Julie Anne Long

by The Runaway Duke

  Their mounts were swift, but hooves were soon thundering uncomfortably close behind them; Connor glanced back over his shoulder and saw the greasy ruffian riding recklessly, his pistol hand waving free. Sunlight glinted on the barrel of the man’s pistol; it seemed their pursuer meant to have blood for his humiliation. Connor swore savagely, slowing his mount just a little to ensure Rebecca remained in front of him. He had no choice but to shoot. He lifted his musket and turned to aim.

  It was too late. A sudden blow to his arm was already giving way to numbness. He glanced down, watching as though in a dream as the red of his own blood rose up through his shirt. Oh, Christ above, oh, God, help us, I’ve been shot, he half thought, half prayed. That bastard has the luck of the devil; he shot me.

  Connor squeezed off a shot, then watched with both a crisp sense of accomplishment and a sense of despair as the ruffian jerked in his saddle, his hand pressed to his chest, his horse stopping, rearing in sudden confusion beneath him. Connor had so hoped to never take another life, and cursed as he felt his own crystal-edged thoughts dimming as the ragged circle of red on his arm darkened and spread. Pain was yet to come, Connor knew. Pain would be fortunate; it would mean he was still alive.

  Behind them, far behind them, clouds of dust rose in the road. The rest of the men were now following. But Connor knew this country well, and he knew his destination. As long as he could stay lucid, he knew he could lead Rebecca to safety and these men would never find them.

  “Rebecca!” he screamed. She glanced over her shoulder and pulled her horse to follow when Connor jerked his horse hard to the right. They galloped off the road, plunging over low fences, through thick stands of trees, the leaves lashing at them, the coats of their gratifyingly game horses blackening with sweat. Connor wove a path from memory, a path that careened through a meadow sprayed in bluebells that gave way to a brief swooping valley that led into a wood that grew more dense and shadowy as the sun slowly dipped lower in the sky. Their hoofbeats were soon muffled by deep layers of soft old leaves.

  After what seemed both an eternity and merely an instant, they came upon it: the hunting box, his father’s rarely used, discreetly located hunting home in the woods. Connor had been certain it would still be here, relatively untouched; these woods had been part of his family’s holdings since Edward III. He pulled his wet horse to a halt and managed to dismount without stumbling too badly. And then he lifted his pack from his horse with his good arm and stared at the hunting box blankly for a moment, as if trying to remember why he was there.

  Rebecca pulled her heaving mare up next to him and swung herself to the ground. She bent slightly, breathing hard, before straightening herself to look around. She began to smile, but something in Connor’s face stopped her.

  “Connor?” she said, puzzled. And then she saw the blood on his arm.

  There was a buzzing in his ears. He put his hand against the door of the hunting box and it gave, swinging open. He looked out at Rebecca from the doorway, noticing that the light pouring down through the leaves had turned her hair into a soft molten halo. She has lost her cap. “Becca,” he thought he said, for he could not hear his own voice, and then the black came in from the sides of his vision like a curtain pulling closed and he fell.

  Chapter Eleven

  Oh God, Oh God, Oh God,” Rebecca murmured like an incantation over Connor’s fallen body. His head lolled sickeningly against the boards of the floor. She touched his eyes, his brows, as though searching for him, willing him to reinhabit his face; he was breathing, otherwise he seemed lifeless as an effigy. A haze of panic began to move over her eyes.

  Her vast and unseemly knowledge of bullet wounds and amputations clamored in her head, words like bandages and suppurating and saws and opium and Peruvian bark jigging among all the other learned advice from her father’s scientific journals. She gave her head a rough shake to sort it. This did the trick; somehow it all fell into place, the things she needed to do in the order she needed to do them.

  She drew in a deep breath to fortify her nerves and pressed two fingers to Connor’s throat. A good pulse thumped there, a bit fast, but strong and even. Rebecca closed her eyes against an almost bruising wave of relief; it meant he had not yet lost a dangerous amount of blood. Her own short sobbing breaths beat in her ears as she considered the chore of unbuttoning his shirt; how ridiculous, how dangerous, even, all those buttons seemed now. She tore it open instead, sending tiny buttons flying like shrapnel across the room.

  She only needed to lift him a little to peel the shirt completely away from his body, but she could not. His weight was astonishing; the solidity of his unconscious body as stubborn as gravity itself. It made her absolutely, irrationally furious. She tore at the seams at the shoulder of his shirt, and then lifted the sleeve away from his arm with breathless care. His own blood and sweat matted the hair of his arms, and this made her angrier still; for miles he had bled, leading her to safety. By the time Rebecca confronted her first musket ball wound, a hideous red little crater in the smooth hard muscle of his arm, it had become her mortal enemy, and she would have victory.

  The wound was only oozing now; the bleeding had slowed, the blood was congealing. She delicately touched the edge of it; she could feel the ball move. It was close to the surface of the wound, which meant she had a very good chance of retrieving it whole from his arm.

  Water. Where was his water flask? She plunged her hands into Connor’s pack and began pulling things out of it in a controlled frenzy, a small sheathed knife, needles and thread, a length of rope, a flint, candles, something wrapped in cloth that turned out to be a brush for the horses, something else wrapped in cloth that turned out to be a couple of meat pies from the Thorny Rose Tavern. All the evidence of Connor’s careful thought and planning, all things she had taken for granted. But no flask. She found his fine brown coat folded neatly and began tugging it out of the pack, but something heavy hindered its progress. Please be the water flask, she thought. Oh, please.

  Fumbling among the folds of the coat, she found a flask in the inner pocket. When she pulled it out, something tumbled out along with it: a soft copper lock of her own hair.

  She went blank for a moment, thrown oddly off balance. The things lined up neatly on the floor in front of her were like words to a sentence in a language she had only begun learning, a sentence punctuated poignantly by a copper curl. They told a story Rebecca sensed she already half knew; she could feel it radiating, increasing in light, on the far reaches of her awareness.

  She gave her head another rough shake. Mulling was a luxury she could not indulge at the moment. She sniffed the flask. Whiskey. In the absence of water, it would have to do.

  Rebecca spilled a bit of the whiskey in her hands and rubbed them together, creating a little puddle of dirt in her palms, and then she rinsed the puddle away with another prodigal splash. Cleansed as well as she was able, she tugged her shirt out of her pants and, using her teeth and fingers, ripped the hem of it into a length of bandage.

  Placing her fingers on either side of the wound she pressed gently, muttering prayers, apologies, vicious imprecations. She felt the ball shift. She pressed again, gritting her teeth, breathing heavily, and this time it surfaced, whole and bloody. With cool antipathy Rebecca held the thing between two fingers and glared at it, then flung it to the floor with an oath, as though concluding an exorcism.

  She soaked a bit of the bandage in whiskey and cautiously, in tiny strokes, swabbed the blood away from the hole torn in Connor’s flesh. The edges of the wound were thankfully relatively clean, and Rebecca marveled momentarily at how much her life had changed: she had never dreamed that something like a clean-edged musket-ball wound could cause her to give thanks.

  She would need to irrigate the wound, she knew, before she bound it up. She took a deep breath before tipping a bit of the whiskey into it.

  At this Connor moaned, a long sound that writhed up out of him like a hot wind blowing through the caverns of hell, and
he stirred, his legs moving restlessly. The sound frightened Rebecca nearly witless. “Dear God,” she whispered, but found herself at a loss for words to include in the prayer; it seemed her vocabulary had abandoned her. Of necessity, for the moment, she had become a creature comprised of instinct and nothing else.

  Rebecca bound the wound neatly, with exquisite gentleness, then sat back on her heels and stared down at him. She placed a tentative hand on his chest over his heart to reassure herself of its steady beating, and after a moment, unable to resist, her fingers curled into the crisp hair there.

  Lord God, the man was lovely in a way she had never imagined. The join of his neck to his shoulders, the taper of his shoulders to his slim waist, the swell of taut muscle above his rib cage, the wondrous texture and temperature and smell of his skin—this hidden beauty made Connor seem a stranger with powerful secrets, like a whole other country with its own laws. A restless curiosity and delight spiked through her, finding its way even through her fear for him. Beneath her hand, beneath his skin, his heart beat. She put her other hand on her own heart, to compare.

  “Was it Robbie Denslowe?”

  Rebecca jumped, jerking her hand away.

  “Robbie Denslowe?” she repeated numbly.

  “Who . . . who taught you just where to hit a man?”

  Connor’s voice was frayed, dragging, but the sound of it filled Rebecca near to bursting with some nameless emotion.

  “Yes,” she said, almost a whisper. She sought his eyes. They were dark and glazed with pain, but behind the pain, he was fully there, indomitably amused and warming at the sight of her. Rebecca uncertainly touched his hand, and his fingers closed over hers tightly.

  “Robbie Denslowe should be knighted,” Connor muttered.

  He managed to lift one corner of his mouth in a smile before closing his eyes. His face contracted, the quickening of his breath betrayed his struggle with pain. His thumb began moving in an unconscious stroke across the top of her hand.

  “The horses?” he asked, after a moment.

  “I will see to them,” Rebecca assured him.

  “My arm—”

  “The bleeding has stopped. I took the ball out, Connor. I took it out whole.”

  “Did ye now?” He smiled again, eyes still closed. “Oh, but you are a marvel, wee Becca.” His voice had begun to sound like a sigh.

  “A marvel,” Rebecca repeated softly. It was all she could manage. It seemed just the appropriate word for everything at the moment.

  “Hmmph,” he said, an ambitious attempt at a laugh. “Wee Becca, I think I shall need to get very drunk, very soon. Take . . . take the musket and knife out with you when you see to the horses. There is a stream nearby . . . ye can find it by sound. And put the flask in my hand, if ye will.”

  He gave her hand a squeeze and released it. His face had retreated from her again, contracting. She folded a blanket in quarters and positioned it under his head, and he accepted her ministrations without a word. With one more glance down at him, she picked up the horse brush and the sheathed knife and took them outside.

  The horses were nosing about the front of the hunting box quietly, looking for tender grasses. “Come, my dears,” Rebecca said softly. “We are sorry to leave you so long, but we had urgent business inside.” She unsaddled both horses, then unwrapped the brush and gave the mare a rubdown, murmuring to her about her bravery, her speed, her beauty.

  And then she turned her attention to Connor’s horse, the gray, and he was told how handsome he was, how valiant, how swift. The horses’ ears twitched forward, enjoying the lilting softness of her voice, the smooth sure strokes of her hands.

  “Let us find the stream now, shall we?” She collected the reins of the horses in her hand and shouldered the musket, then stood still, looking up, listening. A breeze shook the dazzling little coin leaves that hung from the aspens; the larger oak leaves waved at her like languid hands, glowing in the lowering sun as if lit from within. Beneath the hushed rustle of the leaves she heard it, a soft melodious rushing. She led the horses toward the sound, stopping every now and then to mark a tree with her knife so she could find her way back to the hunting box.

  The stream was a pretty thing, silver and gilt in the sun, winding among large smooth stones, bridged by slim trees thick with leaves. When the horses bent their heads to drink, Rebecca pressed her palms against her weary eyes. They smelled of horses and Connor, musk and salt and blood and whiskey. They spoke of the enormous distance she had come. She did not want to wash them just yet.

  Rebecca leaned companionably against her brown mare, then closed her eyes so the remaining warmth of the day could touch her eyelids. After a space of time she let the sobs take her, surrendering to a tangle of emotions that burned and confused and goaded and excited. The day came back at her in a torrent: the gift of an Herbal, Connor’s hands warm against her back when she thanked him. Pistols pointed at her. The fetid breath of a highwayman on the back of her neck, his hand crawling over her breast. Connor bleeding, his head lolling against the floor, his dark hair stark against his white face. His heart beating beneath her hand.

  A soft copper lock of her own hair.

  And through it all, through all the chaos and terrible, wonderful newness, a strange blooming elation had buoyed her, a hot bright thing that swelled and pressed at the very seams of her being. It demanded release, demanded something from her. She wasn’t sure yet what to call it, but she had her suspicions.

  She did know it had everything to do with Connor.

  She would happily face a dozen pistols, a dozen highwaymen, without flinching. For Connor.

  When the sobs had run their course, Rebecca felt renewed and absurdly, dizzyingly cheerful. She knelt next to the stream and rinsed her hands, then splashed a little cool water on her face, a baptism, in a way, of her new self. Today she had taken a musket ball out of Connor Riordan, and he had gripped her hand, seeking strength from her and finding it. This did not tilt the balance between them, but righted it momentarily: Rebecca had not fully realized until that moment how much she had wanted, needed, to give something to Connor. One did not need to pose naked on a chaise to feel powerful and womanly, she now understood. One needed only a musket-ball wound and the feel of a beautiful man stroking the back of one’s hand.

  The ground felt solid beneath her feet for the first time in days, and Rebecca, relishing her new balance, thrust her arms high into the sky as if trying it on like a coat, and stretched deliciously. Then she turned to lead the horses back to the hunting box, humming a little tune of her own invention.

  Chapter Twelve

  She is quite the success, is she not? A diamond of the first water.”

  Lady Tremaine addressed her remarks to the Duchess of Dunbrooke as they watched Lorelei sail by in the arms of Viscount Grayson, one of a clutch of titled gentlemen in need of a wife this season. He looked besotted, but then again, one of his eyes had a tendency to wander, which could lend a besotted effect to anyone’s aspect. Cordelia curved her lips in what she hoped was a fond smile of agreement, one of thousands of smiles of agreement she had been forced to issue over the last several days.

  Lady Tremaine, Cordelia thought, was a new form of torture. As the Duchess of Dunbrooke, Cordelia had never been obliged to suffer boredom for any significant length of time; if the vise of tedium began to tighten, she merely moved on to another conversation group, or joined a card game, or visited the buffet table, or took the air. She deployed her movements much the way she deployed her fan—to keep from suffocating.

  But she was obliged to suffer Lady Tremaine, and Lady Tremaine registered on Cordelia’s senses like a mediocre soprano hitting and sustaining one high quavery note again and again and again. Lorelei—her beauty, her charm, her success, her suitors, her prospects—was what her song was about. Cordelia’s head had begun to throb with it; she half feared it would shatter like a wine goblet in the not too distant future. She wondered if she should plead a headache and go home, retir
e to her room, mercifully alone, draw the drapes and take to her bed until . . .

  Until what? Until the locket was safely in her hands again? Hutchins’s assistants had questioned a pawnbroker in Sheep’s Haven, the Godforsaken town nearer to Scotland and the cold Dunbrooke estate Keighley Park than Cordelia ever wanted to be again. The shop’s fat proprietor had confirmed that yes, a lad with the look of Dunbrooke had tried to sell a locket there, but had changed his mind the moment the proprietor had exclaimed over the splendid miniature of the Duchess of Dunbrooke. The locket scarcely mattered now, or at least paled in significance to the fact that they now knew that the man traveling with the girl did indeed have gold flecks in his eyes.

  And oh, what a fool she was, but when Cordelia heard that Roarke had attempted to trade the miniature of her for pots and a musket and an herbal, of all things, her heart had twisted savagely. She had thought she was beyond feeling that kind of pain now. Or feeling anything at all so powerfully.

  Convincingly portraying a groom for five years would have required cunning and calculation and a great deal of control to keep his refined breeding from poking out of the seams of his duplicity. She should know. She had done precisely the same thing—in reverse—for almost as long. And then there was the matter of the annuity that Melbers had paid him. Imagine, Melbers, the dear old family retainer, a traitor. Somehow Roarke had contacted Melbers when he arrived in England again from Waterloo. But not her. Not Marianne Bell.

  Rebecca Tremaine. Who was she to Roarke Blackburn? Could they be headed for Gretna Green? Did Rebecca know who Roarke really was? Cordelia was stunned by something she rarely felt: jealousy. It tasted like rust in her mouth, turned her palms to ice. Roarke was risking everything for a daughter of a knight, but he had left Marianne Bell without a thought, it seemed. A rage Cordelia had not allowed herself to feel when he had left her, and had forbidden herself to entertain when she thought he had died, caught her now utterly by surprise and nearly made her gasp for breath. She struggled for control, masterfully and inconspicuously, and regained it.