Taken by the Rake (The Scarlet Chronicles, #3)

by Shana Galen

  She blinked up at him with confusion, then pulled his lips back to hers.

  With a restraint it was unfair to expect of any man, Laurent held back. The story she’d told him of her youth niggled his brain, nor had he forgotten the nightmare she’d woken from the night before. She’d refused him before, and now when he took her, if he took her, he did not want to do so without her consent.

  He could not stomach being another encounter she regretted. Not when he knew he would never regret a moment with her. Not when she had somehow come to mean so much to him in such a short time.

  “Honoria, I will kiss you again, but if I do, I will not stop there.” He spoke in English, the language she had spoken when she’d been in the throes of her nightmare and the language he assumed must be the one she felt most comfortable.

  “Is that what you want? Tell me, sweetheart. Do you want my hands on you here?” He traced his fingers oh so lightly over the exposed skin of her plump breasts. “And here?” One hand skimmed down her torso to rest between her thighs. His head swam for an instant. He could feel her dampness through the shift. Surely this sort of restraint made him a candidate for sainthood.

  But his hand between her thighs had finally cut through the haze of her desire. Her eyes focused, became sharply blue, and she grasped his wrist. He allowed her to take his hand away, and he willingly rolled to the other side of the bed.

  His cock throbbed in angry protest, and his entire body ached at the separation. He needed her. More than that, he wanted her. Not just any woman—her. Those lips, that lush body, the way she sighed and laughed and looked at him with a mixture of annoyance and lust.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have allowed the kiss to go so far.”

  “You needn’t apologize to me,” he said through gritted teeth. “I will kiss or cease at your whim.”

  She turned her head to look at him, and Laurent wished she would cover those half-exposed breasts, rising and falling as she caught her breath. And then he prayed she would not cover them. Was it too much to hope her corset would come loose and she would spill free?

  “You would kiss me again, even if such a kiss led to nothing more?”

  His attention was not so centered on her bosom that he didn’t see her gaze fall to his erection.

  “As you see, I am capable of calling for quarter when needed. I want more. That much is obvious. But if all you will give is your kisses, I would be a fool to reject them. Your kiss is like water to a man wandering the desert.”

  She laughed, and he frowned indignantly.

  “How many women have you said that to?”

  “Very few.” He sat. “I am feeling some discomfort here.” He gestured to his cock. “How am I supposed to think of new metaphors when I can still taste you on my tongue and all I want is to breathe you in and make you cry my name?”

  She blinked at him, her violet eyes turning dark, so dark his cock throbbed angrily once again.

  “It is best that we stop now,” she said slowly. “I don’t want to be the next in your long line of women.”

  She sat, but before she could scoot away, he grasped her wrist lightly. “You would never be that. I feel...” He didn’t know what he felt for her. “More,” he finally said.

  She looked down and then must have realized her state of dishabille because her cheeks colored. “I would like some privacy to dress.” She gathered her clothing and slipped behind the privacy screen.

  “Of course.” He rose awkwardly and left her to dress. Rather than think of her righting her clothing or pulling stockings over those shapely legs, he cut bread from the depleted loaf and sliced an apple. She had bought a bit of tea—curse the British and their tea—and he steeped it and wished for coffee.

  Finally, she emerged, looking far too lovely in a slightly wrinkled pale blue muslin dress with a white sash. She’d pulled her dark hair into a tail and secured it with a tattered ribbon, tendrils of it falling down to frame her face. He doubted she knew what a fetching picture she made. She had dressed quickly and probably without too much thought.

  “Oh!” she said when she saw the bread and apple on the plate at the table. Laurent had taken up his position at the window overlooking the Temple.

  “You needn’t have prepared a meal for me,” she said.

  “You aren’t hungry?” He looked away from her and forced himself to make a note on the sheaf of paper before him. The guards had changed. He had been too preoccupied to observe it himself, but he had no reason not to assume they had changed at the same time as yesterday.

  “I am hungry.” She sat across from him. “I should have said thank you.” She pulled the drawing he had made of the Temple interior before her and studied it.

  He’d added to it again last night as he’d remembered more.

  “You must have spent a great deal of time with the Comte d’Artois in the Tower to be able to draw such detailed maps of it,” she said.

  “We would go and explore it from time to time,” he admitted, stiffening. “But Charles Phillipe lived in the palace section of the Temple complex, not the Tower.”

  “Then how do you know the Tower so well?”

  He might as well tell her. He’d lived his entire life under the shadow his father had created. She would likely judge him less harshly than most. “My father was imprisoned there for some months when I was a child.”

  “Your father?” Her head snapped up, her eyes wide with shock.

  “He opposed Louis XV’s policies in the Seven Years’ War and gave financial aid to the enemy. It was not much, but it was enough for rouse the king’s anger. He sent my father to the Tower, and I visited him there with my maman and my sister Amélie almost daily. Finally, the king forgave him and released him. But it was too late.”

  She furrowed her brow. “How so?”

  “My sister and I played there, running and hiding, and once when we were playing she stepped on a piece of rusty metal. That is how she became ill and died.”

  Honoria’s breath seemed to whoosh out of her as she finally understood that his sister had died from exposure to the Temple, the very place the children he’d come to love were imprisoned.

  “My father was released, but my family was never the same. My parents tried to pretend they were still happy and carefree, but Amélie had been their firstborn and captured their hearts. Nothing was ever the same after she died.”

  “And you did everything you could to make sure the royal children didn’t have to suffer a similar tragedy.”

  “Futile effort. I must take Madame Royale and the dauphin away from that place. It is not fit for children. I went back later, when I was older and Charles Phillipe and I could joke about the filth and the rats, but I never forgot the terror I felt when I first walked into the prison and felt completely cut off from the light of the outside world. It has always felt like a tomb to me—Amélie’s tomb.”

  She reached across and put a hand on his forearm. “We will free them, Laurent.”

  He nodded. He had no other choice.

  One more day of watching and he would be ready to put his plan into motion. But what he really wanted was to see Madame Royale for himself. If he could but see her, know she was alive, then he could be assured that he risked his life and that of any others who helped him for good reason.

  “Do you think Ffoulkes will send Dewhurst for an update today?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “He will give it another day, I think. He will want us to gather as much information as possible before we make a plan.”

  “I already have a plan,” he said. Her head snapped up.

  “What do you mean? We cannot go in alone. Not today.”

  “No. It’s a rough plan, and I will refine it as I watch today.”

  “And then?”

  “And then if the League has not come to us, we go to them. I promise you once I see the princess, I will not want to wait long to act.”

  She nodded with understanding. “It will be hard to see her so close
and not save her.”

  “It will be impossible.”

  She stared out the window for a long time. Finally, she rose and gestured for him to move out of the seat that had the better view of the Temple. “Then allow me to take the first watch. You are more likely to see her later in the day if the guards allow her to take a late afternoon walk.”

  He moved aside, but hesitated before leaving the small space. “You do not have to go inside. You don’t owe me anything.”

  “I don’t have to go with you, but I will. And you owe me an escape plan. Go and refine your plan so we can all live to risk our lives another day.”

  He smiled at her, poured them both cups of tea, and sat to study his maps. The tea was weak and tepid, but he hardly noticed. He’d never met a woman like Honoria, and he didn’t think he ever would again.

  SHE UNDERSTOOD HIM better now. It wasn’t just that he loved the princess and her brother, though he obviously did, it was that he felt the need to rescue them as a way to save, even if symbolically, his sister. Laurent had been a boy, a child, who felt helpless when overshadowed by the ominous Temple. Now he was a man. Now he could take action, and she knew he would.

  No matter the risks.

  No matter the gamble.

  He made her want to take the risks with him. She had been a fool to allow him to touch her again. She could still feel the press of his fingers between her legs. She still ached for him to touch her again. Even now, when she should have been watching the Temple, she could not stop her gaze from sliding to him to admire the line of his cheek or the curve of his lips.

  She wanted him to kiss her again. She wanted him to touch her, to make her cry his name as he’d promised. He wouldn’t take her against her will. He wasn’t like so many of the other men she’d known—men she dared not turn her back on. Men like Bowder, who took advantage of her innocence and fear and blamed his own weaknesses on her.

  She’d learned to hate her beauty, even her body. Bowder had made her feel ugly and cheap. And when he threatened to take her virginity, she’d run away for good. She’d been seventeen then and far too young to be alone in London. She’d been lucky that some of her father’s friends at the British Museum remembered her. Mr. Strooper had given her a position cleaning, and she’d steadily worked her way up, proving her knowledge and value to the museum, until she had her own little office and a salary.

  In the meantime, she’d scraped and saved and shared lodgings with anywhere from one to five other girls. She knew something about men and about bedsport from living with the other women, most of them shopgirls. Honoria had even allowed herself to be courted by friends of her roommates’ beaux. They were decent enough men. She’d liked the way they kissed, and there had been one man she had liked more than the others.

  She’d been barely one and twenty and known Victor a year when she agreed to go home with him. He lived alone, and she’d gone to his bed willingly. She even enjoyed it after that first time. They might have continued on that way, but she had asked him, purely on a whim, whether he loved her.

  He’d smiled at her and said he was “very fond of her.” She was very fond of him too, and a few days later she ended the affair. She couldn’t share her body with a man she didn’t love.

  And that was the problem with Laurent Bourgogne. She feared she just might be in love with him.

  Honoria stared out the window at the bleak stones of the Temple. She wondered if it had looked as foreboding in the Middle Ages as it did now. She could not imagine why anyone would ever have made a residence in the complex or hosted balls and dinner parties in the shade of its walls. But perhaps its gloomy medieval aspect was part of its allure. It had been the bastion of the Knights Templar. Who would not want to walk where those warriors had walked or sleep where the ghost of a man who’d fought in the Crusades still roamed?

  But the dreary stones of the Temple really were much better suited to a prison. It looked impenetrable from where she sat, and she could imagine the despair of the children inside. They must have lost all hope of freedom after so many months held inside.

  She looked away from the Temple and stared at the map the marquis had drawn. His dark head was bent over it, and he had placed one long, elegant finger on the Grande Tower, where it was known the princess and the dauphin were being held. It was impossible to guess what the prison would look like inside from the map he’d drawn. It was all long corridors, windows, stairs, and doors. Was it as austere on the inside as it was on the outside?

  Would the last thing she saw in life be a damp, gray stone wall? She wanted to believe she would survive this mission. Honoria knew the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel had faced worse odds and succeeded. The Pimpernel’s men were brave, cunning, and inventive. But so many of those daring rescues had taken place early in the revolution, when the borders were newly closed and the government still in upheaval. Now a certain order had descended, and loyalty to the ideals of the revolution were enforced by the daily executions at the Place de la Révolution.

  Men were not so easily bribed and neighbor had turned against neighbor. The League could not rely on a guard looking the other way or a passerby ignoring suspicious activity. If the princess was rescued, heads would roll, and no one wanted their head to be next.

  Her head might be next, Honoria conceded. Or the marquis’s head. What a shame that would be, as he had such lovely dark hair and those green eyes that seemed to see so much more than she wanted them to. If they did die in that awful stone prison or even under the blade of the guillotine, at least they would die for a good cause. The marquis had convinced her of that.

  She would regret nothing.

  The marquis looked up at her in that instant, and their eyes met. He raised his brows, and she looked quickly back out the window. He’d caught her staring at him, rather than watching the Temple as was her duty. She felt the heat creep up her cheeks, not only because he’d caught her watching him but because she knew she lied to herself when she said she would regret nothing.

  She’d regret never kissing his lips again. No man had ever kissed her like he had. No man had ever made her feel so much with just the press of mouth against mouth, the slide of tongue against tongue.

  She would regret not feeling the way his hair curled against her fingertips or the way he leashed his strength to touch her with the utmost tenderness.

  She’d regret never seeing the look of tenderness and need in his eyes when she looked down at him.

  There were a thousand little things she would regret.

  But she didn’t have to.

  Why was she so intent on keeping him at bay? Why didn’t she just give in to their mutual attraction? She had been right not to trust him initially, but now he’d proved over and over again that beneath his arrogance and conceit lay a man who cared for others more than he wanted the world to see. He cared for her. Honoria knew it. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been so tender with her. He wouldn’t have stopped kissing her and touching her to secure her consent. He would have thought only of himself and his own needs.

  She knew many men like that, and she had thought he fit among their ranks. But she’d misjudged him. She’d looked at his lazy smile, his indolent walk, his soft hands and too-handsome face, and hated him for being like so many other men who’d wanted to own her for her beauty and couldn’t care less about the person she was underneath.

  She’d been wrong about him. His life had not been always full of diamonds and silver. He’d known fear and separation and understood what it was to be an outcast. Perhaps that was when he’d acquired the traits she so admired. He had protected her even when he had nothing to gain by doing so. He’d rescued her even when it put him at great risk. He’d honored her wishes to stop their lovemaking even when it was quite clear those wishes were not his own.

  Honoria did not want to realize, at the hour of her death, that she loved him and she’d wasted her chance with him. If one more hour, one more night, was all they had, shouldn’t she make the m
ost of it?

  She glanced at him again. He’d rested his elbow on the table and his chin on his hand. He seemed deep in thought. How to tell him she’d changed her mind about bedding him? Should she simply blurt it out? What would she say? Take me to bed...

  Her cheeks flamed hotter even as she thought it.

  Perhaps she might do better not to use words at all. She could rise, walk around the table, and when he looked up at her she could pull him to his feet and kiss him.

  But did she have the courage to be so bold?

  Honoria supposed there was only one way to find out. She took a deep breath, pressed her hands on the table, and began to push up. In her peripheral vision, she caught a movement outside—white fluttering against gray—and glanced fleetingly at the Tower.

  A young woman entered the garden, her dingy white dress still clean enough that it looked stark against the gray stones of the prison.

  She was young. Honoria could see that much even from this distance. Her hair was fair and pulled away from her face in a neat coil at the back of her neck. She was slim and pale, and she walked slowly and gracefully, with the elegance of a ballet dancer. Her posture was straight and regal, more so than one would expect of a person so young. A guard accompanied her, but he walked a few steps behind her, giving her some measure of privacy.

  His eyes were sharp, though. Honoria noted the way they scanned the wall of the garden and then darted back to the young woman. He seemed reluctant to allow her out of his sight.

  “Monsieur.” Honoria reached across the table, her hand shaking as she touched a finger to the marquis’s sleeve.

  “Hmm?” He seemed engrossed in his thoughts and didn’t even look up at her.

  “Monsieur, look out the window.” She closed her hand on his sleeve, and he glanced down at her fingers with annoyance. And then the import of her words seemed to filter through the wall of concentration, and he looked first at her and then out the window.

  He gasped in a breath and rose so quickly he all but overturned the table.

  “Is it she?” But Honoria knew without having to ask that it was indeed Madame Royale. No one else would have caused that response.