MC BIKER ROMANCE: Bad Boy Romance: BETRAYED: (New Adult Motorcycle Club Navy SEAL Romance) (Contemporary Military Romance Thriller) (34 page)

Chapter 5

The physician was a rough man. He was very educated, but had apparently never learned the way of being gentle with patients. He kept asking her questions, and Anne felt she kept disappointing him with her answers. Eventually, the questions he was asking made it clear: he believed she was pregnant.

Anne felt hollow. She couldn’t even react to the news. Certainly she could be pregnant. There had been enough opportunities to become so. She saw the news spread as various people came to congratulate her. They did not know. It could not be the king’s. How many months had it been? And how early on in carrying a child could the sickness be expected to come? Perhaps she could convince him that her case was only odd, and she had begun to be sick much later than is usual. Perhaps she could claim that the sickness simply lasted much longer than is usual. But when the time came when he was expecting the child to arrive and it was not yet ready, he would know. How could he not?

When the duke came to see her, Anne knew that he knew much sooner than that. He knew. It was as simple as that.

He didn’t rage at her. Perhaps it would have been better if he had raged. He simple told, her, calmly, straightforwardly, that her child would die in childbirth, and that if anyone ever had even the slightest of doubts that the child was his, then he would make sure that she joined it.

Anne had often wished that she could do away with her husband’s anger. But she knew that behind his anger was at least a certain amount of caring. This calm man cared for her not at all, and there was no doubt in her mind that he would carry out his threats, and Anne knew that the child she carried would only see the light of day for a moment before it was taken from the world.

Chapter 6

Anne sunk into a despondency even greater than she had when she had first married the duke. She did not leave her room. She did not speak to anyone. Those who came to see her found her listless and deaf to their entreaties. The duke no longer came to her, which was a blessing, but Anne couldn’t think much of it.

Sarah was with her through it, but there was little she could do. She only tended to Anne’s needs as best she could, and watched the light in her eyes fade further and further from view.

When Anne refused to eat, Sarah did her best to feed her. But Sarah only tried to convince her that she needed to eat or it would harm the baby.

“The baby will not survive, Sarah,” was all Anne could muster. Sarah was confused at first, but then she understood.

“But how can he know?” she said, as quietly as she could. Anne shrugged, and only said that he did.

“So that’s why you haven’t gone to see him,” Sarah said, half to herself. Anne didn’t have the heart to say the words that were in her mind. He wouldn’t want to see her anyway. Not after the way he had looked at her during the execution.

In her mind, Anne could not imagine how things could have gone worse. She cursed herself for having become involved with James, even as she knew that he was perhaps the only thing in her life she had ever felt that was truly good. She only knew that the pain that she had caused him, and the pain that he had unknowingly caused her, was too great to be overcome.

And then, one day, quite as a surprise to Anne, it did get worse. She was taken from her room, roughly, by guards. She did not recognize them. They were not of the usual palace guard. She asked them questions, but they told her nothing. They only brought her down to the dungeons.

She’d never been to the dungeons before. She’d had no call to visit them. Now she saw that that had been a prudent choice.

She had her own cell, at least, with a small window with bars across it. It was mostly underground, so all she could see through the window were the feet of passersby. She sat herself against the wall so that she could look at them. Now and then she saw a pair of shoes she recognized. She thought perhaps that would lift her spirits, but it didn’t.

No one told her anything. She sat for days in the cell. She slept when she could sleep, which was not often.

After a few days, Sarah came to visit her. Anne was confused when she heard her friend’s voice. Surely coming to see her would only expose Sarah. But she was at the window.

Someone told the king,” Sarah said, after Anne had confirmed that Sarah was not in danger or under suspicion. “Someone told the king, and now the duke is embarrassed. Your arrangement with the duke can’t stand. Not now that they know. He has to do something, Anne.”

Anne’s mind couldn’t comprehend it at first. She didn’t want to understand. But then she did. She was headed for the gallows.

Chapter 7

She was questioned. They wanted to know the name of her lover, but she wouldn’t tell them. They were very persuasive, in ways that Anne never would have expected. She still wouldn’t speak. She wouldn’t speak his name. Not now, not ever. She had betrayed him. She should have told him. But she would not betray him further. She would take his name with her to the gallows. She would take it with her to the grave.

She tried not to count down the days, but on the night before she was to be executed, they brought a priest to her and asked her what she wanted to eat. It was a courtesy other prisoners did not get, she knew. She refused it. Not out of principle, but out of despondence.

Then she heard James’ voice.

“Anne.”

He’d never said her name. He’d always called her Jane. Hearing him say her name brought her to tears. It did not surprise her that she was imagining him, now in her last night.

“Anne, can you hear me?”

She wasn’t imagining him. He was there. She stood, her legs weak. She walked to him. She could see him there, in the dark, just outside her window. There was just enough moonlight to illuminate the basic shapes of his features. She reached her hand up, unable to speak. She needed to feel his touch. That touch had gotten her into this cell, but she thought now, even as she was about to die, that if she could feel his touch one more time, it would all have been worthwhile.

He took her hand in his, and she felt relief run through her body. She could do what she needed to do now. She would go at peace.

But the relief was soon followed by concern.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “They’ll find you. They’re looking for you. Any clue who you are and they’ll hang you with me.”

“Oh, Anne,” James said, and she reveled again in how it felt to hear him say her name. “They’re not going to hang anyone.”

He’d brought tools. He needed her help, but his life was iron. He knew how to work with it. He knew how to cut it, just enough so that she could slide out.

They were as quiet as possible, but still Anne felt someone was always just about to come.

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “The duke has thrown a party to celebrate your execution in the morning.”

Anne couldn’t help but feel momentarily insulted. He was celebrating her death. For all she hated the man, it still stung. She understood his need to try and save face. He couldn’t look betrayed and lovelorn. But still, it seemed excessive.

When they’d freed her, Anne and James made their way through the courtyard as quickly and quietly as they could. They passed through the same rarely-used servants’ exit that Anne had used so many times when she went to meet him. To her surprise, he didn’t need to be led to it, and there was a horse waiting for them on the outside.

Anne looked at him questioningly.

“I had help,” he said, and Anne was struck by Sarah’s loyalty. How Sarah had found him, or how James had found Sarah, Anne didn’t know. But it was a question for another time.

They rode all through the night, as far from the duke’s territory as they could get. As far as they could tell, no alarm had been raised behind them, but it was only a matter of time before the search began. Perhaps they had until the morning. Perhaps no one would check on her until then. She was meant to be hanged at dawn.

They did not stop at dawn. They did not stop until they reached the sea and found a fisherman there willing to take them away. All they had with them was James’ savings, and what little Sarah had managed to smuggle to him of Anne’s valuables. But it was enough to buy them passage, and would hopefully be enough to get them a bit farther besides. The ship was headed for the eastern Mediterranean, and the westernmost reaches of the Silk Road.

“You’ll get to be a trader, Jane,” James said, and despite her tiredness, Anne heard herself laugh.

When they were in their cabin on the boat, Anne finally felt free. She was tired, and she knew James was tired, but it didn’t matter at all. She had been pressed up against his body for the whole of the ride, and she desired to feel it, finally in honesty. She could see from the look on his face that he wanted the same.

He tore the dirty clothes off her. They would not need them anymore. His hands were braver with her, now that he knew she would be his entirely, and his forever. She felt them cupping her breasts while he kissed them, then she felt them running down her body, outlining her hips, and reaching back to feel her buttocks. He’d been smooth and wandering, exploring her while kissing her breasts and kissing her neck and kissing her lips.

And then suddenly he wasn’t. So quickly it was disorienting, she felt her back against the cabin wall. The boat rocked back and forth and with one of the sways he was inside her. She cried out in surprise and pleasure. He thrusted into her again and again, with the swaying of the boat at first, and then he broke with the rhythm and began going faster and faster. When she believed she could take it no more, and felt herself about to lose herself, he stopped. She looked at him desperately, and the mischievous smile on his face.

He moved them away from the wall and onto the bed, throwing her down onto it face down. Shen she felt him, so hard and so forceful, enter her again, faster and faster that felt herself lost to the pleasure of it, again and again.

When he was finally satisfied, she understood that all the time they had known each other, he had never really let her have himself the way she had always let him have her. And now that he had, she knew that it had been more than worth the uncertainly, and the prospect of her death. Death itself would have been worth it, because until she had experienced the rawness of his passion, she hadn’t truly been alive.

Escaping the Prince

Chapter 1

Charlotte Gordon winced as her maid brushed out yet another snarl from her curls, coiffing each lock into place to form an elaborate hairstyle that tugged on Charlotte's temples. Heavy and time-consuming as it was, Charlotte bore with the pain -- tonight was the Duchess of Devonshire's ball and her mother would quite literally murder her if she didn't look perfect.

Charlotte sighed and waved the maid away as soon as she was finished, and with a hurried bow the girl scurried off, leaving Charlotte alone in her room.

At last. Charlotte let herself bask in the refreshing sense of being completely alone, with no one and nothing to attend to but herself. In a few hours, she would once again have to be Charlotte, daughter of the Duchess of Gordon, the
ton's
beautiful and charming "Flower of Galloway" -- but for now, she would have paid her father's fortune for the entire world to just leave her be.

Flower of Galloway indeed!
Charlotte snorted in a way that would have given her mother, ever the ambitious social climber, the faints. She rose and crossed the room, flinging open the door to the balcony and breathing in the cool air of yet another passing day. Another day she had spent laughing and chatting about Lady Worthington's unfashionable dress, or whispering about yet another of Earl Liben's indiscretions, or what a crude, insensible twit the new debutants were.

Yet another day of being trapped in this elaborate, gilded cage. Sooner or later the bars would suffocate her.

Stolen moments like this were breaths of fresh air. She slipped off her silk gloves so she could actually feel the cool breeze on her skin. It whispered secrets of mysterious, far away lands; of djinns and incense and white-faced geishas, where lanterns still burned instead of lamps and legends still rang true.

Charlotte let her eyes slip closed, willing away the rest of the world, if only for a little while. A thud shook her meditations, and in her surprise her glove slipped away from her grasp.

Before Charlotte could do little more than gasp, the expensive silk was nothing more than a white glimmer below. Schooling her face so none of her distress would show through, Charlotte turned around to meet her mother face-to-face.

Lady Gordon stood in the doorway, looking supremely unimpressed as she always did, staring down at Charlotte as if she was in her nightwear and not freshly made up in the latest Parisian fashions.

"I'm not too fond of the print. Tell the seamstress to go with a less...bruised silk come spring. And put on your other glove, what is the matter with you?" Lady Gordon sniffed and, criticisms finished, suddenly smiled. Her whole face lit up in delight. "Your father wants to see you in the drawing room immediately. It's about your marriage."

Marriage
! Charlotte stood up on wooden legs, following her mother down the hall only by sheer willpower. She'd always known this day would come, but so soon? She was only starting on her second season! She was barely more than an untrained debutante!

A tiny optimistic voice rang in her mind.
Maybe he won't care about me? Maybe he'll have a mistress and will allow me free reign.
She didn't even dare hope for someone she would be able to love. All throughout the past year, she'd met every single eligible bachelor from small gentry ("Practically peasants," her mother had sneered) to dukes of every title and reputation imaginable. None of them had been able to stir her heart.

Lady Gordon and Charlotte gracefully entered the drawing room, the picture of civility and grace. Lady Gordon perched herself near her husband, who nodded imperceptibly to his wife before turning his attention to his daughter.

"Charlotte, Lady Gordon --" A slight grimace here, the Duke hated to be reminded of his wife, "has most graciously arranged a fantastic match for you. Using her connections from when she, ah,
dallied
with his Majesty, she asked that you be entered into consideration as Prince George IV's wife. After viewing your performance as a debutante, the Prince himself declared that he would take you on."

The Crown Prince!
Charlotte was shocked, her head spinning.
The prince regent himself!

Her mother and father looked at her expectantly, obviously expecting Charlotte to break down in gratitude, maybe even fall to the floor in a clear faint.

"I...I can scarcely believe it." Charlotte managed to force out while she felt the ground fall out from under her feet, dreams of unwatched carriage rides, whole nights to herself, maybe a country estate where she could ride her steed freely flying out of her grasp. “It’s a great honor.”

“A great honor?” Her mother repeated incredulously. “It’s a miracle that his Majesty didn’t ask for that insipid French princess or, god forbid, yet another Princess of Wales!”

Yes, I wonder what kind of strings you had to pull to arrange this one, Mother?
Charlotte thought bitterly. It had only been a few short years since her mother had been his Majesty’s favorite mistress and Handmaiden to the Queen, and her exile from the court was a disgrace that still haunted their family.

A marriage to the Prince Regent would mean power, status, people fawning left and right, never having to lift a finger again. Everything her mother, not Charlotte, was interested in. She didn’t care for political intrigues or power games or the constant surveillance she’d be under and, dear god, she was about to
suffocate
.

Suddenly, Charlotte felt an irrepressible need to run, run run
run
right out of this mansion. She stood abruptly, cutting off her mother’s diatribe of the Prince’s many accomplishments.

“Apologies, I...I dropped my glove outside. I won’t be but a moment.”

Her mother looked vaguely horrified at her rudeness, but refrained from saying anything in front of her husband to Charlotte’s utter relief. Her father also frowned but waved her off. “Go on then. The Prince will be at the ball tonight -- you’ll need both gloves to impress him, I’m sure.”

Charlotte thanked her father and hurried off, fighting the need to run until she was clear of the parlor. As soon as she was away from the watchful eyes of her parents, she hitched up her skirts and flew through the grand halls, past a flurry of maids and out the stately front door.

Her lungs begging for air and her side in stitches, Charlotte was forced to shamble to a stop somewhere in the sprawl of London. She had no idea where she was or where she wanted to go, but the tightness in her chest loosened with every step she took away from that accursed gilded cage.

Here on the streets of London she could entertain fanciful ideas of escape. Of selling her dress, buying a pair of slops and a coat with the money before stowing away onto a departing ship. She mapped the route she’d take in her mind while she wandered aimlessly, too engrossed in her thoughts to notice the streets slowly emptying of respectable folk as she turned onto one alley after another.

When she snapped back to reality, she was the only one heading down a slowly darkening, unfamiliar street.

“Oi there!” A gruff male voice called from behind her, accompanied by a chorus of wolf-whistles and low snickers. “Who’s this fancy little chit then?”

Charlotte sped up, heart hammering in her chest as the footsteps behind her drew closer.
This is what you get for being foolish,
she scolded herself to distract from the fear that was rising in her throat like bile.
Why would you ever think you could handle a bit of adventure?

The street seemed to stretch on for miles, with no end in sight and her pursuers gaining on her by the second. No matter how fast she walked the pack of men -- sailors from the sound of it -- seemed to move faster, each sneer and taunt sticking to her skin and covering her in their filth.

One of the men finally got close enough to grab her arm, tugging her in his vice-like grip towards his friends. She breathed in, deep, before leaning close to the man’s head and letting out the highest, loudest, most alarming scream she could muster straight into his ear.

He howled and let her go, leaving her free to leap away. She took off like a shot, veins singing with adrenaline and heart pumping harder than it had ever worked before. It was like all her senses, dulled from countless evenings of useless conversation and routine, had suddenly sharpened. She could see the seams of every brick, the signs of every shop, the ginger cat that crossed the street in front of her. She could taste the wind in her mouth, feel it in her hair. And under the cacophony of shouts and cries of “Get her!”, she could hear...laughter?

Good God, was she laughing?

She barely had time to think about it before she saw a hidden alleyway the cat had sprung into and she followed it mindlessly, too intent on getting away from the scoundrels to think about what lay ahead of her.

A strong hand gripped her waist as soon as she entered the shade of the alley and swung her back, stepping in front of her just in time to meet the sailors in hot pursuit.

“Mate, move outta the way. We gots some business with this li’l broad…” The man she’d deafened visibly paled as her protector stepped out into the dusky early evening light. Likewise, the rest of the pack scrambled backwards as the mystery man stood calmly in front of them, suddenly so quiet you couldn’t hear a squeak from any of the bunch.

Who was this man?
Charlotte knew that he couldn’t be part of high society -- his coat, though obviously made from expensive material, was too large on him and wasn’t in any discernible style or shape that Charlotte could recognize -- and being the trendsetter she was, that was saying something. Besides, it was weather-beaten and battered, and no respectable man would be caught dead in such attire.

Yet his outfit was far too expensive for anyone else but the
haut monde
to afford. A merchant perhaps?

When the man finally spoke, his voice sent shivers down Charlotte’s spine. It was deep, rough in a way that reminded Charlotte of tobacco smoke and the stormy sea. Hypnotic, with a gravity of its own, and before Charlotte could stop herself she had taken a step towards his broad back.

“Well, boys, seems like this little lady doesn’t want to play.” He said with a tinge of amusement. “Why don’t you go find yourselves some decent toffers in the rookeries?”

The men left as one, slinking away without even a word of protest. A couple of the bunch even muttered some apologies before leaving. Them gone, the man turned around to face Charlotte, who met his scrutinizing gaze head-on.

“I can see why they chased you,” was the first thing he said after what seemed to be an eternity. “How’d the daughter of…”

“The Duke of Gordon.” Charlotte finished for him. Rather than seeming impressed, he snorted derisively.

“...the Duke of Gordon end up in this part of town?”

Charlotte felt a bit sheepish, and worried the edge of her glove. "I was...wandering."

"Wandering? I've heard the Duke of Gordon was a dodding old fool, but surely even he must disapprove of his famed daughter
wandering
around rookeries. Is this a habit for you then?" Charlotte could
feel
the man watching her, his dark eyes taking in her dress, her hair, even her missing glove. She shuddered.

"Hardly," Charlotte replied hurriedly, if only to distract the man's attention. "And I must thank you for --"

The man impatiently waved away the thanks. "Isn't saving a beautiful lady any man's dream?"

He flashed her a smile then, and proffered his arm. "If the lady wishes, would she take a walk with this poor soul?"

Charlotte hesitated, horror stories of strangers and murders and kidnappings running through her head. Her common sense shrilled at her to stop, to find a police station or some such respectable institution, but the adrenaline still flowed in her veins from her earlier encounter and she felt reckless. Stupid, even. What did she care if she made it back home? Nothing was waiting for her but a life she'd rather leave behind.

The mystery man waited for her patiently, seemingly reading her every emotion as if she was transparent. Charlotte reached out and slid her arm in his, her hands wrapped around a hard bicep.

None of the dandies back at the
ton
had arms like this. They were thin, often flabby, and her fingers had always sunk into their skin. With this man, though, she felt like she was caressing rock.

A heady feeling of being safe, of being protected flowed through her despite the shady district and the undoubtedly questionable characters that occasionally peered into their alleyway. She was excited, energized, truly alive for the first time -- all the while remaining completely safe in this man's arms.

The man was watching her with an inscrutable expression, snapping his face away from her when he realized Charlotte had caught him.

"Well, little Duchess, shall we go?"

Charlotte nodded, and the man set off at a brisk pace. The two glided down the street, Charlotte securely tucked into the man's side. Speaking of which...

"It's hardly fair that you know my name but I have no idea what to call you, sir."