Ruined

by Jess Michaels

  “How do you figure I can help?” he asked, folding his arms. He was trying to appear detached, disinterested when he was anything but. “Did he take a horse?”

  Claire let out her breath in a sound of frustration. “No.”

  She put her hands on her hips and forced him to look where her fingers touched. Beautiful hips they were, even beneath the ill-fitting men’s trousers she wore.

  “War,” she said softly, drawing his gaze back up to her face. “I know your secret.”

  He blinked, but that was the only outward reaction he allowed. He forced down the panic that filled his chest and arched a brow at her. “Secret? Which one? I have more than you likely know.”

  “I have no doubt that is true,” she said, her tone suddenly breathless. She never looked away from him. “But the one to which I refer is your relationship to Captain Jack. What does he call himself? The king of the underworld?”

  War took a few seconds to compose himself, forced himself to remain seated. “I’m sure I’ve heard of the man. His supposed exploits are in the paper rather often. But what do you think you know about me that has anything to do with him?”

  She moved toward him, invading his space just enough that he finally got to his feet, hoping that towering over her might just intimidate her. It didn’t seem to do so. In fact, she merely smiled, as if amused by the effort.

  “I know Jack is your brother, War,” she said. “And you can help me get to him.”

  Claire examined War’s face closely. There was just a flicker of reaction to her accusation. The brief light in his eyes, the way his jaw flexed ever so slightly, the barely perceptible tightening of his fingers at his sides. He had his tells, it seemed, just as most people did. They were enough to confirm what she had heard about him in those dark days and nights when she was at Aston’s side.

  As to her reaction to the confirmation, well, that was more complicated. She was happy War was Jack’s brother. Aston wanted to overthrow the man, take over his territories. Claire had been wracking her mind trying to find a way to get to Aston’s greatest enemy. War was a very direct route.

  But another part of her was disappointed that Aston’s accusations were correct. She had loved one scoundrel in her life. She had hoped to change him in some way, to find the good in him. But she knew now that at their core, no man of that kind could be truly trusted. War being one of them shattered more than a few girlish fantasies about his heart of gold beneath that stoic, unreadable exterior.

  But then, she wasn’t looking for love. And she only had to trust War a tiny bit. Once she was in a room with Jack, the rest would be up to her. It was better that way. She was done with partners. Probably for the rest of her life.

  “Are you going to deny what I’ve said?” she asked, for War was still silent, as if he were weighing his options.

  He looked her up and down, and she could tell he was searching for her tells just as she had found his. She didn’t try to hide them. She let him see that she was absolutely certain of her accusation.

  He finally shook his head. “Why should I deny it, Claire? You seem rather sure of yourself.”

  She let out her breath in relief. “Excellent. That will save us a great deal of wasted time if you simply acquiesce.”

  “I never said I was acquiescing,” he said, a touch of laughter to his voice despite his obviously conflicted emotions about her being here, about her talking to him about this subject.

  She shivered. No, she couldn’t imagine War acquiescing to anything or anyone. He was a master at taming animals, but he was not to be tamed. Not by anyone.

  “I need you to put me in touch with your brother,” she said, pushing the inappropriate thoughts and the equally inappropriate images they inspired from her mind.

  He shook his head and turned away from her. “Well, I certainly am not going to do that, Claire.”

  His tone was so final that it set off a torrent of panic through her. She rushed toward him, swinging around in front of him in order to force him to look at her. She lifted up on her tiptoes as if getting closer would somehow make him see.

  “You cannot say no without hearing me out! I need his connections, War. It is my only hope now. And you are the only one who can get me close enough.”

  To her surprise, he grasped her shoulders, yanking her closer and looking down into what she knew were wild eyes.

  “Jack is dangerous, Claire. Just as dangerous as Aston. I won’t hand you over to him, do you understand?” he snapped. “Not so you can get back some trinket, some keepsake, some—”

  She swung her hands up and thrust his hands away from her shoulders in one smooth movement. He seemed surprised that she was capable of escaping him, but didn’t grab for her again. She was just as happy he didn’t, for when he touched her it only complicated matters.

  “I’m not trying to get back a silly little keepsake,” she shouted, hearing the break in her voice. Hating it and the vulnerability that sound revealed. But she couldn’t go back now. The truth would come out, just as she’d known it would from the beginning. She took a deep breath. “Aston stole my baby, War. Aston has my daughter.”

  Chapter Three

  Since she’d been gone, Claire had obviously developed the ability to hide her emotions. In the kind of world where she had been living, she would have had to do so to survive. But in that moment after she shouted her secret, War saw everything she’d been fighting to hide. Her pain was so clear, it might have been tattooed across her face in words like grief, terror, and anguish.

  “Claire…” he breathed, still trying to digest what she had said.

  The emotions on her face vanished in an instant and she lifted her chin in defiance as she backed away from him. She didn’t trust him. She didn’t want to tell him any of this. But she was forced to give away some part of herself for the baby that was lost to her. The child now held in the arms of such a very dangerous man.

  War cleared his throat. She was ready to run, even though she’d promised she wouldn’t. He could see her gearing up to do just that. He would have to be very careful here if he was going to get the entire story. And he needed that entire story before he could decide how to proceed.

  “Tell me everything,” he said softly.

  She swayed slightly on her feet and moved to the chair she had recently vacated. As she sank back into it, she said, “I have a child. A daughter.”

  “What is her name?” he pressed.

  That brought a smile to her lips. “Francesca. She is beautiful, War. So perfectly beautiful.”

  There was a light to her face as she said those words, a joy that almost erased all the other pain and anger. Almost.

  “How old is she?” he asked, easing the details out so that she would grow more comfortable in sharing them as he guided her toward the harder truths.

  “She turned a year in March, so fourteen months,” she answered.

  He did the math and frowned. Claire had run away in February of 1815. That meant she had gotten pregnant very swiftly after her departure.

  “That was why you stayed,” he whispered. “I always wondered why.”

  For a moment, Claire’s bottom lip trembled, the signal of control about to be lost, emotion about to overcome. But she pulled it back, straightening her spine.

  “I’m sure everyone wondered,” she whispered. “And Francesca was part of it. But she wasn’t the only reason.”

  “Tell me the other reasons,” War said.

  She worried her lip a moment. “At first being with Aston in his underground world was…fun. Did you ever read those old verses about Robin Hood?”

  War nodded. “They are romantic tales.”

  “Very. But the romance intrigued me. We would creep into a house at night, there was the danger of being caught. Sometimes Jon had me play a part for him, a distraction, and it was like a game.”

  War clenched his teeth. He knew exactly what she meant. There had been moments wit
h Jack and his schemes when War had felt the same way.

  “When I first realized what he really was, Aston made it seem like he was taking only from those who could afford the loss and somehow disbursing it to help those in need. I wanted to rebel, and what greater rebellion is there for a spoiled rich girl than to do such a thing?” She laughed, though it was humorless.

  “But that wasn’t the whole truth,” War encouraged.

  Her face fell. “No, in the end it was all a lie. Aston was no romantic Robin Hood. He was just a common thief, out for his own gain. He was as likely to swindle a poor widow for what little she had in her coffers as he was to take from a rich, violent lord of a manor who deserved to be taken down a peg.” She shook her head. “Once I realized that, I knew I’d been a fool.”

  “But by then you were married,” War said, ignoring the twisting pain and disgust that accompanied that sentence. He had always tried to avoid thinking of Claire standing before some sleepy vicar in Scotland, binding her life to a man who didn’t even deserve to look at her.

  Claire looked up at him, her cheeks darkening to a bright crimson. “I—no. We—I—”

  He wrinkled his brow in confusion. “Claire?”

  She shivered. “I never married him, War.” She broke their gaze, fisting her hands against her legs. “He never married me.”

  He staggered despite himself, taken aback by this soft confession, damaged by how much it damaged her and yet thrilled by the fact that she hadn’t linked her life to Aston in such a way. Why, he didn’t want to analyze too much.

  “You aren’t his wife,” he repeated, as if hearing it out loud would reduce some of its power. But it only made it stronger to him.

  She swallowed. “No. When we ran away together, it was what he promised, of course. And then we were waylaid by one thing or another. Eventually, his promises to make me his bride vanished completely. I had already given him my innocence and had no recourse. I was wrapped up in him and his life. I was determined to break free from my previous life that had been such a lie.”

  “A lie?”

  She blanched and shook her head. “I only mean, I started to see cracks in his façade, but I excused them. Then I tried to change him. Eventually I knew I had made a terrible mistake. I was ready to walk away. To flee into the night if I had to. But…but I became pregnant regardless of my lack of a ring, of vows, of propriety of any kind. And then I was trapped.”

  “You could have run away still,” War said.

  “How?” she asked, her voice cracking. “I couldn’t go home after doing such a thing…at least I thought I couldn’t. My family had already been ravaged by scandal thanks to me. And Aston found out my condition. He must have known I was thinking about escape, because he started watching me even closer. When Francesca came, she was so beautiful. Jon actually seemed moved by her presence. I thought he might change then, for her.”

  War squeezed his eyes shut. “But he didn’t.”

  “No.” She sighed. “It wasn’t long before he was back to his old tricks. And he became even more protective of us, almost keeping me in a cage with her, trying to control our every movement. Our every breath.”

  He shook his head. “And yet you are here, how did that happen?”

  She bit her lip, drawing his attention to the fullness of it. Making him want to do the same and make her shiver with need instead of regret and fear.

  “You know that one of Aston’s men tried to kill Gabriel’s new wife. He tried to hurt my brother. Not just my brother. Gabriel is the person I love most in this world outside of my daughter.”

  War nodded. Everyone on the household staff knew that sordid story. Claire’s twin brother Gabriel had been obsessed with finding her since the moment she disappeared. When he got too close to the truth, he and his now-bride, Juliet, had been attacked. Juliet had gone into the frigid Thames and nearly died.

  “Juliet is fine, though,” he reassured her. “And your brother is happy.”

  “Is he?” Claire asked, her relief plain. “Oh, I hoped that would be true when I heard he married. She is a good woman?”

  “Yes. She is the healer who saved your mother’s life when she was ill recently. And she is a good woman and good for your brother.”

  “That makes my heart happy. But Aston’s men would have hurt him, killed her, probably killed him.” Claire’s voice grew hard. “When I found out, I was furious. I confronted him.”

  War’s eyes went wide. “That was brave.”

  She shrugged. “Not very. Aston tried to tell me he didn’t want Gabriel or Juliet threatened. The man who did it, Howe, was exiled from the organization. But even that was a lie. In truth, Aston was furious that Gabriel was getting so close. He wanted him dead as much as any associate of his did.”

  She turned her face, her lip quivering as she stared at his fire. He allowed her silence for a long moment before he said, “I’m sorry, Claire.”

  “You have no need to be. I was the one who was such a fool,” she whispered. She cleared her throat. “When I found out, I realized in that moment that Aston truly didn’t give a damn about me. Obsession was not the same as love, not if he would hurt someone who meant so much to me. Wouldn’t he hurt Francesca, too, by that logic? If it would give him something he wanted or grant him some advantage over me, wouldn’t he?”

  War could say nothing to that. She wasn’t asking, not truly. It was clear she already knew the answer. “Did you just leave?”

  He couldn’t imagine that was true. Not that she would leave behind the very child she was so desperate to protect.

  “No. I decided we had to escape him and I planned meticulously for months,” she said. “I gathered money, I hid away supplies and finally I arranged for a carriage to take us away. I thought I had not left a trail for him to follow, that those who helped me were trustworthy. But I was so wrong. On the night Francesca and I were to escape, when the carriage came and the door opened, Aston was waiting for us inside.” Her voice caught. “And he was so angry.”

  War squeezed his eyes shut. He had heard that tone before, from women in the more dire of positions. From his own mother, even. He remembered her broken tone so well.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “Yes.” That one word and the tone she used said it all, but he forced himself to look at her regardless. Her face was soft with memory, her eyes bright with unshed tears. “But he knew as well as I did that nothing he did to me physically could ever be as horrible as taking Francesca away. He wanted to punish me for trying to leave. So he threw me from the moving carriage and disappeared into the night with her.”

  Even though she was already sitting, War saw her collapse a little against the chair, as if she couldn’t support herself anymore in even the slightest way.

  “How long ago was that?” he asked.

  “A month,” she said, her eyes welling with tears once more. “I have been desperate, War. I’ve searched every place we’ve ever been, talked to everyone who ever had even the slightest connection to Aston. He has vanished in the wind, smoke in the air. If anyone knows his whereabouts, no one will help me. I am out of money, out of options, and I fear the longer my child is with him, the more I am running out of time.”

  He frowned. “You think he would hurt her?”

  She caught her breath and seemed to settle herself. “No. Not physically, at least not at this juncture. There is a good woman in his employ who watches her, Melly. She is likely with my daughter more than he is and she is good at soothing his rage. Better than I was. But if you are Captain Jack’s brother, then I know you were raised in those streets with those kinds of men, War. You know what will happen to her the longer she stays under his control.”

  He nodded. There were not many choices for women of any rank or class, but for the lowest ones and especially those in the company of criminals, the choices were even worse. He would not want any daughter of his own in that circumstance, he couldn’t imagine Claire’s
terror.

  “Aston has begun to threaten some of Captain Jack’s endeavors,” she continued, her eyes now locking with his. “His ultimate goal is to overthrow him as king of the underworld. I know your brother must be watching him. He has spies within Aston’s network, for certain. Jack can find him, War. I’m sure Jack knows exactly where he is. Perhaps even where my daughter is.”

  War opened his mouth, but she rushed to her feet, stepping toward him. Her green eyes were wild.

  “Please!” she interrupted him before he could speak the protests on his lips. “I have tried to shield you from this, shield everyone I love from my mistakes. But I have no other hope now but you. Please, War.”

  It was the “please” that did him in. Claire had always been hard to resist. Somehow he had always managed it, even if it meant painful consequences. But looking at her now, having felt her body beneath him at last, even for a fleeting moment, knowing she had stripped her soul bear in her confession…

  Well, he couldn’t fight her.

  “Please,” she repeated a third time, her voice shaking.

  His head dipped. “Yes.”

  She stepped closer. “What?”

  “I’ll help you,” he all but whispered.

  “War!” she cried out, his name a joyful and a painful cry all at once. She flew to him, her arms coming around him.

  He shuddered as he allowed his own arms to fold around her. She was fragile as a bird there in his embrace. For a moment, she was all strength and then she could keep up that façade no longer. She collapsed against him. She began to shake, deep sobs wracking her. He held her against his chest, feeling her hot tears scald his bare flesh.

  He didn’t move, he didn’t speak, he just held her and let her pour out every emotion that had likely been too dangerous to expose during her time away. Giving those feelings to him was a gift, a trust just as deep as the one implicit in the words she had spoken and the secrets she had revealed.