“Do you feel pain inside?”
Shock warred with relief as she realized he referred to her body. “I cannot distinguish between the sensations yet.”
He made a small sound of acknowledgment.
“Come. Let me help you sit, and you may drink some water.”
She watched him cross the room––the remnants of a rough, peasant sort of dwelling––and retrieve a full leather water bag. She struggled to move but found her limbs ridiculously weak. But he was at her side again, sitting beside her and lifting her with shocking gentleness. Pain and his heat burned through her. Cradled in his arms, she opened her mouth at the touch of the sweet water against her lips. She swallowed the liquid down, her thirst reborn with each new taste.
“Thank you,” she said when she’d had her fill. She frowned at the grateful words that had come unconsciously. She was nearly certain that her injuries were due to an accident he had somehow instigated. She could not forget that even though he was now acting as healer, too.
“Why did you sabotage our carriage?” His body tensed and she tilted her head to look up at him, but even that small movement flared into agony. Tears blurred her vision. She was physically helpless. She couldn’t move so much as to study his face and gain what little information she could from his impassive visage. Instead, he held the water gourd close to her mouth again, but she turned her head away angrily.
“Don’t you have anything to say? Why did you kill Lord Powell?”
He shifted so that he held her up with one arm only. As he bent to place the bag on the ground their eyes met. His gaze was sharp as he studied her, and she realized she had just admitted that she knew nothing. She fought the desire to look away, to hide in whichever way she could.
“You want to live,” he said. There was a threat behind the words and yet he was laying her down on the bed so gently. If he had wanted to kill her, surely he would have already, unless his plan was more nefarious and he intended to hold her hostage. Or he still thought she possessed some information he needed. But in that case, why not interrogate her already? She breathed deeply again, her ribs, shoulder, and muscles protesting at the movement.
This exchange mattered more than any she had ever had and yet it felt outside of anything she knew. Despite the pain, she managed to speak. “If you intend to kill me, then you might as well satisfy my curiosity. And if you do not…what does it matter if I know the reason why? Isn’t it enough that I know it happened?”
“You like questions.”
“I like answers better,” she said, teeth chattering and her whole body shivering, which hurt even more. Exhaustion overwhelmed her.
As he leaned over her, his lips curved and the embryonic smile made him less sinister. He pulled the blanket tighter around her, shrugged out of his coat, and placed that over her too. Then he brushed the hair back from her cheek with a gentleness that made her swallow hard. His hand was warm and she was so cold. “I cannot please you then.”
Please you.
She closed her eyes, the oddness of the phrase sticking with her even as she drifted back into sleep.
When she next woke daylight filtered down, diffused by a layer of grayish clouds. The air smelled acrid with impending rain. These ruins would be little shelter in a storm, but that was not her concern. Not now. That was his concern. Now her only concern was to rest. To heal. To stay alive.
Nausea tumbled through her stomach, rose in her chest, as the sickening crack of a neck being broken shuddered through her memory.
“Good, you are awake.”
A neck broken by this man. The low timbre of his voice had become familiar to her. She turned her head to him, found him standing in silhouette by the door. This stranger who had touched her body more intimately than any since her nurse.
“What is your name?” she asked, as if it mattered. He was a villain who, for some odd reason of his own, had happened to let her live for now. And who acted as her nurse.
“Do you begin every conversation with a question?” He laughed as he moved toward her, his features visible, another day’s growth on his jaw.
“This is unlike any other conversation I have ever had.”
He sat down beside her. “You do not need to know anything but that you must rest.” He touched her hair again, brushed it from her face. In another time and another place, it would have been the gesture of a lover.
But she had had no lovers. There had been a handful of courtiers, men who wished to tie themselves to her father or avail themselves of her dowry. Never had there been a man who had stolen a kiss, pulled her into a shadowy corner for a passionate embrace. Nor would Lady Jane Langley have wished for such a thing. But that life was so very far away and his touch was warm and pleasurable.
Beneath the sheet she was naked. Tending to her, this stranger had seen her body in its most vulnerable state. She should have felt shame or embarrassment at the thought. There was none.
She lifted her hand to her pendant, the gold medallion of Lady Justice with her blindfold, holding her scales and her double-edged sword. It had been a gift from her father, and Jane had always taken comfort in the reminder of the power of reason and the righteousness of the law. The pommel of the sword was a ruby. On one scale was a diamond and the other a sapphire. This man was a murderer but not a thief. She slotted that into her mind as if it were a piece of one of the jigsaw puzzles she liked to complete.
“What happened to the coachman?”
That dark gaze met hers with amusement. “I think you know.”
Nausea rolled through her but she did not look away. She was not a coward and she need not fear. If he had meant to kill her, surely he would have already.
“A casualty of war?” Who had been the target of this incident? Lord Powell? Lady Powell? Jane? She did not know what role Lord Powell played in the upcoming negotiations between countries, but Lady Powell had almost certainly planned to attend for the excitement of the unprecedented event.
“The war is over, no? Napoleon tucked away on his little island?”
“War comes in many forms.” Though Napoleon had been vanquished and banished to Elba, that did not mean all his cohorts and admirers had been vanquished as well.
He shrugged. “True, but irrelevant. And you have distracted me from my purpose.” He held out a package. The scent of warm yeast hit her as he opened the paper. Hunger flared again.
Just as he had hours before, he helped her to sit up, wrapped in that scratchy wool blanket, his arm around her supporting her. Oddly, it was…comforting…to be taken care of, to give up her volition to someone else for a temporary time.
He smelled of horse, as if he’d ridden recently. Yet she had neither seen nor heard a horse. Where had he stabled the animal, if indeed he had? She had a faint recollection of being on one during a brief moment of consciousness. A horse trained to bear the scent of blood.
Blood. She could take no comfort in this half embrace.
She ate, wondering how far they were from other dwellings and where he had procured the simple ham, bread, and rich wine that helped to warm her from the inside. Her right arm lay useless by her side and her left ached as she lifted each bite to her mouth. She was in no condition to attempt an escape, but at some point she would be, if an escape were needed.
She looked about their shelter. On the far side, rain trickled in through the gaping holes in the roof.
“Will it hold?” she asked.
“The roof is sturdy enough in this corner.” The accent that was not quite recognizable gave his voice into a musical lilt. A rich violoncello.
She picked up the half-eaten round of bread and took another bite. Then exhaustion took precedence over the needs of her stomach. She leaned against him more fully, again trusting in his strength. She stared at the rain-filled sky as if it held answers to all the mysteries. All the mysteries but one. The one only he could reveal.
“Why did you let me live?”
As single drops evolved into a curtain of
water flowing over the edge of the ragged roof, puddling in pools on the earthen floor, he repeated the question in his mind. Why had he let her live?
If there were a search, and certainly for a woman as clearly well born as this one, there would be, he had not traveled far enough from the wreckage of the carriage to ensure no discovery. A risk, but how much of a risk would be determined by how persistently those who loved or needed her searched. Her identity was the key to that. It was time for some questions of his own. “What is your name?”
“What is yours?”
He laughed at the obstinate challenge in her gaze.
“So we are back to my question,” she said, her tone light. “Why did you let me live? That you act as if you do not know my identity suggests you either are steeped in intrigue or that I was not your target.”
Her succinct summation made it even clearer to him that this woman was a danger. While he did not believe her to be involved in any intrigue that concerned him, she thought it possible that he had always intended to take her captive. He could press her, use her injuries to torture the information from her that he wished, but the compulsion to tend to this woman, to care for her, bewildered him. He could no more help himself than he would go against the finely honed instinct that had saved his life countless times.
Yet it was wrong, in the way everything had been wrong since last winter, when he’d received the command from his grandfather to pick up a package from his half brother, Marcus Templeton. The legitimate brother he had never before met, heir to a title and lands in England. The contrast between Gerard’s life and that of his soft brother made it pointedly clear how much an “accident of birth” defined the course of his life. That difference had…angered him. For the first time, he questioned everything he had taken for granted.
“Instinct,” he said, half surprised that he spoke and that he did so truthfully. But as he needed to keep her fearing him, his next words were less truthful. “Instinct is a whimsical thing. I might very well decide to kill you in the morning.”
She shifted against him, letting out a soft moan as she did. He was relieved that the sound lacked the intensity of acute agony. She was healing. This tenderness toward her… He had not felt such a thing in years. Not since…not since Badeau’s death.
Anger flared. His muscles tensed, as they always did with the thought of Badeau’s final days, his tutor’s body skeletal from illness, frail and helpless as he had never before been. She shifted again, turned her head up to look at him, her gaze questioning. Always questioning. That made him smile. He breathed deep, willed his muscles to relax.
“It disturbs you that you let me live,” she said.
It did. Because it felt right and yet letting her live went against all of his training. Because he felt clearly at a point of inflection, the curve of life shifting to something new.
But to reveal that was far too much. She was already too unafraid. Her strength fascinated him, but there was danger here.
“You should be quiet, rest and moan. Not interrogate your captor.”
“Is that how you see yourself? Am I a prisoner?”
Yes, by default, she was his prisoner. After all, even if she were healed, he could not let her go. That she could identify him endangered him. He could deflect or ignore each question. Yet did he wish to?
“For now,” he said. So he had managed to silence her with that. He studied her pale face. She looked shocked and scared, and well she should be scared, enough to stop questioning him.
When her body finally relaxed into sleep, he lay next to her. The bed was narrow and his leg pressed against hers. He imagined that beneath the dust and sweat and hay that he could discern the scent she had used in her bathwater. Long hair tickled his nose. Hair that was tangled now but was fine and straight. The last time he had lain next to a woman thus the circumstances had been vastly different: the bed firm, the linens luxurious and scented with lavender, and the scent of passions well spent in the air. He had not lingered in that bed, as he did not linger in that of any woman, whether he knew her as Gerard Badeau or by any other name.
There was no passion here. Not with the dampness of the rain in the air, the knowledge that he had compromised his work uneasy in his gut.
Why had he let her live?
Yes, there were the surface details—her forthright gaze, the youthful beauty, and the slim figure—none of which were disguised by her injuries. But it wasn’t desire that had inspired him to spare her life. It was something a bit more…domestic. She was a woman and a man’s instinct was to take care of the fairer sex. It was an instinct that had not troubled him in a long time. Women were as treacherous and foolish as men. They were spies and manipulators, assassins and leaders of crime. Not that he thought this woman any of the sort. She had been raised softly. That she was well born was clear not only from her clothes and the company she had kept, but also from the way she spoke. Her small reticule had held no passport, no letters of introduction or letters of credit, but somewhere in the wreckage of luggage, those items would be found. He had had no time to tarry and search.
He had let her change the conversation, but in the quiet of night, it was easier to think. He needed to know her identity before they were found. Someone would miss her. Her own suggestion that he had planned the carriage wreck in order to kidnap her implied as much. And even if she possessed no knowledge of import, those who would suspect Powell’s death to be other than an accident—Gerard did not fool himself that no one would suspect such a thing—might think her disappearance of more import than it was.
Might think that she could lead them to him. Or to the secrets behind Powell’s death. Whether or not she actually had any information, and he was inclined to believe she did not, he had made her important. She knew enough to make others think she knew more. He might have spared her a quick death only to sentence her to a future tortured and prolonged one. When she woke, he would discover her identity.
His body tensed against the future threat, he stared into the falling rain. Actions had consequences and like a stone thrown into a pond, ripples were made again and again.
Why had he let her live?
Chapter Three
When she next woke, rain still spattered down through the hole in the roof and she was shivering beneath the blanket again, his solid warmth gone. She wanted it back, to sink once more into sleep cocooned in his warmth. His. She didn’t even know what to call this man who kept her warm while she slept and tended to her wounds. Who had been the cause of those wounds.
Her chest tightened and her stomach clenched. Any kind emotion toward him was like the Sabine women defending their new husbands, men who had abducted them, to their fathers. Minus the husbands and fathers. She laughed, pressing her face down into the fold of blanket protecting her from the prickly mattress.
Her father didn’t even know she was missing. Would not think anything amiss until the Brumbles or Sir Joseph sent him word or called upon him. Her father… She imagined him in his rented rooms, with only his valet and his secretary, and a mere handful of servants. He would be devastated when he learned of her disappearance.
Her insides twisted at the thought. They had been each other’s only family for so long. He needed her. Not that he couldn’t manage without her, but everything went far more smoothly when she was at his side. He had even expressed such a thing when he’d learned she would attend her cousin first.
How many days had it been since the wreck? One? Two? Surely not more than that? Long enough that someone would realize she was missing. Someone would be searching. And she could not be far from the site of the carriage wreck. Not with her injuries, not two to a horse. Yet, no one had found them. Now the rain would wash away what trail there might have been, creating a divide between the outside world and this strange one in which only she and this man existed.
She was cold and each shiver made her keenly aware of all the ways in which she hurt. Her body still ached acutely and her arm resisted movement. A wh
isper of leather against earth, cloth against cloth, a breath louder than silence, alerted her to his presence.
She opened her eyes. The room was cast in a dim bluish light. Late afternoon perhaps, which meant she had slept through the day, as if her body had decided sleep was the best medicine. Here in the wild, away from modern medicine, it likely was.
The relative wilds. Their shelter had once been a sturdy house but looked to be the bare remnants of a fire. The ravages of war? As her carriage had traversed from Calais to Paris and then across the border into Nassau, she had seen some of the effects of war on the French people. Not nearly as bad, she had been told, as those of the countries France had invaded. England, that fortress of an island, had been spared such a fate.
Her gaze caught his form once again made dark by silhouette as he stood staring out into the rain. Sinister and yet beautiful. He had lain beside her, pressed against her. Her stomach tightened again, her chest as well. Too much emotion welled up inside her, emotion she couldn’t begin to examine because she sensed it would go against that very reason upon which she prided herself.
Who was he?
An assassin, yes, but beyond that? For whom did he work? For what country? What power? In the days when he was not laying traps for carriages and English noblemen, or tending to the injuries of women he had taken captive, where did he live?
A house in the crowded warrens of a city, one more anonymous man amid a metropolis of unknown men? Or perhaps, even a bucolic estate, with happy cows and sheep, a waiting wife and children… Neither extreme was easy to imagine.
Was he married? Could such a man of violence be a husband?
She blinked at the stupidity of her question. History was littered with such men. Women, as well. The acts perpetrated in the name of duty had little bearing on one’s domestic life. Unless, of course, one’s duty was solely to marry, to forge bonds between families. Cold relationships. With each year that passed, her hope for finding a match based on mutual intellectual respect and possibly affection was subsumed by the greater likelihood of settling for social and dynastic advancement alone.
Lady of Intrigue Page 2