What a Hero Dares (21 page)

“You mean
my
family? I think you’ve pretty much seen what it’s like. We’re all so different, yet all so alike. We laugh, we argue, we tease. We can be apart for months, but when we see each other again it’s— I don’t think I can explain it, Zoé. But I want you to be a part of it.”

She turned in his arms, to smile up at him. “I’d like that. I didn’t know, I didn’t realize, nearly up to this moment, but I’d like to...to
belong
somewhere.”

“You belong with me, and I belong with you. I think we’ve earned that.”

He lowered his mouth to hers, and kissed her. Softly. Gently.

And a sob hitched in her throat, and her body went warm with wonder.

She slid her arms up and around his neck, or else otherwise she might melt into nothingness and disappear, to float above the meadow. She was already halfway there, as if she was with Max and yet also above both of them, hovering, watching him as he lowered her to the ground among the tall grass and flowers, their mouths still fused together, and held her. Simply held her.

She barely noticed her laces opening, and could only sigh when his hand reached inside the chemise and cupped her breast. She cradled his hand as he kissed her face, her eyelids, her hair, and then began a slow, leisurely descent along the side of her throat, to linger again at her chest, before moving on yet again.

She was crying again when he took her into his mouth, his tongue velvet against her nipple. She’d never felt this way, had never been loved this way, even by him.

There was no fire, no blaze. Just a slow, simmering heat that stirred her heart as much as it did her senses.

“Max...” But that was all she could say. His name.

Inch by inch, her clothing fell away, always to be followed by Max’s touch, his kiss.

And still the tears fell, slipping silently away, into her hair.

She stroked his back. She listened to him breathe. She put a hand to his heart, and willed her own to beat with his.

When at last he came to her, hovered over her, looked down at her with his eyes dark with passion, she welcomed him, rejoiced in him, took him deep inside her and raised herself to him, met him halfway, to both give and receive the sweetest, most eloquent kiss two people had ever shared.

She was shattered, she was made whole again. New. Different. Complete.

Was this love?

Yes...this was love.

CHAPTER TWELVE

M
AX
LAY
ON
HIS
SIDE
, his head propped against his hand, and watched Zoé sleep.

He wanted to wake her, to hear her whisper again as she’d done earlier,
“Je t’aime, Max. Je t’aime.”

I love you, Zoé, with all my heart.

The breeze played with her hair, brushing wisps of airy blond waves against her slightly flushed cheek. She looked so young, her slightly open mouth accentuating her bee-stung bottom lip. She’d laid her head on her hands, pressed together as if in prayer, and he believed she looked more like an angel than any portrait he’d ever seen in his travels across Europe.

Although he doubted any angel had such a wondrous body. Long, and slim, with an enticing dip at her waist as she lay on her side, an entrancing flare to her hip. Still, she was, to him, innocent perfection. And her new vulnerability tugged at his heart in a way he’d never felt until these past strange days.

She’d never left him. Even after she’d gone, as he tried to hate her, forget her...she’d always been there. She’d always be with him, even if they were never together again.

He’d be forced to go on, to walk the world only half a man, all the better parts of him gone. That didn’t bear thinking about...

“Max?”

“Zoé,” he responded, smiling. “You’re awake.”

She boosted herself into a sitting position and pushed at her hair, frowning as she encountered tangles. “How long have I been sleeping? I never thought I’d sleep. Is it soon time to go? I have to get out of these clothes and into my leathers.” She pulled a thick lock of hair forward and gave it a disgusted look. “And do something with
this
.”

“Papa wouldn’t approve?”

“Papa wouldn’t approve, no. But at least I’m clean today. Last night I made for a fine chimney sweep. Are you nervous? I can’t say I’m not.”

“I’m rather glad of that,” Max said, helping her to her feet. “It shows your intelligence.”

He leaned in and kissed her, and she kissed him back, and then they just stared at each other for a time, the pair of them grinning like idiots.

“
Je t’aime,
Max. I love you. I don’t believe I’ll ever tire of saying those words.”

“Good, because I know I’ll never tired of hearing them.
Je t’aime,
my darling, always and forever. Now get up and get moving. You’ve been waiting all day for this, remember?”

“But no longer fearful.”

They walked back to the stream arm-in-arm, her long legs matching him stride for stride. In tune with each other, the way they’d always believed they were, but now knew they hadn’t been, not in the ways that really mattered.

Silently, and with occasional pauses to down bites of ham from the basket Jacko had provided, they went about the job of turning themselves into what neither of them wanted to be ever again. Hunters. Possibly killers.

He’d wanted her to sleep as long as possible, but he might have sliced it a bit too thin if they were to be in place before dusk had turned to dark beneath a moon that wouldn’t be as helpfully bright tonight.

“Do I get to ask one more time?” Zoé was sitting on the ground, tugging on her right boot, pulling it up and over her leathers.

Max had already finished dressing, his clothing as black and close-fitting as hers. “Charfield’s description of the private dining room at the Golden Goose was too precise for their meeting place to be anywhere else. They met, they dined, they proceeded to the ceremonial chamber, or whatever the hell he called it.”

“The Chamber of Celebration,” she corrected, “but I suppose you were close enough. Stuffed boar heads?
How
many did you say are mounted on the walls?”

“I never counted, but at least a dozen, on every wall, and all with brass rings through their snouts.” Max took the last slice of ham and stuffed it into his mouth, then spoke around it. “At Christmastime, our worthy innkeeper strings lengths of holly through them, like a chain. Very festive.”

Zoé had pulled on her other boot and was now standing, stamping her feet fully into them. “And we’re positive my father is there. Because Anton wouldn’t want him too close to the woman, who might ask him his name and then decide
she
wanted him, rather than allow Anton to use him. She probably doesn’t want Anton at all anymore, not if she possesses any intelligence. It does make sense.”

He didn’t want to lie to her. “I can’t say I’m completely positive but, yes, it makes sense. The Goose is small, out of the way, yet closer to Redgrave land than the Eagle, and Anton would want to keep him handy. There’s also the fact that the Goose has been known to offer food and shelter to highwaymen and other unsavories—for a price—not that Anton would be so foolish as to stay there himself.”

“But with a few of those
unsavories
hired to guard him, the inn would be the perfect place to hide my father.”

“We’ll hope so. In any case, the Society certainly wouldn’t want to advertise their presence by staying at the Eagle when they come to dress themselves up like the little devils they believe they are, parade about chanting gibberish and showing off for the ladies being served up to them.”

“I don’t need another description of what they do, thank you.”

“No, I suppose not.” Max shook his head, trying to banish the thought of his grandmother, young, undoubtedly terrified, as ever being made a part of such a scene. Murdered her husband? It was a shame she could only kill him once. But then to believe there was no alternative to keeping her grandchildren safe except to destroy her only son in order to stop what her husband had begun, an evil that might otherwise destroy them all? No, Trixie may have pulled the trigger that day, but it was Charles who had really killed Barry.

Zoé was tucking her hair inside the black toque. “Max? I can see you’re upset. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be hounding you so.”

“No, sweetheart, you have every right. Besides, even without Charfield’s description, there aren’t that many places to stop, dine, hide their horses before traveling on foot to the Chamber of...to the meeting place. It isn’t as if they could have knocked on the door at the Manor and asked for a room for the night. I still can’t believe we nearly met the captain there. This might all have been over by now, if we had.”

“Or we might all have been very dead, the moment someone from the Society realized where we were heading. Are you ready to mount up? And what are we going to do with all of this?” she asked, indicating the basket and discarded clothing with a wave of her hand.

“Leave it, or be the first Crown agent to go chasing after the enemy with a picnic basket strapped to your saddle.”

“And because we’ll be back? I’d like to come back here, to the meadow.”

“I think that can be arranged. You know, I’m not certain there’s a meadow on my estate—the one I haven’t seen in over two years. If not, we’ll have to create one.”

He offered his cupped hands and she put her left foot in them and boosted lithely into the saddle.

“Do you know something, Max,” she told him as she smiled down at him. “I think, for all your past declarations that you are no such thing, you’re becoming
romantical
.”

He swung up into the saddle. “Bloody hell, woman, I’ve been teasing my siblings, telling them the same about them—especially Kate, who’s always said we’re the most
unromantical
family in nature. You can’t tell any of them what you just said, or else I’ll never hear the end of it. Next you’ll want me to sit propped beneath some leafy tree while you rest your head against my lap and I read you the poem I wrote about you.”

They were nearly back to the dirt track where they’d left—escaped—the manure wagon. “Max, never say you wrote a poem about me.”

“Might we please talk about this another time?” he asked, probably nearly bleated. “Otherwise, we’re going to have to rouse your father from his bed before we can rescue him.” He pointed to the right. “This way. Let’s ride.”

* * *

B
Y
THE
TIME
Max’s circuitous route had gotten them to the point where they could safely hide the horses in the trees behind the Golden Goose and get close enough to the inn and its several outbuildings, Zoé had lost all of the inner glow still lingering after their time in the meadow.

She might say she believed in miracles, and their afternoon together, the discoveries they’d made, the profound intimacies and truths they’d shared, certainly qualified, considering their past. But she knew the world for the most part revolved around luck, both good and bad, and it wasn’t always angels who guided the hand of those forced to roll the dice.

She had her stiletto tucked into the sleeve inside her right boot. She had her pair of throwing knives, plus a third already in her left hand. She resisted the need to turn it over and over in her hand, because that would show Max she wasn’t as calm and collected as she needed him to believe.

Max had his pistols—he’d checked them twice before they’d ridden out—and a small, clever, London-built four-barrel pistol that fired two shots at a time. Reasonably accurate. At close range. When it worked. He had a thin but extremely strong rope, complete with knots spaced every twelve inches, coiled and slipped up his arm and onto his shoulder. He also had his strength, his agility and his brain.

They were as prepared as it was possible to be without an army at their backs.

And, in a few minutes, she and Max would once again roll the dice.

“It’s not very large, is it? And with very few windows. In fact, it resembles more a small fortress than it does an inn. How do you propose we get inside? From the bottom or the top?”

“It’s a basically simple place. The attics are only two large rooms under the pitched roof. Guests share them, lying practically cheek to jowl next to each other. There’s only four rooms on the floor below the attics.”

“You’re disturbingly familiar with the layout of the place, aren’t you? What other
service
does the landlord provide?”

He looked at her through the increasing gloom. “Not now, Zoé.”

And why not? Hadn’t they always joked and sparred, to ease the tension that came before a mission? “
Au contraire, mon ami
. Definitely now.”

He flashed her a wicked smile. “Every aspiring young buck has to begin somewhere. The Goose is practically a tradition.”

“Ah, I thought as much. All right, please go on. Tell me more about this sanctuary for highwaymen and brothel.”

“Not a brothel. Simply several friendly, generous and rather educational barmaids. Now we’ll go on. I don’t think Anton would chance locking your father in one of the rooms, either. He might call out, alert the inn patrons. With the taproom floor definitely out of the running, that leaves the cellars. And before you ask me how I know about the cellars, as a young man I’d more than once helped carry up small barrels of ale for the barman.”

“You could have simply said
down,
you know. But it reminds me to enquire more about your earlier life. And the earl’s and Val’s, as well, I suppose.”

Max grumbled something low under his breath. She thought it might have been
and won’t that be wonderful.
A bit louder, he said, “Remind me to come back here another time and break out one of the windowpanes in the corner room. I scratched my name into the pane with the diamond on my signet ring, directly beneath Gideon’s and, for all I know, directly above Valentine’s.” He put a hand on her arm. “Down.”

“Yes, we already—” She looked toward the rear of the inn, to see three men exiting the inn through what must be the kitchens, and quickly went to her belly on the ground behind the bushes they were using as cover. The men were a good twenty-five yards away, and probably couldn’t see them, but one could never be too careful. “Sorry. You meant
down
. Where do you think they’re going? They’re leaving through the kitchens?”

“We need to get closer,” Max told her, and she agreed. Together, they made their way from bush to bush, tree to tree, even using the cover of some of the outbuildings, until they were close enough not only to see, but to listen.

“Come on, old man, can’t you move those dew beaters of yours faster than that?”

“Hobbled as I am by these ropes of yours around my ankles? Hardly. And so I tell you every night. You weren’t a good student as a child, were you?
Vous avez le visage d’un cochon et le cerveau d’une puce
.”

“He’s at it again, running his mouth in that Froggie tongue,” the second man said. “And not sayin’ anything too nice about you, Tom, I wager.”

“Papa,” Zoé whispered, probably unnecessarily. “He’s shackled, wrists and ankles, and he’s carrying a—”

“Chamber pot,” Max finished for her. “It would seem we’ve stumbled upon a nightly ritual. Anton never believed in paying well for anything. If he’d crossed their palms with a bit more silver, your father would still be locked in the cellars, and one of the pair of them toting the pot to the privy.”

“Hold up. Stand right there, old man,” the guard named Tom ordered. “Watch him. Long as we’re out here, I might as well put my piss somewhere else than against the wall, eh?”

Zoé watched as her father held up the brass container.

“Full is full, and full is heavy. You do insist in feeding my delicate body with your inferior English food. Slop goes in, slop goes out.
Telle est la vie.
So if you could please first allow me to—”

Tom backhanded her father across the mouth with his filthy paw. “
Parlay-boo
shut your damned potato trap, Frenchie?”

“Mine,” she said, claiming the one she’d take, leaving the other for Max.

“
Certainement,
sweetheart. No time for a better plan in any case. Let’s just go at them straight on, hope the element of surprise and Tommy-boy’s full bladder help us. On three, before anyone else stumbles out here from the inn.”

“Simple, but probably effective,” Zoé agreed, already crouching down, her weight balanced between the ball of her left foot, the heel of the right, and ready to run. She shifted the throwing blade from her left hand to her right.
One...two...three!