My Rogue, My Ruin

by Amalie Howard; Angie Morgan

  Eloise’s childhood accident was no secret, but her sweet temperament more than eclipsed her scarred face. Still, she didn’t often attend social functions, and Brynn had seen her only a handful of times over the years. It was sad that she hadn’t yet received an offer of marriage, but without the late duchess’s backing and her parentage in question, it wasn’t surprising.

  Brynn gestured to Gray. “You are acquainted with my brother, Viscount Northridge?”

  “Of course,” Eloise said, a smile in her voice as Gray dipped into a polite bow, pressing a kiss to her gloved hand. “Back from London?”

  “Only for a short while to protect my young sister from disgracing herself, it seems,” he growled with an ill-concealed glower.

  Brynn ignored the barb. “We were just discussing dancing partners, and what it does to a girl’s reputation if her brother makes her hold up a column all evening long.”

  “A thing that I am much aware of.” Eloise clapped her hands as if a delightful thought occurred to her. “I have a wonderful idea. We can trade brothers if Lord Northridge will do me the honor, and you must dance with my brother. He has been in a surly mood all evening. Your appearance may yet lighten it.” Brynn and Gray wore matching frowns. Brynn guessed that her appearance would do no such thing for Hawksfield, especially not after their encounter in the woods, but Eloise seemed determined. “Yes, let’s find that brother of mine and try to convince him, shall we?”

  “Convince me of what?” a smooth voice interjected.

  The earlier trip of her heart at Hawksfield’s name became a thud at the sound of his voice.

  “To dance, dear brother,” Eloise said, her smile directed over Brynn’s shoulder. “If only so your poor sister can dance one set without you running to her eternal rescue.”

  Both Brynn and Gray turned to see the unsmiling marquess. He was impeccably dressed—a far cry from his disheveled appearance the day before. “Lady Briannon, Lord Northridge,” he said politely, recognizing them as his sister had, despite the masks they wore, though he was not disguised. Hawksfield remained grim-faced as he extended his arm to Brynn, although she could have sworn she saw something like surprised admiration flash in those silver eyes at her ensemble. “May I?”

  “At least there are plenty of eyes on the two of you this time,” Gray muttered.

  “Gray.” Brynn flushed, chastising him under her breath, mortified he’d mention her earlier run-in with the marquess. “I’d be honored to dance with Lord Hawksfield. As I am sure you would be with Lady Eloise.”

  A muscle ticking in his jaw, Gray forced a smile. “Of course.” Without another word, he pushed off the faux-Greek pillar, one of many placed around the perimeter of the ballroom, and escorted Eloise onto the floor. Brynn knew he would keep an eye on her throughout the entire set, playing chaperone.

  She and her dance partner garnered more than a few stares as Hawksfield led her to the center of the floor, the strains of a new waltz starting. He walked stiffly, and when he drew her close, it was with a slight grimace. “I’m starting to think that the waltz is our dance.”

  “There is no our dance,” she said, and with a glance down, frowned and added, “Are you even certain you wish to participate? I do not intend to be rude, but you seem to be favoring your right leg. Are you in pain?”

  “My ankle has not quite recovered from our jaunt yesterday, but I assure you, I will not embarrass you, if that is what you fear.” His gaze brushed across her face and dipped to the swelling expanse of bare skin above the bodice of the dress before sweeping back up.

  She wasn’t worried about him embarrassing her before the others here at all. Her concern lay in how flustered that penetrating gaze made her.

  A faint curve of his lips hinted toward a smile. “You look beautiful tonight, Lady Briannon.”

  Something soft and delicate flowered in her chest at the blatant admiration in his eyes, and if it weren’t for his expert lead despite his injured ankle, she would have stumbled.

  “Thank you, my lord.” He looked well, too, Brynn thought, in his finely tailored clothing. The creamy white cravat accentuated not only his unruly dark hair, but the golden color of his skin, which she supposed came from a life spent outdoors. From what little she knew of him, he seemed like the type who wouldn’t be satisfied sitting inside, drinking port and growing doughy and rheumy with age. He seemed always to be moving with a restless sort of contained energy.

  Brynn’s eyes drifted up from his cravat, and she saw him staring at her, an amused expression in those mercurial eyes. She swallowed and realized she’d been lost in thoughts about him.

  “Where did you go just now?” he asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I had made a comment, and all I had for a reply were your eyes upon my neck.”

  Heat swamped her still aching chest. “Oh, I…thought I saw…a spot of gravy.”

  Blast! Brynn flushed deeper, certain she now resembled a sickly shade of puce.

  Hawksfield frowned, though she could still see a twitch of amusement at the corner of his lips. “How very slovenly of me.”

  “Oh no, I did not mean at all to—”

  “Allow me to try again,” he interrupted, no longer hiding his amusement. “I had said, that is a beautiful necklace.”

  His gaze dropped to the rise of her chest. The sheer gall! He no doubt enjoyed making her uncomfortable.

  “Thank you. It was…a gift.”

  “From a suitor?”

  She tightened her gaze. “Of course not.”

  Admitting she had accepted a gift as exquisite as this from a suitor would have been paramount to declaring she was off the marriage mart. Which, on second thought, didn’t seem like such an awful thing right then.

  They danced in silence for the next few minutes, Hawksfield’s injured ankle making each turn as ossified as a wooden board. The quiet should have made her happy. At least he wasn’t baiting her as he seemed to enjoy doing. However, it made her only more uneasy, especially when she twice caught him eyeing the rubies. The necklace had drawn his attention, and for the first time, she wondered if it was because he recognized it. The rubies were an exceptional piece. Memorable. Why hadn’t she thought of that possibility before? They’d come from the bandit and had most likely been stolen. Oh good Lord. What if the original owner was a lady in attendance tonight?

  As they finished the waltz and the marquess escorted her off the floor, Brynn was fairly sweating.

  “You look like you might swoon,” Hawksfield commented as he led her toward the opposite side of the ballroom where Gray had been dancing, the Greek pillar now surrounded by a bevy of young ladies and their mamas.

  “I do not swoon,” Brynn said, even as she eyed a pair of nearby doors. They were propped open to a balcony, a gentle breeze wafting inside. Swooning was for ninnies and artful girls, eager for attention. Brynn counted herself above such ploys.

  Then again…she had chosen to wear the necklace for attention. Though only from one man. It wasn’t at all the same. Was it?

  She accepted a glass of champagne from a passing server and took a rather large gulp.

  “I apologize. It is just that I have heard something of your condition,” Hawksfield said, sipping from his own glass. She cut her eyes from the tempting balcony and hit him with a glare.

  “My what?”

  “No need to be embarrassed.” His lips curled up at the corners then. Was he laughing at her?

  Indignation swelled up her throat and threatened to choke her. “I assure you, I am quite well. Whatever you have heard about my previous health concerns is exactly that—previous.”

  He lowered his glass and swallowed his champagne, his Adam’s apple dipping below the snowy folds of his cravat. A spot of gravy. Dear Lord, she was making a mess out of this evening. What had she imagined? That the bandit would actually show up wearing his black silk mask and that he would seek her out for a dance or two? More likely, the true owner of these rubies would spot
them, on her bosom, and accuse her of thievery. Oh! Another rush of heat scorched her chest and neck.

  What if that is exactly what the Masked Marauder had planned all along?

  “Where is your mask?” she asked abruptly, wishing now that she hadn’t been so imprudent. Hawksfield’s answer was a slow tented eyebrow. Of course he wouldn’t deign to wear one.

  “Does the sight of my face bother you so?” he asked. “Perhaps you would rather I place a sack over my head?”

  “Don’t be absurd. It is a masquerade, and without a disguise you stand out as a spoilsport.” Her tone was condescending, and Brynn hated the way it sounded, but she sipped her champagne and faked a bored expression. She’d rather engage in verbal sparring with the likes of him than continue to worry whether some lady in attendance would accuse her of theft.

  A shot of embarrassed heat flooded her ears as Hawksfield stared at her for another second, his expression unreadable. He then reached into his trouser pocket and extracted what appeared to be a black slip of silk. Brynn narrowed her eyes on the silk as he shook it out and pulled the demi mask over his face. His gray eyes glittered in the candlelight.

  Brynn seemed to tumble forward and then back, her vision shaky as her eyes traced his finely shaped nose beneath the silk, to his unsmiling lips. They flicked past the angular cut of his cheekbones to the silver eyes staring steadily at her.

  Why hadn’t she seen it before?

  Shaking slightly, Brynn gripped the stem of her champagne flute, her fingers surging to her throat and the necklace that lay there like a brand. Her pulse tripped over itself as a million possibilities assaulted her.

  It couldn’t be…could it?

  Could Hawksfield be the bandit?

  The tumultuous fall of her thoughts steamrolled all others, including the fleeting yet torturous one of him sans trousers. Her face felt as if it were aflame, and she struggled to compose herself. If he were the bandit, why would he rob someone en route to his own ball? Why would he rob anyone at all? His father was a duke for heaven’s sake, and he was…Lord Hawksfield—a complete, unimaginative boor.

  Brynn shook her head to clear it and set the empty champagne glass on a passing footman’s tray. Clearly, the drink was going to her head. The implacable Marquess of Hawksfield would be the absolute last person on earth to lower his esteemed self to rob anyone. He was too poised. Too arrogant. Too stodgy. She frowned at her own swift logic and reconsidered the possibility.

  Hawksfield was the right size, and the right age, and had the right physique. But it could not be him. His precise tones were several shades lower than those spoken by the bandit, whose voice had been sophisticated and educated, yes, but also ostentatious. This peer of the realm was too rigid, too proper, too…tonnish. Further, the bandit’s tones were higher and more jovial, except when he’d been delirious and his speech slightly slurred. Hawksfield’s diction reeked of excessive good breeding. No, the marquess wasn’t her man.

  However, with that realization, she felt a new emotion cling like a thorn. It prickled and itched, and a moment later she grasped, with a fair amount of alarm, what it was. Blast it all.

  Lady Briannon Findlay was well and truly disappointed.

  Chapter Eight

  “You are right,” Briannon told him in a bored tone, her eyes averting from his masked visage, likely in search of her brother through the crowd. “Perhaps a sack would be better.”

  Archer removed the demi mask and stuffed the scrap of silk back into his pocket. She was only being sarcastic, perhaps to insult him the same way he’d done to her about that awful dress she’d worn to the Bradburne Ball, but it still pricked. Deeply. Which infuriated him. So far, he’d counted three men in attendance who could have recognized him as the masked man who had set upon their carriages. Three men who could be the one behind the anonymous note delivered in his copy of the Times. And yet, he’d dared put it on. For her.

  After last night’s episode, he’d been loath to attend the masquerade. However, when he heard Briannon would be in attendance, he had made the effort, despite the soreness of his leg. The bullet had gone through, and no infection had set in, thank God, but he’d still had to endure Brandt’s mocking.

  In truth, Archer was starting to doubt what he’d seen. He had lost a lot of blood, and Brandt was right—it could have been a groomsman, perhaps one who had been following the carriage as a precaution to an attack. The newssheets had been making an enormous deal of the Masked Marauder. But why would the groomsman have then taken him to Brandt’s cottage? Unless Archer had imagined that, too. Or maybe the man had had a crisis of conscience. It was the reason Archer carried no bullets in his gun during the robberies—he didn’t want innocent blood on his hands. He sighed. Archer had gained consciousness with his mask still in place, though he could not be positive the groomsman hadn’t been curious and peeked underneath. Discovery was something he could not afford.

  Despite that, he had known the odds when he’d donned the silk moments ago, especially so soon after the robbery on Briannon’s carriage. A part of him had been hoping, in defiance of reason, that she would recognize him.

  The foolish, reckless part of him that had felt flattered she’d worn the rubies was disappointed. Something desperate rose inside of him then: a desire to make her respond, anything to take the bored look off her face, the one that amply conveyed what she thought of the man standing before her.

  Archer wanted that man to be the marauder, not the marquess. He wanted her eyes to glow with the tempestuous fire he’d seen on the lane. He wanted her to know exactly who had given her those rubies lying like glowing embers against her breast. They looked as he had expected they would. Dazzling. Seductive. Everything his fevered imagination had conjured and more. Archer wanted to see her in nothing but those rubies. The scintillating thought made his throat—and loins—clench.

  He took a desperate swallow of his drink, banishing the provocative thought of Briannon’s deliciously naked body from his mind. But Archer knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had worn the rubies and that bewitching dress for a reason. She had come here to be the seducer, and he wanted her to know without question that he was the man she’d come here to tempt.

  “Looking for someone?” he taunted, following the path of her gaze. “A lover perhaps?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Briannon’s mouth shaped the words, her transparent hazel eyes narrowed with a mixture of emotions. Archer was transfixed at how each one—shock, injury, outrage—made her eyes a shade greener each time, until they were snapping with vivid color.

  “Why you vile, ill-mannered—”

  Several couples on the dance floor craned their necks to get a better look. Without warning, Archer moved swiftly, taking Briannon by the arm, and led her out the pair of nearby doors to a private balcony.

  “Release me,” she said. “I wish to return to my brother.”

  “In a minute,” Archer said, keeping a firm grip on her elbow as he steered her farther out of sight, beyond the curious stares. “Briannon—”

  She reared back as if his fingers were snakes. “Don’t you dare address me in such a familiar matter, you vile—”

  “You called me that already,” Archer said with a smile. He had no doubt she could be more creative with her insults.

  “Don’t patronize me. Why have you brought me out here after insulting me so?”

  “No lover, then?” Archer’s stare fell lower to the daring décolletage of the dress. A becoming flush stole across her skin, her breasts heaving beneath the glittering tier of gems.

  “Are you quite finished?”

  He stepped toward her, and she took a step backward. Archer wanted nothing more than to provoke her into dropping that fake, haughty stare, and to do so, he had to risk inciting her wrath. “Then whom did you wear this for? This intoxicating dress? Although I can’t quite decide whether I prefer you in men’s breeches or women’s fashions designed to make men lose their fortunes…and their common sense.”
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  Briannon’s mouth opened and closed in shocked surprise. He knew he was being vulgar and insulting, but once he had started, Archer couldn’t stop himself from goading her. He wanted to punish her for not knowing it was he who had gifted her the rubies, not some stupid fop. He was irrationally jealous of a fictional bandit that he himself had invented. The entire situation was ludicrous, but he continued as if compelled by inner demons he hadn’t the slightest control over.

  “Or perhaps the answer lies in wearing nothing at all,” he said, vaulting a mocking eyebrow. Her slap cracked across his face so sharply that the sound echoed into the night. Damn. He hadn’t even seen her hand coming. The stinging feel of it seared his cheek and brought him back to reality. Archer stared at her, tears shining in her eyes, and he felt sudden regret. What was he doing, baiting her like an overeager bull straight out of the gates? The minx would drive him to madness if he’d let her—she was absinthe in his blood.

  But he ruled his emotions…they did not rule him. Archer drew a deep, calming breath. “My apologies, Lady Briannon,” he said in a controlled voice. “Please allow me to escort you back inside.”

  “I don’t want you escorting me anywhere!” Her voice raised into a stifled shriek, the sheen of tears replaced by vitriolic rage. “You’re a…you’re unspeakable. How dare you insult me in such a manner? No wonder everyone avoids you like the plague!” She backed away, and as if drawn by an attached string, Archer followed the movement. “All the young ladies think you are uncouth and ruthless, and they’re right!”

  Archer took another involuntary step forward. It eliminated the gap between them. Briannon’s hands grasped the stone balustrade that rested against her back. Her eyes grew into wide green orbs at his proximity.

  “Are they?” he said softly.

  Trapped and unable to flee, she fought, her sharp tongue as effective as any blade. “Yes…it’s no wonder you can’t find a wife. No respectable woman in her right mind would have you! You’re…you are…appalling.”