Hoyt, Elizabeth - The Leopard Prince2.txt
Page 9
this woman was his employer and he her servant. How could he forget that
fact? Irritated with himself, he faced forward again.
She didn’t seem to notice his pause. “Do you have the eggs still? I’d
like to see them.”
They’d rounded a bend in the road, and Harry saw that a tangle of
branches blocked the way. A tree had fallen across the lane.
“Whoa!” He frowned. The lane was hardly wide enough for the gig as it
was. It would be a devil’s job to turn the carriage around. What—?
Four men suddenly appeared from behind the tangled branches. They were
big, they looked mean, and they each held a knife in their hand.
/Shit./
/Chapter Six/
George screamed as Harry Pye made a heroic attempt to pull the horse
around. The lane was too narrow, and the men were upon him in seconds.
Mr. Pye kicked the first in the chest with a booted foot. The second and
third overwhelmed and dragged him from the carriage. The fourth dealt
him a horrendous blow to the jaw.
/Oh, my sweet Lord!/ They were going to kill him. George felt a second
scream clog her throat. The gig jolted as the horse half-reared. It was
frightened and trying to run, stupid animal, even though it had nowhere
to go. George frantically scrabbled for the reins on the floor of the
gig, cursing under her breath and banging her head against the seat.
“Watch it! He’s got a knife!”
That wasn’t Mr. Pye’s voice. George chanced raising her head and saw to
her relief that Harry Pye did indeed have a knife. He held a thin,
gleaming blade in his left hand. Even from this distance it looked
rather nasty. He was in a strangely graceful fighter’s crouch in the
road, both hands in front of him. He appeared to know what he was doing,
too. One of the villains was bleeding from his cheek. But the other
three were circling, trying to flank him, and the odds didn’t look good.
The gig lurched again. She lost sight of the action as she fell and
cracked her shoulder against the seat.
“Will you hold still, you silly beast?” she muttered.
The reins were sliding toward the front, and if she lost them, she’d
never get control of the gig. Shouts and grunts came from the fighters,
interspersed with the awful sound of fists hitting flesh. She daren’t
risk looking up again. She held on to the seat with one hand to steady
herself and strained with the other toward the slithering reins.
/Almost./ Her fingertips grazed the leather, but the horse jolted,
sending her back against the seat. She just kept her footing. If the
horse would only hold still.
One.
More.
Second.
She dived and triumphantly came up with the reins. Quickly she sawed
them, little minding the horse’s mouth, and tied them to the seat. She
chanced a glance. Harry Pye was bleeding from his forehead. As she
watched, an attacker lunged at him from his right. Mr. Pye whirled in a
powerful move and kicked at the other man’s legs. A second thug clawed
at his left arm. Mr. Pye twisted and performed some sort of maneuver,
too fast for her to see. The man screamed and staggered back with a
bloody hand. But the first man took advantage of the distraction. He hit
Mr. Pye again and again in the middle. Harry Pye grunted with each blow,
doubling over, valiantly trying to swing his knife.
George set the carriage brake.
The third and fourth men advanced. The first man punched Mr. Pye once
more, and he fell to his knees, retching.
Mr. Pye was going to die.
/Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!/ George scrambled under the seat and brought up
a sackcloth-wrapped bundle. Shaking the cloth free, she clutched one of
the dueling pistols in her right hand, raised it with a straight arm,
aimed at the man standing over Mr. Pye, and fired.
/Bang!/
The explosion nearly deafened her. She squinted through the smoke and
saw the man reel away, clutching his side. Got the bastard! She felt a
thrill of bloodthirsty glee. The remaining men, including Harry Pye, had
turned in her direction with varying degrees of shock and horror. She
raised the second pistol and took aim at another man.
The man flinched and ducked. “Gorblimey! She’s got a pistol!”
Apparently the thought that she might be dangerous had never crossed
their minds.
Harry Pye rose, pivoted silently, and slashed at the man nearest him.
“Jaysus!” the man screamed, holding a hand to his bloody face. “Let’s
go, lads!” The thugs turned and dashed back the way they’d come.
The lane was suddenly quiet.
George heard the blood rushing in her veins. She carefully set the
pistols down on the seat.
Mr. Pye still looked in the direction the men had disappeared. He seemed
to decide that they were gone, for he lowered the hand holding the
knife. Bending, he slipped it inside his boot. Then he turned to her.
The blood from the wound on his forehead had mixed with sweat and
smeared down the side of his face. Stray hairs from his queue stuck to
the gore. He breathed deeply, his nostrils flaring as he tried to catch
his breath.
George felt strange, almost angry.
He walked toward her, his boots scraping against the rocks in the road.
“Why didn’t you tell me you’d brought pistols?” His voice was raspy and
deep. It demanded apology, concession, even submission.
George didn’t feel like giving any.
“I—” she began firmly, strongly, even haughtily.
She didn’t have a chance to finish because he was in front of her. He
grabbed her about the waist and yanked her from the carriage. She
half-fell against him. She put her hands on his shoulders to keep from
toppling over. He pulled her against him until her breasts were quite
squashed into his chest, which, strangely, felt very nice. She lifted
her head to ask him what, exactly, he thought he was about—
/And he kissed her!/
Luscious, firm lips that tasted of the wine they’d drunk at luncheon.
They moved over hers in an insistent rhythm. She could feel the prickle
of his stubble and his tongue, running over the crease of her lips until
she opened them and then . . . /Ohm./ Someone was moaning, and it might
very well be her because she had never, never, /never/ been kissed like
this before in her whole life. His tongue was actually inside her mouth,
stroking and teasing hers. She was about to melt—maybe she already was
melting, she felt absolutely drenched. And then he lured her tongue into
his mouth and suckled it, and she lost all control and wrapped her arms
about his neck and suckled him back.
The horse—stupid, /stupid/ animal—chose that moment to whicker.
Mr. Pye jerked his head away. He glanced around. “I can’t believe I did
that.”
“Nor I,” George said. She tried to pull his head back down so he would
do it again.
But suddenly he picked her up and deposited her on the carriage seat.
While she was still blinking, he crossed to the other side and jumped in.
<
br /> Mr. Pye placed the still-loaded pistol in her lap. “It’s dangerous here.
They may decide to come back.”
“Oh.”
All her life she’d been warned that men were slaves to their desires,
that they held their impulses in barely controlled check. A woman—a
lady—must be very, very careful of her actions so she did not put spark
to the gunpowder that was a man’s libido. The consequences of a lady’s
carelessness were never fully explained, but the hints were dire indeed.
George sighed. How deflating now to find Harry Pye was the exception to
the rule of male instability.
He maneuvered the gig around, alternately cursing and cajoling the
horse. Finally he got it turned back the way they’d come and urged the
gelding into a brisk trot. George watched him. His face was grimly set.
There was no evidence of the passion with which he’d kissed her only
moments ago.
Well, if he could be sophisticated, then so could she. “Do you think
Lord Granville had those men attack us, Mr. Pye?”
“They attacked only me. So, yes, it could be Lord Granville. He’s the
most likely.” He looked thoughtful. “But Thomas Granville rode up the
lane only minutes before we did. He could’ve warned the toughs if they
were in his pay.”
“You think he is in league with his father, despite his apology?”
Mr. Pye pulled a handkerchief out of an inside pocket and gently wiped
her cheek with one hand. The handkerchief came away with blood on it. He
must have rubbed his blood on her when they’d kissed. “I don’t know. But
there’s one thing I’m sure of.”
George cleared her throat. “What is that, Mr. Pye?”
He tucked away his handkerchief. “You can call me Harry now.”
HARRY PUSHED OPEN THE DOOR to the Cock and Worm and was immediately
smothered in smoke. West Dikey, the village closest to Woldsly Manor,
was just large enough to boast two taverns. The first, the White Mare,
was a half-timbered building with a few rooms and could be called an
/inn./ Because of this, it offered meals and drew the more respectable
business: passing travelers, local merchants, and even gentry.
The Cock and Worm was where everyone else went.
A series of dingy rooms with exposed beams that had caught more than one
customer a nasty knock on the head, the Cock and Worm had windows
permanently blackened from pipe smoke. A man could sit in peace here and
not be recognized by his own brother.
Harry made his way through the crowd to the bar, passing a table of
workmen and farmers. One of the men—a farmer named Mallow—looked up and
nodded in greeting as he passed. Harry nodded back, surprised but
pleased. Mallow had asked Harry for help back in June about an argument
he was having over his neighbor’s cow. The cow kept escaping its
enclosure and had twice trampled the lettuce in the Mallow’s kitchen
garden. Harry had settled the difficulty by helping the elderly neighbor
build a new wall for his cow. But Mallow was a taciturn man and had
never thanked Harry for his trouble. Harry had assumed Mallow was
ungrateful. Obviously, he’d been wrong.
The thought warmed him as he reached the bar. Janie was working tonight.
She was sister to Dick Crumb, the owner of the Cock and Worm, and
sometimes helped at the counter.
“Yeah?” she mumbled. Janie spoke to the air over his right shoulder. Her
fingernails drummed an uneven beat on the counter.
“Pint of bitter.”
She set the ale down in front of him, and he slid a few coppers across
the scarred counter.
“Dick in tonight?” Harry asked quietly.
Janie was close enough to hear, but her face was blank. She’d gone back
to the drumming.
“Janie?”
“Aye.” She stared now at his left elbow.
“Is Dick in?”
She turned and walked into the back.
Harry sighed and found an empty table near a wall. With Janie it was
hard to tell if she’d gone to tell Dick he was here, went to fetch more
ale, or simply tired of his question. In any case, he could wait.
He’d gone stark, raving mad. Harry took a sip of his beer and wiped the
foam from his mouth. It was the only explanation for kissing Lady
Georgina this afternoon. He’d walked toward her, his head bleeding and
his gut aching from the beating. He hadn’t been thinking of kissing her
at all. Then somehow she was in his arms, and there was nothing in the
world that was going to stop him from tasting her. Not the possibility
of being attacked again. Not the pain in his limbs. Not even the fact
that she was aristocracy, for pity’s sake, and all that meant to him and
his ghosts.
Lunacy. Plain and simple. Next he’d be running through the high street,
naked and waving his John Thomas. He took another glum sip. And what a
fine sight that would be, the state his cock had been in lately.
He was a normal man. He’d felt lust for a woman before. But at those
times he’d either bedded the woman, if she was free, or made do with his
hand. Over and done with. He’d never had this aching, restless feeling,
a longing for something he knew damn well he couldn’t have. Harry
scowled into his mug. Maybe it was time for another ale.
“Hope that look isn’t for me, lad.” Two mugs were slammed down in front
of him, foam sloshing over their tops. “Have one on the house.”
Dick Crumb slid his belly, covered in a stained apron, under the table
and took a swig from his mug. Small, piggy eyes closed in ecstasy as the
beer slid down his throat. He took out a flannel cloth and mopped his
mouth, his face, and his bald pate. Dick was a large man, and he sweated
all the time, the bare dome of his head shining greasy red. He sported a
tiny gray pigtail, scraped together from the oily strands of hair still
clinging to the sides and back of his head.
“Janie told me you were out here,” Dick said. “Been a while since you
stopped by.”
“I was set on by four men today. On Granville land. Do you know anything
about it?” Harry raised his mug and watched Dick over the rim. Something
flickered in the piggy eyes. Relief?
“Four men, you say?” Dick traced a wet spot on the table. “Lucky you’re
alive.”
“Lady Georgina had a pair of pistols.”
Dick’s eyebrows flew up to where his hairline should have been. “That
so? You were with the lady, then.”
“Aye.”
“Well.” Dick sat back and tipped his face to the ceiling. He took out
the flannel and began wiping his head.
Harry was silent. Dick was thinking, and there was no point in hurrying
him. He sipped his ale.
“See here.” Dick sat forward. “The Timmons brothers usually stop in at
night, Ben and Hubert. But tonight only Ben’s been by, and he was
limping a bit. Said he was kicked by a horse, but that don’t seem
likely, do it, seeing as how the Timmons haven’t got a horse.” He nodded
triumphantly and upended his mug again.
“Who do the Timmons work for, d’you know?”
jacks-of-all-trades, see. But they mostly help out Hitchcock, who
tenants for Granville.”
Harry nodded, unsurprised. “Granville was behind it.”
“Now I didn’t say that.”
“No, but you didn’t have to.”
Dick shrugged and raised his mug.
“So,” Harry said softly, “who do you think killed Granville’s sheep?”
Dick, caught as he swallowed, choked. Out came the flannel again. “As to
that,” he gasped when he could speak again, “I figured like everyone
else in these parts that it was you.”
Harry narrowed his eyes. “Did you?”
“Made sense, what Granville did to you, did to your father.”
Harry was silent.
Which must’ve made Dick uneasy. He patted the air. “But after I’d mulled
on it a bit, it didn’t seem right. I knew your da, and John Pye wouldn’t
never hurt another man’s bread and butter.”
“Even after Granville?”
“Your da was the salt of the earth, lad. He wouldn’t have harmed a fly.”
Dick raised his mug as if in toast. “The salt of the earth.”