The Forbidden Rose

by Bourne, Joanna

  “If we only had a deck of cards,” the big man said.

  “I’ll bring some . . . next time.”

  They would have made good Frenchmen, these two. It was a pity Leblanc would soon take her from this cell. One could find worse companions for the long journey into the dark. At least the two of them would be together when they died. She would be wholly alone.

  But it was better not to speculate upon how Leblanc would break her to his will and kill her, which could only lead to melancholy. It was time to slide from beneath the touch of this English spy and be busy again. She could not sit forever, hoping courage would seep out of his skin and into her.

  She stood, and immediately felt cold. It was as if she had left a warm and accustomed shelter when she left the man’s side. That was most silly. This was no shelter, and he did not like her much despite the soft voice he used. What lay between them was an untrusting vigilance one might have carved slices of.

  Perhaps he knew who she was. Or perhaps he was one of those earnest men who go about spying in total seriousness. He would die for his country in a straightforward English fashion in this musty place and hate her because she was French. To see the world so simply was undoubtedly an English trait.

  So be it. As it happened, she was not an amicable friend of big English spies. A French trait, doubtless.

  She shrugged, which he would not see, and began working her way around the rest of the cell, inspecting the floor and every inch of the wall as high as she could reach. “In your time here, has Henri Bréval visited the cell?”

  “He came twice with Leblanc, once alone, asking questions.”

  “He has the key? He himself? That is good then.”

  “You think so?”

  “I have some hopes of Henri.” There was not a rusted nail, not a shard of glass. There was nothing useful anywhere. She must place her hope in Henri’s stupidity, which was nearly limitless. “If Fouché is indeed upstairs drinking wine and playing cards, Leblanc will not leave his side. One does not neglect the head of the Secret Police to disport oneself with a woman. But Henri, who takes note of him? He may seize the moment. He wishes to use me, you understand, and he has had no chance yet.”

  “I see.” They were most noncommittal words.

  Was it possible he believed she would welcome Henri? What dreadful taste he thought she had. “Leblanc does not let many people know about this room. It is very secret what he does here.”

  “So Henri may come sneaking down alone. You plan to take him.” He said it calmly, as if it were not remarkable that she should attack a man like Henri Bréval. She was almost certain he knew what she was.

  “I can’t help you,” the chain that bound him rattled, “unless you get him close.”

  “Henri is not so stupid. Not quite. But I have a small plan.”

  “Then all I can do is wish you well.”

  He seemed a man with an excellent grasp of essentials. He would be useful to her if she could get his chains off. That she would accomplish once those pigs became like the proverb and grew wings and went flying.

  Exploring the cell further, she stubbed her toe upon a table, empty of even a spoon. There were also chairs, which presented more opportunity. She was working at the pegs that held a chair together when she heard footsteps.

  “We have a visitor,” the big English said.

  “I hear.” One man descended the steps into the cellar. Henri. It must be Henri. She set the chair upright, out of her way, and drew her cosh into her hand and turned toward the sound of footsteps. A shudder ran along her spine, but it was only the cold of the room. It was not fear. She could not afford to be afraid. “It is one man. Alone.”

  “Leblanc or Henri, do you think?”

  “It is Henri. He walks more heavily. Now you will shut up quietly and not distract me.” She prayed it was Henri. Not Leblanc. She had no chance against Leblanc.

  The Englishman was perfectly still, but he charged the air with a hungry, controlled rage. It was as if she had a wolf chained to that wall behind her. His presence tugged and tugged at her attention when it was desperately important to keep her mind on Henri.

  Henri. She licked her lips and grimly concentrated on Henri, an unpleasant subject, but one of great immediacy. There were twenty steps on the small curved staircase that led from kitchen to cellar. She counted the last of them, footstep by footstep. Then he was in the corridor that led to the cell.

  Henri had always thought her reputation inflated. When he had brought her the long way to Paris to turn her over to Leblanc, she had played the spineless fool for him, begging humbly for food and water, stumbling, making him feel powerful. She was so diminished in her darkness he thought her completely harmless. He had become contemptuous.

  Let him come just a little close, and he would discover how harmless she was. Most surely he would.

  She knew the honey to trap him. She would portray for him the Silly Young Harlot. It was an old favorite role of hers. She had acted it a hundred times.

  She licked her lips and let them pout, open and loose. What else? She pulled strands of hair down around her face. Her dress was already torn at the neckline. She found the spot and ripped the tear wider. Good. He would see only that bare skin. She could hold a dozen coshes and he would never notice.

  Quickly. Quickly. He was coming closer. She took another deep breath and let the role close around her like a familiar garment. She became the Harlot. Yielding, easy to daunt, out of her depth in this game of intrigue and lies. Henri liked victims. She would set the most perfect victim before him and hope he took the bait.

  Hid beneath layer upon layer of soft and foolish Harlot, she waited. Her fist, holding the cosh, never wavered. She would not allow herself to be afraid. It was another role she had crafted; the Brave Spy. She had played this one so long it fit like her skin.

  Probably, at the center of her being, under all the pretense, the real Annique was a quivering mouse. She would not go prying in there and find out.

  THE grilled window in the door glowed ghostly pale, then brightened as a lantern came closer. Grey could see again. The details of his cell emerged. Rough blocks of stone, a table, two chairs. And the girl.

  She faced the door, stiff and silent and totally intent upon the man out in the corridor. Not a move out of her. Not the twitch of a fingernail. Her eyes, set in deep smudges of exhaustion, were half-closed and unfocused. She didn’t once glance in his direction.

  He watched her draw a deep breath, never taking her attention from that small barred window in the door. Her lips shaped words silently, praying or talking to herself. Maybe cursing. Again, she combed her fingers through her hair in staccato, purposeful, elegant flicks that left wild elflocks hanging across her face.

  She was totally feminine in every movement, indefinably French. With her coloring—black hair, pale skin, eyes of that dark indigo blue—she had to be pure Celt. She’d be from the west of France. Brittany, maybe. Annique was a Breton name. She carried the magic of the Celt in her, used it to weave that fascination the great courtesans created. Even as he watched, she licked her lips again and wriggled deliberately, sensually. A man couldn’t look away.

  She’d torn her own dress. The curve of her breast showed white against the dark fabric—a whore, bringing out her wares. She was a whore, a liar, and a killer . . . and his life depended on her. “Good luck,” he whispered.

  She didn’t turn. She gave one quick, dismissive shake of her head. “Be still. You are not part of this.”

  That was the final twist of the knife. He was helpless. He measured out his twenty inches of chain, picturing just how far a fast kick could reach. But Henri wasn’t going to wander that close. She’d have to subdue Henri Bréval on her own, without even a toothpick to fight with.

  There were red marks on her skin where Leblanc had been tormenting her and the tracks of tears on her cheeks. She couldn’t have looked more harmless. That was another lie, of course.

  He knew this woma
n. He’d recognized her the moment Leblanc pushed her stumbling into this cell. Feature by feature, that face was etched in his memory. He’d seen her the day he found his men, ambushed, twisted and bloody, dead in a cornfield near Bruges. If he’d had any doubt, the mention of the Albion plans would have convinced him. The Albion plans had been used to lure them to Bruges.

  He’d been tracking this spy across Europe for the last six months. What bloody irony to meet her here.

  He’d have his revenge. Leblanc was an artist in human degradation. Pretty Annique wouldn’t die easily or cleanly or with any of that beauty intact. His men would be avenged.

  If he got out of here . . . No, when he got out of here, Annique would come with him. He’d take her to England. He’d find out every damn thing she knew about what happened at Bruges. He’d get the Albion plans from her. Then he’d take his own vengeance.

  She’d be supremely useful to British intelligence. Besides, he wouldn’t leave a rabid hyena to Leblanc.

  The peephole went bright as Henri held the lantern up. His heavy, florid face pressed to the grill. “Leblanc is furious with you.”

  “Please.” The girl wilted visibly, leaning on the table for support, a sweet, succulent curve of entrapped femininity. “Oh, please.” The drab blue of her dress and the crude cut of the garment marked her as a servant and accessible. Somehow her disheveled hair, falling forward over her face, had become sensuality itself. “This is all a mistake. A mistake. I swear . . .”

  Henri laced fingers through the bars. “You’ll talk to him in the end, Annique. You’ll beg to talk. You know what he’ll do to you.”

  There was a sniffle. “Leblanc . . . He does not believe me. He will hurt me terribly. Tell him I know nothing more. Please, Henri. Tell him.” Her voice had changed completely. She sounded younger, subtly less refined, and very frightened. It was a masterful performance.

  “He’ll hurt you no matter what I tell him.” Henri gloated.

  The girl’s face sank into her upturned palm. Her hair spilled in dark rivers through her fingers. “I cannot bear it. He will use me . . . like a grunting animal. I am not meant to be used by peasants.”

  Clever. Clever. He saw what she was doing. Henri’s voice marked him as Parisian, a man of the city streets. Leblanc, for all his surface polish, was the son of a pig farmer. And Henri worked for Leblanc.

  Henri’s spite snaked out into the cell. “You were always Vauban’s pet—Vauban and his elite cadre. Vauban and his important missions. You were too good for the rest of us. But tonight the so-special Annique that nobody could touch becomes a blind puppet for Leblanc to play with. If you’d been kind to me before, maybe I’d help you now.”

  “Leblanc has become Fouché’s favorite. With the head of the Secret Police behind him, he can do anything. You cannot help me. You would not dare defy him.” She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. “I will do whatever he wishes. I have no choice.”

  “I’ll have you when he’s through with you.”

  She went on speaking. She might not have heard Henri. “He will make me oil my body and do the Gypsy dances I learned when I was a child. I will dance in the firelight for him with nothing but a thin bit of silken cloth upon me. Red silk. He . . . he prefers red. He has told me.”

  Grey wrapped the chain around his hand, gripping tight, seized by the image of a slim body writhing naked, silhouetted in the golden glow of fire. He wasn’t the only one. Henri gripped the crossed bars of the grill and pressed his face close, salivating.

  Annique, eyes downcast, swayed as if she were already undulating in the sensual dance she described. “I will draw the crimson silk from my body and caress him with it. The silk will be warm and damp with the heat of the dance. With my heat.” Her left hand stroked down her body, intimately.

  Grey ached from a dozen beatings, thirst was a torment every second, and he knew exactly what she was doing. He still went hard as a rock. He was helpless to stop it. God, but she was good.

  Huskily, dreamily, she continued. “He will lie upon his bed and call me to him. At first, only to touch. Then to put my mouth upon him, wherever he directs. I have been trained to be skillful with my mouth. I will have no choice, you see, but to do as he demands of me.”

  Henri clanked and fumbled with the lock. In a great hurry, was Henri. If the Frenchman was half as aroused by Annique’s little act as Grey was, it was a wonder he could get the door open at all.

  The door banged back against the stone wall. “You must not come in here, Henri,” she said softly, not moving, “or touch me in any way without the permission of Leblanc.”

  “Damn Leblanc.” Henri slapped the lantern down and cornered her against the table. His fist twisted into her skirt and pulled it up. He grabbed the white shift beneath.

  “You should not . . . You must not . . .” She struggled, pushing futilely at his hands with no more strength than a tiny, captured bird.

  “No.” He threw himself at Henri. And jerked short on his iron leash. The circle of pain at his wrist brought him back to reality. He couldn’t get to her. He couldn’t fight Henri for her. There wasn’t a bloody thing he could do but watch.

  “Do not . . .” Her flailing arm hit the lantern. It tilted and skidded off the table and clattered to the floor and extinguished. Darkness was instant and absolute.

  “Stupid bitch,” Henri snarled. “You . . .”

  There was a small squashed thud. Henri yelped in pain. More thuds—one, two, three. The table scraped sideways. Something large and soft fell.

  No movement. He heard Annique breathing hard, the smallness of it and the contralto gasps uniquely hers.

  Planned. She’d planned it all. He crouched, tense as stretched cord, and acknowledged how well he’d been fooled. She’d planned this from start to finish. She’d manipulated both of them with that damned act of hers.

  There was a long silence, broken by intriguing rustling sounds and Annique grunting from time to time. Her footsteps, when she walked toward him, were sure and unhesitating. She came in a straight line across the cell as if it were not dark as a tomb.

  “What did you do to Henri?” The issue, he thought, had never really been in doubt.

  “I hit him upon the head with a sock full of rocks.” She seemed to think it over while she sat down beside him. “At least I am almost sure I hit his head once. I hit him many places. Anyway, he is quiet.”

  “Dead?”

  “He is breathing. But one can never tell with head wounds. I may have yet another complicated explanation to make to God when I show up at his doorstep, which, considering all things, may be at any moment. I hope I have not killed him, quite, though he undoubtedly deserves it. I will leave that to someone else to do, another day. There are many people who would enjoy killing him. Several dozen I can call to mind at once.”

  She baffled him. There was ruthlessness there, but it was a kind of blithe toughness, clean as a fresh wind. He didn’t catch a whiff of the evil that killed men in cold blood, from ambush. He had to keep reminding himself what she was. “You did more than knock him over the head. What was the rest of it, afterwards?”

  “You desire the whole report?” She sounded amused.

  “But you are a spymaster, I think, Englishman. No one else asks such questions so calmly, as if by right. Very well, I shall report to you the whole report—that I have tied Henri up and helped myself to his money. There was an interesting packet of papers in a pocket he may have thought was secret. You may have them if you like. Me, I am no longer in the business of collecting secret papers.”

  Her hands patted over him lightly. “I have also found a so-handy stickpin, and if you will lift your pretty iron cuff here. Yes. Just so. Now hold still. I am not a fishwife that I can filet this silly lock while you wriggle about. You will make me regret that I am being noble and saving your life if you do not behave sensibly.”

  “I am at your disposal.” He offered his chained wrist. At the same time he reached out and touched he
r hair, ready to grab her if she tried to leave without freeing him.

  She put herself right in his power—a man twice her size, twice her strength, and an enemy. She had to know what her writhing and whispering did to a man. Revenge and anger and lust churned in his body like molten iron. The wonder was it didn’t burn through his skin and set this soft hair on fire.

  “Ah. We proceed,” she said in the darkness. “This lock is not so complicated as it pretends to be. We are discussing matters.”

  She edged closer and shifted the manacle to a different angle, brushing against his thigh. With every accidental contact, his groin tightened and throbbed. All he could think of was her soft voice saying, “I will oil my body and dance in the firelight.” He was no Henri. He wasn’t going to touch her. But how did he get a picture like that out of his head?

  “And . . . it is done.” The lock fell open.

  She made it seem easy. It wasn’t. He rubbed his wrist. “I thank you.”

  He stood and stretched to his full height, welcoming the pain of muscles uncramping. Free. Savage exultation flooded him. He was free. He bunched and unbunched his fists, glorying in the surge of power that swept him. He felt like he could take these stones apart with his bare hands. It was dark as the pit of hell and they were twenty feet under a stronghold of the French Secret Police. But the door hung open. He’d get them out of here—Adrian and this remarkable, treacherous woman—or die trying. If they didn’t escape, it would be better for all of them to die in the attempt.

  While that woman worked on Adrian’s manacle, he groped his way across the cell to Henri, who was, as she had said, breathing. The Frenchman was tied, hand and foot, with his stockings and gagged with his own cravat. A thorough woman. Checking the bonds was an academic exercise. There was indeed a secret pocket in the jacket. He helped himself to the papers, then tugged Henri’s pants down to his ankles, leaving him half naked.

  “What do you busy yourself with?” She’d heard him shifting Henri about. “I find myself inquisitive this evening.”