Shameless (3 page)

He made a little sound like a kitten mewling.

Heart pounding like a runaway horse, she watched with a kind of dreadful fascination as his eyes rolled back in his head and his mouth went horribly slack. Then he collapsed on top of her without another sound, pure dead weight.

Thank God,
was her first thought. Her second was,
Oh, no, have I killed him?

Shaking, heart thudding, breath rasping in her throat as she struggled to suck air into her lungs, Beth lay beneath his motionless body for a moment in near shock as visions of her own lifeless body swinging from the gallows at Tyburn flooded her mind. Then she realized that she could feel his chest moving, hear the faint wheeze of his breathing, and felt a quick upsurge of relief.

Not dead, then
.

With that reassuring thought, she recovered some of her wits, and realized she had to move at once lest William regain consciousness, or—and she couldn’t decide which was worse—someone should come in and discover them. Gritting her teeth, willing her poor trembling body to move, she tried to wriggle out from beneath him without success. Unfortunately, there was no budging him. He was simply too heavy.

I’m trapped. What now?

From the distant ballroom, she heard the last flourishing notes of the quadrille, and panic seized her. At any moment someone could open the library door and find them like this.

The specter of ruin flashed hideously in her mind’s eye. But even ruin, she decided in that instant, was better by far than being wed to this man.

But neither was obviously preferable.

Beth never knew from whence she summoned the strength to shove him off, but she found it. Wedging both hands beneath his shoulder, she heaved, then heaved again—and it was enough. William rolled limply onto his back, his outflung hand catching and parting the sumptuous velvet curtains that they had been standing in front of earlier, when she had first told him that the engagement was off.

She had just rolled onto her hands and knees in preparation for jumping to her feet when something caught her eye. Impossibly, a boot was planted there between the curtains. A man’s large black riding boot, scarred and creased from wear, and liberally flecked with mud.

For the space of a couple of heartbeats, her gaze stuck there, riveted.

The boot was attached to a leg, Beth saw as her gaze rose along it inexorably. A long, muscular leg encased in snug black trousers. The leg was attached to lean masculine hips . . .

It was then, with a jolt of pure shock, that the truth registered: there was a man standing in the window embrasure. Until that moment he had been concealed behind the curtains. A tall, broad-shouldered, darkly handsome stranger clad all in black save for the merest hint of white that was his shirt, silhouetted against the grayer black of the moonlit night beyond. His lean face was absolutely expressionless. His crow black hair was tied back in a queue. Without the muffling effect of the heavy curtains, cold air rushed in across the small balcony that overlooked the garden. Remembering the earlier draft on her shoulders, Beth felt certain that the tall French window had been open all along.

He had climbed in through the window . . .
Why?

Having shot to his face, her eyes now locked with his. They were as black and hard as pieces of jet. Cold, pitiless eyes that stared narrowly back at her, their expression so menacing that her breath caught.

In that frozen instant she realized, too, that he held a pistol in one hand.

Beth’s eyes widened. Her heart skipped a beat. Her mouth went dry.

Said pistol was now aimed directly at her.

T
O FIND HIMSELF DISCOVERED
by a big-eyed chit was, to say the least, inconvenient, Neil Severin reflected grimly. And never mind that she was young, beautiful, and half naked, flashing as delectable a pair of round, creamy, strawberry-tipped breasts at him as he had seen in quite a while. He quickly closed his mind to the pretty display, blocking it out with practiced ease, just as he blocked out all other potential distractions as and when they occurred. His mission was simple: gain access to the house, locate and assassinate his target, then vanish into the night. Invisibility was his stock in trade. No one ever saw him come; no one ever saw him go.

Until now.

“Who the devil are you?” she demanded in a voice that, not surprisingly, shook noticeably.

At that, his gaze met hers. Her challenging expression and strong language surprised him a little. As a sheltered young lady of quality, which he was almost certain she was, she should by rights have been in
the throes of hysterics about now, in the aftermath of what she had just endured. Certainly she should have been frightened of
him
. A stranger to her, and standing concealed behind a curtain, no less, he was a muscular three inches over six feet tall, wide of shoulder and chest, dark as a Spaniard, unkempt from two hard, near-sleepless days and nights in the saddle, with an air about him that had been described as everything from forbidding (at his best) to downright cruel—and he was aiming a pistol at her. Not that it seemed to intimidate her to any observable degree.

As she spoke, her brows snapped together into a frown, and she sank back into a kneeling position from which she continued to observe him keenly. Her eyes moved over his face in a way that told him she wasn’t likely to forget a single feature any time soon. With one hand she grabbed at the shimmering gold and cream remnants of her bodice and undergarment and pressed what she could gather up to the truly dazzling curves of her bosom in a less than successful attempt at reclaiming her modesty. In her other hand she clutched something—the poker with which she had dispatched her attacker, he saw as he squinted at it with reluctant interest. With the tiniest flicker of stirring curiosity, he wondered if she was possibly entertaining the thought of using it as a weapon against him. After all, as the evidence of the unconscious man sprawled on his back on the carpet beside her illustrated, it had served just such a purpose, admirably, only moments before, which might have infused her with several degrees more confidence than was good for her. Oddly enough, considering the circumstances, her slightly husky voice was low, as if she didn’t care to be overheard. It occurred to him then that she hadn’t screamed, not at her discovery of him, which had to have been disconcerting to say the least, and not during her recent contretemps with the man she had felled.

Not once.

His interest thoroughly piqued, he wondered why, and regarded her with heightened attention.

“I
said,
who are you?” she demanded. Her voice was still unnaturally low, but steady. Her frown had deepened into a full-blown scowl.

Neil studied her with the quizzical gaze he might have turned on a strange insect under a microscope. Far from being afraid of him, she now looked almost belligerent, glaring at him through narrowed eyes, her brows meeting over her dainty nose, her grip tight on the poker as if she would spring up and attempt to clout him over the head with it if his answer didn’t suit. Unexpectedly, the idea of being attacked by this redheaded slip of a girl tickled his funny bone.

Amusement had become sufficiently rare in his life that he noticed and savored the sensation. And was determined to prolong it, if only for a moment or two.

“A better question, I think, would be,
what have you done?
” His voice, as always, was deep and gravelly, if slightly rusty-sounding from disuse. His tone was impressively awful. His eyes flicked meaningfully from the poker to the man sprawled beside her. Immediately she looked stricken, glancing down at the insensate man with guilt and worry written all over her face. “Robbery? Attempted murder? The authorities are quite harsh with either, in my experience. I would say you’re looking at Newgate at the very least.”

“I—I . . . ” she stammered as her gaze slid over her victim, but then she took a deep breath and lifted her eyes to meet his, her mouth firming.

“It was no such thing,” she said, with a haughty lift of her chin. Despite the circumstances—and the enticing jiggle of her barely covered bosom—she could have been a duchess surveying a chimney sweep. “And you haven’t answered my question.”

“Haven’t I?” He stepped out from behind the curtain and moved toward her.
If a thing must be done, ’twas best done quickly,
to quote—or more likely misquote—Shakespeare. His education had been so brief, and abandoned so long ago, that he could never be sure.

In any case, it was the sentiment, not the words, that mattered.

The lady was young, lovely, amusing, and clearly high-couraged, but very much in his way. Moreover, she had seen him, not just a glimpse but well enough to identify him if it ever came to that. The prudent thing to do was to kill her, not with a shot—that would bring
the house down about his ears; he had only drawn his pistol in the first place because he had been startled to find an altercation taking place inside the room he had chosen for his entry—but quickly and silently.

Just walk toward her, snap her neck, and be done, he told himself. It would be the work of a few seconds merely. He could deliver another blow with the poker to the hapless gent on the floor—a killing blow, this time—and leave the two of them to be discovered later. Probably each would be blamed for the murder of the other.

Certainly no one would suspect him. He could simply disappear into the night and wait for his quarry to surface at another location at a different hour.

“No, you haven’t. And you might as well put that pistol away. I assure you it doesn’t frighten me in the least.”

He didn’t reply, having almost reached her and not wanting to prolong the contact any more than necessary. It really was a shame, but . . .

Something in either his actions or expression must have alarmed her despite the care he was taking not to frighten her into any precipitate action, because she shot to her feet as he drew close. Holding the poker threateningly aloft in one hand, she attempted to stare him down, a difficult task when he was nearly a foot taller and far larger than she was. Plus, the shreds of her bodice shifted with her every movement even as she tried to hold them in place, and her focus was clearly somewhat distracted by the exposure of her bosom.

Despite his best intentions, Neil could not stop his eyes from dropping to take in the view as a rosy bud of a nipple peeked out at him. She must have followed his gaze and glanced down at herself at just about the same time, because she made a small, sharp sound and clamped both arms over her chest. That had the desired result of hiding what she wished to hide, but then the alabaster upper slopes of her bosom swelled temptingly above her tightly folded arms, creating an effect that was almost equally luscious. Neil was conscious of a slight stirring of his body in response, and frowned. When he was working, he rarely got distracted. Her heightened color and defensive look as her
eyes shot up to meet his gaze told him that she was aware of the direction his thoughts had taken, and felt at a distinct disadvantage. Her death grip on the poker didn’t abate, but it had, of necessity, shifted. The implement’s hard black shaft now angled absurdly up past her shoulder, and any credibility it had ever had as a weapon was lost.

“And why is that, pray?” he asked. To his own annoyance, he stopped walking a couple of feet short of his goal to engage her in more ill-advised conversation.

Her eyes never left his face.

“If you were to shoot me, any number of people would come bursting through that door before the sound faded. And you would find yourself taken in a trice.”

Neil felt another of those unexpected quivers of amusement. It was her bravado in the face of impossible circumstances, he thought, that was doing it. She was really quite out of the ordinary, and he surveyed her from head to toe with some regret. Killing her was not what he would choose to do could he see any real alternative. It was a waste, and he hated waste. She was the merest chit, and a raving beauty to boot. Her dishevelment, in his opinion, only enhanced her attraction. Besides possessing a truly magnificent bosom, she was temptingly shaped, slender yet curvaceous where a woman needed to be, of no more than medium height yet erect enough to appear taller. Her skin was a flawless, rose-flushed porcelain, and there was enough of it on display to make him certain that she was that way all over. Her face was not the perfect oval of a classic beauty. Instead, it was square-jawed and high-cheekboned, with a stubborn chin, a full-lipped, willful mouth, and deep blue eyes set off by thick black lashes and silky black brows that were, still, meeting above her elegantly carved nose in a ferocious frown. Her presumably once-elegant coiffure was wrecked, and her hair cascaded over her creamy bare shoulders in a profusion of tumbled waves that were the glorious red of Titian. Her expression, though, in no way mirrored one of that artist’s limpid beauties; the fire in the lady’s eyes as they collided with his blazed even hotter than her hair.

Out of the ordinary, indeed.

“I must certainly put away my pistol, then,” he said, and obligingly tucked his pistol away in his greatcoat pocket, then felt another flicker of amusement at her reaction. She gave a great sigh of relief—the soft white swell of her bosom heaved enticingly above her constricting arms as she did so—and most of the wariness left her face. With his pistol out of sight, it was clear she no longer considered him much of a threat. He had only to choose his moment now, and the thing was done. It would be over before she even knew what was happening. He was skilled enough that she would feel no pain.