When the traffic began to clear as the phaeton turned north he urged the team into a trot. Emily supposed she might have jumped to the ground, then, but at that speed it would leave her scraped and bruised—which she wouldn’t mind, except for the fact that it would make her easier to recognize if he or any of Ebberling’s other dogs should come after her.
He’d clearly made the same determination, because now he didn’t even spare her a glance as they left Town for the meadows and scattered woods and farms beyond. Considering that she’d expected to be driven directly to Ebberling, she didn’t quite know what to make of this drive to the wilderness—unless the marquis was waiting for them out where there would be no witnesses at all. Another shudder ran through her. The moment they stopped, she would run. Plan or not, she likely wouldn’t get a second chance.
Finally they turned off the road along a narrow track that ran alongside a tree-lined stream. Emily kept herself as still as she could, attempting not to tense as the horses slowed once more to a walk. When a heron took flight from the streambed Westfall turned his head to look and she jumped to the ground.
Stumbling to her knees, Emily dug her hands into the dirt, righting herself again, and ran back the way they’d come. She didn’t care where she went, but this would slow Westfall down the most as he attempted to turn the phaeton on the narrow path.
Except that he wasn’t in the phaeton.
She risked a glance over her shoulder. The earl was on her heels, only a few yards behind her. With a squeak she altered her direction, veering across the stream and up into the woods on the far side. So much for either the button in his shoe or the horse treading on his foot—whichever it had been.
Nathaniel caught up to her amid the tangle of roots and rocks on the stream bank, but held back until Emily—Rachel—reached the meadow beyond. Then he lunged forward, grabbing her about the waist, and twisted so that she fell half on top of him. From the way she jabbed her elbow into his ribs she didn’t seem to appreciate his consideration, but that hardly surprised him.
“Stop it,” he grumbled, planting her face down amid the grass and flowers with his weight. He grabbed both her wrists and brought them around to the small of her back so he could hold them with one hand. “That was stupid.”
“I’m not attempting to impress you,” she snapped in between hard draws of breath. She managed a nice kick into his backside with her heels.
He wanted to meet whoever it was who’d identified him as a spy. Not many could, and he or she had not done either him or the woman beneath him a kindness. Subtlety, gaining her trust, or learning more about her before he acted had just been tossed out the window with the morning’s piss. And the button in his left boot felt like it had worked its way through half his foot, damn it.
Very well, he had his own suspicions about what had truly happened at Ebberling Manor. Now he could put them to the test. With his free hand he drew the knife from his boot and stabbed it into the earth a foot past her head, where she could see it. “I’m letting you go,” he murmured, leaning closer to her. “You can have the phaeton, if you can get past me.”
Before she could conjure whatever reply she thought might be appropriate to that, he pushed away from her, rolling to his feet.
Portsman scrambled around to face him, balanced on her haunches. “Why?” she asked, brushing chestnut hair from her face with one dirty hand.
“I’m being sporting.”
Keeping her sharp brown gaze squarely on him, she angled her chin toward the knife. “And after I run you mean to kill me? Fine. Give Ebberling a message for me, then.” Her voice shook, but her gaze never wavered. “You tell him that I wrote it down somewhere. Someone has it, and sooner or later he’ll pay for what he did. And that he’ll never know where or when. Then he’ll have as much peace as I ever did.”
“Y—”
She exploded into motion—not past him and not toward the knife, but north and west. Was she making for Hampstead Heath? It would provide her with a multitude of hiding places, if she could avoid the highwaymen and cutthroats who lurked in the vales and hollows.
Nate gave her a moment’s head start while he scooped up the knife and shoved it back into his boot. She hadn’t seen it as a weapon with which she could defend herself or remove him from the game. And she’d assumed that once Ebberling found her, he would have her killed before she could give out information that she claimed to have passed on in secret.
Just before she reached the edge of the trees he went after her again. If he’d had any doubts about her being a killer, she’d just satisfied them. Emily Portsman, Rachel Newbury—whatever she chose to call herself—hadn’t murdered anyone. And she’d also just told him who
had
killed Lady Ebberling.
Portsman, as he’d come to think of her, dodged behind a fallen tree and then down a hill into a brush-filled hollow. Even in a gown she moved fast, and she was thinking about evasion as much as she was about putting distance between them. “Ebberling killed his wife, didn’t he?” he asked to the woods in general, sidestepping a tangle of branches and moving to cut her off from the rise beyond. “And you saw it.”
Silence answered him. With a curse he realized she’d been waiting for him to make enough noise to drown her out, and then she’d stopped moving. Evidently she’d even stopped breathing and quite possibly she’d become invisible, because he couldn’t pick her green and yellow gown out from the green and brown sun-spotted wood.
He knew approximately where she had to be, and he cut back down the hillside toward the thicker growth below. “He did hire me to find you,” he continued, keeping himself and his gaze moving, looking for a flinch, an inch of cotton, a lock of chestnut hair. A whisper of sound made him adjust slightly to the east. “He said you stole a necklace and murdered the marchioness over it and then vanished without a trace.”
From the corner of his vision a sizable branch rushed at the side of his head. Nate sidestepped and straightened, letting the momentum of the blow carry her into his shoulder. With a twist he pulled the club from Portsman’s hands and shoved her into the trunk of a tree.
Still moving, he grabbed her right wrist and swept her arm over her head, using the tree to keep her pinned. She flailed at him with her free hand, and he trapped it, as well. “Stop struggling,” he muttered in her ear as he pressed up behind her. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“No? You just want to kill me, I suppose?” Her voice broke. “I knew it was stupid to leave the club with you. It went so nicely yesterday, and I thought…”
“You thought what?” he prompted, curious.
“I don’t know. I’m just tired. Tired of running, tired of hiding, tired of being afraid all the time.” A tear ran down one cheek. “Are you supposed to do it, or does he mean to murder me, himself?”
“He’s paying me something over ten thousand pounds to bring you to him alive. He implied that you wouldn’t be turned over to the authorities.”
She shoved backward, trying to set him off balance. But he’d been waiting for the move, and only tightened his grip.
“I’m not going to turn you over to him,” he continued, somewhat dismayed to realize that while he’d made that decision when she hadn’t tried for the knife, it was still a decision. Was his conscience, his sense of morality, so badly damaged that he’d at one point—at several points—actually been willing to turn this woman over to someone he knew meant to kill her? The amount of money offered had been the first thing to make him suspicious, after all.
It was more money than most people would see in a lifetime, and yet Ebberling hadn’t put out a public bounty. Instead the marquis had hired a man he’d known to be a spy, someone who didn’t talk about his clients or his work, someone willing to take a great deal of blunt to do a job and not ask too many questions about it. Nate scowled. He’d asked only for clues about where his quarry might be, and had completely ignored the larger question about whether this vanished chit had actually done what she’d been accused of. Worse than that, he hadn’t ignored the question as much as he hadn’t cared. He’d wanted to hunt, and the whys and wherefores hadn’t troubled him a whit.
“You expect me to believe that you hunted me down, took me out here to the middle of nowhere, and chased me through the forest, just to let me go?” she demanded, still wriggling to get free of his grip.
Nate mentally shook himself. “I’ve been chasing you through the forest because you keep running away,” he retorted. “Stop doing that, and we can chat about the rest of it. I have a picnic luncheon packed behind the seat of the phaeton.”
For a heartbeat or two she stopped fighting him. “Then you meant to feed me cucumber sandwiches and afterward decide whether to kill me or not? You’re an awful, despicable man.”
“And what did you intend, my dear? To announce that you know I’m a spy and then have more sex with me while attempting to wheedle out whether I was after you or some other poor chit?”
“You’re only annoyed because I thought of that tactic first. And if you did suspect me of killing someone, what the devil were you doing in my bed?”
The question annoyed him. “The first time I only thought you might perhaps know where I could find Rachel Newbury.”
“And the second time?”
“Because I enjoyed the first time.”
“Well, I only invited you upstairs because I thought you might be working for Ebberling and I wanted to know what you knew. So you’re much worse than I am.”
That, he was. “I’m letting you loose. Don’t run or I’ll chase you down again.”
He let her hands go and took two long steps backward before she could turn around and kick him in the balls or scratch his eyes out or whatever she might attempt next. The fact that he had no idea what she meant to attempt didn’t annoy him. It made him feel the opposite of annoyed. Something he didn’t quite have the words to describe, when he generally knew everything. A very precise, very ordered everything.
She turned around, facing him. First she rubbed at her wrists, then she wiped the wet from her cheeks, which had the effect of further dirtying her face. Third she brushed her dirty hands down the front of her dirty green and yellow gown. And the entire time her deep brown gaze held his. Every pretty, disheveled ounce of her radiated suspicion and distrust and fear and anger. He wondered what she saw when she looked back at him. His spectacles were somewhere between here and the phaeton, while his cane had never left the carriage at all. They were only the physical part of the disguise he’d been wearing for the past three years, but at the moment he felt distinctly unlike himself—whoever that was.
Finally she stuck out her right hand. “Rachel Newbury. And you are?”
The damned chit had balls, herself. He shook her hand. “Nate Stokes. But you’re still lying.”
Chapter Nine
When she jerked her hand away, he let her go. For a moment something profoundly sad and lonely crossed her features, but it was gone just as swiftly. “I don’t trust you enough or know you well enough to give you the truth,” she said aloud, walking past him in the approximate direction of the phaeton. “But for the purposes of this conversation I’m admitting to being Rachel Newbury. That will have to suffice.”
It didn’t suffice for someone who loved puzzles as much as he did, but for the moment he would accept it. “Very well.”
“Do you keep solemn oaths that you swear?” she continued, glancing over her shoulder at him as he fell in behind her. “Or is it merely lip service that enables you to accomplish whatever task you’re about?”
“You cut more deeply than a knife, my dear,” he said mildly, to cover the fact that what she’d just said had truly hurt. He had sworn oaths in the past, in front of or to people he’d been ordered to stop or to kill, and he hadn’t even blinked. “When I was employed by England, I swore an oath to protect her. I never broke that vow. Is that what you mean?”
“I intended to ask you to swear that you would keep your word when you said you wouldn’t hand me over to Ebberling, but I realized I have no idea if your promises mean anything at all.”
If she continued to rip away at him like that with mere words, he would be asking her to simply take the knife and finish him off in a matter of minutes. “Look at me,” he snapped.
She must have understood the iron beneath his tone, because she stopped walking and turned around to face him. “What?”
“I swear that if you are indeed innocent of killing Lady Ebberling, I will not hand you over to Lord Ebberling. I swear on my life and what remains of my honor.”
For a long moment she searched his gaze. Finally she nodded. “I will accept that.”
“Then tell me what happened.”
“I will tell you over luncheon, Nate Stokes.”
They found the phaeton with the left front wheel jammed against a boulder some thirty feet from where he’d jumped off it. The pair of grays looked none too happy to have been left standing there in such an embarassing situation as running off the road, but he’d had little choice and fewer places to aim the team where he could be sure the carriage would be forced to stop.
“My apologies, lads,” he said, taking them by their heads to guide them backward until the vehicle was clear of the boulder, and then tying them off to a tree.
“You’re not going to blame it on me?” the chit asked, climbing atop the boulder to look down at the proceedings.
He shrugged. “I would have run, too. But I would have grabbed for the knife, so you’re a better person than I am.” The picnic basket had survived the crash, and he carried it over into the shade beside the stream and set it down.
“Would you have stabbed me to escape?”
No.
“I suppose that would depend on whether I’d killed Lady Ebberling or not.”
“So that was a test of my innocence? I thought you were threatening me.” She hopped down from the boulder and untied the ribbon at the high waist of her gown.
“Also a test of sorts. You didn’t take the knife, which meant you weren’t a killer.”
She pulled the gown over her head and stepped out of her shoes before she walked over naked to dunk the dress in the stream. As she washed it, along with her hands and scraped knees and face, she looked over her shoulder at him. “But you said you would have taken the knife.”