Courting Trouble

by Byrne, Kerrigan

  Mercy had often been described as fearless.

  Indeed, she did little to disavow people of the notion. In her home, fear was used to coerce and control. She witnessed how it plagued Felicity, her twin. How it granted her domineering father power over people he had no right to possess.

  And so, she’d decided from a very young age that she would fear as little as possible and therefore maintain as much power as she could.

  Oddly enough, an ironic phobia had developed in the wake of her declaration of personal sovereignty.

  She couldn’t stand to be caged.

  In fact, the confines the prisoner transport wagon made her fingers curl with the need to claw at the locks, the walls, the very flesh that restrained her soul to her body.

  The shiver that had previously ran through her had now become a quake so intense, her bones threatened to rattle together.

  Though the iron and wood interior of their cage was intolerably frigid, a sheen of sweat perceptibly bloomed at her hairline and some of it gathered to trickle between her breasts. The sway of the coach on dubious springs felt to her like a rowboat on the open ocean during a sea gale.

  It was making her green at the gills.

  Well, if her breakfast were to make a reappearance, she’d be certain to direct it at the shackled man taking up more than his share of space, not to mention entirely too much of the fetid air.

  She refused to acknowledge Raphael Sauvageau as she lunged at the door, kicking out at it with all her might. The irons securing her wrists in front of her were attached to a bar above the long bench by a chain that set her teeth on edge with the most grating rattle.

  As the carriage lurched over a bump, she fought for balance lest she end up on the floor in a heap of petticoats and sprawling limbs.

  Mercy hadn’t gone easily into confinement. She’d writhed and scratched and spit like an angry tomcat being forced into a bath. It’d taken four constables to subdue her.

  Behind her, the damnable gangster had sauntered toward his imprisonment as if he were on a lazy stroll, looking so much like he preferred his hands to be manacled behind him so he didn’t have to hold them there on his own.

  His calm was patently infuriating. And if she were speaking to him at the moment, she’d make certain he knew it.

  “Let me out, you knob-headed ignoramus!” She shouted through the bars, gripping them and shaking, as if it would do any good. “It shouldn’t be a crime to slap a man for being a discourteous toad, especially when he gave as good as he got!”

  She ignored a sound from behind her, unable to tell if it was mirth or wrath.

  The uniformed officers around Mathilde’s tidy rowhouse disappeared as their conveyance rounded a corner. In one final fit of pique, Mercy slammed her palm against the door with a satisfying clang before heaving herself onto the bench in a huff.

  “I can’t be here,” she said to no one. Particularly not to the only other occupant of the coach. “My father is a Baron and a Commissioner and my brother in law is the Chief Inspector at Scotland Yard. I’ll never hear the end of it.” She tugged at her tight manacles, twisting her slim wrists this way and that. “Oh, blast and bloody bother!”

  This time, the rumble of amusement was unmistakable, drawing her notice.

  “Really, you mustn’t say such things,” Raphael Sauvageau intoned in a voice that threatened to curl her toes.

  He lazed on bench across from her as if it were as comfortable as a throne, legs sprawled open at the knees and expensive jacket undone. The threads of his trousers molded to long, powerful thighs, calling attention to an indecent bulge at their apex.

  “I’ll say what I like you—you—” If she wasn’t doing her best to avoid looking at it—at him—she would surely have delivered a most clever and scathing remark.

  “Do not misunderstand me, mon chatton, I have no wish to censure you. It is only that I find your attempts at profanity relentlessly adorable and distracting. It is torture to be unable to do anything about it.” Beneath his charcoal suit, he lifted a helpless shoulder made no less broad for the captivity of his arms behind his back.

  “The only thing you can do is to sod off,” she snipped. “They’re going to put you to death, how can you be so calm?”

  That Gallic shrug again. “I have many reasons not to panic, not the least of which is that I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing they ruffled my feathers.” He raised one dark, expressive eyebrow at her.

  Mercy felt her frown turn into a scowl. Every person in a five-city block radius categorically understood the current state of her feathers. They hadn’t been merely ruffled. But plucked.

  Fit to be tied.

  Drat.

  Mercy sagged back and let her head fall against the wall, squeezing her eyes shut.

  She didn’t want to look at him.

  What was he about calling her adorable? Had he meant it as a slight? A condescending jab at her youth? She was only all of twenty, but she was well educated. Well read.

  Not to mention…one just didn’t go around calling people adorable, did one? Not unless they were your nine-year-old niece or something or something equally perturbing.

  She was a woman.

  And some part of her wanted him to know that. To acknowledge it.

  No need to wonder why.

  She’d never been a good liar, not even to herself.

  Raphael Sauvageau was pure, unmitigated male. His voice deep. His manner predatory. His gaze unapologetically lustful.

  When he spoke, his voice purred against her skin.

  And yet, he could seduce a woman without saying a word. Make her aware of all the deep, empty places she ignored.

  He was wickedly, no, ruthlessly attractive. Roguish and virile with sharp bones that cut a portrait of indolent cruelty.

  That was why she refused to open her eyes, because sometimes looking at him made her brain turn to a puddle of useless, feminine liquid that threatened leak out her ears leaving her with no wits at all.

  With no logic. No reason to resist…

  Regardless of her attempt to ignore him, she could feel his eyes upon her like the gaze of some ancient divinity. Pulling at her sinew and bone. Sucking at her veins as if he could drink her in.

  What was he?

  How many women were charred in the combustible heat of such a gaze?

  She didn’t want to know.

  She refused to be one of them.

  Their first and only previous encounter had been the summer before. She’d gone with her eldest sister Honoria—whom they called Nora—and Felicity in search of a missing fortune to save the man Nora had loved her entire life.

  When they’d found the fortune in gold, they’d also found Raphael Sauvageau, the half-Monegasque, half-English leader of the fearsome Fauves—a French word meaning “wild beasts.” He and his brother, Gabriel, lay claim to the gold that had been stolen by Nora’s criminally atrocious first husband.

  Their meeting had been fraught with intensity and the suggestion of threat.

  Mercy and Raphael had sparred verbally, and she’d gone away with the feeling that he’d enjoyed it.

  Or perhaps that she had.

  Somehow her brothers-in-law Sir Carlton Morley and Dr. Titus Conleith had found out and come for them. And….instead of a war breaking out between the men, the Sauvageau brothers had relinquished their gold, which had been a substantial amount, with a promise to return for some mysterious future medical procedure.

  According to Titus, he’d not heard from the Sauvageau brothers in the months since.

  None of them had.

  And yet, the rogue had often intruded, unbidden and unwanted, into Mercy’s thoughts. She’d remember how he looked in the dim light of the lone lantern the night they’d met. All lean muscle and vibrating intimidation subdued by a veneer of cunning, charisma and undeniable intelligence.

  He lurked always in the periphery of her silent moments. Like a serpent in the shadows, deceptively calm, coil
ed to strike.

  He was an invasion. And trespasser. And he didn’t even know it.

  Or maybe he did. Maybe…he’d done it on purpose. Some sort of serpentine mesmerism that had nothing to do with her unruly thoughts and desires, and everything to do with his villainy.

  Yes that must be it.

  Had he worked the same sort of magic on Mathilde?

  That thought sobered her enough to redirect her panic into rage.

  “May the devil fetch you if you killed her.” Though her eyes remained closed, she injected as much venom into her words as she could summon.

  “He’ll fetch me regardless, but I… cared for Mathilde.”

  Despite herself, the veracity in his voice drew Mercy’s lids open so she could study him for other signs of deceit.

  His expression was drawn and serious.

  Lethally so.

  Daylight slanted in through the bars making his eyes glint like polished steel. Motes of dust frenzied in his atmosphere as if drawing energy from the electric force of his presence. A thin ring of gold glinted in his left ear, and sharp cheekbones underscored an arrogant brow.

  He’d look stern but for his mouth, which was not so severe. It bowed with a fullness she might have called feminine if the rest of his face wasn’t so brutally cast.

  Mercy hadn’t realized she’d been staring at his lips, gripped with a queer sort of fascination until they parted and he spoke.

  “You were quite impressive back there.”

  “What?” Mercy shook her head dumbly. Had he just complimented her? Had they just been through the same scene? She’d never been less impressed with herself in her entire life.

  Would that she could have been like him. Smooth and unaffected. Infuriatingly self-assured.

  And yet…he’d only been that way after breaking a few bones. The nose of the officer that had struck her, and possibly his jaw.

  Lord but she’d never seen a man move like that before.

  “I listened to your deductions,” he explained.

  “From where you were hiding in the closet?” she quipped, rather unwisely.

  Something flickered in his eyes, and yet again she was left to guess if she’d angered or amused him.

  “From where I was hiding in the closet,” he said with a droll sigh as he shifted, seeming to find a more comfortable position for his bound hands. “You’re obviously cleverer than the detectives. How do you know so much about murder scenes?”

  Mercy warned herself not to preen. She stomped on the lush warmth threatening to spread from her chest at his encouragement, and thrust her nose in the air, perhaps a little too high. “I am one of only three female members of the Investigator Eddard Sharpe Society of Homicidal Mystery Analysis. As penned by the noted novelist, J. Francis Morgan, whom I suspect is a woman.”

  “Why do you suspect that?” His lip twitched, as if he also battled to suppress his own expression.

  “Because men tend to write women characters terribly, don’t they? But J. Francis Morgan is a master of character and often, the mystery is even solved by a woman rather than Detective Sharpe. His heroines are not needlessly weak or stupid or simpering. They’re strong. Dangerous. Powerful. Sometimes even villainous and complicated. That is good literature, I say. Because it’s true to life.”

  He’d ceased fighting his smile and allowed his lip to quirk up in a half-smile as he regarded her from beneath his dark brow. “Mathilde’s murderer now has one more person they’d do well to fear in you.”

  She leveled him a sour look. “Does that mean you fear me?”

  He tilted toward her. Suddenly—distressingly—grave. “You terrify me, Mercy Goode.”

  She had to swallow twice before she could deliver her question without sounding as breathless as she felt.

  “Did you do it?” She leaned forward, bracing her elbows on her knees as she examined his features thoroughly. “Did you kill Mathilde Archambeau?”

  “No.” He looked her in the eye as he said this. Unblinking. Unwavering. “She was dead when I arrived.”

  The ache in his voice tugged at her and, she was ashamed to admit, uncoiled something complicated from around her guts. Something dark and unfamiliar.

  Surely not jealousy.

  Not for a dead woman.

  Not because of a man like him.

  “Why didn’t you call for the Police, then?” she demanded.

  He flexed his shackled arms, leveling her a droll look of his own. “I’m one of the most wanted men in the empire.”

  Berating her own stupidity, she winced, causing the welt on her cheek where she’d been struck to throb. Testing the wound gingerly, she signed, grateful her fingers were cold against the sore, swelling flesh.

  “What were you doing there in the first place?” she queried impatiently.

  He didn’t answer.

  Instead, his gaze affixed on the spot where her fingers explored her own cheek. Every twitch of discomfort she made seemed to turn his eyes a darker shade of grey, as if a storm gathered within them.

  “I will break every bone below that man’s elbow for the pain he caused you.” Shards of gravel paved a voice that had only just been smooth as silk.

  “I abhor violence.” Mercy lied, if only to condemn him.

  If only to escape the very visceral vibrations that shimmered through her at the ferocity in his tone.

  She drew her fingers from her face and folded them as primly in her lap as her manacles would allow.

  He snorted with disbelief. “Is that why you read the macabre mysteries of Detective Eddard Sharpe? They are always deliciously brutal. Which is your favorite?”

  She set her jaw stubbornly against a little thrill at the idea of discussing the book with him, but refused to be drawn in. He was a criminal and a condemned man.

  A foe. Not a friend.

  “I shouldn’t think a man such as yourself took the time to read…or even knew how.” She was acting the spoiled Barron’s daughter, but she thought it might make that illumination behind his gaze dull. That blaze of interest. The heat that hadn’t waned during their conversation, but grew in strength and illumination.

  He simply stared at her expectantly until she found herself blurting. “My favorite is The Legacy of Lord Longueville.”

  His eyebrow lifted again. “If I’m not mistaken it’s the most violent of the series. A man gets sawed into pieces and his bits are delivered to his family members. One of whom is the murderer.”

  “That’s different,” she huffed, refusing to be impressed. Refusing to picture the man in front of her lazing about some chaise longue, his limbs slack and his shirt undone as his eyes traced rows of delectable words.

  Did he nibble at his cheek as he read? Or perhaps thread those elegant fingers through his hair…

  She snorted at her own absurdity. “Fiction. Entertainment safely contained in the jacket of a book.”

  “In my experience, reality is ever so much more fantastic than fiction. And nothing is so dangerous as the written word. It is how power is usurped and ideas are spread. Literature is the most dangerous weapon a man can use. After all, it has been written that the pen is mightier than—”

  “Are you afraid of the noose?” She interrupted him abruptly, for if he finished quoting Edward Lytton she might do something ridiculous.

  Like kiss him.

  He shocked her with that effortless rumble she was coming to recognize as his chuckle. “I’m not going to hang, mon chaton.”

  “Stop calling me that,” she spat. “If you are half the things they say you are, if you’ve committed half the crimes you’ve been credited with, I don’t see how you can escape execution.”

  Raphael leaned forward, the light across his eyes following the shape of his brow, gleaming off the ebony of his hair and then settling on his shoulders like Apollo’s own mantle as he brought their faces flush.

  Mercy had to force herself not to lean back.

  Somehow that felt like a retreat.

&n
bsp; “What things do they say I am?” he murmured.

  She ticked them off on her fingers as she answered around a dry tongue, pretending his proximity didn’t distress her. “A hedonist. A libertine. A profligate. Scoundrel. Gangster.”

  “Ah, for once, they are right,” he admitted wryly.

  “A murderer?”

  Cool air kissed her neck, but what caused her to shiver, was the tantalizing heat of his breath as he bent even closer. “I have helped men to the next world, mon chaton. But I’ve never hurt a woman. I did not kill your friend.”

  “Then I ask you again. What were you doing there? Were you Mathilde’s lover?”

  A muted clang at caused them both to jump, and Mercy let out a little cry of surprise as the back of the carriage dipped slightly.

  She couldn’t say if it was the movement or her on instinct that shifted her body closer to his warmth.

  To his strength.

  Even though he smirked down at her with no little amount of masculine smugness, his gaze searched hers for something.

  For permission?

  An inner voice warned her that if she opened her mouth it would be granted.

  She lunged away then, scooting to the far edge of the bench in time for the door to swing open.

  While they were still moving?

  A mountain of a man in a dark coat and a hood slid inside and closed the door behind him. He turned his head toward her, but in the shadows of the coach she couldn’t make out anything that resembled a face.

  Only a dark abyss was visible in the oval of shade left by his low hood and his collar.

  But he stared at her from the darkness. Nay, examined her like one might scrutinize an insect before crushing it beneath his shoe.

  With wicked claws he scored that instinct that lived in every human. The one that screamed a warning into her soul that she was not safe.

  Her bones veritably crawled beneath her skin to escape him.

  If Raphael was dangerous, this man was…well he defied description.

  “What took you so long, Gabriel?” Raphael hissed. “Ten minutes more and it would have been too late.”

  Raphael’s brother said nothing. He studied her for the space of two more discomfiting blinks and then gave her his massive back, bending toward his brother.