One Wicked Sin (20 page)

Ethan bit back the instinctive repudiation that sprang to his lips. God help him, he had been about to forbid it, claim her, say: “You are mine, I want you, I refuse to cede to another man….”

Masculine pride, primitive possessiveness, jealousy… He had never been motivated by any of those emotions before. And she was testing him, pushing him a little to see how far she could go. He was not going to rise to that provocation just to please her. He smiled down at her.

“How busy you have been in the couple of days since I have seen you, madam. Any success in that direction yet?”

Her lips pressed together in temper. “Do you think that I would tell you if I had?”

“No,” Ethan said. “I think you would fleece me and then run off with another man without a word.”

She laughed. A couple of heads turned in their direction at the sound, so full of genuine amusement, and she quieted at once, as though aware that someone might recognize her.

“It is true that you know me very well, my lord.” Her voice had quieted, too. “But you offer me nothing.” She sounded disdainful. “Other than this—” Her hand slid to the band of his pantaloons and he stopped her with an iron grip.

“Enough, madam. Not here, now. Unless it pleases you to make love with me in your former husband’s house?”

Again that little smile played about her lips. “I’ll allow that the idea has some appeal, but… No, on balance, I think not.”

“Then come and dance with me instead.” The lilt of the waltz was calling to them from the ballroom.

He could see that the idea intrigued her. She had never thought that they would waltz together in a London ballroom. Neither had he, for that matter.

“Dance?” she said. “In there—in front of everyone?”

He drew her toward the ballroom doors. “Of course. Are you nervous that someone will recognize you?”

She was. He could feel her hesitation even as she denied it. “No, of course not. I have been here a full hour and no one knows who I am.” She paused. “Except your brother, Northesk. He gave me a very searching look when we met in the library.”

They stepped into the dance. It was a risk, a dare,
and he knew that Lottie would not shrink from it simply because that would prove she was afraid, prove that he had won the challenge. Her scarlet domino flared out to reveal a gown of silver beneath. The silk brushed his thigh, rippling, smooth and sensuous as Lottie herself. The other dancers swooped past as the rhythm of the music swept them up and spun them around, and Lottie smiled with exhilaration, as light as thistledown in his arms.

“You dance well,” she murmured. “I would have expected a cavalryman to thunder around the room as a horse would.”

“You do the cavalry an injustice,” Ethan said. “Our leg muscles are very well developed. It makes us the best of dancers.”

“I had noticed your well-developed muscles.” Her voice was dry. She tilted her head to look at him. “So how
did
you find me, my lord?”

“You had told Margery you were coming to London,” Ethan said.

“It is a big place.”

“It was not so difficult.”

It had not been. He had a network set up to gather intelligence about the war, about prisoners and escape routes. Such an intelligence service could also gather information of another sort and find a wayward mistress who was flitting about London incognito and causing quite a stir in the process.

“And why did you trouble to follow me?” Her voice was soft. “Did you miss me?”

That, Ethan thought, was a very good question.

“I wished to ascertain whether or not you would
come back,” he said. Half truths, he thought. Actually she deserved better than that. He had come to find her, to claim her, because he did not want to be without her.

“Did it matter whether I came back or not?”

That was another good question. Ethan had forgotten her penchant for putting him on the spot. He hesitated. What had she said?

You offer me nothing….

He thought about it. It was true that he had given her nothing but money. That had been their agreement. He had bought her for her scandalous name. He did not trust her. He had barely confided in her, other than a few insights into his childhood and a brief painful mention of his son. He had rejected her attempts to draw closer to him. He had even turned from her after the intimacy of making love with such profound and tender passion.

He was using her—even tonight, on his way to find her, he had stopped in some smoky tavern in the rookeries off the Radcliffe Highway to exchange information, letters, plans and news, sending out more spies, more instructions as the day grew closer when the conspiracy would come together. That would be the day he would leave her, with the pile of cash that would be her final payoff.

Except…

Except that he did not want to lose her. He knew that now. He had known it when he had returned to Priory Cottage and found her gone. They were two of a kind, he and Lottie. They understood one another.
For the first time he considered taking her with him. And wondered if she would be prepared to go.

“Yes,” he said. “It mattered whether or not you would come back to me.”

Something shimmered in her eyes behind the mask, an emotion that gave the lie to all her claims of indifference. He felt it, too, the tug of emotion that went deeper than lust. He remembered the times he had made love to her and lost himself in that sense of rightness, of recognition. Such a dangerous affinity, for a man who had never loved and who wanted no ties to bind him. He had been fighting this feeling for weeks. Now he admitted that it had finally caught up with him and it showed no signs of letting him go.

Lottie did not speak. Ethan wished that she would, to break that moment. It felt like a strange magic, the music, Lottie in his arms, and the candlelight and her scent of flowers and summer leaves. He felt like an untried youth who had never had a woman before. Bizarre. Impossible…

There was a clatter of noise in the ballroom doorway and a splash of red uniforms. Candlelight struck metal. Pistols. Someone screamed. The music faded, discordant, and died away. There was a silence with an odd quality of tension to it.

“We have come to arrest the parole breaker, Ethan Ryder.” The captain had stepped forward. “We have information that he is here.”

The crowd gasped with a mixture of fear and excitement, rippling like corn in a storm. A corpulent man in a blue domino, whom Ethan assumed to be Gregory
Cummings, had ripped off his mask and was advancing on the posse of soldiers.

“Ridiculous!” he sneered. “Ryder, here? How dare you disrupt my ball on such a foolish basis, sir!”

Lottie’s hand was in his, tugging at him. “This way,” she whispered in his ear. She was drawing him stealthily through the shifting crowd with a murmured “excuse me” here and an apology there as she stood on someone’s foot. But it was impossible to be surreptitious in scarlet. Heads turned, people pointed. The captain broke off his apologies and explanations to shout an order. And then Lottie was running, dragging him with her, through the door into the refreshment room, pulling the cloth from the table to scatter silver dishes in the path of the pursuing soldiers. One of them raised his pistol, and Ethan saw a man in a domino stumble heavily against the soldier just as he was about to take the shot. It flew wide, smashing a bust of Cummings himself on a marble side table.

“Frightfully sorry, old chap,” the man said. Ethan recognized Northesk’s voice. He raised a hand in brief thanks and Northesk nodded acknowledgement.

Then Lottie was bundling him through the refreshment room door, into the library—which smelled deliciously of burning tobacco—over to a spiral stair in the corner. She grabbed an antiquated sword from the wall and threw it to him, by which he realized she meant him to fight on the stairs. Ethan wondered if the sword was even serviceable. Well, he would find out. The soldiers were bursting into the library now and piling toward the spiral stair. Lottie was dragging him backward up the steps. It was the devil of a job to fight at the same
time, though there was only room for one man to challenge him at a time and the turn of the stair gave him the fighting advantage. He really did not want to kill anyone because then he would be in genuine trouble, so he had to very careful. He nicked one man in the arm, slicing through his sleeve if little else, and caught the next in the shoulder. The whole posse fell back in dismay at the sight of blood. Really, Ethan thought, if this was the way the British fought they did not deserve their reputation. And the antiquated sword was proving rather good. It had excellent balance.

He and Lottie fell backward into an upstairs bedroom and Lottie slammed the door in the faces of their pursuers, turning the key in the lock. Ethan put out a hand to steady her, slow her down, but she was in full flood now and could not be stopped. She had torn off her mask and her eyes were alight with excitement and fervor. Her hair streamed from beneath the hood of the domino, chestnut and gold, adorned with glittering rubies.

“The servants’ stair!” she gasped. “Come on!”

With a philosophical shrug, Ethan followed her through a maze of connecting doors, bedroom to bedroom, down the servants’ stair, flight after flight until they reached the kitchen, the servants jumping back at the sight of the naked blade, a scullery maid screaming with her apron over her head, a potboy leaping for cover and Gregory Cummings puffing through the door with the Captain in his wake. Ethan was willing to bet that it was the first time Cummings had ever visited his own kitchens. The Captain raised his rifle and missed Ethan completely, the bullet ricocheting off a large iron
cooking pot and smashing through a window. A man came at him from the left with a kitchen knife. Ethan disarmed him with a quick twist of the wrist. Out of the corner of his eyes he could see Lottie taking advantage of the moment her former husband’s attention was distracted to break a flan dish over his head. Gregory Cummings slumped to the floor. “The
Ton
will be talking about this for years to come,” a voice said in his ear, and then Northesk had taken his arm and swept Lottie up, too, and was ushering them out into the Mews where there was already a closed carriage put to with horses, waiting.

“Give me your papers,” Northesk said, holding out his hand. “I’ll sort this out for you.”

Ethan reached into his breast pocket and handed over the letter from Mr. Duster granting permission for his trip. He shook Northesk’s hand. “Thank you.”

Northesk nodded. “Godspeed.”

Lottie was looking at him, her eyes wide and dark. To forestall the questions he knew were coming, Ethan bundled her up into the carriage, slammed the door and tapped on the roof. The coach sprang forward.

Lottie took a deep breath. “You had permission to be here
all along?
”

Ethan grinned. “Of course.”

Lottie’s face was working like milk coming up to the boil. “Then what the
devil
was all that about?”

“When a detachment of soldiers come at you with rifles, you tend to fight first and ask questions later,” Ethan said mildly. “Otherwise you may end up dead before you get the chance to ask anything. Besides,” he
added, “you were having such a good time. I did not want to spoil it for you.”

“I? I was terrified!” Lottie looked furious. “I thought they would arrest you—or kill you!” Her eyes kindled. “Not that you do not deserve it! I wonder why I tried to help you! Clearly I am completely misguided.”

Ethan caught her angrily flailing hands and placed a kiss in her palm. “You enjoyed it,” he said. “Admit it.”

Her fingers curled over to trap the kiss. “I enjoyed besting Gregory with a cooking dish. That is true.” She hesitated. “I suppose it was rather fun….” A reluctant smile tilted the corner of her lips. “You do fight awfully well, Ethan Ryder. I am glad I have seen it or else I might never have believed your legend. How you managed not to kill any of those soldiers is beyond me.”

“It was difficult,” Ethan said. “I am afraid that I seem to have stolen this rather excellent sword,” he added. He placed the rapier gently on the floor of the carriage. “Perhaps I should return it?”

“I wouldn’t bother.” Lottie raised one shoulder in a light shrug. “Gregory could never use it anyway. He could not fight his way out from behind a newspaper.” Her eyes narrowed. “If you had permission to come up to Town, Ethan, why would the authorities think that you did not?”

“A fair question,” Ethan said. “I imagine that someone has been trying to stir up trouble for me.”

He lay back against the seat. The smooth movement of the carriage rocked him, soothing the fever in his veins, blunting the edges of his bloodlust. Kill or be killed. Fight and escape. There lay the key, he thought.
Someone had set a trap for him. Someone had wanted him to fight and to be killed.

“I think someone sent word to the authorities in London that I had broken parole,” he said slowly. “I think they were hoping that I would not have the chance to proffer my papers, that because I am considered dangerous they would come for me with swords or pistols, and I would not have a chance.”

Lottie’s gaze was narrowed on him. She sat forward. “A trigger-happy soldier, or a stray bullet…”

“Quite,” Ethan said. “Yes, it would have been very easy to have been killed back there. My papers would have been found to have been in order, of course, but by then it would have been too late.”

“Clever,” Lottie said. Her eyes were bright on him in the darkness. “Who?”

Ethan shook his head. “Who knows? We have discussed before that there may be a spy within the ranks in Wantage.” He hesitated. “It could be Purchase. As an American he is more the natural ally of the British than he is of the French.”

Lottie shook her head stubbornly. “Purchase is an honorable man,” she said. “He would not sell you out.”

“Northesk, then,” Ethan said. “He plays some interesting games.”

Lottie’s eyes opened wide in genuine shock. “You cannot believe that of him! He helped us! You said yourself that he was the only good one in your entire family.”

Ethan shrugged. He felt tired. The taste of betrayal was in his mouth again and he hated it. This was such a
dirty business, using people, trusting no one, not knowing who was friend or foe. He raised his gaze to meet Lottie’s.