The cold, heavy weight of the pistol dangled from Gerard’s hand. An icy ball of fury had lodged in his chest, slowing his heartbeats until each one of them rang in his ears like a ship’s bell tolling disaster. He could scent blood, taste the heady promise of violence on his tongue. Through the roaring in his ears, he heard laughing taunts in. French and Spanish, the dull thud of a boot slamming into his rib cage, the impotent rattle of chains. A hand gave his sleeve a tentative tug.
He swung around, his chest heaving with fury.
“Are you all right?” Lucy whispered.
A wave of self-loathing washed over him. He was supposed to be this woman’s bodyguard, yet she stood gazing up at him, her fingers entangled in his sleeve, her eyes luminous with tender concern.
She was shaking so hard that the rattle of her teeth was audible. Disheveled strands of hair tumbled over her face. Shadows bruised the delicate skin beneath her eyes, making them look even more enormous against the stark pallor of her skin. She had valiantly tried to arrange the soot-stained tatters of her cape around her, as if they could ward off more than just the chill.
As she blinked back tears with a stubborn bravery that shamed him, the ball of ice in Gerard’s chest began to melt. He felt something he’d only felt once before. A searing heat. A fierce tenderness. A raw desire to protect and cherish. A dangerous vulnerability.
He shoved the pistol into his coat and reached for her, but the ugly stains on his hands stopped him. Bloodstains. Not his own, but the blood of others.
Perhaps it was for the best. Better for her to see his true nature as only those dark, damning stains could reveal it. He waited for her to recoil in horrified disgust for the sort of man he had proved himself to be.
He was stunned when, instead, she threw herself past his hands and into his open arms, burying her face in his cravat and twisting his coat in her balled fists as if she would never let it go.
Caught unprepared by the grace of her trust, he wrapped his arms around her. The crude stains on his hands forgotten, he smoothed her damp hair and whispered hoarse, soothing words, some coherent, some not. When his ministrations failed to ease her violent trembling, he scooped her up in his arms and drew the torn cape over her hair to shield her from the fitful rain.
Undaunted by the weather, a rapt crowd had gathered at the mouth of the alley, their appetites for excitement whetted by the rumor of an ugly brawl. Refusing to expose Lucy to their leers and speculations, Gerard bounded over the back wall. There would be ample time later for remorse, time to lash himself for his sins, not the least of which was leaving Lucy to fend for herself on the hazardous London streets.
For now, all he wanted to do was take her somewhere warm, dry, and private. Home was out of the question since her father’s suspicions and censure would render it a prison, not a refuge. He veered away from the carriage and strode toward the welcoming lights of a modest inn.
As Gerard burst through the door in a flurry of wind and rain, the balding innkeeper paused at polishing the bar. A handful of patrons scattered at tables around the hearth glanced up eagerly from their drinking and gaming to see what fresh sport was to be had.
At the sight of the inert, but plainly feminine, bundle in Gerard’s arms, the innkeeper slammed down his rag. “Come now, gent! This is a respectable establishment. We’ll have none of that here!”
Lucy peeped out from her cozy nest, flinching at the rumble of the hostile male voice. Without a word, Gerard drew a heavy leather purse from his coat and tossed it toward the innkeeper. It landed on the bar with a promising clunk. Even in her muddled state, Lucy thought to wonder how Gerard could have amassed such a relative fortune. The Admiral was not known for his generosity to his staff.
To the innkeeper’s credit, he didn’t pounce on the purse as he obviously longed to do. Instead, he blinked away his moral indignation, seized by a mercenary spirit of amiability. “There’s fresh sheets on the bed, sir. Will you be requiring any ale?”
“Warm water and hot coffee,” Gerard snapped with the confidence of a man accustomed to having his orders obeyed. “And see that we’re not disturbed.”
“Aye, sir, whatever you wish.”
As her bodyguard carried her up the narrow stairs, Lucy buried her nose in the worn folds of his badly knotted cravat, breathing in the clean masculine scent of spice and tobacco to wash away the gin-tainted stench of the men who had thought to brutalize her.
The third room they came to was unoccupied. Gerard deposited her on the plain wooden bed and gently pried her hands from his coat so he could draw it off and drape it over her shoulders. Lucy’s hungry gaze never wavered from him as he lit a stubby tallow candle and dragged a faded quilt over her lap.
Beads of frozen rain tapped against the window-pane, dissolving like fluid diamonds as they struck the glass. The fireless room was chill, but after enduring the bitter bite of the wind outside, Lucy found it almost cozy. She dabbed at her nose with the back of her hand, admitting ruefully to herself that it was not the shelter that made her feel safe, but the man who shared it.
Minutes later, the innkeeper’s wife came banging on the door with the water and coffee Gerard had demanded. She craned her neck to catch a glimpse of the bed, but Gerard nudged the door shut in her ruddy face.
As he poured the steaming water from a ewer into a chipped ceramic basin, Lucy tugged at a damp strand of her hair, knowing she must look a fright. Gerard hadn’t spared her so much as a glance since their arrival in the room.
Instead of offering her the water, he dipped his own hands in its depths, scrubbing them with a fervor that made her wince. Only after drying them, taking a bracing gulp of the coffee, and donning his spectacles did he face her, the flickering shadows rendering his expression unreadable. He looked reluctant to come anywhere near her.
Unbeknownst to him, his unselfish ministrations had shaken Lucy more than the attack. Her father had never carried her in his arms, never tucked her tenderly into bed, never smoothed her hair or brushed his lips against her brow when he thought her asleep. She still cherished the memory of her tenth birthday when Smythe had bestowed a shy kiss upon her cheek.
Her heart throbbed painfully. She twisted the empty sleeves of Gerard’s coat in her hands, feeling vulnerable, raw, aching with a hunger to be touched and petted and stroked by loving hands. His hands.
A single tear dripped off her nose. It embarrassed her beyond measure to succumb to such worthless emblems of hysteria. Stop sniveling, Lucinda. He’s only doing his job. And don’t slump. Lucy unconsciously sat up straighter, pressing her spine to the wooden headboard.
“You’ve never called me by my first name before,” he said, breaking the awkward silence with the light touch of a professional. “I wasn’t sure you knew what it was.”
Thinking of the many times she’d doodled his name in her margins when she was supposed to be taking dictation, Lucy swallowed past the lump in her throat and forced a watery smile. “To be honest, I knew it started with a G, but I hadn’t quite settled on Gaston or Gomer or …”
Their eyes met. Her voice faltered. His forbidding image blurred. An uneven hiccup escaped her. Then another. Before she could cup a hand over her mouth to stifle them, a torrent of sobs burst from her throat.
Gerard was across the room in two strides. He sank to a sitting position on the bed and gathered her into his arms like a child. “It’s all right, mouse. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
Mouse. The casual endearment made Lucy want to melt into him. Was this how her mother had felt when confronted by a temptation too sweet to resist?
As Lucy’s lithe body convulsed with the force of the emotional storm, Gerard pressed her to the answering thunder of his heart and rubbed his cheek against her hair. He understood better than anyone the cost of her tears. She was not a woman to weep lightly or without cause. She cried as if to rid herself of all the tears she’d swallowed since birth, beginning with her mother’s blameless abandonment.
When he
r sobs had subsided to fitful shudders, she tried to squirm out of his arms. His iron grip permitted her to do no more than wiggle to a more dignified position. He drew off his cravat and dabbed at her cheeks.
“You must think me a shameless ninny,” she gulped out between sniffles. He held the cravat to her nose and she absently blew it. “These hysterics are quite inexcusable. Those men didn’t even hurt me. They only frightened me. I’m afraid you’ve found me out.” She buried her face in his waistcoat. “I’m a spineless coward.”
His hand tenderly explored every fragile bump of her spine as if to disprove her words. He rested his chin on her head, seeing far past the rented room as he spoke the words he’d hoarded in his heart since he’d first laid eyes on her. “You’re a brave girl, Lucinda Snow. The very bravest. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have dared to defy a wretch like Doom.”
A fresh paroxysm wracked her. Gerard’s arms tightened with a possessiveness that shook him. He’d hoped she was over her futile infatuation with Doom, but the mere mention of the villain’s name made her shoulders tremble with emotion.
“Don’t cry,” he whispered fiercely against her hair. “He’s not worth wasting your tears over.”
When Lucy lifted her damp-lashed eyes, it wasn’t sadness, but mirth that sparkled in their depths. Her throaty contralto of a laugh caught Gerard with his armor around his proverbial ankles, staggering him with its charm.
“You’re starting to sound like Sylvie,” she said. “I hate to tarnish my reputation as an intrepid heroine worthy of one of Mrs. Edgeworth’s novels, but I must confess my encounter with Doom was a blunder from start to finish.”
A blunder indeed. Gerard was chilled to the marrow to think what grim fate might have befallen her at Doom’s ruthless hands.
He drank in the sight of her as if seeing her for the first time. Her tousled hair. The pinkened tip of her nose. Her gray eyes, luminous from their torrent of tears. His gaze strayed to her throat, where a dark bruise mottled her pale flesh.
His thumb glided over the discoloration with infinite tenderness. “Bastard,” he breathed, not sure whether he was referring to the man who had done this to her, her father, or himself.
Her pulse leaped beneath his hand as he leaned forward and gently pressed his lips to the bruise. Her head fell back, spilling her hair over his raw knuckles in a skein of silk. He’d never dreamed the tartness of lemons could taste so sweet. His hunger was not assuaged, but whetted by the delectable texture of her skin beneath his mouth.
Her throat vibrated on a note of pure want. Gerard lifted his head, beguiled by the slender column of her throat bared for his pleasure, her flushed cheeks, her parted lips. Her eyes were pressed shut as if to deny what was happening, as if she could pretend it was just another fantasy encounter with her phantom lover.
They slowly fluttered open, smoky with bewilderment. Her fingertips grazed his temples as she reached up and drew off his spectacles, exposing him for the fool he was. “Mr. Claremont?” Then softer, like a whisper from a dream. “Gerard?”
The spectacles slipped from Lucy’s trembling fingers to the quilt as his mouth came down on hers. He brushed his lips across hers with feathery strokes, mingling their breath, their heartbeats, their flesh as one. She shivered at the unfamiliar intimacy. He wove his fingers through her hair and tilted her head back to allow him even more liberty. His mouth slanted across hers, shaping her lips to his will with such exquisite care that it seemed only fitting that they should part for him, should yield the dark and secret recesses of her mouth to the coaxing mastery of his tongue.
Lucy was intoxicated by his kiss. He tasted even better than he smelled—like steaming spice biscuits on Christmas morning, warm apple cider on a chilly autumn night, the exotic tang of coffee in a foreign port. His contrasting textures wrapped her in a fog of sensual languor. The rough warmth of his tongue stroked the sensitive contours of her mouth with a tender artistry that blunted all of her inhibitions and entreated her own tongue to respond in kind.
Gerard reveled in the melting sweetness of Lucy’s mouth, unable to stop himself from wondering if all of her could be coaxed to receive him so generously. His reckless visions stoked the embers burning low and hot in his belly to a roaring conflagration. Cursing the very imagination that had kept him sane through an eternity of deprivation, he contented himself with her kiss, knowing instinctively that if he pressed her back among the pillows as he ached to do, she would bolt.
He was the one to break the kiss, unable to bear another shy flick of her tongue for fear the delicious torture might snap his tenuous control.
She leaned away from him, still gripping his forearms, and studied his unguarded eyes with quizzical earnestness. A chill of foreboding shot through him as he realized too late that he might have just made a fatal error. But fatal for whom?
“What is it?” he asked, keeping his tone deliberately light.
“I was just thinking,” she replied, the husky note in her voice enchanting him, “that you kiss nothing at all like Captain Doom.”
A reluctant chuckle escaped him. He ought to take offense, but he was too bloody relieved. Her bottom lip was still moist and swollen from his kiss. He stroked the pad of his thumb over it, marveling at its trembling response. “Didn’t the Admiral ever teach you it was bad form to compare kisses? And all this time you led me to believe Doom had played the gentleman with you. I’m quite disillusioned with the rogue.”
The urge to wipe Doom from both their minds was overpowering. So when Lucy opened her mouth to retort “But Captain Doom might have—”, he snatched her up by the back of the neck and seized his prize anew in a dark and devilish kiss that took no prisoners and granted no mercy.
“Now what were you saying about Captain Doom?” he asked silkily when her gasps had subsided to tiny pants. His fingers stroked her sensitive nape, eliciting a fresh shudder of delight.
“Captain who?” she echoed dreamily, rubbing her cheek against his forearm.
Gerard’s gut clenched. The yearning mist in Lucy’s eyes no longer shimmered for her phantom pirate, but for him. He wanted to feel triumph, longed for that heady rush of elation that marked a fresh conquest. But all he felt was burgeoning panic.
Where in God’s name was he going to find the strength to turn and walk away from those eyes? From the tender adoration in their depths? His protective feelings toward her had been a warning he’d ignored at his own peril. And hers as well.
He’d entered the Admiral’s service to do a job, he reminded himself ruthlessly. A job that would brook no interference. Suffer no distractions. Not even one as tempting as seducing his employer’s delectable daughter.
Battling bitter regret, he rescued his spectacles from the quilt and slipped them on. Lucy’s eyes darkened as if she sensed the invisible barrier he’d erected between them. He only hoped it wasn’t as transparent as it was invisible.
“The theater should be over soon,” he said gruffly, avoiding her eyes as he stuffed her arms into his coat. “We’d best get you home before we’re forced to endure another of the Admiral’s lectures.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
The challenging tilt of her jaw made him wary. He cocked an eyebrow. “Your gloves? Your reticule perhaps?”
“Your position. You no longer have one. You resigned.” She folded her arms over her chest. The excess flop of his coat sleeves narrowly missed spoiling her haughty demeanor. “I, sir, am no longer your concern.”
Using every ounce of menace at his present disposal, he braced his hands on the headboard behind her, imprisoning her between his muscular arms. She quailed dutifully, but not before her luscious little tongue had darted out to wet her lips. Gerard ached with the need to kiss her again and damn the consequences.
Instead, he leaned forward until his nose nearly touched hers and growled, “You, God help us both, are very much my concern.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LUCY STABBED A STOPPER INTO A CRYSTAL
decanter of lemon verbena, wishing she could bottle up her feelings with such ease. Since her bodyguard had escorted her home from the inn, leaving her at the front door with nothing but a terse bow, she’d had no luck subduing her rioting emotions enough to let her sleep. For the first time in her memory, she wished she had a mother to confide in. Someone older and wiser who could help her sift through her maelstrom of conflicting feelings.
She wiped a thin coating of rice powder from the marble surface of the dressing table, then began compulsively plucking individual hairs from her silver hairbrush. At least she could bring some badly needed order to the chaos of her bedroom. When the brush was clean, she moved to the bed to snatch a lone stocking from the canopy.
Her fingers snagged the fragile silk as if it were a lifeline. Perhaps her father was right, she thought desperately. Perhaps she’d inherited her mother’s tendency toward hysteria after all. Why else would her mood be veering so wildly between despair and exultation?
She closed her eyes, shivering at the memory of Gerard’s jaw, roughened by the tantalizing shadow of a day’s growth of beard, grazing her cheek. The stocking slipped from her limp fingers to the floor. The unyielding bedpost pressed against her spine, making her acutely aware of the rumpled decadence of the bed behind her.
Her eyes flew open. She wasn’t her mother. She was made of much sterner stuff. She couldn’t afford to succumb to dangerous, sensual impulses. They had cost her mother the Admiral’s love and eventually her life.
Lucy rushed to the wardrobe and began cramming scattered undergarments back into the safe confines of their drawers. The rebellious tangle of silk and lace resisted her bullying. She slammed an overflowing drawer three times before admitting defeat and crossing to the window to sink into the window seat.
A light still burned in the gatehouse, just as she had known it would.
Bits of sleet tapped fitfully against the windowpane. Lucy felt like some helpless creature imprisoned in an hourglass. It was as if Gerard’s kiss had turned her world upside down and shaken it with careless abandon, leaving the pieces to settle in unfamiliar patterns around her in glittering shards, as dangerous as they were beautiful.