Escape with A Rogue (19 page)

Before he could think of what to say—either to shock her out of despair or coddle her out of it—she gave him a dazzling grin. “But it’s all we have. In the middle of more rain.”

She was about to march off again, but he caught her with his arm around her waist. With his other hand, he tipped up her chin, and she snapped, “You didn’t want this, so don’t—” before he captured her mouth with his.

He cared about her. No matter what he’d said to her, or how he’d hurt her with his cold words in the hut, he damn well did. They should be running, but he had to do this first.

He slanted his mouth over hers.

At first, she kissed him back. Then she pushed him away. “Stop! You were right. We don’t belong together. I don’t
want
to kiss you anymore. It just hurts when I do and I’m tired of it.”

It was what he’d wanted to hear but her harsh words cut through his heart like a blade. He didn’t want her. Damn him for being a scoundrel, for being the kind of man who had to hurt her for her own good. “I’m sorry and I apologize for taking the liberty.” He clasped her hand, and urged her to run with him again.

A sharp crack echoed behind them, somewhere in the rain-darkened distance. Lady M. stopped. “It was a shot! They’ve followed us.”

Another sharp, high twang sounded to their right as another bullet hit another granite block.

“They’re damn fools, then,” he growled. “But at least some of them have bad aim.”

Lady M. wrenched free of his hand, trying to see their pursuers in the hazy, gray light that had dropped on the moor. Another roar came, closer this time, and he heard the whistle of a bullet and felt the breeze of it pass his face.

“Dear God, Jack. Which way? Which way do we go?” She clamped her hand on his forearm and tried to drag him. He resisted, listening, and she let go. “Tell me.”

He’d talked to Beau in the prison and knew a few hints to find the best way, the safest way, and he pointed. “We go this way, my—”

But she panicked. She tore off about in the direction he’d pointed, but a few yards too low of where he’d actually meant, where the ground looked soft.

“Stop, Madeline!”

* * *

She was ten yards away from Jack and her boots were disappearing into the muck. Soaked with rain, the peat bog was swallowing her, and as she struggled to pull out, she only went deeper, until the sucking ground had her clamped by her knees.

“Stop struggling, Lady M. You won’t break free.” Jack inched along the ground toward her. Then his foot plunged in.

“Don’t come further,” she cried. “You can’t. Not without sinking.” She couldn’t stay still—dear heaven, people were shooting at them. She tried to wrench her leg forward.

He grabbed a rock behind him and jerked his foot out of the mire. “Don’t move, Lady M. I’m going to get you out of there, but I need you to lie down.”

He ripped off his coat.

“Are you mad? I can’t lie down. I’ll sink over my head.” But she tried to do as he asked. Even that movement drove her feet deeper. She was up to her knees. Ponies could vanish in the bog, desperately struggling to escape until they were swallowed alive.

“There’s a good girl,” he coaxed. “Lie down and I’ll pull you out.”

She couldn’t—not without forcing her body further into the bottomless mire. Sheer panic clawed up her throat and she wanted to be sick. “You want to be rid of me,” she shouted. “Why else would you want me to lie in this?”

Jack braced his feet and leaned out to her, tossing his coat ahead of him. It fluttered toward her and she reached out to clasp it as he shouted, “Don’t try to catch it, let it just hit the ground, my lady.”

But her body’s weight was pitching forward and with her feet stuck tight, she could do nothing but fall. She clutched at air, her fingers clawing at nothing.

She fell forward into the soft bog, her arms splayed out, and her head flung back. Mud splattered everywhere as she landed, then she was able to lift her head. She blinked muck off her lashes, spat away chunks of the stuff from her lips.

She was going to die, out here, for nothing.

“That’s good,” Jack shouted.

She wished she could pull herself out—to go over and strangle him.

“Hold still and don’t panic.”

His coat was a foot away from her. Could she swim through the stuff? With her feet buried, she doubted it.

“I can’t reach you with the coat,” he said. “I’ve got to get closer to you. While I’m doing that, I want you to try to work your legs out.”

The ground sucked at her body. She whimpered. She’d disappear in no time this way.

She twisted to find Jack, barely able to see through the black muck that had flowed up like a wave when she’d fallen.

“Easy, my lady. I’m coming for you.”

Then she saw him. He was splayed out on top of the boggy ground, but where it was more stable, inching toward her.

“No, no!” she called out. “Don’t. You’ll sink too.”

“Trust me, Madeline, and neither of us will.”

His coat flew at her again. This time, she let it fall and the sleeve hit her right hand. She grasped it. She slapped her left hand over her right and drove her fingers into the fabric as hard as she could. Hot tears fell to her cheeks.

“Now, I’ll pull you out, lass. Don’t struggle. Just lie still and let me do the work.” Jack tugged at his coat, heaved and grunted, and shouted and cursed in frustration. The bog held her boots. The mire thought to claim her as its victim and wasn’t going to set her free.

“You’re a heavy thing when your boots are full of muck,” he muttered.

She ignored what he’d said before, and pulled along his coat, trying to crawl to him. Her boots were laced so tight, her feet would never come out.

“Lie still.”

“Not when I want to come over and brain you. Lie down, you say. Don’t struggle, you say. Just wait and sink instead. And I am not heavy.”

Face straining, he yanked hard on his coat, throwing his whole torso into the motion, and he dragged her body a foot through the mire. A whole precious foot. Anger. Of course, she should have guessed. He was a passionate, tempestuous man.

“What good is that?” she complained. “You’ve no idea what you’re doing, Jack.”

His eyes had narrowed to dark slits, and he hauled again. Two feet of the bog skimmed by her eyes and she fell heavily when he loosened the tension on the coat. Stretching out, she could touch coarse grass and solid ground.

He was happiest when angry with her. The time they had behaved as friends was in the past. And it was easiest for her now when she was angry with him. There was no turmoil of confusion to knot her stomach. “Come on,” she gasped. “The aging gardener at Eversleigh could have got me out faster.”

Jack didn’t bother with the coat. He wrapped his hands around her wrists and dragged her out of the sucking mud. He collapsed with her on top of him and embraced her.

Tears touched her upper lip and she swept them away with her tongue. “This means nothing, Jack. I’m too tired to stand, that’s all. Otherwise, I’d never think of touching you. Though thank you for saving my life.”

He laughed, his chest rumbling and rising. At once, his arms dropped away from her. “You’re right to mock me, but someone has to brush all the mud from your face.”

She was alive. That was all that should matter, but she put her hands to her face in horror. Thick mud stuck to her cheeks and her chin. Some had gone up her nose. She must look like—like some fool of a farmhand who’d fallen in the pigsty.

Jack laughed again, and she was about to smack him on the shoulder. He swept up his coat and shook the shoulders, sending clumps of peat-black muck flying around them. Then he draped it around her. “Listen,” he murmured. “What do you hear?”

Her heartbeat and her wild breathing, and . . . “No more shots. No shouting.”

“They must have abandoned us to our fate,” Jack said softly.

* * *

Despite being exhausted and wanting nothing more than to lie down and sleep, she found herself marching again. The half-moon was low in the sky and gleaming blue-white. Madeline’s teeth chattered.

Jack had smelled smoke. “There could be a farm nearby, Lady M. We should be close to the River Dart.” He’d offered to carry her, but she knew he must be as tired, so she’d refused.

Could shelter be close at hand? For her entire life, she had kept fear hidden under a collected, ladylike surface. Now tears of frustration had dried on her cheeks, on top of the ones of fear. All those years when her greatest fear had been that her father might reject her, or she might hurt her parents by accidentally revealing her secret? How trivial that worry seemed when a person was tired and starving and running for her life.

By a miracle, they had passed to the outskirts of the bog without falling in again. Well, Jack’s leg had plunged in a few times, but he’d been able to haul himself out.

Trees loomed over them, which meant firm ground. She let Jack grip her hand and he pulled her resolutely along, weaving through the trees.

They came out into a clearing. A squat stone cottage lay ahead and smoke curled from its chimney. To its side, a stone wall enclosed a patch of cleared land. She stopped, staring at the wisps of smoke. “There are people at home—there must be, if there’s a fire going. What if they object to handing over food and clothing?”

“Lady M., you could catch your death. You need to be dried off and warmed up. There’s no way in heaven you can keep running across the moor, soaked to the skin and covered with mud.”

Fear cascaded through her veins like ice water—like bog muck sucking her to the bottom. “I’ve got money. We’ll try to buy things from them.” But what if the people refused, guessing they must be running from the law? The penalty for helping a convict was death. Perhaps stealing would be the best way—the only way, for it would mean the farm inhabitants could claim they hadn’t willingly helped.

With a shudder, she remembered how he had efficiently, remorselessly broken a man’s neck. That man had been a true threat. Still, what would he do to an enraged farmer who took up a knife or rifle to protect what was his? “I won’t let anyone innocent be hurt, Jack. I couldn’t live with myself.”

If anything, her words made his lips harden into a tighter line, and his green eyes darkened. “You need to get dry and change your clothes. I won’t lose you over this, Lady Madeline.”

Her heart lurched at the ragged pain in his eyes. She was shaking with the chill, and she ached everywhere, and her heart—her foolish heart—sang over the fact he was worried about her life. But she would
not
allow him to injure innocent people to rescue her. He had that flat, cold look to his face again.

Then his lips kicked up in an attempt at a smile. “All right. First, we’ll try bribery.”

* * *

The farmhouse proved to be home to an elderly couple, shocked to find a mud-covered woman and a gaunt, rough-looking man at their front door. Madeline thought of the disguise she had planned for her and Jack in her Rundlestone cottage. These people were the living version of it.

The husband, as gnarled as the stunted trees on the moor, wanted to see them off. His wife—and Madeline’s hastily produced gold sovereigns—changed his mind.

“Who are ye to be out here, so far away from a town, and tramping through the bog?” the wife asked. She moved to open the lichen-covered door wider, but her husband’s firm hand gripped the edge of it.

“No,” he growled. “I can guess at once who they be. He’s like as not on the run from Dartmoor prison, and this foolish lass is ’elping him.”

“All the way up here? With money like that?”

“Some of those Frenchy officers ’ave got blunt. They the likes that shot our Tom—”

“I’m not French.” Jack took a step forward and put his foot on the threshold so the door could not be slammed on them. “Nor am I a prisoner of war.”

That, at least, was true enough.

“Aye, I’ll grant that you’re not French.” The old gentleman possessed blue eyes, vivid and lively, in a reddened, wind-beaten face. “But no sane man takes to the bog unless ’e’s running from something.”

“We lost our way.” Madeline emptied two more sovereigns from her small cloth bag. “We’ll be no trouble and we won’t bring you any. Won’t you please spare us a bit of charity?”

The woman bent to Madeline, laying a small hand on her shoulder. She whispered, “You’re with him willingly, then?”

“Of course.” Then, at the troubled looked in the wife’s eyes, Madeline understood. “I’m not his hostage.” She saw a softening in the woman’s grim, harshly set face. “I’m his wife.” She winced at the lie, but she had to work for sympathy. “We have come from Princetown. My husband was convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. He spent a year on a prison hulk and then was taken to the prison. So I helped . . . I helped him to freedom.”

The farmer’s wife bit her lip. “Our eldest died at Salamanca. Our next went to prison for taking a pair of boots. Aye, he shouldn’t have done it. But there was work to be done, and he needed his feet shod—”

“I’m so very sorry,” Madeline broke in. “Where is he—perhaps I can help him?”

She caught Jack’s warning look but ignored it. But it was the old farmer who spoke, with an angry glare at his wife. “Hush up, woman. They’ve no need to know our business. I won’t ’ave them in the ’ouse. They can make use of the barn. With the sheep out to pasture, there’s naught for them to steal out there.”

“But the lass needs to bathe,” the wife argued.

“There’ll be plenty of water in the barrels out there. They can have some food.”

Jack withdrew his foot. The door slammed and Madeline’s heart sank. Perhaps it had all been a lie to put them at ease, so the couple could then barricade themselves in.

She stepped back, on the path of haphazard stones that led to the low front door. Should she pound on the splintered wood and demand her sovereigns? Once, she would never have let herself be cheated out of so much as a penny. Now, she no longer had the strength to care.

Jack looked as if the slam of the door had been a punch in the face. Then, before her eyes, his mouth hardened and his eyes glinted with anger.