Irresistible

by ROBARDS, KAREN

  He could not afford to have his interest piqued by her.

  “You’re in a deal of trouble, you know.”

  Shucking his clammy breeches, he addressed the huddled form in a grim voice that was a pretty faithful echo of the way he felt.

  “If this is about money, I’ll pay you well to let me go.”

  Her voice was low, husky, well-coached in the cadences of a lady. It was the first time he had heard it properly, and it surprised as well as disturbed him. Like the rest of her, her voice was too attractive, too feminine, too well-bred, for his liking, considering how their acquaintance was destined to end. Her eyes opened as she spoke and then widened. For the space of perhaps a couple of seconds she watched as, naked, he toweled himself off. Then her eyes had snapped shut again.

  His lips compressed. He cast the towel aside and reached for the dry shirt that James had left for him on the table.

  “Will you indeed? And have you money on you?”

  If she was carrying money, it stood to reason that the letters would be in the same place. Perhaps concealed beneath her skirts, safe in an oilskin bag?

  Her eyes flicked open again just as he reached for his drawers. “Not on me. But—I can get it.”

  Of course he had not expected the accomplishment of his mission to be that simple. In this business, nothing ever was.

  “Pie in the sky,” he said pulling on his breeches, serviceable ones of black stockinette that suited the station of the impecunious Frenchman who, while in Paris, he professed to be.

  “It is not! I can get it! I can!”

  Her eyes widened. As if in agitation, she raised her head a few inches off the puddled floor. She shook her head, flinging back the obscuring curtain of hair like a wet dog indulging in a shake, and incidentally showering the immediate area with water droplets. As his last pair of dry breeches got spattered, he glanced down with a grimace. Then his gaze lifted, and suddenly, to his horror, Hugh found himself looking into the face of one of the most ravishing beauties he had beheld in many a year.

  Gargoyle, indeed. Even calling her a high-flyer failed to do her justice. What he was looking at was nothing less than a diamond of the first water. And to make matters worse, she looked to be scarcely older than a debutante.

  Taken aback, he took his opponent’s full measure and was suddenly transported to a grim area far beyond dismay. He’d been in the right of it when he’d termed the golden eyes that had been peeping at him siren’s eyes, he thought. They were the color of candlelit honey, fringed by thick black lashes and set aslant below delicate black eyebrows that seemed to take wing toward her temples. Her face was a classic oval, with high cheekbones, a smooth, unlined brow, and a delicately molded jaw and chin. Her nose was small and straight and elegant; her lips had been carved by a master, the upper finished with an exquisite bow in the center, the lower with a lush curve. Even tinted faintly blue, as they were now, they were imminently kissable lips.

  At the thought Hugh pulled himself up sharply. Beauty or no, it made no difference in the job he had to do.

  “What if I told you that I have a price, but it isn’t any amount of money?” he asked as he retrieved the knife he always kept concealed on his person from the table where he had placed it as he stripped. He slid it from its sheath and moved toward her, deliberately handling it so that its sharp-honed blade flashed silver in the light.

  Wide-eyed, she focused on the knife, as he had intended. Fear clouded her eyes. Good, he told himself. He might well have need of her fear.

  His bare feet encountered the outer edges of the cold water in which she lay, and he glanced down. Left as she was much longer, she just might succumb to exposure, in which case he would not have to involve himself any further in the process of ridding the world of a traitor.

  Ah, but letting nature take its course wouldn’t get him the information he needed, and was most chancy besides. She only looked fragile, he reminded himself. In his experience—and he had a large and varied experience in such matters—females of her stamp tended to be unexpectedly hardy.

  “I—I would pay it.” Her voice was tremulous; her eyes, wide with apprehension, were riveted on his face. Then her lashes flickered, and her lids dropped. He watched, unable to help himself, as she wetted her lips with the tip of a little pink tongue. Abruptly her lids lifted again so that those siren’s eyes met his full on. “Anything.”

  He could not mistake her meaning. Still, that last word had a grim resolve to it that fell far short of the seductiveness such a proposal called for. Paradoxically, that she did not bill and coo at him made her offer that much more attractive.

  That he found himself tempted, even momentarily, infuriated him.

  “Would you indeed?” His voice had hardened along with his resolve. Still skirting the puddle, he walked behind her, the knife held purposefully in his hand.

  “I—What are you doing?”

  Sounding panicked now—he guessed by the knife—she tried to sit, all the while craning her neck to keep him in view. Hampered as she was by her bound limbs, her movements were clumsy flailings that, suddenly impatient, he put an end to by the simple expedient of placing a hand on her shoulder and pushing her back down against the floor. Without effort he held her there, on her side as she had been before she’d tried to sit up. After the briefest of struggles she subsided, although he could feel the tension in her muscles through the cold wet cloth that covered them.

  Crouching behind her, he was treated to a view of her profile as she strained to look back over her shoulder at him: It was as perfect as a cameo. The realization had him swallowing enough curses to shock an abbess.

  That his quarry had turned out to be a woman was cosmic joke enough. Making her a chit of a girl and a raving beauty to boot was overkill.

  Sticking his knife into the waistband of his breeches, Hugh flipped her onto her belly without further ado.

  “What are you doing?” she asked again, still watching him over her shoulder and sounding almost pitiful as he secured her by the simple measure of placing one knee in the small of her back, just below her bound hands.

  “Lie still.”

  Careful not to let too much of his weight rest on her slight form—and thoroughly annoyed with himself for being so careful—he conducted a comprehensive search of her person, running his hands down her arms, along the insides and outsides of her thighs, around her slender waist, and over the fetching curve of her bottom. The saturated cloth kept no secrets; through it he could feel every toothsome inch. She sucked in her breath and went very still when first he touched her, but offered no resistance. When his weight shifted and his hands slid beneath her to feel their way up her rib cage, she shuddered once and seemed to shrink, but still made no protest.

  Her cheek rested against the wet floor with her face turned to the wall. Her eyes were closed, and he was treated to a view of long sooty lashes curling against her cheeks, and soft parted lips trembling slightly as his hands went about their business. She looked helpless, and frightened, and about eighteen.

  If Hildebrand didn’t rot in hell for eternity, there was no justice in the world.

  The soft roundness of her breasts under his hands and the feel of her firm little nipples thrusting into his palm were almost his undoing.

  Gritting his teeth, all too aware of his quickened pulse and swelling loins despite valiant attempts to ignore both, he finally acknowledged himself outgunned even as his hands ascertained that there was nothing concealed in the near vicinity of her breasts. Silently cursing, he withdrew his hands more quickly than he would have done with any other suspect and mentally declared the search, imperfect as it was, ended.

  If she was hiding the packet of letters he sought, or a weapon, or anything else about her person, it was too well-concealed for him to find this way.

  He pulled his knife from his waistband.

  Her breath caught in an audible gasp. Clearly she’d been watching him from beneath her lashes.

  He’d
forgotten that doxy’s trick of hers. Forgotten everything for a moment except the feel of her under his hands.

  And that, damn it to bloody hell, was enough to dazzle any man breathing.

  It would, he reflected bitterly, behoove him to be careful what he was about, just as James had suggested. Of course, James hadn’t realized that the person Hugh had to be most wary of was himself.

  “What are you going to do with that knife?”

  “What do you imagine I’m going to do with it, I wonder?”

  The harsh note in his voice was deliberate. Contrary to her obvious fears, he had already realized that using his knife on any part of her save the rope that bound her hands and feet was beyond him.

  “I—don’t know. Please—don’t hurt me.”

  Her voice had dropped until it was no more than a shaky whisper. Hugh swallowed another curse. His impulse was to reassure her, but he ruthlessly suppressed it. That was the one thing he could not do.

  “Don’t move,” he said, even more harshly than before, and shifted so that he was crouching beside her, knife in hand. She drew in a ragged breath, but lay still, watching him from the corner of her eye. She was breathing too fast; he could see that from the rapid rise and fall of her slender back.

  “Your name is Hugh, isn’t it?”

  Uttered in that soft, throaty voice of hers, his name took on a whole new dimension. As she finished speaking, her tongue came out to moisten her lips again. Watching, Hugh felt another fierce burst of heat shoot through his loins, and steeled himself to resist her wiles and his own base impulses alike.

  It was very possible, he reminded himself grimly, that she was enticing him deliberately.

  “Yes.”

  A long shudder racked her, probably from the cold, although fear or a conscious attempt to win sympathy were other possibilities. The thought that she should be bundled in blankets and set before a roaring fire forthwith occurred to him, only to be sternly dismissed. Try though she might to seem so, she was not some small defenseless creature that required his gentle care.

  She was a traitor.

  “Please don’t hurt me, Hugh.”

  There was a quaver to her voice that caused his muscles to tighten. Even knowing what he did about her, even suspecting that she was deliberately playing on his sympathies, he discovered that, though he would give much for it to be otherwise, he was not proof against her frightened-sounding entreaty.

  “I’m not going to hurt you—at least, not if you behave yourself. I’m going to cut the ropes.” Cursing himself for a softheaded fool, he shifted so that he was on his knees beside her. “But be warned—if you give me any trouble, any trouble at all, you’ll regret it.”

  He felt some of the tension leave her body as he pushed aside the nearly waist-length tangle of wet hair that hung in his way and set to work. Her skin was corpse-cold, he found as he touched it, but soft and smooth, and her fingers were elegantly tapered and well cared for. There was a long scratch on her left hand, but no indication that she had ever done anything more strenuous in her life than lift a bonbon to her mouth. In short, she had the hands of a lady, he registered unwillingly. Setting his knife to the rope binding her wrists, he began to saw with some savagery at the wet hemp. He would cut her free, get her dry and warm because that was the expedient thing to do, and allow her to think that he might just let her go if she gave him what he wanted.

  The letters, that is, and the full story of how and why she had obtained them and to whom she expected to give them once she reached France.

  Nothing else.

  “Hugh. Thank you. I would have drowned if you hadn’t jumped into the water after me. You saved my life.”

  Clearly she was attempting to forge a bond between them. During the years he’d spent in his country’s service, he’d encountered that trick more than once. It was, in fact, a classic captive-to-captor maneuver, and he was too old a hand to fall for it. Still, she was surprisingly clever for so freshly minted a spy, he thought with a welcome surge of cynicism, even as he found himself responding instinctively to the soft sweetness of her voice.

  “I had a reason.”

  “Still. Thank you.”

  He didn’t reply. When the rope, cut through, dropped to the floor, she pushed herself into a sitting position with a quick, fluttery-lashed glance over her shoulder at him. Drawing her bound legs up beside her, she chafed her wrists and shook her hands, presumably to get the blood flowing to them again.

  Hugh started to work on the rope around her ankles without a word.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Cutting the ropes?” His question was dry. The blade continued to saw at the resistant hemp, and his attention stayed focused on his work.

  “Why did you kidnap me? What do you want?”

  As the last rope fell away, he glanced up at her. Her face was just inches away. With the wet, matted snarls of her hair springing out around her delicate features like a lion’s mane and her eyes gleaming a feral gold in the lamplight, she looked like some untamed creature at bay. A supremely beautiful creature. Even as their gazes met, he could not help but acknowledge that. She regarded him warily but with a shade less actual fear than she had shown before. Then she essayed a little smile.

  “I want the letters you stole from Lord Archer, to begin with,” he said, in a tone made utterly grim by her smile. “It would make it easier on both of us if you would just hand them over and be done.”

  Her eyes widened into big pools of utter innocence. Her lips parted and rounded. The faux bewilderment was well done, very well done indeed. His mouth twisted as he took in every nuance of her expression. She was an actress of no little talent, without a doubt. Too bad she hadn’t chosen to take to the boards rathen than betray her country.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Her artlessness grated on him, for which he was thankful. It would be far easier to do what he had to do if he could see her as the kind of conscienceless, conniving witch she undoubtedly was instead of the ravishing young girl she appeared to be.

  “Of course you don’t.”

  Standing, he returned his knife to his waistband and looked her over sardonically. She was still giving him the big-eyed treatment when he reached down and curled a hand around her elbow, hauling her without ceremony to her feet.

  Even soaking wet, she weighed surprisingly little. So little that using his strength against her bothered his conscience. Actually, it made him feel like the biggest brute alive. Manhandling helpless women was not normally his style.

  She, of course, was not a helpless woman. He had to keep reminding himself of that. As he struggled mentally to replace the image of her his senses gave him with what she was in truth, she hung awkwardly in his grasp, stumbling a little as she got her feet beneath her.

  “If you choose to make this difficult for yourself, then so be it.” His voice was pure steel. “You will oblige me by disrobing.”

  A search of each garment must needs be made in case she had sewn the letters into a secret pocket in her petticoats or chemise. They were not in her bodice, he was willing to swear.

  “What?”

  Looking utterly taken aback, she tried to pull away then, but he held her fast. As her eyes fixed on his face they were wide with what gave every appearance of being genuine alarm. Again he gave her points for acting, although given her profession and the fact that she had already offered herself to him, she was perhaps overdoing the role of shocked innocent a bit.

  “You heard me.” He was deliberately brutal. “Take off your clothes.”

  7

  “Hugh. Please. You must listen: There’s been a mistake.”

  Claire knew she sounded desperate, which was reasonable, because she was. Her breathing came quick and shallow, and her heart pounded as she fought to keep calm, to think, to plan. Her exhaustion was forgotten. This harsh-faced man whose hand bit into her arm had a grim air about him now that frightened her anew. The decency she
had thought—hoped?—she’d detected in him earlier had vanished. His eyes—they were gray, she saw now, the cold opaque gray of lead—were as wintry as the day just past. She realized that if he chose to force her to do anything, anything at all, she would be hard put to successfully resist. She was already well acquainted with his strength, and he was, in addition, far bigger than she. The top of her head fell inches short of his chin, and with his broad shoulders and wide chest he dwarfed her far smaller frame. And when he had so nonchalantly stripped off his clothes right in front of her widening eyes, she had been provided with more evidence than she had cared to see of his whipcord muscularity.

  Words were her strength, practically her only strength, and she wielded them frantically.

  “Indeed, truly there has been a mistake. I know nothing of any letters, and as for Lord Archer—I believe he may be a friend of my aunt’s. I have never met him.”

  For a moment he stared down at her, his eyes narrowing. He was so close that she could see the tiny lines radiating from the corners of his eyes; so close that she could almost count each whisker that made up the shadow darkening his lean cheeks; so close that she could smell on him the faint salty aroma of the sea.

  For an instant, she thought with budding hope, he almost seemed to be considering her words. Then his mouth twisted sardonically.

  “I’m too old a hand to be taken in by a glib tongue and a pair of big eyes, and so I warn you. Come, we’ll deal better if you’ll leave off the pretense. I’ll give you one chance to hand over the letters voluntarily, and one chance only. Well?”