When she caught up to him, he growled, “You should stay in the carriage.”
“I know the inner workings of mills better than you. And two of us can find him quicker than one.”
Stephen was already vaulting through the crowd so fast that his hat tumbled off. She had to hurry to keep up. She scanned every boy’s face she saw, but didn’t see Tom anywhere. As soon as they reached the entrance, she broke into a run ahead of Stephen.
“Damn it, Amanda!” Stephen called as he raced after her up the stairs and into the building.
She paused in the entryway to look around. There wasn’t much smoke down here yet, thank goodness. She instantly spotted the open blue doors and headed for them.
Stephen caught her by the arm. “You’re not going down there. I’ll look for him.”
“From what I remember the workers saying, it’s a large cellar. It will take us both to search it.” Wrenching her arm free, she darted through the doorway and down the stairs before he could stop her.
The cellar was only three quarters of the way in the ground, so a short stairway down and they were entering a cool, damp space that stretched the entire width and depth of the building.
At least the walls were stone—those weren’t going to burn, but the floor above . . .
She shuddered. As long as they found Tom before the fire engulfed the first floor, they ought to be fine. There wasn’t yet a whiff of smoke down here. But if the single fire engine couldn’t get it stopped, this would become a tomb, since the only windows were two tiny ones at either end, too small for even her to crawl through.
Fortunately, between the windows and the lantern Stephen had fetched off a hook by the landing on their way down, there was light to see by. Calling Tom’s name every few steps, they roamed the tables built to accommodate nearly a hundred apprentices.
At the back of the cellar the walls were lined with old pieces of equipment, thread cabinets, broken spindles. And on one end were stacked several cotton bales, which fell short of the ceiling by a couple of feet.
That would certainly be a place for a boy to hide, wouldn’t it? And as she recalled from their interviews, child apprentices were often punished for returning late from meals for work because they were sleeping.
So as Stephen moved swiftly along the tables, she searched the tops of the bales. She found Tom atop the third stack.
“Tom!” she cried, and he jerked awake.
“What’s happened? Where am I?” He leapt off the bale. “Cor, I’m late, ain’t I? The master will beat me!”
As Stephen came toward them, she snatched Tom up in her arms. “No one’s going to beat you ever again.” Tears stung her eyes. “No one!”
“We have to go,” Stephen urged.
“Yes, yes, of course.”
They headed back toward the entrance just as a sudden rumble sounded somewhere above.
“Damn!” was all Stephen had time to say before something crashed down at the top of the stairs.
Chapter Seven
The dust settled enough for Stephen to look around. At least they still had light coming from the cellar windows and the lantern.
“Is everyone all right?” Amanda asked.
“I am,” little Tom said.
“Let me go make sure it’s safe before we try to get out.” Still carrying the lantern, Stephen climbed the stairs. But as he neared the top and the light fell full on the doorway, his blood chilled. “It looks like the entrance is blocked.”
He set down the lantern and shoved against whatever blocked the opening. Made of solid iron, it didn’t budge.
This was bad. Very bad.
As Stephen descended the steps, he saw Tom gaze up at Amanda and ask, “Are you sure I won’t get beat for being late, miss?”
“I’m sure,” she said fiercely and clutched him to her. “I won’t let them.”
Stephen’s heart flipped over in his chest, the way it had when he’d heard her tell Mrs. Chapel about Yvette giving Tom a position. While he talked about reform, she did something about it, even if only to help one little boy. It humbled him.
“I think it’s a piece of machinery,” he told Amanda. “Bloody thing must have fallen through the second floor and right in front of the doorway. I can’t move it.”
She swallowed hard and looked about her. “Might Tom be able to get out through a cellar window?”
“It’s worth a try.” As they approached the nearest one, Stephen removed his cravat and wrapped it about his hand. “Stay back.” He pounded on the window until the glass broke, then cleared the glass from the frame.
Amanda lifted Tom in her arms. “Do you think you can get through, my boy?”
“Oh, yes, miss. I’ve squeezed into spaces smaller’n that.”
“Good boy.” She pressed a quick kiss to his cheek. “Just be careful of the glass once you get free.”
Stephen hoisted the lad up to the window. Young Tom wriggled his arms and half his body through, but it took a shove from Stephen for him to get completely out.
When he scrambled to his feet, he turned and bent to peer down at them. “Now you, miss.”
Amanda shook her head. “Sorry, but there’s no chance of my getting through that window.”
Tom looked crestfallen.
“But you can go fetch someone to help clear the door,” Stephen said. “Hurry, now!”
As soon as Tom ran off, Stephen turned to Amanda. “It will take him some time to make himself heard in that melee.”
Amanda nodded. “In the meantime, we should see if the machine blocking the door can be moved.” She took the lantern and rushed up the stairs. Swinging the light over the metal contraption, she released a defeated breath. “It’s an iron boiler. Several men and possibly horses will be needed to move that.”
Slowly she descended the stairs to the landing and set down the lantern, then removed her bonnet and tossed it aside. Her eyes were bleak and lost. “We’re going to die here, aren’t we?”
Stephen’s heart thundered in his chest as he hurried up to the landing to sweep her into his arms. “No,” he said fiercely. “Not if I can help it.”
“How are you supposed to stop it?” She wrapped her arms about his waist and laid her head against his chest. “The boiler is blocking our only way out. Eventually the fire will burn through the floor above us, and the smoke will kill us before anyone could even get close enough to help us out.”
She was only voicing what he knew to be true, but it stabbed him through the heart to hear her lose faith. It wasn’t like her. “They might still put it out.”
“I doubt that. One of our mills caught fire when I was a little girl.” Her breathing grew ragged. “Jeremy and I watched it burn to the ground.”
He clutched her to him, his throat closing up. “You have to have hope.”
“I’m all out of hope.”
Tipping up her chin so he could look into her face, he murmured, “You saved Tom, didn’t you? So there’s no reason yet to despair. He’ll get help.”
“Even if he does, there’s nothing they can do!”
“You don’t know that. Have faith. I swear I’ll get us out of this somehow.”
She cupped his head in her hands. “Oh, my darling. Even you have your limits.”
My darling. The words fell on his parched heart like summer rain, and he couldn’t help himself. He kissed her. Hard, with his blood beating a wild staccato.
Then she threw her arms about his neck and kissed him back. There was desperation in their kisses, both of them knowing these might be their last ones. After a few moments, she pulled back to whisper, “Make me yours.”
He couldn’t have heard her correctly. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.” She brushed a kiss to his jaw. “If this is our last chance to be together, I want to be together.”
“Amanda—”
She cut him off with a kiss, her mouth soft and supple, then eager, opening beneath his. With a groan, he gave in. The
landing was far enough up the stairs to be out of sight of the windows, giving them their own private space, and he wanted to be together, too. He wanted her, even in this place, in this hour. Because the idea that he might die before ever making her his cut him to the bone.
After that, they moved in a frenzy. She shoved off his coat. He untied her cloak. As he worked her wrapped bodice down to her waist, she unbuttoned his waistcoat and slid her hands inside.
Within moments, he had her undergarments lowered and her soft bare breast in his hand. “My dearest,” he murmured in her ear as he rubbed her nipple erect. “I wish we had more time. I would kiss and lick every inch of you. I would make you want me so badly that you never left my side.”
Her eyes slid closed and her mouth parted as he fondled her breast. “I already want you . . . more than you could possibly imagine.”
“Do you? Let’s see.” He raised her skirts and felt around beneath until he found the slit in her drawers. Then he cupped her warm flesh, exploring with his finger until he discovered the slick feminine core of her.
“Ohhh . . . Stephen . . .” she moaned as he slipped his finger deep.
“So sweet and hot and wet for me,” he said, exploring inside her satiny passage. “You’re mine.”
“Not yet, but I will be, my darling,” she whispered, her breathing shallow, panting. “And you’ll be mine, too. I’ll take however much I can have of you. Now. Here.”
She tried unbuttoning his trousers, and he hissed out a breath at just the brush of her hand against his straining cock. Impatient to be inside her, he pushed her hands away so he could get his trousers and drawers open. Shoving both down past his hips, he backed her against the stairwell wall and caught her behind the thighs to lift her so he could fit himself between them.
“Hook your legs behind mine,” he ordered. When she did so and he felt the damp silk of her plastered against his aching cock, he nearly lost his mind. “I have to be inside you.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, please.”
Though she didn’t know what she was asking for, he didn’t have the strength to resist her. It took some maneuvering to get her positioned, but the minute he was easing inside her, it felt so incredible that he wished he could make the moment last forever.
She tensed, and he murmured, “I can stop.”
“No,” she said hastily and clutched at his shoulders. “No, don’t.”
“I swear I will make it good for you, dear heart.” He took his time pushing into her, but she only uttered a small mew of complaint at the beginning and then she was opening to him like a fragrant winter rose.
Thank God she was such a slip of a thing. Otherwise, he would never have been able to hold her against the wall and still enter her.
Once he was fully seated, he let out a heavy breath. “If being inside you is the last thing I ever know, I’ll be content.”
“I won’t. I want to know it all.” She tightened her grip on his shoulders. “I want to have it all.”
He brushed a kiss to her temple. “And I intend to give you what I can while I can.”
Amanda meant to hold him to that promise. Already he was exceeding her expectations. She would never have thought she’d relish being pinned against a wall and filled with a man’s . . . member. Especially when it was so thick and hard inside her, so embarrassingly intimate. But when Stephen began to move with slow, steady strokes, like a well-oiled piston in perfect rhythm, he roused an odd aching between her thighs . . . and a piercing need in her heart.
His eyes met hers, hard and searching, in the reflected glow of the lantern. It was as if he looked into her very soul and saw what she wanted most. To have more time with him. Nights entwined like this, days spent running her mills together.
Shoving that futile dream from her mind, she threw herself into taking what she could of him now. She kissed his chin, his throat, whatever she could reach. In the little time they had left, she meant to learn every inch of him.
He shifted her higher. The next time he thrust, he hit that aching spot between her legs so perfectly that it sent her into a mad frenzy of squirming and bucking against him for more. “Oh, Lord, that feels . . . oh, Stephen . . . that’s . . . astonishing . . .”
“Yes . . . it is.” His breath came in staggered gasps. “You make it so.”
Dragging his shirt up, she worked her hands beneath it to feel the muscles of his chest working and flexing as he held her suspended with such ease. “Goodness, you’re . . . strong.”
“Not strong enough.” He drove harder inside her. “I’d give anything . . . to be able to shove that . . . boiler free.”
“So would I.”
With a low moan, he quickened his thrusts until he was pounding into her, deeper and hotter and fiercer with every stroke. The force of it sent her careening wildly, as if a wind had caught her and was carrying her up and away, high and fast, until she shot into the pure white air of sky . . . and exploded all over Stephen.
“Yes!” he cried, and drove into her hard, then spilled himself inside her. “Yes . . . my . . . sweet . . . Amanda. My dearest . . . love.”
The word love sounded like a gong in her ears, and, still quaking from her own release, she cried, “I love you, Stephen. I do.”
He bent his head to her ear, his breathing still rough and ragged. “I love you, too.”
The words were so sweet she wanted to clutch them to her. But she wasn’t sure she trusted them. As he pulled himself from her and she let her feet slide down to the landing, she whispered hesitantly, “You’re not just saying that . . . because we’re about to die, are you?”
He caught her head in his hands. “I’m saying it because it’s true. And because we’re about to die—I don’t want to go to my grave without your knowing that I love you.”
This time it was her heart, not her body, that soared. Tears stung her eyes, but before she could even swipe them away, he was kissing her, deeply, warmly, as a man kisses the woman he loves.
“Stephen! Miss Keane!” called a voice. “Are you there?”
Both of them jumped. Thank goodness they couldn’t be seen in the stairwell.
“Stay here,” Stephen whispered as he hastily did up his drawers and trousers. “I’ll be right back.”
Then he strode down the steps as if he weren’t in only his shirtsleeves, with his waistcoat undone and his cravat missing. “We’re here!” he called out. “We’ve been seeing if we can’t move that boiler.”
Hastily, she pulled her bodice up and her skirts down. Stay here, indeed. She wasn’t about to hide like some lily-livered coward. She hurried down the steps to go to Stephen’s side.
Lord Knightford’s alarmed features filled the cellar window. He glanced from her to Stephen speculatively, but merely asked, “Are you both all right?”
“Except for the fact that we’re about to die, we’re fine,” she snapped. “Please tell me that they’ve put out the fire.”
The look of utter agony on his face gave her the answer even before he said, “I’m afraid not.”
Slipping his arm about her waist, Stephen pulled her to him. “Is there any chance that they might?”
“It’s not looking good. And it’s too hot to go in and move the boiler, even if they could do so in time.”
More voices sounded behind Lord Knightford, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. His face disappeared from the window, and she heard a muffled discussion.
When next he peered in the window, he looked decidedly cheerier. “Listen, old boy, the mill chaps here tell me there’s another exit. It’s boarded up and it’s behind equipment and furniture in the back of the cellar, but they’re going for the ax to chop the door down, so if you and Miss Keane can start—”
He hadn’t even finished the sentence before she and Stephen were racing to the back of the cellar. They couldn’t see any door, but there was so much refuse and equipment that it would be impossible to see anything without moving some of it.
�
�Did they tell you where exactly the exit is?” Stephen called out to his brother as he started yanking pieces of equipment off the pile and tossing or shoving them behind him.
“I’ll find out!” Lord Knightford cried, and disappeared.
Meanwhile, she pulled anything she could reach from the tops of bureaus and cabinets and dragged empty barrels back from the mass of refuse.
Wisps of smoke had started to seep through the floorboards over their heads, lending their efforts more urgency. She kept her head down and took great gulps of air from below to keep from breathing in smoke. All it would take was one spark from the floor above, and half of this, especially the cotton bales in the corner, would go up in flames.
“How deep does this go, anyway?” Stephen wrestled a broken carding machine away from the wall, then paused to wipe sweat from his brow with his shirtsleeve.
“I don’t know,” she shot back, her hands bleeding from tugging on jagged metal objects. “I didn’t get to tour the place, remember?”
Then suddenly they heard it. Chopping. And it didn’t sound too far ahead of them either. Heartened by that, they focused their attention on the sound, frenziedly pulling and jerking and tossing refuse behind them. They were about to attempt to move a massive cabinet when it suddenly started moving toward them of its own accord.
They both jumped back just as a soot-blackened head peered around the edge of it. “This way, Miss Keane!” the fellow said and extended his hand.
That was all the invitation she needed to get the hell out of that cellar.
Choking on smoke, they rounded the cabinet and stumbled up an ancient cracked brick stairway overgrown with ivy. When they broke free into the snow-covered lawn behind the mill, she thought she’d never seen a more beautiful sight. Behind them, smoke billowed into the air and fire crackled, but they were safe. Alive. Together.
Once they got free, they were swamped by friends and family, everyone laughing and crying and congratulating the men who’d rescued them.
Amanda glanced anxiously back at the burning mill. “Is there anyone else in there, do you think?”
The Heiress and the Hothead Page 7