My Pleasure (11 page)

And she abandoned herself to it. To him.

With a sound of frustration, she pulled her arms free, lashing them about his neck and clinging to him, bewildered by the need he incited, the need she felt roiling through him, setting her afire.

“Jesu!” He muttered thickly against her mouth and, still holding her above the ground, moved back into the deeper shadows of the archway, back behind the column of the far arch, back until her shoulders felt the brick wall behind her.

He pinned her there, his hips tight against her, forcing her to comprehend the message sent by the hard, masculine presence pressed against her belly and recognize its answer in the heated sensation pooling between her thighs. Wanton. Wicked. Irresistible. Reason clamored for caution, for restraint, shouting at her to retreat. To struggle.

She didn’t. She couldn’t.

And Reason, finding no place to take purchase, ceded ground to Instinct, and Instinct flourished. She closed her eyes and answered his fierce kisses with her own. With a will of their own, her hands delved beneath his jacket and smoothed over the warm linen shirt covering him. They flowed up his hard flanks around to his back and up along the shallow channel of his spine to the heavy planes of his shoulders.

He shuddered. He trembled beneath her touch.

A deep growl issued from his throat as he lifted his hands to her face, bracketing her cheeks between his palms, tipping her head back as he dragged a searing kiss up her chin, along her jaw to beneath her ear.

“Kiss me,” he whispered thickly. “Kiss me as if you want me. Make me believe it.”

As if? As
if
? She
did
want him. Desire ripened within her like a rare orchid patiently waiting for years for just the right dark, heated, moonless night to bloom. He was that dark night.

She speared her fingers through the thick black locks and pulled his head down to meet her mouth. She kissed him eagerly, impatiently, and when his tongue pushed between her lips, she opened her mouth and met it with her own.

She had wanted this forever, from the moment she’d seen him in Lovers Walk. From the moment he’d set her afire with his kiss, she’d hungered for him. She’d lain in her bed at night, and in those fever-kindled moments between dream and wakefulness, this is what her imagination had been filled with. This. Him.

She was only dimly aware of him untangling the ties at her throat, of his fingers brushing aside the linen blouse. He stroked the soft swells of her breasts where they pushed above the tight banding. His head dipped and Lord! She gasped at the sweet drag of his mouth, the raw scrape of his incipient beard across her tender virgin flesh. She gasped, aye, but at the same time arched into the tantalizing sensation and—

He froze.

His already hard form tensed even more and his head snapped up and jerked around, like a hound scenting something evil. He eased back, his clasp loosening until her feet touched the ground. She grabbed helplessly at his biceps, praying he would not abandon her now, because her legs would not hold her upright.

“Mr. Munro?”

“We are being watched.”

The blood drained from her face. For an instant his gaze touched hers, and the grim set of his mouth disappeared into a savage line. He looked from side to side, from the empty archway leading into the street to the one leading into the gardens. Through either portal she could see people strolling past, heedless of them. But while the shadows might conceal them from a casual passerby, they would not conceal them from a secret spectator.

She did not doubt what he said for an instant. Hadn’t she too felt the touch of a malevolent gaze earlier this evening?

She shivered, and Ramsey wrapped her closer against him, shielding her with his body as his gaze searched the area. She glanced down and saw that her breasts were exposed above their bindings, soft and milky in the umber drift of darkness. And with that, reality rushed in, dissolving the heated spell. She stood in the arms of a man who did not know her name, in the shadows of a public pleasure garden, the tops of her breasts reddened by the beard of a stranger, accepting from him the sort of kisses she suspected few wives enjoyed.

Enjoyed.

She closed her eyes at that treacherous turn of phrase. Aye. But it didn’t make it any less vulgar. Her body burned at how far she’d been willing to abdicate her pride for pleasure’s sake. How much further would she have followed her body’s siren call? Thank God she did not need to know.

She pushed against him. “I have to go. I have to.”

His head swung back to her, his eyes fixing on her face. They glittered in the half-light. With an oath, he stepped back and reached between them. She shrank against the wall, but he only closed her blouse, retying the stays with ruthless efficiency before taking her elbow and turning her from the archway. Swiftly he escorted her out onto the street.

“You don’t need to—”

His look cut off her words. He led her to a cab, motioning for the driver to stay atop his seat.

“I don’t expect you’ll give me your address to tell the driver,” he said.

She shook her head. “No.”

“Of course not. You can tell him en route.” His expression was closed and impartial. He’d wanted her; he’d lost her. But he was a gentleman. He accepted his loss without rancor. If only she could.

He wrenched open the door and pulled out the block of steps from inside. She ducked inside, and he closed the door behind her. From outside she heard him shout for the driver to head back to the city, and at once the carriage lumbered from the curb.

That was it then. That was all there would be.

She could not help herself. She grasped the edge of the window and pushed her head out, craning her neck to look back. He stood at the curb, exactly where she’d left him. And then the carriage turned and he was lost to her sight.

Unhappily, she sat back on the cracked leather upholstery and only then did she see it lying beneath the window on the other side of the carriage. A single red rose.

FLORENTINE:

a fencing style where a secondary full blade is used offhand

RAMSEY HEADED BACK INTO THE GARDENS, intent on finding whoever had been spying on them. He still felt the touch of that evil gaze. The idea that it had also touched Helena, creeping over her like filth, filled him with cold fury. So he searched. For half an hour he searched before finally conceding that whoever had been watching them had vanished.

Uneasy and with nothing more keeping him at Vauxhall, he struck out for White Friars.

He could still feel her body, supple and yielding against his, her mouth beneath his. Desire thrummed through him as keenly as if he still held her pinned against the wall. Who would have thought that Ramsey Munro’s acclaimed sangfroid would be shattered by a masked slip of a female in boy’s clothing, no matter how well she filled them out?

But they had not watched her like he had. They hadn’t spent years learning the still language of her composure: the way her pupils dilated with ire, the gentling of her mouth when she was amused, the downward glance that hid the mental ripostes she dared not utter. They had not grown ever more fascinated by the seeming enigma of her while forcing themselves to stand within arm’s reach of her at the opening of a new exhibit or in a crowded street fair, knowing she must not turn those clear, cool, blue eyes upon him. Must not know that he watched her, guarded her.

He picked up his pace. His salle was miles away, but the night, as he was all too grievously aware, was young, and his need for physical activity—any physical activity—acute. As he moved toward the wharves, the district in which he traveled grew shabbier. At first the changes were subtle, but they became more pronounced as he went. The houses grew smaller, the shops meaner, the public houses more decrepit and numerous, the sounds spilling from them more raucous.

Ramsey paid his surroundings scant heed even though he knew he was being observed, his pace calculated, the worth of his clothing tallied. Evil intent followed Munro the way a cat trailed a fishmonger’s cart. He could taste the threat in the atmosphere the way other men tasted the rain on an incoming wind. He’d not survived unscathed for two years in prison through sheer luck.

Yet it took only a stabbing glance from him to quell any unseemly interest emanating from the denizens of the fetid streets. Because just as he could sense potential danger, those who lived in places such as these could tell the difference between prey and predator, and Ramsey Munro was definitely a predator.

Last week’s chance encounter with Helena had been a matter of grace or punishment, prize or penalty, depending on one’s mood. But tonight?

He had told himself he was going to Vauxhall Garden as a likely place to get information about the identity of the man who had nearly gotten Kit MacNeill killed earlier this year. But the truth was that he’d come hoping to see Helena Nash again and see if he could satisfy himself as to the mystery she presented.

Who was she?

Perhaps she was what she declared herself to be, an adventure-seeking newcomer to the world of pleasure. Until now she had lived a grimly proper life. If she wanted something to relieve the drudgery of her daily life, he was certainly in no position to take exception to that.

Then why the bloody hell had he wanted to? Even as he’d bruised her mouth and fumbled at her breasts like a randy boy with his first maid, why had he wanted to caution her against him and every man like him?

He did not know himself, his motives, his impulses. He’d thought he understood himself with an unsparing clarity. That he might not displeased him greatly. He tensed, sensing another close by, and then relaxed.

“Have you found anything out?” he asked.

“Gar! I never goin’ ta get used to you doin’ like that,” Bill, a raggedy, rubber-faced man complained, slouching out of a darkened doorway to fall into pace at Ram’s side. “Ain’t natural. How’d ya know’d it were me?”

“You breathe like a bellows.”

“Coal dust,” he said proudly.

“What news have you for me?”

“I been along the wharves and got me mates doin’ likewise, and no one seen no one wid any rose-shaped scar burned into their hides. Not this six months past. Nor have any of the whores along the docks or even the grander whores toward town.

“’Course, memories be short when they’re drowned in gin, and most of the lads down here get on land and don’t stop drinking till they ship out ag’in. But still, a tavern owner or some wench would remember a brand like the one you described, let alone some Frenchie. Sailors right hate the Frenchies, they do.”

Ram’s eyes narrowed as he mentally tallied the efforts he’d made to ascertain who had threatened Kit MacNeill and his bride and left a circlet of dried yellow roses tied about a dead rat’s throat six months earlier. It had to be someone from St. Bride’s. No one else knew of the yellow roses that grew in the remote abbey, no one else knew their special importance to the men who’d once been orphans there, or the oath of fidelity they’d made to each other, which that rose had come to symbolize.

There had been four of them, raised to believe in ancient oaths of fidelity, holiness, and honor: Douglas, their leader, passionate and dedicated; Kit, the ruffian, strong and imposing; Dand, clever and irreverent; and him. When the abbot had requested volunteers to go to France as spies, they had all come forward. They had all gone. They had all been captured. They had all been marked by the experience, and in a most tangible way.

His fingers fell to his right pectoral muscle. Even with the linen shirt between his fingers and his flesh, he could feel the raised edges of the brand. He could still smell the stench of his own flesh scorching.

Then, after months so dark they seemed now like nightmares, they had been betrayed by one of their own. The betrayer had to be either Dand Ross or Toussaint, the exiled French priest who’d helped devise the original plot. Neither seemed possible, but there could be no other explanation. No one else knew the things that the prison warden had gleefully disclosed.

And, having gotten his information, the warden had set about guillotining them. One by one. Douglas had been first. Dand was to go second. But then, on the eve of his execution, their releases had been secured by an Englishman, Colonel Roderick Nash, their freedom purchased with his life.

Freedom had not, however, freed them. Suspicion haunted them, corroded their brotherhood. Accusations were made, but as there was no proof, no one acted. They were hindered by their ignorance as much as by their one-time brotherhood.

After the survivors had returned to England and made their vow of aid to the colonel’s family, Ram had left Kit and Dand behind. Then, about six months ago, Father Tarkin had written to Ram from St. Bride’s of Kit’s forthcoming marriage.

Ram had stared at that short note a long time. He’d thought of a hundred reasons not to go, a dozen not to care. But in the end, he’d gone. He’d ridden from London to northern Scotland, having decided that he would ask Kit one last time if it had been he who’d betrayed them. He hadn’t anticipated Kit would ask him the same question. But he had. Just as Kit had accepted, without question or doubt, Ram’s denial, Ram had accepted Kit’s. It was enough. It was a benefice in a world rare shy of charity.

After, Kit had told him everything that had transpired during his journey across northern Scotland with Kate Nash Blackburn. Ram had suggested that while Kit was off leading His Majesty’s men in battle, he might revisit the painful question of who had betrayed them. Because it never really had been closed. Kit had agreed.

He’d felt the past’s cold touch a dozen times these past few months. For himself, he did not care if Dand, with his quick wits and fast fists, or Toussaint, with his swordsman’s skills, found him. Let either come. But Kit’s bride, Helena’s sister, had also been visited by their unknown adversary, making it clear that no one close to them or to the late Colonel Nash was safe from whatever evil that French prison had spawned. Charlotte, cocooned by the Weltons’ enormous wealth and status, he deemed safe enough, but Helena, at the mercy of an old tyrant and sent scurrying across London on the veriest of whims, was far more vulnerable.