The Steel Rogue: A Valor of Vinehill Novel

by K. J. Jackson

  Sleep still heavy in her bones, she flopped her left arm straight out from her body onto the bed, her fingers stretching out past the edge of the sheets toward him, hanging in the air. Pointing to him or reaching for him, she wasn’t sure.

  He was so far away. His right arm curled under his head, his left knee cocked out, his other hand on his belly. More comfortable than she ever looked on a bed, for she was forever tossing about in her sleep. She could have sworn he had fallen asleep under the weight of her head and half her body. But maybe she had woken him with her tossing about and he couldn’t sleep next to her.

  He jerked, his face contorting and pain furrowing his brow, then his eyes popped open, wild and terrorized for a moment before he saw her in his bed.

  His grey eyes calmed. He still looked like death had curled about him in his sleep, but he was calm again.

  She blinked, her outstretched hand twitching toward him. “You moved to the floor to sleep.”

  “I did.”

  “Did I wake you?”

  “No. I usually sleep on the floor.”

  “Why?”

  “Too many years in Newgate.” He flipped onto his side, his right arm still tucked under his head, his left hand picking at the wood planks of the floor. “Too many years sleeping wherever there was a bare spot of ground in the woods, in a stable, in a warehouse.” He reached out and touched the bottom rail of the bed. “This ship has held the first bed I’ve known as my own since I was sixteen.”

  “And you don’t even use it.”

  “No.”

  She slipped her left arm under her head, mirroring his pose. “Can I ask you a question that you may not like?”

  His gaze lifted to her. “You can do anything you want to, Torrie. But I can’t promise my reaction.”

  “Fair enough.” Her cheek lifted in a half smile. “You said your brother escaped the squalor of St. Giles?”

  “Yes. I always knew he would.”

  “He left you there?”

  “Yes. No.” He paused, taking a deep breath, his head shifting on the crook of his arm. “No, I made him leave me there. He didn’t want to, or so he has told me. But I forced him to do it—to abandon me.”

  “How could you do that?”

  “My actions alone dictated it. I almost ruined his escape from the cruelty of the life we were destined for there.”

  “What happened?”

  “My brother, Logan, had saved enough to take him and Sienna—my sister-in-law—out of St. Giles. He was going to board a ship for the Americas and take her with him. I loved Sienna just as much as he did. We grew up together in her father’s whorehouse doing everything we shouldn’t—stealing, fighting—learning to survive in the wretched world that is St. Giles. Both of our mothers had died when we were young. So the three of us were family.”

  He paused, rolling over onto his back, his head clunking onto the floor as his right hand shifted to rest on his forehead. “I didn’t know Logan had been squirrelling away coins. Hiding away enough to escape. But then I found the money and a schedule of ships leaving. He was leaving—leaving me behind. The both of them leaving me behind. The only two people in the world that mattered. All I had were Logan and Sienna. My family. So I reacted without thinking. I always did in those days.”

  His sudden silence hung heavy in the cabin until Torrie prodded him on. “What did you do?”

  “First, I got drunk. Then I told Sienna’s father that they were planning to escape. He took to Logan with an axe and I dragged Sienna away from them—I was in another world—a blurry, horrid betrayed world. I thought I was about to be abandoned and the anger of it took me over. I hurt—or I think I hurt Sienna—I know she was fighting me. Logan got free of her father and saved Sienna from me. And they left. Left London. Left me behind, just as I feared. Just as I knew they would.”

  His eyes closed. “But I made them do it. It was my fault. Logan had never planned on abandoning me—he had enough for passage for all of us. We were to escape together—the three of us—to start new lives far away. I only learned the truth of it a few years ago when I got out of Newgate.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “Yes, even though I didn’t want to. Logan doesn’t lie. Never did.” His thumb and forefinger went to rub his eyes. “And I ruined my chance for escape, just as I ruined everything I touched in those days.”

  The raw regret in his voice shook her, making her belly clench into pain for how horrific life must have been for him as a child. The hardened steel of his eyes made sense—they held a lifetime of anger and disappointment. Everything he held hidden from the world behind those molten grey eyes.

  She exhaled a long breath, her gaze locked onto his profile, onto the tip of his nose, the distinct hard line of his jaw.

  What he’d seen and done in his life set hers to the pale. Her family—Jacob and Lachlan and Sloane—had been mischievous and adventuresome, but always in control. Always surrounded by staff that loved them, that instilled respect and order into their lives.

  She had family. She had always known love and still knew she had unfailing support from both Sloane and Lachlan.

  Roe had lost everyone long ago.

  That he lay there now, captain of this ship, a crew that respected him to no end, friends that had his back—it was testament to how he had come through his life and ended with valor on his side.

  Yet it sent cracks through her heart that he still lived with such darkness. That he could still get lost within it.

  Her left arm extended out past the bed again, her fingers twitching, outstretched to him. This time she knew it was her reaching out for him. To touch him. To feel his wounds, to live them, just as she lived her own.

  His fingers dropped away from his eyes and he looked to her. “The fire, Tor. There’s something I need to tell you about the fire.”

  Her hand stilled and her body froze in place. Her eyes wide, she parted her lips, her words a cracked whisper. “What about the fire, Roe?”

  ~~~

  Her instant reaction to his statement told him volumes.

  Doubt.

  She still didn’t trust him. Still didn’t believe him—not to her core. She wanted to believe that he hadn’t set a torch to her family, but deep in her soul, there was still doubt.

  Doubt that was not going to be helped by what he had to tell her.

  But he had decided it last night—she needed to know everything of those moments. Everything of what he had done in those minutes when the world was in flames around her.

  “Roe?” His name came from her lips, choked, as she pushed her torso upright from the bed.

  He sat up, spinning toward her and leaning his back against the wall next to the door of his cabin. “I didn’t lie to you, Tor. I had no part in setting your family’s farm ablaze.”

  She blinked, relief washing across her pale green eyes. With a deep breath, she nodded. “Then what is it?”

  He pulled his knees upright, resting his forearms on the top of them. It took several breaths for him to meet her look. He had to face her when he told her this. Had to take the brunt of her reaction straight on. “When you were on the ground in flames, writhing in pain. Our eyes met—you saw me and I saw you.”

  She nodded, her lips pulled tight.

  “I didn’t want to walk away from you, but I had to. I had to turn away from the horror of it, and it didn’t have anything to do with the pistol aimed at my back. I turned my back on you by my own volition.”

  A slight gasp, and she recoiled slightly on the bed. “Why?”

  “It was who I was at that time, Tor. I can explain, but I cannot excuse it. Who I was—there was no weakness in my world. It was never allowed. Weakness was death. So when I see it I react.”

  “You react with what?” Her words were slow, careful.

  “With disgust.” His lips pulled into a tight line, his head shaking at what he was. “Weakness meant death in my childhood and you either stomped it out or you got as far away f
rom it as you could. You had to, to survive. And that was how I reacted when I saw you in flames. I reacted with disgust. With wanting to get far, far away.”

  His head dropped, his fingers rubbing his dark eyes. It took long, silent seconds for him to lift his gaze to her again. “And then that disgust instantly turned inward—what sort of a monster am I to walk away from an innocent in pain like that.”

  Her mouth opened to say something, but no words manifested. He couldn’t blame her.

  “That was the most grievous failing of my life. The moment I walked away from you in flames. I know that—hell, I have been haunted by that one moment in time every day, every hour, every second since then.”

  “Why are you telling me this, Roe?”

  “You need to know who you’re dealing with.” For all that he wanted to look away from her, he held fast to his stare. He would face this, no matter what. “What I’m capable of. The darkness that is so ingrained in me I can never rid myself of it. I’ve tried—tried so hard to distance myself from my visceral reactions. In prison I spent years helping the doctor there—stitching wounds closed, availing as much mercy to the weak and broken as I could so that I would never again react as I did with you. But it’s inside of me—it always will be.”

  Her right hand had crawled up her chest to clutch her neck, her left hand tangled in the sheet barely covering her bare breasts. And there, shining in her green eyes, the shock of it, the horrification.

  Yet still she was beautiful. Repulsed by him and she still held him transfixed.

  “Why are you telling me this, Roe?” She repeated the question, forcing him to say what he was avoiding.

  “I’m telling you because we need to stop this, Torrie. Whatever this is between us. I want you—make no mistake—I want you in ways that border on the unholy.” He swallowed hard. “But you need better than me. I cannot give you what you need—what you deserve.”

  Torrie’s head dropped forward, dark strands of her hair falling in front of her face, hiding her eyes from him.

  He sat frozen, unable to talk, to move. Ready for every hateful thing he could ever imagine forming on her lips to be hurled at him.

  But silence.

  Silence for so very long.

  Her head popped up, her golden green eyes piercing him. “What were you dreaming of?”

  “What? When?”

  “Minutes ago—just before you awoke,” she said. “You were terrorized in your sleep, but then you opened your eyes and you saw me and you calmed.”

  “That?” He turned his head from her, his look centering on the chest of weapons at the end of the bed. “That was nothing.”

  “No. You do not get away with that answer.” The gold flecks in her green eyes hardened. “You know I dream of the fire, I told you that, and now I want to know what it is that haunts your dreams.”

  He shook his head, his gaze dropping to the floor.

  “Tell me.”

  He let the silence stretch in the room, but she didn’t speak. She only looked at him, waiting.

  He drew in a heavy breath. “Too many years—too many years to count that I dream this.”

  “What is it?”

  His look, but not his head lifted to her. “You visited me in prison, in Newgate.”

  Her eyes went wide. “You remember that?”

  “I do.”

  “I thought you were unconscious.”

  “I wasn’t. I could only see out of one eye for the beating I took that day, and at that, barely.” His look drifted off of her to the windows as he paused. He had to force his gaze back to her. “But your eyes. The girl with the golden green eyes telling me to rot in hell. I dream that on most nights. Your voice. The gold sparks in your eyes sharpened with so much hatred they struck more viciously than the hardest blow of a sword. ‘Rot in hell, you bastard.’ Those words—your voice—a constant echo in my head. The loathing in them. I’ve never been able to escape the sound—how you looked at me. Like you knew everything I was inside—every demon and every deed that had stained me for all of time.”

  She exhaled, her shoulders dropping, her body curling up on itself as her gaze fell to the floor between them.

  With a heave of a breath, her shoulders pulled back, her face lifting and her look cutting into him. “I meant the words at the time. Make no mistake.”

  “I never did.”

  “But now…” She let the sheet in front of her drop and she moved out of the bed, dipping to the floor and crawling the short distance to him. She stopped just before him, pulling upright to balance on her knees and toes, her body long and naked in front of him. “Now I don’t mean them. Not now. You need to strike them from your mind, from your memory.”

  “You know as well as I that memories define us, Tor. It’s not as easy as that.”

  “It should be.” She crawled over his upturned knees, pulling open the trousers he had slid on in the middle of the night. His cock instantly alive the second she let the sheet slide off her body, the air hit it and it jutted hard into his lower abdomen.

  She slid down his thighs and set her folds full along on his engorged member. “Whatever the darkness of yours is, I’ve had the same in me, Roe. And I don’t know what’s right to do here.”

  Her mouth descended on his, her lips gentle at first touch and in the next instant, parting, hungry for the taste of him. She pulled up. “But I want you, Roe. Whatever it is when our bodies meet, it is right. That is the only thing I can trust right now. That this…” She lifted herself and slid her body onto his straining cock, taking him fully inside of her. She exhaled as her eyes closed, the pleasure reaching deep within her rolling across her face.

  Her eyelids parted, her golden green eyes filled with nothing but raw hunger as she set her hands alongside his face. “This is right. How our bodies fit together. I don’t want this to be over—I don’t want to give this up at the altar of darkness that should be long in the past.”

  All resistance leaving him, his hand moved up into her hair, dragging her down to his mouth to stave off the torture of keeping his lips, his tongue off her body.

  The cool touch of her ever-freezing hands spread across his shoulders, sating the heat on his skin, the same as her body would sate the raging fire he’d discovered could only by quelled by his shaft deep in her core.

  She lifted herself, sliding down long and slow on his cock.

  His control nearly lost the moment she’d crawled over his lap, he steeled his chest, holding off on exploding in her.

  Damn, she made it a Herculean feat. Sliding up and down, the murmurs from deep in her chest catching in her throat, her nipples brushing along his jaw, slipping into his mouth as she lifted herself to the very tip of him, then plunged downward.

  His hand moved along her inner thigh, his thumb holding fast to her nubbin as she sent her body faster. Harder.

  Hold. Just hold.

  Her head tossed back, a scream catching in her throat as the depths of her clenched around his cock, coming and drawing him deeper into her, wave after torturous wave.

  Every last vestige of control deserted him and for the life of him, he wanted her wrapped fully about him, her body drawing every bit of him into her.

  Not fair.

  Not fair to her. Not with who he was.

  He yanked out of her just as his seed came hard and fast, a stifled yell in his chest.

  She collapsed against him, her body still tensing into quivers in even intervals, the pleasure that had commandeered his body reflected in hers.

  Roe buried his face along her shoulder, his breath lost in her dark hair.

  He’d tried, tried to do the honorable thing.

  Tried to end it when all reason and righteous virtue demanded he do so.

  The darkness that sprung from him—a well that burrowed straight up from hell—was only going to destroy her. It had destroyed him long ago, made him nothing but a wretch to any woman with a light burning within her. And in those moments that she was on top o
f him, under him, her lips parted, gasping for air, her body vibrating in pleasure, she possessed the brightest light of all.

  Light he wanted to capture, hold deep within him forever. Light he knew he didn’t deserve.

  Light he knew would be taken over by his darkness.

  He still needed to end it.

  But his obsession with her denied every sane thought in his head.

  He couldn’t be honorable. Not today at least.

  { Chapter 12 }

  “I have a surprise for you.”

  Torrie pulled upright from her last deep stretch as she approached Roe leaning against the ladder to the forecastle deck. Her hands went to her hips as she tried to catch her breath. For all the good the stretches did for her legs, her lungs screamed after every session that they weren’t built for taking in as much air as the exercise demanded.

  She peeked over her shoulder at the thin line of greyness creeping into the dark on the far horizon. “It’s almost daybreak—shouldn’t I be scurrying back into your cabin?”

  The lantern five feet to his left lent light enough to see his face as he grinned. “Normally, yes. But not this morning. This morning we wait for the sun.”

  “The smile on your face makes me suspicious.”

  “Always be suspicious of a sailor.” He held out his hand to her. “Come, we’ll go onto the forecastle deck to watch the water while avoiding the crew as they stumble awake.”

  She climbed the rungs to the forecastle deck with Roe right behind her, his arms wrapping her from behind, and then he led her to the port side of the deck. She tried to catch her breath as she leaned forward on the railing, her forearms balancing on the worn wood. Roe stood straight beside her with both his hands on the rail, his thumbs tapping the smooth grain of the wood.

  “We’re not facing east, so it isn’t the sunrise we’re waiting for—what is it I should be watching for?” The sliver of light from the rising sun to her right was edging the blackness of the sky into a grey that drifted into a dusty blue. She looked up at him. Enough light now to see Roe’s features without a lantern.

  He didn’t look down at her, just kept his focus forward. “Patience. It will come to you.”