Scoundrel in My Dreams

by Celeste Bradley

  “Because of his orders, we were cut off. The French were all around us. We hid like animals in the rocks of the mountains and waited for our commander to save us. He would not, or could not. I still do not know.

  “I took the lead. I hoped to somehow salvage Blakely’s honor, to declare him ill and unable to command due to circumstances beyond his control. He would have none of it. He said I betrayed him. I could have saved him, just as I saved all the others, but Blakely would not retreat. He had some notion that it would be cowardly. Better to die in error than to live to fight another day.”

  The waves went on. Jack wanted to close his eyes and sail away on those waves, to be stroked by those relentless hands, to sleep cradled on that beautiful bosom.

  To wake next to that beautiful figure and roll her beneath him, sleepy and soft, willing and damp.

  The willing part might be a problem, once she knew the truth.

  “In the end, I left Blakely in order to lead the others back through the bloody field of battle to the main column of the British Army. We crept like rats in the dark, without pride or bravery. It was the only way to bring them back alive.”

  The room remained quiet. The ceiling did not crash down upon his head. The deepest secret in his life was being revealed, and not only was the world not ending, but also Laurel had not even ceased in her task.

  Perhaps things could go on as before. Perhaps if he told the truth, just once, then the tangle of his thoughts would ease and the words in his mind would line up neatly and obediently behind his lips.

  “I left him behind.” He inhaled, then let out a slow breath. “I killed him.”

  The sound of the paper waves ceased. He opened his eyes to see that Laurel had turned to gaze at him. “The French killed him,” she said softly. “He went to war. He did not have to go. You did not cause his death.”

  He gazed into the clarity of her sky blue eyes. At sea, a sky like that meant that a man could sail forever. “I read once that despair . . . is when you are no longer able to sustain, even for the briefest moment, the notion that all will be well in the end.”

  She rested her hands in the skirt of her gown and blinked at him solemnly. “Yes. That is precisely the definition.”

  Sweet, serious Laurel, seeker of words. How he wished she would give him the right ones.

  “The reason I despaired, the secret that has turned me into . . . ,” he waved a hand over himself, “this, is . . . I killed my cousin with my own hands.”

  He saw the denial in her eyes and went on before she could interrupt him again. “It was after the retreat, you see. Once I had the men, at least, most of the men, safely back with the Army, the next morning I broke ranks to go back into the battle, to find Blakely and persuade him to retreat.”

  The next part—that would be the hardest. That would be the moment when her clean blue gaze would flinch from his, when she would turn her face away, when she would no longer listen, no longer speak.

  She would turn away from him. The entire world would, if they knew.

  So why was he telling her? Why was he cracking himself open like an egg to let her gaze at his foul and rotten center?

  Because perhaps if she understood how many pieces he’d been in, she might realize . . . what, that he’d not been responsible for his actions toward her? Coward.

  No, what he truly wanted her to know was that it had all been his fault. He ought not to have taken the comfort she so innocently offered him. He ought not to have sheltered in her arms and her body. He was a murderer, not a gentleman. He’d been a scoundrel to involve her, an irresponsible fool.

  And she . . . she’d been an angel.

  Now the angel would finally see the devil in him.

  He kept his gaze locked on hers. He must see her response. He owed it to Blakely to pay for his crime with her repugnance.

  “I found Blakely. And when I found him, I killed him.”

  Laurel sat with her hands dropped serenely in her lap, showing no sign of the alarm that shot through her. Not killed, surely. Did not save, perhaps.

  He gazed at her with all tension washed from his expression. “You are thinking that I take the blame where it is not due. You are thinking that Blakely died from a French bullet, or a battleground disease, or a fall from a horse—but I tell you he did not.”

  He held out his hands again as if to show her. They were large hands, finely shaped and a little callused from his life on board ship.

  “I see no blood on your hands,” she said evenly, though fear chilled her belly. He seemed to truly believe it.

  He made fists, then relaxed them, letting his hands drop to his knees. “There is no blood when you wrap your hands about someone’s throat and strangle the life out of them.”

  Shock echoed through her, bouncing around as if she were naught but an empty shell. It could not be. He could never, ever—

  “Strangle?” She could scarcely choke out the word. It was like a stone in her throat.

  “It was surprisingly easy.” Jack’s gaze went far away for a moment. “His legs were gone. There was nothing to save, they were so shattered by cannon fire. He would have spent his life as a helpless invalid, being carried from room to room by servants like an infant, never to ride or hunt or even stride around his estate on a fine day.”

  Laurel drew back. “Men live without their legs. A rich man could afford the help.” It was too awful to contemplate, what Jack claimed to have done. Such an awful, wicked waste. “There is so much to offer even a man who cannot walk. What of music, and books, and—?”

  Jack shook his head slowly. “You speak of a life of the mind, a life such as you might make for yourself. You have the imagination to see a different future. Blakely was not that sort of man. To him, his life was over. Even should he have survived surgery and infection, he had already lost everything he loved most.” Jack’s gaze focused on hers, as if remembering that she was there. “I’ve never told anyone that I’m a murderer before.”

  Laurel didn’t move, didn’t react, didn’t even blink, but inside she was raging against the calm self-loathing she saw in his eyes.

  Mutiny and murder. She’d wanted a way to blackmail him. Now she had one. Of course, the fact that her heart ached for him, that she nearly had to press her two hands to her bosom to keep it from breaking in half at what he’d been forced to do, well, that had nothing to do with anything. That was simply the sort of thing that happened in captivity. After a time, one stopped knowing where one ended and one’s captor began.

  Still, the fury that always seemed to live just beneath her skin now had a target. “Blakely was an idiot.”

  “Oh yes.” Jack almost smiled. “Everyone thought so, even before he decided to go to war.”

  “A selfish idiot to boot.” She gazed at Jack, seeing it as if it were enacted before her eyes. “He forced you to do it, didn’t he?”

  Jack’s brows lifted. “It was my decision.”

  “Ha!” she barked rudely. “Selfish, silly man, too concerned with himself to realize what it would do to you if you respected his wishes. He begged, no doubt. Told you that if you hadn’t defied him, it never would have happened. Made you feel responsible, and then took the coward’s way out!”

  “He did not suicide. I killed him.”

  “No, he was too cowardly even to die at his own hand. I imagine there were weapons lying all around him, like leaves in the fall. Did he take one up to use on himself?”

  Jack blinked. “It was my responsibility. He was like my brother. When he chose to disobey his orders and advance, I should have stopped him.”

  “I knew it!” She sprang to her feet and began to pace. “It was his responsibility to refuse command if he was too stupid to do it well! It was his responsibility to listen to wiser heads in battle! It was his responsibility to get his men to safety. Instead, you had to do it all for him, even down to his own suicide.” She folded her arms. “Bloody weakling!”

  Jack gazed at her, startled. “I—” The
n he shook his head. “It does not change the fact that I took his life. It does not wash away the memory of the way it felt when the life left his body under my choking hold.”

  She could not bear it. In an instant she was across the room, kneeling at his feet. “No.” She took his hands in hers. “I know these hands. These are not the hands of a killer.”

  He went very still at her touch. “You should stay away from me. My hands have already done things to you they should not have done.” He swallowed. “I don’t think I am quite . . . civilized anymore,” he said hoarsely.

  She saw a vein throb in his neck. Her own heart sped. His hands . . . his large, skilled, uncivilized hands. Suddenly she realized how small she was at his feet. Even sitting, he towered over her, his wide shoulders blocking the slanting late-afternoon light. So powerful a man, yet his hands shook slightly in hers.

  Too close. Too dangerous. Hot, wet wanting flared between her thighs. Yet she dared not move, dared not stir him one way or the other—or herself.

  The breathless moment hung like a Chinese rocket in the sky. The explosion was imminent.

  Nervously she licked her lips, a quick dart of her tongue.

  In that fraction of an instant he was upon her.

  Twenty

  Jack pushed Laurel down to the carpet and rolled onto her. He never released her hands, only kept them trapped in his. He spread them wide on the floor, pinning her. His mouth came down onto hers, desperate, starving, and most delightfully uncivilized.

  Laurel fought him, writhing and bucking beneath his heavy weight. She wasn’t sure why, for she wanted it as badly as he did, except that he frightened her a little.

  Or perhaps you frighten yourself?

  Oh yes. She terrified herself. All that fury, all that dark loss and pain she carried within her, became something else when this man touched her. Rage turned to passion in a blink, fury into lust. She wanted to take out her pain and her betrayal upon his body with her mouth and her hands and the heavy, damp, aching need between her legs.

  I don’t think I am quite civilized anymore, either.

  He moved against her, though they lay fully clothed. She could feel him, thick and rigid, pressing between her thighs, into the wet, aching core of her. Layers of cloth did nothing to stop the heat of him from radiating into her as he ground his erection into her. He matched the rhythm of his thrusts with the rhythm of his tongue deep into her mouth.

  Taste, heat, and the bondage of her hands drove her mad. She kissed him back, moaning into his mouth, panting, whimpering as the swell of his erection rubbed her throbbing clitoris into fully engorged excitement.

  Every time he touched her, it was like that night all over again. The world as she knew it went away and they were lost in a maelstrom of violent lust and aching need and, threading through it all, the most tender caring. How could something be part healing, part giving, and part wild, grief-stricken retaliation?

  Unless it wasn’t him whom she retaliated against. Could it be the two of them, together, taking vengeance on the world itself, refusing to lie down and die beneath its cruelty? With their bodies and their mouths and their hot, roaming hands, did they cry out, We live!?

  Then came the voice in her mind: If you lie with him he might let you take Melody.

  If I lie with him, I might never come up for air again.

  The hell of it was, she couldn’t at that moment decide if that was good or bad.

  She felt herself sliding away, falling into him, forgetting why she’d come here, why she’d stayed. Pulling her mouth from his with a gasp, she turned her face away. “No! Stop!”

  He went very still on her. After a breath, she looked back to see that he gazed down at her with eyes nearly black with lust and need. She swallowed. “Let me go?” Her voice was a husky whisper. She tried again, this time remembering to add some conviction: “Let me go!”

  “You want this.” There was a hardness in his face and she saw a glimpse of the soldier. She could almost see the smoke of the battlefield wreathing within his eyes. “I can feel you, hot and wet against me.” He pressed into her again. “You want me inside you.”

  She let out a breath that was almost a moan as another rush of damp lust proved him quite right.

  No. That was the word she struggled to recall. “No.”

  He went still once more, but he did not release her. “I can feel how wet you are. I can feel you throb against me. I could be thrusting inside you right now. You could be screaming your orgasm into my mouth like you did yesterday and no one would hear a thing.”

  Because she was in a cell. Because she was his prisoner, pinned to the floor, overpowered and vulnerable. Heaven save her, but the thought excited her further.

  He wanted her. She was his prisoner and he wanted her nonetheless. That was the darkness inside him, the wild lawlessness given him by battle. That wildness drew her, excited her, made her want to hike her skirts and let him take her on the floor like a Viking prize. That damaged edge of him was what had drawn her to his room in the middle of the night once. It was what made her climb into his bed to soothe him. She’d known where it would lead from the moment she’d touched the latch on his door. She’d known that the spark that had always lain between them would flare into a bonfire in the dark.

  She’d taken him that night.

  And she could take him now. She was no prisoner in this house. She was a spy.

  He doesn’t know that. He thinks you are his captive. Now his blood is hot and he wants you nonetheless. Afterward, when his head is clear, he will think he has committed a crime, another crime, and he will loathe himself to destruction once again.

  Because she couldn’t allow that, because she was no Blakely, she fought down the thudding runaway horse of her desire and shook her head. “Let me go, Jack.”

  Black need flashed rebellious in his eyes for an instant, setting off an answering wicked rush of depraved hope within her hungry body. Then his hands loosened about hers and he rolled off her.

  She sat up, rubbing at her hands and pushing her skirts down, tucking her feet modestly to one side. When she looked at him, he was sitting half turned away, one hand over his face.

  “My apologies,” he said tightly.

  She could feel the battle raging within him still. His need was so much more than lust, so much more than simple loneliness and loss. He was a strange, complicated man, full of odd strength and not a few flaws. Iron turned to steel upon the anvil of battle, gleaming brightly beneath the soot and blood, he was a beautiful lean sword of a man.

  The right woman could wield such a man and keep him by her side forever, all the stronger for him.

  That would not be me. I am too cracked and badly glued. I could never hold all of him.

  Recalling the impulse to fall into him and never emerge, she shuddered. I am not strong enough. He would take me over. He would own me.

  She could not allow that. She’d fought so hard to keep herself before and she’d lost. Another such loss as that would end her.

  Taking a deep breath, she stood. There was a mark of dampness soaking the front of her skirt, ruining the fine silk, proof of her lust for him. She slipped Lementeur’s beautiful shawl quickly over her shoulders, letting the length fall down the front of her gown to hide the stain. Only then did she turn back to see that Jack was also standing, fastening his surcoat. The cut of it did not completely hide where he’d pressed into her. Nor did it conceal the thick bulge of his persistent erection.

  After the first glance, she carefully kept her gaze on his. He met her eyes, but his were hooded and unreadable in the early-evening gloom.

  Laurel lifted her chin. “I need candles.”

  He said nothing for a long moment. The gloom increased, turning him into a silhouette against the bluish windowpanes.

  When he spoke, his voice was a growl. “Will you agree to abandon your plan to flee London with Melody?”

  “Would you believe me if I said yes?”

  “I would.�
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  “I could say yes and then run with her when you let me go.”

  She saw him nod.

  “You could. I would find you.” Then his head tilted a little. She wished she could see his face. “But you do not lie, Laurel.”

  She folded her arms. She sometimes forgot that he saw into her as easily as she saw into him. “The truth, then? No, I do not agree. I will have my daughter, Jack.”

  His fingers slipped into his waistcoat pocket and withdrew the key. With a start, Laurel recalled her own key, still tied about her neck, entirely forgotten within the bodice that she’d nearly allowed him to rip from her body. It was all she could do not to clutch at it protectively.

  “I regret this, but I must leave you to think on it another night.” He turned to leave, but just before he stepped through the door he turned back, his face slightly averted.

  “Thank you,” he said quietly. “You were ever a good listener.”

  Then he was gone, the clunk of the lock tumblers the last sound in her silent cell.

  When Jack returned down the main club level—by way of his room to change his trousers, of course—he hesitated outside the old club room, which had transformed from a masculine den of peace to a great scrambling, toy-filled, occasionally pet-infested family parlor.

  They would want to know where he’d disappeared to. Oh, they wouldn’t ask out loud, but Colin and Aidan would give that slow assessing gaze they always did, as if they were gauging his current tendency toward madness.

  And who could blame them? You almost assaulted Laurel against her will.

  Yet he hadn’t. He was not quite the scoundrel he’d thought himself, it seemed. The civilized man had won out. It was a small victory, but he would take it.

  He only wished he didn’t have to endure their questioning gazes every time he walked into a room. Taking a breath, he put his hand on the latch and pushed the great oak doors open—

  To find that no one so much as noticed his entry. They were all, Colin, Pru, Aidan, Madeleine, Evan, and all the old goats of the club, clustered around something at the far end of the room.