I Loved a Rogue The Prince Catchers (5 page)

Eleanor held the porcelain cup to her lips and inhaled until she felt it in her toes.

Mrs. Hodges plunked her hands on her hips. “Well, aren’t you going to drink it?”

“I am reveling.” Her lips could nearly taste it. Nearly.
Temptation
. The waiting teased.
Deliciously
.

“You’re an odd duck, aren’t you, miss?”

“Not usually.” She tilted the cup upward. “Usually I am entirely predictable. Reserved. Modest.” Her words were muffled by the rich liquid so close, heating her flesh.
Heady sensation
. “Usually I am very”—she let the chocolate wash against her lips—“very”—and a ripple of pleasure went through her—“good.” The sweet, thick milk stole around her tongue. Decadent.
Sinful
.

She sighed.

Taliesin appeared in the kitchen door.

She choked.

“Well now, sir,” Mrs. Hodges said, wiping her hands on her apron. “Miss was just teaching me here how to make chocolate like they do at all the big houses.”

He leaned a shoulder into the doorpost and crossed his arms. His shadowy eyes scanned her from toe tips to brow, finally coming to rest on her lips. “Was she?”

A thick droplet of chocolate clung to her bottom lip. Eleanor felt it there like a beacon. She should wipe it with her kerchief.

The tip of her tongue stole between her lips and licked up the droplet. Another shiver wiggled through her.

What was she doing?

“Now then, miss,” Mrs. Hodges said, “you’d best go and leave the kitchen to me, and I’ll fix up a nice dinner for you.”

Clutching the cup in both palms, Eleanor went to the door. Taliesin stepped back but with so little space she had to shift sideways to move past him. She darted a glance upward.

Immobility
. His. Hers. She could see every line, every whisker that had not been on his face eleven years ago.
Not
the same boy she’d known. A man now. Her pulse fluttered. Then it fluttered harder as his scent mingled with the flavor of chocolate upon her tongue. Horse. Leather. Him.
The same
. It tangled in her nose, in her head, a memory barreling through her, while he watched her eyes from inches away.

She slipped past him.

The taproom was empty now. Mr. Treadwell was probably in the stable seeing to his Arthurian characters and Betsy must be in their room seeing to mundane tasks Eleanor was accustomed to seeing to herself.

“Chocolate?” the incubus behind her said. “Missing the luxuries of the ducal mansion so soon, are you?”

She swung around to him and the chocolate sloshed in the cup. “Is that what you think? That I have grown spoiled by my sisters’ good fortune?”

“No.” His black eyes hooded.

“No? Is that all you can say?” Her tongue, it seemed, was an unbridled thing. Too much prison. Too much
feeling
to swallow again and again. “We’ve not seen each other in eleven years, and now for four days you have said nothing to me.”

Again he leaned his shoulder against the doorpost in an attitude of sublime nonchalance. “You made it clear you did not wish my escort. I am respecting that.”

She didn’t believe it. He had never respected her. He had teased her endlessly. “You could at least speak to me.”

“What would you have me say?”

“Anything. How do you go along these days, Eleanor? How is the parish? Is it still the same as eleven years ago when I departed so precipitously, without warning, without word?”

His face grew still, planes of dark beauty like hewn marble. “Ah,” he said in a low voice. “You wish for empty pleasantries. Or perhaps an apology? I regret that neither is in my lexicon.”

“I don’t wish for pleasantries or apologies. I don’t care why you left as you did. But you hurt Papa. Do you even know how deeply you hurt him?”

His lips were an unbreakable line.

“He wouldn’t even speak of you.” Locked behind bars for years, Eleanor’s words now tumbled forth. “He said nothing except when Ravenna mentioned you. She did not understand why you left either, but she accepted it in her way. She always thought you would return. But Papa didn’t. And it wounded him.”

“I wrote to him,” he said after a moment.

“Rarely. So few letters that the pages grew thin from folding and unfolding. He never said a word about them or read a line to us, but do you know where he kept them? In his Bible, tucked in Luke, chapter fifteen. The story of the prodigal son.”

His eyes had become hard obsidian. But he remained silent.

Her hands clenched around the cup. “Why won’t you speak?” she exclaimed.

“Seems like you’re speaking enough for the both of us.” His perfect lips barely moved.

“Can’t you even be civil? Or did you leave those lessons behind too when you left St. Petroc?”

“Listen to you. As righteous as you always were.”

She threw the chocolate at him.

She didn’t know quite how it happened. One moment strange, frantic panic coursed through her, straight from her heels to her throat. The next moment a demon possessed her, seizing her arm and forcing it to jut forward and disgorge the contents of her cup at him. Chocolate spattered everywhere—on the wall, the doorpost, and on the dark, handsome man from her past for whom she had wept months of tears.

“What in the—” But he didn’t finish. Instead he came at her. Her foot dropped back but he grabbed her wrist and jerked her hand with the cup up between them. “What do you think you’re doing?” Chocolate dripped down her wrist and along his cheeks and lips. He stared down at her in astonishment.

“Wasting my chocolate.” She tugged. His grip tightened. Arm to arm, he held her close, and he did not look into her eyes. He looked at her lips. The shadows in his eyes were deeper, but now limned with fever brightness, so bright that she could see the flecks of brown there that she had discovered as a girl.

“How do you go along these days, Eleanor?” His voice was rough.

“Wh-what?”

“How is the parish?” His gaze never left her lips, his fingers strong around her wrist. “Is it still the same as eleven years ago when I departed?”

“Precipitously,” she whispered. “Without warning. Without word.” The syllables trailed into the silence of her raucous heartbeat.

“Precipitously. Without warning.”

Through his hand she felt him. Her skin, her bones, her blood felt him.

“You are poking fun at me,” she said. “Don’t.”

“What will it be, Eleanor? You demanded my attention. You have it now. Do you want it or not?”

She wanted to taste the chocolate on his lips. She wanted to remember the danger and delirium she’d felt the last time she had been entirely alive.

“You are holding me.” She saw only his eyes, so close she could count each ebony lash. “Why are you holding me?”

“Hot beverage. My face. Sound familiar?” His lips and jaw were bathed in sugar. Parted lips. Uncompromising jaw. “But if this counts to you as holding,
pirani
, you’ve clearly missed a lot of life shut up in that vicarage.”

She could not speak to confirm or deny it. For the first time in eleven years he had called her his pet name.

Black eyes scanned her features slowly. The groove between his brows deepened.

“Damn it,” he growled, and released her. He crossed the room in hard strides and went out. Cool air swirled around Eleanor, bathing her fiery cheeks. She peered into the cup in her quivering hand. Breaking every rule she had ever learned about comportment, she stood alone in the taproom and licked the cup clean.

BETSY
SNORED.
THE
innkeepers and Mr. Treadwell had long since gone to bed, and Eleanor supposed Taliesin had washed his hands of her—and chocolate—for the night and now slept too. But her thoughts spun and the blood in her veins seemed whipped up with fire. She needed air, and space.
To breathe
.

She dressed quietly and tucked her feet into her shoes. Drawing her cloak about her shoulders, she slipped from the bedchamber and out of the inn. Between the clouds, the full moon struggled to illuminate the moor, wind twirling across the hills like dancers in a ballroom. The air smelled of snow. When she lifted her face, an icy mist settled on her hot skin.

She crossed the road and walked out onto the moor, wrapped in her cloak but buoyed by strange excitement.

“Do you have a death wish?”

She pivoted around. Taliesin walked toward her. He carried a lamp. The light cast him in a glow, not of comfort or warmth but of mystical, dangerous things—faeries and fire demons and elven kings.

“You needn’t be here,” she called to him.

“If you’re wandering alone on the moor at night, I’m thinking I need to be here.”

“There is no one around for miles. There is no danger.”

“There is more on the moors than men,
pirani
.”

“If a stray sheep accosts me I will defend myself like a knight of old against a dragon. Have you a sword that I can borrow?”

“Not at present.” Almost, he smiled.

Her stomach did pirouettes. “I don’t need a protector.”

He halted two yards away. “All evidence to the contrary.”

“You are only here because Arabella would not agree to fund this journey unless I allowed you to come. Did she tell you that? She forced me to accept this arrangement. But I don’t need you here, and she won’t know if you leave now. Mr. Treadwell has a pistol. Once we come to the coast tomorrow I am familiar with the country and can manage without your help.”

“I am not your protector. I am your guide only. Your sister asked this favor of me and for the gratitude I bear your family I agreed to it.”

“You agreed to it because you knew I didn’t want it.”

“What do you want, Eleanor?” he asked, an edge of darkness in his deep rumble. “To take to the road on this quest like a peddler without assistance and hope for the best? I’ve been there, and I can assure you it’s no holiday. Not even for a few weeks.”

“I’m not naïve. I know the challenges I face.” Tiny, icy pebbles from the sky layered the earth, covering the darkness with sound. Bits of frozen rain clung to her lashes. “You don’t think I can do this, do you? Find my parents.”

“I think you could do anything you put your mind to.”

He always had
.

“Is that—” Her words stumbled upon feeling. “Is that a challenge?”

“A challenge?”

Shame like nit bites prickled her skin. What a fool she was to imagine that their shared past meant anything to him. “You don’t remember.”

“Remember what, exactly?” he said warily.

“When we were young, all you wanted was to prove that you were better than me, superior, smarter, more daring and adventuresome, that you could best me at any challenge,” she said. “When we—”

“When we were young, all I wanted was you.”

Her limbs were butter.
But it wasn’t true
. He had not wanted her. He had wanted to win.

“Fortunately, youth passes,” he added. He lifted a hand and rubbed the back of his neck. The gesture was so familiar, she must have seen him make it hundreds of times—the last time on that last day, when she had been buttoning her gown and he’d stood in the middle of the pond up to his hips in water and watched her.

“I heard that after you left St. Petroc you went to jail,” she blurted out.

“Ah. But which occasion?”

“It’s true? What did you—what did you
do
to merit it?”

“Vagabondage. Roguery. Nothing worth the telling.” He stepped forward. “Is that it? Is this journey about proving your daring? Your foolhardy courage?”

“Of course not.”

“No. I see now.” He spoke slowly, watching her face so closely that she felt touched. “It’s about proving your strength, isn’t it? But to whom, I wonder.”

A thousand unspoken words clogged her throat. Black satin locks falling over his collar and the lamplight glinting off the silver loops in his ears made him look like a pirate—or how she always imagined a pirate, save for the peg leg, of course. Taliesin’s horseman’s legs were long and sharply muscled beneath fine, clinging wool. She felt hot and unsteady. Wild inside. Like she’d never seen a man’s legs in breeches before.

She dragged her attention up. Looking into the eyes of the single person who had never once doubted her strength, she lied, “No one.” Her whisper threaded through drops of falling ice. “I don’t wish to prove anything to anyone.”

The year after her illness, when she was still weak, she had been bursting to leave the house, to capture on her skin not only the sunshine in the garden but the wind on the cliffs. Her papa cosseted and fretted over her, and she reveled in the attention. But the moment he left the vicarage, she’d stolen out and gone to the Gypsy camp, where Taliesin had taught her how to ride. She met him every day and neither of them told anyone.

“I simply want to find my parents,” she said.

Now he walked to her until he stood just before her. He seemed so large, so powerful, and certain of himself.

“You are trying to convince yourself that you are afraid,” he said, his deep voice coated the icy stillness of the moor.

“I am not.”

“You aren’t afraid.” Then he touched her. Just like that, skin upon skin, flame to flame. He stroked her cheek with the backs of his fingers and she did not move, did not flinch, did not turn away. The weight of all the stars hidden behind the clouds held her immobile.

“You are a wild bird, caged too long and desperate to be free,” he said. So close, his skin and scent. His mouth. Dear God,
his mouth
. If he kissed her, she would let him. She would fall to pieces. “You have believed every word they’ve said about you, Eleanor. You have accepted the cage, despite your nature. Even now when you are freed, you have allowed them to tie the jesses tight to ensure your return.”

“I— What jesses?”

“Ducal carriage. Lady’s maid.” His shadowy eyes, glittering gold, caressed her lips. “But they chose the wrong man for the job of bodyguard, didn’t they? Only you and I know that.”

“I’m not trying to convince myself that I am afraid,” she forced past the clutter of emotions in her throat. She had loved her life. He’d been the one to abandon the vicarage, not her. “There is no cage. No fetters.”