Not Jack. Please God, not Jack. Everyone around her must be wishing the same thing for the people they loved.
Loved? Mairey scrubbed that impossible word from her thoughts. She couldn’t love the man—wouldn’t.
Everyone grew still as the top of the lift appeared, the cage groaning its way up through the center of the iron frame until it jerked to a stop. There was a shocked silence and then a riotous joy swept the crowd.
The men were safe and stumbling out of the cage! Jack had done it—had rescued them just as he’d promised.
Mairey still searched the grimy faces, her heart frantic as wives and mothers swarmed around the rescued men and pulled them away from the danger and into their arms.
How she envied them all their joy even as she shared it. But Jack wasn’t among them, and she’d never been so frightened in all her life. Tears swam in her eyes as the cage descended into the shaft, making seeing difficult.
She pushed closer, found a familiar face—Richmond—the engineer! She recognized him from Jack’s office, though he was altogether inky. She caught his arm, happy to see him safe, but terrified for Jack.
“Have you seen Jack? Is he coming up?”
“Ah, Miss Faelyn, isn’t it?” Richmond enveloped her hand and shook it with all the glad vigor of a man recently resurrected, grinning with stark white teeth. “We met at Drakestone.”
“Yes, yes. But did you see Jack down there? Is he all right?”
Richmond smiled even wider, pointing over her shoulder to the cage rising up again out of the terrible pit. “Looks well enough to me.”
Jack! Oh, how she wanted to shout his name and run to him! The lout was safe! And oily black, from the top of his head to his once-crisp white shirttails that now hung out of his stained leather trousers.
Mairey’s anger burned as brightly as her relief as Jack made his way toward her. They were shoved together in the tempest of glad-handing and reveling, and he held her tightly, length to length, and grinning
“We saved them all, Mairey,” he whispered, his eyes shot with red. “Thank you.”
Thank you? For covering for him, for telling his lies, for praying for him, for his people, all through the hellish night?
“‘Glad Heath,’ Jack? Is that what this valley was before you destroyed it with your coal pits? A misty, heather-scented moorland?”
He frowned down at her, then slid his hand along his cheek as though she had slapped him there. “It was a heath to be sure, Mairey. But long, long before it came to my hands.”
“It’s ugly here, Jack.”
Something unfamiliar and humbling flickered in the clear midnight of his eyes. He set her from him, a distance that seemed lonelier than winter.
“Glad Heath is a colliery, if you haven’t noticed. It’s not a spit-clean university. It lacks the clipped hedges and the oak-paneled eating halls. It’s grimy, stark, and dreary. The work abrades the skin and blackens the lungs—”
“And it crushes people, Jack.” Her panic and anger made her reach for him and hold tightly, made his thick, sinewy arms seem all too vulnerable against the force of a mountain bearing down on him. “Can’t you see the danger? Couldn’t you feel it while you were down there?”
“I know the risk.”
She hated that part of him—the cool mining baron. “I’m sure you do. But the risk is theirs, Lord Rushford, not yours. Their sons and husbands, their fathers.”
“And my father.”
“Oh, and a great risk he must have taken every day. Sitting in his fine office in London, worried about his profits, his investment—”
“His life.” He frowned. “My father had no office in London. I don’t know where you get that notion. He labored all his days here at Glad Heath. He died here.”
She wasn’t sure she had heard him right; she was tired to the marrow and confused by all the celebrating. “Your father died here? How?”
“In a riot during a labor dispute.”
“A mining baron, dying at his own mine in a labor dispute? Now there’s a switch.”
“Mining baron?” He laughed then, throwing his head back to the brightness of the sky, a touch of madness in his laughter. “Bloody hell, madam—my father was a pitman.”
“A what?”
“A coal miner.”
“No.” He was lying, trying to make some kind of point.
He cocked his head at her, raising a brow that was hardly distinguishable from his coal-begrimed skin. “No?”
“He couldn’t have been a coal miner. Then how did you—”
“How did I—the son of a poor man—end up with Glad Heath?” He snorted and took the cup of water that a buxom, dazzle-eyed young woman offered to him. He drank it down in a single quaff. “My thanks, Molly.”
“And my greatest pleasure, my lord.” The brazen woman drew a smile out of him as she sped away with her skirts caught up to her shapely calves.
Mairey’s face flushed as a wave of blatant, green-tinted jealousy swamped her. A wholly unworthy and out-of-proportion emotion.
“How did you end up with Glad Heath, Jack?”
He glared down at her, swabbing his neck with a red kerchief. It came away black and dripping with sweat. “I bought it from the estate of the man who killed my father.”
Another woman came to Jack, the matronly Mistress Boyd, handing him a chunk of bread and a wet rag, leaving him with a motherly kiss and a pat on his backside. His eyes followed the woman fondly before he turned back to Mairey. He seemed righteously proud of himself and so much at home here. “My father worked this mine from the time he was eight years old. He formed a union and led a strike against the unsafe conditions in the pits, shutting down the mine for a month.”
“He was killed for leading a strike? Jack, that’s horrible. How could that happen?” Feeling roundly possessive, Mairey took the rag out of his hand as he stuffed the bread into his mouth, and she began to scrub the coal off his nose.
“Cahill sent his private army on horseback from the train station, rode them up the hill to the pit, and let them loose against a handful of unarmed men and boys.”
“How could he?” Horrified, Mairey scrubbed more thoroughly, streaking the black off his cheeks and forehead, while Jack submitted blissfully.
“Cahill was a bastard who trafficked in human lives. My father was killed right over there.” Jack opened an eye and sighted down his inky finger to a lamppost. Its flame burned hotly, even in the blaze of the sun. “He died in my arms.”
Her tears blurred his face into a watery gray blotch. “Then you know how dangerous the mines are, Jack. Everything about them, inside and out. How can you in good conscience send people down there to be killed? They depend upon you, Jack. They trust you.”
“And by the grace of God I have earned that trust.” He took a step backward and frowned at her. “I’ve turned a death camp into a safe, profitable colliery. Now if you’ll excuse me, Mairey, I have a mine to run.”
“Ballocks!”
He had turned away, but now he swung back again, the devil in his eyes.
“What?”
“How can you say that your mines are safe, when you’ve just suffered a cave-in and put all those people in danger?”
“Mairey, some accidents can’t be prevented. I would never, ever send anyone down a shaft or into a tunnel that wasn’t safe enough for my own father, nor for anyone I loved.”
“Ballocks again!”
“I’ve had enough, woman.” He came at her like a bull, head down and charging, and in the next instant he’d thrown her over his shoulder, her backside to the sky, his hand clamped there like a sizzling hasp of iron.
“Put me down, Jack!”
“You’ve a lesson to learn, Mairey Faelyn.” He stomped through the celebrating toward the mine shaft, with its whirling, whining gears and shuddering cables.
“Do you plan to throw me down your mine, Jack Rushford?”
“Tempting, but you’d only gum up the works, woman, and I
’ve just got them working again.”
Mairey squirmed just to spite him, knowing that it was useless, that he would only tighten his scorching hold around her legs.
As they approached the shaft, its steel cage rose up again from the bottomless hole into the towering head-frame, then came to a squealing stop.
“Jack Rushford, where the devil are you taking me?”
He stepped into the swinging basket. “To hell, madam.”
Mairey’s courage fled as he finally released her, sliding her down the length of him as though he enjoyed the contact. “I don’t want to go with you.”
“We’re partners in a silver mine, my dear. It’s time you looked at one close up.”
Partners—he kept saying that, as though she shared his despicable dreams of silver. They were adversaries.
The lift started down with a shudder. Mairey grabbed his leather coat and hung on for dear life as the cage jiggled down into the darkness.
“Is it supposed to do that?” She was quaking herself, a miserably frightened ninny.
“Do what?”
“That jiggling.”
He laughed gently and turned her away from him, so that the layers of rock flew past her nose. “Physics,” he said into her ear. “You’ll be all right.”
Mairey grabbed handfuls of his sleeve where he’d wrapped his arm around her waist. He was warm and breathing steadily, her rock. Her heart was racing with kinetic danger, her pulse thrumming against his fingers where his large hand had claimed her shoulder and the rise of her neck.
“It’s windy,” she said as a cool breeze blew her hair upwards, a flying, freeing sensation.
“It’s supposed to be.” He gathered the swirling of her hair into a bundle and held it in his fist. “I’ve spent a lot of time and money to keep the air circulating through the ventilation shafts.”
She had expected stifling heat and the stink of sulphur. But the air was clean, if coal-smelling, and cool.
They stepped out of the lift into a bright chamber, framed like an old Saxon cathedral in tall timbers and crossbeams. A forest on a winter’s eve. It had an eerie, underworld beauty. Dark, shiny-faced elves scurried into a second tunnel with their buckets, feeding an ever-rising chain of tubs that carried coal up to the surface.
“That’s the last of the cleanup from the cave-in.” He put one of the metal caps on her head, a mate to his own, took her hand, and started into one of the tunnels. “I’ll show you where we rescued the men.”
If she lived, if she ever saw the light of day again, she’d at least have a better understanding of her enemy and his lair. The tunnel twisted and rose, then dipped and straightened. She’d expected seeping walls and crumbling terror. But Jack’s mine was clean-lined and stout, and as bright as noon.
“Shoring up the passageways is the key to safety.” He stopped at an intersection and slapped his palm against a fat, foot-square timber. “The more bracing, the safer. A great expense, but necessary. I’ll take the same care in the Willowmoon tunnels.”
You won’t get the chance, Lord Rushford.
“We’ll use these same double-screened Davy lamps, an added safety feature developed by my engineers. Explosive gasses aren’t the problem with silver mines that they are with coal. But light is fundamental to a man’s spirit, and I’ll bring daylight into the darkness of the Willowmoon Mineworks just as I have here.”
Then light a candle for me while you’re there, Jackson Rushford. Because I’ll be dead before I let you riddle my glade with your worm holes.
“Come.” He took her hand again and led her deeper into the mine, past a small culvert and a dark pool, under the great air shafts that dropped sunlight-scented air onto them.
It didn’t matter that the people of Glad Heath counted Rushford among their saints. And it mattered even less that Mairey herself had seen too much saintliness in the man this past day.
He could pay each of his miners a thousand-pound wage every year; he could build stately town houses for each of their wives; send their sons to Oxford; marry their daughters off to members of the peerage. But he couldn’t bring back the mountain or the woodlands, nor could he restore the streams that had once bubbled up from the springs. And he would never, ever have the chance to do to her village what he and his like had done to Glad Heath.
Agile and sure of himself, Jack moved along the tidy, down-sloping passage with its low ceilings and shadows. He stopped at a short tunnel dug into the stone. It had a hole at the end that emptied into blackness.
“Back there is where we broke through into the Shalecross. We had to cut another, quicker passage. There wouldn’t have been enough clean air to last the other way.”
“You did all this today?” All the digging and the timbering, as single-minded as ants.
“It took six of us twelve hours, but we managed.” He took the lantern and her hand and led her to the end of the rescue passage.
His palm was torn and rough, and she turned it up to the wavering light. Blisters, broken and bleeding and needing care.
“You helped them dig?”
“When I could. I’m not as young as I used to be, and I’m out of shape.”
Hardly. He was huge; had shoulders like a…Of course! No wonder he was so broadly muscled.
“You were a coal miner!”
“Like my father.” He hung the lantern on a peg above her head. “I started when I was eight, holding open the ventilation doors. I was big for my age, so I was picking coal by the time I was eleven. I worked Glad Heath until the night my father was killed.”
He stood close, so very tall and overwhelming. Her metal cap clunked against the thick post behind her and the brim lifted off her forehead like a halo, leaving her to stare up into his breathlessly devilish grin.
“Where did you go then?”
“I emigrated.” He flicked his own cap off his head, and it landed with a ringing racket. He stepped closer, still straddling her legs. “I left the country on the next tide, with the law on my tail.”
“Jack, why?” The man was a maze of mysteries. The lantern above them planed his features in orange; the coal took the shadows and deepened them. But his eyes were sparkling like diamonds, and made her heart flip.
“Father’s strike was illegal, and so was the riot that followed the murders.” He threaded his fingers through her hair with tender care, then drew his thumb slowly across her lips, watching all the while, grinning a bit. “I was accused of setting fire to Lord Cahill’s offices.”
“Did you?”
The corners of his eyes crinkled; his laughter filled up her lungs. “Oh, yes, Mairey. With my father’s name on my lips, I did it.”
Her eyes pooled again with tears, but she snuffled them away. “Good.”
“Yes. Good.” They stood hip to hip, her belly to his groin. His erection was a wonder. So grandly different than her dusty old collection: hotly independent, compelling her to squirm, to do something with it.
“Ah, Mairey.” He took forever bending to her mouth, touching his fingers to her lips. She rose up on her toes to be nearer, sooner. It wasn’t wise to tempt a dragon, especially when one was deep in his den, miles from the sky and the green trees.
“Beautiful, Mairey.”
“Jack, I—” Oh, bliss. Oh, gracious. He covered her mouth with his, possessed her absolutely, sweetly, and then with a hungry, diving groan that shot sparks to the ends of her fingers, to the center of her, where his never-to-be-conceived children slept. Tears gathered in her throat, unshed and aching. His kiss was deep, his lips softly searing.
“Worth waiting for, Mairey.” Her miner’s cap clanged to the ground as he caught her up in his arms and gathered her against him.
“Yes, Jack.” Her head spinning with stolen gladness, Mairey climbed deeper into his embrace, ground her hips against his hardness, wanting more of him, as much as she dared in this dark fairy tale of theirs. She kissed him rampantly, traced the planes of his midnight-bristled jaw, brushed her lips across
the soft play of his eyelashes. He tasted of soap and fresh bread and a heart-stopping rescue.
He laughed suddenly, his smile as crooked and mussed as his spiky hair. “I’ve never in my life kissed a woman in a mine.”
She liked that a lot. “You brought me all the way down here just to kiss me?”
“I wanted you alone, Mairey. Need you.” Another kiss, slanting, slippery, sliding down the front of her bodice, blowing hot through the linen. He shaped his hands beneath her breasts, grazed his thumbs across her nipples, sending a deliciously feverish clenching to the joining of her thighs. “I want you thoroughly, Mairey. In every way I can imagine.”
She didn’t know what to say, because she could imagine so very much, all of it ending abruptly in heartbreak. He was trembling like the quaking of the earth when he enfolded her in his arms, a caress far more profound than the flesh that still ached for completion.
How simple it would have been to keep on hating him. But he’d taken that from her. He was a man who was doing his best at the only life he knew.
And he did it so admirably, with such easy grace.
She’d survived his horrible mine. He’d kept her safe all the time, just as he’d promised.
What was it that he had said before he’d scooped her up and brought her spiraling down into his netherworld? That he would never send anyone into a mine shaft that wasn’t safe enough for his own father….
Or for anyone he loved.
Oh, Jack!
Chapter 13
Mairey was still breathless long after his kiss, long after he’d sent her back up into the light.
Glad Heath was celebrating, and Jack was their hero, though he stayed below, unmindful of the feasting in his name. The town put the mine to rights in eager shifts, having beaten back the devil this time.
And though Mairey looked for Jack all the rest of the day, she didn’t find him again until late afternoon. He was leaning back against the lamppost near the pit, only standing because his legs were spread wide with his knees locked, his arms fallen heavily to his sides. His head was tipped back and his face glistened black in the sunlight.
She approached him quietly, thinking at first that he was asleep on his feet. But he coughed suddenly and so violently that he dropped to his knees and bent over, holding himself up on the flat of his hands.
Linda Needham Page 16