She must be depraved.
On the heels of that thought came the realization that the hand that was not squeezing her bottom was sliding along the bared skin of her shoulder, sliding down along the base of her neck, the long fingers seeking—and finding—her naked breast.
Even as the large, hot hand closed over her soft flesh, a shaft of pure fire shot through her clear down to her toes. Her nipple hardened instantly against the scorching caress of his palm—and from somewhere Anna found a strength she had never dreamed she possessed, a tremendous surging strength that enabled her to wrench herself from his arms.
“How dare you! How dare you touch me, you— you
swine!”
she cried, panting, backing away as he made a move as though to come after her. She could tell her face was flushed; she could feel the hectic flags of rosy color that flew in her cheeks. Her hair was tousled; tumbling over the black cloak that she clutched to her as if it could, magically, protect her from him. Her lips were parted as she struggled to control her breathing, and tender and swollen from his kisses. Her eyes, which never left him, were huge with a jumbled mixture of confusion, shame, and fright.
At her words he stood still.
“There’s no need to be in such a taking,” he said, his voice soothing, those unsettling eyes watchful as they tracked her progress. Like hers, his breathing was faintly uneven. Dark patches of color burned high in his cheekbones, and those midnight-blue eyes had darkened once again to something more nearly resembling jet black. “ ’Twas only a kiss, no more.”
Anna took another step away from him, coming to an abrupt stop as she backed into one of the long tables that graced either side of the hall. The silver on it rattled, and she put a hand behind her instinctively to keep a tall candlestick from toppling over. Her knuckles brushed the top of a glass display case. Her eyes flickered as she suddenly remembered what it contained: a pair of silver dueling pistols once prized by old Lord Ridley as a gift from his father. Although they would not be loaded, and probably not even functional after all this time,
he
would not know that. If only the case was not locked—it was not. Stealthily she lifted the lid and slipped her hand inside to seek and close over a cool metal handle. Lifting the pistol from its velvet nest, she withdrew her hand, keeping the pistol concealed behind her back. With that, she might, with any luck at all, succeed in holding him at bay. Her eyes never left him. He had made no further move to come after her, but she knew that he did not mean to simply bow and leave. No gentleman, this, she reminded herself, then blushed to the roots of her hair as she remembered how she had responded to this man she had never in her life set eyes on before, this rogue, this nonrespecter of women, this thief!
“I have a gun,” she said hoarsely. Withdrawing the weapon from behind her back, she leveled it at him. “If you come one step nearer, I’ll shoot.”
His eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed. For one moment they fixed on the pistol, then lifted to her face. He looked unnervingly cool—but he made no move to call her bluff, and even lifted a placating hand. Anna steadied her trembling fingers with sheer force of will and made herself meet those dark eyes with a calm that, she hoped, belied her wildly beating heart.
“Let’s not be hasty, now,” he said, his gaze sliding to the pistol again, briefly. “I’ve done you no harm at all, nor do I mean you any.”
Anna snorted, and the pistol wobbled in a way that would have alarmed her had she been the one on the business end of it. But he seemed unrattled.
“You will leave—
now
.” Anna tried hard to sound authoritative, but she feared her voice was not altogether convincing. In any case, he made no move to obey. Instead, he shook his head regretfully.
“I can’t do that, I’m afraid. At least, not without you.” He smiled at her then, a roguish smile that might, under other circumstances, have charmed her.
“You’ve no reason to fear me. I’ll not hurt you— nor force you into giving anything you don’t wish to give—but you must see that I cannot leave you behind.” His voice was soothing, his tone eminently reasonable. Anna blinked at him. If she had not known better, she would have thought from his tone that
she
was the one being outrageous, while he tried to gently cajole her into more acceptable behavior. He had quickly recovered his composure, if indeed he had ever lost it, and stood easily erect, watching her—and the pistol—keen-eyed. Without the cloak, he was still formidable-looking, a tall man with wide shoulders and an athlete’s powerful build. His coat was black like his cloak and not overly fashionable. His breeches were black too, not as snug as was the current style but still close-fitting enough to reveal the powerful muscles of his thighs. His boots were not Hoby’s, but well-scuffed and worn, black like the rest of his attire. His linen was white, but faintly crumpled, and his cravat was carelessly tied.
Not a gentleman, she decided again, but frighteningly attractive for all that.
“Just go away! Please!” For all her good intentions, her voice wobbled more alarmingly than the pistol.
He smiled again and shook his head. “I can’t do that either, I’m afraid. I’ve no doubt that as soon as I’m gone you’ll run screeching for reinforcements. I don’t fancy a bullet in the back—or a noose around my neck. But I’ll set you free as soon as I’m safe away, and give you money for your passage back here. You’ll come to no harm, I promise you.”
“I won’t go with you! Have you no eyes in your head? I have a gun!” Anna practically hissed the last words.
His mouth tightened fractionally, and his brows twitched closer together. “I haven’t time to stand about arguing with you. There’s no help for it; you must come with me. Your only choice is whether you walk out of here with a modicum of dignity or whether I stuff my handkerchief in your mouth, bind your wrists behind your back, and carry you out on my shoulder.”
“I’ll shoot you if you take a single step toward me. I will, I mean it.” Panic edged her voice. He could not really mean to ignore a pistol pointed squarely at his head—could he?
“That pistol looks older than I am—and unless I much mistake the matter it seems to be missing its hammer.” He shrugged. “Under the circumstances, I believe I’ll just have to chance it. Fire away.”
Even as the sense of that sank in, and her eyes dropped in questioning horror to the maligned pistol, he lunged toward her. His movement was so unexpected that Anna squeezed the trigger automatically. The gun went off with a deafening boom. Then he was wresting the pistol from her grasp and flinging it aside. She gasped, struggling, as his hands closed on her arms and yanked her toward him, twisting her at the same time so that she was falling through space. Her fingers scrambled frantically for something, anything to break her fall.
Anna was too shocked even to scream as she hit the floor with a jarring force that bruised her hip and rattled every bone in her body. Already he was looming over her, making good his threat to stuff his handkerchief in her mouth. She choked, spluttered, struggled, gagged, but he rammed the dry linen in and twisted her around, meaning, no doubt, to bind her hands before scooping her up again. She was lying on the floor, half on her side and half on her back, one of his large hands and a knee holding her down. He was in an awkward position, a kind of half crouch, his hands busy with the knot of his cravat. No doubt he meant to use it to tie her hands. Soon she would be helpless, and he would carry her away—to do what with her? Murder no longer seemed such a strong possibility, but ravishment, or rather his particular brand of seduction, did.
To her eternal shame, the thought of enduring such, with him, brought with it not fear but a shivery excitement that heated her blood and quickened her heart.
“Next time, Green Eyes, don’t be so gullible.” The amusement in his voice rankled more than his words. So his distracting comment about the gun had been as much a bluff as her holding the gun on him in the first place, had it? She’d been a fool to look down. The knowledge that she’d actually had a loaded, working pistol in her hand and let him trick her out of using it lit her temper. Not that she would have actually shot him—at least, not on purpose. Although, had she the thing to do over again, the grinning creature might very well end up a headless corpse.…
She was at his mercy—again. At the realization she went cold all over. And then Anna realized that she held the key to her own salvation in her hand: the heavy silver candlestick that had stood on the table beside the display case. She had instinctively grasped it as she felt herself fall.
Her hands were hidden by the cloak. His hold on her was loose, his attention half distracted as he sought to wrench the cravat from around his neck. Anna clutched the candlestick, shut her eyes, and waited.
The game was not quite played out yet.
Then, when he had his cravat free and was lifting her to her feet, she struck. Her hand clutching the candlestick snaked from beneath the cloak with desperate speed. Arcing toward his head, the candlestick was a mere silver blur. His eyes barely registered surprise before weapon and temple connected with a sound that at any other time would have turned Anna’s stomach.
Chest heaving, eyes huge, Anna stared into the rogue’s widening eyes for a timeless instant as he continued to loom threateningly over her.
Then, with a little grunt, his eyes rolled back in his head and he crumpled soundlessly at her feet.
At last she managed a real, full-bodied scream. As she stared down at his motionless form, the hysteria she’d held at bay for weeks finally claimed her. Ear-splitting cries emerged from her mouth of their own volition. Had she wanted to, she could not have stopped.
V
“F
or the Lord’s sake, Miss Anna, what is it?”
“Miss Anna, Miss Anna, is you killed?”
Anna’s screams still echoed off the stone walls when Davis, the grizzled, portly butler who had been with the Traverne family since before Paul’s birth, burst into the front hall accompanied by Beedle, the first footman. Both men were less than fully dressed, with Davis’s shirt hanging out of his breeches and Beedle barefoot. They were armed, Beedle with an ancient axe that ordinarily hung above the entry to the kitchen (and that probably hadn’t been moved for a hundred years) and Davis with a poker. Panting, breathless, they charged through the door only to come to a sudden stop. Their eyes popped as they beheld Anna, both hands pressed to her mouth in an effort to stop the shattering cries that issued from it, her hair wildly disheveled and her night rail clearly visible beneath the too-large cloak that fell from her shoulders. She was leaning over the prostrate form of a very large, unknown man. The heavy silver candlestick that normally stood on the hall table lay on its side at Anna’s feet, and a pistol rested on the flagstones some little distance away. Smoke and the acrid scent of gunpowder filled the air.
“Miss Anna, what’s happened? Who is that?”
Davis had known her from childhood. With the privilege of an old family retainer he hurried across the floor to give her shoulder a good shake. “Miss Anna, hush that noise and tell us: are you hurt?”
The old butler’s obvious concern did more than the one-handed shake to silence Anna’s hysterical cries. She gulped once, twice, shuddered, and looked down at the man she had felled.
“Oh, Davis, have I killed him?” she asked faintly. The housebreaker lay inert on his back, his face as pale as hers felt. From where she stood, it was impossible to tell if he still breathed. Anna remembered the sound of the blow and felt sick. Abruptly she sank to her knees as her legs refused to support her any longer. Davis hovered over her while Beedle shifted from foot to foot, both men clearly at a loss.
“Miss Anna, did he harm you? Are you shot—or worse?” Davis’s voice was low and fierce.
Both servants’ eyes were fixed on her person, Anna looked down at where their eyes rested and felt herself blush. A too-thin shoulder and the upper slope of a creamy breast, exposed by the rip in her night rail, were clearly visible beneath the open cloak. Made clumsy by shock, her fingers fumbled to close the sides of the cloak and hold them together, thus restoring her modesty.
“No. No, he didn’t hurt me. And nobody was actually shot,” she said in a low voice, her eyes moving to the man who lay so frighteningly still less than a foot away. “There was a struggle and the gun went off, but it missed. Then I—hit him. With the candlestick.”
“Miss Anna, you never did!” Beedle’s voice was full of admiration. Davis shot him a silencing look and bent to rest a cautious hand on the housebreaker’s neck, his poker held at the ready.
“He’s not dead.”
At Davis’s pronouncement Anna felt a quiver of relief. He was a thief, and an impudent rogue, and undoubtedly a very bad man, but she wouldn’t want his blood on her hands. Not even when she remembered the heart-shaking power of his kiss—or the shocking way he had dared to touch her.
At the memory, her body went first hot, then cold. Her eyes moved warily to the unconscious man on the floor even as her hand lifted of its own volition to scrub across her mouth. She knew it had to be her imagination, but it seemed as if the taste of him lingered still.
“What’s ’appened? What’s ’appened?” Mrs. Mullins, the stout, white-haired housekeeper, came puffing up through the passage that led to the servants’ quarters, bearing a lighted taper that she carefully shielded from the draft. At any other time Anna would have smiled to see her in her night rail with her feet bare and her cap askew. But at the moment she was in no mood for smiling. Her stomach churned, and she felt curiously light-headed. The thought that popped into her mind, refusing to be banished, was, Dear Lord, what have I done?
If she had it to do over again, she would have choked on the end of his cloak before giving way to the screams that had brought the household down upon them—although of course the shot would have brought them running in any case. She could not have let him just carry her off; the idea was unthinkable. But now that he was captured, the housebreaker would likely be hanged. At the thought of that powerful body dangling at the end of a rope, Anna felt a sharp wave of nausea.