Robert Waters dropped him, picking up the knife that had fallen when she’d kicked the ruffian a second time. “Remind me not to make you angry, Mrs. Prudence.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Saving your skin.”
Robert had no more time to talk, for they were no longer alone. Some men had noticed the altercation and had decided to join the fray. Three men came at him then. Robert stabbed the first one in the sword arm, and the man dropped his cutlass. Pru lifted her skirts in one hand, darting into the fight to pick up the sword, brandishing it as if she would fence with them. All three ruffians still standing started laughing, but she held her ground, covering Robert’s back.
“It’s a good thing you’re here, Pru, or I’d be worried.”
She could not quite believe that he was making jokes while facing three adversaries. He had made short work of the first one, but there were three left, only one of them bleeding.
She decided to go along with him. “Well, I’m glad you’re here, Robbie, or I might muss my gown sorting these three out.”
“I’ll muss more than your gown, little widow woman.” The shortest of the dirty men went for her before Robert could get between them. She did not falter but stabbed him in the gut. She failed to kill him, and only stabbed his side, but he fell down just the same. Robert quirked a brow at her, and she shrugged.
“I’m not fond of those that try to kill me,” she said.
“So I see.”
The other two came at Robbie at once, no doubt sure that when he was down, they could have her at their leisure. Robbie gave as good as he got, perhaps even a bit better. But before he could lay them out, and before she could stab another of them, three hulking brutes strolled up as if they were out for a Sunday walk and just dropping by the parson’s for a cup of tea.
“Here, now, little man. And who’s this you’re trying to kill?”
Pru had never been so happy to hear a Scottish brogue in her life.
One of the Scots, a true giant, hoisted the unwounded assailant by the collar, choking him effectively. The man hung there, spluttering, while his partner in would-be crime ran, still bleeding where Robbie had stabbed his arm. The Scot let them both go, setting the struggling man on his feet. He did not try to fight again, but fled. The Scots moved around the two who were on the ground, disarming each of them. They did not keep the weapons for themselves, but offered them to Robert.
“She took the second one out,” Robert said.
So the bearded Scot offered those blades to her. “No, thank you,” she said, feeling for all the world as if she had fallen into a madhouse.
The true giant put the three knives on his belt, and tucked the fourth in his left boot. Robbie examined the weapons of the man he had throttled, and took only one of the knives, one with a good leather pommel. He did not waste time, but cast the others into the Thames.
Pru wondered who these men were, and if they meant to rob her and Robbie now that the other ruffians had been dispatched. Though why they would have offered their prospective victims weapons first, she was not certain. But then, she had daily proof that she did not understand the Scottish mind.
She turned toward them with her cutlass in her hand. If they wished to strike, they would find her ready.
Fourteen
All three men saw Prudence’s stance and burst out laughing. Robbie did not join in their merriment, but put his hand on her sword, in case she should take it into her head to run his brother’s men through. The gigantic Gregor smiled down at Mrs. Prudence.
“Call off your fluffy dog there, Robbie. I would not want to get a bite on my ankle.” Gregor laughed. Robbie smiled at her, taking in the sight of a fine woman who knew how to defend herself. He wondered how he was going to get the blade out of her hand, until she decided to bide by his judgment, tossing her sword away.
“It strikes me that a lady might want a more subtle weapon,” Robbie said.
“Like a rapier,” she quipped.
Robbie felt her pulse as he held her gloved wrist. It seemed that her heart was beginning only now to stop hammering. Prudence must have begun to feel lightheaded, now that she realized that she was not going to die. Her knees bent a little, and Robbie caught her around the waist to hold her up.
Gregor laughed to see Robbie’s solicitousness, but Eachann said, “Perhaps we should find a tavern and drink a pint in the lady’s honor.”
They all agreed to that, and Robbie was willing. He owed Ian’s men a drink at least for pulling him out of that scrape. He could hear them now, regaling his brother’s flagship with his latest escapade. The story would spread like wildfire in the clan, among those in the New World as well as those in the Old. Robbie would suffer a serious ribbing more than once at the Gathering in August for coming down alone to the East India docks, but Prudence’s life was more than worth it.
Robbie pulled her close against him, shoring up her legs without actually lifting her off the ground. They started walking, and she must have found that her knees remembered themselves. She pulled away from Robbie, who did not want to let her go. He kept hold of her arm as if they were on promenade in a London ballroom. She did not seem to want to be that close to him, regretting her earlier weakness, but Robbie did not care. He would not take his eyes or his hands from her again until he had her safe in the duchess’s house.
“Is my brother Ian with you?” he asked them, as much to tell Prudence who they were as to discover his brother’s whereabouts.
Gregor, the biggest man to sail on any of Ian’s ships, laughed. “Nay, Bantam. We’re down south to deal with the East India Company. Ian would rather hang himself. It’s good he’s not in London or he’d thrash you himself for being a fool.”
“Don’t tell him then.”
“Only if he asks.”
“As he doesn’t know I’m in London, he won’t ask.”
“You never can tell what the commodore knows, Bantam.”
They came to a pub that looked half-decent, and took a table for themselves. Prudence sat among them like a flower among weeds, blinking at the huge Scots from behind her glasses. She looked for all the world like a demure woman who had never seen a blade in her life, much less wielded one. Ah, the wiles and ways of women.
Eachann, Davy, and Gregor did not speak, but drank their first pints down and ordered seconds, but Robbie nursed his own slowly, not trusting to English beer. Prudence stared down at her own pint of dark ale as if it were a snake that might bite her.
“So you’re south to marry off Mary Elizabeth,” Gregor said, drinking his second pint more meditatively than he had his first.
“That’s so.” Robbie wondered if the whole clan knew of his mother’s folly by now, sending them down among the enemy to marry off her only daughter. But then again, his mother was half-English. Robbie drank deep, to banish the traitorous thought. Gregor talked on.
“No disrespect to Herself, but that is the damnedest fool thing I ever heard tell of. An Englishman taken into the clan like family. God preserve us, and saints defend us.”
Robbie quirked a brow at the man across the table. A hulking brute who loved to use his fists, Gregor had never seemed one for prayer. But then again, if bringing an Englishman into the family was not call for prayer, nothing was.
Of course, Alex’s little wife, Catherine, was English. But women took on their husband’s clan. An Englishman would only ever be a burden and a nuisance.
Even so, Robbie would not speak against his mother, then or ever. “Women do as they please, and we follow along in hope.”
Gregor spat on the floor, and both Eachann and Davy did the same. “God preserve us from women.”
His compatriots spoke as one. “Amen.”
Robbie swallowed a bit of ale so that he would not laugh out loud at their sudden piety. Perhaps it was drink that brought it on, but they seemed
no worse for wear when they stood to go. For men that big, it would take more than two ales to make them feel the liquor.
“Godspeed to you, Bantam. Watch your back while you’re down here.”
“And you, Gregor.”
His brother’s man laughed. “Ach, I’ve got these two for that.”
Eachann and Davy both tipped their hats to Prudence, as did Gregor as an afterthought, and then they were gone as suddenly as they had come.
Prudence chose that moment to find her tongue. “I wonder if they might have put us in a hack before they left,” she mused.
Robbie let his gaze rove over her, the black gown she wore clinging to her breasts like a second skin. This one seemed a bit too tight for her. She must not have worn it much since her husband died. He pushed away all thoughts of the good parson and drank his ale, since he had paid for it.
“I can get you safe home, Mrs. Prudence. Never fear.”
“Why do they call you that strange nickname?”
“Bantam? Because I’m small and I’m fierce.”
Prudence laughed. “Small? You’re the tallest man I know.”
“Ah, but Mrs. Prudence, all the men you know are English. I’m the runt of the litter back home.”
She shook her head, still laughing. “Your poor mother.”
He joined her laughter then, and finished his ale.
“I thought you were a whisky man,” she said in her pert way, her great blue eyes blinking at him like an owl behind the lenses of those spectacles. He had never seen a woman careless enough of her appearance to wear spectacles in public. They looked delightful on her, as everything else seemed to. Robbie wondered when he might see her without them.
“I’m an ale man when my brother’s sailors are around.”
She tipped her own ale back. “When in Rome.” She must have discovered that she liked the taste, for she drank it down like milk.
“Exactly, Mrs. Prudence.”
Robbie ordered two more, watching her all the while. As she picked up her second ale of the afternoon, a flush began to rise in her skin, making her pink cheeks even pinker. The sight whetted Robbie’s appetite to take a bite out of her flesh as if she were a candied apple. For some reason, his thoughts moved to her rounded behind, and how those cheeks might taste. He cursed himself even as his lust threatened to override his reason. She was a decent widow woman. He needed to remember that. A tavern at the docks was not place to begin negotiations with a woman like her.
“I imagine your reverend husband did not know that you are a woman who likes a blade,” he said, hoping to distract himself. Of course, the thought of a blade, any blade, in her hand only made his lust rise faster.
Prudence laughed out loud at that, her laughter growing louder and longer the more she drank. Other men in the tavern turned to look at her appreciatively. Clearly they were not all English, for they had the eyes to see the sweet curves that her ugly black gown with its old-fashioned skirts did nothing to hide. Robbie wondered—and not for the first time—why a widow woman as beautiful as she had not remarried.
The merry look in her eye belied any thought that she might be pining for her dead. Still, a man could never tell. Women were as fathomless as the sea, and as impossible to understand.
“And what of your brother, Ian? Is he with the King’s navy?”
Robbie found himself laughing at that. As if a man of his family would ever willingly serve the government that had done all it could and then some to grind his people into the dust. Of course, being an Englishwoman, she probably did not know that the ’Forty-Five had even happened.
“No, Mrs. Prudence, my brother is called the commodore because he manages my family’s shipping interests. He sails with the flagship, but he keeps his hand in with all of them.”
“How many ships does your family have?”
“Well, there it gets complicated. The Waterses have five ships. The whole clan has fifty altogether.”
Prudence whistled appreciatively, as a man might have done. “My brother thought himself rich to hold only one.”
Robbie quirked an eyebrow, but did not draw attention to the fact that she had revealed more about herself. The drink was telling on her, it seemed. He should not take advantage, but he was too curious not to keep pressing gently.
The door to her past had swung open without her noticing. Perhaps he could get a bit more out of her, and satisfy his need to know her, who she was and where she came from, beyond the fact that she liked a sword in her hand and had once married a curate.
“And your brother was rich to have one ship, no doubt of it. Richer still if he came back with the hold full, unmolested by pirates.”
Her face darkened. “He did not come back.”
Robbie did not speak, but drank his ale.
“I heard that he was still alive, that he had been seen at the East India docks. But I was a fool to come and look for him.” She tried to smile, and failed. The attempt nearly broke his heart in two. “The dead stay dead.”
“I’m sorry, Pru.” Robbie squeezed her hand in silent sympathy. “I have not lost a brother, but in your place, I would have come to look for him, too, and damn the cost.”
Fifteen
Robbie’s hand sat heavy over hers, but she did not want to pull back. Instead, the weight made her wonder what it might feel like to have his whole body press down on her, holding her so that she could not get away.
She felt guilt as soon as the thought entered her head. Even as she mourned for her brother all over again, she felt her new, bizarre feelings for Robert Waters rise like a tide that would not go out.
For his part, Robert did not seem to notice the fact that he made her head swim and her palms sweat in the cotton of her gloves. Maybe he did not feel the same level of attraction for her as she felt for him. And why should he? She was completely inappropriate for him. He needed a soft, biddable woman who would put up with his nonsense and not bother him about her own ideas and thoughts. He needed a woman like the one John Vaughton had found, a woman with money to add to his family’s coffers.
She was not sure what a clan was, but she could count to fifty. If his family held that many ships, and got money from all the cargo moved with them, he was far richer than she had first thought.
Robert pulled her to her feet and led her out of the tavern. A few men called after them in appreciation of her derriere, which she found both horrifying and gratifying in some strange, drink-addled way. Robert glared at the room at large and they fell silent until she had passed.
Robert kept her close as he hailed a coach. She stood near him, drinking in the scent of cedar on his skin. Though her sorrow lingered over her lost brother, so did the realization that she had almost died. The ale had assuaged some of the wildness she had felt standing over her foes with a sword in her hand, but not all of it. She felt wild still.
She might die tomorrow.
The thought came to her with a reality that it had never held before. She might die this very hour, on the way back to the duchess’s house in Mayfair. She might fall beneath a horse as she stepped out of the hackney cab, and be kicked to death at the curb. She might be struck by God and fall down dead for no reason at all, as her grandmother had.
If she was going to live, she may as well start now.
She climbed into the cab, letting Robert hand her up. She sat as demurely as she might, until he had given their direction and rapped on the roof with his fist. As soon as the carriage started moving, closing them in partial darkness and swaying motion, Prudence leaned over and kissed the man she wanted more than she had ever wanted anything in her life.
* * *
There he was, trying to mind his manners and get Prudence home safely, when he found himself with two handfuls of willing woman.
Her lips tasted of the ale they had just drunk. He wondered for a moment if she wa
s drunk indeed, if he should pull back and revisit this notion later in the day, after she had sobered up. The taste of her was far more intoxicating than the ale he had taken. He pulled back once and looked her in the eye.
She met his gaze squarely and did not look away.
“I’m kissing you, Robbie. Now stay still and let me.”
He laughed at that, but she was on him again, her tongue wending its way into his mouth. He lost all desire to laugh then, stroking her tongue with his own, coaxing her in deeper, his scruples partially discarded. She seemed not to know what to do once he had her there, but he let his tongue teach her, wondering again if her parson had been a complete dolt. How could a woman be married and not learn how to kiss? No doubt he’d been a fool who only pecked his wife and did his business on top of her as if going to the chamber pot, only to climb off again and snore at her side, leaving her unsatisfied.
Robbie thought of the very real possibility that he might yet be the first man to bring her to bliss, and his body hardened so much that he thought he might push her down onto the threadbare seat then and there. He breathed deep, pulling away a little, but she followed him with her mouth, the sway of their hired carriage bringing her hard against his chest so that he could feel her breasts soft against him.
“God help me, Mrs. Prudence. You’ve a witch’s way about you.”
She did not take offense at this, but stopped trailing her lips along his jaw long enough to take in his words, her head tilted to one side as if to hear them better. She smiled then, a long, slow smile that made him want to toss her on the carriage seat and draw her gown up around her waist.
But before he could do such a thing and ruin her impression of him as a gentleman, the carriage stopped in front of the duchess’s house. He took a long, slow breath to gather his wits, and in that moment, Prudence was gone. She was out of the carriage as if shot from a pistol, leaving the door open behind her, paying the driver from a little bag of silver she had tucked in her sleeve.
How to Wed a Warrior Page 9