“I don’t want to be free,” Ned protested. “In fact, I want you to let her go and charge me instead.”
“Facts, Mr. Carhart, are facts. Wants are wants. The law does not allow me to substitute one for the other, no matter how keen the wanting might be.” The magistrate drew himself up as he spoke. Law hadn’t seemed to matter much to him before he discovered that Kate was the daughter of a duke. “Mr. Carhart also suggested that Lady Kathleen be tried by jury.”
Harcroft smiled at Ned. “I am perfectly happy to put the evidence I’ve obtained before a jury,” he said with an aggressive lift of his chin. “I should love to have one sworn in, right at this instant.”
“Right now?” The magistrate looked vaguely ill. “But it is almost three in the afternoon.”
“What has that to do with anything?” Harcroft demanded.
“This court closes at three.” The magistrate glanced at Harcroft, astounded. “We don’t stay after hours, my lord. Not—not for anything.”
Harcroft stared ahead, his jaw working. “Very well. Toss her in the cells. We’ll finish this in the morning.”
“The cells!” Kate said.
“Lady Kathleen,” Ned said quietly, “will not be seeing the inside of the cells. Surely Your Worship recognizes that a gentleman such as myself can be trusted to return her for trial tomorrow.” He stared the magistrate full in the eyes, letting his threat sink in. If a duke and a marquess were to turn their attention on a puny little police magistrate, the man would be stripped of his seat on the bench before he had a chance to pronounce sentence.
“Ah. Yes.” The magistrate glanced warily from Ned to Harcroft, and licked his lips.
An earl could cost him his seat, as well. Ned would have felt sorry for the magistrate, except that he’d agreed to go along with this travesty in the first place.
“I release the prisoner into her husband’s care for tomorrow’s trial,” the man finally said. “We’ll start at eleven. Sharp.”
NED FELT HOLLOW on the carriage ride home. He’d known Harcroft was planning something. He just hadn’t guessed what. He should have known. He should have done something. But now Kate was threatened, and all his fine plans to prove himself tangled up in his mind.
“Are you sure,” Kate asked dryly, seated across from him, “that we can’t just slay this dragon?”
“Ha.” Ned shook his head wistfully. “I think there are a handful of swords somewhere in Gareth’s home. Maybe stored in the attic?”
It was an enchanting thought, that—sneaking into Harcroft’s house in the dark of night, swathed in a black cloak, sword in hand. With nobody to prosecute the case on the morrow, Kate would be sent home.
It would be lovely, up until the moment when Harcroft was discovered dead in his home. At which point the municipal police wouldn’t need to look far to discover a person who had both an interest in his demise, and an inconvenient bloody sword wrapped in a black cloak.
As if Kate knew the path down which his thoughts had drifted, as if she’d trodden silently down the hallway of his imagination, sword in hand, she sighed. “Drat.” The carriage rolled up to the house and she shook her head as the door opened.
She disappeared into the night, and Ned stared after her. She’d meant the crack about dragons as a joke, as a way to defuse the tense, despairing energy that ran between them. But to him, it felt like more. Dragon or no, she was in need of a hero. And lo, here sat Ned, in the carriage still. He fought the urge to rush into the servants’ quarters in search of long kitchen knives. Some knight he made.
Damn it.
As names went, “Harcroft” didn’t even have a particularly villainous ring to it. It sounded respectable. Stodgy, even. And the threat—imprisonment—wasn’t even the sort of thing that could be slain. Not by typically heroic means. The heroes in the stories had it easy. A week ago Ned had been trying to figure out how to win Louisa’s freedom. Now he was fighting for his wife’s. His entire quest had started off-kilter, and it had only skewed with the passage of time.
Ned pushed himself out of the carriage. “You know,” he said, catching up to her at the door, “If I killed Gareth, we could forestall this whole affair, too. I’d be the Marquess of Blakely. And you, as my wife, could only be charged in the House of Lords.”
“Well. There’s a thought. And so convenient, since the swords are stored in his attics.” Her lips quirked up.
And the sight of that tentative smile—the first he’d seen since she’d been taken to Queen Square—was exactly what Ned needed. Enough with the analogies. Enough with the panic. Kate didn’t need the sort of hero that slew her enemies. That was the easy kind of heroism—the stab-and-vanquish sort. Any idiot with a sword or a kitchen knife could engage in the appropriate hacking motions. No. At this moment Kate needed a real hero. The kind that would put a smile on her face today, and bring her victory tomorrow.
Ned could be that sort of hero.
She walked into the parlor and sat on the silk-cushioned sofa, her silhouette illuminated by the firelight. She turned to look into it, presenting him with her back.
Her back seemed as good a place as any to start. The thin, tense line of her stance made a miserable curve.
He set his hands on her shoulders. The silk of her gown seemed cool to his touch as he slid his hands down; he could feel the ridges of whalebone beneath, stiff lines against his hand. She was wearing a small corset, one that fit neatly under her breasts, clasping her ribs. The chances of his being able to remove it seemed as dim as the lighting in the room.
But above that garment, he could still massage away the hard knots of worry that had collected in her shoulders. He took them on, one by one, letting his fingers speak the reassurance that his voice could not. And once her shoulders had loosened, he noticed how tight her lower back seemed, just at the edges of her corset.
There was only one way to defeat Harcroft on the morrow. Oh, it was possible that Harcroft’s information wasn’t sound, that the testimony he’d collected—and the gravity of his charge—would leave the jury unconvinced. But Ned wasn’t willing to accept a mere possibility of her release. After all, she was charged with a crime, and however good her intentions, she had committed it. He’d gambled enough in his youth; Ned was not going to merely toss the metaphorical dice again and pray for the best.
He pressed his palms into the heated curves of her waist and made gentle circles there, over and over, until those muscles, too, had relaxed.
By contrast, he was all on edge. Kate could tell the entire truth of her story—that Louisa had come willingly, that she’d been beaten by her husband—but so long as Louisa was absent, it was Kate’s word against Harcroft’s.
She had relaxed a little more under his touch, but she was still stiff. Her hands were still clenched at her sides, her fingernails biting into the palms of her hand.
There was the possibility of countering Harcroft’s claims with charges of their own. Assault on Kate, assault on Louisa herself. But every charge Ned could imagine would require Kate to explain the circumstances that had brought them about. She would have to admit her guilt. No, there had to be another way out of this. Something that would leave Kate unquestionably free.
He took her hands. They were still cold and trembled slightly. He flattened her delicate fingers between his, and then pressed his thumb along her palm. Trust me. Trust me. He coaxed the tension from every finger, squeezing them in his grip, working his way up the muscles of her forearm.
She had leaned back as he rubbed her arms, her body molding against his. Holding her as closely as he was, he couldn’t help but brush his arms against her chest. And as he did, he couldn’t help but notice that her nipples had grown hard and tense. And so he massaged them, too.
He made little circles with his fingers about her breasts, radiating from the center on out. She let out a sound, halfway between a sigh and a sob, as he did so. And when that did not relieve the tension in those tight buds—when she turned around and straddled
him, her petticoats covering his legs, her thighs clasping his, her body sweet against his—well. Only a cad would have left her in such a state.
Only a cad would have removed his hands, would have kept his mouth from finding her breasts beneath that gown. Only a cad would have pushed her hands away as they undid the fall of his breeches. And only a true villain would have ignored the rising tide of lust that came up between them.
She slid on top of him; he clasped her waist tightly. She leaned her forehead against his. Their breath mingled, then their bodies. Ned could have let everything go in that first half a minute. He might have rolled her beneath him and held her tight, until he emptied all his fears inside her. But her hands clenched tight on his shoulders. For her, this was more than release. It was reassurance, proof that even the courts of the land could not make her into a small powerless thing.
She was a heated breath of air about him, a warm clasp around his member. Her hands pinned him in place. Only a cad would have taken that control from her.
Tonight, Ned was determined to be her hero.
And so he was.
Chapter Twenty
RELEASE HAD NEVER SEEMED QUITE so relieving to Kate. After they had finished, after he’d kissed her and withdrawn from her and rearranged her skirts, he pulled her back onto his lap. She sat there, her cheek pressed against his, his arms clasped about her. Somehow, that act, primal and real, had jolted something loose inside her. She could think again, could face the prospect of an uncertain tomorrow.
“What do we do?” She whispered the words into his hair.
His hands splayed on her backside, caressing her still.
“We need to tell Gareth,” Ned said. “Send for him immediately, in fact. We’ll need to have our marquess here, to press our advantage.” He smiled slightly. “I shall enjoy using my cousin as a figurehead.”
A thousand doubts clamored up in Kate’s mind. “But—”
“Jenny was already suspicious of Harcroft, I think. And after the role they have played in this, they deserve to know. I would like them to hear it from you.”
“They don’t like me,” Kate said in a small voice.
“They don’t know you. They don’t know anything about you. Don’t you think, Kate, that it’s time you told someone besides me?”
She’d been hiding this side of herself for so long, she couldn’t respond at first. She wanted to, wanted someone else to know what she’d done—and she didn’t want to, all at the same time. If they rejected her for the person she wasn’t, it was almost as if it didn’t sting.
“Gareth respects people who get things done. He’ll take your side of things. Just tell him honestly what you’ve done, and what has transpired.”
Laid out logically like that, the thought was actually a relief. After all these weeks, she could finally tell someone besides Ned the truth—about Louisa, and about herself. It had been a confining secret. Perhaps it was best that it was about to be blown apart. She might have allies again. She nodded in agreement.
“And,” Ned continued, “I’ll need to get Louisa. We need to prove she went of her own accord, and she’s the only one who can convince the jury of that.”
Those words froze Kate. “But Harcroft will demand she return to him.”
“We can shield her from him for a little while yet. Gareth is a marquess. He has no legal claim on her, but in the public’s eye, if he places her under his protection, people will start to think. And the more Harcroft rages, the more society will see him for what he truly is.”
“That’s not what I meant. You’ve seen the state Louisa is in. What could she do? She won’t testify against Harcroft. She can’t even sit up straight when she thinks of confronting him. How can I ask her to speak on my behalf with him sitting there in the courtroom?”
“She’ll testify.” Ned’s voice went dark. “She’s strong. And I can convince her to give Harcroft a taste of his own medicine. I must get going if I’m to fetch her. It’s past dark, and she’s still twenty miles away.”
“Going?” Kate felt a cold flush wash through her. “Fetch her? You’re leaving now?” The words tumbled out before she had a chance to think them through. She knew rationally that he didn’t need to be by her side. But tonight of all nights, she wanted to be held. She wanted to know he was close. She desperately desired to know that she hadn’t been abandoned. It had, after all, happened before. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
He pulled back from her and met her gaze gravely. His eyes seemed impossibly dark in the night, and yet warm, like the charred remains of a log in the fire. “You know Louisa wouldn’t trust a hired man who arrived on her step. Hell, I wouldn’t trust anyone enough to send him, either. It has to be me.”
“I know.” Kate shook her head. “I know. But…” It was foolish to think herself safe when wrapped in his arms, not with danger threatening her so. And with her trial pending in the morning, it would be downright idiotic to suggest going herself, however much she wanted to.
She felt irrational, foolish and mulishly idiotic. Just not so much that she would actually say so.
He must have understood, because he smiled and tipped her chin so that her lips were inches from his.
“Kate,” he said. “I’m not leaving you. I am merely willing to forgo a great deal of sleep in the next few hours. This time, I am going to slay your dragons and leave them for dead. You can count on me.”
Trust him. He lifted her off him and then stood, adjusting his clothing. Something in Kate’s stomach jarred loose.
A great deal had changed since his return to England. She had thought trust was an evanescent thing, impossible to cabin. But whatever the stuff that their marriage was made of, it was not some dry and weightless thing any longer. It had taken root inside her, and it wasn’t going to blow away.
“Ned.”
He turned back toward her again, his face wary.
“Be safe,” she said.
A smile spread across his face, as if she’d given him an unexpected gift.
She wrapped her arms around her waist. It was as if she could feel his hands against her skin, even as he stood yards away. He looked up at her and grinned one last time. She memorized that expression, every last line of it. The memory of his smile was as good as an embrace, even as he walked away.
THE SHEPHERD’S COTTAGE WHERE LOUISA was staying was three hours’ hard ride from London on a good night. This night, Ned realized, wasn’t good. It was desperately dark out; only a sliver of moon lit the way, and even that pale lantern shone fitfully behind ragged, breathy clouds. Tiny, icy spicules of rain cut into Ned’s face as he rode out of the stables.
His mare’s hooves clopped dully, muffled by the rain. The streetlamps edging the cobbled roads of London cast globes of light, dividing the world into stark regions of harsh yellow and impossible shadow. But after half an hour, as he urged his horse on, even that dim illumination faded into nothingness behind him. The moon slipped closer to the horizon. He could make out nothing about him but the dim moonlit track, two muddy wheel-ruts carved through dying autumn grass. It rustled in the wind, rattling in the rain. His horse fell into a relentless canter; the wind rushed by his face, cold and numbing. It didn’t matter. There was no direction but forward; no possibility except success.
It seemed Ned had been riding for an eternity, suspended in night air. The horse’s rhythm pounded into his flesh, until he was nothing more than the fall of hooves against mud, and the whip of the wind about him. One hour faded into two, then crept up on three. The rain stopped; the wind did not.
He came to the point where the track turned off toward Berkswift and entered the woods. During daylight hours, the grove seemed nothing more than a scraggly copse of trees. Now he could feel the change in the night air immediately as the horse entered those shadows. The musky scent of earth grew thicker; the air felt colder when he drew it into his lungs.
The foliage had never seemed particularly dense in the sun. But the black leaves filtered out a
ll but the most persistent light—and that came through in dark, waving blotches, shadows chasing each other across the uneven forest floor as the branches overhead moved in the wind.
His mount shied and skittered, throwing her head in fear of those moon-tossed shadows. Ned patted the animal’s neck in a fashion that he hoped was soothing. There wasn’t much time to cater to equine sensibilities in his schedule. And while he’d chosen the animal for the speed and sureness of her footing, with these shadows about, she was almost as skittish as Champion.
A quarter-mile into the forest, an owl hooted. For one heart-stopping second, Ned felt his horse’s muscles tense in panic. He reached forward to give the animal another soothing pat, but before his gloved fingers landed, the animal let out a frightened cry. She reared up, and before Ned could regain his balance, she broke into a teeth-jolting gallop.
Ned sawed uselessly on the reins. The heavy leather strings cut into his gloves, but the mare had grabbed the bit between her teeth and was too frightened to pay the least attention. She stampeded along the unlit path, her sides heaving in terror. Branches crashed into Ned’s cheeks, little whippy things that left stinging lashes across his face.
“Hush,” he tried. And then, “Quiet.” Not that the horse could hear any of Ned’s attempts to calm her, not over the cacophony of breaking branches.
“Stop!” he finally shouted.
As if the mare heard this command, her forward motion checked. It happened too fast for Ned to react, and yet it seemed to occur so slowly, he could see every leaf on the tree in front of him. There was a cracking noise; Ned felt a sudden sense of drunken vertigo as inertia slapped him against his mount’s neck. The beast stumbled. There wasn’t time to move as his mare fell, but still, Ned tried to kick free. His boot caught in the stirrup—he swung wildly—and the ground rushed up to slam into him. The next instant after that, the horse was rolling on him. Ned’s leg twisted underneath that crushing weight. He pulled away; his leg wrenched.
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