The Lady Risks All (14 page)

“One point to bear in mind,” he said, “is that the only reason Kempsey and Dole would have for breaking Roderick’s foot is that they intend to keep him alive. They aren’t planning on killing him, at least not soon.”

She stared, shocked but nevertheless taking in his words. Some of her welling desperation eased, but her anxiety remained. “They weren’t intending to kill him when they seized him, but for how long do they plan on holding him? And
why
?”

Unanswerable questions. He was saved from having to respond by the innkeeper and her daughters, who arrived to set the table and then serve them a simple but excellent dinner.

Over the meal, his partner in pursuit remained captive to her imagination and the anxiety it spawned. He attempted several conversational gambits, but none succeeded in breaking the hold of her worry.

The sight of her overcome by dire thoughts pricked and prodded at him. Made him restless in a discomfiting and unfamiliar way.

Until finally, with the meal at an end, he pushed back his chair and rose. “Come on. Get your cloak. Let’s go for a stroll.”

She was surprised, but she fell in with his plan, doubtless imagining he had some purpose in mind.

Which he did.

Her hand resting feather-light on his arm, they walked into the town. It wasn’t far to the hall he’d noticed when they’d driven through earlier; when he drew her to join the queue of well-dressed patrons, interspersed with students and dons, waiting to pay for admission, she blinked at him. “A concert?”

“There’s nothing we can do about Roderick tonight. I thought we could both use the distraction.”

She read the playbill posted beside the door, then glanced at him. “Handel?”

He paid at the little window, then took her arm and steered her into the foyer. “I’m partial to Handel.”

She humphed disbelievingly. He smiled.

He sat riveted through the performance, sparing only the occasional glance to confirm that she was riveted, too. The choir excelled with a selection from the maestro’s secular oratorios, with a few arias for contrast; the quality of the accompanying small orchestra suggested it was drawn from the university’s music school.

At the end of the performance, when the resounding applause had died and they joined the wave of patrons flowing out of the doors and finally found their way onto the street, it was to discover night had long ago fallen, and that the music was powerful enough, memorable enough to follow them, filling their minds as they walked back to the inn.

Soothed on multiple planes, he nevertheless kept his eyes peeled as they walked through the darkened streets. Oxford was safer than London, but they were on its poorly lit fringes.

Slowly drifting back to earth, with the music only gradually relinquishing its grip on her, Miranda realized that her lips were curved, a glow of simple pleasure gently coursing through her. Her concern for Roderick was still there, but held in abeyance; as Roscoe had said, there was nothing they could do to help her poor brother tonight.

Instead, he’d set out to distract her. For the past two hours her mind had been held hostage by the music, a respite from her thoughts, her compulsive cares. He might have enjoyed the interlude, too, but the impulse to bring her to the concert hall hadn’t sprung from self-interest.

Most of the audience had come from deeper in the town; strolling along the Woodstock road, she and he were now alone, the night peaceful and still about them.

Roscoe halted at the corner where they needed to cross the street. He paused, looking ahead, his features etched by the light from the last lamp they’d passed, some yards behind them.

She studied the face of London’s gambling king, the long, chiseled planes, the strong lines of nose and lips, the sculpted jaw, broad brow, and heavy lidded eyes.

A face others saw as hard and unyielding, but one she’d learned hid a bone-deep kindness.

Yielding to impulse, using the hand resting on his arm for balance, she stretched up to brush a kiss—a simple, unadorned, thank-you caress—across his cheek.

Just as he turned his head her way.

Their lips met.

Touched, brushed.

They both froze. For an instant, for a fraction of a heartbeat.

Lids lowered, her gaze had locked on his lips. His gaze was on her face.

Then he moved. She moved.

And their lips touched again.

This time they clung.

Hers softened; his firmed.

And the connection became real.

Transformed, aching and sweet, into an exchange so delicate, so unrehearsed and unintended, its very fragility fascinated and lured.

With no plan, no intent, no purpose, the mutual pressure of their lips, so tantalizingly novel, spun out and stopped time . . . letting sensation flare and wash through her.

She forgot what she was doing. Forgot where they were, why they were there.

For seconds, minutes, however long, the touch of his lips on hers imprinted, the gentlest of brands, on her senses.

For those minutes, nothing else mattered. Nothing else had ever captured her like this, had ever been this exquisitely enthralling.

Roscoe’s head slowly spun. Giddy. Him. And all from just the touch of her lips.

He wanted more. His muscles tensed, well-honed instincts rearing, ready to direct, to take charge and orchestrate . . .

What was he doing?

His mind reengaged with a rush, a mental slap.

Abruptly, he raised his head, shattering the delicate, evocatively innocent caress.

Stunned, he stared into her shadowed face—tried to see the siren who had captured him so easily. She had to be there . . . somewhere.

Miranda Clifford blinked lustrous eyes wide and stared back.

Even in the poor light he saw color flood her cheeks.

Then she stepped back.

Putting distance between them.

He hadn’t even taken her into his arms, but he had to fight a sudden urge to reach out and haul her back.

She swung away, faced the street. “I’m
sorry
.” The words reached him on an agonized whisper. She dragged her cloak more tightly about her. “I only meant to . . . thank you.” Without glancing at him, stiffly she inclined her head his way. “It won’t happen again.”

Why not?

He bit his tongue, banished the errant thought. She was right—she was a lady and he was London’s gambling king. There could never be anything between them; better they both kept that in mind.

No matter their impulses.

But what could he say? What, that wouldn’t be an outright lie?

Accepting there were no glib words he could utter to ease her, he went to offer his arm, realized the futility, and converted the gesture into a wave. “Come—we should get back.”

Head rising, she nodded. Still without looking at him, she stepped out, and he fell in beside her.

Chapter Six

T
hey were, Roscoe discovered, both excellent at dissembling. Regardless, as he and Miranda traveled at a good clip up the road to Birmingham, awareness sat, an all but tangible phantom, between them.

On reaching the hotel the previous night, they’d retreated to their rooms with barely a mumbled “Good night.” This morning she’d emerged and had joined him in the parlor for breakfast; no matter how hard he’d looked, he hadn’t detected the slightest sign that she even remembered what had passed between them.

Except that she’d reverted to treating him with rigid correctness; he hadn’t realized how much she—and he, too—had relaxed in each other’s company. Now, however, they were once more London’s gambling king and a lady wedded to respectability, with nothing in common beyond their mutual desire to rescue her brother—a simple, straightforward connection with no overtones or undertones of any complicating attraction.

He wondered if they’d be strong enough to hold to that line until they found Roderick and returned to London.

Last night, alone in his room, he’d had time to think—about that kiss, about what it had revealed. He’d been attracted to Miranda Clifford from the instant he’d set eyes on her in the upstairs foyer of his house, her face and figure lit only by diffuse moonlight. But he was accustomed to feeling such physical tugs and, on learning her identity along with her purpose in coming to his house, had dismissed it with little further thought.

Then she’d returned and asked for his help, a plea of a sort he was constitutionally incapable of refusing; he knew his own weakness on that score. But he couldn’t claim to have been unaware of the particular edge to his interest in her, an edge further honed by increasing fascination.

He’d never been a monk; his thirty-eight years encompassed ample experience of the opposite sex, from the Cyprians of his wild youth to the bored matrons of the ton seeking relief from the ennui of their marriages, who, over the last decade, had been his principal source of incidental bedmates. Since becoming Roscoe, he hadn’t kept a mistress—a dangerous proposition, for him as well as the lady—but he certainly hadn’t retreated from that aspect of life.

Experience had, from the first, told him that his attraction to Miranda Clifford was reciprocated.

The same experience had warned that far from embracing, let alone encouraging, that mutual attraction, she found it unsettling, something she wished to ignore.

Despite his wolf’s clothing, he was a gentleman born; he’d done his best to oblige her and ignore it, too.

Until last night.

Neither of them had meant it to happen, but it had.

That reality sat between them, large as life, as the wheels rattled and they rolled on up the road.

Eventually Birmingham rose before them, a haphazard conglomeration of buildings old and new. He was familiar with the town; it was the closest to Ridgware, although he usually traveled to the estate by a more direct route.

Miranda looked about her with increasing dismay as Roscoe drove into Birmingham. The town had grown significantly since she’d last visited; finding Roderick in such a teeming city would be a harder task than she’d supposed.

As they approached the town’s center, she glanced at Roscoe. “What now?” Other than the simple courtesies, they’d barely exchanged three words through the day.

“Now we take rooms in one of the smaller hotels, then I’ll go out and make inquiries.”

“But if this is where Kempsey and Dole call home, they won’t be using taverns and inns.”

“No, but we need to confirm that they have, in fact, remained here, rather than simply passed through on their way to, for example, Liverpool.”

She was tempted to ask why he’d thought of Liverpool—the port from which many vessels left for the Americas—but decided she’d leave exploring that until it became more than hypothetical. She had to keep focused.

They’d inquired after her “sick cousin and his companions” at numerous small inns and taverns along the way. At the last, on the outskirts of Birmingham, they’d learned that the battered coach with its odd pair of horses had driven into the town. The possibility—like Roscoe, she would put it no higher—that Roderick lay somewhere within reach left her equal parts excited, reassured, and apprehensive, but it definitely spurred her on.

And helped keep her from dwelling on the man beside her and that wholly unexpected, eye-openingly magical moment they’d shared on an Oxford street.

She’d told herself she had to regret it, that scintillating moment, yet she couldn’t quite force herself to be that hypocritical, even in her own mind, so she’d decided that ignoring it, wiping it from her conscious memory and denying it any scope to influence her behavior, was the wise, sensible, and respectable course. But all that had accomplished was to make her even more tense, as if she was constantly battling herself, her true inclinations . . .

Realizing her mind had once more drifted, she ruthlessly hauled it back on track. And realized he was glancing at her, puzzled.

He’d asked her something.

She blushed. “I’m sorry. I was woolgathering. What did you say?”

Woolgathering
. Viewing the color in her cheeks, Roscoe could guess about what. Looking forward, he clenched his jaw against any unwise retort, reminded himself of the line to which wisdom dictated they both should hold, and after a moment managed to reply in a halfway reasonable tone, “I wanted to know if, as at Oxford, we should be wary of any neighbors from Cheshire who might be passing through.”

She grimaced. “We should. Most travel to London via other routes, but enough come through Birmingham for us to need to be on guard.”

“So we can’t use the major hotels.” He wasn’t keen on using the larger hotels either; the years might have aged him, but there were those in Birmingham who would still recognize him as the man he no longer was. His family didn’t need any unexpected sightings of a scion society hadn’t seen for twelve years. “Luckily, the town has several smaller establishments.”

He drove to a minor hotel with a tiny yard and rooms overlooking nothing more exciting than narrow streets and alleys. Catering to professional men traveling on business, the hotel nevertheless boasted several suites. After being shown around one, its sitting room and the two bedrooms on either side overlooking the rear alley, he left Miranda in the suite and descended to finalize the arrangements. After seeing their bags carried up the stairs by a footman, he walked out of the hotel and set off to learn what he could of Kempsey, Dole, and Roderick’s whereabouts.

H
e returned sooner than he’d expected. After barely an hour of wandering into taverns and chatting innocuously about mismatched carriage horses, the instincts honed by his years in London had started flickering.

He’d used Kempsey’s name only once, his description twice, and Dole’s name only once, all at different places, yet he’d caught enough arrested glances to grow wary; he might want to know where Kempsey, Dole, and Roderick were, but he didn’t want to attract attention, especially not that of Kempsey and Dole.

Accepting the outcome as confirmation that Gallagher had heard aright and Kempsey and Dole were indeed Birmingham born and bred, he’d stopped asking questions and, even though he hadn’t spotted anyone following him, had taken a roundabout route back to the hotel.

Climbing the main stairs, he paused on the landing on the first floor and, looking down into the narrow foyer, waited. After five minutes had elapsed and no one had sidled in to inquire about the gentleman who had just entered, he continued on to the second floor, and their suite.

Opening the door, he walked in.

Standing at the table between the two long windows, Miranda glanced up from some packages she was unwrapping. Hands stilling, her gaze searched his face. “What did you learn?”

Shutting the door, he shook his head. “I had to stop asking. My queries were attracting too much attention.” Shrugging off his greatcoat, he laid it over a chair.

She straightened. “If we can’t ask, how will we learn?”

“We have other options.” He crossed the room to her. “The Philanthropy Guild funds a large project here. Through that I have contacts who’ll be happy to help, and who are likely to be more successful than I. They’re locals, so information on other locals will be easier for them to get.”

Halting by the table, he studied the contents of various brown-paper-wrapped parcels. Bandages, ointments, gauze, a small pair of scissors, a set of small splints, several pills and powders. “Where did you get these?”

Miranda might not know him well, but she recognized the import of his too-quiet, too-even tone. However, having no idea why on earth he would disapprove, she ignored it. “From the apothecary’s a few streets away. If Roderick’s foot is broken and he’s in pain—and he may well be fevered by now, too—then I’ll need these to tend him once we rescue him. The sooner he gets help the better, and as we have no idea if there’ll be a doctor close—”

“You went out alone—you walked to the apothecary’s shop, and back, alone?”

She frowned. “Yes. I asked the clerk downstairs and—”

“Since when did walking the streets in a large city alone become acceptable practice for a respectable lady?”

She stiffened, straightened. “It was the middle of the afternoon and it was only a short distance—”

“How far away it was isn’t the point.”

Roscoe watched her hazel eyes ignite.

The carapace of rigid restraint behind which she’d retreated cracked and fell away, and she asked with heated intensity, “Then what
is
your point?”

Jaw set, he held her gaze and implacably stated the obvious. “You should have waited for me.”

Her eyes flew wide in wholly spurious shock. “Good gracious! If you imagine I’m going to ask your permission to fetch bandages for my injured brother, you can think again. Or is it that you believe me too weak to carry these parcels?” A haughty wave at the items on the table. “Or, no—wait. I have it. You believe that I’m too witless to know what to buy!”

“
None
of those things.” The sheer weight of reined temper in his voice should have made her back down; any of his men would have.

Instead, she leaned closer, her eyes boring into his. “Then
what
?”

The belligerent, stubborn, imperious demand rang in his ears. Eyes locked with hers, equally furious, he dragged in a breath, grimly held onto his temper. “
Miss
Clifford.”

Her eyes widened again. “What happened to Miranda?” She jabbed a finger at him. “You were quick enough to use my name when it suited you.”

His jaw felt as if it would crack. “Miranda, then. I—”

“For your information”—she tipped her chin higher—“I am not a child who needs to be watched over. I’m twenty-nine years old, I’ve managed a household for years, and I’m perfectly capable of walking several hundred yards in broad daylight without getting lost, or accosted, or whatever it is you’re imagining!”

She was a twenty-nine-year-old lady whose posture and glide evoked visions of a goddess, who dressed beyond conservatively yet succeeded in drawing male eyes wherever she went, but she lived too distanced from the wider world to have any notion of such visceral attraction.

Leashing his temper was what he needed to do; why it had escaped him, why the notion of her being potentially exposed to danger when he hadn’t been close enough to aid her had succeeded in so provoking it . . . eyes still locked with hers, he drew in a deep breath. Felt his temper quiver like a hound about to pounce. “It would,” he said, his tone deadly, low, precise, “have been better all around if you had waited until I returned—”

She threw her hands in the air. “I had no
idea
when you would come back!” Narrowing her eyes on his, she demanded, “And better for whom?”

His temper erupted. “
Me,
if you must know!”

She flung her arms wide. “
Why
?”

Involuntarily, he stepped closer.

Head tipping back, she held her ground, her adamantine gaze locked with his.

They stood toe to toe, temper to temper, will to steely will—while he battled the urge to sweep her into his arms and answer her question.

The heat of their tempers, and something else, licked like flames over them both.

This wasn’t wise. The effort it took to haul his impulses in and lash them down, then ease one small step back, away from the precipice on which they’d both stood teetering, left him inwardly trembling.

She blinked, seemed to realize only then how close to real danger she’d stood.

Breathing in enough to have her breasts rising, she edged back a step, too.

That made it easier for him to swing away, to swipe up his greatcoat, then stalk to the door before which his traveling bag sat. Bending, he hefted the bag, and with his hand on the doorknob glanced back. “What time’s dinner?”

She met his gaze levelly. “I arranged it for seven o’clock, in the dining room downstairs.”

“I’ll meet you here just before.” Not a question. Pushing the door open, he walked through.

Miranda watched the door close with careful precision.

She stared at the uninformative panels for a full minute, then, her heart still racing, lips firming, she turned back to sorting her supplies.

N
ine o’clock the following morning saw her, garbed in her black mourning gown but without her hat and veil, standing beside Roscoe on the pavement outside a large church. A sign declared the massive edifice to be St. Philip’s, including St. Egbert’s Home for Boys. “The Philanthropy Guild supports the boys’ home?”

Starting up the steps, Roscoe glanced sideways to ensure she was following. “It was one of our first projects.” His first project, long before the Guild had been born. “And we don’t just support it. The Guild is the principal benefactor.”

Pushing open one of the heavy church doors, he held it for her. When she paused in the foyer, he waved down the nave. “There’s a corridor off the transept.”

He would have preferred not to have brought her with him, risking her learning more than he wished, but the thought of leaving her to spend her day alone, at liberty to wander wherever she took it into her head to go, had occurred only to be dismissed; the potential for calamity was too great.