Untamable Rogue (Formerly: A Christmas Baby) (2 page)

“Not a chance in Hades,” said the third rogue—Hunter, Ash called him—his whiskey-induced grin rather endearing, if also a danger to the female population. “Though I do think your grandfather’s ultimatum is rather absurd, not to mention, damned-near impossible to achieve. At this rate, you’ll never inherit.”

“Stubble it, Hunter,” Myles said to both the personal slight to himself, and the discouraging commentary on Ash’s dubious future.

Hunter shrugged and returned his attention to Ash. “Devilish bit of bad luck, there, getting yourself jilted again.”

Again? Larkin sat straighter, ignoring their banter as it escalated toward disagreement. Jilted? Ashford Blackburne had been left at the altar? More than once?

Were society women daft?

“Does the first count as a real jilt?” Hunter, with his whiskey-grin, put in. “You ran off to fight Boney without a word, after all, and Ellenora was desperate to marry; we all knew that. She could hardly be expected to wait and see if you would survive. Ames was a Duke with a fortune as big as hers, so she
would
take him.”

Ash leaned over the table, fisted a quick hand, and knocked the sot of a speaker on his arse. “Thank you for the patronizing reminder, but she took the man too bloody fast, if you ask me. She did not even wait two months and that I cannot forgive. Fact is, I’d rather run this pub than be stuck with the fickle likes of either flighty jilt.”  

Whoever the women were, they must be lacking in wits, as well as eyesight, to deny their hands in marriage to a handsome rogue like Ashford Blackburne, Lark thought, ignoring the talk of trade and pub profits that ensued.

She would have waited for Ash, however long it took him to return, Lark admitted to herself, no matter the issue of low funds, for Ashford Blackburn would know how to treat a lady. Then again, she did not need much—a cot, a warm blanket, a monthly bath.

“Well now, I don’t feature
sellin
’ ye me pub, me fine Lord, but I’d sure like a go at playin’ ye for it.”

At her father’s words, and no small shot of panic, the warm haze of Lark’s musings popped. What? What had her Da just said? Rat’s whiskers, she wished she’d been paying attention.

“Name your stakes,” Ash said.

Oh no
. Lark sat straighter and peeked around the stair-wall as Ash rubbed his clean, strong hands in glee, the fool. He’d had a great deal too much to drink, if he was thinking of playing her Da for The Pickled Pigsty.

Lark sighed as her father called for Toby, his barman, to bring a “
fresh
” deck—properly marked, of course. She supposed she should be Da hadn’t tried to add her to the pot.

“If ye win, ye get me fine pub,” said her Da, spelling out the terms and entertaining Lark with his wit. No doubt he’d also add his secret recipe for mystery-critter stew, and call it ambrosia. “If ye lose,” he said, shuffling the cards fast enough to make the sots dizzy, “I get a thousand gold guineas. And just so ye don’t go home empty-handed,” he added, generous as a Lord, “I’ll throw in me beautiful daughter for wife, as a consolation.”

Ash gave an inebriated laugh and took another swallow of his whiskey, as Lark rose with a silent screech and made to leap to her own defense … until her father shot out with a right, and liked to blacken her eye.

She hit the floor behind Ash and scampered back to her walled stairwell as he looked up from his drink. “Did you hear that?” Ash asked no one in particular.

“Rats,” said her Da as he dealt the cards. “To keep the cats out.” He shuddered. “Hate the mewling things.”

Lark cupped her throbbing eye and refused to acknowledge the sting. She had once seen her sister on her knees, weeping and groveling at the feet of a bloody cur, and vowed there and then that no man would see tears in Larkin McAdams eyes
…
especially not Ash, the man who’d once called her brave.

Testing her vision, Lark saw him pointedly regard her father with speculation in his red, drink-dazed eyes.

Myles cleared his throat with authority. “The daughter of an innkeeper is hardly a suitable wife for an Earl, old man.”

No bloody fooling, Lark thought, but her father rose, as if in indignation. “Her mother was the daughter of a duke, I’ll have ye know,” he said in all truth, though he failed to mention that Mum had been born on the wrong side of the blanket.

Ash’s laugh raised Larkin’s hackles in an odd, unsettling way, as if she must prove her worth, when she knew bloody well she had no worth to prove.

“How old is this unexpected blue-blood?”

“Twenty-two come May.”

Ash choked on his drink. “A bit long in the tooth.”

Larkin took offense, wishing she could fight for her aggrieved honor, for no one else would.

“Look at it this way,” Myles said. “Win or lose, your problem is solved.”

“I bleeding well wish he would lose for a change,” Hunter said, retaking his seat and tossing a handful of coins on the scarred oak table. “Might as well throw my blunt in a cesspit.”

Ash regarded his friend Myles with intoxicated bewilderment. “What problem will be solved if I win or lose?”

“If you win the game, you win the pub, so you won’t need a bride or your grandfather’s blunt when you’re turning a profit. If you lose the game, you get the bride you need to fulfill your grandfather’s requirements. Either way, you win.”

Ash seemed to ponder some thorny quandary, and after a stupefied minute, in which Larkin found herself holding her breath for some odd reason, Ash nodded, as if with respect for his friend’s wisdom. Then without thought to the consequences of the shoddy solution, he returned his attention to the cards in his hand—a measure of his whiskey-soaked brain.

Why did a man like Ashford Blackburne not have brides clawing at each other to get him to the altar? Lark wondered.

Though Ash took her father’s “gracious” suggestion to heart, that he “start the bloody betting,” Ash’s brow remained furrowed throughout the better part of the first hand.

“A consolation prize for wife,” Myles repeated, his chuckle harsh in the deep silence. “Lose and you could have a woman with no choice but to marry you.”

Ash cursed and Larkin’s eyes widened, but even as she tried to work up the proper measure of indignation on his behalf, or imagine her hero losing at anything, a rather pleasant lethargy stole over her at the very notion.

Ashford Blackburne for husband … she should be so fortunate.

“Is she a virgin, at least?” her erstwhile hero asked, sending a shaft of fury through Lark, and lowering him mightily in her esteem, partly for the intimate nature of the question, and partly because he attended more to arranging his bloody cards than either her Da’s answer or the cheatin’ glint in her sire’s eyes.

CHAPTER TWO

Two hours later, Larkin knew that Ashford Blackburne, womanizer, spendthrift, card sharp, was as good, or as bad, as his colorful reputation painted him. He was like to win the game, hands-down, despite her father’s treachery, and the knowledge made her sweat.

She had started thinking of little Micah, alone in the country—no mother, save her, God help him, not that she managed to see him above twice a year, if that often.

What would it mean to Micah to be brought up in the home of a wealthy man like Ashford Blackburne?

With growing apprehension, and that thought in mind, Lark watched the game’s every turn through the eyeball-sized hole she had bored between the planks in the stair-wall over the years.

Only two players remained now—her father and Ash. The others had long since fallen into whiskey-induced sleeps, Myles with his head on the table, Hunter curled on the floor—snorting and snoring fit to rattle the rafters, the both of them.

This last hand could decide Micah’s fate, Lark realized. Until today, the boy might have spent his adult life on the streets, at worst, or running the Pickled Barrel Inn, at best,
if
her father ever relented and acknowledged his grandson’s existence.

At seven, Micah was too young to care which sad future he faced, but Larkin cared. He was a good boy, was Micah, living in a foster home without complaint, asking for nothing save a warm blanket and a daily scrap of bread, but Larkin wanted better for the boy.

The more she considered his wretched prospects, the more she knew that this fool’s game of chance might very well be his single hope for a decent life. If only she could tip the scales….

Her Da rose and went to nudge Toby, none-too-gently, toward the door and Ash lowered his cards to take a left-handed swig of the inferior ale just poured him. The drunker her Da’s customers got, the lower the quality of drink he served, and Ashford Blackburne and his cronies were plenty damned drunk.

Larkin regarded the cards dangling from Ash’s loose grip as something akin to a gift from the gods, and she had never been one to refuse a gift. With Micah’s future in the balance, she reached over and plucked at the fabric of Ash’s right sleeve.

His cards hit the floor and scattered.

While Ash blinked and looked about, as if to identify the sound, Lark replaced his Ace with her father’s two of hearts, the card Da had earlier switched for the Ace up his sleeve.

Lark had originally pocketed the switched card as evidence of her father’s cheat, with a thought to proving her sire’s deception and setting Ash free. That she was now attempting the opposite, Lark considered minor compared to Micah’s needs.

Later— Later, she would fix everything. She would set Ash free, she promised herself, but not until Micah’s future was secure.

When Ash gathered his pickled wits enough to retrieve his cards from the floor, and she knew there was no turning back, panic and remorse rose in Lark, until she reminded herself that her switch was no worse than picking pockets to keep a boy—a babe, really—fed and sheltered. She loved Micah enough to do murder, if she must, so what mattered a little fast and fancy card shuffling in the harsh game of daily survival?  

When Ash crowed, Lark cowered and covered her head, certain she was caught and about to be trounced. Prickles raced up her arms and down her legs, but the blow never came. When she raised her head, and looked through the peep hole, all Ash had done, as her father took his seat, was fan his cards on the table with a flourish. “Looks like I win,” said the cocksure Earl, brain addled and smile bright.

At her father’s greedy-eyed behest, Lark watched her toppled hero focus on his “winning” hand with slow-dawning surprise. He scratched his head of dark mahogany, and examined his cards again. “I’ll be damned.”

“Damned or married, same difference,” said her Da slapping his own winning hand onto the table. “Arky!” he bellowed.

When Lark could not move a trembling limb, could not for the life of her believe what she had set in motion, her father’s beefy fist appeared to drag her by the scruff of her neck into the morning light. “Behold yer bride, me lord. Ah and here’s the vicar, as fetched by me good man Toby.”

“Wait just a bloody minute!” Ash rose like a vengeful god, no longer a victim, but the Earl of Blackburne once more. He towered over the group with haughty disdain, and looked ten times more glorious for it, in Larkin’s opinion.

Of a sudden, his alert predator’s eyes, however red-rimmed, were fixed upon her, as if he knew the depth of her deception. Black and furious as thunder, dangerous, Ashford Blackburne looked. Menacing. And more handsome than a racing heart could bear.

Lark told herself she could stop this foolishness now. Ash deserved better than a stinking, street-smart pickpocket for wife, but for the life of her, she could not make her throat work enough to speak the truth and set him free. For Micah’s sake, she dared not.