The Devil May Care (Brotherhood of Sinners #1) (18 page)

For the rest of this journey, he’d have Rachel with him, alone. Without so much as a roof over her head. She’d be in his hands. And she’d have to learn to trust him.

Chapter Ten

Rachel was beginning to think Lord Gargoyle wanted her to break down and weep. Already this morning, he’d smuggled her off the
Calliope
in a cargo crate, as if she weren’t perfectly capable of walking on her own two feet. She’d had to focus her eyes on the strips of sunlight streaming between the boards and tell herself there was fresh air just inches away so she wouldn’t hurl herself against the wood like a rabid dog.

Now he was circling her in the kitchen of the “safe house” he’d brought her to, glaring at the costume he’d procured for her: leather breeches and a linen shirt, with a heavy leather vest and coarse wool jacket, topped off with a ridiculous flop-brimmed hat.

“You are the least convincing man I’ve ever seen,” he pronounced at last. He made it sound like a terrible failure on her part.

She tried to square her shoulders, but knew it didn’t help. Everything was over-sized, and yet the shirt and vest still pulled snug at the bust, and the breeches constricted across the roundness of her bottom. The boots were dreadfully heavy, pulling at her inner thigh muscles with every step. No doubt she looked as unnatural and uncomfortable as she felt.

Sebastian had dressed himself in peasant’s clothes as well, but on him the attire only enhanced his masculinity: the tight leather breeches clung to the long, hard muscles of his legs, and the rumpled shirt, worn without a gentleman’s neckcloth, showed the hard knots of his collarbones and a crisp mat of dark tawny curls on his chest.

She hadn’t known a man’s throat could be so beautiful. Damn her ridiculous flesh, the sight of it made her blood heat, made her want to touch him again.

“Too bad we can’t cut your hair even shorter,” he said, frowning deeply. “But you’ll need to be Salomé when we reach Vigo. Maybe we can rub it with charcoal, hide the color at least.” He blew out a hard breath. “Damn. The shape of your face is just . . . we can’t even pass you off as a pretty boy. You’ll have to keep your head down, hide under your hat.”

She glared at him, daring him to find her anything but masculine. And yet her heartbeat kept losing its rhythm every time she looked his way.

“Well,” he said, “if we’re lucky, no one’s going to see us, except from a distance. Especially with the horses. They’re thoroughbreds, both, and I don’t think there’s mud and blankets enough in Spain to hide what fine goers they are.” He stopped, offering a small smile that seemed all irony, and entirely at her expense. “At least those pants are sturdy; you’ll be saddle-sore enough as it is.”

She shot him a skeptical look. She’d never so much as sat on a pony, and now he wanted her to trust her spine to some temperamental hussar’s mount, which no doubt would be expecting her to leap fallen tree-trunks, charge into cannon fire, and ride breakneck at all hours of the day and night.

But it didn’t matter.

She’d come all this way to get to the place Sarah had considered her home for many years, and she’d cross those mountains dressed in chain mail if she had to. While riding a rhinoceros.

So she endured Lord Gargoyle’s badgering about walking as a man would walk, as he gave her a quick lesson in the art of swinging her arms instead of keeping her elbows tucked in ladylike against her waist, and swinging the legs parallel to one another with no roll of the hips. An ironic task, that, considering the hours he and Jenny had spent teaching her to sway like a courtesan.

At last Sebastian dropped one final stack of his mysterious papers into a leather pouch and tucked it into his vest. He picked up a deadly-looking pistol as well, and secured it to the same strap that held his spyglass. “It’s time we left,” he announced. “Our Corunna agents will have our traveling supplies ready near the edge of town. The horses should be powerful mounts, if the names are any indication: Fortress and Mountain, prized possessions of two hussars who jumped at the chance to keep them alive.”

He took a battered black leather hat from a peg on the door and clapped it on his head. It was low-crowned and wide-brimmed and definitely disreputable.

Instantly, he was a lowborn highwayman, a look of rakish danger in his eyes. Hard and spare and lean—no trace of a soft-living aristocrat in any lineament of his body. A man who lived on the edge of a knife.

Very, very male.

Thankfully, he turned and headed down the steps without another word.

She followed then, and he led her at a brisk pace through the winding, cobbled streets of Corunna. He took up a position just slightly ahead of her and further into the street, trying to shield her from view. Instinctively, she kept her head down, ignoring the occasional curious glances she got from passing British troops. Perhaps she hadn’t quite mastered the masculine walk just yet.

About a block into their journey, Sebastian paused by a small stand of orange trees growing in earthenware pots beside a house. Stooping, he scooped a bit of soil with his fingers, and, not bothering to so much as warn her, smeared it over her cheeks and jaw line.

“There,” he said, inspecting his handiwork, his hand lifting her jaw. “Marginally better. But damn that little elfin chin of yours.” His eyes blazed at her, shifting from her chin to her own eyes, and then down to linger on her lips, and for a moment she almost thought he was about to kiss her. But then he reached up and tugged the brim of her hat down hard.

The impulse to kick him was almost ungovernable, but he was already striding away. She had to scurry to catch up.

“What about the way you look?” she asked in a low voice, as close to a baritone as she could manage, and pitched for no one but him to hear. “What would your fashionable London friends say if they saw you now?”

His palm clapped the thigh of his leather breeches. “I prefer these clothes to London finery, as it happens.” He flashed a quick look at her, a reminder she’d said nearly the same words to him the night he’d walked in on her when she was wearing the plum silk gown.

Her cheeks heated. “Do you, indeed? You have a taste for leathers and coarse flax?”

He flexed his shoulders, gave them a backward roll. “At least a man can move in them. Nothing from my London tailor gives more than a quarter-inch in any direction.” He tipped his head towards her, his whispering mouth perilously close to her ear. “And fashionable boots are the devil’s own work. The moment I get a pair properly broken in, my valet whisks them away to donate to some under-footman. Apparently, I may only wear boots that make me feel I’m encased in oak.”

“Surely you could order your valet to leave you your broken-in pairs.”

“Surely I could. But I don’t. What you fail to understand,
ma nonnette
, is that the clothes I wear serve their purpose.” His breath brushed against her cheek. “To be thought a fribble is a great advantage for a man in my profession. Most of my social acquaintance amongst the
beau monde
assume I’d weep if I found a scuff on my dancing slippers, and take to my bed for days if ever I lost a cufflink.”

She couldn’t resist a small smile at that. “Yet you let them know your skill with a sword.”

“Well, I must display at least some manly prowess. How else could I inspire ladies to share my bed?”

“
Trollop
.”

“Still, if you were to suggest to anyone in London that I use my leisure time crawling over Spanish mountaintops or knifing French agents in back-alleyways in Cheapside, they’d laugh in your face.”

Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. “And
have
you knifed many French agents in back-alleyways in Cheapside?”

“One or two, perhaps.” He offered a bland smile. “My lips, generally speaking, are sealed as to the details of any particular mission.”

She let that information turn over for a beat or two in her mind. “And do you enjoy yourself when you do that sort of thing? Killing, I mean? Like you do when you fence?”

“Sometimes.”

“That’s . . .
horrifying
.”

He shrugged. “Better than the alternative.”

“Which alternative?”

“Almost any alternative you could mention.
Getting
knifed, for one. Or sitting about a ducal drawing room, listening to some doddering old codger complain of his kidneys.”

She pursed her lips. “So that’s what you do all this for? For excitement?”

He gave her an odd look. An unusually thoughtful one. “Hard to say. Perhaps. Not as noble as your motive, but I suppose it serves well enough.”

“You don’t even know why you do it?”

“Well, I did it originally because I was asked. By a man I owed a very serious favor.”

“What man?”

“A great master of spies. You’ve met him—he was one of Helm’s two companions when you were brought to my house that first day.”

“Oh! That terrifying giant fellow with the black hair!”

Sebastian seemed amused. “No, not him. The other. The handsome one.”

Her mouth gaped. “
Mawbry
? The one with the charming smiles and all the cologne? Isn’t he a bit silly to be a spymaster?”

“That misjudgment has cost many enemies their lives. Mawbry’s one of the most dangerous men in Europe, when he chooses to be. When he doesn’t, the smiles are real enough. Espionage is a long Mawbry family tradition, as I understand it.”

“It must have been quite the favor he did you. You’ve been at this for years. Hasn’t your debt been well paid?”

“Hmm. The Game is . . . rather hard to leave once you’ve begun to play.”

“The
Game
?”

“It’s what we all call it. It’s what Sal called it.”

“It hardly seems like a game,” she said. “But if that’s what it is, I assure you I intend to play to win. And Victoire de Laurent will lose, with a knife in her back.”

Sebastian lengthened his stride for several paces, his hands stuffed into his pockets, his hat hiding his face from view. The set of his shoulders was tightening visibly, as if he were tensing to lift a heavy weight, or as if one were pressing on him from above.

Abruptly, he stopped. He turned, and looked her full in the face. “This Game is not so easy. It takes
years
of training.”

“We haven’t got years.”

His expression was implacable. “You need to know how to kill a man. It doesn’t require a gun. A writing quill, or a brooch pin, or even the handle of a spoon can be all the weapon you need—you set the point into the cavity of the ear with one hand, and with the palm of the other hand, drive it straight and deep into the brain—”

“That’s
hideous
!” she said. “I don’t want to know about that!”

“I assure you, the time may come when you’ll be glad of it.”

“I could never be glad about driving a quill into a man’s brain!”

“Other points on the body are vulnerable, too,” he said, talking right over her objections. “A broken bottle, drawn across the neck–”

“Stop!”

“Why? Do you think our enemies will be kind and gentle?” He stepped very close to her, and she caught his scent again, that edge of leather and musk.

Despite the subject they were discussing, heat flushed through her.

“Do you think the French will hesitate to kill you,” he said, “any way they can? The French army will march on Vigo, mark my words, as soon as Corunna’s secured. And it’s not just men in uniform you’ll need to watch out for. It’s those who look like bakers, and carriage drivers, and priests—the more harmless-seeming, the more dangerous. Beware women most of all. Anyone can be your enemy.
Anyone
. You must be ready to fight, with any weapon you can reach.”

“Did Sarah think like this?”

“She learned to, yes. And you must do the same, if you’re to live. Think of men in terms of hard and soft spots. If you have a knife, aim for the belly, the groin, the cheek, the soft flesh up and underneath the jawbone.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake!”

He showed no sign of stopping. Some cold fury drove him on. “If you have only your hands, try to break an attacker’s nose. Use the base of your palm and hit like you’re trying to drive the bridge of the nose straight out the back of his skull.” He gripped her forearm with one hand, gave it a hard shake. “Are you hearing what I'm telling you?”

“I can’t help hearing!” She glanced down the street they’d been walking up, almost hoping to see someone else coming, so Sebastian would have to cease his tirade and start moving again.

“One blow will seldom kill a man—you have to hit, and hit again, and again. If you can’t kill outright, aim for maximum pain. Debilitate him long enough to get away. Stamp your foot into his instep, hard enough to snap the tendons there. Bite, use your nails. Gouge at his eyes, and then
run
, and kept running, without looking back, until you’re somewhere safe
.”

“I’ll gouge at your eyes right now if you don’t stop.”