Dangerous Exile (An Exile Novel Book 3)

by K. J. Jackson

A sharp chuckle left her lips. “This is supposed to be the moment when you convince me I’m safe—that you know what you’re doing. Not when you admit that you don’t.”

  “Juliet sent you to me to protect, so let’s just say that right now, I’m living off her faith on that point as well.”

  A wry smile crept across her face. “She better be as smart as I think she is.”

  “Exactly.”

  Ness took another sip of her tea and then looked at him, her voice steady once more. “Your turn. Why do you owe her?”

  He didn’t hesitate. A deal was a deal. “Juliet saved my life.”

  “How?”

  “As in, she physically saved my life. A building was burning down around me and I had been knocked unconscious on the third floor. Juliet dragged me out of the building.”

  Her jaw dropping, Ness leaned forward in the chair. “She what? By herself?”

  “Aye. By herself. No one was left in the building. She had gotten all the women out of the place and then came back in for me.”

  “That was the South Selkie brothel?”

  He nodded.

  Her eyes wide, she stared at him, her jaw still slack. “But Juliet is so small—taller than me, yes, but tiny compared to you. How did she manage that—getting you out when you were unconscious?”

  “When I say dragged, I mean dragged. She dragged me down the stairs—I had a disjointed shoulder and the bruises from every step along the way to prove it.” His right hand lifted, bumping along an imaginary line as though going down stairs.

  He shrugged. “But she got me out. And she only singed the bottom of her skirts in the process. Then she was beyond irate with me, kicking me awake. I had been under strict orders not to go to the brothel without her, as I’d just purchased the building and the women there didn’t quite trust me yet. But I went alone and brutes from a rival brothel were there. Nonsense ensued. Nonsense that Juliet would have mitigated. Regardless, I was knocked unconscious, and they set fire to the place.”

  Her head shook. Whether she believed the story or not, he wasn’t quite sure. She truly had no knowledge of the machinations and danger of the underworld he thrived in.

  Her look met his. “No wonder you love her.”

  His left eyebrow cocked. “Love her?”

  Ness nodded. “Juliet. How could you not?”

  His lips pursed for a moment. “Aye, I suppose I do. I love her as the sister I never had, as family.”

  Her forehead wrinkled. “You never wanted to be with her?”

  “Bed her?” His head shook. “No, Juliet is worth far more to me as a friend than a bed partner. I respect her too much.”

  Her mouth opened as though she was about to say something, but the words stalled. It took her a moment of staring at him before she continued. “So, the women you do bed—you don’t respect them?”

  “How do you come by that conclusion?”

  “I…” She shrugged.

  Did he respect the women he bedded? Debatable. He kept his mouth clamped shut.

  Her cheeks pinkened. “I…I just think that makes it wise for me to be your friend.”

  Talen took a swallow of his brandy and set it down on the sideboard. He turned back to her, a wicked gleam in his eye. “Usually, my friends offer me something in return, but you, dear Ness, have only taken thus far.”

  The insult hung between them, thickening the air for several pulsing seconds.

  Until Ness jumped up from the chair, slamming the teacup down along the edge of the side table to break it, and then she ran at him, swinging the sharp shard of the porcelain still in her hand at his head.

  With a laugh, he ducked. Baiting Ness was too easy. And he liked her angry. Coming at him.

  He caught her elbow high in the air and twisted her arm outward as he wrapped his left arm around her waist and yanked her body hard onto the length of him.

  With a fiery growl she wrenched her torso awkwardly to look up at him. Their faces only an inch apart, their hot breath entwined for far too long of a moment.

  Excruciating.

  The devil himself testing him—her body shifting against the front of him, the blasted scent of apricots in his nose, lips that screamed to be devoured.

  Her mouth parted with an intake of breath as her amber eyes went wide. Wide, like she’d just seen down to the carnal core of him. Wide, like she wanted to explore that carnal darkness ready to escape.

  All it would take was the slightest move of his head and her lips would be his. Tasting her. Molding her body to his. Dragging his hands down to the perfect mounds of her breasts.

  But no.

  No.

  She was too wounded. Too married. Too much trouble that he didn’t need.

  Juliet had known that.

  Protect her. That was all.

  He jerked his head back, dropping his hands from her waist and wrist as he stabbed a step away. He forced another chuckle to cover all that he’d just imagined doing to her body. “Good, I like to see the fire in you when you’re mad. Your angry swings are much better than your usual puny strikes.”

  A screech and she swung the shard of the teacup at his head again. He dodged it, jumping toward the fireplace and kicking up feathers.

  The shard of the teacup high and aimed at him, she stalked him. “The one thing I can bring you, you don’t want.” She struck, the sharp edge of the broken porcelain nicking his ear.

  His hand flicked up to his ear and then he looked at his fingertips. Blood. The minx had made contact. He looked to her. “Which is?”

  “Your past.”

  His body instantly tightened at her words and his arm swung out, shoving her to the side as he stomped past her toward the door. His voice dropped, cold and vicious. “Aye, you’re right. I don’t want that. Don’t need that. Because you don’t know it.”

  “But maybe it wants you,” she screamed, dropping the shard of the teacup and picking up the cane chair she’d been sitting in.

  With a growl, her right arm swung back and she hurled it at him as hard as her small frame allowed. Except the chair went flying into the bookcase next to the fireplace because she released it too late, sending her into an out-of-control spin. A spin directly toward the protruding white stone mantel of the fireplace.

  Her forehead didn’t stand a chance and her skull crunched into it.

  She instantly crumpled.

  Talen leapt, mercifully able to get his arms under her, breaking her fall at the last instant.

  Stretched out across the wooden planks, his arms under her, he froze for a long moment, waiting for her to wake up, to move. When she didn’t, he set her long onto the floor and frantically moved next to her. His hand went onto her chest, his fingertips pressing down into the flesh just above her left breast.

  A heartbeat. Lungs expanding.

  Relief surged through his veins. She’d merely knocked herself into blackness. And she was going to have a walnut-sized lump on her head.

  Exhaling his held breath, he stretched out along his side on the floor next to her. With his head propped on his left bicep, his right hand didn’t move from her chest where he measured her heartbeat, her breaths.

  He stared at her face, taking stock of the bruises quickly fading, only yellowish streaks left under the skin. The cuts about her lips had faded to faint pink streaks. Her left eye no longer swollen.

  A sigh overtook him. “From a cocoon of bruises and pain, you emerge. What am I going to do with you?”

  Tufts of feathers that had been kicked up still drifted in the air. Landing on her forehead, on her hair. He blew a puff of breath sideways to dislodge a feather that landed on his cheek.

  A knock and the door to his office cracked open behind him. Was there no blasted privacy in this place?

  “Ye well, boss? All the noise stopped. Ye said not to bother ye no matter the noise. But now there’s none.”

  He didn’t bother to flip his head around to glance back at his man, Simon. “Aye. I’m well.”


  “The lady well?”

  “Aye. She will be.”

  His fingers on her chest curled slightly.

  She would be.

  He would see to it.

  { Chapter 9 }

  Leaning close to the small round mirror propped atop the rosewood desk in her room, Ness prodded at the lump on her forehead. Verity had been kind enough to set a simple braid into her hair before disappearing into the bowels of the Alabaster, and though removing all the pins in her hair had helped, it hadn’t stopped the pain.

  Her head had been pounding for hours and even the slightest touch of her fingertips along the lump sent sharp pangs into her skull. Her face had only just returned to its normal shape after the beating and now this.

  She’d woken up on the floor of Talen’s office to see him sitting next to her, his back against the wall, watching her. Concern evident on his face, his light blue eyes intent on her. His look almost making her squirm.

  He didn’t care for what had happened. It’d been her own fault, slamming into the mantel as she did. Stupid to not have her balance before she’d picked up that chair, but he’d made her so furious and the feathers were so slippery.

  Everything was so easy for him, including baiting her into attacking him. And she fell for it every time. Though she was getting stronger. Smarter. Quicker. She could feel that in her bones. And her broken arm barely held her back anymore.

  But the anger that tinged the corners of his eyes in that moment when she opened her eyes made him look dangerous. Dangerous in how he looked at her.

  Odd, unless she’d misunderstood those few short seconds when she had been frozen in his arms, their lips near to touching. The man was too virile, and heaven help her, in those moments, she wanted everything that Talen was. The heat of him. His lips. His hands rough on her body.

  All of him on her.

  Yet he’d yanked himself away.

  I’m not your hero.

  His lips to her ears, the echo of those words haunting her.

  And he didn’t have any intention to become so. The anger lacing his eyes when she’d awoken proof of that.

  Not that she needed a hero. She just needed a place to exist, to heal, to plan before she could move onward. If she’d learned one thing from Juliet, it was that she needed to be her own hero.

  Walking out of his office, Ness had been startled at the destruction they’d caused. Feathers everywhere, two chairs broken, glass from a lamp scattered across the floor. Yet every time Talen brought her back into his office for another training bout, everything looked perfectly tidy and new and intact, as though the tornado of their training hadn’t torn through the office the day before.

  Talen was entirely too lenient with her in destroying his possessions.

  She winced as her fingertip poked at the side of the lump in the direct center of her forehead. She needed something—anything—to get the swelling down. What was it her mother used to do when she had a lump on her knee from banging into something? Set cold to it. Ice, if they had it.

  Surely there was an ice house adjacent to the kitchens here at the Alabaster. The cook in residence couldn’t have made the apricot iced cream that had been sent up with her dinner two days ago without it.

  Grabbing the key for her door that Talen had given her, she walked across the room. She’d been surprised when he’d handed her a copy of the key two days ago. She’d said she felt as though she was in prison, so he’d given her a key without argument, though made her promise that she would stay in her room. It was to be used in an emergency only.

  Soothing the pounding red bump on her head seemed like an appropriate emergency. And how hard could it be to avoid people and find the kitchens?

  Difficult, it turned out. She’d had to ask two different footmen she encountered as she’d slipped down the servant stairs and along the lower corridors the correct way to the kitchens. Not quite circular stairs, each level seemed to have a set of square stairs with four turns. And now she was lost on her way back to her room, standing in a stairwell by a doorway, ice wrapped in a cloth melting in her hand, trying to remember how many flights she’d just walked up.

  The lump on her head had addled her brain.

  But the one thing she couldn’t do was step out into the main corridors where she could clearly hear men—too many men—laughing and arguing and carousing. It sounded like a very full gaming night. If Talen discovered she was lurking about the house, he’d kill her—but not before taking away her key—the one small semblance of freedom she now had.

  She lifted the ice wrapped in the linen cloth to her forehead, rubbing it about the lump as she closed her eyes, walking back up the stairs in her mind. One more level? No. She could hear what she assumed was the main gaming room on this level. That meant two, maybe three more sets of stairs to climb.

  Her eyes opening, Ness continued up the staircase when the door behind her opened. She quickened her steps, hoping to avoid running into another servant. That she already encountered two footmen and three workers in the kitchens wasn’t a good thing.

  Footfalls thudded on the stairs behind her. Steps following her upward. Two sets of steps speeding up. She glanced over her shoulder. Two men and neither was a servant, both in expensive dark jackets. Their eyes blurry, their shoulders banging into the outer walls of the tight staircase. Soused. She’d had her fill of drunken asses—enough to last a lifetime.

  She doubled her speed up the stairs.

  The stout one closest to her reached up, catching the back of her skirts for a second before she kicked back, clearing his hand.

  “Stop, little mouse.” His feet on the stairs sped faster. “Are whores now at the Alabaster? Mr. Loggerton didn’t tell us that. We’ve been asking for years now.”

  Hell.

  Her look dodged upward. There. A door up at the top of this turn of stairwell. That was her escape.

  She dropped the ice, her breath speeding as she tried to gather up her skirts with her right hand to bound up the stairs two at a time. Damn skirts in her legs. Tangled.

  “Stop—stop—you little whore. We could use you.” The second man yelled at her, his shout echoing off the walls of the staircase. “Stop. It’ll only take a few minutes of your time and we won’t have to leave for the whorehouse down the street. We’ll make it worth your time. Stop her, Harry. Stop her.”

  The door. Escape. That was what Talen had been pounding into her head. Escape.

  She reached the door, her right hand fumbling as she tried to open it. It swung wide and she bolted into the hallway. Her room. Her room at the end of the hallway. Escape.

  Her head jerked back suddenly, the braid of her hair almost yanking from her skull. Her feet flew out from under her and she crashed down onto her backside.

  The man directly behind her laughed and then wrenched her braid upward, dragging her up with it onto her feet. Her right hand flew to the base of her braid, trying to hold her hair from tearing out of her head.

  “No—no—I’m not a whore. I’m not.”

  His laugh didn’t stop as he twisted the braid around the palm of his hand, pulling her closer to him. “I don’t think you get to tell us that, mouse. We get to decide what you are. Filmore, you take a go at her while I have her stuck nice and good—the tail of a little mouse.”

  The second man moved closer to her, trapping her against the wall, already loosening the fall front of his trousers. A gold chain dangled across his chest in front of her eyes, the gold flickering in the light of the sconce at the end of the hallway.

  Her chest seized upon itself, clamping off all air to her lungs.

  Panic. This was the panic Talen had been teaching her about.

  Panic that she couldn’t let take a hold of her.

  Fight. Escape.

  Whatever it took.

  The world slowed as her right hand let go of her hair and she ignored the pain of her hair ripping from her scalp. The stout one had twisted her half in front of him, her head bent to the s
ide. Which meant his ballocks were directly behind the stiff wooden splint wrapped onto her left arm. It would be brutal against the break, but the board was the only solid weapon she had. She had to save her knee for the one in front of her.

  She went still for a long second, coiling her energy as the sounds of their laughter edged away, like they were in a far-off glen surrounded by trees.

  One wild swing backward with her left arm, and she hit the stout man square on his already engorged member. Before he could even scream, she shifted her weight and viciously sent her right knee up into the groin of the man in front of her.

  Screams erupted almost in unison as they both doubled over.

  But the man behind her didn’t release her hair, it was bound so tight around his palm. Instead, his fist at the back of her head punched downward, jerking her to the floor at his feet.

  She kicked off from the wall, trying to tear his hand out of her hair. No luck. Their screams ended and she stared up at two raging monsters above her with brutal revenge in their eyes.

  “You’ll pay for that, you little bitch.” The stout one lifted his fat hand, ready to swing down at her with the back of his ring-laden fingers.

  But then his eyes popped wide, almost out of his head.

  An arm flew across his neck, choking him. Choking him.

  His right hand tangled in her hair fell to his side and she quickly reached up, ripping her braid from his palm.

  A rush of legs jabbed about her in the tight hallway, boots barely missing her limbs as the stout man was yanked away and thrown to the floor.

  Talen. Talen over the man, his fists flying into the troll’s face as Declan slammed the other man ruthlessly into the wall.

  Whimpers, squeals. The piercing crack of bones breaking.

  And she sat in the middle. Blood splattering about her, arms and fists flying. She sat in the middle, perfectly still. Perfectly safe.

  Safe because Talen was there and she knew it, just as Juliet had promised.

  Knew it down to her bones.

  Talen would keep her safe.

  { Chapter 10 }

  “Talen—enough.” Declan jumped over Ness on the floor of the hallway, screaming. “Enough. Stop.”