Rogue in My Arms: The Runaway Brides

by Celeste Bradley

  Now he was going to be gone much longer than he’d planned. He’d been unwise, in such a hurry to leave that he hadn’t given any thought to what would happen if he couldn’t find Chantal immediately.

  He shouldn’t have left. He’d left Melody and he’d left Pru. He ached to remember the look in two pairs of gray eyes and one pair of blue ones as he walked out of the inn.

  An image flashed across his mind, a single moment of the past. A small boy, short legs pumping fast, running down the country lane after the carriage that was leaving him behind. “Papa! Don’t leave me here! Papa, come back! Papa!”

  Melody’s incoherent wail. Noooo!

  He’d sworn he’d never be that man. He’d disdained his father for his failures and he’d vowed that when he had a family he would never abandon them so.

  And yet he had. His reasons were sound, but no doubt his father thought his reasons were sound as well. Reasons didn’t matter to a child. They hadn’t mattered to him. They certainly didn’t matter to Melody.

  The pain that he’d caused his tiny daughter made him draw a harsh breath. What the hell am I doing?

  Just then he saw a light in the darkness ahead. Slowing Hector, he realized that a man stood in the road, waving a lantern. It was a common signal for help, so despite his sense of urgency Colin pulled back on the reins and slowed Hector to a stop.

  “What is it?” He squinted into the circle of light. “Is there an emergency? Are you injured, sir?”

  The man approached. His face was bruised and battered and his lips bled when his mouth stretched into a welcoming smile.

  Then recognition flashed. Colin blinked. “It’s Seth, isn’t it?”

  “Aye, sir, that it is.” The hairy groom nodded and smiled, his face gruesome in the lantern’s light. How unfortunate it was the last sight Colin saw before something heavy struck him on the back of the head.

  CHAPTER 25

  Back at the inn, Pru had to put a weepy Melody to bed without her promised story from her uncle Colin. Pru tried. “Once upon a time on the high seas, there sailed a mighty pirate ship. Upon the prow were letters etched in the blood of honest men and they read—” She waited.

  Melody only chewed Gordy Ann’s arm as two fat tears leaked from her big blue eyes. Pru ached for her.

  I’m going to kill him when he gets back.

  Her anger helped disguise her worry, for a short time anyway. When Melody finally drifted off, her pillow damp from her sorrow, Pru kissed a drowsy Evan on the brow and left the room.

  Downstairs in the public room, Olive was polishing things that already shone. There was a plate of cold chicken waiting for Pru on the bar, but she could only pick at it restlessly.

  She smiled her thanks to Olive anyway. “It’s delicious but I’m simply tired, I suppose.”

  Olive nodded, avoiding her gaze. “Hmm.”

  The landlady’s disquiet finally caught Pru’s attention. Her gaze sharpened on Olive. “You’ve already cleaned that table twice,” she pointed out. “If you’re not careful you’ll clean a hole right through it.”

  Olive pursed her lips and kept rubbing.

  Pru tilted her head. “Are you worried because Mr. Rugg is not yet back from the next village?”

  Olive blew out a breath. “No, miss. His brother lives there and he often stays over on a visit.” She shot Pru a strange glance. “These roads ain’t always safe at night, miss.”

  Pru walked slowly across the room, gazing closely at the woman. “Olive, something is bothering you. What is it?”

  Olive turned away but Pru saw her hands, her knuckles white as she twisted the cloth in her grasp. She put her hand on the woman’s arm. “Olive, talk to me.” She let a little Prudence into her voice. “I insist that you tell me at once!”

  Olive turned to look at her and chewed her lip. “It’s Seth, miss. He’s run off, he has.”

  Pru blinked, confused. “Seth? The stable hand? That’s a shame. Will it mean a great deal more work for Mr. Rugg?”

  Olive’s shoulders rose. “It ain’t that, miss. Seth . . . well, Seth wouldn’t have nowhere to go, y’see, unless he were goin’ back to that gang o’ his.”

  A chill went through Pru. “Gang?”

  Olive nodded miserably. “Seth’s done some bad things in the past. I tried to give him a chance. I knew him when we were children. ’E weren’t a bad boy, just had no one to look after ’im.”

  Pru nodded but she didn’t truly understand why this was her concern.

  Olive wrung her hands and went on. “It’s that man and his lot—he turned Seth bad. He used to stop here on his way north and south . . .”

  Pru waited, her gut chilled. Olive wouldn’t be this upset if it weren’t important. “What man, Olive?”

  Olive looked left and right before uttering the name in a hoarse whisper. “Gaffin.”

  “Gaffin?” There had been a man of that name in Brighton, a man Chantal had taken up with for a while.

  Olive nodded miserably. “It’s opium. That’s what he does. He runs opium up the North Road.” She knotted her apron with her reddened hands. “That . . . and a bit o’ kidnappin’.”

  Kidnapping. Pru’s stomach turned to ice. Oh, God. Colin!

  After Olive’s frightening revelation about Seth, Pru couldn’t bear to go to sleep. She remained with Olive in the kitchen, drinking cup after cup of tea. Every so often she would jump up compulsively to check on the children in the room upstairs.

  She kept the key in her pocket and unlocked the door silently, opening it just enough to wave her candle into the opening and light the room slightly. Once again, her worried gaze was met with two children, tucked safely in bed, peacefully asleep—if one didn’t count Evan’s manful snores. Evan didn’t seem to mind having a chance at the bed, not even when it meant that he spent the night with Gordy Ann shoved into his side. Pru was fairly sure that the only reason Melody was asleep at all was because Evan was there with her. The little girl’s baby face was still flushed with crying, her lashes still spiky with all the tears she had shed.

  Just as silently, Pru withdrew her candle and shut the door. She locked it carefully and dropped the key into her pocket once more. When she reached the top of the stairs, she blew out her candle out of thrifty habit and began to descend toward the lighted public room.

  “I know it’s wasteful when no one’s about,” Olive had told her nervously. “But I just can’t bear to sit in the dark tonight.”

  Pru sighed and rolled her neck against the tension in her spine. She’d known Colin’s promise to return by nightfall had been ill thought and unlikely, yet she couldn’t help worrying. Worrying had kept her and Evan alive more than once. Learning when to listen to their fears and instincts had helped them flee any number of unsavory characters in the past.

  So when a fearful pounding came on the door of the inn, Pru shrank back up the steps into the shadow above and listened as Olive scurried across the public room to answer it.

  Don’t. Don’t answer.

  She didn’t call the warning out to Olive, despite the chilling jolt that went up her spine. This was an inn. It was how Olive and Rugg made their living, letting strangers into the place.

  Then she heard Olive shriek in fear. Then a harsh exhalation of pain.

  In seconds, she was back at the door of their room, unlocking the door with shaking hands. Once inside, she turned back and locked it again as silently as she could. Then she flung herself to her knees beside Evan’s sleeping form.

  “Evan! Evan!” He grunted in protest.

  “Time to run, Evan!”

  His eyes flew open then and he sat up in the dimness. She shoved his boots at him and then felt her way to the other side of the bed. “Melody? Melody, sweetheart, wake up now. Shh.”

  Melody woke quickly. “Is Uncle Colin home?”

  Pru hushed her piping little voice with one finger. “We must be very quiet, pet. Get dressed, quickly.”

  It seemed like hours getting Melody into her cloth
ing and buttoning up her little boots, but it must have been only minutes. Evan was swiftly gathering up their things and shoving them willy-nilly into whatever carriers were handy, regardless of ownership. “We can’t carry all this,” he told her.

  Rough voices raised in anger came from downstairs. Pru fought back her fear and tried to think. “Hide it, then. We’ll come back for it.” If we can.

  Evan looked about the room for a moment, then got down on his knees and began shoving the valises far beneath the bed, up against the wall under the headboard.

  “Clever lad,” Pru said as she buttoned Melody into her coat. “Now, quickly, make up the bedding so it looks like no one used the room.”

  They did it quickly and none too neatly, but it wasn’t that sort of inn anyway. Then Pru faced the part she’d been dreading. She opened the window and looked down. “Oh, sweet heaven.”

  Evan wedged his head out beside hers. “It ain’t too bad. I’ve climbed worser.”

  Pru couldn’t breathe. “How are we going to get Melody down?”

  Evan clicked his tongue for a moment. “There’s a bit of a ledge and then there’s a drainpipe. We ain’t all that high up, this being the uphill side.”

  “She can’t climb down that! She’s only a baby!”

  Evan snorted. “Baby monkey, maybe. ’Sides, she can ride on your back down the pipe. Won’t take but a minute to slide down that.”

  Pru withdrew her head back into the room. “I can’t. I can’t leave Olive alone.”

  Evan stared at her. “What d’you mean? You and me, we always run together.”

  She hadn’t wanted to say it out loud, hadn’t wanted to admit it to herself at all. Turning to Evan, she gazed into her brother’s eyes and made her choice. “I can’t leave. The intruders . . . they have Mr. Lambert.”

  When Colin was pushed to his knees and the hood taken off his head, he felt fear as he’d never known before.

  They’d brought him back to the inn.

  Oh, God. Melody.

  Oh, God. Pru and Evan.

  Olive cowered back from the rough group crowding into the inn. Her eyes met his for a second, then flicked away. Good woman. You don’t know me.

  He looked around covertly. No sign of Pru or the children. They must be asleep upstairs. Would they hear the noise? Would they know to hide or would they come downstairs and stumble into danger? Fear skittered madly in his mind. Melody.

  Pru would take care of her. Pru never let anything stop her.

  But who was going to take care of Pru?

  The leader, the man with shadows of madness in his eyes, advanced on Olive. “Where is your man?”

  Olive began to weep. “ ’E’s gone . . . to the next village. We needed . . . tankards.”

  “Don’t lie to me, woman!” The leader raised his fist high. Olive shrieked in fear.

  Colin rose to his feet in protest, starting for the man. Something hard hit him in the stomach and he collapsed with a groan.

  Upstairs, Pru let herself quietly out of the room and waited in silence for a moment, listening. There were voices and the sound of heavy boots and coarse laughter downstairs, but no one seemed to be on their way upstairs. Not yet anyway.

  A crude lantern hung on a hook in the hallway, right where she’d remembered it. It was the sort of thing one might find in a stable, not an inn, but for once Pru blessed the rustic surroundings. Quickly she unhooked the lantern and let herself back into the room. Kneeling before the coals, she used a piece of straw to light the candle within the glass and iron box. Light warmed Evan’s worried scowl and Melody’s excited eyes.

  “Melody, Evan is going to help you climb down. You must be very, very quiet.”

  “Are the pirates back?”

  Pirates. “Oh, yes, kitten—”

  “Mousie. Maddie calls me ‘mousie.’ ”

  Pru inhaled. “Yes. Of course. Mousie. The pirates are back and Olive and I have to get our rolling pins out. Time for you and Evan to hide again.”

  “I want to watch.”

  “Not this time,” Pru said firmly. “This time you go far away to hide.”

  She turned to Evan. “Take this lantern and tie it to your braces. Climb down and go back down the lane. Stay behind the hedgerows. We passed a farm when we came that way. Stay there until I come for you.”

  Evan nodded, his sharp little face very adult. “I’ll take care of Mellie.”

  Yes, Evan was taking the danger very seriously. He knew a little something about dangerous people. Pru pulled them both close for a quick hug.

  She helped Evan out the window and then lifted Melody to his back. He shot Pru a pained look when Melody clasped her hands across his throat, but quickly managed the ledge and then the drainpipe. They both took a spill at the bottom but Melody gave a single squeak of surprise and then remained silent. Evan waved up at Pru and took Melody by the hand. In a moment, they disappeared behind the hedgerows lining the road, the lantern light no more than a firefly’s spark.

  Swallowing her fear for them, Pru reminded herself that the night held less danger than the inn did. Then turning, she smoothed her fear-dampened palms on her skirts and let herself out of the room.

  This time she left it unlocked. It was only an empty inn room now. Nothing suspicious about that.

  Evan tugged Melody along the road, thinking. He’d lived in many different boarding houses in Brighton. Enough to know never to trust strangers, not even if they lived close by. He remembered the night that he and Pru had run from the Trotters. He remembered going to that man, the solicitor, and how the man had tricked them into going back into danger.

  Stopping, he pondered the road that led to some stranger’s farm. He didn’t need some farmer. He didn’t need anyone. He could take care of himself and Melody just fine on his own.

  “Come on, Mellie. Let’s go on another picnic.”

  Pru stepped slowly down the stairs, listening. Rough voices, crude laughter, the sound of tankards clinking on the tables. Olive was serving the “guests.” Good idea. Olive’s ale was enough to warm the hearts of even the most heartless men.

  Was it Gaffin and his gang? She hadn’t known about Gaffin’s gang in Brighton, only that he was a dangerous sort and that, inexplicably, Chantal found him exciting. Pru cursed Chantal’s one-track mind, for although Pru knew more than she cared to about Gaffin’s sexual preferences, she knew nothing remotely useful.

  Would he know her? Probably not. She’d seen him lurking about the theater, though only from a distance. She’d kept that distance on purpose, for Chantal wasn’t one to share a man’s attention, not even with her seamstress. When Chantal had a caller, Pru stayed in the costume room.

  Besides, Gaffin had given her a chill down her spine, even from a distance. He was tall and very handsome, in a sharp-featured way. His hair was as blue-black as Chantal’s own and his gaze flat and alarming. No-color eyes. Rather like a predator, with hunting eyes and prowling stillness. That predatory gaze had been fixed on Chantal and Chantal alone.

  What sort of idiot woman sought out dangerous men? Pru would never comprehend it. Give her a warm, affectionate family man any day. A man like Colin.

  Worry for him wound through her like a cold, slimy worm. She hadn’t heard him again after that one sound of pain.

  They won’t kill him. He’s no good for ransom if they kill him.

  She only wished she could be more sure of that.

  Finally, she was at the last few steps, where she would become visible to the public room in general.

  There was no point in trying to sneak about. She really only had one option. Tugging her cap lower over her face and making sure her distinctive hair was completely hidden, she drew a deep breath. Then she trotted down the remaining steps, rubbing at her eyes and faking a yawn.

  “We got guests, missus? Ye should o’ woke me.”

  Half a dozen dark bearded faces turned her way and not a few knives and pistols as well. She didn’t have to fake the shock that leached the c
olor from her face.

  Olive cleared her throat nervously. “ ’Bout time ye woke up, ye lazy cow. Get ye to the pourin’!”

  “Aye, missus.” Then, because Colin was gazing at her with ashen horror and more questions in his eyes than he ought to have, she added, “Good thing I cleaned out the best room, missus. All’s ready upstairs.”

  Olive’s eyes widened but she nodded shortly. Colin’s color improved and he looked away from Pru just as Gaffin turned to gaze at him curiously.

  “You came with people, Seth told me. A woman and two children. Where are they?”

  Seth. Pru froze. She’d forgotten the hairy stable hand. Surely he would know her!

  But Seth wasn’t in the room. It seemed that the man had placed his loyalties in the wrong hands, for he’d not been included in the gang’s activities tonight.

  She wondered if he was dead. Poor Olive. She’d tried to save him. Personally, Pru felt a bit more bloodthirsty toward the man who’d endangered them all.

  Olive handed her a thick crockery pitcher and gave her a shove toward the “guests.” Pru bobbed her head at the “missus” and began to make the rounds, filling tankards as full as possible. These men looked like they could drink like fish and still win a knife fight blindfolded, but any little advantage would help. Generous helpings of Olive’s fine ale might at least take the edge off their reactions.

  It was all she could think to do. How in heaven’s name was she supposed to help free Colin from the clutches of seven ruthless bandits?

  To be truthful she was beginning to wonder how she was even going to free herself!

  CHAPTER 26

  Gaffin had Colin and himself seated at the good table in the only remaining chairs, positioning them in the best spot before the fire. The rest of the gang took up what was left of the trestle tables and benches, distributed more or less evenly on either side of the leader’s table.

  Gaffin called for a tankard for Colin and watched it be filled. Colin’s hands were tied before him. He could have managed the ale well enough but he didn’t touch it. Gaffin took a deep draught of his own ale and then wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He gazed at Colin for a long moment before speaking. When he did, it was as if he were simply continuing a previous conversation.