Once Tempted (7 page)

What had the Moorish tract read?

Only those pure of heart and intent can claim the King’s Ransom
.

Pure of heart and intent.
Robert counted on neither measure.

And unfit as he was to claim the ancient treasure, according to the twelfth century Moor who’d done the most thorough investigation into the missing ransom, then his manhood and limbs would soon be withering.

She slanted a glance at his arms and legs and even at the tight fit of his breeches.

Much to her chagrin, she found no signs of dissipation in any direction. Instead she did her best to ignore what was probably the best example of potent male physique in the entire
ton.
“In your rush to the Peninsula, you forgot to do a little more research on your prize. It is guarded by a curse.”

He gave a dismissive wave and continued straightening his clothes. “I don’t believe in curses. And I doubt you do either.”

She shrugged, for in fact she didn’t believe in ancient myths or hexes, though it didn’t stop her from wishing that perhaps this one held some small bit of validity.

Robert casually retrieved his discarded coat. She followed his lithe movements with the pistol.

He glanced over his shoulder, his expression seeming to say that he was surprised to see she still bothered. “So have you come for your share?”

She’d been wrong to think him changed. Oh, this was Robert, all right. Already his greed ascended over any good sense he may have possessed.

She waved the pistol at him in what she hoped was a derisive gesture—and to remind him that she was in charge. “What makes you think I would want any part of your blood money?”

“You’re here. With a pistol.” He nodded toward the piece in her hand. “I presume that thing is loaded.”

She nodded.

“Then do be careful. Those models have a questionable trigger.”

“Now you know why I chose it.”

His lips turned in a rather appreciative smile. “Intelligent and beautiful.” He paused, then added as if it were an afterthought, “Just as I remember.”

Beautiful! He had the nerve to call her that now? He’d said those words before, but she knew he hadn’t meant them. She’d never been considered a beauty by anyone’s standards. Too tall. Her hair too red. Her features hardly noteworthy.

But when he had said the words just now, there had been a ring of genuineness behind them that made a small, long-buried part of her wish that they were indeed true.

Oh, dear God, what was the matter with her? A few minutes in his company, and all of a sudden she was falling prey to his false praise.

“It won’t work this time, Robert,” she told him. “I haven’t forgotten your old lies as yet.”

“Still thinking about them, though,” he noted.

Her cheeks flushed hot, but she ignored their stinging admission. “Go over there,” she told him, waving the pistol at a writing table that stood against the far wall.

“And what would you like me to do there?” he asked.

“Write your confession.”

He just stared at her. “You expect me to condemn myself?”

“Yes.” Olivia pointed the pistol back at him.

Robert chuckled. “And what will you do with this confession, Miss Sutton? Clear your name and repudiate your involvement in all this? Who will believe it?” He laughed again, as if that notion was quite ridiculous.

She bit her tongue to keep from telling him exactly what she would like to do with it. Even if he was probably right.

As a peer of the land, his word would always supersede hers.

Still, she clung to a small hope that his confession was a start toward exonerating herself and ending her years of hiding. It just had to be.

She shook the pistol at him. “Just do as I say.”

He shrugged and made his way to the desk.

“What do you propose I write this confession on?” he asked, after he had sat down. “I seem to be out of writing paper.”

Olivia ground her teeth together to keep from using one of Jemmy’s more colorful expressions. Then she remembered that while packing to leave Finch Manor, she’d brought along some of her ladyship’s instruction sheets on traveling, along with some blank sheets of her ladyship’s stationery.

It had been nothing more than habit at the time, but now she could see why Lady Finch insisted a lady always carry proper writing materials on her travels.

Olivia knelt down beside her valise, and with one eye and the pistol still aimed at Bradstone, fished out a piece of paper from her bag and handed it to him.

“Write,” she ordered, nudging him toward the seat with the muzzle of the gun.

He shrugged, then took up the quill. “What would you have me confess to?”

A hundred things,
she thought.
How you lied about loving me. That you had no intention of calling on my mother and asking for my hand in marriage. That you intended to ruin my reputation and my life.

Instead she told him, “Why don’t you start with the most important part and explain that I had nothing to do with the murder of that man.”

His head swung around, his eyes narrow, the force of hatred and anger pouring from them startling her with its intensity. “And you don’t think you did?”

His accusation hit at the heart of her guilt.

He has the right of it,
a nagging voice in the back of her conscience chimed in.
If you hadn’t been there, that
young man might still be alive.

It was an indictment that had plagued her on more sleepless nights than she cared to count.

“Well?” he was asking. “Do you really think anyone is going to believe that man’s death was
my
fault? Especially when you were found over his body with the murder weapon in your hand?”

How dare he continue this vilifying charade! Her hand tightened around the grip of the pistol. In a dark moment her anger got the better of her, and she wanted nothing more than to kill him, here and now.

“If I have to go to the gallows for murder, then perhaps I should go for having actually committed the crime,” she told him.

Robert smiled at her. “If ever you intended to kill me, you would have done so five minutes ago.”

The pistol wavered. “How do you know I won’t do it now?”

He nodded over her shoulder. “Because it is too late.”

Olivia twisted slightly only to discover a giant of a man looming over her.

Before she could even utter a yelp of protest, Robert quickly stripped the pistol from her hand, but in the process, the sensitive weapon discharged.

In an explosion of powder, the bullet whizzed past his ear and tore a hole through the expensive gilt paper covering the wall behind him.

“Damn you, Robert,” she cursed, as his henchman pinned her arms behind her back and held her as one might pin a butterfly to a display case at the British Museum. “Damn your nine lives. You won’t do this to me again.”

Robert crumpled up the piece of paper on the desk and tossed it aside. He stalked toward her until they were nose to nose. “It appears, Miss Sutton, I already have.”

Chapter 3

M
iss Sutton let loose with a rather eye-opening curse, the type one might expect from an unrepentant young rake about town but certainly not from the lips of a young lady of good breeding.

Then again, Robert was fast coming to his own conclusions as to Miss Sutton’s qualifications on that point.

There was a lot about the lady that left him dumbfounded. The Olivia Sutton of Pymm’s rather unflattering description and the intelligence he’d gathered had in his mind looked like all the other boring English misses he’d met. With their pale complexions and mincing manners, they caught his attention about as much as he paid heed to his morning meal—and there were only so many ways to serve kippers, and that seemed to be true of London misses.

Certainly he hadn’t expected this tempestuous handful.

While she had the look of a bookish scribbler, with her black, boring dress and ink-stained fingers, the rest of her defied that stereotype.

For one thing, her coloring was all wrong. A fiery mane of rich, thick auburn hair fell free from its halfhearted attempt at a matronly chignon.

Even her widow’s weeds, a hideous dress designed to put a man at arm’s length, hinted that beneath the black silk lay hidden a lush body. For the bleak gown could not conceal the fullness of her breasts straining the front buttons or how the skirt fell over the seductive curves of her hips. She might hide behind her weeds and books, but he doubted even a Spanish mantuamaker could conceal such a ripe body.

A paphian hidden beneath a bluestocking’s guise.

And her eyes. Wherever had that color come from? No demure blue for this one. More like the Spanish sky over the high plains of Castile—rich and azure, so clear and deep that one almost thought one was looking at the heavens.

And right now they burned at him as if she furiously wished she hadn’t hesitated to pull the trigger of her pistol and send him to his just reward.

Preferably one where he stayed dead.

“Ouch!” Aquiles cried out, shaking one hand and hanging on for dear life to the little wildcat with his other. “She bit me.”

To make matters worse, she connected the heel of her sensibly shod foot with the poor man’s shin. Aquiles appealed silently to Robert to do something, anything—for Robert knew only too well, his batman held all women in high esteem, even when they were robbing him blind or leaving him bartered and bruised, as Miss Sutton seemed intent on doing.

“Enough of that,” he told her. His sharp reproach stilled her—for the time being.

In the tense silence of the room, Robert heard the aftermath from the pistol shot—the house had gone into a state of alarm. Downstairs Carlyle shouted orders over the pealing shrieks of the maids, while the pounding feet of the footmen indicated they were searching the house. Rising above it all, his aunt’s histrionics pierced the clamor and din.

Any minute now, someone would barrel through the door and discover him with Miss Sutton along with her smoking pistol.

He could imagine the scandal and gossip that would follow—and hinder his investigation. Robert’s gaze swung around the room, looking for somewhere to stow her until the furor had died down.

She seemed to follow his intentions. “It is too late, my lord,” she told him. “You are about to be caught.”

“Not yet,” he told her, catching up the horrendous length of his cravat. He ripped off an end, wadded it up in a ball and shoved it in her mouth. With the remaining length, he tied the gag firmly in place.

Her protests continued, though muffled, punctuated with more shots from her thick and sturdy heel—no delicate silken slippers for this miss.

“Get her in the dressing room,” he told Aquiles, opening the door to the chamber off his bedroom. “Tie her up. Hang her from the shelving, if you must. Just make sure she can’t get loose and that she remains silent. Then post yourself outside this door and make sure no one goes in there until I return.” He went back and grabbed the lady’s valise, which she’d left in the middle of the room, and tossed it in behind his friend and their squirming and twisting captive.

Just as Aquiles disappeared into the adjoining chamber, Carlyle and Lady Bradstone burst into his room. “Robert! Did you hear?” she asked. “Carlyle says that horrible noise was a pistol. How can that be? Shots fired in our house? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he told her.

“I feared the French were coming to take you away from me,” she said between big tearful sniffs into her handkerchief.

“No, madame. Nothing like that,” he said, holding up the weapon. “Aquiles found this in my dressing room. I had forgotten all about winning this piece in a card game from Lord Potter, or was it that Bingham fellow?” He shrugged and tried to effect a lazy grin. “Not that it matters now. Still, imagine my surprise when I discovered the damned thing was loaded after all this time.” He nodded at the hole in the wallpaper. “My apologies, madame.”

For once, his aunt didn’t notice his formality, for she was staring in wide-eyed shock at the wall. “Goodness!” she exclaimed. “You could have been killed.”

“Not this time,” he muttered as he wrapped a comforting arm around her and led her from the room. “Not this time.”

The fête downstairs was in full swing by the time Olivia was able to wiggle her hands free from Aquiles’s knotted restraints. With her fingers loose, she plucked off the lacy gag and took a deep, freeing breath.

Damn the man,
she seethed, as she felt her way to the door of the tiny chamber. She had half a mind to march down to his welcome home festivities and tell one and all about his nefarious deeds.

“Yes, Olivia,” she grumbled to herself. “And just who will believe you?”

What she needed was proof that Robert had been the one who’d murdered that man, not her.

But how to get it?

What would Hobbe do
? she wondered. Her hero wouldn’t have gotten himself in this entanglement. Of that, she was certain.

Well, first things first,
she thought.
I need to get out of this prison.

With her ear pressed to the door, she could hear the even, steady snoring of Robert’s henchman close by. And as she tried to push the door open, she found it barred by some great weight.

Probably the big oaf himself, she realized.

She turned around and leaned against the door, vexed and angry at herself for getting caught by Bradstone this second time.

If only he wasn’t still so . . .

She stopped herself before she even dared finish that thought.
Still so handsome,
was what her wayward imagination had been about to admit.

And yet, there was something fundamentally different about the Marquis of Bradstone.

Oh, there were the superficial things. Take the scar on his jaw, for instance. Or his plebian hairstyle.

But what had stopped her was the light in his eyes as he stared down the barrel of Jemmy’s pistol. A black-hearted gaze that held a courage of character she’d never thought Robert Parnell, Marquis of Bradstone, could ever possess.