Tiger's Eye (18 page)

Alec took advantage of the man’s pain to punch him in the throat, once, twice, as hard as he could from such an awkward position. The man choked, his body snapping back away from the blows. Alec used the man’s loss of center to get his heels beneath him once more and heave the attacker up and off his body.

In seconds Alec had him pinned on his stomach on the floor and was on top of him, his own arm closing about the other’s neck.

There was a sound at the door leading to the hall. Even as Alec registered it, the door burst open, flying back on its hinges, crashing into the wall. Alec tensed, looking at the site of this new threat with savage eyes. His arm tightened reflexively around his prisoner’s neck.

“What the bloody ’ell …?”

“Alec, are you all right?”

It was Paddy, with Pearl right behind him. The fight had completely gone out of the man beneath Alec. Keeping a wary eye on him, Alec sat up and put a hand to his injured shoulder, wincing.

“They had another go at murdering me,” he said grimly, addressing Paddy, then looked in the direction of the bed, which seemed to be empty. Fear tightened his throat. “Isabella …”

Paddy lit a candle and held it high, illuminating the room. His other hand gripped a pistol. Pearl ran toward Alec where he sat cross-legged on the floor, breathing hard as he tried to catch his breath.

There was no doubt that the assassination attempt had been aimed at him. But had they killed Isabella instead?

XXIII

“R
ight behind you,” Paddy said dryly. Alec turned his head to find Isabella, candlestick clutched in hand, standing motionless by the hearth.

“Thank God,” Alec said, closing his eyes in a momentary wash of relief.

“I couldn’t tell which one of you was which. I was afraid I would hit the wrong man,” she said, her voice oddly hoarse. She dropped the candlestick with a clatter to the hearth. Then she sat down beside it, as though her knees had suddenly given out. Her head lolled forward to rest on her knees. Her hair, loosened from its braid, fell in a curtain of waves to the floor.

“Oh, Alec, you’re bleedin’!”

Pearl dropped to her knees at his side and dabbed at the bloody puncture in his shoulder with the hem of her extravagant nightdress.

“I’ve had worse,” Alec said impatiently, although the blood ran down his arm and chest, and his shoulder ached. Still, he’d been in fights enough to know that the injury wasn’t mortal, not anywhere near the same degree of seriousness as the ball he’d recently taken through the chest. He had a feeling that the wooziness he was beginning to feel was more a result of the brandy he had consumed than the wound.

“Goddamn, Alec, ’e’s dead! You broke ’is bloody neck!” Paddy, examining the man Alec had felled last, sounded disgusted. Straightening with a shake of his head, Paddy crossed to the bloody corpse blocking the entrance to the dressing room.

“ ’Ell, you’ve done for this rotter too! ’Ow do you expect to find out who’s behind this if you keep crabbing ’em before we can question ’em?”

Alec sat up, suffering Pearl to dab at his shoulder as he grimaced at Paddy.

“I beg your pardon, I’m sure. Next time I have a fight to the death, I’ll try to be more careful.” Irony lay heavy in his voice, but as was usual with such nuances, it was lost on Paddy, who was going through the dead man’s pockets with a disgruntled look on his face.

“I’ll send for Mr. ’Eath,” Pearl said.

“The hell you will,” Alec said fiercely. Then he added more slowly, “At least, not for me. Isabella …”

Pearl’s eyes narrowed. Isabella lifted her head from her knees. Great blue eyes met his.

“I’m all right. Just shaken up a bit.”

“You’re not injured in any way?” Alec asked.

Isabella shook her head. “My throat aches a little, where he tried to strangle me, but I’m not hurt.” Her lips quivered. “Dear God, who were they, and what did they want? They weren’t after me. Were they?”

This last was said in a tiny voice that begged for reassurance. It made Alec wish the bastards were alive so that he could kill them again.

“ ’Tis certain they were after Alec. After all, your people all think you dead. You’re safe enough, as long as they continue to think so,” Paddy answered.

“Do you recognize them, Paddy?” Alec asked.

“Nah. Though there’s something about this one …” Paddy’s voice trailed off as he stared at the corpse at his feet.

Alec’s eyes narrowed on the dead man. He was almost sure he’d never seen either of them before—but as Paddy said, there was something … “Somehow they found out I was here. But how?”

Paddy shook his head. “No one knew where you were but Pearl and me—and the countess ’ere. We didn’t tell, and she couldn’t ’ave. Someone must ’ave seen something and gotten suspicious.”

“I know what it was!” Pearl exclaimed. “That night she ran out into the ’all! One of the girls saw ’er, and the gent saw ’er too, and they figured out that we were using ’er to ’ide you!”

Alec’s eyes moved to rest thoughtfully on Isabella as he considered Pearl’s theory. Paddy stared at her too. Isabella looked guilt-stricken at the mere idea. Alec quickly shook his head.

“That’s not likely. There’s no one to connect Isabella with me. ’Tis more likely that Paddy’s been seen coming and going here more than is usual, and someone drew conclusions from that.”

Paddy nodded. “That’s possible.”

Pearl looked disappointed, Isabella looked relieved.

“Well, we can puzzle it out later,” Pearl said as she got briskly to her feet. She noticed the small crowd of half-clad girls and their gents who, attracted by the commotion, had gathered in the open doorway to stare.

“You girls go on about your business! Take your gentlemen with you! Go on now! Shoo!”

“But Miss Pearl, all this blood …!” One wide-eyed chit with improbable red hair swept the room with her eyes, and made a distasteful moue. “What ’appened? Who’s the gents who’ve been offed?”

“ ’Tis none of your business, is it now, Daisy? I don’t pay you—any of you—to ask questions. Gentlemen, unless you care to pass the remainder of the evening in some other establishment, I suggest you return to your entertainment. Girls, take your gents and get back to work!”

Pearl’s threat had the effect of making the girls scatter, pulling their men with them. As they left, Alec got to his feet. His legs were a little rubbery, and blood spurted from the gash in his shoulder as he moved. He looked at the wound, disgusted.

“Get something to tie this up with, would you, Pearl?”

“Darlin’, let me send for the sawbones! You took quite a beatin’! Besides your arm, your eye’s all swollen! Please, Alec?”

Her earlier ire at him was forgotten in the face of his present condition, Alec realized. Pearl really was a very good sort. So he smiled at her even as he reiterated his firm no to the sawbones. That smile did the trick. She practically cooed at him before hurrying away to get bandages and medicines.

Paddy was busying himself with searching the bodies. With a cursory glance at him, Alec crossed to where Isabella sat huddled on the raised hearth.

As he crouched down in front of her, her eyes met his, and a faint color stained her cheeks.

“Let me see your throat.”

“I’m fine. Really.”

“Let me see.” He was insistent. The look she gave him from big, dark-shadowed eyes was inscrutable. But she obediently lifted her chin and let him see her throat. Alec winced.

The delicate skin was scraped and red. There were three long scratches down the side of her neck where the slimy bastard’s fingernails had raked her.

Alec felt that fierce urge to kill again as he raised a hand to touch the raw scratches. Isabella flinched.

“Don’t touch me,” she said quietly. Her eyes were very blue suddenly. The light smattering of freckles that dusted the bridge of her delicate nose stood out more than usual against the shocked paleness of her skin. Her mouth looked slightly swollen and very soft. From his kisses, of course. Staring at those lush red lips, Alec suddenly thought how very much he wanted to kiss her again.

Something of what he felt must have shown in his eyes, because she drew away from him.

“Don’t ever touch me again.” Her voice was steady.

He looked up from her mouth to meet her eyes. “Isabella …” he began, impatient to have her come off her high ropes and smile at him as she usually did. Hell, he could explain about Pearl, and if an explanation was not enough, he would even apologize. Anything to stop her from looking at him like he was something that had just crawled out from under a rock.

“Alec, come over here! I think I recognize this chap after all!”

Paddy’s summons interrupted him before he could put his intentions into words. His eyes flickered in Paddy’s direction with some annoyance, and his lips compressed.

“Alec!”

“Go on,” Isabella said, and her eyes shifted away from his. Again that fugitive wash of color stained her cheeks and receded.

Alec cursed under his breath as he got to his feet. When he explained to Isabella all the ins and outs of the situation in which he’d found himself, he wanted to do so in privacy. And now was definitely not the time for the kind of discussion he had in mind.

“I’m coming,” he said to Paddy, then quickly stepped to the bed and pulled the blue silk coverlet from it.

“Wrap up in this. You look cold,” he said brusquely, dropping it around Isabella’s shoulders. She looked at him without speaking, her eyes guarded, but she did pull the coverlet around her shoulders, cocooning herself in its soft folds.

XXIV

I
sabella pulled the blue silk coverlet closer about her body, trying to stop herself from shaking. But with the best will in the world she could not.

It had been, in every sense of the word, a hideous evening.

Alec had killed two men tonight. She had known that he was capable of violence—of course, he had to be to come up as he had through London’s slum hierarchy—but somehow it had never seemed real before. Even the shootings she had witnessed when he had confronted her kidnappers had not seemed real. But this—this bloodbath was real. He had fought for his life and hers, killed two men, painted the walls and floors of her chamber with blood, and sustained a dreadful-looking wound himself. Yet he did not seem particularly shaken.

Certainly he was not racked with remorse, or trembling with reaction as she was.

Pearl was his mistress, yet he had bedded her, Isabella, as casually as he might change his boots. Like the violence, her surrender to him appeared to have affected him not at all.

Which brought her to the inevitable question: Just what kind of man was Alec Tyron anyway?

Isabella made a sound that was almost a sob under her breath.

Giving herself to him had been a monumental act, one that would haunt her the rest of her life.

She doubted if he would remember it by the morrow.

That was the kind of man he was: a handsome thug, a charming brute. A user, especially of women. His easy charm was only camouflage masking the cold steel of the man beneath.

Witness how he had dispatched the two would-be assassins: with utter ruthlessness. And in bedding her without any emotion save lust, he had displayed the same ruthlessness.

Tears began to fill her eyes. Isabella closed them tightly, willing herself not to cry. She was not the first woman to make a fool of herself over a man. And she would not be the last.

Despite her best efforts, a tear forced its way past her closed lids, rolled down her cheek. Without making a sound she huddled on the hearth, blue silk coverlet wrapping her to her chin, face buried in her knees so that no one would see the tears streaking her cheeks.

“There, now, angel, you’ve got no cause to cry.”

Isabella looked up in surprise as Pearl, her nightdress covered now by a feather-trimmed emerald wrapper, sat down beside her, draping an arm around her shoulders. The other woman’s eyes were surprisingly compassionate. Isabella took a deep breath, fighting to control her voice.

“I … I’m just being silly, I know. But I … I can’t seem to stop.”

“Shock,” Pearl said knowledgeably. “You need to lie down. Come on, into bed with you!”

Isabella looked at that bed where so many unspeakable things had happened to her in that one night, and shuddered. She could not lie there again.

“I … Could I have another room, do you think, just for the rest of the night? The blood …”

“Sure, angel. Sure. I don’t blame you, neither. Come on, you can share with me.” Pearl was warmly understanding.

“Thank you. That’s very kind of you.”

“You’ve kind of got ‘kind’ on the brain, don’t you? But all right, if you like, I’m being kind. Can you stand up?”

Isabella managed to get to her feet. Her knees shook, but with the support of Pearl’s arm around her waist, she was able to walk. Alec crouched on one knee near the door. His shoulder now sported a bandage similar to the one around his chest, which Isabella supposed Pearl had applied for him while she sat with her head dropped on her knees. As she and Pearl approached, he looked up from his examination of some items apparently culled from the pockets of one of the dead man’s clothes.

“Where are you going?”

“She’s going to sleep the rest of the night with me,” Pearl answered.

Alec’s eyes fastened on Isabella. She quickly averted her face, refusing to meet his gaze. His lips compressed, but then he nodded.

“ ’Tis probably a good idea. Pearl will take care of you.”

Isabella didn’t say anything, and her face was expressionless as she and Pearl walked slowly out the door and down the hall.

One or two of the girls were leaning out into the hall, watching with interest as Pearl, in her elaborate wrapper, and Isabella, still wrapped in the coverlet, came their way. Pearl sent them popping back inside their rooms with no more than a searing look. No doubt the locked room and the mysteriously ill “new girl” had been the object of much speculation amongst the Carousel’s denizens. And the night’s noisy excitement would have added to their curiosity. Isabella was conscious of eyes boring into her back as she started down the stairs.