The Gamble

by Laura Parker

  That thought roused her from her momentary silence and she reached up to flick his hand from her hair with a scornful gesture. “Never touch me again.”

  “But you are so very delicious, my lady.” His careless phrasing made mockery of the compliment. Though he did not move even an inch away, he did not attempt to touch her again. “Since you will not permit an exchange of pleasantries then I must press you for your gold.”

  Something in his words, in his appearance, struck her as oddly familiar. And then she knew why. “But I know who you are!”

  A menacing glint flashed in his gray gaze and was gone. “Indeed? Just who do you think I am?”

  The belated realization that sharing her discovery might not have been wise made Sabrina blush hotly. If she had not, hours before, tormented Mrs. Varney with the idea she might never have thought of it at all. “You are Jack Law.”

  The declaration came forth so softly the breeze all but stole the words away.

  “How came you by this conclusion?”

  His mild response bolstered Sabrina’s composure. After all, there was only so much fear she was willing to endure for the sake of a highwayman. “Your reputation is well-touted by your victims.”

  “What reputation would that be, my lady?”

  She shrugged extravagantly, annoyed that he was once more the inquisitor. “Rumors are that Jack Law is not really a common highwayman at all but a wealthy aristocrat who robs travelers for the thrill of it. While other noblemen are content to keep to the meadows in pursuit of a fox, he chooses for his stalking fields the byways and highways of England.”

  “ ’Tis a pretty tale.” The sound of derision had many chords in his voice, Sabrina decided. “And you equate us upon such slim observation? I am charmed.”

  She folded her arms under her bosom, determined to meet him word for word. “I do wonder at your lack of caution, Mr. Law. After all, ’tis you who give yourself away. Your coat is more costly than my cloak. The lace of your jabot is the finest quality. Most telling of all, your speech surpasses the king’s own son. A clever man would better disguise himself.”

  As she spoke, the gleam of admiration at last entered those remarkable eyes. “Surely there is more?”

  Switching tactics, she reached out and casually rested her left hand oh so lightly on his velvet cuff, seeking to take advantage of his admiration. A year in London had taught her that besotted gentlemen always did her bidding. “ ’Tis said you once allowed a new bride to keep her wedding ring when she told you it was the only thing of value she had ever owned.”

  Once again Sabrina found herself looking into his quicksilver eyes warmed by admiration, and felt triumph slip into her hand. But when he reached out and clasped her hand in his before she could avoid his grasp, she knew she had miscalculated.

  She attempted to snatch her hand back. Instead, his lean hard fingers forced her unwilling hand to his face as he bent his head over her hand in salute. The courtly gesture startled her, as did the brush of linen covering his mouth, and the unexpected damp rush of his expelled breath through the cloth.

  Remarkably, she found herself thinking, I should like to know this Jack Law better.

  A moan from the coachman who lay in a heap near the right rear wheel broke that strange, inexplicable, wholly inappropriate spell. Sabrina blinked as though freed from blinders.

  He straightened to his superior height and said abruptly, “I regret the need to cut short this charming interlude.” He turned from her and held out his gloved hand to the older woman. “You, first. Hand over your jewels and money.”

  Mrs. Varney dug into her pocket at once and produced a jingling purse that she held out like a supplicant offering. “I have but forty pounds, sir.”

  Sabrina smirked as Cousin Robert’s money disappeared into the robber’s pocket. That smirk dissolved as he turned to her.

  “I’ve not so much as a ha’penny,” she answered in clipped tones, annoyed to realize he still intended to rob her, as well.

  “You must have some small bauble about your person,” he countered. “A brooch from a suitor perhaps, a strand of pearls upon your majority? Some little something?”

  His all-too-accurate supposition that she possessed pearls spurred her indignant reply. “If I possessed such things, be certain I would not hand them over.” She turned to climb back into the coach.

  He caught her by the shoulder, his fingers griping tight the folds of her cloak as he forced her back to face him. “Then be good enough to shrug free of your cloak.”

  “I—I will do no such thing!” She swallowed back the burst of rage that fed her stammer. He seemed to be reasonable as long as she remained so. “I shall catch a chill.”

  Something akin to amusement again struck sparks in those gold-lashed eyes. “You will. Or I will strip it from you.”

  With a begrudging admiration for a superior force, she unhooked the heavy clasp that held the cloak closed at her neck and swung the garment from her shoulders. “I expect you to return it, and quickly.”

  He caught it in one hand as she tossed it to him and then felt along all the seams. When he was done he looked her over again.

  Sabrina was surprised by the tremor of emotion that passed through her as his gaze skimmed her slim figure. The night had quickly prickled her skin with goosebumps and there was a fair amount exposed upon which it might do its work. The Chinese silk wrapper she wore was held closed by a mere series of pink satin bows that began at her waist and rose to the lowest point of her cleavage. Dressed in negligee with her unbound hair tumbling free over her shoulders, she knew she looked more like a wanton who had just stepped from her bed than the weary traveler she was.

  Contrary to her impulse, she controlled the urge to turn away from him as he regarded her with his singular attention. He was not the first man to ogle her bosom, she told herself. She could almost guess his salacious thoughts. Ordinarily, a gentleman’s prurient leer inspired only her contempt. But something in this man’s gaze forestalled her attempts to despise him. Her heart beat in a strangely unfamiliar pattern that caught its rhythm not from fright but the elation of the risk.

  “Now then, I will have your wrapper.”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “Then I will help myself.”

  Indignation flamed in Sabrina’s cheeks. She was no maid or underling to be ordered about, even less the cowering maiden. Yet, more than any insult to her modesty, she feared he would discover the necklace tucked into her bodice. She had kept them safe for more than three years. She would not simply give them over to a common thief!

  As he took a purposeful step toward her she balanced a fist on each hip, uncaring that the action lifted her bosom precariously to the brink of her neckline. “Enough of your threats, you yellow-spined, dim-witted jackanapes! We have given you what we have! Find other prey. We are done being afraid!”

  She turned away and then swung back to add in afterthought, “You cannot be Jack Law. You are a miserable failure of a highwayman!”

  “Miserable failure?” He spoke softly, as if the dawn itself might shrink away before the release of his rage. But there was no temporizing of the look in his eyes as he closed the distance between them.

  Sabrina held his hard, unencouraging gaze. “Do your worst.”

  “My worst?” He cocked his head slightly, as if she had posed a challenge requiring thoughtful consideration on his part. “What, I wonder, would you consider my worst?”

  She did not flinch this time as his free hand slipped down about her waist. She felt his fingers spread over her lower back, impelling her forward until the front of her wrapper brushed his waistcoat. Emotion passed through those bright eyes, hard and disturbing where minutes before they had been kindled by personal warmth. Know him better, indeed! Mercy’s grace! What could she have been thinking? At the last moment her courage failed and she tried to wrench away as he bent his head to hers.

  “No need to be coy at th
is juncture,” he whispered through his mask into the hollow of her right ear. “You would know the stuff of which Jack Law is composed? I offer you a taste.”

  He jerked down his mask a scant instant before he turned his head and his lips found and locked on hers.

  She knew she should have protested, cried out and kicked, clawed and bit him. Yet her treacherous body did not respond to a single urging of its own defense.

  From deep inside her, a place where a year of unhappiness and frustration had simmered and smoldered, an insidious rebellious voice whispered, Let him! Let him defile you! Learn what it is to lie with the devil. And then we’ll see if Cousin Robert can keep to his plans to marry you off!

  That thought forestalled her protest just long enough to make it unnecessary.

  The pressure and texture of his lips upon hers was unlike any touch she had ever entertained of Satan. His lips were warm, despite the night air, and firm and smooth as the finest silk. She had been kissed before but the pressing of slightly damp flesh had always left her repelled and unmoved.

  The touch of Jack Law’s mouth was altogether different. The embrace of his lips seemed the warmest, most inviting place in all the dark, chill dawn.

  Her world careened crazily on waves of pleasure as his arms went about her. She gasped as he licked her lips with slow, confident strokes. Her knees weakened, threatening to tumble her until her hands reached and found mooring in the sleeves of his coat. Her nails curled possessively into the plush. She had not known she could feel such things. So this was a kiss. In the hands of Jack Law, a kiss was the most potent temptation she had ever known.

  His hand found her bodice and then the heat of his kneading fingers spread through her clothing, making her breast ache with bliss and shame.

  Her conscience struggled vainly once more. This was madness, surely. You risk everything by acquiescence.

  Yet the strict urgings of reason could not hold sway. She wanted only more of the glorious, disconcerting thrall in which this stranger held her. For that she was willing to risk even ravishment.

  As if he read her thoughts and found them exactly to his desire, the highwayman suddenly lifted his head. “So, there beats within the heart of m’lady a rake!” he murmured against her ear.

  As he swung away from her with triumphant laughter, Sabrina felt as if he had slapped her. No worse, he was laughing at her. Ridicule was the one thing she could not, would not tolerate.

  She saw her moment and seized it. With both hands she dove for the curved pistol butt he had hooked over the edge of his coat pocket when he had embraced her. Her fingers wrapped quickly about it and then she jerked, tearing fabric as it came free.

  He moved quickly but she was the quicker, backing up even as she lifted the barrel and leveled it at the middle of his chest. “Be gone! Before I do you mortal harm!”

  For the space of two heartbeats he stood before her, backlit by the halo of lantern light, and then he swung away. Only then did she realize he had shown his face to her. But she had been too intent on aiming the barrel steadily to notice any distinct feature in the gloom.

  “Coward! Blackguard! Villain!” Her heart beating in exultation to see him, the would-be vanquisher, at last on the run. Kiss her, would he? Make her quiver with never before felt desire? Humble her? She would see about that!

  He made the saddle in one graceful leap and dug his spurs mercilessly into the flanks of his steed. It was a beautifully executed maneuver that she would have admired had some ancient, predatory instinct not informed her that he was getting away. The pistol came to life in her hands as if by its own volition.

  She saw the rider jerk but his horse did not falter as it ate up the ground swiftly putting distance between them.

  “Miss Sabrina!” Mrs. Varney rushed up to her. “You could have been killed!”

  “Posh!” Sabrina answered smartly. “My father taught me to shoot when I was but six years of age. I believe I winged the villain.” She smiled in satisfaction. “Impress me, would he? Rather I have given him something to long remember me by!”

  Chapter Six

  Sabrina stood in the doorway of a cottage whose lintel barely allowed her to stand upright. She had been set the task of watching for the sedan chair that would bear her hostess—and gaoler—Mrs. Thaddeus Noyes to her daily ritual of bathing at Queen’s Bath.

  Her first two weeks in The Bath, as the locals referred to it, were nothing short of disaster. Not only was Mrs. Noyes all that Cousin Robert had led her to expect in the way of piety and disapproval of worldliness, but the woman was a recluse. Sabrina had not set one toe into society since her arrival. Not only that, her hopes of meeting an acquaintance of the Beau Monde in the lane had been scotched by her location, as far from the heart of fashionable society as possible.

  Mrs. Noyes’ drafty stone cottage was set in the oldest part of town, located near the town’s medieval East Gate and not far from the Abbey. Adjacent to an alley on one side, it was hemmed on the other by a row of ancient, half-timbered cottages whose residents kept piggeries in the rear. The windows were tiny and few, giving the cottage the feeling of being perpetually in the shade. The only concession to modernization had been to have the once beaten-earth floors paved with slate stones. Mrs. Noyes proudly boasted of the efforts of the Master of Ceremonies of Bath, Beau Nash, who had seen to it that the spa’s streets were no longer filth-laden gutters brimming with the refuse of chamber pots and entrails from butchers’ shops.

  An appreciation for these better times was lost on Sabrina, who pressed a scented handkerchief to her nose whenever she looked out. Early drizzle had left the neighborhood overhung with trapped coal and wood smoke, and the faint stench from the fisheries located on the nearby river. Despite the inclement weather, the neighborhood’s denizens thronged the muddy lane before the cottage, along with carts and barrows and barking dogs. The neighborhood was no better than the notorious rookeries of London.

  A plaintive yowl of hunger directed Sabrina’s gaze downward.

  “Oh, and what do you suppose you are doing?” she asked the tabby cat who was weaving a friendly greeting about her ankles.

  The feline had wandered in over the threshold the day after Sabrina had arrived. Despite the order to destroy it from Mrs. Noyes, who was terrified of the “slinking beasts!” Sabrina had not done so. Instead, it pleased her to secretly outwit the old woman by keeping the kitten hidden in her room.

  Sabrina picked up the purring puff of brown, orange, and white and scratched behind the delicate ears of the kitten, feeling the bony skull in some alarm. There was little to steal to feed the tiny one.

  It had taken no more than a few days to discover that Cousin Robert’s parsimonious bent was far exceeded by that of Mrs. Noyes’ miserliness. Not a scrap went to feed the animals she kept at the rear of her little cottage if it might be tucked into a pie. Not a crumble was left to the foraging of mice when it might be softened with a drop of milk or sherry and fashioned into the vile concoctions Mrs. Noyes called bread puddings.

  “She eats much and nastily,” Sabrina confided to her only friend as she climbed the narrow, crooked stairway that led to her bedroom. Being country-bred she had never developed the overly refined sensibilities of some city-bred ladies. Yet she had quickly met her fill of coarseness and meanness in this household.

  “No need to mind my figure here,” she murmured. She could scarce abide to swallow a spoonful of any course at the table. As nothing was allowed to go to waste, for fear of offending God’s benevolence, Mrs. Noyes consumed every bite. No hog in her yard grew as round and corpulent as the owner herself.

  “Now shoo!” She bent at the waist to drop the kitten lightly inside her door and then made certain this time that the latch was set. Secret acts of rebellion were no good unless they were kept secret.

  “Sabrina? Do I hear the sedan chair?” inquired a querulous voice from below.

  “Miss Sa-brin-a!”

  Th
e sound of her name was like the meshing of unoiled gears. With jaw set Sabrina tiptoed back down the stairs. Despite Cousin Robert’s design, she was determined not to resist the role of menial to this woman of no taste and less refinement.

  “Miss Sa-brin-a!”

  As the third cry went up from the room at the rear of the cottage, Sabrina spied with relief the thin girl with lackluster brown hair trailing beneath her cap who was Mrs. Noyes’ servant.

  “Sophie, see to your mistress. I shall await the chair.”

  “Yes um,” answered the much put-upon maid.

  As the girl moved to do her bidding, Sabrina noted her ill-fitting black gown, rusty with dirt and soot and mended in so many places it resembled a patchwork quilt. Surely there was a castoff among her things that the girl might have. Or would Mrs. Noyes usurp the gift? Sabrina smirked. It would require three of her gowns sewn together to cover the obese woman.

  “Miss Sa-breee-na!”

  Sabrina poked her head once more out of the doorway to escape the screeched summons. No doubt Mrs. Noyes would take and sell any gown offered to the maid. Her stinginess seemed exceeded only by her greed.

  Not a moment had been lost in posting a letter to London detailing the “infamous doings” of the highwayman who had relieved Mrs. Varney of her purse. Set to the task, Sabrina had dutifully written out Mrs. Noyes’ demand for a replacement of the funds which were to have been used to ease the introduction of two more into her household.

  Sabrina’s lips twitched. At least there had been one bit of satisfaction resulting from the robbery. Mrs. Varney had been sent forthwith back to London by the incensed Mrs. Noyes. “Can’t abide a body without the wits to guard her own pursestrings. Imagine, offering good gold after bad deeds!”