To Capture a Rogue_Logan’s Legends

by K. J. Jackson

  “Blast it, Nic.”

  Her eyebrows arched. “Or shall we talk about why you’re limping?”

  He jerked slightly away. “You saw that?”

  “It is hard to see, but you can’t hide it from me, Gareth. I know exactly how you walk. I saw it in your gait at the park, but I was too angry to acknowledge it. I saw it just now while we were sparring.”

  His arms dropped from her as he pulled fully away and turned to the side, his head down and silent as he reset his white linen shirt and buttoned the front flap of his trousers.

  Slowly, she slipped off the edge of the phaeton, smoothing the front of her skirts as they dropped. She stared at him. He wasn’t going to tell her. Not that she expected him to.

  She took a step toward him, her fingers lifting to go to his arm. “Gareth—”

  “Nic, there are things you need to know.” His head turned to her, his brown eyes haunted. “Things that happened during the war.”

  She gasped, her fingers snapping back to her chest as she stepped away from him. “I…no. I do not want to know.” Her head shook, her feet shuffling backward. “I—I cannot know. Not now. This is too much. Too much all at once. I cannot think about that.”

  Her feet stopped, her body stilling as tears welled in her eyes. But she forced her eyes to him as realization overwhelmed her. “Not when I want you back. Holding me. My husband. But…but the war… I cannot…I cannot know. Not now, Gareth.”

  He took a long stride to her, grabbing her shoulders. “Dammit, Nic. You cannot avoid this forever. You have to know.”

  She jerked out of his hold, recoiling back, her arms wrapping around her body as her look dove to the side. “I don’t have to know. Not now. This is too much—not now.”

  “Stop, Nic.” His hand lifted, reaching for her.

  She jumped another step backward before he could grab her.

  His voice dropped low, both a warning and a plea. “If you cannot even look at me, Nic, what is there for us?”

  His words sank into the air between them.

  Heavy. Accusing. Questioning.

  She couldn’t lift her eyes to his face. Couldn’t force a reply—an answer—that she didn’t have.

  What was there for them?

  He wanted hope, and she wasn’t sure she could give it to him.

  So instead she did the only thing she could.

  She turned and ran.

  { Chapter 10 }

  “He needs help.”

  Gareth looked down at his plate of roast sirloin and set his fork down. Without fail, Miss Ruby made the best glazed sirloin on King Street, but it currently tasted like air—swallows of fat nothingness sinking down to his belly. He hadn’t been able to detect the slightest flavor of any food in the two days since being with Nicolina in Lord Samport’s carriage house.

  He’d had her. For one tiny moment in time, he’d had her back. In his arms. His wife. His life.

  But then he had blinked and it had vanished.

  His wife couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t hear about the past. Couldn’t acknowledge it.

  And he couldn’t force her to do so.

  Not with the pain it would cause.

  His eyes lifted to Logan sitting across from him in the tavern. It was a rare night off from both the work at the Revelry’s Tempest and the singular missions Logan often procured for his men. Gareth shook his head at his boss. “I’m not the one to help him.”

  “You are.” Logan lifted his silver tankard and sipped. “It’s time. Do you remember where you were when I found you? That sorry state of yourself? In that decrepit pot-house—in that corner, slumped in your own piss and vomit for days? The infection in your leg rotting you from the bottom up?”

  “I remember.” Gareth’s fingers curled into a fist on top of the heavy oak table. “You also swore you would never judge.”

  Logan glanced at Gareth’s fist and then met his eyes. “I judge just enough to know when to help. And now it is your turn. You need to move on from the Revelry’s Tempest. It’s time, Callison.”

  “It’s not time.”

  “It is.” Logan took another sip of ale and set down the tankard. “You cannot be in two places at once. Not at the Revelry’s Tempest at night while you have a wife waiting for you.”

  Gareth bristled. “My wife is not waiting for me.”

  Logan’s eyebrow cocked. “No?”

  Gareth’s eyes drifted off to the left and settled on the low fire in the enormous fieldstone fireplace in the corner of the dining room. “Not yet.”

  “I imagine you will be rectifying that soon?”

  Gareth shrugged. “If it can be.”

  With a nod, Logan picked up his fork and knife and cut into his sirloin. He took a bite, then looked up to Gareth as he cut his next morsel. “After you asked me to procure those swords several days back, I looked into the foundry that created them. Remarkable work they did—beyond the standard weaponry—at least while your wife’s uncle was alive. The artist, Felix Madson, was a talent beyond compare, if those two swords are any indication.”

  “He was. He was born from a long line of Spanish swordsmiths.” Gareth picked up his fork, jabbing mindlessly at his sirloin. “He was also the one to first teach me to fight.”

  “Truly?”

  “Yes. It was the last thing my mother did before she died—my father was Felix’s partner early on, before I was even born—and she made Felix promise to give me an apprenticeship. She even threatened him with eternal haunting if he didn’t.” Gareth took a bite of the beef, hoping against hope it would taste like something. It didn’t. “She was convinced it would be safer for me to learn to create weapons, than to wield them. Especially with Boney running roughshod over the continent.”

  “Intelligent woman.” Logan slid another bite of beef into his mouth.

  “She was. But she didn’t realize Felix would insist I learn to fight with the swords before I learned to create them. He needed me to understand the weight of the steel. How they swung, sliced, cut. It’s hard to build something one doesn’t use.” Gareth picked up his ale and swallowed, helping the meat down his tight throat. “Felix was a warrior before he was a craftsman. He made me the same.”

  “And that was where you met your wife?”

  “It was. Felix was her guardian. And he had also been training her with swords for nine years before I arrived there. She beat me soundly, and daily, in our bouts for two years.”

  Logan chuckled. “So that is where you perfected your uncommon humility.”

  Gareth’s eyebrow quirked. “Humility? I doubt it.”

  Logan inclined his head. “Let us just say you have never been one to be boastful. And your record in the war earned you every right to be so.”

  A pensive half smile lifted Gareth’s cheek. He had gone to war for one reason alone, and no matter what Logan thought of his feats on the battlefield, Gareth lived with the knowledge that he had failed in that one reason.

  Gareth took another bite of the beef, chewing slowly to purchase time as he searched for a reply. He swallowed. “Yes, well, many of my actions since I was on a battlefield beget nothing but shame.” He pointed at Logan with his fork. “But do tell me what you found out about the foundry. I only just learned that my wife’s brother had lost possession of it.”

  Logan nodded. “At the tables, or so the rumor goes. And since Bournestein took it over—”

  “Bournestein owns it? Hell.”

  “Exactly. All the true artisans left once Bournestein took it over. The foundry has been producing little more than brittle rubbish for the last year.”

  Gareth’s fist pounded on the table, his head shaking as his gaze travelled upward to the rough-hewn timbers spanning the dining room. For all that Felix had taught him—for all he owed the man—he had sworn to keep the foundry running just as Felix had designed it. To keep his legacy alive.

  Instead, Gareth had let Nicolina’s wastrel brother gamble it away.

  “So I bought it
.”

  Gareth sputtered a cough, his look whipping to Logan.

  Logan sat, chewing, not the slightest change in his countenance.

  “You—you bought the foundry?”

  “I did. Not under my name, of course. You know why. But I bought it, and now I need someone to run it.” His look pinned Gareth.

  “A bit presumptuous, wouldn’t you say?”

  Logan shrugged. “The foundry can produce greatness. It did once. It can again.” Setting his fork and knife down, he leaned forward. “Run the foundry, Gareth. Make it profitable again and half of it is yours. You will have your nights back. You will have time for your wife—that is, when you finally convince her she does want you. And if I or the Revelry’s Tempest needs you, we will call upon you.”

  “Lipinstein—”

  “But there is a condition. You have to bring in your replacement first.”

  Gareth’s head bowed, his eyes closing for a long moment as he reconciled Logan’s terms. “Greyson?”

  “Greyson.”

  Gareth’s head remained lowered, but his eyes opened, looking to Logan. “Where is he?”

  “At the Joker’s Roost in St. Giles.”

  “Isn’t that one of Bournestein’s establishments?”

  “It is.”

  “And Greyson’s state?”

  “Much the same as you were a year ago.” Logan picked up his fork and knife and started cutting his next bite of sirloin. “Covered in his own filth. Two drinks from death.”

  Gareth nodded, his gut clenching. He remembered too well how Logan had found him.

  Logan reached into an inner pocket of his dark coat. He pulled free a velvet sack, dropping it on the table. Coins clinked within. “Take this. Pay off his debts. Drag him to the Maddox house. Get him sober.”

  Gareth gave one long nod. The last thing he wanted to deal with was a belligerent arse without a lick of respect, waiting for death to take pity on him. His eyebrow cocked as he looked at Logan. “Much the same as I was?”

  Logan nodded.

  Gareth pushed his plate away. He couldn’t choke down another bite. He grabbed the sack and tucked it into his coat, then stood.

  Stepping alongside the table, he paused, his knuckles rapping the oak table. “Logan.”

  “Yes?” Logan looked up at him.

  “When will your time be?”

  Logan paused, uncharacteristic for him, as the man paused for nothing. He gave a slight shake of his head. “I do not know, Gareth.”

  “Recognize it when comes, my friend.”

  Logan offered a slight incline of his head, his face carved into its customary unmovable stone.

  Gareth walked across the dining room and opened the door to the street.

  He had a wastrel to wrangle.

  { Chapter 11 }

  Gareth slipped out into the cool night air, closing the door to the gardens quietly behind him. The space was calm, as it should be since the gaming had begun only an hour before inside the Revelry’s Tempest. It usually took several hours before people needed a cool respite in the gardens—respite from too much claret, too much losing, too much of a wandering eye that needed satisfaction.

  But still, one of the maids had said she had seen activity in the back corner of the garden, and Gareth wasn’t about to let the report go unchecked.

  Rubbing his eyes with the base of his palms, he gave a quick shake of his head, trying to snap alertness into his muddled mind. He had been up for the past day and night with barely a half-hour’s worth of sleep squeezed in. Forcing a fully soused man a head taller than him with brick-like hands into a hack, and then keeping him captive in a room to sober him up had been easier imagined than done.

  Gareth craned his neck so he could see the dark windows of the townhouse’s top floor. Not chancing leaving Greyson alone at the Maddox house, he’d had to drag the man to the Revelry’s Tempest and then had shoved him into an upper room. At least Greyson was now finally sleeping off his latest binge.

  Taking three steps down onto the main gravel pathway that cut the garden in half, Gareth moved to start a quick round of the corners. He hadn’t made it five strides before a figure jumped out from the deep shadows in one of the rose arbors.

  “Gareth.”

  He jumped, blinking hard at the figure in the shadows just to assure himself he was awake and not walking about in the midst of a dream.

  Pulling the hood of her dark cloak off her head and exposing her blond hair, Nicolina rushed to him, planting herself in front of him. “Gareth, I need your help.”

  His eyes scanned the dark recesses of the gardens lined with evergreen hedges. His look settled on his wife. “You told the maid to get me out here?”

  “I did. I need your help.”

  He stifled a sigh. For the smallest second he held hope that she had shown up in the dark merely to see him. But instead, she only needed his help—and was apparently desperate enough for it that she would risk getting caught in the gardens.

  But if her need for his assistance was the only thing that had driven her to be standing in front of him, he’d take it.

  He grabbed her arm, pulling her back toward the townhouse. “Not out here.”

  She didn’t resist, moving along in step with him as he led her into the Revelry’s Tempest and up the four flights of servants’ stairs to the top floor of the townhouse. He moved down the hallway, stopping at the third door and ushering her into an empty room. The space tiny, wooden beams of the roofline angled sharply down just two feet inside. He went over to the chest of drawers next to the bed to light the lantern that sat on top.

  Standing with his back to his wife, Gareth lit the lamp slowly, taking a moment to collect himself. For as tired as he had been five minutes before, he was now wide awake, blood rushing madcap through his veins.

  He rubbed his eyes one more time before he turned around to Nicolina. She had drawn her bottom lip into her mouth, worrying it with her teeth.

  “You need my help, Nic?”

  She took a deep breath, her chest rising as she smoothed the front of her black cloak and then met his eyes. “I do. And before you say no, please, hear me out.” She paused for another moment, stalling before her words gushed out. “Norton came to me and he was drunk and asking for help. He said he was working on something important days ago and that he could make it work—absolutely make it work—if I would help him. And he needs it to work or he is going to be so deep into Bournestein’s clutches that he will never be able to get out. So he—”

  “I’m not helping that wastrel, Nic.” Gareth’s jaw tightened.

  She stepped to him, her hand going to his chest. “You have to, Gareth. You don’t—”

  He snatched her wrist, dragging her hand away from his body. “He was the one that hit you, wasn’t he?”

  Her mouth clamped closed.

  “Tell me the truth, Nic. He hit you.”

  Her green eyes dipped downward and she exhaled. Her eyes slipped closed as she nodded.

  He tossed her wrist away from him. “This is why you come to me, Nic? That profligate arse that lost your uncle’s legacy? Stole all of the funds I sent to take care of you? Hit you?” The last two words hissed through gritted teeth. He stepped around her, going for the door, his voice a growl. “You are mad if you think I’m helping that bastard.”

  His hand wrapped around the doorknob and she grabbed him, her fingers digging into his upper arm, her words a brittle whisper. “I cannot lose another brother, Gareth.”

  He froze.

  The air froze.

  The world froze.

  The only thing still alive, still moving were her fingers tightening, throbbing as they clutched him.

  Slowly, achingly, his head dropped forward and he had to remind himself to breathe.

  Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

  “Gareth.”

  Her fingertips dug even harder into his muscle.

  “You told me you would take care of my little brother, Gareth.” H
er voice shook. “You swore it.”

  A blow, straight to his chest, stilling his heart.

  “Yet Pippin died.” Her whisper was flat, stating the fact.

  Gareth yanked his arm to free himself from her grip, but her hand was locked, not letting go.

  Instead, her fingers tugged, starting to rage. “You wanted to talk about this, Gareth. You. You demanded as much two days ago. So this is it. This is what there is for us. Let us talk. Pippin died in the war even though you swore you would keep him safe. You swore it to me. So there it is. It is said—open between us now. And because he died you abandoned me.”

  “Nic.” His voice dipped low into a warning and he jerked his arm.

  “Let us talk about that. Pippin died. So tell me. Did he die in a field? In muck? A sword? A bullet? Did he breathe his last breath in your arms? Did he know what was happening? Did he say anything? Was it long? Was he”—her voice hiccupped, stumbling over her words—“was he in pain? Did he suffer?” Her hand gripping him started to shake. “Dammit, Gareth, look at me.”

  His head tilted back, his eyes going to the ceiling as he refused to turn to her.

  Her breath stopped, silent, only a slight gurgle as she swallowed back a sob. Then her voice, raw, ripped through the air between them. “Look at me, Gareth. Tell me.”

  He closed his eyes, his head shaking as the vision of Pippin in the midst of exploding ground, dirt blasting in all directions, invaded his mind. Pippin’s body jerking. His torso flying backward. His arms flailing. Falling. Falling.

  “It was quick. A bullet. He didn’t suffer.” He said the words quickly before he couldn’t manage to form them.

  She gasped, her fingers tightening, and then going limp on his arm. Her grip eased, her hand falling away as she took a step backward.

  A step away from him.

  Just as he imagined.

  Just as he feared.

  Just as he knew it would be.

  He had never wanted to be in this position. Never wanted to lose her this fully. This irrevocably.

  If they were apart, at least he could pretend hope. Still had her in some way.

  Not this. Not the end.