The Perils of Pleasure

by Julie Anne Long

  Polite applause rippled around the table accordingly.

  “Will you be out in the row with us come Saturday morning, Mr. Baxter? We have a timed trial with the Mercury Club carriage, and perhaps you can best one of us.” The man positively twinkled with competition.

  “Oh, I’m still learning my way about the larger conveyances, Mr. Bradshaw. I’ve a beautiful new high flyer, however, and a matched team, and I’d be happy to run them up against yours.”

  Bradshaw nodded. “I’ll look forward to that race, then, Baxter.”

  There was polite laughter around the table, a few comments about high flyers and Tattersall’s, but Marcus, who liked both high flyers and horses, was smiling but not listening, because he was trying to decide what bothered him about what Baxter had just said:

  Learning his way around the larger conveyances.

  Interesting to learn that Baxter was still learning the ribbons to a carriage the size of the one belonging to the Mercury Club, but then again, the man’s money was new, and perhaps he hadn’t had an opportunity yet. So as a member of the Mercury Club, he would have use of the carriage any time he wished.

  But he would have needed to hire a driver if he did.

  Chapter 16

  Madeleine was resourceful. Colin consented to get back into the coffin for as far as St. Giles—a slow, harrowing journey through the city, to be sure—where he was surreptitiously able to roll out of the coffin. The cart and horse were left in the care of an enterprising if grubby looking boy, along with a coin, and Madeleine flirted a hackney driver into accepting three pounds for a drive as far as the Coaching Inn, purported to be on the outskirts of Marble Mile, a few hours outside of London.

  He agreed, since he was confident he would be able to find passengers there.

  She boarded, and Colin waited for the driver to climb up before he climbed up into the carriage, too. And once again Madeleine and Colin were in an enclosed space, hurtling rapidly out of the city.

  This particular hackney was elderly, hadn’t any springs, and like many conveyances in London, someone’s coat of arms had been scraped from the door. Colin amused himself by wondering if it might have once belonged to the Earl of Malmsey.

  “Do you want to know something ironic?” Colin asked after a lengthy silence.

  “All right,” Madeleine agreed.

  He smiled a little. “You might have noticed how I’ve become something of a hero.”

  “Have you, now?”

  He quirked the corner of his mouth. “The funny thing is…all my life, in many ways, I’ve wanted to…stand out in some way. My brothers are all very impressive. Marcus makes the money. Ian and Chase were war heroes. Each came home with impressive wounds, you see. One of them even has a limp, and it makes the ladies swoon. I came home unscathed, so I somehow neatly avoided being a hero. My father prefers the three of them to me.”

  “Do you think that’s the reason?”

  Colin’s mouth quirked a little. Interesting that she didn’t argue the point. Some women might have wanted to soothe him out of that particular notion.

  “I think he’s always preferred them.” Colin had never quite said this aloud before to anyone, and it wasn’t easy to say. “The girls, Olivia and Genevieve, came last, so they were novel, I suppose, and he dotes on them. They look a good deal like him—only pretty, mind you. He already had three sons when I came along. And it’s funny, so it became rather a habit of mine…doing things to see if I could get noticed. And then it was a pleasure to experience things, to see what I could get away with. I couldn’t seem to stop. And sometimes things take on their own momentum, and before I know it I’m dangling from a trellis outside of Lady Malmsey’s window.”

  Madeleine Greenway laughed at that. “So what are you saying?”

  “That I find it deeply ironic to be a hero for doing something I didn’t do. Something…horrific.”

  In truth, Colin found it unbearable, and it had been difficult to say it aloud. Particularly since he had genuine heroes in his family.

  But it seemed important to hear what Madeleine Greenway thought.

  She inhaled, exhaled, as if fueling herself for mulling it over. And then she said, “You went to war, and risked your life for your country, and came back alive, and you managed not to disgrace yourself, at least not that the broadsheets mentioned. And I’m certain that would have been mentioned, since they love to mention you. Some might say it takes a certain amount of talent and skill to stay alive.” She said this dryly. “And you’re quite good at noticing things. I imagine it helped you to be a good soldier and to stay alive, and to keep other men alive.”

  Well. He’d never really thought of it that way. He gave a snort.

  “You saved my life,” she added softly. “I wasn’t shot because you noticed something. Isn’t that true?”

  “Oh, that was a reflex. Some male instinct to throw my body on top of a woman. It had been some time, you see, since I’d done that. Prison and all that.”

  She tipped her head back against the carriage back and smiled. Her dark hair was coming down from its pins in fine spirals again. Diabolical of her to tempt a man like that. She really ought to have paid more attention to the condition of her hair. Those loose strands drew attention to her long, pale throat, and reminded him that he’d touched her silky cool ear, and her bare hand, and that soft hair itself, and her peaked nipple, albeit through muslin, and if he kept thinking like this he would be quite hard and very uncomfortable so perhaps he ought to pay attention to what she was saying. Which was:

  “But you could have been killed when you threw your body over mine. And then all my work to rescue you would have been for naught.”

  “Oh, very well, then. I was heroic,” he conceded. “And forgive my selfish disregard for your ‘work.’”

  She laughed. It was odd, but every time she laughed, he felt as though he’d won a prize, and he felt happy all out of proportion to the humor of the occasion. She had a very good laugh, feminine and genuine, unrestrained when she gave it.

  Funny the things he’d come to be grateful for over these past few days.

  No one before had caused him to try so very hard to charm. And to do it, he was reaching into places in his mind and heart and soul that he’d never before reached into.

  She was bloody exhausting.

  “Sometimes being heroic means showing uncommon grace in the face of untenable circumstances.”

  She wasn’t looking at him as she said this. She was peering out the window of the carriage. He studied her, and a smile spread out all over his face.

  “Are you complimenting me, Mrs. Greenway?”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.” Still not looking at him.

  And so the trip passed in tentative exchanges of information interspersed with dozing until they reached the Coaching Inn. Then Madeleine paid their driver and Colin slunk in the shadows while she found a local person to tell them where Mutton Cottage could be found. (“Up the road a mile or two, past a farm, and then past a small inn, and after that you walk on another mile or so, past some very pretty oaks, and you’ll see it right on the road, can’t miss it, really. If you pass the oak with a great bump on the trunk that looks like an old gentleman, you’ve gone too far. Dunno ’oo lives a’ Mutton Cottage now.”)

  Alas, their advisor had lied.

  Or, rather, had likely underestimated, as was often the case with people who lived in the country, as they were accustomed to walking everywhere, and distances seemed like nothing to them.

  For Madeleine and Colin had walked and walked as the sun sank lower and lower into shreds of unremarkable pink clouds, and these shreds were now rapidly purpling. Three of the sky’s more aggressive stars already winked overhead. There was a sliver of moon showing, looking like light shining through a door just slightly ajar.

  Not the perfect light for grave robbing, in other words.

  Within an hour or so it would be night officially, and they’d passed no markers or signs
indicating Marble Mile was within a reasonable distance, nor had they passed any inns. There was just country stretching before them and country stretching after them and the opening notes of the evening’s cricket symphony starting up around them.

  Conversation between them sputtered out, replaced by taut uncertainty that was nearly as loud as conversation, and neither one wanted to acknowledge a hint of despair.

  “He said we’d pass a farm,” Colin said, mostly to himself, as Madeleine knew this, too.

  Shortly after Madeleine began rubbing her arms against the encroaching chill and the purpling sky began to prick up in stars in earnest, they saw the barn. Or rather, Colin saw the barn. It was really more of a tall, shadowy mound in the distance, but he knew what it was.

  He pointed at it, and without saying a word, Colin took off his coat and tucked it over Madeleine’s shoulders.

  It smelled to her like pine from that coffin and like male, like Colin, and in that moment the silent gesture felt as shockingly intimate as if he’d slowly stretched his body out over her.

  But Colin wasn’t even looking at her. “We’ll sleep there tonight,” he whispered firmly, pointing. “Come.”

  Madeleine hesitated, feeling foolish. “It’s a farm. There might be dogs.”

  Not the skinny, hungry, sneaky, frightened London sort of dogs, either, she thought. The giant, healthy, straightforward farm sort.

  Colin slowly turned his head toward her, and his expression was so incredulous she was torn between wanting to laugh and wanting to kick him.

  “It’s a farm. There are always dogs. So…” He raised a finger to his lips and frowned darkly enough to unite his brows.

  All right, then. Silence it was from then on.

  They crept across the field toward the barn, keeping to trees hugging the perimeter to take advantage of the shadows they cast, then creeping along the barn wall. And Colin pushed the door open very slightly, and the two of them squeezed in.

  The rich animal smell engulfed them. They stood for an instant in what felt like pure dark until their eyes grew accustomed to it, and then the gleam of benign animal gazes appeared. A plow horse standing nearly as tall as Colin lifted up its great head and stared at them with velvety eyes, then lost interest and dropped its head again. Four other stalls contained four cows who eyed them dispassionately, their cheeks moving endlessly as they worked the hay over.

  Colin tossed up their bundle of blankets and food, and it landed in the loft with a rustle. Madeleine gauged the height of the loft, set her foot upon the third rung and swung her body up onto it.

  The bloody ladder wheezed and groaned like an old man with gout.

  She froze, squeezed her eyes closed, and waited for a pack of baying hounds to descend upon them.

  Long seconds passed before she exhaled. She heard no baying. Just the sound of hay being crunched beneath large molars, a fringed tail slapping a taut rump, and the symphony of crickets outside. A deceptive sound, crickets, Madeleine decided. It seemed as though nothing at all could go amiss when crickets sang.

  She turned her head slowly, inquiringly, down toward him.

  Colin admired for a moment the line of her elegant, stubborn chin, pale in the dark shadows, aimed down like an arrow in inquiry, and assessed the situation quickly. She was small enough to need to take at least two more rungs of that ladder before she reached the loft, but God only knew what sort of sound those rungs might make.

  In the next moment, he scooped both his hands beneath what turned out to be a taut and deliciously small arse and gave her a hard boost upward, with a little squeeze just for the pleasure of it. Her hands found the edge and she hooked one leg over, and there was a soft thump and a rustle as she swiftly rolled out of his view in the loft.

  Colin stood back and considered for a moment. His legs were long enough to stretch up to the fourth rung, but he knew he couldn’t afford to allow it to complain beneath his weight. Instead, he touched the ball of one foot to it and swiftly propelled his body upward. The rung gave a surprised-sounding squeak, but his hands easily reached the loft’s edge, and he used his arms to pull his long body up and over the edge of it into the dark.

  He was still for a moment, winded. Damn. Prison had leached so much of his strength from him. He took a steadying breath.

  Pride made him prop himself up more quickly than he might have preferred. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark: there Madeleine was, kneeling facing him, her face a blue-white oval, her eyes velvety shadows. He saw the flash of teeth. A smile or a snarl? A smile, he decided optimistically.

  He patted about for the bundles he’d tossed up, intending at first to spread a blanket out for a bed of sorts. But conveniently enough for them, the day’s heat seemed to have risen and collected in the loft. It lay over them softly as down, and straw pricked at his back. Moonlight eased in through the hair-fine fissures between the boards of the roof and made deep blue shadows around them.

  Colin sat all the way up and touched Madeleine’s shoulder to gain her attention, pointed at her, then pillowed his hands beneath his tipped head. Sign language for: You. Sleep. Tonight.

  He rolled the blanket to make a pillow long enough for the two of them to share without sleeping right on top of each other, and then gave it a little pat and made an exaggerated For you, my lady flourish with his hands.

  And after a moment’s hesitation, Madeleine gave a mockingly regal nod. Scooting slowly, inching, actually, so as not to tempt the loft into creaking or the straw into rustling overmuch, she made her way to the pillow, then stretched out and exhaled luxuriously as her head sank into the pillow.

  Colin watched that exhalation avidly, as it was an eloquent sight indeed, that lift and fall of neat round bosom beneath muslin. He wondered if the sigh was for his benefit, then decided perhaps optimism and nobly restrained desire had prompted that speculation.

  And then he slowly, slowly, stretched out alongside Madeleine, a good foot away or so from touching her, and within excruciatingly close reaching distance of that bosom.

  God, how he wanted to roll over and show her precisely the nature of his own genius, in all its infinite variety.

  But oddly…he also wanted her to sleep. He wanted her to abandon herself to sleep. It would mean she trusted him, and he wanted this as much as he wanted to touch her skin. And the realization surprised him so thoroughly he almost forgot to feel noble about it.

  He breathed in, and there it was: lavender. He half smiled. It did nothing to calm his blood.

  Beneath them, large, slumberous animals breathed and shifted on their hooves, and for a time Colin simply was still, and listened to Madeleine’s breathing, listened to the crickets, listened for dogs, listened to the cows chewing and sighing, tried not to think about spiders and how much they enjoyed dark places like lofts. His ankles itched; his wounds were healing. He didn’t scratch. The familiar farm smells ached in him.

  And in that instant he wanted Pennyroyal Green. He wanted…familiar. He wanted simplicity and peace and Louisa Porter, and the life he’d always imagined for himself, the life that a bizarre injustice had taken from him.

  And this was when the rage he’d kept tamped for so long finally reared up and swiped at him with long claws.

  It shocked him; it was a sneak attack. His lungs locked, his hands curled into hard knots, his every muscle went rigid. He struggled for his equilibrium as surely as though he were engaged in actual combat, but his enemy was abstract: it was injustice. In this imposed silence, he couldn’t banter or spar with Madeleine to deflect a little of it, or keep moving in order to outrun it, and so it simply had him now. He needed to let it have its way with him. It was something new to accommodate, this rage, and he wasn’t quite certain how to do it. It was something else that hadn’t been a part of him before Newgate.

  But through all of this came the sound of Madeleine breathing softly and deeply. In and out. Waves rushing up to the shore and drawing back again.

  Sometimes being heroic
means showing uncommon grace in the face of untenable circumstances.

  Colin focused on her breathing, began to breathe in time with her, and little by little the anger eased from him. He thought to court peace by imagining it was Louisa who lay next to him, breathing softly, her gold hair spread over a pillow. But the image wouldn’t come. He simply couldn’t picture Louisa Porter on her back in a loft after having been boosted into it with a gratuitous arse squeeze.

  Peace eluded him. In part because he didn’t think he could bear another moment without touching Madeleine Greenway. He slowly propped himself on his elbow, one knee up, and gazed down at her, thinking to inventory her features in the dark. And testing a suspicion.

  His heart stuttered.

  Because, as it turned out, Madeleine Greenway wasn’t sleeping at all.

  Madeleine had kept her breathing even, pretending to sleep. But she was in truth listening to Colin Eversea…think. It was a familiar enough sound to her, the sound of a man with something weighty on his mind. There was something about the quality of the silence. A difference in his breathing, a tension that hummed nearly audibly from him, the way he lay very still on his back. It was something you learned about a man only over time.

  She thought she was beginning to know this one. In some ways, it was though she’d always known him and was simply rediscovering him.

  And then she heard the rustle, and looked up to meet his pale eyes in the dark. Her heart gave a mad, joyous thump.

  She gazed back at him now as he looked down over her, propped up on his elbow, one knee up. She didn’t doubt for a moment that Colin Eversea wanted her as badly as a man could want.

  But he also wanted her to choose.

  She inhaled deeply, sighed out an uneven breath. And chose.

  She lifted her hand up, and, as lightly as leaf drifting from a tree, dropped it softly against the inside of his thigh.