Amanda Rose
Amanda Rose
Karen Robards
Grand Central Publishing (2001)
Tags: FIC027020
FIC027020ttt
Impetuous English beauty Lady Amanda Rose was determined to escape the loveless marriage that her cruel stepbrother would impose on her. She never imagined that a mysterious rogue from the new world would be the man to change her destiny.
AMANDA ROSE
. Copyright © 1984 by Karen Robards. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Warner Books
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
ISBN: 978-0-7595-2031-8
A mass market edition of this book was published in 1984 by Warner Books.
First eBook Edition: March 2001
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
.
Contents
She Should Step Away From Him, She Knew.
SHE SHOULD STEP AWAY FROM HIM, SHE KNEW.
His arms had loosened their hold on her waist, and all she had to do was take a single step backward to be free of his touch, but she didn’t. She told herself that she didn’t want to make it obvious to him how much his closeness disturbed her. The very warmth of his body held her in thrall.
She could feel his muscles gradually stiffening against her, and her brow wrinkled as she puzzled at it. Perhaps she was hurting his wound? She shifted slightly. He tensed even more. Concerned now, Amanda pressed lightly against his chest with both hands, tilting her head to peer up at him. The darkness made it impossible for her to see his face.
“Matt?” she whispered, his name a question.
His hands clenched on her waist.
“Oh, hell,” he growled softly. Her eyes widened. She knew then … he was going to kiss her.
“Ms. Robards has the marvelous talent to zero in on the heart of erotic fantasy … no one writes with more fire.”
—Romantic Times
“One of the finest, most talented writers of romantic history today.”
—Affaire de Coeur
“Ms. Robards writes spellbinding romance.”
—Publishers Weekly
B
OOKS BY
K
AREN
R
OBARDS
Amanda Rose
Dark Torment
Loving Julia
Night Magic
To Love a Man
Wild Orchids
Published by Warner Books
To my husband, Doug
Dr. Walter L. “Pete” Johnson
and my mother, Sally Skaggs Johnson,
with love and appreciation for their
help and support over the years
Amanda Rose
It was a perfect day for everything except dying.
Matthew Grayson lifted his face to the bright April sunshine and sniffed the sweetness of the air, an automatic gesture born of years spent at sea at the helm of his own ship. In those days—were they only a few months ago?—he had thrived on storms and dangers and challenges of every sort, thrived on pitting his courage and skill against anything that sea or sky or man—or woman—could throw at them. Grappling with death had always exhilarated him, making his blood sing with the sheer joy of being alive. Only now, when death was a grim reality and not a faceless chimera, had the singing abruptly stopped.
His eyes flickered once in his otherwise carefully expressionless face as he thought briefly, longingly, of happier days. The first time his men had seen him laughing at death—he had been hurling mocking defiance in the teeth of a killer hurricane that had sunk a hundred ships from one end of the Atlantic to the other—they had looked at one another in quaking disbelief, silently questioning his sanity. Then, when their own ship, the
Lucie Belle,
had emerged from the tempest unscathed, the more superstitious among them had stared fearfully at their black-haired, swarthy-skinned captain. His teeth were flashing white in an exultant grin as he worked with unflagging energy while the crew was ready to drop from the exhaustion of more than forty-eight hours spent battling the storm. And, one by one, they had crossed themselves. It was then that the whispers began: Matt Grayson had made a pact with the devil, had bartered his soul for his own and his ship’s safety. The
Lucie Belle
was blessed or cursed, depending on the speaker’s point of view.
It was a rumor that Matt did nothing to encourage, but he didn’t discourage it, either, because from then on men lined up in droves to sail on his ship whenever she docked in her home port of New Orleans. For every vacancy there were twenty applicants, and Matt liked being able to pick and choose. He prided himself on having the best crew afloat, and, in turn, the men prided themselves on their captain’s invincibility. It seemed that nothing could touch Matt Grayson—not storms, not bullets, not knives, not even the occasional jealous husband. Nothing, until the devil was ready to claim his own.
The less superstitious among his crew had another, simpler explanation for their captain’s uncanny ability to bring them safely through the worst the sea could throw at them. “Those born to be hanged will never drown” was what they said of him when the ocean rose up in fury and threatened to crush the
Lucie
Belle
’s hull like a giant, angry fist holding an eggshell, only to set her down again safely in calmer waters some hours later. The saying kept his men from despairing when the waves were thirty feet high and the sea and the sky met and seethed like a briny mixture from hell’s blackest caldron. Matt, hearing the words passed like a talisman from man to man, would throw back his head and laugh in incredulous amazement that grown men, and hardened sea dogs at that, could take comfort in something so ridiculous.
But he was not laughing today—had not been laughing for some time now—because it looked as if he would, after all, meet the fate the men had prophesied for him. Three months ago, in a sequence of nightmarish events, he had been summarily arrested, tried, and found guilty of the grisly murders of Lord James Farrindgon, Tory nephew of the prime minister, and his wife and children; today Queen Victoria’s government meant to exact its vengeance on one who had removed a thorn from its side. Today they were going to hang him, Matthew Zacharias Grayson, by the neck until he was dead.
“Aw right, get on down there.” Those words, uttered in a low growl by one of his three burly guards, brought him sharply back to the sorry present. So, too, did the nudge of a rifle butt in the small of his back with which the guard emphasized his command. Matt winced, stumbled, and would have fallen out of the back of the dirty farm cart, which had just rumbled to a halt after conveying him to Tyburn from Newgate Prison, if another guard, perhaps more humane than his fellow, had not caught hold of the chain that linked his shackled wrists and jerked him back upright. Not so long ago Matt would have felt a murderous flash of rage at being so treated, but lately he had been unable to summon emotion of any sort. He felt nothing but a curious blackness, as if he were already dead. Inwardly he blessed that lack of feeling. They were determined to do their worst to him, determined to wring every last drop of pain and suffering from his battered flesh. But he was beyond pain at last, and nearly beyond their reach. For that reason alone he was ready to welcome death with open arms.
“G’wan, get down. We ain’t got all day.” The first guard prodded him again with the rifle, sounding impatient. Matt thought wryly that he must be keeping the man from something important, like his luncheon. Well, no matter. He was ready to go. They were determined that he would die, and if he did not walk to meet the death they had decreed for him, they would drag him to it. He preferred to spend his last moments on earth like a man, not a cringing dog. Clenching his teeth so hard that a little muscle jumped in the side of his jaw, he clambered awkwardly down from the cart, stumbling and nearly falling as the short, thick chain between the irons on his ankles tripped him up.
“Watch out there.” Immediately the guards were around him. Afraid he might try to escape, Matt surmised, and would have laughed if he could have summoned the will to do so. He was, or had been, a strong man, big, nearly six feet four inches, with muscles that had earned him a healthy respect in ports from San Francisco to Africa’s Barbary Coast. But the months in prison, without sufficient food or exercise and with frequent beatings and other tortures (they had hoped to wrest a confession from him; he took pride in the fact that they hadn’t succeeded), had shrunk the flesh from his bones. He was a mere shell of what he had been, and he doubted that he had the strength to overpower a girl-child, much less three guards who had surely been chosen for their bullish physiques. But it seemed they were taking no chances. They closed ranks around him, hustling him the short distance from the cart to the foot of the gallows as if terrified that he might break away.
If he could have, he would have, Matt acknowledged silently, staring up dry-mouthed at the men who awaited him on the platform above. The first twinge of fear pierced the apathy with which he had armored himself as he recognized the black robes of a priest, and the hooded executioner. Matt cursed himself inwardly. He, who had never feared anyone or anything in his life, would not start now. He would meet death with his head up, his step unfaltering, and laugh in the faces of those who had come to hang him. They had taken from him all else that he valued; he would not surrender his pride.
Urged on by the guards, he mounted the rough wooden planks, his movements slow and awkward because of the confining chains. Over their clanking, he suddenly became aware of a swelling roar. Surprised, Matt looked around and down. A milling, unruly crowd stretched around the gallows like an endless expanse of sea around a tiny island. The sight stopped him in his tracks. He had not been aware of them before, wished he had not become aware of them now. They were staring up at him, a featureless blur made up of hundreds of faces, come to watch him die. Their mouths shouted obscenities; their eyes screamed hate.
“
That
’s him. That’s the one. Grayson—bloody
murderer.
”
Matt stared at them. Missiles thrown by the crowd began slicing through the air around him, rotten tomatoes and eggs and even rocks. The guards, as caught up in the maelstrom of refuse as he was, cursed viciously and hurried him up the stairs. Matt did nothing to hinder them. Every ounce of his concentration was suddenly focused on fighting down the terror that tiptoed icily up and down his spine. He scarcely felt the rock that bounced off his left temple, leaving a darkening bruise and a trickle of crimson in its wake.
The platform was long and narrow, just wide enough for perhaps four men to stand abreast. It stood a good fifteen feet off the ground—far enough so that there was at least an even chance that the drop would break the victim’s neck. After all, England in the year 1842 was a humane country; no one wanted a man to meet his death twisting at the end of a rope and choking for as long as a full half hour. No matter that it happened like that more often than not; at least it was not
planned.
Thinking of the horrible, blackened face and gasping sounds of a man he had once seen hanged and who had died hard, Matt promised himself he would watch for the hangman’s signal, then jump upward at the last moment so that he would fall through the trapdoor with a little extra force. All he asked now was that his finish be quick and clean. Being slowly strangled to death by a frayed piece of hemp was an end he preferred not to contemplate.
He was not the only man scheduled to die that day, he saw as soon as he set foot on the platform. Two other poor wretches were there, their irons already replaced by a single rope securing their hands behind their backs in the attitude in which they would soon meet their maker. Each had a man with a rifle standing behind and a little to the right of him. The Crown was clearly taking no chances, even at this late date. Three nooses instead of the one he had envisaged swung gently in the breeze. Two sets of eyes other than his own were viewing the soft beauty of a budding spring day for the last time. Matt took odd comfort in the presence of the two other condemned men. Only now did he realize how little he had relished the thought of dying alone.