My Unfair Lady (8 page)

   Byron shook his head. She sounded sincere. The child didn't recognize sarcasm when she heard it. He'd opened his mouth to continue when the carriage made a sharp turn and slapped him up against the window. He frowned, something niggling at the back of his mind, but the jostle hadn't bothered Summer. She continued to watch him with eager fascination, and he couldn't refuse that look of entreaty for long.

   "The door stood half open, and on the floor"—he choked on a laugh, but refused to give in to it—"lay old Lord Roster, naked and wrinkled as a pig's skin, with Miss Carlysle perched atop him, equally naked, mind you, covered in mounds of white cream, with a pack of his house dogs gleefully wagging their tails as they licked up the cream from whatever part of the couple's bodies they could reach. She screamed at me to help her"—this time he coughed on the choke before he could continue—"because she'd thought it was my room, you see, and there'd be no cream left for us if I didn't call the dogs off." He had to cough again.

   "I don't see what's so funny."

   "Don't you? She wasn't worried about being found in a compromising situation—she was worried about the cream!"

   Summer nodded, but she still missed the humor of it. "But why would she kill herself over something like that?"

   "I don't believe she did. I believe she was just a bit unbalanced. Still, married women, madam, are allowed their indiscretions. Young, single maidens are either trying to trap a man into marriage, or excessively loose. Either way, it doomed her reputation. And as it took me and several servants to haul those dogs off her, the story would eventually have spread to His Highness anyway."

   The carriage gave another jolt, this time flinging Summer from her seat and into his lap. For a moment the warmth of her, the silky feel of her hair across his cheek, the summertime flowery smell of her, overwhelmed his senses so that his mind went blank, and all he could do was gather her up and cradle her in his arms and just experience the sheer delight of it.

   "Let me go," she whispered, her mind muddled by the feel of his strong arms about her. She had to remind herself of her engagement, that she owed loyalty to another man, not this one.

   The carriage had come to a full stop, bringing Byron to his senses, that niggling in his mind turning into real concern as he glanced out the window. The cheerful gleam of city gaslights had been replaced by the fog-shrouded light of the moon, its weak glow outlining broken-down buildings constructed of scrap wood and tarpaper instead of neatly tailored mansions. Why had the coachman driven through this part of London? There'd be no reason to bring them through the East End…

   The carriage door flew open. "Just take it easy, guvnor," said the coachman, only his livery recogniz able to Byron, for the man wearing it had a voice and face he'd never seen before. "You and the lady, step from the coach nice and easy, hear? Then maybe nobody gets hurt."

"WHAT IS IT?" ASKED SUMMER, THE COOL AIR FROM the open door clearing her mind from the obsessive thoughts of the man across from her.

   "That isn't the coachman I hired," he whispered. "Just do what he says, and you'll be fine… and remember what I said about that knife."

   
Too late,
thought Summer, the feel of it in her hand as reassuring as the confident manner of her escort. He preceded her from the carriage, in an effort to protect her she knew, for when she followed him out he kept his body in front of hers, between her and the coachman. Did he think she needed protecting? She grinned.

   "See here," said the coachman, his voice low and menacing. "Just hol' very still, and my partner here will make yer pockets a bit lighter now, eh?" He carelessly waved a pistol at them, the glint of metal causing the duke to stiffen like a pillar of stone.

   Another man appeared from the shadows, a dark shape that walked with a slight limp and shuffled over to Byron's side, patting his hands over the duke's clothing, the smell of him making Summer grimace with distaste. Her eyes skimmed the empty street. She noticed the way the footsteps of the limping man echoed in the silence.

   She watched as Byron allowed the man to touch him, and then alarms went off in her head as she saw that the thief did a cursory search, taking only a watch and the stickpin in the duke's cravat. If they were robbers, surely they'd be interested in what he carried in his pockets as well?

   "Now, the woman," said the coachman, aiming the muzzle of the gun on Byron. "And no funny moves now."

   "Don't touch her," he growled as the limping man reached out for her, his voice so low with threat that he stopped the man in his tracks. "She'll hand you any items on her person. But you don't lay a filthy hand on her."

   "Seems you're forgettin' who's got the gun, guvnor."

   "No, I do not. But if your partner attempts to touch her, you might have to use it, wouldn't you? And the crime of murder is something I'm willing to wager that you wouldn't want to risk."

   Summer shifted sideways, so that Byron now only partially blocked her view of the coachman. She realized that he was attempting to talk their way out of this. And if this had been a real robbery, he probably would've succeeded. But something about this smelled wrong to her.

   The coachman snorted, his face splitting into a grin that managed to make him even uglier. "And what makes you think that, guvnor?"

   Summer knew, even before the man pulled the trigger, that he intended to kill Byron. She'd seen it in the eyes of a man before. With a speed she didn't know she possessed, she pushed the duke and threw her knife straight at the coachman, causing his shot to go wild.

   If only the blasted duke hadn't been stiffened into a stone, the coachman's shot would've missed him entirely; instead she heard the puff of a bullet penetrating skin. And if the
blasted
duke had moved when she'd shoved him, her knife would've flown true; instead it missed the coachman, and she heard it rattle on the cobblestones behind him.

   And then things started to happen very fast. Summer yanked the arm of the limping man up and around, heard a satisfying crack and a grunt of pain. She turned to face the coachman, amazed that Byron hadn't fallen down after he'd been shot, truly astonished now to see him flip his body over to the coachman, spin like a top with his leg in the air at a seemingly impossible angle, and kick the gun from the other man's hands.

   Then she felt a blow across her face, hard enough to spin her sideways and knock her to the cobblestones, and skinned her hands as she landed. So she hadn't broken the limping man's arm, as she'd thought. Summer tried to shake off the sparkling lights that spotted her vision, tried to get up and help Byron, for now it was two against one.

   To her amazement the duke didn't need any assistance from anyone. Both men stood a head taller, both men converged on him at once, but Byron spun like a dervish, kicked and hand-chopped with an accurate precision that caused the most damage to his opponents at the least expense of energy to himself. He could've taken on a dozen more men. Summer sighed in pure admiration.

   Within seconds, both men lay flat on the ground.

   Byron rushed to her side. "How badly are you hurt?"

   "Where'd you learn to fight like that?"

   Byron grasped her beneath the arms and pulled her to her feet. "What? Don't you have enough sense, madam, to go into hysterics, or to at least be insensible from the blow you were given?"

   His face swam for a moment but quickly steadied. "No, really, how'd you learn to do that?"

   He studied her intently for a second, nodded in assur ance that she seemed fine. "The bobbies aren't likely to be about this neighborhood, and the filth are only uncon scious, so I suggest we leave before they wake, agreed?"

   Summer nodded. She'd agree to about anything he said just now. This ghastly feeling of hero worship when she gazed at him had her giddy with the feel of it. Before he could say anything to stop her, she wobbled down the street and recovered her knife, scooping up the gun that lay not far from it, and at Byron's glare of rage from where he sat in the coachman's seat, hastily scrambled into the carriage. She'd barely closed the door before the duke slapped the reins on the horse's backs and had them barreling through the streets.

   She felt her cheek and realized she'd have a nasty bruise from this night, and thought that the man could no longer complain about disasters happening to him while in her company. For she'd had quite an exciting evening, all at the fault of the Duke of Monchester, and really, all he'd ever suffered from her company had been a scuffed boot from a tiny dog.

   Sooner than she'd expected, the carriage stopped in front of her own town house, and Byron ducked through the door and sat beside her. He searched her face, brought a hand to her swollen cheek, brushing it so softly that she didn't even flinch.

   "If you didn't look so dreadful," he said, "I'd verbally thrash you for what you did back there."

   Summer couldn't believe it. "What
I
did?"

   He sighed, his hand straying to a lock of hair that had fallen across her cheek, twining it around his finger. "What in her majesty's name made you throw your knife?"

   "Aah." She relaxed her shoulders. Excellent fighter, but not very good at discerning a situation. "They meant to kill you."

   "Pardon?"

   "They meant to murder you. That sham about robbing us was exactly that, a sham. Now who would want to kill you and make it look like a robbery? That's the question you should be asking."

   He gave a gentle tug at her curl and leaned away from her, those muscular arms folded across his broad chest, and she noticed for the first time the dark stain spreading across his shoulder. "What makes you think it wasn't a robbery?"

   "You're hurt," she murmured, and that giddy hero-worship thing swept over her again. "Let's go inside so I can tend to it."

   "The bullet barely grazed my skin. Answer me first."

   Oh, he could fix her with that gaze, scarcely allowing her to breathe. "The look in the coach man's eyes."

   One golden brow rose. "You could see his eyes from four feet away, in the fog?"

   "Yes, if you know what to look for."

   "And what made you look for it?"

   She shrugged, finding it hard to verbalize what was mostly just a feeling. "The limping man didn't check your pockets. Now what honest thief wouldn't check a man's pockets for money?"

   He threw back his head and laughed, the sound of it making her own lips curl upward. "I don't know any thieves—honest or otherwise. But I'll take your word for it that you do. I can't say that I agree with your assessment of the situation, but for now we'll just agree to disagree, yes?"

   Summer nodded and laid her hand on top of his. What kind of man would say such a thing? Any other man, including Monte—who she'd gotten into several interesting arguments with—would've made her agree with him or told her that she was wrong. Tarnation, it was bad enough that she felt so physically attracted to him, but if his real character kept peeking out from behind that wall he'd built for the aristocracy, she'd be in great danger of breaking her vow to Monte.

   She squeezed his hand. He jerked back as if she'd struck him, then leaned toward her like he had a string attached to her body and felt automatically pulled back. Summer grinned. "Tell me how you learned to fight like that."

   He sighed, his breath warm across her face. "We're back to that again. I told you, no personal questions; this is supposed to be a strictly business relationship."

   "You saved my life tonight. I think it's safe to say we went beyond your invisible guidelines."

   He pondered that a moment. His eyes guiltily sought out the bruise on her cheek; then he shrugged. "We'll make a deal. I'll answer one of your personal questions, and you answer one of mine. And only one. That way we're trading information, and not having an intimate conversation."

   Summer nodded. Whatever worked for him. "It's a deal."

   She could tell he liked the way she said that, as if it still kept them on a firm business footing. Although she also noticed that he hadn't moved his hand out from under hers, and had actually turned his wrist and laced his fingers through her own.

   "In case you hadn't noticed," he began, "my height is a bit below average. Therefore, by necessity, I had to learn to fight very young… or get used to being beaten up. Fortunately for me, we had a Chinese gardener." He stopped for a moment, his face melting into a rare expression, one of respect and a softness that Summer hadn't seen him display toward his own family. Then his features hardened again, back to that aloof mask, so quickly that she wasn't sure if she'd only imagined that expression. "He'd been a priest in China and had studied a discipline called kung fu, not so much a way of fighting as a way of living… it's hard for me to explain to someone else. But even though he was our servant, I always called him 'Master.'"

   "Would you teach me?"

   "Certainly not. Now, I've answered your question, you answer mine." His fingers had been stroking back and forth across her own; Summer couldn't quite remember when he'd started to do it, only aware that now they'd progressed to her upper arm, past the lace of her gloves, to her bare skin. She suppressed a shiver, not wanting to call attention to what he did, afraid that would make him stop, and it felt too divine for her to let that happen.