I Loved a Rogue The Prince Catchers (7 page)

“Look what you have done to your fine coat,” she said. But she wasn’t looking at his coat around her legs. She was staring at his shoulders.

“It’s nothing.” His voice sounded hoarse. Her ankles were so narrow, his fingers spanning them even through the coat. The fabric of her skirts encased her knees haphazardly. Without allowing himself to think, he let his hands follow his gaze upward.

“But—”

“There are other coats.” But there were no other women. No women like this. No women he wanted to both goad into daring and rescue from danger, and touch everywhere, as he was doing now, her calves a new paradise, a discovery of pure feminine perfection. No women who made him hot as hell with a mere blink of her lashes, with her parted lips as he slid his palms higher, curving his fingers beneath her knees. No women that drove him as mad as she had apparently become in the decade since he’d last seen her by a pond in a copse, barely clothed, sunlight in her hair and a mischievous smile on her lips—a smile that coaxed him into the sea in the midst of winter.

Her breathing was fast, faster than moments earlier, her eyes wide as sunlight.

Ice-pale lips. Pink tongue. Lashes long as eternity draping themselves downward as his hand climbed. His fingertips strafed the underside of her thigh, salt and sand and pure beauty against his skin.

She gasped. Fear shone deep in the gilded green of her eyes.

Chest constricting, he released her.

Dragging her legs free of his coat, she scuttled back like a crab, scrabbled to her feet, and ran.

Taliesin’s blood pounded, a tide he’d no power to control. He bent his head and stared at his empty hands.

Chapter 6

The Whiskey

S
he couldn’t stop looking at him.

Neither, apparently, could Betsy.

“I don’t trust him, miss.” Brow crunched, Betsy shook her head and sipped tea.

Beyond the window, on the cobbles just above the stones that bordered the beach, the stable boy led Taliesin’s great black horse to him. He took the reins and spoke to the boy for a moment. He had changed into dry clothes, and wore now both hat and greatcoat. Except for the silver rings in his ears, he looked like a gentleman. Earlier, on the beach, he had behaved like one. Until he hadn’t.

“Why don’t you trust him?” Eleanor said a little breathlessly.

“I saw how he stole your shoes.” Betsy glared through the window.

“Then you also saw how he replaced them with his coat.”

Betsy leveled her a challenging eye. “Has he given the shoes back to you, then?”

“Well. No.” She hadn’t really given him opportunity. The wind on the beach had pressed the very fine shirt linen to his shoulders and arms, revealing muscles she’d been too naïve to even dream of. Then his big, strong hands had slipped from her feet up her calves, and she’d lost a little bit of her mind. “I thought perhaps he gave them to you.”

Betsy wagged her head anew. “I’ve heard tell Oriental princes don’t let their womenfolk wear shoes. Their men like to keep them trapped in the house at their ravenous mercy, you see.”

Betsy, it seemed, had an overly active imagination. They were well suited.

“And they have more than one wife,” Betsy added. “Dozens of them, I’ve heard.”

“That may be. But it has no bearing on my shoes. Mr. Wolfe is not an Oriental prince, of course, and I am not a member of a harem.”

“Then what’s he done with your shoes?”

Mr. Treadwell walked from the mews alley. Taliesin spoke to him, impossible to hear through the glass, then mounted and rode away.

Eleanor flexed her toes in her dress slippers. “I shall have to ask him when he returns.” She’d no idea where he was going. He could not possibly be leaving her in this little fishing village with only a maid and coachman, not on the verge of nightfall.

But on the moor she had asked him to leave her alone. Then, the challenge. Since then, she had taunted him into the frigid ocean, and when he’d gone to his knees in the sand before her and touched her like he should not have, she’d fled like a frightened girl.

Mr. Treadwell entered the taproom. “Ma’am.” He touched the brim of his cap. Beneath it was a tangle of straw-colored hair. His face was long, and he wasn’t above twenty-five, despite his weathered skin. He turned to Betsy with a shy smile. “Good day, miss.”

Betsy’s cheeks flared rusty pink. She looked down into her teacup.

“Mr. Treadwell, where has Mr. Wolfe gone?”

“He said he’s got a parcel to retrieve a distance aways, but he won’t be no more than a few hours.”

“What sort of parcel?”

“I shouldn’t be saying, ma’am. But he wouldn’t hear of me going and fetching it for him. I’d have done it too. Guinevere, you see, doesn’t mind being saddle rode by a good man every so often. Just like her namesake, I suppose.”

Eleanor cracked a laugh. Then slammed her palm over her mouth.

Betsy’s freckles became one large splotch of pink.

“Beggin’ your pardon.” Mr. Treadwell’s cheeks had grown ruddy too. He twisted his cap between his hands. “There’s times when my tongue runs away from me.”

“Do not fret, Mr. Treadwell. You’ve caused no trouble for me.” Queen Guinevere of legend had ridden the wrong man, Lancelot, despite how dangerous it had been. She’d done it simply because she wanted him and the temptation was too great to withstand.

But Guinevere had been a fool. From the comfort and safety of her queenly throne, she had stepped straight into the fire.

Eleanor suspected she ought to take some lesson from this. With the memory of Taliesin’s hands on her like a wicked dream, she could not.

Taliesin did not return in time for dinner, nor did he return by the time she changed into her nightclothes and crept under the covers of her narrow bed not unlike the bed she’d slept in for twenty years of her life. While he had slept in a barn. And elsewhere, she supposed.

What had he done with his life since he’d left St. Petroc? Ravenna said his business trading horses was successful. Where had he made that business away from his uncle’s family? Gypsies didn’t often leave their families. And how had he the time now to escort her on this quest? Or was he simply still the wild boy she’d once known, a nomad by blood, up to a lark if it meant travel, even if it meant playing escort to an aging spinster?

An aging spinster whose legs he had caressed with hands that made her dizzy.

With the sounds of the sea in her ears she couldn’t sleep. Her blood pounded quick, pulsing, every moment lying abed a moment wasted. She’d wasted too many moments of her life already.

Today she had waded into a frozen ocean, with nary a sniffle to show for it. Only a pressing need to be
alive
bubbled in her now.

Donning her cloak, and once more stealing out of her shared room, she made her way down to the taproom. Betsy’s shoes were large and clomped on the stairs. No one else lodged at this inn now; she didn’t fear encountering anyone.

The taproom was dark, not even the kitchen dog anywhere to be seen. She drew her feet out of the heavy shoes and padded to the window on bared feet, her toes exploring each floorboard like an exotic landscape. The clouds had departed. Now the moon shone brilliantly, silver-white amidst clusters of thousands of stars, illumining the cove.

She lifted her eyes to the moon and sighed. She
sighed
.

She had never sighed before in her life.

In the morning, with a head heavy and aching from lack of sleep, she would not be sighing. She would be grumbling.

Moonlight allowed her to peruse the bar. The innkeepers were trusting people; two bottles sat atop it. Her papa sometimes shared with her a finger of sherry as a nightcap. Not, however, since Agnes had begun to join them after dinner. A girl of Eleanor’s delicate constitution, she had kindly suggested, should not be drinking sherry before sleep. Warm milk would serve her better.

A girl of Eleanor’s delicate constitution should not be wading into a frozen sea or daydreaming of the infidelities of a medieval queen either.

She reached for the whiskey and a spoon.

The first spoonful caught in her throat and made her sputter. She waited and felt nothing. She stared out at the sea in which he had held her to his body and looked down at her with eyes that had grown hot even as her feet had grown numb, and she felt no stirring of heat from the whiskey like the heat he had stirred in her that afternoon. No sleepiness either.

The second spoonful of whiskey curled across her tongue and into her chest like a living thread of fire.

The third spoonful worked its way into her lips and her belly, and into her head in warm clouds.

The fourth spoonful made her eyelids droop, her head tilt back, and her heels seek the chair opposite.

The fifth spoonful—what was left of it after she spilled some on the table—caused her fingers to unbind her braid and made her breaths long and slow and deep as she remembered his hands sliding up her calves. Then higher.

Upon the sixth spoonful she thought, perhaps, that she was coming to understand Guinevere remarkably well indeed.

TALIESIN
FOUND
HER
in a pool of moonlight, her cloak cast off, her nightclothes bright like the robe of an angel, her hair cascading in ripples down her back. Bare feet propped up on a chair, hands folded over her waist, and eyes closed, she slept in the middle of the public room like a princess reclining in her own boudoir.

But perhaps she did not precisely sleep. A half-empty bottle of Irish whiskey and a spoon rested on the table beside her.

Not a cup or glass. A spoon.

Instead of loosening the cords that had been wrapped around his chest since she’d run from him on the beach, that spoon cinched the tension tighter.

For months she had taken medicine by the spoonful. Never complaining, always obedient to the doctor, by the strength of her will alone she had survived an illness that should have killed her.

He remembered the moment he had first been allowed to see her during her convalescence. Emblazoned on his soul, it would never leave him.

She had not stirred from her bedchamber in months. The disease had left her lungs, but she could not walk well, Ravenna had told him with the blithe perplexity of a girl who’d never known a day of poor health in her life. Eleanor’s knees buckled when she tried to walk; she fell over, her sister reported. She ate little, and she had no strength. So she remained in her room, away from his eyes. Every day that he came to the vicarage to work and take his lesson, all the while knowing she was mere yards away, beyond the closed door of her bedchamber, was another day of purgatory for him.

The Reverend went about with shadowed eyes. One day, when Taliesin was scooping ash from the grate to scatter over the garden soil, the Reverend looked up from the sermon he was writing. In a bruised voice, he told Taliesin that his eldest daughter would not read. Her weakness had turned her despondent. She possessed enough strength to lift a book, but she hadn’t the will for anything more. Devastation had marked the vicar’s haggard face.

Several days later, entering the house by the back door, Taliesin met Ravenna in hot pursuit of her monstrous black dog.

“Tali!” she gasped, pausing in her full-tilt run out the door to shove a book against his chest. “Beast is after the squire’s pointer bitch again. I simply must catch him before he catches her! Take this to Ellie, I beg of you. Papa wants her to have it immediately. He’ll be cross with me if she doesn’t.” Flashing him a wild grin, she flew out the door after her dog.

He didn’t need a second invitation. The vicar’s study door was closed. He wouldn’t know.

Taliesin knew it was wrong, that he should not enter a girl’s bedchamber under any circumstances.

He did it anyway.

He went with his heart in his throat. Then that heart fell to his feet.

Standing in the doorway of her bedchamber, he stared at the fourteen-year-old invalid wrapped in blankets and shawls, a wraithlike shadow of the girl he had loved since the moment he’d set eyes on her five years earlier, and the backs of his eyes prickled painfully. He’d never in his life wept. But this wan specter was not the girl he knew, not the sharp-tongued tormenter who drove him mad with her nose-in-the-air superiority and her sudden, unguarded smiles.

Sensing his presence, he supposed, she had turned her head. Her eyes, dull and listless, were ringed with black.

“Go away,” she whispered.

“No,” he managed to choke out. The single, rough syllable sounded harsh in the confined space.

“I don’t want you.” Her voice was barely a breath.

“I’ve brought—” His throat felt thick. “I’ve brought a book the Reverend wants you to read.”

“I don’t want it.”

He stepped into the room. “Then what do you want? To die? Because I can’t think of anything stupider than making it through the worst of it just to waste away afterward.”

She turned her face from him and her eyes stared like glass at the drawn draperies. “Go away.”

Crossing the tiny chamber, he pulled wide the curtains, allowing the pale winter sunlight to enter. He sat down on a stool before the window and opened the book.

“All right,” he said, trying not to touch the pages with his fingers that were filthy from the barn. Usually before he came indoors for lessons he made certain to wash his hands. “If you don’t want to read it, I will. I don’t suppose you’re smart enough to read this one, anyway. Don’t know what the Reverend was imagining to think you were.”

“Are you laughing at me?” Her words came forth crackly. “I can’t see your ugly face to tell. The sunlight is behind it.”

“I can see yours. You look awful.”

“You are”—she pulled in a shallow breath—“a beast.”

“And you’re a miserable invalid. Which is worse, do you think?”

“I can read it.”

“I’ll wager you can’t.”

“I
can
.” A puff of air came out of her mouth upon the word, the most she’d worked her beleaguered lungs in months, he guessed.

“Prove it,” he said.

That day she read a page. When her fingers slipped on the binding and the book tumbled from her lap, he caught it. Leaning her head back on the pillow, she closed her eyes and said, “Will you . . .”

He waited. But weakness—or perhaps pride—did not allow her to complete her request.

“Listen here,” he said, opening the volume across his palms. “This next part is where Abelard gets charged with heresy for applying philosophical methods to Scripture.” He read aloud but soon she slept, and he departed itchy under the collar and out of sorts.

The next day when he opened the door to her room, her face was turned toward him. The book rested beside her on the counterpane. Her eyelids cracked open and she drew a stuttering inhalation. “Come for more proof, stupid boy?”