Undeniable Rogue (The Rogues Club Book One)

by Annette Blair

  “I would have to check you everywhere. You would have to take off—”

  He relaxed his stance. “That could be agreeable.”

  “You did sleep with the boys, so you must allow me to check you. Come here so I can—”

  The minute he got close enough, Gideon removed her wrapper and grinned when he saw that she was still wearing his pantaloons but nothing much else, except her chemise. “I had forgotten where we were up to.”

  “I remember where you were up to,” she said, unbuttoning his shirt, watching him react to her standing there as she was, half dressed.

  “Gideon,” she said, stepping into his arms. “What we have together is not so bad, is it? Even children and dogs and cats and spots? You do not have any, by the way. Spots, that is.”

  He kissed her. “I feel much the same, Sabrina. Not about the spots, but that this is good, our life.” He carried her to his bed. “I have also been thinking that it is about time Papa had another turn.”

  And though it was still too soon for consummation, they did not do much talking before they slept the sleep of the sated.

  * * *

  The watcher wondered if any stranger would invade Stanthorpe Place this night. There were so many intrusions, ‘twas a wonder Stanthorpe did not simply leave the front door open.

  Once upon a time he might have been welcome at that door, himself.

  Back then he stood tall, taller than most, and strong. Used to be, he stood handsomer than most, as well. A heart-breaker women had once called him.

  A rogue, a lady-killer. He scoffed. Not anymore, not unless the women he gazed upon died of fright.

  The only heart he broke now was his own, every time he looked into a mirror.

  Every time he regarded the scar slashing his cheek, he recalled everything ugly in his life. They told him, of the knife-wound to his face, that it sat close enough to his eye so that only a miracle could save his sight.

  Only a miracle could have saved his life as well.

  Yes, he got his miracles, both of them, much good they did him. He had paid a high price.

  But he supposed someone had to pay.

  Someone always did.

  * * *

  That evening, when Gideon came into her bedchamber, Sabrina was already wearing his pantaloons and trying to button his shirt. “I cannot fit my breasts into your shirt,” she said in greeting.

  “That is not the only problem,” Gideon said, regarding her, hands on hips, his look warm and assessing.

  “What could be worse than this tight thing?”

  “Those two wet spots at the front.”

  “Oh, Lord, I am leaking. I will expel all Juliana’s dinner, if I am not careful. I told you it was too tight.”

  “That, my Sweet, I can see for myself.”

  “Help me out of this, will you?”

  “I have never been more eager to assist.”

  “Oh, you. Will you, never, pay attention to anything more than the desires of the flesh?”

  “I did not hear you complaining last evening. As a matter of fact, I seem to recall someone asking for more. Was that me? I did not think it was me.”

  Sabrina kissed him and danced from his reach. “That will be enough. Deviltry is to be saddled in two days time at dawn, so we can go for an early ride in Hyde Park and I can demonstrate my riding skills. I will set Waredraper to making me a larger shirt tomorrow.”

  “And what do you plan to wear for a coat?”

  “He found an old one of his and is fixing that for me. I knew the coat would be a problem, but I did not consider the shirt. Now you must teach me to walk like a man.”

  Teaching his seductive wife to walk like a man became an exercise in futility. When she tried to walk straight, Gideon found the swivel in her hips truly amazing.

  When they got down to business, they decided she must at least learn to swagger like a man. This, she tried with Gideon behind her, his hands at her hips, to keep them from swiveling, but it was no use.

  Sabrina could not walk like a man for anything.

  All the exercise served to do was arouse Gideon, which was fine with him. He had rather be the rider, where his wife was concerned. He certainly had no intention of letting her jockey in a race. He was simply having as good a time with her foolish notion as he could while it lasted.

  * * *

  Both the coat and the shirt turned out well and on the day of their early morning ride, Sabrina woke Juliana to feed her early. Then they were off.

  In Hyde Park at five o’clock in the afternoon, all the fashionables paraded through the gates, in open carriages, on horse back, or arm in arm. But at five o’clock in the morning, none but a robust and dedicated few riders could be found there.

  Since Gideon kept several good stallions in the mews behind his Grosvenor Square house, he gave his blood bay to Sabrina for the ride there and he rode Deviltry, himself. “When we arrive,” he told Sabrina. “We can trade mounts.”

  Truth to tell, he wanted to be certain that she did, indeed, ride well, and that she had a good seat, before he took a chance either with her neck, or Deviltry’s.

  As good as her word, Sabrina proved to Gideon that she could handle and sit a horse as well as any member of The Jockey Club, so they switched mounts.

  Once she was up and settled on Deviltry’s back, they chose a course for a short race between them. Gideon was so cock-sure he would win, even on Ransom, because of his superior riding skills, that when the race began, he did not bother to try. But when he saw what an exceptional race jockey Sabrina proved to be, he bent low over his horse and gave it his best.

  Still, Sabrina won, hands down.

  “Where did you learn to ride like that?” Gideon asked. They turned their horses back toward Grosvenor Square, with her riding Deviltry, and him cutting a fine figure on Ransom.

  Sabrina petted Deviltry’s neck. “I rode everyday when I was a child on my father’s estate in Exeter.”

  “You said you were not of the gentry.” Gideon slowed and allowed her to take the lead on the left turn toward his stable in the Grosvenor mews.

  “I said I was not a member of the fashionable set, not that I was never a member of the gentry,” Sabrina said, dismounting.

  She waited for him to dismount and join her. “My father lost our estate ages ago,” she continued as they approached the house. “Therefore, as an adult, I was not fashionable.”

  “Who are your parents?” he asked as they crossed the kitchen and took the stairs toward their bedchambers.

  “My father was a country squire who gambled away the money and property his father left him. And I do not see that it makes any difference,” she said, preceding him into her bedchamber. She turned to face him, for once allowing her self-confidence to show. “What matters is that I ride well, do I not?”

  “Very well.”

  She threw herself into his arms. “Then you will allow me to race at the St. Eustace Winter Fair, to win you the purse?”

  Gideon pulled her close and tried to distract her with kisses.

  She pulled away. “You will, will you not?”

  Gideon sighed. “I will not.”

  To his shock, she shoved away from him so quickly, and with such force, she left him off balance, literally.

  “Why did you let me race you this morning?” she cried. “Why dress me and—”

  “Undress you?” Gideon raised one, speaking brow. “Why, indeed.”

  “The race, everything, it was all a hum? A big fat Banbury tale?”

  “This morning’s race between us was a lark, Sabrina. Nothing more. Of course you will not ride in a public race.”

  “You bounder, you reprobate, you...you—”

  “Husband?”

  “But—”

  “No. You cannot. Absolutely not. Over my dead body. Next question.”

  Sabrina marched across the room tapping her hand with her riding crop, arguing beneath her breath at a ripping pace.

  Gideon could
just imagine her working up her best argument, while he fortified himself against same, by going off to his club and not returning until long after she slept.

  Unfortunately, he had discovered that spending time at his club did not hold the appeal it used to.

  Before he opened his eyes the following morning, Gideon sensed that his bedchamber spun about him. He also suspected that someone had set the bed afire.

  He wished he had gotten drunk the night before, so there would be a good reason for this misery. As it was, he had done nothing but play cards and win.

  “Oh, oh,” he heard Damon say, from somewhere beside him.

  Loathe to open his painful eyelids, Gideon hoped, for once, that the exclamation meant that Drizzle had desecrated a carpet.

  “What is it, Sweetheart?” Sabrina asked, stirring as she woke beside Gideon. “What is wrong?”

  “Papa has—”

  “Do not say it,” Gideon begged, his eyes closed against the room’s gyration.

  “Spots,” the boy said anyway.

  “Damn.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “You are the worse patient I have ever come across,” Sabrina said the evening of the fourth day of Gideon’s confinement.

  “Of course I am,” he snapped. “I am hungry but food does not stay with me. I am dizzy and the room will not settle. I itch where one should never scratch, and that of course mostly happens while Grandmama is reading to me.”

  Sabrina giggled. “But you are better today. I see that your spots are fading.”

  “Thank God for that. Except that I am fading, too, and it is barely dark outside.”

  “Sleep, then,” she said kissing him and rubbing his back as he turned on his side to close his heavy eyelids. “Come to bed,” he said as he drifted. “I will sleep better, if you do.”

  He awoke late the following morning, feeling worlds better. After he ate the breakfast delivered to his bed, he discovered that his food stayed where it ought.

  When Bilbury returned for the tray, Gideon asked him to fetch Sabrina.

  “I am sorry, your grace,” he said nearly an hour later. “But we cannot seem to locate the Duchess.”

  “Did you look in the nursery?”

  “Of course, your grace.”

  “In the kitchen?”

  “We looked everywhere, your grace. Your wife is nowhere on the premises.”

  “Nowhere?” Gideon said. “She has to be somewhere. Wait. What day is this?”

  “It is the third of February, your grace, in the year of our Lord, Eighteen Hundred and Sixt—”

  “Stuff it.” Gideon jumped from the bed. “And fetch my clothes.”

  Bilbury offered the pantaloons he had already brought in. “But your grace—”

  “The St. Eustace Winter Fair begins today, does it not?” Gideon tugged his pantaloons from his disapproving valet’s reluctant grasp.

  “Er, yes, your grace. It does begin today.”

  “Have my carriage brought around. Hurry, Man.”

  * * *

  By the time Gideon’s carriage arrived in Chelsea, it was early afternoon and obvious from the cheering crowd that the race had already begun.

  Gideon jumped from the conveyance, blocked on all sides by farm animals, farmers and other assorted fair fanciers. He fought his way amid the throng, weaving through a score of gaily decorated booths and tents selling every item from silk gloves to baby pigs.

  He denied an opportunity to buy a manure spreader and bypassed a miracle elixir, advertising a cure for ailments ranging from apoplexy to temper tantrums. “Too bad they do not have one for headstrong wives,” he muttered.

  He almost cut through an abandoned cockfight ring, until he saw that it was littered with the carcasses of birds that looked to have exploded.

  In a huge open ale tent, a table full of red-faced merrymakers, back-teeth-awash, invited him in for a nip. He damned near joined them.

  At a Far-Eastern pavilion, a bearded lady propositioned him, stopping him in his tracks. Gideon apologized and told her that he had enough problems, thank you very much, with the woman he already had.

  By the time he made it to the front of the spectators, he saw Deviltry, clear as day, pass a length ahead of the rest.

  Gideon could not moderate his grin, no matter how angry he tried to be.

  “Two more times around the bell course,” he heard the announcer say.

  His palms sweat and his knees knocked. Gideon had never been so worried. If Sabrina got out of this alive, he was going to have to beat her, after he assured himself she had not broken anything but his trust.

  The runners passed again. Only one more time around—he just might make it.

  A rider was down. Damn.

  Gideon charged onto the course, nearly getting himself trampled, but he fell and rolled, just in time, and neither horse nor rider was forced to break stride.

  When he reached the felled rider, the injured man was cursing a blue streak, accusing the race commissioners of allowing a professional jockey on the course with a blasted Arabian.

  Sabrina. They thought Sabrina was a professional. “I’ll be—”

  The race had ended, the spectators cheering and crowding ‘round the winner.

  Gideon elbowed his way through. Sabrina sat atop a snorting Deviltry, grinning with pride, laughing, congratulating Deviltry, until she saw him.

  When he grabbed her by the waist and hauled her to the ground, she yelped. Then he crushed her in his embrace and kissed her dizzy.

  The crowd went dead silent. The Duke of Stanthorpe had just kissed his boy jockey before the entire world and his brother.

  Someone tapped Sabrina on the back, stealing her attention from the fiery exhibition she and Gideon had just presented. She turned to accept the five-thousand pound purse and caught sight of Homer Lowick, grinning, not ten feet away.

  Amidst the chaos of happy congratulations, the horrible little man tipped his hat and made a cutting motion with a finger across his neck.

  Sabrina tried not to faint or to run. She turned away, but stood her ground, glad now that Gideon had come, glad to have his supporting arm around her.

  In addition to the race purse, she received an additional thirty-five hundred pounds from the bet she had Doggett place. When Doggett brought her the second purse, Gideon all but growled at the man, likely for abetting her in this jaunt. Then her husband had the gall to ask Doggett to bring Deviltry home for them.

  Through it all, Sabrina felt sick, she was so worried. There remained no doubt in her mind any longer. Homer Lowick knew where to find her and who to find her with. He was closing in and she would be forced to run again or she would have no choice but to stand and face her enemy.

  After the race crowd finally thinned, they began to make their silent way back toward Gideon’s carriage. But it was getting late, so Gideon stopped to purchase tup’ney pies and found a bench where they could sit and eat them.

  “Tell me,” he said, breaking the tense silence. “Did our daughter receive any sustenance today?”

  “I expressed my milk so Miss Minchip could bottle feed her. If I was not back by now, she was going to feed her pap. Do not worry. Juliana is not at home starving.”

  “I am pleased to hear it.”

  And that was the end of their dinner conversation.

  By the time Gideon’s driver was able to move the carriage from its location amid the merrymakers, dusk had just begun to paint the horizon with wild streaks of pinks and grays.

  They rode home in silence as well, on opposite seats in the closed carriage, facing each other, but not.

  Gideon was furious. Sabrina knew that. She could still see the tic working in his cheek. Yet, he had kissed her. Why?

  She could not bear his silence, because guilt rode her. She could not bear her own silence, because she kept seeing Lowick’s threatening action in her mind’s eye.

  “When it was clear that you wanted to beat me, why did you kiss me, instead?”

&
nbsp; “To keep from beating you.”

  “Oh.”

  He turned from his absorption in the passing scenery to regard her. “I thought at first that you had fallen and broken your neck, but by the time I saw you, I had already discovered the injured to be a different rider. I was grateful enough that you were spared to need to kiss you.”

  Thunderclouds formed on his brow and the timbre of his voice rose an octave. “But I need to beat you as well, because you could have been the rider who was injured. Damn it, Sabrina, you could have been killed!”

  “Is the fallen rider badly hurt?”

  “Not as badly as you will be when I am finished with you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Your vocabulary seems to have deserted you.”

  “I believe I dropped it somewhere near the finish line...when I spotted your face in the crowd.”

  “And trampled it underfoot, like the years you took from my life with that stunt.” Gideon leaned his head against the squabs and closed his eyes. “God, Sabrina, I would never have forgiven myself, if something had happened to you.”

  “Why? I made the choice. Why would you blame yourself?”

  He regarded her as if she had grown an extra head. “Because I told Hawksworth I would care for and protect you. And if you were injured, I would have failed to honor that promise.”

  “Oh. I thought, perhaps, you might have had...a different reason.”

  “Like?”

  “Me.”

  Gideon reached for her and hauled her across the carriage to his lap. “I had many very good reasons,” he said, as he opened his mouth over hers and kissed her in such a way as to leave her with no doubt of his feelings on the matter.

  “Because you like me?” she asked with a satisfied smile when he allowed her up for air.

  “Hoyden,” he said kissing her again. “Vixen.” Another kiss. “Enfant terrible.”

  “I am not a child,” she snapped, pulling away and crossing her arms.

  He stroked her breast, and she moved to accommodate his possession, sliding back into his embrace.

  “Point taken. You are not a child.”

  In an unprecedented move, Sabrina slipped her hand inside the flap on his tightening pantaloons, garnering an oath from her husband that seemed less a curse and more an exclamation of appreciation.