Claimed by the Rogue (33 page)

Robert studied her with steely eyes. “Why the sudden desire to seek out my company? You didn’t seem much interested in speaking the other day.”

She set the glass down atop a three-footed table encrusted with gemstones. Really, who lived like this? “You were hardly fit and I was not… When I saw you with…her…on the bed, where you and I…I couldn’t begin to think beyond being so terribly hurt.”

He blew out a breath. “I was tricked into calling when the house was empty and once arrived was drugged. I don’t expect you’ll believe me, but ’tis true.”

“But I do believe you.”
 

He stood. “Brilliant, now that we’re sorted, I’ll have Caleb see you safely back to shore and to your carriage.”

He made as if to usher her out, only Phoebe was having none of it. They were not, in point, sorted. He needed to talk—and she needed to hear. “I’m not going anywhere and neither are you.” She shot to her feet. “This once at least, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”

Posing her a puzzled look, he asked, “Meaning?”

Her fisted hands found her hips. Hardly caring that the stance must bring to mind a fishwife, or better yet an oyster woman, she sallied forth. “It’s all well and good for you to materialize after six years—at my betrothal ball, no less—and to climb through my bedroom window like a house-breaker, but now that I’ve taken the reins and visited myself upon you, I am supposed to leave for home like the biddable girl you once meant to marry. Best you think again. I have come to you at great risk, both to my reputation and my person, and you should know that I have no intention of setting foot outside this cabin until we’ve come to terms.”

He had the audacity to look amused. “Terms?”

She shrugged. “An understanding, if you prefer.”

He spread his arms. “If this is some reprisal of your bloody rules—”

Her fingers unfurled, her arms falling to her sides. “It’s not.”

“Very well, let’s hear it. What do you want from me, Phoebe?” A weary-sounding sigh followed.

She hesitated, moistening her lips. The inside of her mouth felt as if sprinkled with sawdust. “Quite a lot, but I should like to start with your forgiveness.”

From his widening eyes, she gathered he hadn’t expected that. “If you’re seeking absolution, you’d do better to search out a priest than a pirate.”

She reached between them and dealt his chest a shove. “I’m trying to apologize, you ninny.”

His expression darkened. He let out a laugh, its sharpness slicing at Phoebe’s heart like a razor. “Can it be that Lady Phoebe, pillar of London society and paragon of all the virtues, is condescending to apologize to a low fellow like me? Surely my ears deceive me?”

Hurt though it did to hear, she supposed she deserved that. “I was a fool to take Betty’s word over yours, an even greater fool to judge you without a fair hearing. I should have known you’d been tricked, that never would you force yourself upon a woman no matter how provoked you might be.”
 

Thinking of the night he’d climbed through her bedroom window, of the dark sensuality he’d given her a glimpse into, she felt heat climbing her throat. Though he could have easily ravished her, he’d chosen to hold back and simply and generously give.
 

He leaned toward her, so close she could all but taste the anise and Madeira on his breath, a spicy, intoxicating combination. “Ah, yes, but then how can you be so certain? Mind you can’t possibly ever bring yourself to trust me.”

Determined not to allow herself to be drunk on him, not yet, she sipped her bottom lip and did her best to keep a clear head. “I do trust you. I didn’t before, but I do now—wholly.”
 

He pinned her with a skeptical stare.
 

“I trust you, Robert. I do. I wouldn’t have come here like this if I didn’t.” She hesitated and then reached for his hand, feeling as though she were laying hers in the lion’s paw. “Now it’s your turn to trust me—with the truth.”

Phoebe’s quicksilver gaze held his. “It’s time you told me exactly how you’ve spent these past six years,
why
you stayed away, and don’t attempt to fob me off with that rubbish about needing to make your fortune first. I may have accepted that feeble excuse as fact when you first returned, but I shan’t now.”

His chest tightened as though a vise cinched him. “It’s not a pretty tale.”

Her chin firmed. “I didn’t come here for a tale. I came for the truth.” Seeing her strip off her gloves, Robert surmised she was indeed settling in.

He braced himself with a deep breath. “I told you my ship was boarded by pirates.”

“Yes.”

He fell back into his chair. “Everything I said was true, but there are things I left out, things I’d hoped never to have to admit to you.”

She cast the gloves aside, closed the space separating them, and knelt at his feet. “Tell me,” she said, taking his cold hands between hers.

He hesitated. How did one confess the consummate cowardice? “I told you that once the pirates boarded us, I escaped and made my way to land, but that was a fiction, a lie. I did attempt it, but they caught me as I was trying to set out in one of the hatch boats and brought me back. Their captain was an Englishman by the name of Arthur Trent. Even for a bandit, he was the very worst of sadists. It wasn’t enough for him to kill. He took his greatest pleasure from inciting his crew to torture. As one of the few survivors who was neither a young boy nor an old man, the price I’d fetch in the slave markets made me too valuable for killing, but that didn’t mean…” His voice broke off.
 

Pained eyes lifted to his. “But you must have gotten free eventually.”

“I resolved to make my escape, but not in the way you’re thinking. Once they…broke me, I made up my mind to take my own life.” He hesitated and then held out his left hand, the wrist bare of its concealing bracelet. Done with subterfuge, he’d taken the thing off and tossed it into the water upon boarding.

Phoebe’s soft hand banded his wrist. She turned it over to the scar inside. “They didn’t do this, did they? You did.”

Throat knotting, Robert didn’t deny it. The angry wound had been made by him, the scar that was supposed to have brought release, only it hadn’t, not because he hadn’t cut clean and sure but because the Powers That Be had once again intervened.

Her stark gaze lifted to his. “Why?”

“I was sick in body and soul. I loathed my captor, but that was nothing compared to the contempt I felt for myself. I spent every free moment working out a plan in my head. There was a rusted bit of shaving razor that had been tossed aside and every day I’d take it up and work on the rope at my wrist. The moment my hands were free, I’d slash the main artery and there’d be nothing he or anyone else could do to bring me back.”

He’d steeled himself for recrimination, but instead she bowed her head and pressed her sweet, healing lips to the scar. Robert’s heart turned over. Though he’d loved her for more than six years, he’d never fully owned her worth until this moment.
 

She turned her face up to his once more, and the love shining from her quicksilver eyes humbled and heartened him, lending him the courage to continue. “Only I couldn’t manage to get suicide right either. The blade was dulled and just as I’d steeled myself to have at it in earnest, he walked in and stopped me. The ship’s surgeon was called in to suture and bandage the wound, and they forced something bitter down my throat that made me sleep.” He felt wetness on his cheeks and realized he must be weeping. “When I awoke, two days had passed, and we were putting into port at Madagascar. I was taken ashore and kept overnight in a filthy hole somewhere between an oubliette and a storage cellar. The next day they dragged me through the streets to the market square and sold me to a quarry owner for what I later learned was a paltry sum. It seemed they’d pegged me for a dead man. But I didn’t die. I lived to slave in that bloody pit for two full years.”

She lifted her hands to cover her mouth. “Oh, Robert!”

He forced a shrug. “It wasn’t all bad. It was there I met Caleb.”

She lowered her hands and laid one along his thigh. Though she couldn’t know it, she touched the very spot the brand had scored. “Was he…mute when you met?”

“He was. Apparently one does not require a tongue to pull a cart.”

“You said before you saved his life?”

He nodded. “I’ve always been quick upon my feet. I shoved him clear from being crushed by a falling boulder, and we’ve been together ever since. When I was sold again, this time to a silk merchant who wished for a tutor to teach him English, I persuaded him to take Caleb as well.” He paused, sucking down a shaky breath.
 

Phoebe squeezed his hand. “Go on, I’m listening.”

“My new master was a man of considerable means, learned and not unkind. Fortunately for me, he also had enemies.”

“Did one of them aid you in escaping?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I never escaped, though I grant you mine would be a worthier tale if I had. Quite the contrary, I saved my master from an assassin’s dagger and in return he granted me my liberty. I took it, the purse of gold he’d pressed upon me and Caleb and together we made our way to India.”

She hesitated. “And so Robert Lazarus was born?”

He nodded. “Once I arrived at Fort William, I came to understand I’d been written off as dead for nearly three years. My attempts to persuade the powers that be that I was who I said only made me out to be a charlatan or a madman. After a few days, I gave up, went elsewhere and enlisted at another Company outpost for maritime training as Robert Lazarus.”

Phoebe let out a long breath. “And the pirate captain, whatever became of him? Has he been brought to justice?”

Blowing out a breath, he admitted, “So far as I know, he remains at large though should we cross paths again, not even the love I bear you would stay me from slaying him.”

Her eyes widened. She grabbed for his hand and pressed a fervent kiss into the callused palm. “Then let us both pray you never do.” Drawing back, she asked, “What happened to you…is that why you can scarcely stand to be touched? Why you prefer pinioning me to leaving me at liberty to lay hands upon you?”

“I’d hoped to keep hidden that much from you, but yes.” He scraped a hand through his hair, the fingers trembling against his scalp. “So there, you have it, all my dark, shameful secrets spread out before you, a grim little picnic of the grotesque.”

“I’m glad you told me.”

He laid a hand upon her elbow and stood, bringing her with him. “So am I. I’m only sorry it’s taken me this long.” Confession might be good for the soul, but that didn’t mean it was pleasant for the hearer. He’d asked so much of her already that inflicting himself any further struck him as the quintessence of selfishness. Before he utterly fell apart, he’d do well to see her out. “I’ve kept my promise. Now it’s time for you to go back before you’re discovered gone. I’ve entrusted my life to Caleb on more than one occasion. You’ll be in safe hands.”

Phoebe lifted her chin, meeting his gaze with her steely one. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here with you.”

“You don’t know what you’d be committing to, what it means.”
 

She cut him off with a look at once determined and wise. “I know full well what it means.”

Only she didn’t. He’d bared his soul but he’d yet to bear his body. Hearing he’d been tortured had to have been hard, but witnessing the result would test in her ways for which she might not yet be ready. Her pity was not something he was prepared to face.

Only it wasn’t sympathy he saw on her face now but a scowl to rival her mother’s. “Ever since you returned, you’ve done all that you possibly could to claim me, making a bloody nuisance of yourself and nearly getting yourself murdered in the bargain. And now that you’ve won your way, now that you’ve won
me
, you’re hell bent on sending me away. It makes no sense and even if it did, this isn’t six years ago. I shan’t stand for it.”

She was offering herself to him. It was what he’d wanted all along, wasn’t it?

A better man would persist, but Robert had never been that, not where Phoebe was concerned. “If you stay with me, know that taking you to my bed shall mean as much as vows said in a church. Once we’ve lain together, once you’ve let me inside you, I won’t step aside, not for Bouchart, not for any man.”

“Dear fool,” she said, shaking her head and laying a gentle hand upon his jaw. “I wrote to Aristide earlier, ending our engagement.”

Half afraid to believe, he covered her hand with his. “Can it be true?”

A smile trembled across her lips. Slipping her other hand into his, she nodded. “I would not have come to you otherwise.”

“There will be talk, you know—scandal.”

“All that matters is that I’m free—free of Aristide, free of the past, free to be with you.” Pinning him with tearing eyes, she smiled again. “Now take me to bed, you foolish man, and claim me as yours in every way.”

Phoebe wrapped her arms about Robert’s neck and pulled his face down to hers. Standing on tiptoe, she matched her lips to his, her body to his, her
passion
to his, until it was no longer possible to tell where he ended and she began.