, was not tireless. After several hours she was forced to stop to let Jim drink from a village water trough. Some of the laborers and tradesmen coming home at the end of the day cast curious glances in her direction. She stared into the far distance, trying to look as if she belonged.

By the time she rode on, the long summer twilight was already drawing in. Shadows stretched over the muddy road. The traffic thinned out and disappeared as night eased into the hedgerows. At a crossroads she rode past a gibbet. The indescribable contents of the iron cage creaked in a small breeze. Instinctively dodging away from the sight, and having no idea where she was, she took a narrow lane that ran off to the right.

Soon she must find a place to shelter for the night, and this time there would be no faithful follower to make sure that no one disturbed her. Though it was her own choice, though she had left him deliberately lost in sleep in the clearing, that loss hurt like a burn.

At least the night promised to be warm. She would not need to risk a fire. She never would have done so before, of course, except that she knew that Ryder would be there to keep watch and would care if he thought she was cold.

That idea was terrible to her: that she had ensnared a fundamentally good man in the disastrous web of her misfortunes. She had tried to repay him in the only way that she knew and only woven the snare more tightly. Now she had compounded it. In a last desperate bid to get free, she had deliberately taken advantage of his fatigue and his desires to trample on his honor.

Yet it had been necessary. He would sleep now for hours, probably till well after dark. He would wake to find her gone. He would remember what she had admitted, something she had never told any of her previous lovers:
When I was six years old, I was apprenticed into the local cotton mill
.

He would wake to think about it and be dismayed. Any fantasies he might have woven about her must collapse under the weight of that reality: She was a scion of the ignorant laboring masses. Her brother was a shoemaker. The brilliant society courtesan was a fraud.

And she knew men. As quickly as they developed their obsessions, they tired of them. There was always a new woman: younger, prettier, less trouble. If she was lucky, Ryder might have come to that conclusion already.

An odd kind of luck, of course, when it made her heart numb with dread at the loss.

Jim flicked back an ear. Miracle stopped the pony and glanced over her shoulder to listen. A carriage was driving up behind her. There was no obvious place to get out of the way. Each side of the lane was bordered by high banks topped with hedgerows. Fortunately there was a wider spot just ahead, where a five-barred gate stood open in a gap in the hedge. If she could reach it in time, she would simply ride off into the field beyond.

She urged Jim forward. The pony balked.

The approaching horses were obviously fresh and galloping too fast for safety. Some gentleman, eager to get home after a day's drinking with cronies, perhaps, or late for a dinner engagement?

Her heart beating hard, Miracle pressed Jim up against the bank as the coach and four sped past and—in a flash of red and gilt—she saw the crest on the door panel.

The sickening jolt of panic made her clumsy. She frantically tried to turn the pony around. Jim backed his rump into the hedge. The carriage pulled up, blocking the road ahead. It began to turn, using the gateway.

Miracle hauled Jim about with the brute force born of terror, but the pony stubbornly snatched at some grass. As if she rode in a living nightmare, she tried to kick him into a gallop, knowing that Jim could not outrun the carriage horses, knowing that she was trapped, even when the tired pony finally lumbered forward.

The carriage rolled back at a mocking, almost leisurely pace. When the postilion drew level, he simply leaned down and seized her pony's bridle. Mutinous now, Jim balked, then reared. Miracle slid from the saddle. The carriage door was flung open, cutting off any last hope of escape.

The coachman grinned down at her from the box. A liveried servant who had been clinging behind the carriage ran to the horses' heads. The postilion winked at his comrade.

Lord Hanley slid forward on the plush seat inside the coach to stare at her. His hair gleamed like silver.

“So I was looking for a hedge whore! What a comedown for the glorious toast of London! Rats seem to have taken up residence in your hair, ma'am. Most distasteful!”

Miracle extricated her skirts from the thorns and stood as upright as she was able in the space encompassed by the bank, the carriage door, and her own pony.

“If my appearance so distresses you, by all means drive on, Lord Hanley.”

“Drive on?” He smiled. “Oh, no, I don't think so. You really shouldn't have stabbed Philip Willcott. You've put me to some considerable inconvenience.”

“No more than you've put me.”

The earl took a pinch of snuff, then dabbed at his nostrils with a pristine white handkerchief. “Yet here you are, neatly netted like a perch. Though not quite as neatly as that corpse we just passed, rotting on the gibbet. A fell warning to ill-doers.”

“Then perhaps you should take the lesson to heart, my lord?”

He leaned back and laughed. “Pray, step inside, ma'am. Your idiotic flight has just come to an end.”

Miracle curtsied. The intensity of her fear hammered hard beneath her ribs. The stifled rush of frantic energy threatened to choke off her breathing. “Your Lordship is kind. However, I prefer to remain here in the hedgerow.”

Ice congealed in Lord Hanley's gaze: the cold blue stare of a blinded reptile.

It was almost impossible to believe that she had ever been his lover. Yes, he had always been distant, his caresses perfunctory, his tastes uncaring—though that had made it easier, of course. Her aim had always been to fulfill a man's needs, while leaving her heart unscathed.

“Turn the bloody pony loose,” the earl said. “Throw the saddle and bridle over the hedge.”

“How very mean of you!”

“Nowhere near as mean as I intend to be very soon. You will kindly step up into the carriage. Or shall I have my men lift you, kicking and squealing?”

“While I have the free use of my limbs?” She climbed into the carriage and sat down opposite the earl. “Certainly not. I'll save the kicking and squealing for the scaffold.”

He grinned and snapped closed the lid of his snuffbox. “Yet perhaps we may first kick and squeal a little together? Though it pains me to think that afterward you're still destined to hang by your pretty neck until dead.”

She heard a slap—a man's hand on her pony's rump, no doubt—and hoofbeats as Jim trotted away. The carriage jostled and started forward.

“Nothing would possess me to share anything more with you ever again,” she said, though the choking fear still ran and ran, like a never-ending river of ice in her veins. “Better a fast end on the scaffold than the slow torture of your bed.”

His chin jerked, though his gaze was still veiled. “You won't goad me with petty insults, Miracle. I seek only justice. However, you owe me something for my trouble.”

“Really? I thought that any debt that remained in our relationship was yours. We had a bargain. You broke it.”

A muscle twitched in his jaw as he stared from the window. “What the devil do you think that I owe you? The baggage you left behind on my yacht?”

“Good Lord! I can't imagine that you still have it.”

“No.” Something intense flickered in his eyes as he glanced back at her. “I threw all of your trash into the sea. After all, your valuables weren't there any longer.”

“You searched my bags? Why? Wasn't that a little undignified?”

He seized her arm, passionate interest burning in his gaze.
“What did you do with it?”

“With what?”

He released her and stared from the window again, his expression suddenly bland. “Surely you had jewels? A little money?”

“I fail to see how that's your concern, my lord. I took nothing of yours.”

The earl leaned back against the squabs, drumming his fingers on the window frame, though he continued to stare out at the passing night.

“You will tell me,” he said at last. “However, I have other needs at the moment.”

“Which are not my concern.”

He glanced back at her and smiled as he opened his jacket and waistcoat. He began to undo the buttons at his waistband. “No? I've never been fellated by a condemned woman before, but the idea has a certain appeal. Imminent death is said to intensify sexual gratification.”

For a split second the absurdity of her predicament overwhelmed her fear. “Hardly relevant to our situation, when it's my death, not yours, that's at issue.”

“You refuse me?” Already aroused, he tugged down the flap of his trousers to free himself.

Miracle laughed. “Oh, I think so, though I'm also rather tempted—”

His teeth flashed white. He took her by both wrists to jerk her forward onto her knees. “You nasty slut! So I tempt you, do I?”

“—only to bite, if you force me.” She smiled up at him, though his grip hurt, and the strength of fury washed through her blood. “After all, I have nothing left to lose, and you have so very, very little to offer.”

The earl released her left wrist to swing back his hand. She was determined to defy him, but—as if her body refused to forget Willcott's earlier blows—her eyes flinched shut.

The blow never landed. Lord Hanley rocked back as the carriage jerked to a halt.

Miracle wrenched free and scrambled sideways. A blast reverberated into the night and another shot cracked past the window. Cursing, the earl fumbled to secure his trousers. In that one free moment Miracle dived for the pocket and grabbed the coach pistol.

A highwayman's cool tones cut through the night air outside like a blade.

“Stand and deliver!”