Shameless (26 page)

A most beautiful, feminine flame.

Who was sadly out of charity with him and taking care to let him know it.

It had been a long time since a woman had been in a snit with him. People in general tended to be frightened of him, and as soon as they had a chance to take his measure usually gave him a wide berth. Women typically fell into one of two categories: attractive, round-heeled, eager wenches who fawned over his looks and fell into his bed at the snap of his fingers, and the rest of them, whom he barely noticed.

Madame Roux was something new.

“I—I can go no higher,” Jane gasped. Glancing up, he saw that she had stopped dead some three-quarters of the way to the top. Flattened against the wall, her toes wedged in a barely visible crack and her arms stretched above her as she hung on to a craggy outcropping, she looked for all the world like a large, bedraggled bat—complaining of the cold, she had been offered the domino and was wearing it at that moment—that had lit on the cliff face and clung. Shadows leaped across the walls and shrouded the soaring ceiling, throwing elongated images against the stone and making her position look far more precarious than he was almost sure it actually was. With his burning torch and the one in the passage above as the only sources of light in an encroaching darkness as absolute as the tomb, it was hard to tell if she was in imminent danger or not. Much had changed in the caves since he had last passed
through them. So far they had encountered ample evidence of flooding and rock slides, and in places water seeped through the walls, making them damp to the touch, and dripped from the ceiling. But even if the rock crumbled and she fell, the distance was not all that great. And he would, of course, do his possible to catch her.

“Don’t look down,” Beth warned, as Jane’s frightened face tilted their way.

“Ye great looby, ye can’t stop there. Not unless ye means to ’ang on to that rock till Judgment Day.” Mary-the-mosquito, on her hands and knees inside the upper passage, looked down on Jane with a frown. Clustered behind her, the other women peered over the edge, their faces studies in concern. “Ye must either come up, or fall down. There be no other way.”

Jane whimpered. Her eyes sought Neil’s. “You’ll catch me, sir, if I slip?”

Although he had climbed the cliff first, demonstrating how easy it was in the teeth of their collective skepticism, showing them each handhold and foothold, promising to catch them if they fell had been the only way to induce the majority of them to make the attempt. If he had not made such a promise, they would be standing at the base of it arguing still.

“You won’t slip. Lift your right foot out of that crack and move it about ten inches up and a little to the side. There’s a ledge, and once you are standing on it you’ll find the going much easier,” he instructed her. His patience was being sorely tried, as a trek that would have taken him at most three hours alone had now stretched to twice that, with another hour or more at the rate they were progressing to go, and his hope of arriving at their destination in the early hours of the day, when few if any people would be about, quite ruined. But he had discovered already that his unwanted charges were best handled like skittish horses, with a calm voice and steady demeanor, and the occasional firm hand on the bridle.

“Sure, and if the rest of us can get up here you can,” the Irish farm girl—Peg—encouraged her as Jane, visibly shaking, lifted her foot the
required distance. A shower of pebbles accompanied the movement, and as she gained the safety of the ledge a paper-thin layer of shale dislodged beneath her and slid down toward the bottom in a slithering rush. Gasping, Jane flattened again. The gasp, and the rattle of the pebbles and subsequent crash as the shale reached the bottom and shattered, echoed hollowly off the walls.

“Keep going,” Neil said. To his relief, after a frozen moment in which the issue hung in the balance, she did. A moment later her hands touched the lip of the passage, and the others, with much chatter and many exclamations, pulled her up amongst them to safety.

“Thank goodness,” Beth said. The remark wasn’t addressed to him, precisely, but he was pleased to take it as conversation and reply.

“She would have had no trouble at all if she hadn’t stopped.”

The look she shot him in return told him clearly that he was still in her black books and conversation wasn’t on the agenda.

“Miss, when you come up, have a care when you put your foot in that crack. It felt like it wanted to give way,” Jane called down to Beth. They’d all taken to calling her “miss,” just as they called him “sir.” Except for Mary, who most ironically persisted in addressing him as “yer worship,” as though he were a bishop or some such.

“I’ll watch out,” Beth called back.

“If you’re afraid . . . ” Neil began in a lowered voice, because she could be forgiven if that sliding layer of shale had given her cause for concern. Then he remembered the last time he’d suggested the possibility that she might be afraid of something, and smiled.

“I’m not,” she answered curtly. From the look she gave him, she was remembering, too, and, unlike himself, not fondly.

Only he and she were left below, which, as he had determined the order of ascent, was how he had intended it, given that it was difficult to coax her out of the sullens with six pairs of nosy ears listening to every word he said to her and every snippy reply she made to him in turn. Unfortunately, having the others up while he and Beth were down did not provide them with the privacy he had hoped to achieve. Having all too quickly gotten over the excitement of Jane’s arrival, the
women were all looking down at them from the passage, once again ably fulfilling their roles as the duennas from hell.

There was nothing for it but to adjust to adverse circumstances. He couldn’t make them vanish with a wish, and, as he had already discovered, he couldn’t just leave them behind, either. And not solely because Beth wouldn’t like it. It was a shocking thing to discover about oneself after all these years, he reflected, but he found that abandoning six helpless women inside a cave system that they would almost certainly never find their way out of alive was beyond him. Even if he was hoping for a private moment or two with the woman beside him, and they were, once again, decidedly in the way.

“Your turn, then.” With an inner sigh that signaled capitulation to forces beyond his control, he wiped the smile from his face and turned to face Beth, with—truly!—nothing any longer but the business at hand on his mind.

She gave him an evil look. Under its influence, his determination to stick strictly to the business at hand wobbled. Unfortunately, at least from her point of view, the first foothold was some five feet off the ground. His role had been to boost the ladies up to it, and the process clearly required more contact than she was in a mood to allow him.

“Come,” he said, beckoning.

Looking as if she tasted something sour, she stepped closer.

“Well?” she prompted when he didn’t immediately make a move to boost her up.

“You’ve forgotten to tuck up your skirt,” he pointed out. Just as she was, her fellow females were once more wearing their gowns, and they had most sensibly tucked the fronts of their skirts into their waists so as not to catch their feet in them as they climbed. He expected that she would tell him to close his eyes, as some of them (really, all except the brazen blonde) had done, but she did not. Instead, with an expression that clearly told him that she trusted him not an inch, she turned her back. Despite her precaution, he was treated to a pretty glimpse of a froth of ruffled petticoats and elegant calves in white silk stockings, along with a tantalizing flash of bare thighs. Having seen the lady’s legs
in their lovely entirety only the night before, he was already acquainted with their slender shapeliness. Still, his body responded with appreciation, and as nature intended.

Having arranged her skirts as modestly as she could under the circumstances, which meant that a considerable amount of leg was still on display should anyone—ahem!—care to look, she turned back to him, shooting him a wary glance.

“Are you just going to stand there?” she demanded testily.

“Certainly not.”

Thus summoned to his task, he thrust the torch down between two rocks to hold it steady and stepped up to her, grasping her by the waist and lifting her clean up off her feet before she had a chance to guess what he would be about. She was no feather, but she wasn’t heavy, either, and he liked the way she felt beneath his hands.

“What . . . ?” She looked down at him in surprise as her hands flew to his shoulders for support. Their eyes met, she glared at him, and he had a sudden, almost overwhelming urge to let her slide down into his arms and kiss her until the glare was replaced by another expression entirely. Only the thought of their by now probably wide-eyed audience above caused him to refrain.

“Is ought amiss?” he asked, as innocent as if he had no idea what the problem was. Without waiting for a reply, he shifted into a better position vis-à-vis the wall and at the same time lifted her incrementally higher despite a warning tightness in the vicinity of his wound.

“You know there is!”

Given that he had hoisted the others upward by means of their feet in his cupped hands, her reaction was not unexpected. But the mood of devilry that seemed to have taken possession of him over the course of the morning and in the face of her ill-humor was really quite irresistible now, almost as irresistible as the lure of putting his hands on her again had been. He’d been forbearance itself since she’d first greeted him with a lift of her chin and a dismissive glance when he’d come to wake the ladies that morning, only to find her already up, dressed, feeding the fire, and in no mood to talk to him. But the
desire to tease her a little had grown with every cold glance and curt syllable she’d thrown his way. Now he had his chance, and he made the most of it. Lifting her slowly, his hands tight around her waist, his fingers splaying across her lower back and pressing into the resilient flesh beneath layers of silk and muslin, he measured the trimness of her waist and the gentle flare of her hips with pleasure while she eyed him grimly. She was tense and her muscles had tightened as a result, but he remembered the normal softness of her curves very well. It had been a while since he’d had a woman, so perhaps his memory of his own usual response had grown dim, but the heat that last night’s relatively chaste exchange had engendered in him seemed truly quite remarkable, now that he thought back on it. A few kisses and a caress of her not-quite-bare breast should not have left him riven with lust, nor should the memory of it have stayed with him the way it had. But, like the memory of their first encounter when he’d been treated to a full, unobstructed view of the luscious globes of her breasts, it seemed to have lodged indelibly in his mind. Even feeling the fully clothed shape of her waist beneath his hands now was engendering a salutary response, he discovered. Last night had shown him that she was far from indifferent to him, too. Under the right conditions, and given sufficient privacy, which he hoped to achieve at some point, helping her overcome her apparent aversion to physical intimacy would provide him with a great deal of gratification. He would never take what she was not willing to give, of course, but once they were on their own he was confident of his ability to seduce her with her full cooperation.

Are you really that big of a bastard?

That disgusted inner voice belonged, he was astonished to realize, to his own conscience. Having been almost completely silent for a number of years, its interference was unexpected, unaccustomed, and most decidedly unwanted.

“Can you not lift me up there any faster than this?” Her eyes shot sparks at him.

“Would you have me hurt my shoulder?”

His shoulder repaid him with a decided twinge for his mendacious
response, but he ignored it. As the veteran of numerous wounds from bullets, knives, and various other assorted weapons, he was accustomed to functioning through far more pain than this mere bagatelle of an injury caused him. But under the watchful eyes above them he could only stretch out the moment for so long, so with regret he lifted her high enough so that she could gain a toehold on the rock that was the starting point, held her while she got her balance, and finally, reluctantly, let her go. Clinging to the rock face now, she shot him a fulminating look.

“Having failed to mention it last night, may I take this opportunity to tell you that your legs are truly lovely?” he said, his voice pitched to her ears alone, his eyes sliding admiringly over her legs, one of which was on charming display from midthigh down as a result of her tucked-up skirt. “Almost as lovely as your beautiful breasts.”

“Oh,”
was her indignant reply. Situated as she was, she was unable to cover herself, or to reply as she might have wished. But the temper in her glance said everything she was clearly biting back. “I’ll have you know that a
gentleman
wouldn’t look, and certainly would have better taste than to comment on anything he might accidentally have seen.”

“Leaving me to once again reflect how fortunate I am that I’m no gentleman.”

“Come on, miss, there be nothing to it a-tall,” Mary called down in response to what she clearly interpreted as Beth’s hesitation. The dove gray girl—Alyce—thrust the torch she held out into the cavern so that more light fell on the cliff face, and the others offered advice and encouragement in such a vociferous tangle that he, for one, could not make out one word in ten of what they said. But it quickly became apparent that Beth needed no help from anyone. Though he stood watchfully below, most fully prepared to catch this particular female without fail should she slip, there was little danger of that: fueled no doubt by anger at him, she scaled the wall with ease, and without mishap.

Once her hands reached the lip of the passage, the others pulled her in and out of sight.

Snuffing the torch, which he then did, added the odor of charred wood to the pervading scent of earthy dampness. With the thing still
smoking, Neil called up to the women to stand back, and threw the blackened stick up amongst them. The flint and steel had already been carried up by Mary in the pocket of her dress, and used to light the torch that Alyce now held, which he had thrown up to them earlier. Without any light, the caves would be black as the most impenetrable night, and practically impossible for even someone who had knowledge of them, such as he himself, to navigate. With light so critically important, he kept the candles by him, in the pocket of his greatcoat, which he wore. He’d had to abandon his frock coat and waistcoat because of the hole that had been blown through them and the blood that had soaked them as a result. His shirt he’d likewise had to leave for the same reason, but at least he’d managed to exchange it for another, though ill-fitting one. His decimated neckcloth now adorned his shoulder rather than his throat, but he was wearing his own trousers and boots. His greatcoat was a trifle heavy, and the length of it occasionally got in his way, but he was loath to abandon the perfectly good garment. Aside from the growing paucity of his wardrobe, it was quite possible that, given the uncertain spring temperatures, either he or his unsuspecting hostage would be glad of its comfort as soon as the caves were left behind, and their flight—sans her de trop companions—resumed. He might be safe from Clapham and his ilk for the moment—only a select few even knew of the caves’ existence, although he had little doubt that his pursuers would learn of them soon enough if he didn’t resurface elsewhere—but as soon as he was above ground again he would be in mortal peril once more. Those who were chasing him would not stop until either he stopped them or they saw him dead, and that was the hard truth of the matter.