A Breath of Scandal: The Reckless Brides (14 page)

“Having a bit of trouble, are you, sir?”

A sailor, surely, who had instinctively recognized one of his own kind. But behind him, three other fellows scraped their chairs back and stood in opposition to
him.

Antigone wrapped her hand around her tankard, braced her feet solidly on the floor, and made herself as tight and compact and small as possible, ready to move. Because there was surely going to be one unholy hell of a fight.

“Good of you to ask.” Jellicoe seemed to feel none of the tension in the air, and smiled broadly as he greeted the sailor like a long-lost friend. He turned his back, ignoring the red-faced terrier, which completely stymied the man. Without his bone, the poor soldier had nothing to gnaw upon. He foundered, and it seemed as if the whole place, from the barman down to the travelers warming themselves at the hob, held its breath with Antigone, waiting for him to cry havoc and set mayhem loose upon the floor.

But it wasn’t the lieutenant who slipped the leash. One of the lieutenant’s comrades, another scarlet-coated belligerent, decided to involve himself in the fray. He shoved himself past her, on his way toward Jellicoe’s back. His passage knocked the table hard into her middle, knocking the air from her lungs, and most of her sense from her head.

“Teach you to respect your superiors,” the man was muttering in a beery way. He raised his arm up, with his fist seized around the barrel of his gun, ready to strike Jellicoe in the back of the head with the butt of his pistol, but Antigone was already instinctively acting.

She abandoned her safe perch—and the very last of her good sense—and launched herself at the redcoat’s back. She fell upon him like a fury. The force of her weight knocked him over and carried them both to the floor. He went down hard beneath her, but she made sure he stayed down by grabbing him up by the hair, and slamming his face down into the sticky floorboards for good measure.

Teach
him
to try and strike at a friend of hers from behind, like a bloody coward.

Although that was what she had just done herself, wasn’t it? But Antigone had no time to debate the finer points of tavern etiquette, because above her head, the fight was on.

Her unthinking action had let slip the dogs of destruction, and the place erupted into a heaving, seething mass of bodies flinging themselves, or being flung, at one another. Sound rose up around her—of invective, and grunts as fists met flesh, and crashes as furniture was overturned and glass was purposefully shattered. The bloodlust was up and there would be no relief, or cessation in the violence, until the combatants had wreaked their havoc and punched themselves into a stupor.

What little reason left in her brain fled for safer surroundings, and was replaced by something wholly feral and raw. A chair, or something similarly hard and wooden, crashed into her side, dislodging her from the red-coated cur’s back. A boot landed in her belly, and she rolled and retaliated with a vicious kick. She rolled back onto her knees, and rammed her head into a fellow’s gut, when a strong arm hauled her up, and she found herself pulled against the wide wall of Jellicoe’s torso. But only for a moment.

His left hand slapped down on the top of her head, and shoved her down in front of him, while his right exploded above her in a withering cross that laid out whoever had been about to come at her from behind.

“Fuck all,” he roared, as he hauled her back to her feet. “When I said there might be a fight, I didn’t bloody mean for you to bloody well start it.”

“I didn’t start it!” She yelled her indignance into the din. “He did.”

But there was no way to carry on a conversation in the midst of a brawl. Jellicoe stumbled into her from the force of something hitting him from behind, so he turned and laid into some fellow’s gut, and then heaved him away by the scruff of his collar, while she was left to fend off a scrappy young drover who thought to throw a tankard at her head.

She slapped the heavy crockery down as it sailed toward her, and swung at him with a cross from her left, but the drover—not so jolly at the moment—ducked out of range. She was advancing upon him, ready to try a go with the right, when Jellicoe stepped in front of her, planted his palm in the lad’s face, and shoved him dismissively into the melee of tangling bodies.

And then Jellicoe grabbed her by the hand, and was towing her at speed toward the kitchen door. He had to lay his shoulder into the wood, to forge his way through, as the barmaids had taken shelter behind the panel’s stout bulk, and were trying to barricade themselves in.

Without pausing on his passage through the kitchen, Jellicoe flipped a coin to the speechless barmaid. “For your trouble.”

And another to the red-faced, steaming inn wife who looked ready to let loose with a stream of invective. “For the damages,” he said as he tossed her a golden guinea.

And then they burst out into the blessedly cool night air, and she was laughing from the release of all that tension and fear and nervous excitement and pure, heady intoxicant of danger. “Oh Lord, I—”

“Don’t say a word, Preston,” he said as he shoved his arms back into the greatcoat he must have snatched up in their exit. “Not a word. Not if you value your hide.”

“No. I won’t,” she pledged. She couldn’t. She was breathless and laughing and sore, and frightened and elated, and there was nothing she could do but laugh.

“You’re impossible,” he said, but he was laughing, too, his smile so wide, his white, even teeth glinted in the torchlight.

And then, for no reason at all, he reached out and took her face between his strong hands, and kissed her.

And she stopped breathing. Because air was no longer a necessity.

Will Jellicoe was.

Chapter Nine

It was the laugh. They had just been involved in a brawl that might continue into the wee small hours, and she just laughed. Tipped her head back, and laughed to the dark gray heavens, and he knew at that very moment that he must kiss her. He couldn’t live another day without knowing the taste of that laugh upon her lips.

He swooped in to kiss her without warning, or preliminaries, but when he moved his lips against hers, pressing into her, she opened to him. And just that easily, he fell into a softness so profound and so sweet, he felt he could float away on it.

He deepened the kiss. His hands caressed the nape of her neck and cradled her cheekbones, his callused palms creating a light, stimulating rasp along her jawline that made her part her lips in astonishment and pleasure. Her gasp was a sound of wonder and delight. And encouragement.

Will drew her mouth up farther, holding her face, fanning his thumbs along her cheeks as he slowly slid into the soft, open warmth of her mouth. His tongue touched and caressed as his lips had, lulling her with gentleness, drugging her with sweet sensation, drawing her out to join him, until she began to make instinctive sounds of hunger and pleasure in the back of her throat.

Every fiber of his being was heated, rushing toward the intoxicating heat of her mouth. She tasted soft and fresh, like clean water, and under her jaw, her soft skin held the sweet lingering smell of yellow daisies in a June garden.

Will’s hands slid back, stroking and spearing into her hair as he kissed the side of her mouth, trailing kisses along the sensitive underside of her jaw as she made breathy sounds of pleasure. She raised her arms, and looped them around his neck, pulling herself closer, pressing herself against his chest and arms. She ran her fingers over his collar and up around the nape of his neck, caressing and exploring, driving his self-control to the brink.

Will brought his mouth back onto hers with a new urgency, with a more insistent pressure against her lips, until she was pressing back, greedily taking all he would give, unselfishly giving back all that she could. Their tongues tangled and tasted, and he let go of his self-restraint, and gave in to the sensuous need to touch and excite. She was incredibly responsive, giving herself up to their mutual pleasure easily and passionately.

Devil take him, he wanted her badly. His hands slid around to mold themselves against the contours of her arching back. A possessive sound, very much like a growl, rose from deep in his throat, and he pulled her tight against him, pressing her pliant frame closer until he could feel every swell and indentation of her long, lithe form. Her hands tightened in his hair, pulling his mouth closer so she could suck delicately on his tongue.

It lasted only moments in reality, the give-and-take, the sharing and wanting, but it felt like a lifetime stretching on and on, until Will somehow began to remember where he was. With a well-bred young woman of good family. In a public tavern yard. In the middle of the night. Outside a brawl.

“Damn my eyes.” But he wouldn’t apologize. He had never been less sorry for doing something in his entire life. “For all your reckless skill at brawling, I’d wager my last grout that you’ve never been kissed before.” He laughed, because the thought made him unaccountably happy. Happy to have shared her first taste of delight and desire. Happy that he had been the one to show her that delight.

She blushed and screwed up her face for a moment, but she didn’t deny it. And her eyes were as bright as if she kept the whole of the pale shining moon inside them.

“As sorry as I am to have to stop kissing you, Preston, this is neither the time, nor the place. We need to get our sorry, troublemaking arses out of here before the publican comes looking for the malefactor who started the whole noisy”—they both ducked at the sudden sound of shattering glass—“fight. To wit, you.”

“Me? I wasn’t the one about to clout you in the head with a gun butt.”

“Remind me to thank you later. But for right now, just go get the damned horse.”

This time he got himself into the saddle with a great deal more alacrity and anticipation than he had approached his first mounting. It was something more than a pleasure to moor himself up to Preston’s snug backside as they set off at a clattering canter on the remaining miles back to Northfield.

Once they were well out of shot of the tavern, Preston reined the mare down to a sedate walk, and as they carried along the dark country lane, swaying together to the rhythmic stride of the horse, he worked on that imaginary but highly specific mental image of what she might look like without all the intervening layers of shapeless clothing between them. Trim, lithe torso. Small, ripe, rounded breasts. Tapered waist. And then that well-muscled, delightfully rounded derrière that dissolved into a pair of lavishly long legs. The image brought an unexpected, though not unwelcome, rush of blood through his veins.

Her every move was an enticing, confident combination of animalistic strength and grace.

“The question comes up again, Preston—where
did
you learn to fight?”

Her shoulder blades rounded into a shrug. “I’ve seen prizefighters at the fair, and every once in a while some of the stable boys in Wealdgate will have a go. But mostly books.”

“Books?”

“Mr. Jack Broughton has published on the science, and Gentleman Jackson—or someone purporting to be him—has written at least one pamphlet that I know of.”

“Good God. You really must give me the name of your bookseller.”

He kept his hands around her waist, and held her tight against his chest, for the simple expediency of managing two persons’ weight upon one horse. And for the not so simple reason that she gave his interested body a small taste of ease. That, and despite the disreputable clothing, she also smelled divine.

Beneath the strong overlying aroma of wet wool and cold rain was the warm, lemony scent of citrus and something else familiar and sunny. “You smell like calendula flower.”

It sounded even to his deaf ears more like an accusation than he had intended. As if he were put out that she had purposely chosen the one scent so inexorably tied to his notions of comfort and home, just to tease him.

She stilled—at least as much as she could on a moving horse. “Calendula? That’s a yellow daisy. How do you know that? I didn’t think they had flowers in the navy.”

“Yes, I know. I have always had a vial of calendula oil in my sea chest. I’m sure it was originally put in for some arcane medicinal purpose, but it smelled nice all the same.”

“Oh. Then thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“We make the soap at home, with lemons from my father’s greenhouse and yellow daisies, among other things.” After a brief moment, in which she steered the mare around the dark shadow of an exceptionally large puddle of indeterminate depth, she returned her own cautious compliment. “You smell nice, too.”

“Thank you. I shall count your approval worth the sacrifice of not wearing my uniform then.”

She stilled again, perhaps as struck by the thought of him
not
wearing his uniform, as he had been by his mental images of her similarly disrobed. One could only hope.

Will let his right hand stray to the top of her lean thigh, whereupon he felt a remarkable and highly alarming bulge. How in all that was holy had he missed
that
? “Preston, just what the hell have you got inside your coat?”

“My gun.” She transferred the reins to her left hand, reached into her coat and pulled out a well-used, remarkably serviceable pistol.

“Well, damn my eyes.” Appalling, confident, troublemaking, delightfully well armed girl. Oh, God, how he
liked
her. “Do you know how to use it?”

“What do you think?” She halted the mare, brought the pistol up into an en garde position, cocked the hammer back with her thumb, and took steady aim upon the dark form of a linden tree across the road in one smooth series of motions. “Would you like me to demonstrate?”

And it was clearly loaded. “Hell, no. Save the charge by all means. It’s good to know I shan’t be ridden about the countryside unprotected.”

She let her hold of the weapon subside, and uncocked the hammer. “You’re an officer. Why don’t you carry a gun?”

“Bad sportsmanship for a professional to carry a gun. And laziness. I’d rather let you do all the hard work.” Not that he wasn’t hard in other ways, damn his hide.