Dangerous Exile (An Exile Novel Book 3)

by K. J. Jackson

  “Will we?”

  His look centered on her, his light blue eyes untroubled. “We only need to worry about one thing at this moment, and that is get to Scotland as soon as possible. That is the first order of business. The rest of…everything…we will figure out.”

  “Am I still in danger from Gilroy’s men?”

  “When are you not in danger?”

  She laughed. “True.”

  “Your husband’s men. Your father. Random fops at the Alabaster. You collect danger like posies.”

  Her smile faded away. “This isn’t fair. What I have brought you, the mess that I am, what it has made you do—spill blood.”

  “Spilling blood means we now have information on the men Gilroy hired. Declan is on it and I imagine they will be found tonight.” His right cheek pulled back in a half smile, his fingers brushing the hair along her temple. “Plus, I don’t mind blood. Don’t mind any of the harsh realities of kill or be killed.”

  He said the words so casually, her heart twisted at the thought of the boy she once knew becoming a man as hard and calloused as the mighty Talen Blackstone.

  Her hand lifted, her fingertips tracing the line of his collarbone. “How was it that you became this?”

  “Became what?”

  “Harsh. Deadly.”

  He stilled for a long moment, then his chest lifted in a deep breath. “The road to hell is littered with good intentions. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Or as complicated. Something made you into this man—and I don’t judge you for it. I am not so daft that I do not realize that the man you are has saved me numerous times in the last month. But something built you into this man from the boy I once knew, and I worry on that. What happened to you?”

  He shrugged. “I toiled for years on that first Royal Navy ship—it was where I met Declan. Those were harsh times and both of us were skinny whelps, prime for whippings. The war, what we saw. We were nothing in those days, so it was about survival.”

  She winced, the thought of a cracking of a cat o’ nine tails across his back filling her brain. “And you did survive.”

  “Aye, we did. After the war we eventually made it onto a privateering ship, the Firehawk, and after a number of years, we left the ship in London with a meager fortune. Declan and I pooled our money and we purchased a gaming hell by the docks. Then another one. Then another one. We moved the business farther into London. He took care of our people and I took care of the numbers. We both took care of any threats. And we hired the best men we could find—those that knew how to inflict pain, but were principled men.” His right hand ran through his hair. “It wasn’t long before our men became feared, which presented its own opportunities by the docks—acquaintances wanted our men to see to the safe delivery of certain goods.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Smuggled goods?”

  His look shifted from her to the ceiling. “The less you know, the better.”

  “Or the more I know the better?”

  His gaze dropped down to her, his look severe as he shook his head. “No.”

  She gave him an exasperated smile. “So, you expanded your business.”

  “We did. In those early days it was a scrabble for every coin, every speck of power. Lots of blood was spilled, territories carved out. But it worked. We earned our corner of London. A better life for me. For my men.”

  His mouth closed in a long pause and she could see his mind drift to the past. “Then some of the men wanted to marry. Wanted families. Wanted better lives for their loved ones. Good intentions drove all of it. A slippery slope to what we did to expand. Little by little, morals slid away. There was always a reason. Johnson’s wife was sick and needed medicine and a home in the countryside to get her out of the London air. Tiller’s oldest boy needed a stash to go to America and buy land. Perkins’s family in Scotland was destitute, all of his twelve younger siblings due to the workhouse after his father died. Noble causes, all of it. All of us wanted better for those that depended on us. The ill-gotten measures to those goals became normal. Normal became moral. And that is where things stand today.”

  She met his look, her bottom lip jutting up at the harshness of what she had to ask. “Are you a bad man, Talen?”

  He paused for a long moment, his look on the soft cream ceiling—no cherubs, just simple, elegant coving along the edges of the room. “I don’t think so. But there will be plenty to tell you otherwise.”

  “Who did you do it for? You say it was driven by wanting better for your men’s families, but who were you doing it for?”

  “Nobody.” He stopped, shaking his head. “No. My men. Their happiness was what was important. Loyalty dictated it. Their loyalty to me, my loyalty to them.”

  Her head curled down along his chest as her arm slid around his torso. “I am sad for the loss of your innocence. The loss of the boy you once were.”

  “I don’t remember that boy, Ness.”

  She held in a sigh. “Then there is nothing to grieve.”

  “Exactly.”

  She exhaled a long breath.

  Maybe he’d been right all along. He wasn’t that boy. Hadn’t been him for a very long time.

  So did it even matter if he remembered or not?

  And why was it so bloody important to her?

  { Chapter 18 }

  “I know this place.”

  Talen looked across the carriage at Ness as she scooted forward on the cushion, her right hand going to the bottom of the window.

  The devil take it, she was beautiful. A ray of sunlight angled in across her eyes, making them glow like molten gold. Excitement clear on her face as she searched the countryside along the edge of the village that they’d just passed through.

  Four nights with her in his bed and where he should well be tired of her, his infatuation had only grown. Four nights in bed, with every waking moment spent with her on this journey north to Scotland, and his body, his mind should be sated of her.

  But he wasn’t.

  Infatuation? Hell, he was obsessed. Obsessed like a scrawny teenage whelp who’d just strolled past his first whorehouse with his mouth agape at the breasts and nipples stuffed high above corsets.

  Except Talen’s obsession was centered on one woman, one body. Ness’s.

  This was the longest continuous stretch of time he’d ever spent with one person. Declan and he had grown up together on the ships, but they’d always been busy, always working, always scraping. This—this had been a purity of time. No emergencies. No demands. No piles of ledgers to go through. No bones to bust. Just sitting across from Ness in the carriage, whiling away the hours with laughter and stories.

  His chest at ease, when his chest was never at ease. The only thing in the last days that had made his chest tighten, his blood rush, was the moment when they would escape into a room at a coaching inn and her fingers would slip along the bodice of her deep blue traveling dress, nudging it off her shoulder, insistent that he help her undress.

  He shifted slightly on his seat, trying to calm his cock that became ornery and demanding at any thought of some part of her body sans clothes. It didn’t matter which part. Her knee. Her shoulder. The spot just above her hip bone where he liked to set his lips to her skin and tickle her. Those images crept into his mind and the blood rushed straight to the very appendage he could do very little about in the carriage in the middle of the day.

  The excitement on Ness’s face boiled to a pitch and she jumped up from the rear bench and banged on the ceiling of the carriage with the side of her fist. “Go left at the next crossroad,” she shouted at the top of her lungs to the driver.

  A muffled “Aye,” came down to them.

  Talen grabbed her wrist as she started to sit back down. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “This is it—don’t you see? Look.” She wedged her right hand away from his grip and pointed, her finger wagging toward the window as words flew frantic out of her mouth. “Just look. This is it. This is where you lived or a
t least where you lived when I knew you. This is where your family’s estate is. This is where you grew up and where my family visited yours. This is it. I know because I recognized that church at the edge of that last village and then the old gnarled oak tree that is half alive and half dead with its crooked branches that I always thought were going to snatch me out of the carriage as we went by. This is it. We would take a left and I knew I was safe from the tree because we were so close to your family’s estate. I remember it so distinctly. The turn is not too much farther up the road, maybe a mile or two. We are so close. We have to turn. We have to go there.”

  An icy chill ran down his spine. “We don’t have to do anything.”

  She slumped onto the bench, her head shaking at him. “Why don’t you believe I knew you when we were young?”

  “Does it even matter if I do or do not believe it?”

  “Yes. It would seem to me, yes.” She reached forward, grabbing his knee. “You were buried, Talen. Buried with your parents. A third coffin, laid into the ground. But you weren’t in it. You were alive. Don’t you want to know why?”

  “Whatever you think you know…” His words stopped as his gaze drifted to the window. Why did she keep up this inane insistence that he remember the past? The past meant nothing to him. It never had. “No. My life is what it is now.”

  Her hand on his knee clutched hard. “What if I could prove it to you—prove to you who you are?”

  “Leave it, Ness. Just leave it.” His hand jutted upward and he clunked on the ceiling with his knuckles. “Stay the course to Scotland.”

  Another “Aye” echoed down to them.

  Her look pinned him. “Why do you not want to know? Why won’t you even give it a chance—to know who you are, where you came from? How can you live with this blank space in your life?”

  “Because it wasn’t good, Ness.” His words snapped. “Whatever it is that I can’t remember. It wasn’t good. It was bad. It would have to be or I would remember it. And I already live in darkness. I don’t need more.”

  She crumpled back against the cushions, her right arm curling across her stomach. “You live in darkness?”

  He stared at her for a long moment, his jaw flexing hard. “People that I’ve destroyed. Killed. Sins I’ve had to come to terms with. There is already so much darkness that permeates my world that it is hard enough to live in. I don’t need to add to it. I don’t want to know what happened to me. Where I came from.”

  Her jaw dropped, her amber eyes stunned.

  Good. She would drop it.

  Her mouth closed for a breath, but then her lips parted, not quite defeated. “Knowing the past would make who you are now worse?” She leaned forward. “Or could it make everything better?”

  His head instantly shook. “That is optimism not becoming of you. You’ve lived through the end of innocence. Is it worth knowing what you were when you compare it to what you’ve become?”

  A frown set deep on her face. Worry. But not worry for herself. Worry for him. Worry so deep it made the corners of her eyes wrinkle as she looked at him.

  He wouldn’t take her pity.

  “We need to make it to Scotland, Ness. Your safety depends on it. We need to wed before anything else.”

  She exhaled a long sigh, her voice quiet. “You don’t understand, do you?”

  “Understand what?” This woman was intent on driving him to Bedlam.

  “That I want you to know who you are before you marry me.”

  “Why?” His hand flipped upward. “It won’t make a difference to me. I could learn I was the King of England and still the only thing I would be concentrating on is getting you across the border in front of a blacksmith with me.”

  “But it will make a difference to me.” Her palm landed flat on her chest. “I want you to know who you are. This isn’t for you—it’s for me. So you don’t think you’re marrying a woman who is insane.”

  “I don’t think that.”

  “I know how marriages work in Scotland, Talen. The reasons it takes to get out of one. Believe me, I know.” Her knuckles set upon her lips as her stare fell to the floor of the carriage by his feet. “Adultery or desertion is primarily needed for a divorce. But an annulment may be pushed through if one party is insane or lied about one’s identity. Both of which are very relevant in our case. Both reasons which my father could manipulate to rip me away from you, and I don’t want to give him that chance.”

  “How do you know so much about it?”

  Her look snapped up to him for a second before her mouth clamped shut, and her stare shifted to the window.

  “Ness.”

  She kept her gaze trained at the window. “I inquired into it years ago when I still had hope of getting out of my marriage with Gilroy. We had married in Scotland and I knew the laws were different, but I didn’t know what they were. So I had to find out.” She paused for moment as her lips pulled inward. “And I ended up paying dearly for that knowledge.”

  Instant rage coursed into his veins and he leaned forward, setting his face in her view, only barely able to keep his voice to a low rumble. “How did Gilroy find out? What did the bastard do?”

  “The clergyman told him of my inquiry. That was when I realized I was truly alone up there. I was rewarded with a jaw pummeled so far out of place I couldn’t eat solid food for a month. So I know. I know what my father can use against me. Us.”

  Never in his life had he wanted someone who was dead, so much alive. He wanted Gilroy alive. Alive so he could tear the bastard apart with his own hands. Limb by limb. Scream by scream.

  He couldn’t do that, but he could give this one simple thing to Ness.

  He shifted backward onto his bench, his words coming out through gritted teeth, the rasp in his voice rougher than usual. “Fine. We’ll go.”

  He slammed a fist up onto the ceiling. “Take the left turn.”

  In a minute, the carriage swayed with the turn, bringing him closer to the very thing he vowed he’d never do.

  Learn his past.

  { Chapter 19 }

  Talen watched the back of Ness’s dark blue skirt swing in front of him, the bottom hem dusting along the overgrown grasses half-dormant along the hillside.

  “Not too much farther.” She looked over her shoulder at him, a half-smile on her face meant to encourage or placate him, he couldn’t read.

  Fifteen more steps and she crested the top of the hill, pulling to a stop at a wrought iron fence that he hadn’t been able to see from the angle they walked up the hill. The fence encircled a plot of land dotted with headstones.

  The heavy rocks already rolling about in his gut multiplied. He didn’t want to do this. Didn’t want to do this with every fiber of his being.

  He needed to leave. Leave now. And at the exact moment he started to turn on his heel to do just that, he caught sight of Ness’s gaze on him.

  Intent, worried, needing this.

  Needing it more than he needed to escape. She needed this to move forward with him, so he would give it to her. He would look at a couple headstones and then they could be on their way.

  Easy enough.

  Hunks of granite with names emblazoned on them couldn’t conjure memories that were long since forgotten.

  Her look darted away from him. “Over there is the gate.” She pointed to the far side of the iron fence. “We must have come up the back way, but it was the only way I knew of. That sheep field below is where we would escape to, your cousin, Harriet, and I liked the lambs and you liked chasing the sheep. Harriet always used to yell at you for making the ewes nervous. And you liked to tell us ghost stories of who was buried up here on the hill. So when it was near to dark, we used to dare each other to come up here.”

  His gaze went back to the long pasture they’d trekked across, several sheep moving slowly in the distance along the stone fence they’d crawled over. Grey skies above threatened rain. None of it looked familiar. His bottom lip jutted upward. Just another memory he d
idn’t have.

  “My mother said we couldn’t come to the burial—that was men’s work. But Harriet and I snuck out of the manor house and watched them lower you into the ground from over there.” She pointed to her left at a long bank of trees, oaks with crispy, russet-hued leaves still stubbornly holding onto the limbs.

  “This isn’t right, Ness.”

  She stepped toward him and took the shovel that they’d borrowed from a farmer along the way from his hand. “I don’t want to disturb the dead any more than you do. But I don’t know that there’s another way. You need to know. I need to know.” Before he could snatch the shovel away from her, she moved away from him, her gaze determined on the iron gate opposite them.

  Talen followed her, a new fear burning down his chest. Fear of what this would do to Ness if she was wrong about this grave. His grave.

  Half of him wanted her to be wrong for his sake. Half of him wanted her to be right for her sake.

  Pulling a hard breath into his lungs, he followed her around the fence to the front of the cemetery. It was private at least. The site nestled between three hills. No one around for miles. It’d taken a full half hour to walk here from the road where they’d left their driver and carriage and if they didn’t hurry, twilight would be upon them before they finished the business of this.

  By the time he caught up to her, Ness had already wedged the point of the shovel into the ground by a headstone on the far left of the graveyard. Her movements were awkward with her left hand and arm still wrapped along the splint gently trying to help balance the handle as she dug her heel onto the back of the metal spade.

  He stopped directly behind her, his hands slowly going around her waist as he slipped the shovel out of her hands. “I’ll do it, Ness. This isn’t work for you. I shouldn’t have even let you come up here.”

  “You know I need to be here, just the same as you.” She turned around in between his arms, her hand on his chest, her look lifting to him. “I need you to look at the headstone. Your headstone. Your name. This is where I lost you. Where we all lost you.”