To Tempt a Saint (22 page)

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Authors: Kate Moore

BOOK: To Tempt a Saint
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“You had the wind knocked out of you.” His voice was rough, his breath warm against her ear, his body’s strength solid. He took the pig-sticking knife from her shaking hand and dropped it in his pocket.
He reached for Charlie, pulling the boy to his feet. Charlie shook, and his wild hair stuck out every which way. “It . . . happened . . . so f-f-f-ast.”
“You acted fast.” Xander Jones clapped a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You saved your sister.”
Charlie looked around at the street. There were no signs of the brief attack except the chestnut pan, its coals and chestnuts spilled. “That giant was trying to put her in the cart.”
For a moment they stood, Xander Jones holding them together. Cleo felt her lungs contract painfully, her heartbeat slow its frantic tempo. The image of Charlie on the ground with the brute’s boot aimed at his head flashed in her mind, a moment of utter powerlessness. She began to shake.
“Got your breath now?”
She didn’t yet. He held her while she coughed violently, covered in bits of dry, fragrant leaves.
When her lungs and throat felt clear, she nodded. “Thank you,” she said to Xander. “You saved him.”
“He saved
you
, Cleo.” Charlie turned to Xander. “There were three of them, weren’t there, sir—the chestnut boy, the brute with the sack, and the donkey driver was in on it, too?” His eyes relived the attack.
“Could you say what any of them looked like?” Charlie shook his head. “Who were they? Not thieves.”
Xander Jones caught Cleo’s eye, a question in his glance. She shook her head. They both knew March was behind this. One minute the world was an ordinary and familiar place of donkey carts and street vendors. The next, it was violent, alien.
“You were following us.”
“You never saw me.”
 
 
 
 
 
X
ANDER heard the tentative knock on his door as he knotted his cravat. Not his wife then, unless she was feeling subdued by the aftereffects of the attack. “Come in.”
Charlie poked his head in. “Sir, could I have a word with you?”
“Xander,” he corrected, motioning the boy in. “Brothers-in-law can call each other by name, I think.”
Charlie swallowed. “Xander, then, thank you. Again. You knocked that fellow to Jericho, and . . .” Charlie looked at the fire.
“And?”
He met Xander’s gaze with apparent effort. “And, well, we,
I
, haven’t been as grateful as I should be for your hospitality, for having us both here. You see I thought you just wanted Cleo’s money. But you’ve been decent to us both. Well, more than decent. My room. Mr. Hodge. Telling me about the gasworks. And . . .”
“And?”
“You protected Cleo. I’m supposed to protect her because I’m her only male relative, but she’s always been older. She always protects me even though I’m taller and grown, and I should protect her, but she just takes charge and goes and does what she wants, and she calls me
dearest
, and I gave her the knife when I should have ...”
“Charlie, sit.” Xander pointed to a chair by the hearth.
“Yes, sir, Xander, sir.”
Xander took the chair opposite. “You are not to blame for the attack on your sister. And you will always be an important man in her life, but she does have me. I should have been closer instead of following to prove a point to your stubborn sister. She and I have to sort that out between us.”
He expected the boy to look comforted and relieved, but Charlie squirmed in the chair.
“Got more to confess?”
“Yes,” he blurted.
Xander controlled his expression. “Go on.”
“You’re being decent as Jupiter.” Charlie gave a sigh. “And we’ve been calling you Bluebeard.”
“Bluebeard?”
“You know, the fellow in the story who murders his wives.”
Xander raised a brow.
“You have the house and the secrets and you seem not to like Cleo very much, but then you did protect her, so you can’t mean to murder her for her fortune and stuff her in a closet.”
“I see those closets trouble you both.”
Charlie nodded.
“This is my mother’s house, you know. She lives in Paris now, and the closets hold her things.”
“Oh, makes perfect sense.”
“I’m glad to relieve your mind.”
“I won’t call you Bluebeard again. I started it, not Cleo.”
“Good to know I’ve come up a bit in your estimation.”
The boy lapsed into silence.
“Is that it?”
“Yes, sir, Xander.”
Xander stood. “Thanks for your frankness.”
“You’re going out?” Charlie stood up, too, looking sheepish again. “I’ve held you up.”
Xander shook his head. He was not about to tell his young brother-in-law that he had to distance himself from Cleo or bed her. Their marriage would end soon. He and Will were close to finding Kit, closer than they had ever been. He could use his wife’s money and repay her twice over, but he would be the bastard Miss Finsbury named him if he took her body and her affections.
He had never been more tempted to do both. She had walked away after the attack when he thought he could not let her out of his sight. Only the blaze of light in his house had kept him standing in one spot as she disappeared up the stairs.
March had tried to take her from him. Of that he had no doubt, which meant that even with Tucker’s willingness to perjure himself, March didn’t expect to win their legal battle, or he didn’t want the matter to reach the court. What did March fear to have exposed in that court? That was a problem Xander would take up with Norwood in the morning.
“Yes, well, I wanted to be honest.” Charlie’s words reminded Xander that the boy was still standing there.
“Pass your entrance test, and I’ll show you the gasworks.”
The boy’s eyes widened. “Yes, sir, Xander.”
“Charlie, if you remember anything more about your attackers, you’ll tell me?”
The boy nodded.
There was something, a detail that nagged at Xander, but it was another wagon he saw. He was walking up a fog-shrouded street with Kit, the rumble of cart wheels fading in the darkness before them.
 
 
 
 
 
C
LEO clutched the rail of her little balcony, already too numb to feel the cold. She wanted her husband. He had a power over her quite different from her uncle’s power. Little tremors still shook her, and impressions flashed in her mind like the countryside seen from a runaway gig.
The chestnut boy’s face concealed by the cap and scarf. Falling. Gasping for air. Seeing the boot raised above Charlie’s head. Will Jones warning her that she could disappear. The shadow with the white face in her garden.
She tried to picture the chestnut boy’s face. Nothing came. She saw his oversized cap and heard his accent, pure London street. She did not want to think she had been a fool, leaving food for him in her garden only to be so wholly betrayed, but the boy in the cap had been part of the attack. He must have been watching her from the first to know her face and her habits.
Voices drifted up from the kitchen. She took a steadying breath, scanning the darkness below. The kitchen door opened, spilling a stream of light into the dark. Instantly, a shadow shifted at the base of the tree on the far side of the garden. Cleo swung her gaze to the place and kept it there while Isaiah passed unknowing through the gate.
Nothing moved below her for a long frozen moment. Cleo studied the thick trunk of the tree where she had seen movement. Her bundle was gone. She heard Isaiah putting the horses to the carriage. Alice called from behind her, and in a flash, a shadow tore itself loose from the tree and sped toward the back of the garden. It scrambled nimbly up the wall.
“Wait,” she cried.
A pale face turned her way for an arrested second, then the shadow dropped out of sight, and she heard light footsteps fade in the lane. And she knew her spy was not the chestnut seller. The chestnut seller had strong, white teeth.
Chapter Sixteen
X
ANDER returned at two and found his wife in his bed. He tossed his jacket on a chair by the hearth. “Did you come to express your gratitude?” he asked, though the answer did not matter. He had delayed this reckoning as long as he could.
“No.” The green eyes flashed, startling him with their certainty.
She sat propped against his pillows, her coppery hair loose about her shoulders, a heap of discarded silk, her wrapper, on the floor. Candlelight made the white ridge of her collarbone soft as pearls. Other women had invited him to shadowy beds in dim rooms to exchange guilty pleasure. Only this woman met him in the light, wholly and frankly herself.
His hand closed mindlessly on the end of his cravat, a fragment of intention caught in a rushing Thames of desire. He jerked the linen loose and tossed it after the jacket.
Deliberately crossing away from the bed, he repeated the litany of resistance he had been saying to himself since her arrival on Hill Street. She was here because her uncle attacked her. She was here to free herself from March whatever the cost. She was here to get a babe. She had not come for him.
It was no use. He felt himself yield to her, to the dream released from his sleeping mind. At the door to his dressing room he tried one last tactic.
“Is this an attack? Do you have your knife?”
“I believe you have it.” Cleo could not be sure he really saw her, understood her presence in his bed. He spared her the briefest glance, a look that was not cold steel, but a volatile quicksilver flash, the leap of something alive.
Xander’s feet, less bedazzled than the rest of him, carried him into the dressing room, away from her. But such was his weakness for her that he had already filled the room with her presence. Her knife lay on the chest of drawers next to the straw and the jar of leeches—a brief history of their marriage. He worked the buttons of his waistcoat, finding his fingers unexpectedly clumsy with the silk. He was a man who had undressed before frankly appreciative ladies whose accomplishments went far beyond piano playing and embroidery. Already his cock pressed insistently against linen and wool.
Cleo’s gaze followed her husband’s back as he passed into his dressing room. The sight of him stripped away the layers of reasons in which she had clothed this one action of waiting naked for Xander Jones in his bed. Really she had no other reason than wanting him.
She understood now the import of that first moment in the bank. It had led inevitably to this one. His back, straight, broad-shouldered, clothed in fine wool, had revealed him to her as clearly as any volume of the history of his life. That back, that stance invited the world to do its worst. He would shake off whatever blow fell on those broad shoulders. He would not bend or bow if the world called him bastard or laughed at his dreams or blocked his path. He had risen above his birth and the world’s taunts to become himself.
Her knife had always been useless, a puny thing against his will. She hadn’t seen that until now, but desire, this longing that consumed her, filled her up, and shook her, made her body a force against him that would overwhelm his will.
“It’s only me,” she called. “The only weapon I have is myself.”
Then I am in trouble
, he thought. He freed himself of gentlemanly trappings, except for his trousers, a moment of sanity taking hold before he presented himself to her in all his evident need. In the bedroom he stopped a few feet from the bed.
“You’ve put yourself in an interesting spot.” His voice sounded rusty in his ears.
“You said you dreamed of me naked.” She caught the flash of his gaze before his dark lashes swept down. His plain room revealed him, too, its drawers firmly closed on perfumed letters with overflowing script. He had closed himself off against emotion and sensuality, her saint.
“I understand that I have been cast as Bluebeard in your story.”

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