by Mara
But what had he betrayed? The vows of a sham marriage—a marriage he’d made clear he couldn’t wait to discard.
So why did it hurt so badly?
Even knowing what he’d done, she’d dreamed of him last night. She’d dreamed he’d done exactly as he threatened—taken her, sinking into her body.
Though she was still a virgin, she could imagine how he would feel thrusting inside her, how his big body would flex and move over hers as she wrapped her legs around him. In her fevered dreams, he’d fondled her breasts in his hot palms and sucked her nipples.
Instead, he’d probably been doing those things earlier to Lysette. She turned away and put her knuckles to her mouth.
What a bewildering position to be in—and she wasn’t particularly steady and clear-thinking in the best of situations! She knew her own weaknesses. She was impulsive, often saying and doing things without thought. She had emotions that swung from one extreme to another like a pendulum, and she felt things too strongly.
Worse, all her faults seemed to be exacerbated when he was around. Her emotions ran high, and actions and words that seemed undeniable at the time made no sense in retrospect.
She’d always been like that to a degree, but she’d endeavored to better herself. She’d learned that whenever she got into a temper, or whenever she was inundated with what her cousins labeled Bad Ideas, she needed to step back from the situation, perhaps leave the room to compose herself—to give herself a chance to see things rationally, reasonably.
Stepping away had always helped her; now here she was, trapped in a coach.
She let out a weary breath. She wished she were a reasonable person, wished that inexplicable urges and impulses didn’t goad her.
Why was it that everyone could see these faults in her, but no one bothered to suppose that she didn’t want to be so flawed?
Jane could imagine what it would feel like to be reasonable. She imagined she could do something as simple as donning spectacles to see the world more clearly. She would peer at her relationship with Hugh, and see a very simple equation.
Hugh equaled pain.
By the second day after they’d left the inn, Hugh had decided he would welcome Jane’s games.
She’d ignored him with an ease that would bruise any man’s sense of worth. As their coach rolled through another sleepy town, he glanced over at her by the open window, watching as the sun and the breeze streamed in, toying with her loosened hair.
Over the past day, she’d silently read A Gentlewoman’s Apprentice —or whatever book was behind the false cover. He hoped it wasn’t a novel in the same vein as the one he’d skimmed in her room in London. Especially since her eyes had been riveted to it as she ate an apple, or nibbled on a piece of hay she’d plucked when they stopped for food at midday.
He should be glad that she’d left him alone. So why did he hate it when she ignored him, if the alternative was enduring her teasing?
How many more days—and nights—can I take?
For the tenth time that day, he silently willed his brother to work fast. Ethan had an uncanny way of finding people, and the best case scenario would be for Ethan to locate Grey and stop him before he even reached England. The worst case was that Grey could evade him for months….
Hugh thought back over his and Ethan’s last conversation. He should have pressed him about what had happened with the Van Rowen girl. He should have given Ethan the benefit of the doubt and asked if his brother might be searching for something more. Hugh had, Court had—why had Hugh never considered his older brother would have the same needs?
When Hugh saw him again, they would split a bottle of scotch and discuss this situation like men. If Ethan truly wanted the lass—even after discovering who she was—Hugh could share strategies for putting her from his mind.
Strategies to share? Smug once more, MacCarrick? When he could think of little but Jane?
Eyes wide, she gasped and flipped to the next page.
At least she was in better spirits now than yesterday. Then she’d appeared deadened—not sullen, just lacking her usual animation. Jane generally exuded energy, but she had stared out the coach window, seeming to see nothing.
He’d feared he had startled her with his attentions. Or that she even felt guilt for allowing his kiss because of her relationship with Bidworth. Perhaps she’d been appalled with herself for…enjoying it.
As much as he couldn’t comprehend it, she had enjoyed his lips on her. He kept recalling how she’d appeared—breathless, pupils dilated, her skin flushed. But if she’d been like a firebrand that night, the next morning, she’d been like ice….
Jane was clearly unhappy—a condition Hugh had never been able to handle well. “Sìne, I want to speak with you about the other night.”
She didn’t glance up from her book. “So speak.”
“Lass, I am fallible,” he said quietly. “And I’d asked you no’ to taunt me like that.”
She raised her face to him in a flash, eyes glittering with fury. “So what you did at the inn is my fault?”
Taken aback by how strongly she felt about this, he said, “No, I should have been able to govern myself. It will no’ happen again.” Of course she felt strongly. She’d thought she could play without repercussion. She’d never expected him to kiss her like that.
“Why do you care how I feel about your…your behavior?” she asked. Had her accent ever sounded so proper?
He hesitated, then admitted, “Your opinion of me is important.”
“Is that why you won’t talk about your profession?”
He said simply, “Aye.”
“Silly, Hugh.” Her slow, unexpected smile in the sunlight was spellbinding. “I can’t think less of you than I do right now.”
“Lysette,” Grey whispered at her ear, stroking her blonde hair from her forehead. “Wake up.”
She did in an instant, shooting up in bed. Her jerky scream into his hand turned to a whimper when he placed his knife against her pale throat. The polished blade reflected the light from a nearby lamp, glinting when she began to tremble. “You’ve got so many men watching the place, I’d started to think you were expecting me,” he murmured. “Don’t tell me you’ve missed me.” He eased the pressure of his grip on her mouth, but increased the pressure of his knife. “I don’t have to remind you how short your scream would be, do I?”
When she cautiously shook her head, he grinned in the face of her fear, of the tears beginning to fall, before finally removing his hand. “Yes, you must have suspected I’d visit, since you have your inn guarded like a fortress. But you of all people should know I can get past anyone you’ve brought in.”
“What do you want from me?” she whispered, easing the bed covers up to just below her neck.
“Hugh and Jane stayed here on their journey north. I want their destination.”
“You know he wouldn’t trust me with that information.”
Grey raised his brows. “And you discovered nothing in all of your customary prying while they were here?”
“Hugh’s cautious, and I don’t believe the girl knows.”
“I have a good idea anyway,” he said honestly. “I merely was hoping to confirm. So it seems this might have been a wasted trip.” He removed the blade. Just when her big blue eyes began to fill with hope, he said, “Of course, since I’m already here, I plan to make you pay for selling me out to Hugh and Ethan.”
Her shoulders slumped. “They wanted to help you.”
“Help me?” He remembered Hugh in a terrible rage, his bone-crushing blows raining down so quickly that Grey hadn’t had a chance in hell of defending himself. Then the two brothers had forced Grey into a murky basement where his muscles had curled and tightened, until he’d screamed with pain. For day after day, he’d suffered hallucinations in the dark, interrupted only by his vomiting.
Even now, shadows passed before him as he remembered how those haunting faces with their glassy, sightless eyes had descended on him.
He hadn’t been able to escape them. Because of her duplicity.
“I only told them because I wanted you back with me,” she cried. “I wanted you to get well.”
“You wanted me to get well, or you wanted to ingratiate yourself into the bed of a strapping young Highlander?”
She looked away. “What are you going to do to him?”
Grey spotted a bottle of scotch—fitting, he thought—beside her bed. He helped himself to a glass. “Take away what’s most precious to him.”
“The girl is innocent in all this.”
He nodded. “Which is lamentable, but, in the end, incidental.”
“Hugh will die before he lets you hurt his woman.”
Grey sipped, savoring. “So I’ll likely kill him within minutes of Jane.”
“His brothers would hunt you to the ends of the earth.”
He shrugged. “Ethan’s already on my trail. With all the subtlety of a charging bull.” That was how Ethan had always operated. No sneakiness, just annihilating his enemies with relentless pursuit. He would wear them down until they got sloppy—or grew too wearied of looking over their shoulders expecting to find his gruesome, scarred visage in the night.
Ethan was incredibly effective in his occupation, a legend of sorts. Not famed like Grey, of course. “He nearly found me three nights ago. Apparently, he somehow knew about my London loft,” he said in a chiding tone. That was his Lysette, selling out to the highest bidder. Not a drop of loyalty.
Luckily, Grey knew all of Ethan’s hideaways and properties as well.
“I didn’t tell anyone about it”—she shook her head, her blonde tresses dancing about her pale shoulders—“I swear it.”
Deciding that she was actually being truthful, he said, “Don’t worry, I believe you. I can admit that Ethan’s good.” If information was as valuable as coin, then Ethan had amassed a fortune from others like them who secretly worked in service to the Crown—outside the law. “And I realize now that he must have been keeping tabs on me ever since he deigned to free me from his basement.” Grey’s fist tightened on his knife handle.
Lysette saw it and flinched.
“I’ll take care of Ethan, though his life’s so bloody miserable, it’s almost not sporting to relieve him of it.” Which would be more cruel, to make him live or to kill him? Didn’t he himself have an affinity with Ethan? Ethan was a man who had nothing left to lose. Wasn’t there power in that?
“And Courtland?” Lysette asked softly. “Do you think he won’t seek retribution for the rest of his life, if it takes that long?”
“Lysette, I’d be more worried about your own survival right now.” He gave her his most affable grin. “Or you can just relax and accept what’s inevitable.” He would finally sever her from his life…slowly.
That got a fine Gallic rise out of his little Lysette. Her tears stopped, and her eyes narrowed. “Hugh’s going to win. And I just wish I could be around to see it.”
Grey threw his glass to the floor and lunged across the bed. “I try to avoid allowing last words.” He grabbed her chin, skimming the knife up her body. “And I don’t normally tolerate last-minute confessions, but I’ll make an exception for you.”
Hatred burned in her expression. “My last words? You’ll lose—because Hugh has always been better than you. Faster, stronger. Even before your affliction you were a pathetic shot—”
The knife flashed and blood sprayed over him.
“You clever girl,” Grey said wonderingly with a cluck of his tongue. “You got me to do it quick.”
Twenty-one
Jane slammed the door on Hugh hard enough to make him grit his teeth just before the impact. The pictures on the walls were still rattling when she locked it behind her.
After two days trapped at Ros Creag, the MacCarricks’ depressing lakeside manor, with Hugh’s curt surliness as company, she was ready to march up to Grey and say, “Do your worst. I defy you.”
The only reason she hadn’t hied herself off to a cousin’s estate was that members of her family were due to arrive at Vinelands any day now. Not that Hugh knew that. “At this season, there will no’ be many around,” he’d said, defending his decision to take her here. But her family sought out the quiet fall season when there weren’t many around , since it was the only time they could be themselves….
“Jane, I’ve warned you about locking the door,” Hugh grated outside her room. “Open it, or this time I’ll break the goddamned thing down.”
“As you said yesterday—”
The door burst open.
She gaped, as much from the wildly swinging door and splintered doorframe as from Hugh’s lethally calm demeanor—he wasn’t even out of breath.
“I’ll be damned if I can figure out why you’ve been angry,” he said. “But I’ve about had enough of this.”
“As have I!”
“You know, I always wondered what it’d be like to live with y—with a woman.”
“And?”
“It’s a wee bit like hell, with your carrying on.”
“What do you construe as carrying on?” she asked, indignant. “When I avoid you because you’ve cut me off at every attempt I’ve made to start a conversation? Why would Iwant to be around you when talking to you is like pulling teeth?”
“And how’s that?”
“I asked you why your brothers haven’t married, and you snapped, ‘Drop the subject.’ I asked you why none of you have any children, and you said, ‘Enough of this.’ I asked you if you’ve ever considered adding a trellis and a rose arbor, anything to soften the grimness of this place, and you just walked out of the room! I’ve never met a surlier man.”
“If I am, it’s because you’ve ignored everything I’ve asked of you.”
“Like what?”
“I asked you to avoid the windows, yet I continue to catch you in the window seat in the upstairs parlor, staring out at Vinelands. I’ve asked you to pick up things in your room, and you tell me it’s your ‘horizontal system’ and that if I canna discern it then I must be stupid.”
Everybody who knew Jane knew she was untidy—her lady’s maid played solitaire and read gothic novels all day because Jane wouldn’t let her straighten much—but untidy worked for Jane. Without her system, how would she ever find anything?
“And you refuse to let the maid clean up here,” Hugh finished.
“I don’t wish to cause any extra work for anyone, and the servants are only here for a few hours a day. If it bothers you so terribly—and, really, Hugh, when did you get to be so exacting?—you can keep the door closed.”
“You know I canna do that.”
She sighed and trudged across the plush rugs to peer out the window. Ros Creag, which meant “stony promontory,” was as forbidding and no-nonsense as its name, just as it had been in the past. But then, the appearance did exactly what it was meant to—it kept people away. Had this place been welcoming, the MacCarrick brothers would have been overrun with Weylands borrowing fishing gear and foodstuffs, dropping off pies….
Everywhere she looked outside, the gardens were freakishly orderly, as though a gardener had laid out the shrubs and flowers to the inch with a ruler, then ruthlessly checked any undue exuberance. The manor was stately but imposing, its bricks made of dark rock, like the craggy, lakeside cliff it clung to.
Though separated from Vinelands by just that small cove, this place was a world away from it. Whereas Ros Creag was stern and solitary upon a cliff, Vinelands occupied an expanse of lawn rolling down to the water and a swimming beach, and looked like a quaint country cottage, though it had eight bedrooms. Arbors and follies dotted the property, and a small dock crawled lazily from the shore into the water.
And Hugh wondered why she’d always preferred her own home to his.
“So you truly doona like it here.” His words came from just behind her, but she hadn’t heard him approach. She frowned, recalling that he’d done that in London, too. He used to stride loudly, his boots
booming across the floor. Now he was all sneaky silence.
With a shrug, she turned and headed for the door. One good thing about Ros Creag? It was big enough that they need never see each other.
Damn, she’d been nettled since the night he’d kissed her. Apparently, Jane agreed with everyone else that Hugh reached too high in wedding her.
As he watched her walking away, he told himself yet again that it didn’t matter. Once Grey had been killed and she was completely out of danger, Hugh would leave her just as he had before.
And go where? Do what? If the list went public, he would have no profession. He’d thought about joining up with Court’s crew of Highland mercenaries, but had dismissed the idea. Hugh was a loner, always working solo. Always on the periphery.
