“I see a cave.” Roane dismounted.
Helen swallowed a groan. She did not want to go into another cave. Not at all.
He helped her down from Starlight, but his hands did not linger. “You truly do not like caves?”
“Truly.” She turned in a slow circle, scanning the area. The waterfall poured into a small pond. Bordering that was a sandy beach, sharp limestone walls, and thick green plants covering everything.
It was a magical land. Someplace faeries would frolic.
Beside her, Roane leaned against a tree and tugged off his boots.
“Whatever are you doing?” Helen asked, breathless as his second boot was tossed aside. “Are you disrobing?”
He chuckled, his excitement at finding the gold obviously overriding his good sense. “You are very cute in your haughty outrage, princess. Your nose puckers up just so.” He leaned forward and touched the tip of her nose with his finger.
She looked down at his bare toes. “Do you think the gold is in the pond?”
“No.” He pulled off his shirt and her mouth went dry. No living man had a right to be so beautiful. It quite stole one’s ability to think.
Thankfully, he left his breeches on. He charged into the water until it reached his waist, then dove in. When he surfaced, his blond curls were slicked back, highlighting the bones of his face.
“I needed that,” he said. “I’ve been on a horse too many days with no bath. I did not sleep last night, and I cannot think.”
“This is hardly a proper bath.” The words were out of her mouth before she realized how ridiculous they sounded.
“Come in,” he called.
She shook her head. “Any manner of creatures lurk in that pond.”
“It feels good,” he taunted.
“I am not going in that water, Roane. I’ll just look for clues why you cavort, shall I?”
He snorted and scrubbed his hair. Blond curls and water droplets flung every which way. Helen quickly turned her back and considered the area around her.
Where would her brother bury something in this dell? She ignored the splashing behind her, though her mind conjured wicked images of Roane, wet and shirtless.
She stomped around the vegetation lining the pond. The gold could be anywhere. They needed another clue.
Roane climbed out of pond on the opposite bank, rivulets of water running down his bare chest.
“Any ideas?” he called.
“None,” she barked, irrationally irritated.
He flashed her a look, then began his own detailed search around the cave’s mouth.
They had shed blood, sweat, and tears to get here. Had traveled over a hundred miles, through great adversity, to this hard won spot. And, now that they were here, Helen found she could not focus on the search.
It was him.
He was distracting her with his tanned skin and dripping wet curls. She would rather watch him search than search herself. But what good would any of it do? In the end, no matter what lived between them, he would try not to miss her.
The situation was utterly preposterous. The exact reason she did not want any romantic entanglements in her life. All the drama was entirely unnecessary.
“I’m going in the cave,” he called.
Just wonderful. Another dark cave full of snakes and God knew what else.
“Grab a candle and flint from my pack, will you?” he said from the opposite bank. “And my shirt.”
Helen did as he asked, then stood at the edge of the water. “Here,” she held the items up.
Roane looked at her over his shoulder. “Bring them to me, if you please.” He punctuated his request with a grin.
With a huff, she kicked up a cloud of dirt and called Roane names in her mind. He just watched, smiling. Gritting her teeth, she sat on the small sandy beach and pulled off her boots and new bonnet, then waded across the shallowest spot she could find. The water still reached her knees.
“Here.” She thrust the candle at him.
“Are you nervous about the gold?” he asked.
“Hmm. Something like that.” She was being ridiculous, she knew. She should be excited. She felt all…pent up. And frustrated. And like she needed something, but she didn’t know what.
The gold, she told herself. She needed the gold.
But it was more than that. It was something deeper. In her bones. In her blood. A wanting for the world to change, somehow. For the earth to turn differently. Her breath to be…
God, it was him. It was Roane.
She wanted her breath to be tinged with hints of him.
She wanted to her body to be touched by him.
She wanted her world, her life, to be threaded with his.
This was terrible. A mess. She could fall in love with him, if she wasn’t careful.
“I have a good feeling about this.” Roane grinned, totally ignorant of the battle going on within her. “You ready?”
“Ready.” But she wasn’t. She wasn’t ready to deal with the weight of this wanting.
It was only supposed to have been about finding the gold and fighting off danger together. None of this should have happened.
Roane pulled on his shirt and climbed the embankment to the small cave. He stopped just outside the entrance and lit his candle.
Excitement shimmered in the air around him like sunshine on the pond. He had been waiting years for this moment, she knew. His future relied on what they found inside.
And she wanted it for him, as much as she wanted it for herself, for her family, and the earldom. She wanted Roane to have his dreams.
He slipped into the cave first, and she was sure to be close behind. He held the candle up. The small ring of light barely touched the deep darkness.
“Do you see it?” She was ready to go back out into the sunlight.
“He would put it somewhere out of sight.”
Wonderful.
Roane took her hand in his. Big and warm, it made her feel better.
The wanting in the pit of her stomach stood up and cheered. He is touching me!
He stepped deeper into the darkness and she understood that, rather than seeking her touch, he wanted to be certain she followed. They could easily lose each other in the pitch black.
Roane moved the candle up and down as they walked, searching a rock wall to their right. “James hated caves about as much as you do,” he murmured.
“Then why would he leave the gold here?”
“He knew where I would look.”
“What are you, a bat?” she grumbled.
Roane laughed, unaffected by her mood, and inched deeper into a cave. He turned a corner then stopped short. She bumped into his back.
“What is it?” she breathed, fear in her voice.
“A seam in the wall.” He held the candle up, and she could just make out a crack that ran vertically through the stone. “Hold this.”
He handed her the candle, then crouched down. A soft sound filled the cool air as he rubbed his palms together. “I’d rather I have my gloves for this.”
“What are you—” Helen held back her squeal as Roane thrust his hand into the dark crack. Certainly he would be bitten by a snake, or a spider, or some other creature of the dark.
Then she heard it. A soft clank. A distinctive snap of metal against metal.
“I cannot believe it,” she breathed.
“I can.” Roane’s smile split his face as he pulled a dirty sack from the seam in the wall. He unknotted the ties and Helen shone the light on his hands.
Gold.
Bars and bars of gold.
“We did it!” She felt like dancing. Like kissing him. “We found it!”
“Careful with that wax,” Roane admonished, just as the light to the candle snuffed out.
***
Darkness swallowed them. A darkness so complete, up could be down and down could be up.
Helen gripped ont
o his arm but did not seem as terrified as she might have been. Her breaths were even, the pressure of her hand steady.
“That was not well done of me.” The woman sounded like she was going to laugh. Where was the fancy lady from London who shrieked at spiders and shied away from caves?
“We’ll have to follow the wall.” Roane tested the weight of the sac in his hand. Just to be certain, he found the crack in the stone and searched it once more. There was nothing more within but a disturbing amount of spider webs. “Shall we?” he asked, as if inching though a dark cave were nothing more than an easy stroll.
“Let us onward.”
“Keep close.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them. For she pressed the length of her body against his, and he could feel the heavy curve of her breast, the tip of her hipbone.
It was all too easy to imagine her naked beneath him, here in the dark.
He hefted the gold into his left hand. Then, stepping forward, he slid his right fingers along the wall. He really ought to have his gloves on.
“Can you see anything?” Helen whispered.
“No.” They had taken a turn down one of the tunnels. He only hoped he could find it.
“Neither can I.” Her voice was mere breath. Any more space between them and he wouldn’t even have heard her.
“Caves do tend to be dark,” he murmured.
“So I am learning.”
Roane smiled despite himself. “Why are we whispering?”
“I don’t want to…you know…”
“No, I don’t know.” The wall was cold and damp. He hated to think what he was touching, living and dead. He focused on Helen instead. “You don’t want to what?”
“Arouse anything.”
He choked on his own breath. Surely she couldn’t mean him. Hell, he was in a state of near arousal all the time around her. And her whispery, feathery soft words were not helping. Not here in the dark, where she kept bumping into him. And not after she praised him, even knowing the truth about him. Hope dared to well in his breast, a powerful aphrodisiac. “I see.”
“You see what? Light?”
“No, I mean, I understand what you are saying.”
“About waking up the things in the dark?” She pressed herself closer to him. Now, panic edged her voice. “Do you agree, then? I have cause to worry.”
“No, I didn’t mean—”
“I think something is behind me.”
“What?” Instinctively, he pulled her into his arms and pressed her against the wall. “Did you hear something?”
The movement of her braid was a faint whisper.
“Did you hear something, Helen?” he asked again.
“I shook my head no. I simply had a… a feeling.” She shivered in his arms.
Roane leaned forward and rested his forehead against hers, fighting a laugh. Or a sigh. Or a kiss. All three, really, for this woman had a way of tangling him up inside.
“I’ll go first.” She stood up tall, and he was forced to straighten. “I still have my gloves on.”
He’d rather not touch the wall barehanded. He shifted the weight of the gold into his other hand. “Very well. Run your fingers along the wall. It will take us to an intersection where we will turn right. The entrance to the cave is close beyond that.”
She didn’t say anything, merely shifted in the dark.
“Helen?”
“Sorry, I nodded again.”
He smiled. “You make a fine companion in adventure, Lady Helen Gladstone.”
She took a tentative step forward. “Why thank you, Mr. Grantham.”
Silence settled, only the sound of their feet shuffling on gritty stone echoed through the cave. Roane shifted the heavy bag again. He ought to be thinking of the gold, and the next step in getting it to safety, but Helen was far too distracting. He lowered his hand and, when she stopped, he accidentally brushed her arse.
She sucked in a breath.
“Pardon me.” Was that him? He sounded like a fool.
“The wall ends here,” she whispered.
“Can you turn right?”
“I shall try.” Her feet shuffled, then “Oh! I see light!”
It ought to have been prophetic, or biblical, or some such. The reformed thief coming out of the darkness and into the light. But hell if he felt reformed, his lascivious thoughts were far from pure. As soon as he could see, he trained his gaze on Helen’s arse. Her lovely, rounded, luscious arse.
He couldn’t wait to see it bare. And he would.
Before this adventure was through, he would.
For he had need of the gold. His future depended on it, as seed money for his breeding operation.
But what he felt for Helen had gone beyond need. One did not need breath. Just as a fish did not need water. She was simply part and parcel of his being.
He reached out and stopped her before she stumbled into the light. “Wait. Give your eyes a moment to adjust, here between the sunlight and the darkness.”
She turned toward him. He knew he sounded odd.
“You are too vulnerable otherwise. Blinded by the sun, anything could happen.” Panic, or something like it, flayed the edges of his attention. He had the gold. He was victorious. He wasn’t supposed to feel this way. But he didn’t have her. Hell, he didn’t even deserve her. “It’s best to take time to adjust to the change,” he continued.
“Very well.” Helen looked out into the afternoon, then back at him, where he lingered in the shadows. “What next?”
She sounded as lost as he felt. A bit at loose ends, without the chase and the destination. Now, the world opened herself. Anything was possible.
Or perhaps life would just go back to the way it had been before.
“What would you like to happen?” He felt like he’d been punched in the stomach by his own damn question. Would she leave him straightaway?
“I would love a bath. I’m positively wretched.” She hadn’t understood what he had asked. Or she had deliberately misunderstood. Either way, he was relieved. For now.
“You have eight thousand pounds in gold, Helen. How wretched could you possibly be?”
She flashed him a warm smile. “Very.”
He smiled back. He was an idiot.
“Oh, shouldn’t we count the gold? Just to be sure?”
“Yes, of course, yes.” Damn, he should have thought of that, rather than standing around like a fool.
He untied the sac and withdrew four velvet purses. Helen grabbed a purse from his hand, a laugh bubbling through her. She picked apart the ties and sat, then poured coins—gold coins, sovereigns all— into her lap. Roane weighed the other three bags in his hands.
Helen’s laugh was as free as the birds swooping beyond the cave’s entrance.
“There should be fifty pounds there.” He nodded toward her skirts. “And I should have the rest here.”
He sat next to her, there in the dim light between darkness and sunshine, and crossed his legs as she had done, as if they were children playing a game.
Though this was no game.
He opened the first bag and dumped out a handful of gold bullions. The bars were twenty-two carats and stamped by the Bank of England.
Helen’s eyebrows lifted and she leaned against him, examining the pile before him. “Bars of gold? How lovely.”
Roane dumped out the other bags, then exhaled a whoosh of breath.
James had done it; he’d really left the gold. All of it. Truth be told, Roane had doubted his good friend.
“You thought my brother would have tricked you?” she asked as if she could read his thoughts.
He looked up at her. “Did you not? Did you expect he would have left all the money intact?”
“No.” She twisted her lips and shook her head. “I expected nothing of James, in life or death, other than trouble.”
“It seems he has surprised us yet again
. I truly think it is all here. Or most of it, anyway. I cannot recall exactly how many bullions there were.”
“There is a note.” She pulled a folded scrap of parchment from the pile of gold bricks. “Do you mind?”
He waved his hand. “Go on, read it.”
She unfolded the paper and leaned toward the light.
Treasure is as treasure does.
Use it wisely, use it well.
Be sure my portion goes to my kin.
I ken you will.
May the wind be at your back, old friend.
I’ll await you down below.
Roane scrubbed a hand over his forehead. Christ, he missed James.
But what would James do if he knew the thoughts his old friend was entertaining about Helen? James would come back from the grave to haunt him, no doubt. Younger sisters were not to be trifled with.
No one knew better than James that Roane was not worthy of Helen. She deserved a man with a secure future. A man who could keep her safe. And, while he had dreams and goals, they were still just castles in the air. In the end, he was still a gambler, betting his fortune on horseflesh.
He would see she returned home safely with her treasure, and that would be it. Things could not go any further between them.
“We’d best bundle it back up and put it away.” Roane scooped the gold back into the bags and scanned the cave entrance. “We need to get to a safer location.”
The laughter fell away from Helen’s eyes. “Are we in danger?”
As long as she was with him, she would always be in danger. “I know somewhere we can go. An inn, owned by a good friend. You will get your bath there. And a warm meal.”
“And a bed. Please say there is a bed.”
“Of course. After this, it’s all luxury and comfort for you, my lady.” Roane stood and walked into the light.
Chapter Eighteen
Roane led them on a circuitous, ambling route that left Helen wondering if they were being followed. Or worse yet, lost, for she knew Roane did not take well to being lost. She felt curiously empty and adrift as she followed closely behind. All this searching, all this frantic worry about the gold and the future, and now it was over. She should feel happy and relieved, but she didn’t.
The Rogue Returns.smashwords Page 20