Claimed by the Rogue (7 page)

Fearing she might faint again, he laid a guiding hand on her arm, thinking to steer her back to the sofa, but she shook him off. “Don’t dare to ever lay hands on me again.”
 

Taking in the tangled hair tumbling about her shoulders, the darkened eyes and kiss-swollen lips, he allowed he’d never seen her lovelier—or so angry. “Spare me your hypocrisy. You wanted this every whit as much as I. You still want it. You still want
me
. No, want is too paltry a word. You
crave
me.”

He barely saw the blow coming. Phoebe hauled back and struck him—hard. Her hand sang across his cheek. Her fingernails, though no longer bitten to the quick, were at least trimmed short. Focusing his watering eyes upon her, he spied the tears spangling her lower lashes. She was near to breaking though not in any way he might want.

“I wish you’d never returned,” she said with feeling, backing away as though she expected him to return the blow.

The paltry violence brought the benefit of clearing his head. “Have a care what you wish for, milady. You may come to rue the day your wish is granted—as I have.”

Chapter Three

Robert’s lips, the same lips that had plundered Phoebe’s mere moments ago, curved into an infuriatingly smug smile. “For now, I bid you goodnight, milady.” Stepping back, he offered her a brief bow, the gleam in his gaze making a mock of the mannered civility.

Even now, after all the years and all the hurt that lay between them, she couldn’t look at him without remembering how good it once had been to hold and be held by him, how perfectly her head had settled against his chest, almost as if they were twin halves of a Chinese puzzle box that only when fitted together formed a whole.

He turned on his heel to go, the motion sharp, crisply efficient, almost military. Phoebe watched his departure in mute fury. Swaggering steps carried him to the study door. He opened it and stepped out. She quickly turned away lest Aristide or her mother glimpse her as she could only imagine she must look—flush-faced and trembling, her cheek bearing the brand of Robert’s day-old beard.
 

From the corridor, Aristide’s raised voice reached her. “You have made your goodbyes and now you have no reason to return. Do not come near my bride ever again.”
 

Phoebe curled her hands into fists, deliberately digging her nails into her palms, the petty violence the very least she deserved. While she’d comported herself no better than a common harlot, Aristide had stood guard as he’d sworn to do. The show of loyalty prompted a stab of guilt. Her betrothed might not be the most constant of lovers, but unlike her former feckless fiancé, at least he kept his promises.

Robert’s voice rose in response. “Until she’s your bride in truth, I shall see her as I please. Stay out of my path, Frenchman, or prepare to answer for the consequences.”

The implicit threat shot a shiver down Phoebe’s spine, for she now understood that the cutlass Robert carried was no more a costume contrivance than any other article on his person. Considering the roguish life he’d led, she suspected the blade was seasoned with the blood of more than one victim who’d crossed him. She must warn Aristide to have a care, she must…
 

The first thing she must do is steer herself back to the sofa—and sound sense. Self-control had been her watchword for the last six years. Observing it had served her well. No more clandestine meetings in the mazes of moonlit gardens, no more impetuous engagements made for love alone. She’d put away that part of herself as she had her bridal gown and wedding china, both wrapped in cotton wool and buried at the bottom of her marriage chest. Or so she’d supposed.
 

Running a finger along her tender lower lip, she sank onto the seat. Robert’s kiss, and her surrender, seemed to have fed him in some way, curbing his anger and fortifying his resolve. She instead felt hollowed out and drained, boneless as an eel and with scarcely more wit or will. Alas, his boast that she wanted—
craved
—him wasn’t baseless braggadocio. It was the shameful truth. The kiss he’d stolen hadn’t been stolen at all.
 

Lowering her hand, she took note of the faint bruise blooming on her right wrist bone and sought a steadying breath. Though she’d sooner devour dirt than admit it, having him bind her had appealed to a primitive part of her. Being forced to bend not only to his body but also to his will had made her throb with longing.
 

But even as Robert’s breath-stealing kisses and mastering touch had stoked her banked desires to flaming life, she’d felt empty and unanchored. Emptier even than she had on the day she’d received word that The Phoenix, and Robert, were lost. For six years, her grief had grounded her—that and the assurance that once she’d known a pure and perfect love. Now she saw that all had been a lie.

The man whose memory she’d cherished and kept alive in her heart all these years didn’t exist. The pirate who’d returned in his stead might not be a specter, but he was most certainly a stranger.
 

A dangerous stranger she’d do well to avoid.

Oh, she knew his amber eyes darkened to burnished brown whenever his temper or his passions became aroused. That his hair grew out from his temples in soft ripples. That when pondering a puzzle he was prone to jiggle his knee and toy with his timepiece. But beyond those small and rather inconsequential details, she didn’t know
him,
not really, not in any way that mattered. The sun-bronzed adventurer who’d swaggered into her life might have the look, manner and even scent of Robert, but in every way that most mattered, he was a stranger.

Like a splinter left to fester, anger worked its way to the surface and with it a wrenching sense of betrayal. How callused he must be to have pursued his seafaring life for six years whilst back in England all who loved him believed him dead.

She picked up her all-but-forgotten glass and gulped the remainder of the brandy as though it were water. Throat on fire and lips stinging, she choked down a cough, feeling as though she’d just cauterized a wound. In a way, she had.

Robert Bellamy had stolen six years of her life. Six
years
! And not any six years, but those commonly accounted to be a woman’s prime. In society’s eyes, a woman was valued on par with a loaf of bread or a pitcher of cream, a perishable commodity that must grow moldy or sour with time whilst a man was considered to age in the manner of a fine wine. Before Aristide had come along, she’d been considered to be on the shelf, almost a spinster.

Phoebe reached up and tore the locket from her throat. Her hand fisted about it, her arm shaking with the force of her fury. As of now, this very moment, she was done with crying, done with mourning what might have been, done with waiting to live her life because the present couldn’t possibly live up to the past’s rose-colored perfection. To prove it, she hauled back and cast her former treasure faraway across the room.

Because of Robert Bellamy, she’d wasted six years. She’d be damned if she’d give the blackguard one bloody day more.

In the course of the past six years, Robert had fantasized about his and Phoebe’s reunion many times, so often that he sometimes felt as though he’d lived it. A modern-day Odysseus, he would return to England young yet wise, seasoned yet whole. Like that mythical Greek warrior’s devoted wife Penelope, Phoebe would have held all her would-be suitors at bay. Waiting, she would wear one of her simple pale gowns, her shorn golden locks stirred by the slightest springtime breeze. A mellow English sun would beam benignly down upon them, a swathe of manicured lawn their sole separation. Feeling his gaze upon her, she would look up at the very moment he stepped out from behind a stand of trees, a hedgerow or some such conveniently concealing foliage. Their gazes would connect, collide. Seconds later, she’d pick up her skirts and fly toward him. They’d meet in the midst of all that cool, lush countryside, and she’d launch herself into his arms, already open to embrace her. They’d kiss, a kiss to end all kisses, and when they finally broke apart, laughing and breathless and giddy on gratitude, he’d lift her high against his chest and swing them both ’round and ’round until there was no telling where the earth stopped and the sky began.

How very far removed from fantasy the recent episode within had proven. And yet her response to his kiss lent him hope that she might be brought around. At the very least, his impromptu reappearance had forestalled any announcement of a marriage. He had no way of measuring how much time tonight had bought him, but he meant to put every precious minute to its most potent use.

Stepping out from the Tremont townhouse, he marked that most of the guest carriages had not budged. Like crows picking over carrion, the ton would linger as long as possible, feeding on the succulent scandal of an unannounced betrothal. Robert had no stomach for it. Unhitching his horse from the post, he allowed that though he had succeeded in postponing Phoebe’s betrothal, he was as yet far from seeing it broken. But he could do no more tonight. Arguably he had done more than enough already. His rough handling had crossed a line, giving Phoebe further fodder for seeing him as a rogue and a bounder. In contrast, Bouchart had maintained the mien of a consummate gentleman, behaving impeccably throughout the interlude. In forcing himself on Phoebe, had he played into the Frenchman’s hands?

Furious with himself, he swung up into the saddle and headed for Berkley Square, anger making a blur of Mayfair’s tidy tree-lined streets, classically styled townhouses and elegant shops. The temptation to seek out a public house and get stinking drunk was enormous. Resisting it, he rode on. Before he did anything, including deciding whether the remedy for what ailed him was brandy or rum, there was one other to whom he needed to make his return known—his sister Chelsea.
 

Chelsea and her husband, Anthony Grenville, Viscount Montrose, bided at 12 Berkley Square, one of a terrace of fashionable Palladian-style townhouses faced in pink stucco and fenced in black ironwork. For the first time it occurred to him to wonder why he hadn’t seen them at the ball. Even masked, with her flamboyant flame-colored curls Chelsea would have been impossible to miss. Surely such high-ranking near-neighbors would have made it onto Lady Tremont’s guest list even if the viscountess bore the taint of having him as a brother. Then again, Anthony had once been affianced to Phoebe. Though ending their engagement had been a mutual choice, in Lady Tremont’s eyes her daughter had been as good as deserted at the altar.

Light shone from a second-story window; otherwise the house was dark. Grateful for the profusion of street lamps—not the case in lesser areas of town—Robert dismounted, tethered his horse to the post and crossed to the gated residence. He let himself in, the well-oiled hinges opening near soundlessly, and followed the stone path bisecting the patch of manicured grass known as “the area.” A slender set of marble steps led up to the fan-lit facade.
 

Starting up, second thoughts assailed him. Ought he to have curbed his eagerness and waited until morning? And yet were Chelsea to learn he was alive through a third party, he would never forgive himself. Nor, he felt certain, would she. Resolved, he reached for the brass knocker fashioned in the form of a pineapple, the international emblem of hospitality. Hoping he would find that most welcome sentiment within, he brought it down with a bang.

A salvo of solid strikes brought the door finally opening. A lanky manservant of late middling years appeared on the threshold dressed in a drooping nightcap, striped cotton robe and bearing the countenance of one rudely awakened. Holding a taper aloft, he peered at Robert over its fledgling flame.
 

Heartened to see a familiar face, Robert reached out and seized the butler’s bony shoulder. “Chambers, old sod, you’re a sight for sore eyes. You look splendid.” Indeed, the butler seemed to have shed a good decade.

Chambers dropped his gaze to the cutlass hanging from Robert’s side, and his bleary gaze bugged. “My father retired to Bath nigh on five years ago,” he said, a tremble to his tone.

Chambers…
Junior
? Robert withdrew his hand. Until now he’d supposed the man had observed him through the peephole, recognized him and only then opened the door. Seeing that was not so, he made a mental note to have a word with his brother-in-law about the lax state of his household’s security. Montrose might have chosen to play fast and loose with his life in his bachelor days, but now he had Chelsea and the twins to consider. For their sakes, if not his own, the viscount was duty-bound to do better.

“Pray convey my regards when you next visit. And see that in the future you make better use of that peephole,” he added, jerking his chin toward the small opening above the knocker. “For all you know I could be a cold-blooded killer out to murder you all in your beds,” he added deliberately, stroking the cutlass hilt.
 

The statement had the desired effect. The thin hand clutching the taper began to shiver like a ship with sails all in the wind, causing the candle to sway. “Lord and Lady Montrose are abed. If you’d care to, er…leave your card, I shall be happy to present it in the morning.”

“Leave my card, a pox on that!” The butler’s dropping jaw reminded Robert that his rough seaman’s bearing wouldn’t do for London. Modulating his manner, he added, “I assure you her ladyship will receive me despite the hour. I am her relation recently returned from…abroad.”
 

He stopped short of claiming kinship as a brother. The disastrous reunion with Phoebe had shaken his faith, making him cautious about presuming his return would be greeted as wholly happy news.