Shameless (35 page)

Pulling the horse to a halt in the lee of a just-greening larch, she smiled at him seraphically, triumph plain in her eyes.

“Piqued, repiqued, and capoted,” she said.

“So it seems.” He was still angry, she knew he was, but he had it well in hand now and, had she not known him so well, it wouldn’t have shown. His tone was deceptively mild.

“Why must you kill Richmond, or he you?” she demanded, keeping a wary eye on the distance between them. “Unless you wish to be left to walk, you’ll tell me. The truth, mind!”

“’Tis fortunate, then, that walking suits me well enough.”

To her surprise, with that he turned his back on her and walked away, striding off into the trees along the narrow path that wound down the hill. Most unexpectedly thwarted, Beth stayed where she was, frowning after him. He kept going until his tall form was almost lost amidst the forest’s early-morning gloom.

The devil fly away with him!

Only for a moment did she consider just turning about and riding away. Abandoning him when search parties scoured the countryside hunting for him had never been what she intended. Despite everything, she had no wish to see him recaptured. A little anxious, entirely wrathful, fearing a trick, she nudged the horse forward and followed, keeping him in sight, staying carefully back. Once in the woods, it quickly grew almost as dark as though dawn had not yet broken. A wash of deep charcoal gray lay over everything. Mist rose like fingers of smoke from the ground. The air smelled of damp. The twittering of just-waking birds was punctuated only by the jingle of the bridle, and the rhythmic plodding of her mount’s hooves.

A branch, wet with dew, brushed her cheek. Ducking, she pushed it away. When she once again looked at the path, she realized that he had increased the distance between them. Or, at least, she thought he had. That was he up ahead. Wasn’t it? No, it was a thick branch half fallen across the path. Surely she hadn’t lost . . .

A flurry of movement from behind caused her eyes to widen with fright. A grunt, a rush of air, the landing of a weight heavy enough to jar her and make the horse throw up its head and lunge forward in surprise, followed before she quite knew what was happening. She barely had time to gasp and tighten her grip on the reins to steady the plunging horse before a strong arm clamped around her waist and a hard body slid into the saddle behind her and another hand—his hand—caught the reins in a steely grip that took instant control. Stunned, she realized he had leaped onto the horse from behind, and both cursed and marveled at herself for not having foreseen it.

Stiff with indignation, Beth didn’t even bother to struggle as he settled more comfortably into the saddle and took the reins from her unresisting hands. With his thighs pressing against hers and his wide chest supporting her back, she might as well have been sitting on his lap.

“What now, Madame Roux?” he said in her ear, with just the smallest hint of gloating in his tone.

Knowing herself bested for the moment, Beth scorned to put up what she knew would be an entirely useless fight.

“If you think you are just going to drop me off where it suits you and go off and kill my brother-in-law without any hindrance from me, you are sadly mistaken, and so I take leave to tell you,” she flung at him over her shoulder. “I will raise the mightiest outcry you have ever heard. I will scream for help until the windows shatter as far away as London! I would sooner see you recaptured than permit that.”

“Ah, but that’s because you don’t perfectly understand the case.” He continued to guide the now understandably skittish horse down the trail with an expert hand. “If I’m recaptured, I’ll be executed as close to immediately as they can manage. Without trial. On, I might add, Richmond’s orders. Or at least, with his concurrence.”

“But
why
?” He was telling the truth. She heard it in his voice, and her stomach tightened in fear. Her fingers clenched on the pommel. “Neil, please, I’m begging you. Whatever the truth is, I deserve to know it.”

“Believe me, you are much better off not.”

She skewed around to look at him. His eyes were inscrutable, his mouth hard. Lines she had never seen before etched his skin, and she realized that, for all he gave no outward sign of it, he must be as weary as she.

“I have developed a—fondness for you, you know,” she said, a trifle gruff. “Nothing you tell me, no matter how terrible it is, will change that.”

His arm tightened fractionally around her waist. A quick glint in his eyes was as quickly gone.

“I thought it wouldn’t be much longer before I was treated to a display of feminine wiles. The last trick in a woman’s arsenal, are they not?” His tone was light, purposefully, she believed. “Egad, you’ll be fluttering your eyelashes at me next.”

Giving him a pert grimace by way of a reply, she faced forward again. “I mean what I say. Whatever dread secret you’re harboring, I will not think the worse of you for it, I give you my word.”

He laughed, the sound utterly mirthless. “Are you so sure I care for your good opinion? That’s mighty conceited of you, my girl.”

“Yes, I think you do.”

She felt him tense. The arm around her waist went suddenly hard as iron.

“Very well, then, if you will have it. I’m an assassin.” He practically bit off the words. “A hired killer who has dispatched so many souls over the course of my career that I’ve lost count. A government-sanctioned murderer who, in one of life’s smaller ironies, now finds my own kind unleashed on me.”

The truth was terrible, but, Beth realized, not altogether surprising. It explained much.

“So where does Richmond fit into this? He is not an assassin, too.”
That last wasn’t even a question. Impossible to imagine Hugh in such a role.

“What, no hysterics? Not even a delicate, maidenly shrinking at finding yourself trapped in the arms of a killer?” His tone was bitterly satirical. His arm remained hard about her waist.

“I can’t see that either would be the least use, and hysterics might further frighten the poor horse.”

Almost, she thought, he laughed. Certainly he made a quick, choked sound, and some small degree of tension in the arm around her eased.

“Thus speaks my unshakable Beth! You’ve been a rare delight to me, you know.” They reached the meadow at the bottom of the hill, and he set the horse at a canter through the mist that now glimmered in the rising sun. “Making your acquaintance has been like encountering a ray of sunshine in the darkness.”

She gripped the pommel tighter. “You say that almost as if it’s a farewell. You should know I don’t mean you to be rid of me that easily.”

“But you will be rid of me nonetheless, as soon as I can contrive to set you down somewhere safe, because I would not kill Richmond in front of you. And kill him I must, for all I own I would rather not. Afterward, I imagine the fondness you profess to feel for me will be at an end.”

Her heart clutched. “There must be some other way.”

“There isn’t. A death sentence like the one hanging over me is all but impossible to elude. The only chance I stand lies in vanishing from the face of the earth. And the only way I can do that for as many years as it will take is by resuming my true identity. I kill Richmond, then am never seen again, while the Marquis of Durham lives quite comfortably into what is hopefully a ripe old age.”

Beth took a deep breath. “Are you saying you . . . are the Marquis of Durham?”

“Do I detect skepticism in your voice, Madame Roux? I am indeed. And unfortunately for him, Richmond is the only one who knows it.”

There came the briefest of pauses. Beth thought that over, then came to a most eye-opening realization.

“No,” she said softly, “he isn’t. Because now I do, too. And even if you hadn’t told me, our paths would have crossed sooner or later, if you are who you say and you mean to take up that identity again. I would ever have recognized you.”

There was a long silence broken only by the creaking of the saddle and the horse’s muffled hoofbeats.

“I must be more tired than I had supposed. You’re quite right, of course.”

“So do you now feel compelled to kill me, too?”

“It seems the obvious solution, doesn’t it? Yet I believe I must make an exception for you.”

“You cannot expect me to keep silent if you kill my brother-in-law.”

“I wonder if I meant to spike my own hand?” There was a musing quality to his voice. “I won’t kill you, and I can’t expect you to keep quiet. What does that leave to me, then? Clearly I must now flee the country at the very least, and do my poor best to deal with whoever catches up.”

Unspoken between them hung the near certainty that sooner or later, someone who caught up might very well deal with him instead.

“I have a better solution,” Beth said. “One that I believe will save us all. I will marry you.”

A
SMALL VILLAGE
in the south of Dumfriesshire, Gretna Green was less than four miles from the River Sark, which served as the dividing line between England and Scotland. It was a notorious place, the scene of many a scandalous marriage, because the law provided that a couple need only show up in town and pledge themselves to each other in the presence of another person, and the deed was done. To wed over the anvil, as it was called, was such a disgraceful act that the shame of committing it made Beth shudder inwardly. Adding to her dismal spirits was the knowledge that she was submitting to a yoke from which she would find it most difficult, if not impossible, to ever free herself. From the time the vows were said, her life would no longer be her own. When a man and woman wed, they became one person according to the law, and the man was that person. To all intents and purposes, she, Lady Elizabeth Banning, would cease to exist. The lure of becoming a marchioness—if indeed Neil was telling the truth about the title, which she rather thought he was but could not be sure about—did not
tempt her in the least. Yet she stood in the marriage room of the village blacksmith’s house—a half-timbered cottage with chimneys at each end, the smithy’s workplace behind, and a single window that looked out onto the cobbled street in front—and with outward calm said the words that would make her Neil’s wife.

Her blood drummed so hard in her ears that she scarcely took in a thing after that, or heard what he replied, or what the smith—
the smith!
—said to them. All she knew was that the whole exercise—from the time they walked in the door, said the words, and signed their names to the registry and the marriage lines, to the time they walked out again—took less than five minutes.

Then she found herself outside again, standing on the smithy’s stoop in the cold starry quiet of a Scottish night, dressed in the same plain blue gown that had been lent to her by Creed’s nephew’s wife at the White Swan, and worn now for more than twenty-four hours straight. Her hair had been groomed by a borrowed brush, and, although she had done her best to put it up properly before the ceremony, tendrils had already escaped to curl around her face and straggle down her back. She had washed her face and hands, but longed badly for a bath, and her own—or at least fresh—clothes. In the last twenty-four hours, she had napped for perhaps a total of two hours, wrapped in Neil’s arms in a leafy copse after they had stopped to share a purloined lunch basket that a farmer busy plowing his field had left unattended. Exhausted, hungry, wearing a sadly crumpled dress, Beth shuddered inwardly at what she had done. Shorn of the trappings that she had never before realized meant so much—wedding gown, flowers, church, society’s approbation, her sisters’ support—she was nonetheless a bride. She was also freezing cold, sick to her stomach, and, save for her new husband—
husband!
—now standing silently on the stoop at her side, utterly alone.

She had never felt so low in all her life.

This is my wedding day.

“Well, ’tis done,” Neil said, and walked on down the steps. Dry-mouthed, Beth watched him descend. Wearing a buff coat and a
cravat he had purchased from the smithy, who was fortunately a large man himself, along with the previously borrowed shirt and his own pantaloons, he, too, presented less than a creditable appearance. But as handsome as he was, an unshaven jaw, disheveled, poorly fitting clothes, and mud-spattered boots lent him a raffish air that a fair number of people might have found added to his attraction. Certainly, over the course of the day’s journey, Beth had caught more than one female, including the smith’s plump wife, looking him over with appreciation.

“Yes,” Beth replied, following him, for there was nothing else to do. More buildings of various descriptions lined the broad street, which was the main one for the village. Except for the inn, which possessed a lively taproom and where they were to pass what was left of the night, the world seemed asleep. They dared not tarry much past daylight, because the threat of their pursuers catching up was ever present, if remote, for who would expect to find them in Gretna Green? Already it was late, and moonlight cast a pale glow over all. He waited for her in the street, watching her come to him with an absolutely expressionless face. Without touching, without another word exchanged between them, they turned and walked side by side toward the inn. Walked, because he’d had to sell the horse to pay the half-guinea cost of the smithy’s services, and provide sufficient funds for their night’s lodging, and meals, and various other sundries, and to hire a carriage to convey them back on the morrow to London, where at Beth’s insistence they were to go immediately to Richmond House and thus seek protection in the very belly of the beast who sought Neil.