by Kate Sheperd
She set her horse to a gallup, wanting to shorten the road as much as possible, so she almost missed the figure sitting on the rock about half a mile from the city, elbows on his knees, chin in hands.
The horse saw him, though, and pulled himself up short, nearly tossing Isobel from the saddle.
“That eager to leave me behind?” Will asked sliding off the rock with a too-pleased grin.
“I...I didn’t expect you’d be here,” she admitted.
Will approached the horse, laying a hand on its flank and stroking gently. “I thought about what you said. About turning spy. I hadn’t ever thought of it as breaking my word. I’ve given no Scot my word.” He looked up, and she met his eyes, almost frightened of what she would see in them.
“Except you. I gave you my word not to run.”
“You needn’t keep it now,” she said softly, surprised by his determination on the matter.
“Then I’ll give it again,” he said, reaching up to pull her from the saddle, setting her on the ground in front of him, his hands on her hips. “Isobel Darrow, I give you my word not to run from you. For all my life.”
She was smiling. She didn’t remember starting to smile, but she was. Her hands slid up his arms to his shoulders, and she raised herself up on her toes to kiss him.
“Well,” she murmured against his lips. “We shall see what the word of an Englishman is worth.”
Tempted by the Rogue
Chapter 1
Henry
The ceiling was wrong.
The thought echoed through my mind, bouncing off the painful walls. It took attention away from my sore throat and my aching head.
Something was wrong with the ceiling.
I’d seen it when I tried to open my eyes the first time, winced, and closed them. It wasn’t the ceiling above my bed. Not the one I’d seen most nights these last seven years.
“Henry?”
The voice was high, and a little bit musical, but also a little bit scratchy. It hurt my head a little more, but then, most anything would at this point. But it began to bring the memories of the night before back to me. What had I been doing? I tried to adjust in the bed and open my eyes, and the soreness of my muscles immediately answered my question. I’d been dancing. Definitely.
I fought through the pain and sat up, prying my eyes open. I needed some water. Or a drink. Or both, really. I needed both. Maybe breakfast. No, I definitely didn’t want breakfast. But I’d need breakfast.
The woman in front of me wasn’t beautiful. Not in this light. She was unkempt and smiling. I tried to smile back at her but found in difficult.
“Henry, how are you feeling?”
And there was a new problem. She knew my name. But I didn’t know hers. If I focused, I could remember bits and pieces of the night before. It was an event, some kind of ball. There was always some kind of ball. We’d been dancing. Some had seen, and that had bothered me. Why had that bothered me?
What was her first name? What was her last name? I couldn’t very well not know, not after what we’d done afterward.
That was a little clearer when I thought back on it. The hands on skin. The delightful game of unwrapping all her layers to find the soft, pale flesh beneath. The ribbons and the lace that women always left hidden away, so that we men only got to see it when we’d earned out prize.
I figured it would be best not to speak. It would only trigger the pain in my head further if I did, anyway. Instead I sat up and grabbed her suddenly, flashing her what I supposed must be my most charming smile, based on the reaction I often got for it. And she gave me what I was after: her giggle and writhing. I thought perhaps this was a bad idea. I needed a drink. I needed some water. I needed some breakfast. I knew this.
But I wanted her.
A little voice in the back of my head reminded me that I was uncomfortable that others had seen me dancing with her. It tried to get my attention and tell me that whatever I did, I should do it quickly. But it was easy to shrug it aside. After all, this morning we could skip the unwrapping. She was already unwrapped. This morning I only had to enjoy my present.
I kissed her neck and her chest and ran my hands all over her. She was moving a bit too much, and a bit distractingly, but I didn’t let it put me off.
Not until she pulled away, and sat up in bed, rigid. She wrapped the blankets around her and was listening intently to something. I did my best to listen as well, but the general hustle and hubbub of London below meant nothing to me. My house was a bit more isolated, so city streets had always just sounded like city streets to me.
“Mr. Headwidge,” she said, with a sudden air of formality, “I think you had better be leaving.”
The abrupt change in her manner was perplexing, but the little voice in the back of my head was coming into its own. See? it was yelling at me.
“My dear,” I said, closing the gap between us and putting my hands back around her waist where they belonged. I was still unsure what else I could possible call her, but I continued anyway.
“Whatever could disturb us on such a fine, fine morning as this?”
She shook her head slowly at first, and then more quickly. And then the flutter of movement began. The present needed to re-wrap itself. It might be a fine present indeed, but I was not who it belonged to.
“My husband!” she whispered harshly, suddenly wholly concerned with secrecy.
The ache in my head and the ringing in my ears put up no contest in the light of my desire for self-preservation. The last time I’d been caught with a married woman had almost been the death of me. I’d ended up with pistols at dawn, nearly. Only the threat of the whole matter becoming public had persuaded the husband not to challenge me.
And I’d paid dearly in the end even so. I had no way of proving it, but I’d always believed the man had paid a group of thugs to apprehend me on my way home from the club one night only a week or so after. They’d beaten me to within an inch of my life, and it was a solid three months before I would even consider unwrapping another man’s present again. It had been the longest three months of my life.
No, I couldn’t be caught again. Usually you could trust the woman only to take you back to her home if her husband was well and truly out of the way for the time being. If he was on a trip to the continent, or to the Americas for his health. These were usually the situations in which a lady (or rather, a “lady”) would bring me back to hers. Usually they weren’t so careless as this one.
“Am I mistaken in the recollection that you insisted your husband would not disturb us?” I asked her, pointedly. I had no such recollection, but she must have insisted as much, to convince me to return with her.
“You are not mistaken, sir,” she said, rather harshly, I thought, “But I was mistaken, it seems.”
This was a waste of time. I was wasting time. I needed to find a way out. The master of the house wouldn’t take too long to get back to his bedroom. The ritual of greeting servants and learning of the state of his town affairs in his absence would only take precious little time.
The window opened onto the street. I barely stopped myself in time. Three stories up! In retrospect, I was a little bit impressed with myself that I’d managed the climb in the state I must have been in last night. But there was no time for congratulating myself. The window was not a viable option. What then? I couldn’t leave by the hall. There was simply no way I wouldn’t meet the cuckold coming up the stairs, and no explanation, under the circumstances, and with the fragrance of his wife still on me, that would do.
Under the bed? I’d used that one before. It was the workhorse of bedroom hiding places. But a moment’s examination convinced me that it wouldn’t do. The bed was too short, and would leave no space for me.
That left the next, most desperate option: the wardrobe. The cramped space was preferable to a husband’s potentially fatal reaction… but only just. These small spaced had always bothered me.
But alas! This woman must have been such a va
in one! Her wardrobe was full beyond belief. No man, however motivated, would be able to fit in there.
“Quick, Henry!”
The woman, whose name I still couldn’t recall, was motioning to something. I didn’t want to believe it. It was a travel trunk that sat in the corner of the room.
“It’s quite tiny,” I said, wracking my brain for some other solution. Surely, there had to be another solution. Surely I couldn’t be instructed to climb into that thing.
“Hurry! It is the only thing in this room that is empty and will fit you!”
I didn’t doubt that it was the only place in the room that was empty. I only doubted that it would fit me. But I had no choice. The husband’s footsteps were audible now, and they drew closer and closer to the room. I folded myself into an absurd, contorted shape and got into the trunk, which the woman closed and, quite unfortunately, latched.
I kept my breathing as shallow and quiet as possible. It would have been a waste in the extreme if I suffered through this circumstance only to be found in the end anyway. Even so it sounded so loud to me in the tiny space. But to judge by their conversation, the husband and wife making their happy reunion mere feet from me could not hear it.
Their conversation was absurd. It just about sickened me. I thought at least I would learn the woman’s name, but I did not even have that sliver of silver lining. He called her “poppet,” laughably, and she called him “dearest.”
They discussed far too much. The minutia of his journey, the reason for his early return – all information I could have done entirely without. I barely listened, honestly. Not out of concern for the sanctity or privacy of the marital bond (this clearly did not concern me) but simply because it was so unendingly uninteresting. If she were my wife, of course, and I had been away for weeks verging on months as this man had been, there would be no mere words exchanged on the occasion of my return, that much was certain.
The thought should have been pleasant, to imagine myself as a man returning home after a successful journey to an adoring wife. But instead it made me uncomfortable and melancholy. I did not like to think why, but I knew.
“And of course Brest was as it ever is,” the man was saying, and a noise escaped, entirely involuntarily, from my throat. It filled the little cavity allowed for my breathing so completely that I was sure I was done for. Had they heard it? They must have heard it. Mustn’t they?
There was a pause in the conversation. Surely, this was confirmation. My last day was today, most unexpectedly. It seemed an anticlimactic end.
We’d never gone to Brest, in the end. But we were going to. It was going to be our honeymoon, where I would have her. Where I would claim her forever and I would know she was mine and she would know I was hers. I would have been hers.
Some melancholy recollections didn’t suit me. They didn’t suit anyone. But in the moment, I thought I was dying. They sprang to my mind unbidden.
“I say, poppet, did you hear a sound?”
The woman protested that she did not, and I held my breath entirely, feeling as though my lungs were about to burst. After a long, tense moment, he believed her.
Their conversation went on only a short while after that, and they left the room. They were to breakfast together in town, and I considered again, though only briefly, how different such behavior was from what my own would be. But then, my own wife, if I had a wife, would never [S15]be so abandoned as to make her an easy night’s conquest for a passing scoundrel. Perhaps “scoundrel” seems an uncharitable term to call oneself, but to me it had always appeared as a badge of honor, and I took it in the spirit I meant it: as a compliment.
Slipping out of the house was hardly difficult once the man and wife were gone. A few coins here and there to whatever servants I could not avoid would go quite a long way towards securing their silence, and I had a few extra on hand as well for them to spread out amongst any others who had been on duty the night before. This was a small household, so the bribe would be, no doubt, perfectly effective. Besides, no servant would have his or her reputation survive being the one who had brought such unwelcome news as an infidelity to the attention of their master. It was a truth I had counted on time and time again, and it had not, as yet, let me down.
When my feet hit the cobblestone, I just began walking without any certainty as to destination. I simply chose a direction and strode in it, to put as much distance between me and this household as possible. I had no fear of running into the happy couple, as they would almost certainly be in a carriage, and I, poor fool that I was, had no option available to me but my own two feet.
The day spread in front of me impossibly vast. I was, I found, quite exhausted, but my bed held no allure. Perhaps there are some men who would see a headache and an unfortunate degree of exhaustion as a reason to return home to their beds. But heaven help me if I should ever be such a man!
No, I needed a drink, and some water, and perhaps eventually I could stomach the idea of eating solid food. And there was none of that to be found at home. Briefly I considered calling at a friend’s for breakfast, but there were no friends who sprang to mind who would welcome me without at least some reservation on the part of their wives, or at least their valets, and I was not in any sort of a mood for condescension.
No, there was only one place in the entirety of London that would suit my purposes, and it was a mere hour’s walk away.
The entrance to the gentleman’s club that I had always frequented, as had my father before me, was a kind of home to me. I knew the room well, and the floors had felt the bottoms of my shoes more often, quite possibly, than any other building. But there was an unfamiliar face. He was young, and looked in a bit over his head. I strode past him.
“Excuse me, sir!” he finally summoned the words when I was almost out of his reach entirely.
“May I have your name?”
His question was impertinent, and I tried to make him understand this entirely from my gaze alone. I could tell by the frightened look on his face that I was successful.
“Only I am in charge of the front desk, you see, today. We’re not supposed to let non-members in.”
I considered briefly letting him know that I had been a member of this club since my sixteenth birthday, and it was more home to me than whatever place he called a bedroom must be to him. But the poor boy looked overwhelmed already.
“‘My lord,’” I said, which only managed to confuse him further. “You must address me as ‘my lord.’ I’m Lord Henry Headwidge. I trust you’ll find me on your list if you only take the time to look.”
He thanked me profusely, and consulted his list, but would not let me leave. What he found in the ledger provided him with a most pronounced sense of consternation.
“I’m afraid I must ask you, sir, about the matter of your bill.”
His voice lost all the body in it halfway through the sentence, and he only withered further under my gaze. I considered, for a moment, my luck. An older man, in charge of the book, would likely be more difficult to wither or ignore. But this man…
“Young man, am I to understand that you believe a lord would bother to carry something so trivial as money on his person? Whatever matters of my bill that there may be to be settled should be brought up with my accountant who deals with such matters entirely without my intervention.”
The boy had trouble finding his voice, but speak, eventually, he did.
“But sir, all that is quite ordinary. Only I’m afraid it is such a large amount that if my training is to be believed, I must ask you to—”
“Your training instructs you to deny entrance to a lord, whose father was one of the founding members of this club itself, does it?”
At this finally the boy was silent. He shook his head, and provided no further barrier to my entrance.
The main room of the club provided me with everything I needed. There was water to slake my thirst, a stiff drink to cure my sickness, and food on offer should I ever decide such an item was not
repulsive to me. I gathered the drink and the water, and wandered, quite unobserved, past several older men playing chess. The game did not interest me, nor did the political conversation occurring two tables over, even though I knew a few of the participants. The club was only sparsely occupied at this time of the day, a fact for which I thanked whatever gods preside over the best interests of scoundrels. A chaise lounge at the very back of the room, in the most secluded of corners, was well free, and I would have the entire quadrant of the room to myself. I picked up a newspaper from a tray as I passed, making only the most cursory show of glancing at the headings on it. Announcements: dull. Current events: also dull. Goings on about town: not dull, but a matter for further investigation when my mind had forgotten my last folly enough to plan a new one.
I lay on the chaise lounge and covered my eyes with the newspaper and fell, gratefully, asleep.
“Henry! I say, Henry!” it was the second time today that I’d been woken with my name, which was twice too many. I was disoriented, and it took a moment to take in my surroundings fully. There were more people here now, so the day must have got on a bit. And here was Willy.
“I say, Willy, do you not know better than to wake a sleeping man without food on offer?”
I found I was suddenly ravenous, as the pain in my head and the knots in my stomach had all abated. Willy, to his credit, had anticipated this and did, in fact, have the servers coming with food momentarily, which news convinced me to sit up and engage him.
I gave him some details of my morning, although he was skeptical, as I could not remember the lady’s name.
“I find it unlikely,” was all he would say. He was not disapproving, though, which was his chief positive attribute in my opinion. I could tell Willy most anything, and he would never disapprove. His own night, which he regaled me with tales of, was considerably less exciting.
“Are you to tell me,” I asked him, when it seemed his interminable tale had finally concluded, “that the sum total of your exciting evening is that you spoke to a woman?”