The Rogue (25 page)

She jerked back.

He sucked in an audible breath, and his hand scraped over his face then dropped to grip the edge of the seat.

“All right,” he said to the empty seat opposite. “Clearly not a good idea.”

She felt cold, sick.

It mustn't win.

Gulping in air, she reached for him, clasped his face between her hands, and took his mouth beneath hers.

This
—this was all she wanted—his lips parting, claiming hers instantly, the caress of his breath and his flavor of desire and heat. There was nothing like this, nothing like touching him. She kissed him, breathed him in, tasted him, and let him feed her. When his hands circled her waist she rose to him and wove her shaking fingers into his hair.

“I am sorry.” She kissed his jaw, wanting the scratch of his skin against her lips, then his mouth again, needing to feel all of him at once. “I am sorry.”

“Never apologize while you're kissing me.” There was husky pleasure in his voice. “Never apologize to me at all.” His hands were firm around her waist. He did not move to touch her elsewhere. It made her want to weep and kiss him until she forgot the world.

“Forgive me.”

“For throwing yourself at me? I will not.”

Laughter tumbled through her kisses. But she needed him to understand.

“Forgive me for hurting you then. Can you ever?”

“It is forgotten.”

“You make me want to forget,” she whispered.

“And you make me want to carry you off to that meadow you once spoke of to me, weave flowers through your hair, and watch you dance wearing the most immodest white dress you can find.”

“Yes. Tomorrow.”

She felt his smile against her lips.

“The moment the sun rises,” he said.

She clutched his shoulders and wanted his hands all over her. This need was honest and thrilling and good.

“Before the sun rises.” She laid her palms unsteadily against his chest. “Tonight. Now.”

He looked into her eyes. Then he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her, deeper, fusing their mouths
together, their tongues making love like she needed their bodies to. Stripped of secrets, she felt raw and naked and strong.

The carriage halted. She drew away from him. But he grasped her hand as he took a long breath. Then he lifted her fingers and he kissed her knuckles as though it were the lightest gallantry and not an arrow straight into her heart.

The coachman opened the door. Saint released her and climbed out. But he did not offer his hand to her. Men's voices sounded on the street, and the clop of shod hooves on cobbles.

“What is it?” she heard him say as she put her foot on the step. In the misty drizzle that lit the street with a confusion of amber and orange from torches, two men stood facing Saint, four more mounted. All of them wore the sober black coats of the Edinburgh police.

“Good evening, my lady,” the officer closest to Saint said.

“What is happening?” she said.

“Mr. Sterling, if you'll come peacefully with us, we won't need to use those.” He gestured toward the manacles in the hands of the officer beside him.

“For what are you arresting me?” he said as calmly as though he were accustomed to being met on a dark street by officers of the law.

“For the murder of Annie Favor of Duddingston.”

“No,” Constance said. “This is a mistake. He—”

Saint turned his face to her. In the eyes that moments earlier had looked into hers and made her want to fly, now there was nothing. No warmth. No laughter.

And no denial.

C
onstance dressed carefully in a gown of sober gray with black kid gloves and a black hat with a veil that covered her eyes. Taking up the basket of food her cook had prepared, she went to the carriage, upon which two footmen and a coachman perched in full livery, including wigs. She would arrive at the jail in ducal splendor, and damn them if they did not cower.

Of recent construction and magnificently austere on the exterior, Calton Jail was dark, forbidding, and wretchedly cold within. A guard admitted her and Eliza and walked them the length of several corridors that smelled of the worst of humanity. Behind doors fashioned of iron bars, in cells no more than a few feet wide, men wearing slatternly garments slept on straw pallets. From another cell with a small, closed peek window came a bestial wail.

“Good gracious!” Eliza cried, lifting a kerchief to cover her nose.

They passed several empty cells with barred doors, then the guard halted before the last in the row.

“He's here,” he said with a weary gesture.

Constance gave him the basket of food. “The tart and roast is for you and the other guards. The guinea under the roast is for you alone.”

“Obliged, my leddy.” He bobbed his head.

“If I promise not to approach the door, will you allow me to speak with my husband in private?”

“I dinna—”

“Do consider: if he is guilty of this crime, I haven't any wish to be within reach of him.”

“Aye. I dinna suppose ye would.” He retreated down the corridor with heavy steps. With a frown, Eliza followed.

Constance went to the barred door. The cell was empty of everything but a straw pallet and her husband. He stood facing her, morning light from a barred window painting him in shades of pearl and midnight.

“Good day, my lady wife,” he said. “How pretty you are in your funereal gray.”

“Don't.” She peeled back the little veil over her eyes. “This situation is not amusing.”

“I prefer comedy to tragedy.” He did not approach the door.

She moved to the bars and laid her hand upon the iron. “Miranda Hughes called on me an hour ago. She did not know about this, I think. But she is worried about you. She told me that Lorian played cards two nights ago with a deputy advocate to the Solicitor General as well as a City Council member, and that he seemed cheerful last night after the party, despite your bout.”

“Ah. Yes. Your noble pursuer.” He stared off to the side. “You would think I would learn.”

“Learn?”

“The last time I dared to dally with a lady of high estate I nearly met my end too.” His gaze returned to her. “How careless of me to have repeated the misstep.”

“He must have planned this before you beat him yesterday.”

“But, do you know,” he said as if she had not spoken, “I would do it again. Especially if I could be assured of that kiss in the carriage last night. And our enjoyable interlude at the Assembly Rooms. And in the stable at the castle—for all that I wasn't quite prepared for that one.”

The bars were frigid beneath her palms. “You jest so cavalierly.”

“I'm not jesting. In order to touch you, I believe I would risk any punishment anyone could invent.”

“You cannot be sincere.”

“Of course I'm sincere. Go take a long look in a mirror, Constance. It's about time you understood the truth of your allure. I am only a man.”

Her throat was nearly too tight to speak. “You once said that you wanted to be with me even if you could not see me.”

Finally he broke his immobility, but only to scrape his hand over the back of his neck. “You remember that, do you?”

She remembered everything from that fortnight at Fellsbourne, every word and glance and moment of stolen happiness.

“It is as if you are trying to turn me away from you,” she said.

Slowly, it seemed, he drew several long breaths. The evening finery he wore accented his male beauty. No sword hung from his hip now. He was unshaven, hair rumpled, without a neck cloth, his boots scuffed, and his eyes revealed what his speech did not—pleasure in her despite this horrible situation. He was perfect and she wanted to press herself against the cold iron bars, touch him, and speak the words that had nearly tumbled over her tongue in the carriage.

“I sent for my father. He will arrive tomorrow, no doubt, and arrange for your release. The police have no evidence to connect you to Miss Favor, of course.”

“They do.”

The floor seemed to shift beneath her shoes. “Oh?”

“Yes.”

“You were acquainted with her?”

“I was. In the interest of accuracy, I must add that it was a brief acquaintance.”

Releasing the bars, she stepped backward. “How brief?”

“In the public house in Duddingston. There were a number of witnesses to the moment I met her, including my cousin, though none of course to the time I spent with her alone.”

Her lungs would not seem to hold air. “Was it before our wedding? Or after?”

He walked to the bars and wrapped his hands around them. “Before I went to your father's castle. After Dylan and I arrived in Edinburgh he told me about your father's offer of a position. I was with her—once—for the first and last time—before he told me.”

“But you must have known she was the girl found near the duke's house that night.”

“Later, yes.”

“Yet you did not
tell
me?”

“I had no reason to. The events were unconnected.”

“Were your sword and dagger with you at the time you met her?”

“Always. Except now, of course.”

Her limbs felt peculiarly numb. “Have they told you the details?”

“The details?”

“Of Miss Favor's death.”

“They have told me nothing. Except for the guard that brought water and uttered no intelligible words, you are the first person I have spoken with since they locked me in here.”

“She was cut with a blade. The examiner said the wounds did not seem accidentally or hastily inflicted. Saint, where were you at the times of the winter solstice and the fall equinox last year?”

For an instant he seemed confused. Then the light disappeared from his eyes. His hands dropped to his sides.

“Constance, you cannot be asking me this.”

“And yet it seems that I am,” she said through her choked throat.

He stared at her with eyes she had never seen before—disbelieving, shocked. Devastated.

But he did not defend himself.

“You cannot lie, can you?” she said, a fragile hope inside her crumbling. “You are incapable of it.”

His chest rose and fell sharply with jerking breaths. For a minute that seemed an eternity he made no other movement.

“I want you to go.” His voice was hoarse. “Now. Please go.”

She approached the door but did not touch the bars that separated them.

“I will tell you a story now,” she said, every syllable hitting the same note, as though struck upon one key of a piano. “It is of that man I told you about. The man who hurt me.”

He said nothing.

“I pursued him,” she said. “We had been close acquaintances for years and I felt confident he needed only encouragement. You see, I was watching my dearest friends marry, and have children, and I was . . . alone.”

“You? Alone?”

“I cannot expect you to understand. You have seen so much of the world. But when I moved to London, I was frightened. I knew no one. I had lived so solitary, with my mother who could not keep company, and then with Eliza. In London when strangers sought my attention I did not know how I was supposed to be. Ben took me in. He taught me how to go along. I depended upon him, perhaps too greatly, and when my cousin Leam returned from abroad, him too. With everyone else I was the duke's daughter. But with them I was the girl who rode astride and hid in secret corridors.”

Her hands clenched, but he did not speak.

“Then Leam married and left London,” she said. “Last October, when Ben reunited with a woman he had known before, I knew so swiftly what would come of it. I saw in his eyes what I had once felt . . . years ago.”

Saint's throat constricted visibly.

“It began abruptly,” she said. “My acquaintance and I were both guests at a party in the countryside. At Fellsbourne.” Where the footbridge at which she had met Saint each morning was still twined with honeysuckle vines. Where Jack's gravestone still seemed freshly hewn. Where the memories were so powerful she could not escape them. “Nearly everybody there was married, except us. I agreed to be with him. I did not know what he intended, but he assured me that I would enjoy it. I imagined myself a woman of the world, but in fact I was naïve. You—you were the only man who had ever touched me. You had done so with such respect. Almost reverence. I remembered it so well. I didn't truly understand that it could be otherwise.”

“Constance—”

“No. Let me finish. I must.” She drew a breath to steady her words. “When he told me that a woman's body must be tamed for a man to enjoy it fully, I said that was foolishness. But I trusted him. I allowed him to bind me. At the time it seemed like a harmless game.” She stared at the cell bars. “It was not a game. I felt great pain and afterward I bled.” The words came swiftly now; she was desperate to expel them. “The next time we met, I told him I would not allow him to touch me again. It was then that he said he loved me and only wished to give me pleasure. He admitted that my beauty had inspired him to seek the greatest ecstasy the first time, and he assured me that pain could make the pleasure sweeter. But he promised to be more careful. He produced a—a tool, of sorts.”

Saint made a sound.

“He cut me,” she said before he could speak.

“
Constance
—”

“I didn't realize what was happening until it was already done. I had trusted him. He insisted that he cared about me. He said I was precious to him and that there was no other woman he wanted to be with, to touch. It was as though he knew exactly what to say to deceive me. I had always longed to be touched, after all. You must remember. Even those
women at Jack's party and the freedoms the men took with them had not repelled me. Instead, when I watched them I
envied
them.”

Finally she looked again into his eyes.

“I did not tell you the truth last night. When my mourning ended I would not see you because I
did
feel guilt. Overwhelming guilt. When Jack died, I thought it was my punishment for having wanted you. I had never wanted anything as much as—as much as I wanted you. But I made a mistake and people I loved suffered because of it, because of
me
. For nearly six years I denied myself every feeling of desire, every longing, in penance for betraying him. I tried to forget, and I tried to satisfy that longing with friendship. But it was never enough.”

“So you sought him.”

“It ended at a ball. He led me to a darkened chamber and forced himself upon me. I had already told him he could never touch me again, and I fought. It was so painful that—” Nausea rose through her like a wave. “
Terrifying
,” she heard herself whisper. “His strength—” She dragged herself from the memories. “I saw him only once after that, in a public place, and I finally learned the truth. He had used me intentionally, with guile, in order to injure my dearest friends whom he hated. But I could not allow him to win: I never told my friends how he hurt me. Only my maid knows of the wounds. Only you know, now, how I acquired them.”

She returned her gaze to him.

“So you see, I am entirely capable of blinding myself to a man's true nature, even to my own detriment.”

“Who is he?”

She shook her head. “Who is—?”

“Who is the man that did this to you?”

“Why do you wish to know?”

“Because I am going to find him and kill him. Tell me his name.”

His eyes were full of a violent fury she didn't recognize.
While she spoke she had watched horror grow upon his face, and disgust. She had anticipated that. But not this anger.

“I sent Fingal to the castle at first light,” she said, turning away. “My father will arrive soon to see to your release.”

“My release?”

“A gentleman needn't be incarcerated like this, not upon such slight evidence. Your arrest and imprisonment in the manner it happened only prove that a man of influence engineered it. My father will set it to rights. You see, there are some advantages to marriage to me, even if not those you expected. The judge will allow you liberty until the investigation is complete. You will not be condemned unjustly.”

He did not reply. Skin prickling with cold, she departed.

C
ONSTANCE DID NOT
shut her doors to callers. Lord Michaels would not come to the drawing room, and her visitors remarked on his absence. But if she had learned any lesson while ferreting out hidden information for her Falcon Club friends, it was that appearances meant everything. If she treated this as a minor mistake by the police, others would come to believe it.

Her father arrived after dinner. Only pausing to change clothes, he went straight to the home of the Lord Advocate. A school companion of his from years ago, her father said, he would certainly assist them.

Evening crept to midnight. Certain she would not sleep, Constance rested her head on the divan in the parlor and awoke to the sound of a carriage. Dashing the sleep from her eyes, she went to the window. Her father descended from the carriage to the street. And then Saint.

She met them in the foyer.

“Good morning, Constance,” her father said, drawing off his coat and giving it to the butler.

“Thank you for coming, Father.”

“This is a temporary measure, of course. But I suspect it will all be settled shortly. Good night, Sterling.” He nodded to Saint and went up the steps.