Behind the Marquess's Mask (The Lords of Whitehall Book 1) (14 page)

“Stop pushing me, you big clodpate, and explain your coat!” Kathryn sat upright immediately when Grey released her.

“My—” He glanced down at his crimson-stained coat, and one side of his mouth slowly curled up in a crooked grin because
he
was the one who had smeared a shocking amount of blood over his chest.

“No,” he answered. “I have not been wounded. However, I am afraid I have murdered my new coat in cold blood.”

“The men…” She strained to peer around him at the bodies. “They were—”

“They’re dead,” he confirmed, moving to block her view. “And I, for one, am prodigiously thankful it isn’t you or me in their place, which would be the alternative.”

“Dead,” she repeated faintly.

Grey studied her closely: horror-stricken face, pale skin, shakiness. There was no way she could stay in the saddle on her own all the way back to the cottage.

“Rest here as long as you need,” he said after a moment’s pause. He tossed his hat carelessly on the grass and settled himself beside her. “As long as you need less than half an hour,” he added, stretching one leg out and bending the other to prop his arm on his knee. “The sooner we get you safely back to the cottage, the better. You will have to ride Drogo with me, I am afraid.”

Kathryn sent a worried glance toward Grey’s prized beast pounding his front hooves into the dirt irritably. “Oh, no. I can… I can ride.”

“In case you failed to notice, Drogo was the only mount not blind with panic only a few minutes ago. You would have to be a foolhardy simpleton to attempt to ride a spooked horse in your condition.”

Her brows snapped together. “What does that make you? Antagonizing brigands on the road, challenging them with pistols whilst theirs were aimed at your heart. Cocked and ready to fire, no less.”

He returned the vexing woman’s challenging glare. She had a point unfortunately, but only because she had no idea how paltry the threat had been compared to what he was accustomed to. If she knew what his odds normally looked like, she might have understood, but he could hardly relay the facts.

He forced his jaw to unclench and dropped his head, sighing wearily. “Look at you.” He gestured to her with a flick of his wrist. “You are shaking from head to toe, hardly able to take a breath. I can’t have you falling from your mount on every bend. You might break your neck the next time.”

“I might break it, anyway,” she muttered, studying Drogo.

“I won’t let you fall,” he promised. He would have laughed at her apprehension if his words hadn’t somehow meant more than he had meant them to.

Her blue eyes flashed to him then back to the road, an inscrutable question looming in them.

A breeze picked up her scent, engulfing him in the light aroma of lilies. Suddenly, it seemed they had lingered far too long on the roadside.

“Half an hour was rather generous,” he said, starting to get up. “Perhaps we ought to—”

“Why did they want me?” she asked. “What did I do?”

He was crouched, ready to straighten his legs to stand; but instead, he sat back down heavily.

“You have done nothing apart from marrying me,” he lied. “I am not without enemies. Now that I have a wife of my own, there are quite a few gentlemen ready to strike back any way they can, and you would fetch a fine ransom.”

“A ransom?” she muttered, frowning.

“Indeed,” he confirmed. “If I could afford to pay it, that is.”

Her frown turned quizzical. “You are one of the wealthiest men in England.”

“Am I?” he asked suspiciously.

“Aren’t you?” she asked, clearly confused.

He studied her with narrowed eyes as he crossed his arms over his chest. “You tell me. Has your dear mother decided to bundle me off the poor house? Has she tossed all my coin to the modistes of Bond Street as though she were a dashed king on coronation day?” He imitated the action half-heartedly.

Kathryn’s mouth was a taut line, her eyes overly bright under a knit brow. For a moment, Grey thought he had offended her, but then her face split into a wide grin with a melodic chuckle. That was when the sunlight finally broke through the clear, blue sky. Though spring still hung with the chill of winter, as bitter as it was, the warmth of summer emanated from her.

Grey watched her laugh with his own foolish, crooked smile. Her cheeks were still a tad pale, but she no longer appeared in danger of keeling over with the slightest breeze.

When they finally departed, Drogo thankfully decided it was in his best interest to behave—more or less—for the short quarter hour ride back to the cottage. He didn’t bite once, though he tried a couple of times. The rest of the time, he was nearly impossible to keep from breaking out into a dead run, a run Grey wanted just as badly.

A sickening feeling settled in the pit of his stomach. He had lied, but why should that bother him? It wasn’t the first time. He couldn’t very well tell her she might be murdered at any moment. He knew very little about comforting women, but he doubted this bit of news would be helpful. He could follow it up with the reassurance that she was protected by His Majesty’s finest assassin, but somehow, he didn’t think she would find that very comforting, either. He wouldn’t after that pitiful display.

He had been completely unprepared for whatever the devil had happened to him when that barrel had been pointed at Kathryn.

It was interesting Bexley had not come himself. It would have been easy enough for him to take lodgings in the area on the pretense of hunting or visiting friends if the sodding whelp had any. A stray bullet in Grey’s brain would do the trick. He could blame it all on a tragic hunting accident.

Could this attempted kidnapping be unrelated? Multiple, interested parties racing to the prize?

Bloody hell.

Perhaps Matthews had it right. Maybe this was a bad bit of business Kathryn had gotten herself into. What the devil could she have done to be tangled up in this mess?

It was time to get back to London for a more in-depth discussion with Matthews. There appeared to be some details he had left out of their initial meeting, and Grey wasn’t too keen on being thrust into an assignment without all the details.

L
ate into the evening
, Grey was in his study, reliving the episode on the road, trying to reason how it might be connected. As possible as a ransom ploy might have been, the chance of that being the case was less than minute when stacked up against the alternatives. He tried to focus on those alternatives, but his thoughts kept drifting back to Covent Garden.

He had spoken with Dr. Meade at the time, convincing him to give up the details. Meade had not only been Lord Grenville’s physician, but the physician favored by the Home Office for years. As such, he and Grey had naturally been well acquainted.

Grey had a tendency to get ill quite often, in fact. He would need splints and slings for his winter cold for instance. And bandages, brandy, and laudanum were needed to pull out those stomach bugs that looked suspiciously like lead balls.

Due to their very long-standing history, Dr. Meade had not minded at all explaining Kathryn’s injured state to Grey, especially knowing how much pain the athletic man could take, how many men he had made disappear, and the threatening way he looked when the good doctor had first refused to expound on Kathryn’s condition.

Grey was curling his hands into fists at the thought. Someone had hit her. Hard. Multiple times. And no one had been there to protect her.

He should have been!

Grey crushed a spent cigarette into a crystal tray on his desk as he pushed back his chair and stood. His jaw clenched, his brow furrowed, and his eyes burned. He felt as though he were being torn to pieces from the inside out.

He tried to focus on the shadow, the brawn who no doubt committed the bruising of Kathryn’s small, soft body. He tried to focus on Bexley, who had undoubtedly organized the entire arrangement. He tried to focus on the highwaymen and the fact that three of the men sent to kill her were dead. It would take time for whoever had sent them to learn of their deaths and find replacements. Still, he was no closer to finding out who that person was, why they were after Kathryn, or how many more might come for her.

Grey let out a frustrated growl as he picked up a crystal snifter of brandy and sent it crashing into the fire, causing a giant flame to lick the mantle.

Even with his Runners stationed outside he was anxious, which was a bad sign in his line of work. Moreover, the only remedy he had found so far was to peek inside Kathryn’s bedroom to see that she was still safe and sound. Even that had only given him half an hour’s peace the three times he had done it so far, but at least it was something.

He growled and pushed away from his desk, striding once again toward Kathryn’s bedroom. He eased the door open to find the room lit with only a few candles placed sparingly throughout, bathing everything in a dim, yellow aura. Even in the low light, his gaze was drawn to her immediately. She was already dressed for bed, brushing her hair at the vanity.

One halfway-spent candle flickered on the corner of the vanity, teasing in its whisper of illumination over her skin. A blanket of auburn silk curled around her face, spilling over her shoulders and falling in waves about her waist. From her faraway expression in the mirror, it was obvious her mind was elsewhere, each slow stroke of the brush merely an automatic motion.

He stood, leaning lazily on the doorframe, unwilling to break whatever spell she was under or the spell she had put him under. He ought not to still be there since she was obviously quite well, but his muscles refused to budge.

Devil take it, she was the loveliest thing he had ever seen.

Her eyes fluttered as though she were waking and landed on his reflection in the mirror. In a flash, she spun around to face him, clutching the edge of the vanity.

“Grey,” she gasped, the light from the candles backlighting her figure through the sheer fabric with painful clarity.

“Pardon the intrusion.” He bowed stiffly, automatically taking a step back into the hallway.

She was scared to death of him. Now that she’d had time for reflection, she must have realized what he had done. The memory of what his fists had made of what was once a face sent his own stomach roiling.

“Wait!”

Grey forced himself to step back into the room, though it might bloody well kill him. If seeing the fear flicker in her eyes didn’t do it, seeing that damned filmy negligee and all it gave away underneath would. He could see every beautiful curve of her. It couldn’t have taken more than one thread to put the whole of it together, and he took in every inch. Being a male in possession of all his male parts and processes, it was impossible not to.

When his gaze reached the dark patch below her navel, a strangled sound caught in his throat. This was by far the cruelest torture he had ever been subjected to, and he had done it to himself.

She caught her bottom lip between her teeth before slowly padding toward him.

Grey reflexively took a step back, watching her as though she were a rabid, man-eating creature before he realized how preposterous that was. He then forced himself to stop retreating, staying motionless when she stopped only a few inches from him.

Lilies came with her, lilies and sunshine.

The sheen of her auburn hair teased his chin. He wanted to bury his face in it and breathe in the scent and warmth he knew lingered there. His hands itched to explore the figure that had haunted every one of his nights since he had climbed into that cursed hack at Covent Garden.

When he inhaled, he breathed in lilies and woman, and his lips began to tingle. Thoughts of all the lascivious and depraved acts he wanted to perform on her with his tongue exploded in his mind like a thousand firecrackers.

Large, blue eyes blinked up at him, and a dainty hand lifted to touch his chest. He was already swimming in those deep, clear pools, but once that featherlight contact radiated molten heat throughout his chest, he was lost.

“The blood was here,” she recounted softly. “If you had been hurt, this is where the wound would have been.”

* * *

K
athryn had tucked
her fingers under his waistcoat to brush the lawn of his shirt. He seemed to be a furnace pushing against her hand with every breath, and she began to feel the mush he never failed to turn her brain into.

He closed his eyes, and a muscle ticked dangerously in his jaw. He was affected. Good. After resorting to candlelight and impractical lingerie, she needed some encouragement. Who would have thought it would be this difficult to seduce a libertine?

Unless, of course, he was disgusted by her brazen display.

But, no, she should not even consider that yet, not before she had given it her best effort. She would not be banished to some country estate to live out her days in endless ennui once this little retreat was through. She would
not!
If that meant using feminine lures to convince him not to turn her into a country bumpkin, then so be it.

She moved her fingers against his chest, pretending simply to feel the fine material of his waistcoat. Was all of him this hard?

Long, blunt-tipped fingers wrapped around her wrist, and she lifted wide eyes to his as he unfastened several buttons then slid her hand farther under his waistcoat to rest over his heart.

“If they had been skilled enough to draw blood, it would have been here.” His heart pounded rapidly, matching the pace of her own. Then he let go of her wrist, and both of his hands were back at his sides.

“That would have killed you,” she breathed, and her brow knit as she stared at the dark blue silk swallowing her hand.

He nodded.

“I was afraid they would,” she admitted softly, concentrating on the subtle designs worked into the fine silk.

“You were afraid for me?” He searched her face. Then the corner of his mouth lifted mirthlessly. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

“Someone ought to,” she said. “You certainly don’t.”

“Yes, well,” he muttered. “The devil looks after his own.”

“You are no devil, Grey,” she said, lowering her lashes in a way she hoped was alluring. “You are a man.” She mentally readied herself then slid a trembling hand down his chest, but before she could dip below his waistband, he groaned and gripped her shoulders, stepping away.

Tears of frustration threatened to burst. No doubt, she had done something unspeakably gauche, but how was she to know if her own rake of a husband refused to show her? How could she possibly be so utterly undesirable that even
he
wouldn’t want her?

“Do you not like to be touched there?” she asked tightly.

His face twisted before he laughed softly, but there was no humor in it. “Oh, yes, I like to be touched there.”

“It’s me you don’t like, then,” she concluded with a blessedly steady voice, but she felt her eyes begin to well. Stupid girl, upset about
not
having the attentions of a rake. “I quite understand, given the circumstances. Now that I have made an utter fool of myself, perhaps it’s best we say good night.”

“Kate”—Grey began to reach out for her, but then his arms abruptly dropped back down—“I kill people, and I am good at it. You don’t want anything to do with me.”

Kathryn swallowed a childish snort. “Like it or not, we are married. I think we are far past
wanting anything to do
with each other. Anyway, your being good at killing has saved my life.”

“I didn’t have to kill them to save you.”

“Of course,” she muttered mockingly. “They were amiable highwaymen, after all. They wouldn’t dream of using the ready pistols they had trained on your chest.”

“I am far better skilled than they were,” he said stiffly. “I had options.”

“Options.” Yes, Kathryn had options, too, and she would use them all before she willingly accepted a boring life as a country matron.

Squaring her shoulders, she lifted her chin and did the only thing she hadn’t yet tried.

She lifted her hands to frame his face, determined that he would not somehow dodge her. If one shot was all she had, she was going to make it count. If only she knew what the blazes she was doing.

She pressed her lips to his—crushed, really—desperately squishing their faces together. She felt him stiffen, unmoving. It was like kissing the statue of David. They stood there with their faces squished together for several seconds before Kathryn gave up hope and let him go. Defeat, heavy and bitter, swarmed her as she lowered herself off her toes.

“Damn it, Kathryn,” he groaned. Then he pulled her into him, his mouth covering hers.

She gasped, and his tongue swept inside, lapping against hers. She could feel the hard press of his body against hers as he surrounded her, overwhelming her senses. Every place he touched tingled with energy, coming alive with a speed that left her spinning.

His hands roved over the thin nightgown, grabbing, stroking, massaging her until her breath came in short pants, and her body trembled. He took her breasts into his warm palms and rolled the aching nipples until they pebbled under his fingers. Then he squeezed them, and she gasped at the shocks of pleasure it sent through her.

He lightly sucked and nipped her bottom lip before he broke the kiss. She whimpered and pulled at his hair in an effort to guide his mouth back to hers, but he wouldn’t be navigated.

His stilted breath warmed her as he laughed wickedly then trailed open kisses down her jaw. He was teasing her again. If she weren’t afraid he would stop, she would very much like to slap the man.

He nuzzled her neck as he grazed the tender skin with his teeth. With a growl, he grabbed the round swells of her bottom and pulled her into him, grinding the hard length of his arousal into her belly.

“Kathryn, if there were ever any doubt of this being what you want”—his groan vibrated into her neck— “Please, tell me you want this.”

Kathryn chuckled breathlessly. “Do you expect me to say no?”

“If that’s what you want. There are no take-backsies when it comes to your virtue.” As he spoke, his shaky breath warmed her neck, still wet from his mouth.

He straightened and stepped back half a step with his hands on her shoulders. He was watching her, waiting, beseeching, promising, barely restrained. Yet she had no doubt he would leave without argument if she asked. It was as though he were asking permission to seduce an innocent, not make love to his wife.

“Please don’t stop, Grey,” she whispered. She couldn’t bear it if he left her with this confusing bundle of sensations and need, not again.

“If I were a gentleman, I would ask twice.” He smiled, gently squeezing her shoulders, before he stepped back to shrug out of his coat and waistcoat. With a few impatient tugs, he tossed his cravat to the floor. Finally, he pulled his shirt up over his head and threw it in the pile with the rest of his finely tailored clothes.

He went for the fastenings of his trousers but stopped at her quick intake of breath, his sober gaze snapping back to her.

He stood before her half-naked, his torso a sculpture of strained muscle and sinew. The candlelight flickered against his bronzed skin, accentuating every ridge of muscle and the scars that marred his body from shoulder to waistline. A thick, ragged scar ran from his left shoulder across his chest like a sash. Another stretched several inches horizontally along his waist, curving up toward his ribs as it wrapped around his side, and two circular scars marked his arm and abdomen.