He was deliberate, he was relentless, and she was despairing, and now she was struggling desperately not to laugh.
“Don’t you think it’s a very erotic fantasy, Mad?” he pressed on, sounding nearly academic now. “It’s a popular one. Rather like a naughty theater show. Have you ever been to a naughty theat—”
“Colin!” she protested, laughing. “Enough!”
He whirled about and immediately began walking backward, facing her. “Colin!” he crowed delightedly. “She called me ‘Colin!’”
“Stop it. I really…
“‘Colin!’” He mimicked her protest.
She attempted severity. “I do not wish to talk about it. It happened.”
“Very well,” he agreed with completely unconvincing sobriety. He returned to face the road ahead, and they walked on.
“I think it’s simply that we both needed the…release,” she offered tentatively. “The intensity of the past few days…the danger…”
“Good enough,” he said evenly.
Blessed silence ensued, and Madeleine began to relax into it, counting off paces as they walked, half absently. She was unaccustomed to walking anywhere without knowing precisely where she was going, and as she was weary, it was an odd dreamlike feeling, following this flower-flanked dirt lane to a rumored inn. She worried about her boots. She could feel the sole of one wearing thin; the road was more immediate beneath that foot, somehow.
But with every step she felt the reminder of the previous night between her legs, where she was tender, and the tenderness made her mull over every aspect of the previous events, but she couldn’t seem to think about them, arrive at any conclusions about them. She could only remember them in terms of his beautiful eyes on her, and the white lights bursting behind her eyes, and his mouth closing over her nipple, and the feel of his slim, warm body beneath her hands, and the glorious feeling of his powerful arousal all for her, and the burst of heat inside her when he came. It had been pleasure so pointed, so profound, so—
“Colin!” he imitated again on a girlish squeal.
That did it. He was incorrigible, a beast, a man who obviously excelled at tormenting women.
She laughed. Helplessly.
It burbled out of her, and once she started, she couldn’t stop; she choked with it, buckled with it. Thrust her hand against her mouth to stop it, to keep from alarming the birds from the hedgerows and calling all the farmers from miles around out of their homes.
And Colin turned to watch her as if all this laughter were the result of an experiment. He was walking backward, a grin splitting his face, his eyes bright in the hot sunlight. He watched as though he simply enjoyed watching her.
Laughing hard made her stumble over a rut.
“Mind the rut, Mad,” he called.
Four more days to prove this man’s innocence. And maybe it was this—this ticking clock—that was causing the laughter, the playfulness, the near recklessness. The heightened intensity of every emotion and sensation.
Oh, nonsense. What she felt was joy.
It was early summer, hedgerows were a riot of hawthorn blossoms; horse chestnuts, beeches, and the occasional old oak stood sentry over the roads; songbirds rustled amidst all the greenery. Up ahead, around the bend, Madeleine could see the branches of an enormous oak splaying out in every direction, taking up more than its share of roadside.
“Do you know what I haven’t done?” Colin said suddenly. He stopped, allowed her to catch up with him.
She brushed away tears of laughter and gave an indelicate sniff. “Very little, if you believe the broadsheets.”
“I haven’t yet kissed you.”
And then he snatched hold of her hand and pulled her behind that oak, barely giving her time to squeak.
Blessed shade the tree provided, with arms that splayed everywhere like a mad octopus. It hid the two of them from the road, but not from the gaze of a gently curious sheep, who paused in its grass cropping to stare. Colin spun her about and had her up against the tree trunk in a thrice, pinned between his arms, and he towered over her, staring down for a moment. At the stars in my eyes or my great white forehead? she wondered.
“Don’t—” she began nervously.
“Don’t what, Mad?” Colin laughed softly, in a voice that stroked up her spine like velvet. His arms dropped from the tree, went around her waist; he pulled her hips hard against his hips, very familiarly; she felt the outline of everything male about him. “Don’t…what?” He whispered it this time, and when his hands went up to her face, it was she who closed her arms around his slim waist, flattening her hands to feel the hard muscles of his back, keeping him pulled close to her body, keeping the two of them groin to groin. She wanted to feel again the heat of his body over the entire length of her.
His knuckles dragged softly over her cheeks, and she closed her eyes, because his eyes were too merry and too hot and too soft and too knowing, and she, at the moment, didn’t want to be known by a man who had known nearly every woman in London, if rumors were true.
She did want to be kissed.
And then his fingers opened to feather across her ears, along her throat, the nape of her neck, and she felt her head tip back trustingly into his hands.
Cradling it, he touched his lips very, very softly to the pulse in her throat.
“Oh, Mad.” It was half sigh, half soft laugh. “Do you have any idea how I’ve wanted you?”
“Of course,” she whispered.
Colin smiled. Then he dragged his lips softly from the arch of her throat to her ear, to her lips, which were parted, while her eyes were still closed.
“Now I’ll kiss you properly,” he murmured.
She knew how to do this. She’d done it before. Her body knew where it wanted to be touched, and how it wanted to fit against his, and oddly, nothing had ever seemed more right. And still somehow it became a little battle, as it always was with the two of them, in part because she still only felt safe in the midst of battle. Their lips brushed, bumped, nipped softly, Madeleine now afraid to surrender to this. Too late she recalled how a kiss sometimes had the power to split one dangerously, vulnerably, open. More so even than lovemaking.
“Shhhh,” he whispered against her mouth, although she wasn’t making a sound. It was as though he wanted to soothe the battle inside her. “Shhhhh.”
His hands were at the back of her neck, soothing, stroking, and he brushed his lips over hers, urged hers apart with tender strokes of his tongue, sending a rain of silver sparks down her spine, and she gave a sigh. It was part pleasure, part some unexpressed sadness. The sound of something released.
Madeleine’s hands slid up to the hard blades of his shoulders, pulling him closer, and her lips fell open beneath his. His tongue, at first, was a gentle invader, warm, velvety soft, finding and twining with hers softly in a tentative foray.
He took his lips away from hers, looked into her eyes, as though looking for some sort of answer or wanting to see what the kiss had done to hers. His own eyes were hazy with desire.
And then his firm, clever lips took hers again, more decisively this time, and she was ready. Her arms slid up his chest to wrap round his neck, and he pulled her into his body, and his iron-hard arousal pressing against her was a maddeningly erotic contrast to his soft lips, his soft tongue. He drove the kiss deeper, and she met him; their tongues touching and tangling, part dance, part duel. He moaned softly, the sound of it vibrating in his chest beneath her hands. He withdrew his tongue to bite her bottom lip gently, a sensation startling and erotic.
Then he took her mouth again, ferociously this time, and she took as much as he did, devouring, needing him deeper into her body. He tasted sweet and dark, and as she kissed him everything in her was melting, dissolving, until she knew that terrifying, exhilarating sense of having no other existence outside the heady, penetrating bliss of this kiss.
And then Colin suddenly broke the kiss with a gasp.
He tucked his cheek against hers. H
is whiskers rasped at her delicate skin; his breath was hot and swift on the crook of her neck.
He was quiet for a long time. His arms loosened on her.
Confused and strangely bereft, Madeleine clung to him a moment longer. Then her arms loosened about him, too, uncertainly.
“Just a kiss,” he whispered, sounding dazed.
She didn’t quite understand what he meant.
They remained close but not nearly as close as moments before, their breathing slowing to before-kiss rhythms.
Colin lifted his head up, looked down into her eyes. He looked as if he was considering whether to speak.
“Did you love him, Mad?”
The question surprised her so completely that she didn’t have time to disguise the truth, and she was certain it was written all over her face.
Why did he do this? How did he do this?
He took his thumb and gently brushed it over her jaw, over those two scars. One for her husband, one for her son.
“Life can be the very devil sometimes, can’t it?” he said softly.
She stared at him.
“The very devil,” she agreed thickly after a moment.
He smiled down at her, as only Colin Eversea could smile.
And when he took her by the hand back out to the road, Madeleine felt as though she’d been thrown from the moon back down to earth.
And then they were walking again.
A long interval free of conversation but filled with the maniacally cheerful birdsong ensued. The denizens of the country were certainly noisy.
No travelers were on this track, thankfully, or at least not this early. Colin strode ahead up to the very slight rise—flat country, this—peering hopefully for the crossroads sign.
“Colin!” she heard him squeal to himself, in yet another marvelous imitation of her voice.
And then he chuckled. And kept walking.
Just as he was about to vanish over the rise, she scooped up a pebble and threw it at his back.
“Ow,” he said cheerfully, without flinching and without looking backward.
Chapter 18
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Marcus said to the phalanx of soldiers lounging in front of the Eversea town house. He’d brought out a plate of seedcakes for them, and they all took one. They looked bored, as well they should. Why on earth would they think Colin might migrate to his own town house?
“Good morning, Mr. Eversea.”
“Any signs of my brother yet?”
“None, Mr. Eversea.”
“Good,” he said.
They all laughed. “One hundred pounds, Mr. Eversea! Colin is worth a fortune!”
“So I’ve heard. But not for the lot of you, am I right? Finding him is your job. What a shame, eh? And my brother is innocent, you know.”
He’d said this every morning since Colin disappeared. It had become a ritual for all of them.
“If you say so, sir,” they answered politely.
Soldiers amused him.
“Where are you off to, Mr. Eversea?”
“To see Mr. Redmond. We’ll be having a talk about gaslight.”
“Oh, very good, sir!”
Marcus didn’t have far to go, for the Redmonds’ town house was also on St. James Square. He galloped for the mews, dropped the reins and headed for the carriage house.
Mr. Bell was sitting with his feet up on the table, hat tipped down over his eyes, blue caped coat hanging over the back of his chair. He was snoring softly.
“Good morning, Mr. Bell.”
The man nearly crashed to the floor, startled, and Marcus righted the chair for him just in time.
Bell stood rapidly, brushed his hands over his immaculate trousers, and when he registered that it was Marcus Eversea who stood before him, Mr. Bell, who trended toward swarthy, went decidedly pale. He did manage to bow, however.
Marcus dispensed with his own bow. “I have a question for you, Mr. Bell. Were you hired to take out the Mercury Club carriage?”
A pause. “Why would I do that?”
This was the classic stalling question used by a person unaccustomed to stalling or lying.
Marcus stepped forward. Mr. Bell stepped backward.
“I know Mr. Baxter hired you, Bell, on the day after Roland Tarbell’s murder and the day of my brother’s hanging. To do what?”
He wasn’t certain of this, but he became certain when Mr. Bell looked about wildly, as if for an exit or assistance.
Marcus had his hand clenched in the man’s cravat before the man saw it dart out.
Mr. Bell looked more surprised than alarmed for a second, and then alarm took over, and he stared down at the hand below his chin.
“To do what, Mr. Bell?”
Bell swallowed hard, which was difficult to do when one’s cravat was nearly doubling as a noose.
“Whatever Baxter paid you, I’ll pay you twice as much,” Marcus added every so slightly more politely.
“To take Mrs. Redmond to St. Giles, and passengers to Marble Mile,” Bell choked out quickly.
“St. Giles? You took Mrs. Redmond to St. Giles?”
Bell nodded rapidly.
Marcus would puzzle over that later. “Where in Marble Mile did you take these passengers?”
“Place called Mutton Cottage. Past an inn.”
Marcus released his grip, and Bell’s hands went up to rub his throat and rearrange his cravat lovingly.
“And who did you take, Mr. Bell?”
“This I honestly cannot say for certain, sir. I thought it best not to ask, you see, as it all struck me as rather odd, though the pay was very good. But I do know I took on several bundles at one location in Southwark. And I fetched a man from a pub near the docks.”
“Just one man?”
“Well, one man and a dog.”
They’d walked nearly an entire day in the country heat, with stops for forays into their rations and for Madeleine to attend to Colin’s ankles with Saint-John’s-wort and fresh bandages, and they finally stumbled not across Mutton Cottage…but the rumored inn.
From a slight distance away on the road, they stared at it.
“A bed,” Colin finally said, with the hushed reverence one might say, “The Grail!”
They silently pondered their options.
“Do you think it even exists? Mutton Cottage?” Madeleine replied. It seemed a fair question at this point.
“More than one person seems to know about it, Mad. We’ll get there. But we can’t keep walking all night tonight, and I want to sleep in a bed. How much money do we have left?”
“One pound.”
“All right, then. We’ll indulge in untold extravagance of a shilling or two for a bed.”
The inn wasn’t crowded—a few sleepy-looking elderly men were playing chess by the fire, and a couple was dining on what appeared to be stew in the dining room—and Madeleine paid for a room for herself and Colin, who made sure he was gazing anywhere but into the inn proper, and managed, somehow, to appear unobtrusive.
Once in their room, Colin locked the door and of course slid a chair beneath the doorknob, and Madeleine examined the window, and the height from the window to the ground. One could leap out with minimal injury, if it came to that.
And the centerpiece of the room was, indeed, that glorious thing called a bed.
They both approached it gingerly, as though it would flee in terror if they came at it too quickly. And then they crawled over it, and turned over onto their backs, and sighed.
And then there was a silence.
Madeleine would have thought they would reach for each other and begin pawing off clothes, but neither seemed inclined. The silence was peaceful and reflective, and they both seemed to be allowing the weariness of the day, and indeed the whole journey, to sink into the mattress below them. They could almost pretend he wasn’t a convicted escaped criminal with a price on his head.
“What will you do when you reach America, Mad?” Colin asked after a moment.
“Oh…I shall very likely marry as soon as possible,” she said practically.
“Marry!” He sounded so astonished, she was both amused and nearly insulted.
“And why shouldn’t I marry?” she said mildly. “It seems the practical thing to do.”
“Practical?”
“Well, of course. ’Tis a rugged country. I’ll have a farm, and I’ll need assistance with it.”
“Who?” He demanded. “Who would you marry?”
“Well, an American, no doubt. Perhaps another farmer.”
“An American farmer!”
He sounded so outraged she couldn’t help smiling. “What have you against Americans? Or farmers? They’ve as much need of wives as Englishmen. More so, I would warrant.”
He seemed to be searching for a reason. “They bathe very rarely. Americans.” It was half in jest.
“Yes, whereas you smell like a garden.”
There was a silence.
“I should like a bath,” he muttered gloomily.
He gazed up at the ceiling for a time, and the quiet expanse of whitewashed white seemed to cool his mood.
“I like them well enough,” he conceded finally, begrudgingly. “Americans.”
“Oh, so do I,” Madeleine concurred warmly. Because she was enjoying his outrage.
More silence.
“You know nothing of farming,” Colin said. It sounded like a warning.
She wanted to say, How do you know? but he was right, so she simply waved a disdainful hand. “I learn quickly. I can certainly fire a musket, and I daresay I should hold my own against an Indian or a bear. And I thank you for your concern.”
He seemed to take his time mulling this, too. She turned to him. His sea-colored eyes distant with thoughts of that wild, malodorous land across the sea, no doubt. And then he smiled a little, no doubt picturing her in battle with an Indian or a bear.
“We’ve a farm. The Everseas.” He sounded more reflective now. “On the downs, near Pennyroyal Green. It’s where I’ve always hoped to live one day, in truth. Sheep. Wool. I know my father would be happy to surrender it to me.”
“You! On a farm! I thought London was your home.”
“Louisa is my home,” he corrected, somewhat absently. “Wherever she is…”
The Perils of Pleasure Page 24