Julie Anne Long (12 page)

Rebecca scanned the room as though deciding upon the best place to devour her dinner, absently tugging the boy’s cap from her head as she did. She shook her hair from its tether, and Connor watched as the candlelight played the tangled coppers and golds and russets like the world’s softest symphony. He thought of all the kinds of light there were in the world, all the kinds of light that could possibly dance across Rebecca’s hair, and felt a brief stab of happiness.

Rebecca finally decided to settle on the bed, and held her hands out for her bowl of stew and bread.

“Why do you think the highwaymen want our locket?” Rebecca asked between bites. She had refastened it around her neck.

“A mystery, wee Becca.” Connor was concentrating on his own plate.

“Perhaps it was taken from her lover and her lover wants it back,” Rebecca mused.

“Aye, that could well be true,” Connor said, taking pains to sound noncommittal. He loved the way she pinkened ever so slightly over the word “lover.” He found himself pleased that she was bold enough to include it in her vocabulary but modest enough to be a trifle shocked at herself for using it.

“Roarke Blackburn,” Rebecca said dreamily. “It is a very romantic name, don’t you think, Connor? He sounds as though he could be a pirate.”

Connor nearly choked on his mouthful of stew. “Oh, aye, a very romantic name,” he agreed.

“Connor, I did not know that you could read.”

Oh, but the girl was astute. This was faintly treacherous territory; very few grooms could read, and Connor had read the bloody locket inscription aloud. He looked up from cleaning his plate.

“Aye,” he said carefully. “I can read. My da insisted I learn.” This much was true, at least.

“What was your father like?” Rebecca asked.

Connor looked up from his plate for a moment and stared at her. Her plate was shiny from the rigorous mopping she’d given it, and her eyes, those eyes the color of the sea at dawn, were fixed on him with a sleepy, gentle curiosity. There was a dark spot at the corner of her mouth that he assumed was stew. He pointed to the corner of his own mouth, and Rebecca took the hint, her pink tongue darting out to take care of the last of her dinner.

“You’ve a need to ask questions, wee Becca, now that your belly is full?”

“Aye,” she said, mimicking him. Connor laughed. Because she deserved whatever version of honesty he could offer her, he tiptoed out over the quicksand of his past, and gave her a careful answer.

“My father was an angry man, wee Becca. Angry and proud.”

“He must have been very unhappy, then, if he was angry.”

This brought Connor up short. He had never once thought to question his father’s happiness. He still sometimes woke at night from dreams of his father’s blows, his skin tingling, his heart racing from the shock of it. It was part of him now, in his blood, in his soul, the humiliation that came from knowing that someone had the right to do this to him merely because he was blood, the despair that came with knowing that his only defense was a pathetic sort of endurance and his own stubborn pride, the Dunbrooke pride. Speaking out of turn, taking his horse out without permission, arguing with his brother, a less than perfectly completed lesson—anything, everything could bring down his father’s wrath. His brother, Richard, had not been spared. And his mother, who gave her life giving birth to Richard one year after Connor was born, had not been there to witness it, or temper it.

What a bitter thing life must have been for his father, for his rage to be so easily shaken loose. Had his father seen his duties to his family, his title, his lands, his country, as chains, and fought them blindly? Had an inward turning of grief over the death of his wife festered into anger? Connor would never know. His father was dead.

“Aye, I think ye’ve the right of it, Rebecca,” he said softly. “I think my father was an unhappy man. But I only knew fear of him. I left home as soon as I was able.”

Something was stirring in him, though; a bud of comprehension that could very well bloom into forgiveness if left unchecked.
But then who will I be?
he thought. He pushed the feeling away; it was too much all at once.

“What did you do then?” she asked softly.

“I found it very soothing to shoot at the French,” he answered wryly. “I was wounded. I’ve a grand scar,” he added, surrendering to a less than noble impulse to impress her.

Rebecca’s mouth made an “O” of awe and morbid fascination just as he’d suspected it would. She scooted to the edge of the bed and peered intently as he pulled off his boot, rolled up his trouser leg, and peeled off his stocking. And there it was, a hard shiny path of gouged and raised white skin where the musket ball had plowed his calf.

Rebecca stared at the scar, which seemed to glow hotly still. And then, because curiosity had always been her compass, her eyes moved up the length of his calf. It was magnificently hairy and the line of it had a very unexpected and almost brutal beauty, curving as it did down to his long white foot, tufted with a few more dark hairs. She traced it with her eyes and then found herself oddly restless; her eyes felt thwarted at the interruption in the view his rolled pant leg presented, for the implication was that there were other parts of Connor that were equally magnificently hairy and intriguingly formed. She wanted to see them.

Realizing that she had been quiet for a very long time, Rebecca finally forced herself to lift her eyes up to Connor’s face, and she cursed her fair skin, for she knew her cheeks were flaming.

Connor was watching her, his dark eyes nearly black, his expression unreadable. Rebecca’s senses were crowded; she found she could not speak. At last, Connor drew in a long breath, then rolled his trouser leg down, still watching her.

“We’ve need of sleep, wee Ned, as we will be leaving at dawn. You take the bed, and I’ll take the floor.” The words were light, but Connor’s voice betrayed a bit of a strain.

Rebecca nodded, realizing a protest from her would result in a conversation about propriety that would have seemed like so much banter a few days ago, but which now seemed strangely fraught with shadowy implications.

“How will you stay warm?”

“Oh, and are ye forgetting so soon I was a soldier, wee Becca? The ground is as feather down to the likes of us, and the air is as a blanket of wool.” This, of course, was not at all true, but it made Rebecca giggle, and the peculiar tension in the room sifted away.

“You may use my cloak for a pillow,” she said magnanimously.

“Thank you, my fine lady. But I shall use my own cloak for a pillow, and we’ve a blanket or two among our supplies. Now please go to sleep, and kindly do not leap off the bed in the middle of the night in fright, for I’ve no wish to be crushed.”

Rebecca had never before slept in a pair of trousers and a long shirt and thought yearningly of the soft cotton nightdress she had included among her things, but since Connor seemed to think nothing of sleeping in his own clothes, she decided she would do the same. She wriggled under the counterpane, which though coarse seemed clean enough, punched the pillow to soften it a bit, and settled down to sleep.

She sincerely doubted she would actually sleep.

A drone of voices came up through the floorboards of their room. Not the voices of Mama or Papa or servants, but of a crowd of rough-looking men laughing and arguing over tankards of ale. Every now and then she could even hear the clink of glasses, or the crash of a chair tipping. Good God. She was in a
tavern
. In a place called Sheep’s Haven. A mischievous little smile curved her lips. Lorelei would simply be
appalled
—

She might never have a chance to tell Lorelei about it at all.

A swift pang of longing for home, for Lorelei and Mama and Papa, stopped her breath for a moment. The Tremaines’ neighbor, Bessie Hardsmith, was a grandmother many times over, and she had never set foot outside of St. Eccles. Rebecca almost understood; once upon a time, Tremaine House had felt like a universe to her.

How small her world would have been if she had stayed.

If not for Connor, she would have spent the remaining nights of her life lying in a marriage bed next to the loathsome Anthony Edelston. With the blessings of her parents.

Rebecca lay very still so she could listen to the sound of Connor breathing on the floor next to her, and the sound filled her with gratitude and an immeasurable, piercing tenderness. She pictured him as a lad, bullied and afraid of his father, and the thought that anyone could treat him with something other than thoughtful affection curled her hands into fists. She forced her hands open and took a deep breath; she had lately come to understand injustice and tricks of fate, and how they could turn you into someone else completely, maybe even turn you into the person you were meant to be.

Rebecca gingerly moved to the edge of the bed and stared down at him through slitted eyes. With a new avid absorption she watched his chest move with his breathing, his lashes trembling on his cheeks, noticed the short coarse beard beginning to shadow his normally smooth jaw. Janet Gilhooly had put her hands on Connor’s face, had touched him freely, as though it had been her right to do so, as though she had done that very thing dozens of times. Janet Gilhooly had probably put her hands on the rest of him, too—not only his beautifully hairy calves, but the rest of what lay underneath Connor’s clothes. And though the very idea of it made Rebecca want to growl like a savage dog, she was peculiarly grateful to Janet Gilhooly, too. She was grateful to anyone who had given comfort to Connor Riordan.

For Connor was here with
her
now. By choice.

And as she looked down at Connor, she longed to touch him, too.

Once wrapped in a blanket and settled on the floor, Connor was quickly reminded of just how comfortable sleeping on a completely unyielding surface really was. Sleep would come slowly, and his muscles would complain about it in the morning.

Good God, why now, when he was poised to leave his past completely behind, did it return in the form of a
locket
, of all things? At last, he let his thoughts slide to the place he had held them back from all night, and that was Marianne Bell.

More than anything, Connor thought, Marianne Bell had been an
achievement
. Out of boredom and perversity one night, a lifetime ago, it seemed, he had visited a seedy little East End theater called The Sweet Apple, far from the more refined entertainments offered by the
ton
. It was not the sort of place that one typically found the
heir
to anything;
riffraff
was in fact a diplomatic way to describe the audience.

But that’s where he had first seen Marianne.

The part had required little more of her than walking on and off the stage, but something about the way she moved caught his eye. When he finally caught a glimpse of her face, the totality of her beauty had been very nearly overwhelming. At first Roarke could only withstand it by letting his eyes dart from one of her features to the next, from a delicate black brow to the full perfection of her bottom lip to the daunting blue of her eyes. He had wanted to immerse himself in it, to somehow own it.

He had returned to the theater night after night. He sent expensive gifts to her and plied his charm insistently; Marianne Bell politely demurred again and again. But in the end, there was no denying that Connor was the heir to the wealthiest duke in all of England; as such, there was very little he wanted that he could not have, and this extended to Marianne, as well. Ultimately, naturally, she capitulated.

He set her up in discreet lodgings, gave her a generous allowance, and set about enjoying the woman he had won. She was a careful creature; cool, proud, and watchful, with a wit that occasionally surprised him. Making love to her had proved to be a quick immersion in physical splendor—he had not been her first, but he had cause to give thanks for the tutelage his predecessors had clearly given her. But the experience always left him feeling strangely dissatisfied, perhaps because her true essence remained as intangible as a breeze; he could feel something in her retreat the moment he rolled away from her. He could every now and then surprise a genuine laugh from her, and once or twice he thought he caught something in her eye, something raw, yearning, wounded, but whatever it was had vanished so quickly he had decided he must have been imagining it.

On the occasion of my Lady Macbeth
, the locket said. And he remembered, with a twinge, the night he’d left her for good.

He had come to her filled with a barely suppressed rage, for he had come to her from his father.

“When are you going to do your duty and get a proper wife, Roarke? It’s time to stop pissing my money away on your whore and get down to the business of breeding an heir,” his father had said as he departed the London townhouse.

He had long since learned to meet his father’s goading with a show of impassiveness, and had even come to appreciate, in a sense, the great reservoir of resentment that resulted. He had discovered that he could channel it with grim precision into shooting at targets, picturing his father’s face in the bulls-eye, and learning to fight, picturing his father’s face on his opponent. Consequently, he was accounted an excellent shot and a skilled and almost deadly pugilist. But he was tired that evening, and had drunk a little more than usual the night before. And perhaps it was because he was still young, and had not yet calcified into the sort of cold, bitter man who could equal his father in a contest of control and measured vitriol. But the words were out of his mouth before he could reconsider them.

“Get a wife?” he drawled. “So I can get her with child and watch her die in childbirth, the way you killed my mother?”

The fist connected before he could duck. It surprised him; his father had not hit him since he had gone off to Oxford, and usually he used the flat of his hand, not his fist. The blow knocked him down, and his father had then driven a contemptuous foot, over and over again, into ribs.

Connor, who could happily strike anybody in the name of pugilism, could not bring himself to strike his own father. And so he had struggled to his feet, gathered his coat and hat, and calmly and silently exited the townhouse. He had gone to Marianne, but his thoughts had been fixed on retaliation, on his long-suppressed burning need for retaliation, the perfect, most appropriate sort of retaliation, and not the luscious semidressed female standing before him.