The Perils of Pleasure

by Julie Anne Long

  That was gratitude for you.

  “Are you hurt?” he pressed, still struggling for breath. “Are you—”

  “Give that stick to me right—”

  “Christ,” he said, and pushed himself upright instead, ignoring her. He kept the pistol trained on her, half dragged himself to the chair and lifted it in one hand, fully intending to jam it as quickly as possible beneath the doorknob at the top of the stairs. He had no intention of allowing her to leave until he had answers.

  But God help him—that modest flight loomed like a mountain. His legs were still relearning to walk without shackles.

  Although fury might have helped propel him up.

  “Wait!”

  She had pushed herself to her feet. It occurred to him that it had hardly been gentlemanly of him to leave her to accomplish that on her own, but then again, he also sensed the rules of chivalry didn’t quite apply under these circumstances, given that this particular lady was demanding the return of her pistol—oh, correction, her stick—and given that he hadn’t the slightest idea what she might do with him now. Someone had tried to kill her.

  He wondered what incentive she now had to allow him to live.

  “Cover me,” she said tightly. “I’ll do it. And faster,” she added unnecessarily.

  “Do what?” he demanded, angry now. A test. He’d aimed her pistol right between her breasts.

  “The door. That’s what you were about to do, was it not? Jam the door?”

  A charged and complicated second followed. Did he trust her? No. Would she bolt out the door once up the stairs? Unlikely, given that someone who had just come through it had tried to kill her. Would he shoot her if she tried? She had no way of knowing, but he had just saved her life. Doubtless she would assume he wasn’t eager to kill her.

  So he nodded. After all, he was the one with the pistol. Unless she had another hidden on her person.

  She limped a little as she passed him—carefully beyond his immediate reach—and cast an unreadable glance up at him. But she swung the chair up in both hands easily enough and shook off the limp as she took the stairs, rapidly despite her skirts. Strong, for a small woman.

  Then again, he’d heard madwomen possessed uncommon strength.

  He kept the pistol trained on the door and on her, but because he was Colin Eversea and he did it like breathing—the admiring of women—he couldn’t help but admire the line of her spine as she made her way up the stairs. There was something marvelous about the brisk grace with which she did everything.

  She expertly wedged the back of the chair under the doorknob. And then, to his awe, she jammed the lock, too—by thrusting her own key hard into it. So she was no amateur at…at…

  Whatever in God’s name this was.

  Who was this woman?

  When she was on her way down the stairs once more, Colin obeyed an impulse. He examined the stick; handsome thing, ornately decorated with nacre over a grip that looked like polished walnut. Brass fittings. He locked the pistol and checked the pan. It was indeed loaded.

  On impulse, on suspicion, he sniffed the powder.

  And then handed the stick back to her.

  “You can have your stick, Miss Greenway. Your powder is bad. You never would have got off a shot.”

  Madeleine briefly stared at the pistol as though her favorite pet had turned snarling on her. She recovered swiftly and took it gingerly from Colin Eversea, her mind spinning. She couldn’t speak.

  “Who the devil are you, madam?” Colin Eversea’s voice was low and furious.

  “Madeleine Greenway,” she said faintly. “I believe you heard the man.” It was difficult to speak over the clamor in her mind. Who had just tried to kill her?

  And then a sudden realization set her world on end: she wasn’t entirely certain she would know bad powder from good. She was brilliant, she could shoot the heart out of a target, but if Eversea was right…

  She was a fraud. Because she was a woman, and didn’t know good powder from bad, and she hadn’t noticed Colin Eversea’s bindings were loose enough for him to free himself.

  “What are you, madam? What is the meaning of this?”

  “I was hired to rescue you, Mr. Eversea. And someone just tried to kill me. It all seems rather obvious to me.” Her answers were curt and distant. She wished he would stop talking. It was noise to her.

  She needed to leave now.

  Because she needed to have a little word with Mr. Croker.

  “Obvious? Who hired you? Did my family hire you?”

  He sounded baffled and incensed. Well, that made two of them.

  “I don’t know who hired me, Mr. Eversea. I never do. The transactions begin with my broker.”

  “The transactions?”

  “Yes. With Mr. Croker,” she clarified impatiently.

  “Croker the Broker?” And now Colin Eversea sounded bewildered and a little incredulous.

  She hadn’t the patience or time for this. “Mr. Eversea, I wish I could say it had been a pleasure, but it’s urgent that I leave now. If you’ll ex—”

  “Who arranged for Croker the Broker to hire you? Are you telling me it wasn’t my family?”

  “Your family was never mentioned to me.” She said this in a rush and took two steps backward. She didn’t owe him any information. She was, in fact, sorry she’d said anything at all.

  “Then who?” He demanded. “And who wanted to leave me tied?”

  She’d said too much. “Mr. Ever—”

  “Help me, Miss Greenway. Take me to Croker. I need to talk to him.”

  “Mr. Ever—”

  “I killed no one,” he said curtly.

  “I don’t care—”

  “I…killed…no…one.”

  The words neatly cleaved her sentence.

  Madeleine stared back at him. His face was still partly in shadow. Anger, or fear, or weakness—he’d been in prison for a few months, after all—made his breathing audible.

  Panic had begun to amplify her own sense or urgency. Colin Eversea could be a martyr; he could be Satan’s minion. She simply didn’t care. She resented the need to consider Colin Eversea at all. He’d been cargo she was paid to liberate, and the portal to her future, and for a few minutes he’d been her greatest triumph.

  And now her future was unraveling and she was penniless and he was nothing but a burden.

  She would find answers more quickly on her own.

  “I killed no one, Miss Greenway.” His tone was quieter now, his control regained, but the words were still taut. “I believe someone made Horace Peele disappear, because someone wanted me to hang. And now it seems someone wants me to live…but on their terms. I want answers. I need your help.”

  Madeleine was distantly amused that the bloody man hadn’t yet said please. Yet he seemed genuinely bewildered and righteously furious, and weary, and…

  He’s too thin.

  The traitorous thought crept in beneath the panic from some other slumbering place within her, and she knew that once she had thoughts like those, Colin Eversea would become a person to her, and this she could simply not afford.

  “I’m sorry, but you’re as weak as a kitten, Mr. Eversea.”

  There might have been a kernel of apology in her soft scorn, but as soon as she uttered the last word, she whipped around for the window to leave him to his fate.

  She’d scarcely taken one step when her body was jerked backward.

  In less time than it took to gasp, she was unable to move at all.

  A heartbeat’s worth of disorientation later Madeleine understood what had happened: Colin Eversea had managed to snap out his hand, seize her arms, and twist her around to face him. Magically, the angle at which he held her—her arms bent upward so her fists nearly met her chin—immobilized her all but completely.

  He now stood scarcely an inch away from her, so close she could feel the heat of his body. With it rose a slightly dank odor, which must have been hiding in the folds of his beautiful, lim
p coat. Eau de Newgate.

  There was nothing at all gentlemanly about his grip.

  Too curious, and frankly, too certain of herself to be truly afraid, Madeleine tilted her head back. In the lamplight his Newgate pallor made his eyes brilliant, nearly feverish, and now she could see they were an unusual shade, more green than blue, but not decisively either color. She’d seen that color just once before: in the sky just before a thunderstorm. They were set deep above strong cheekbones, and dark hollows of sleeplessness curved beneath. The pallid light outlined the slightly too-pronounced bones of his face, the broad planes and elegant hollows, that bold nose. A long face, but it suited him. Long lashes, too.

  This last absurd observation floated across her awareness, welcome as a gnat.

  She mentally batted it away, freed herself with some difficulty from his gaze and frowned faintly down at the large hand encircling her arm.

  It had been a breathtakingly quick maneuver. How on earth would he have known how to—

  “War,” he said with grim humor, surprising her by answering that unspoken question “And three older brothers who taught me to fight.”

  In the brief, silent stalemate that followed, Eversea’s grip eased not at all, and a pye man’s enthusiastic bellow, the very sound of optimism, came to them through the walls. One could always count on a hanging to stimulate appetites, even if the hanging never actually took place.

  The world outside was clearly beginning to right itself.

  For a dizzying moment Madeleine felt as if she existed outside of time. Regardless of the outcome of this moment, whether she or Colin Eversea lived beyond today, London would go on as usual, closing over the hole they’d left the way a river fills in the dimple left by a skipped stone.

  “Impressive, I grant you, Mr. Eversea,” she said quietly. She’d decided to appeal to his sense of chivalry, even as her heart beat in time with the precious seconds she was losing. “But I’m still stronger than you are at the moment. I assure you I shall be safer without you. And as you are a gentleman, I would ask that you unhand me and leave me to go.”

  “I saved your life.” It wasn’t a petulant statement. It sounded like the curt resumption of a negotiation by someone who suddenly found himself with the upper hand.

  “Then we are even, as I saved yours, Mr. Eversea. Release me, please.” She shifted her eyes, which gave her a view straight up into his nose. Reluctantly, she shifted her gaze back to those unexpectedly compelling eyes and gave a minute, reflexive tug at the same time.

  His grip budged not a hair.

  “Ah, but you were paid to save my life, Miss Greenway. I saved your lovely hide voluntarily. Which means your act was commerce, and mine was…” He paused. “…virtue.”

  To his credit, that last word did arrive with a whiff of irony.

  “Correction, Mr. Eversea—it would have been commerce, if I had been paid. I was instead fired upon for my services, and this, I hardly need point out, would not have happened had I not rescued you from what was very likely your just deserts.”

  She’d meant to goad him. This was a bad sign. It meant he’d managed to stir either her temper or her pride, both of which were formidable, and either of which could cause an inconvenient tipping of her precious equilibrium.

  It meant she had begun to panic in earnest.

  “In short,” she continued quickly, “you are bad luck, Mr. Eversea. I would prefer to be on my way without hurting you, but regardless, I shall go. And I assure you that I know a variety of ways to hurt you, despite our current…” She gave another minute tug of her wrists; they budged not at all. “…position.”

  Hmm. Well, she could drive her knee into his—

  Almost absently, Colin Eversea planted both his booted feet around her feet, trapping them.

  Damnation.

  They were so close his knees were virtually between her legs. It was perhaps the most intimate she’d been with any man in…well, it wasn’t as though she’d actually kept count of the days.

  The corners of the devil’s mouth turned up into a faint, hard smile.

  “You might very well have a point regarding my current physical condition, Miss Greenway. But I’ve lately learned that desperation is astonishingly motivating. Care to take the measure of my desperation?”

  She’d seen any number of desperate men in her day; desperation, in fact, kept her in blunt. But none had looked quite like this. Or spoken quite like this. With obvious intelligence, or a penchant for irony, or a gentlemanly menace.

  “You need me,” he pressed a few heartbeats later. It was a guess on his part, and a good one. “My family is wealthy.”

  “I need you to release me,” she corrected.

  “You need me because my family will pay for my safe return,” he corrected bluntly. “They shall be…happy to have me returned alive to them, regardless.”

  Interesting hesitation. “You don’t sound convinced.”

  His smile was rueful, but this time it reached his eyes. “I’m not. At least, I’m not certain they all will be happy. But I am certain you will be paid to return me to them. For we’ve honor, you see. We Everseas do.” More irony. “And something tells me it’s urgent that you’re paid.”

  “Mr. Eversea, more specifically, it’s urgent that I am paid very quickly. I haven’t time to waste on—”

  “Ah, once again we are in accord, then, as it’s urgent that I return to Pennyroyal Green quickly. It’s beginning to feel a bit like destiny, wouldn’t you agree, Miss Greenway?”

  Mrs., she almost corrected. Though it hardly seemed relevant anymore.

  “Why do you need to return urgently?” she demanded instead. She wanted a fact, something convincing, by way of collateral. She wanted proof his urgency equaled her own.

  “I need to stop a wedding in Sussex. And I need to prove my innocence before I do it.”

  Oh, for God’s sake. Excessive sentimentality ought to be a hanging offense.

  “Oh, really. Who is this paragon?” He wasn’t the only one who could construct a sentence out of irony. “I imagine her name is Louisa.”

  “She’s not a paragon. She’s a flesh and blood woman. And she belongs with me.”

  The words were terse. The sun rises in the east. It’s dark at night. She belongs with me. Same tone. There was an odd, faint answering echo of pain somewhere inside Madeleine when she heard them. She took in a deep breath.

  “If this is true, whom is she marrying instead?” There was no pain her sharp mind and a sharp retort couldn’t blunt.

  Another of those funny, brief hesitations followed. “My brother Marcus.”

  Ah. So he’d decided to be honest, as that confession could not have been pleasant for him.

  For her part, she’d decided to be relentless. “So it’s your brother who has the family money.”

  This was clearly a little too accurate, as his grip on her tightened infinitesimally.

  “My brother had the advantage of not being in Newgate.”

  “Presumably because he didn’t stab a gentleman to death in a pub?”

  She’d gone too far. His eyes went dark, his mouth opened abruptly, and it occurred to her too late that she might not like to make this man truly angry. But then—

  But then he surprised her. He closed his mouth over whatever retort he’d planned, his brows came together in a sort of puzzlement, and he studied her for an unblinking moment.

  Before her eyes some sort of realization gradually lit his. That frown tilted up at one corner and…

  Damned if it didn’t become a nearly tender smile. As though he understood something about her she didn’t quite understand yet.

  “Presumably,” he said, and his words were gentle now. “Then again, as I said before, neither did I. It’s just that I simply cannot seem to prove it.” Self-deprecating humor in the words. He was actually trying to soothe her.

  A wee taste, then, of Colin Eversea’s vaunted charm. It enveloped, sliding in through chinks she didn’t know sh
e had. Madeleine hadn’t the faintest idea how to deflect it. She stood, for the first time in longer than she could recall, without the upper hand.

  It was terrifying.

  With some difficulty, she tore her gaze away. Ah, that did the trick. Her wits recongregated and presented her with a triumphant realization. “Have you any sisters, Mr. Eversea?”

  He went still, clearly surprised. And then his head went back a little on a genuine, appreciative little laugh. Acceding a point.

  “Yes, I have two sisters, as a matter of fact. Which is how I know very well that women aren’t quite the fragile, helpless creatures most men think they are. Or they would like men to think they are…when it suits them.”

  It was both an acknowledgment and a warning, and somehow it was just the right thing to say.

  Quite unexpectedly he released his grip at last and took a step backward, his palms up.

  And just when she was growing accustomed to that Newgate smell.

  She rubbed at her wrists eloquently and stared up at him. Not a trace of guilt altered his handsome face. Damnation. She stopped rubbing, as her wrists weren’t really troubling her.

  “Have we an honorable agreement to help each other, then?”

  Oh, not this. It never failed to amaze her: men and their bloody frivolous attachment to the notion of honor. Her own notions of right and wrong were instinctive and, in truth, quite flexible.

  “Yes,” she humored, tamping impatience. She could revise her version of an honorable agreement at any time, she decided.

  “Shall we shake hands, then?” There was a glimmer of something about his mouth.

  Ah. And now she knew he’d been a devil. She wasn’t eager to give her hand or any of her other limbs back to him, and he knew it. Still, he might as well know she wasn’t afraid of anything. She thrust a hand out, he closed his large warm hand over hers and gave it a firm shake as though she were any gent, and he released it as though the touch of a strange woman’s bare hand moved him not at all; while her thoughts, for a shocking instant, were altogether vanquished simply by the heat of his fingers closing over hers.

  “No one knows about the window,” he guessed.

  “Of course not.” she said shortly, when she could speak again.