The Secrets of a Scoundrel (4 page)

“This goes with it.” She handed him a light, fluffy dinner roll. He took it reverently; she watched, bemused, as he lifted it to his nose and inhaled the buttery smell of it as though it were some rare perfume.

He squeezed it between his fingers gently, savoring the texture.

Gin smiled and wished she had bought more.
Poor man.
Slowly, he looked over at her, wordless thanks in his dark, soulful eyes. She held his gaze; he didn’t need to say it aloud. Then she looked away to let the starved lone wolf eat in peace.

Unfortunately, it soon became clear that it was difficult for him attempting to eat soup in a moving carriage while wearing heavy iron manacles.

Gin did not dare offend his pride by offering to help him, but when calamity struck and a particularly large pothole sent the dinner roll flying out of his hand, he let out a vile curse.

She raised a brow.

He mumbled, “Sorry.”

She brought up her hand and showed him that she had caught the dinner roll in her hand before it fell. She gave it back to him, then decided to move closer, crossing the carriage to sit beside instead of across from him. “Why don’t you let me . . .”

He watched her every move as she took the bowl of stew from him, along with the spoon.

“You could unchain me,” he pointed out in a low tone.

She just looked at him. Then she filled up the spoon and fed him a mouthful of the stew. He accepted it, staring into her eyes all the while. She proceeded to feed him.

But the intimacy of this act soon had her squirming and casting about for some way to dispel the climbing tension between them.

“So,” she started in an idle tone, “what about this bullet you took for the Regent?”

He snorted. “Oh, yes. I am one heroic son of a bitch.”

She looked at him in surprise. “Such language in front of lady.”

“Is that what you are?” he challenged her with a taunting gleam in his eyes. “Traipsing into a dungeon to buy a traitor’s freedom isn’t exactly delicate behavior.”

“You’re not a traitor.”

“Well, they didn’t put me in that cell for being a saint, love. And you weren’t even chaperoned.”

“Unless we count this.” She lifted the hem of her gown just high enough to pull her pistol out of its garter holster. She gave the black barrel of it a kiss.

Nick grinned. “I think I’m in love.”

She flicked a playful scowl at him, her lashes bristling. “Don’t annoy me, or I can always find another cell to put you in.” He gawked at her stockinged leg as she put her gun back away. “There’s always room in the kennel where I keep my hounds, and if they won’t share, I’m sure I find an extra chicken crate.”

“Lady, I have been called many things, but never chicken.”

“Obviously not. You slapped the entire Order across the face, then stepped in front of a bullet to save the life of a man I wager you don’t even respect. Why?” she prompted in a confidential tone, glancing into his eyes. “Why did you take that bullet for the Regent?”

“What makes you think I did it for him? I’m a selfish bastard. Didn’t you read that in my file? I did it to save my own neck, of course. Put me back in the Order’s good graces.”

She considered his answer for a moment, then shook her head. “No. Here’s a better use for that mouth of yours than telling lies.” She fed him another mouthful of beef stew, leaning closer.

As she did so, she could feel his raging sensual interest—and her own response, the quickening in her blood.

He swallowed the mouthful of stew, then licked his lips. “Delicious,” he remarked with a stare that made her wonder if he was talking about the food. She looked away but could feel him studying her. “Your turn to answer a question for me, I think.”

“You’re in no position,” she chided, though she was intrigued by his interest in her.

“How did your husband die?” he asked bluntly, scrutinizing her as he waited for her response.

The question startled her. “In the war.”

“Combat?”

She shook her head. “Fever hit the camp.”

He must have noticed something darker in her demeanor than mere wifely grief. His fiery stare intensified.

“What is it?” he murmured.

Gin abruptly remembered that Order agents were trained to read people, and right now, he was reading her.

She didn’t like it.

Her father used to do that, search her out as if he wished to comprehend her every mood.

Difficult to hide anything from these men.

“Nothing.” She fed him another spoonful of food to silence his questions. It was not as if she could tell him that her husband’s death was her fault, indirectly. How could she ever tell anyone that she was responsible?

At least, she
felt
responsible.

But that was between herself, her dead husband, and their Maker. She’d have to answer for it someday, in the next world, if she ever saw Burke again.

Until then, she hid her guilt away.

Nick saw her refusal to talk about it and shrugged the question off. “As you wish.”

When he had finished the beef stew, she gave him the chicken pie. This was not quite as messy a dish; he could manage it on his own. So she returned to her own seat and leaned against the squabs, gazing out the window.

After another hour passed, she reached in boredom for her newspaper. “You were reading something in your cell. Would you like your book?”

He shrugged. “Why not.”

Because of his chains, she fetched it for him. The groom had stowed the box of Nick’s things in the compartment under the opposite seat. She lifted the lid, exposing the storage area. She immediately spotted the book he had been reading. It was right on top of the box.

She picked it up and read the cover.
A Journal of the Voyages and Travels of a Corps of Discovery, by Sergeant Patrick Gass, 1807.
When she saw what it was, she handed it to him with a rueful half smile. The caged warrior had obviously spent those months locked up in his cell dreaming of the ultimate in liberty.

“You find my choice of reading material amusing, Lady Burke?”

“Not at all. I just don’t know where President Jefferson found men mad enough to want to go out into that wilderness.”

“I’d go,” he said.

She laughed. “Of course you would. Not I, thank you very much.”

“Ah, come. Does it not intrigue you just a little? Wondering what might be out there . . . ?”

“Not in the least,” she assured him with an arch smile. “I am a creature of civilization. The Americans are welcome to their wilderness. I am looking forward to Paris, actually, once we get our game piece.”

He snorted. “Philistine,” he teased.

She smiled back at him. “Barbarian,” she answered.

Then they both settled into their seats side by side and read together in relative contentment.

E
very now and then, Nick sneaked a glance at her from over the edge of his Lewis and Clark book. “So, um, where are we going?” he asked hastily when she caught him gazing at her once again.

“To Deepwell, my estate in the North Riding. Won’t be long now.”

“Ah, Yorkshire. I have always appreciated the North,” he remarked. “Good people. Who mind their own affairs.”

“And where are you from?” she asked, turning to him.

“But my lady, surely you already know. You seem to know everything about me.” He arched a brow, waiting for her to tell him how she knew so many details.

Surely, Virgil had not told her all their life stories over tea.

But the baroness just looked at him, unwilling to share her sources. Then she lifted her newspaper again and turned the page.

Nick snorted under his breath and turned to stare out the window at the landscape again. He soon became absorbed in it, his very soul starved for the autumn beauty that unfurled before him.

Sun rays angled through a moody sky and lit up the sweeping green valley below, dotted with woolly white sheep.

The woods around the edges of the valley were clad in all the colors of autumn: the ash trees golden, the oaks maroon, chestnut trees a glorious orange; and on the distant brow of the next emerald hill, the sad medieval ruins of an abbey with its scattering of ancient gravestones lying all around like broken teeth.

The carriage rumbled on, winding through a quaint stone hamlet. They passed through the angled shadow of a weathered stone marker at the cross, then out the other end of the little village, taking a country road.

It followed the ridge he had seen from the last highway, out into the countryside. From there, they climbed a hill. The tired horses slowed a bit.

“Here we are,” Lady Burke murmured when, at last, the carriage turned in through a pair of towering wrought-iron gates and proceeded up the wooded drive to the stately manor house ahead.

The grounds of her estate struck him as especially beautiful.

Everywhere he turned his gaze, the landscape seemed carefully orchestrated to delight the eye and inspire the soul. Either Capability Brown had created a masterpiece here, or Nick had merely been imprisoned too long.

Then he frowned, wrinkling his nose. “Bloody hell, that smells worse than I do. I think you’ve got a dead deer out there somewhere in the park.”

“No, that’s the odor from the hot springs on the property. It’s in a limestone cave, over there.” She quickly pointed out the mossy and mysterious opening of a cave in the wooded hillside as they drove past. “I’m told the water contains sulfur, iron, magnesium. Bathing in it has been known to cure all sorts of ills. Everything from gout to infertility.”

“Really?” he murmured in surprise as the cave mouth disappeared behind the trees. “Rather like the waters at Bath, then?”

She nodded. “There are several such springs throughout the area. I’m just lucky enough to have one on my property.”

“Except for the smell.”

“You get used to it. Smells like home to me.” She chuckled at his skeptical glance. “My husband’s ancestors discovered it in the late 1500s. You are welcome to take the waters if you like, before we set out on our mission.”

“Not if I come out smelling like that.”

“I daresay it would be an improvement to how you smell right now, my lord,” she said dryly.

He scowled at her.

She laughed. “You should try it. It’s good for you! Besides, it feels wonderful.”

“I see.” He eyed her in guarded amusement. “So you got me out of the dungeon to bring me to a health spa. Not bad. Not bad a’tall.”

They drove on toward the house.

Nick was glad to note that, thankfully, her husband’s ancestors had had the good sense to set the mansion far enough away from the “healthful” odors of the sulfur spring.

When the coachman brought the weary horses to a halt in front of the house, Lady Burke turned to Nick with an earnest, searching gaze.

“I’d like to take the shackles off you if you give me your word that you won’t run.” Her neatly manicured fingertip came down to rest on the chain between his wrists. “I know it hurts your pride, and I have no desire to subject you to anything worse than you’ve already been through. So can I count on you to honor our agreement and not try to escape?”

He looked into her eyes. It had been a long time since anyone had put any value in his word of honor. “Of course,” he mumbled. “You have my word, of course, my lady.”

Where else would I go?

He had no family, other than a mother who had always had better things to do them worry about him.

He still had the loyalty of his friends, his former teammates, but he did not want them to see him in this condition. “I’m not going anywhere,” he assured her in a low tone, holding her stare. “You helped me; I help you.”

The softening around her tender lips did strange things to his insides. She slipped the key to his chains out of her décolleté where she had hidden it close to her heart. She held his gaze and thrust it into the hole. Nick swallowed hard, wanting her to the point of pain as she turned the key and made the iron lock pop.

As the manacles released, he nearly groaned.

She removed the little key from the manacles and handed it to him. He leaned down and unlocked the cuffs around his ankles.

The iron shackles dropped to the carriage floor, an unutterable weight taken from him, like a very anchor that had been holding him underwater, placed there by all those who were just waiting for him to drown. Straightening up, he gave her back the key. “Thank you,” he said in a low, earnest tone.

Again the hint of a silken smile tugged at her lips. “After all you’ve done, you deserve better than to have my staff see you in chains.”

Nick searched her face for any sign of irony. He found none. Yet for his part, he barely knew what she was talking about—“everything he had done.”

All he could remember these days was the bad imputed to his account. The guilt. The disappointment he was to those who had invested so much in him. Prison had a way of making a man forget the good about himself if he had ever really known it in the first place.

Then the carriage door opened.

Lady Burke alighted, her hand resting on that of her groom. Nick rubbed his chafed wrists as he stepped down after her, leaving his shackles behind as he stepped out into the sunlight.

“This way.” The baroness turned to him with a steadying gaze, as if she knew how disoriented he felt as he stood there in the drive, a free man, more or less, for the first time in months.

Damn.
It was so moving to taste freedom again that he, Nick Forrester, trained assassin, hardest of the hard, had a lump in his throat.

A sunbeam caressed his cheeks as he turned his face to the open sky above him.

“Come.” Lady Burke touched his elbow gently after a moment. “Welcome to Deepwood, my lord. If you’ll follow me?”

He opened his eyes and found her watching him. Her curious stare brought him back to earth, then he trailed after her as she went ahead of him into her grand, porticoed mansion.

Nick was almost beginning to feel like a real human being again as she introduced him to the butler, Mason; the housekeeper, Mrs. Hill; and the first footman, Edward, who would be looking after him.