Anne Stuart Read online

  “I don’t think so,” she said, finding her voice from somewhere. She wanted to wipe the blood off her hands, but the only possible spot she could find was her full skirts, and that would only make things worse. She wasn’t used to men. Cousin Miriam kept the house almost cloistered, a fact which Emma had accepted without argument. She didn’t see many men, and she’d certainly never seen one like this.

  “Because if you are,” the elegant man continued, moving into the room and closing the door very quietly behind him, “I suggest you take a step or two back so that you don’t fall on the corpse.”

  Emma swallowed. “I’m not going to swoon,” she said with a fair degree of certainty. “I might throw up, though.”

  He didn’t appear alarmed at the notion. “Surely not,” he murmured. “If you’ve survived this much, you won’t succumb to such paltry behavior. I presume you killed him. Why?”

  “I... I...”

  “Not that it’s any of my business,” he added casually, skirting Horace’s body. The smallsword lay on the floor beside him, and the man picked it up. “But I do confess to a bit of curiosity. Logic impels me to assume you’re a doxy, set on robbing one of your customers. Frankly,” he said, glancing at her as he hefted the weapon, “you don’t have the look of a doxy. The clothes are wrong. And there’s something about your eyes as well. I could be mistaken, though. Are you?”

  “No.”

  “Pity,” he murmured, letting his green eyes slide down her disheveled body. “You could make a fortune.”

  She already had a fortune, inherited from her father’s manufactories. Not that it would do her a speck of good. “He was trying to rape me.”

  Again that long, assessing, intimate look. “I can sympathize with the temptation,” he said, half to himself. “Still, he’s paid for his crime. Do you know the fellow?”

  “He was my uncle. And guardian.”

  “How delicious,” the man said with a faint, heartless laugh. “Do you have an aunt as well?”

  “A cousin. His daughter. She doesn’t like me very much.”

  “I don’t expect her affection is about to increase.”

  “It’s not likely to matter. They’ll hang me.”

  He tilted his head to one side, watching her. The mane of black curls was disconcerting—the few men allowed in the house in Crouch End wore their hair tied back in queues, or powdered and bewigged. The loose curtain of hair was somehow disturbing, intimate.

  The haphazard elegance of his clothes was equally unsettling. Emma was used to men who dressed conservatively and properly. Men of sober habits and dour demeanor, who kept their vices behind closed doors.

  This man was slightly drunk. He was surveying the scene of a murder with a combination of faint curiosity and amusement, and her sense of unreality grew.

  “That would be a great shame,” he said. “Such a pretty little neck.” He sighed. “I suppose I’ll have to do something about it.”

  Emma could hear the thunder of footsteps approaching, the babble of voices. The maid’s high-pitched squeal rose above the rest, her voice carrying through the closed door. “She was standing there covered with blood, as cool as you please!” the woman shrieked. “I saw her. She killed the poor old gentleman, stabbed him through the heart, I swear...”

  Emma barely saw the man move. He strode past her, graceful, swift, and pushed open the door. A crowd of people gathered there, wide-eyed, bloodthirsty.

  “I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” he announced in a cool, arrogant voice. He still held the smallsword in one hand, and he swung it with a negligent air. Blood still clung to it, and Emma had to control her stomach with sheer force of effort. “I’m afraid I killed him.”

  “Lord Killoran!” the innkeeper exclaimed, horrified. “Were it a duel?”

  “I’d hardly stab the man in cold blood, now, would I, Bavers?” he said. “The man was deranged. He attacked this young lady, and when I came to her rescue, he tried to kill me. I had no choice.”

  Bavers stared at him, clearly astonished. “You rescued her?”

  “From the brutish hands of her father,” he said.

  “Uncle,” Emma corrected him unhelpfully.

  “Ah, yes. We didn’t have time for proper introductions.”

  “Lord Killoran, you can’t just walk into one of my rooms and spit a guest,” Bavers said in a reproachful voice.

  “He didn’t seem inclined to meet me outside. The floor will come clean, if you don’t leave his moldering corpse for too long.”

  A necessary, Emma thought longingly. A few short moments of privacy to cast up her accounts, and she’d face her fate with all the grace she could muster.

  Except that fate seemed to have been spared her, due to the lazy ministrations of this glittering stranger.

  “There’ll need to be an inquest,” Bavers warned.

  The man referred to as Lord Killoran leaned forward, and the heavy coin that passed between his pale, elegant fingers and the landlord’s rougher ones took care of matters quite nicely. “I’m sure I can count on you to see to things.” He glanced up, toward the doorway. “I think we’d best be on our way, Nathaniel. This inn is far from peaceful.”

  And without another glance at either her or the corpse of her uncle, he walked out of the room.

  The other witnesses followed, no longer interested in something as mundane as a dead man, and the landlord was alone with Emma.

  He bit into the gold coin, then grunted with a fair amount of satisfaction. He looked up at Emma. “You there,” he said, his earlier deference vanishing. “We don’t need your sort here. I heard what his lordship said, and I don’t believe a word of it. Lord Killoran wouldn’t lift a finger to save his own mother. Be off with you, doxy.”

  He was the second person in a matter of minutes to assume she was a whore, though Lord Killoran had at least been polite enough to ask. “If you’ll have the horses put to…,” she said faintly, watching as the landlord knelt in the blood, going through her uncle’s pockets with a singular lack of squeamishness. He came up empty.

  “I’m keeping the horses,” he said. “Something’s owed me for dealing with all this. They aren’t yours, anyway—they’re this poor, dead gentleman’s—and I’d be remiss in my duty if I let you take them without so much as a by-your-leave.”

  Frustration made her curl her hands into fists. She had no money—her cousin Miriam had always seen to that. She was alone, penniless, with no one to turn to for help, least of all her family. She considered this for a moment, feeling an unlikely surge of hope.

  Destitution was one side of the coin. Freedom was the other. No one to touch her, pinch her, hurt her. No one to watch her, questioning her every move. To force her to spend hours on her knees, recounting nonexistent sins. In Miriam DeWinter’s stern household, Emma had had little opportunity for sinning and no temptation to do so whatsoever.

  Suddenly she was free. She could simply walk out the door and not a soul would stop her. The thought was absolutely terrifying.

  Before the greedy innkeeper could change his mind, she ran into the hallway, racing down the narrow stairs, not daring to slow her pace for fear that reaction and reality would set in. She would escape, disappear into the city, and no one would ever find her. She would be safe from Cousin Miriam; she would be happy. And then she looked down at the blood staining her hands and shivered.

  Killoran stood alone in the private room, staring into the fire, a glass of brandy in his hand. Nathaniel had been sent to make certain the horses were put to with all possible dispatch. Apparently he’d decided to keep Killoran company a bit longer. Killoran viewed that prospect with a jaundiced air but he was too weary at the moment to bestir himself and send the young hothead home.

  The young woman upstairs was far more interesting, and he was requiring a surprising amount of self-denial to keep from taking her with them. Not that he had a great deal of experience in self-denial, but something told him the young woman would be more trouble than she
was worth.

  For one thing, she was quite astonishingly beautiful. Not at all in the common style, she was possessed of a thick mane of impossibly flame-colored hair, a tall, lush body of dangerous voluptuousness, and the warm, honey-colored eyes of a complete innocent. That red hair called to him, a siren lure, but he assumed it was only nostalgia and misplaced sentiment. Not that he’d ever been known to possess those two qualities.

  She reminded him of another redhead, long dead, albeit a more subdued one. The creature upstairs, despite her shocked eyes, was far from demure. The blood on her hands only added to her allure.

  Ah, but innocent females could be very dangerous indeed, and it wasn’t anything as mundane as his worthless hide Killoran was concerned about. He’d had virgins before, and knew just how uncomfortable that could be. They tended to imagine themselves in love, and when they discovered their seducer was a man who simply didn’t believe in love—didn’t believe in much of anything at all, for that matter—they grew furious, subjecting one to tears, rage, bitter protests, and the like. All for the sake of clumsy, untried sex.

  No, he would leave this fascinating, murderous virgin alone. He wouldn’t even offer her a ride back to London in his carriage—there was a limit, after all, to his self-control, and she was quite the most tempting female he’d seen in years. With luck, he’d never set eyes on her again.

  He still couldn’t quite fathom what had inspired his quixotic act in the upstairs bedroom. The words had been out of his mouth before he’d realized it, claiming responsibility for the man’s death. Indeed, it had been no sacrifice on his part. He’d killed before, in duels, and he was known to hold human life in very low esteem.

  Besides, as he’d observed, she had such a lovely neck. It would be a shame to bruise it with a thick hemp rope.

  He’d done his good deed—it should shave a year or two off his stay in purgatory. Assuming he didn’t go straight to hell, a far more likely eternity for a man like him. And he was a man who believed in hell.

  There were times, he thought, staring into the fire, when he wearied of it all. Years ago he had decided, quite simply, that goodness and decency had been denied to him by the vagaries of fate. The innocent rashness of youth had led him to disaster, and made victims of those he loved. He had chosen, then, to be a villain. Never again would a moral imperative cause others harm. He had no morals. Nor any other qualities he could think of, apart from his skill with horses, with women, and with gaming. All of which bored him heartily.

  It was far more comfortable to live without soul or conscience. He knew it, since those discarded commodities occasionally attempted to return to haunt him. But he was finding it easier and easier to banish them once more. Soon they wouldn’t trouble him in the slightest.

  For example, the fate of the young woman upstairs was nagging at his brain, when he should have been far more interested in concentrating on the landlord’s fine brandy instead of thinking about her and his odd gesture. It had been a whim, brought on by the large amounts of brandy he’d already imbibed, or perhaps by a momentary madness brought about by that flame-red hair, and if he didn’t get away soon, there was no telling what kind of noble behavior might take hold of him. The thought was chilling.

  He had no intention of succumbing to a lamentable resurgence of conscience. He drained his glass and started for the hallway, suddenly quite desperate to escape the Pear and Partridge and the titian-haired innocent in the upstairs chamber.

  Before he betrayed his determined lack of principles again.

  Chapter 2

  He was alone in the darkened hallway, her savior, when Emma reached the bottom of the narrow stairs. He halted at the sight of her, and she could see the startled wariness in his silhouette. She started toward him, ready to fling herself at his feet in gratitude.

  His hands reached out to catch her, stop her. Hard hands, pale in the gloom, hauling her to her feet. “Not that I couldn’t find any number of interesting things you could do in such a position,” he drawled, “but this is a public place.”

  She had no idea what he meant, but she flushed, anyway. “I owe you my life,” she said. “How can I repay you for your kindness and nobility—”

  “Don’t deceive yourself,” he interrupted her, his voice cool and ironic. “I have not a trace of kindness or nobility in my entire body.”

  “But you saved me. You risked your own life, your reputation, all out of the goodness of your heart.”

  “I have no heart,” he snapped, that mocking drawl sharpening. “Nor a reputation to be damaged, child. And I ran no risk. He wouldn’t have been the first man I’ve killed, and he won’t be the last. One more corpse on my head is of little account.”

  “But still…”

  “But nothing, my love. I didn’t take the blame for your bloodthirsty dispatching of your father out of goodness, kindness, or even for the sake of your magnificent, tear-filled brown eyes.”

  “My uncle,” she said numbly. “My cousin’s father.”

  “Details,” he replied airily. “I did it because it amused me.”

  “Amused you?” she echoed, disbelieving.

  “I was bored. Heartily bored. It entertained me to take the blame for your uncle’s death. But now you’re boring me once more. Do go away.”

  She stared at him in shock. He was surveying her with all the interest one might bestow upon a tankard of flat ale. Perhaps even less.

  “Go away?” She heard the helplessness in her voice and hated it.

  He raised a dark eyebrow. “Were you thinking you might come with me? I assure you, I have no need for a mistress, and you’re a little too well bred for a scullery maid. Of course, you could always work as my paid assassin, but in general, I like to do my own killing.”

  His mockery was like a blow, one she almost reeled under. She backed away from him, staring at his black-and-white elegance with a kind of numb contempt. “Forgive me,” she said in a husky voice. “I didn’t mean...”

  His smile was wintry sweet. “You’re very pretty, child,” he said, reaching out with one of his slender, strong hands and brushing it against her cheek. She jerked, but he merely smiled at her reaction, and ran his fingertips over her soft lips. “If you just sit in the taproom with your magnificent eyes filled with tears, I’m certain you’ll find someone to take care of you.” He glanced down at her. “You might, however, endeavor to wash some of the blood off your hands. It might put a man’s appetite off a bit.”

  She tried to pull back from him, but he was surprisingly fast and surprisingly strong for such an indolent-looking creature, and she found her wrist caught tightly in one of his deceptively pale hands. “Then again,” he murmured, leaning closer, “it does seem to whet mine.” He was dangerously, hypnotically close, and she wondered dazedly what would happen if he moved closer still.

  “Killoran!” A young man stood in the doorway, his body radiating outrage and horror.

  The dark man’s smile was sudden, rueful, and oddly charming as he released her, released her hand, released her from his dark, entrapping gaze. “My conscience calls, sweeting,” he murmured. And he walked away from her, clearly dismissing her from his mind.

  Emma watched him go. She found she was trembling. She could still feel the heat and strength of his hand on her wrist, still feel the caress against her face. She had the sudden, unmistakable conviction that the threat from the dark man was even more devastating than the bloody death her uncle had planned for her.

  And that she’d had a very narrow escape.

  “You can’t be meaning to just leave her there,” Nathaniel said, running to keep up with Killoran as he strode toward his carriage.

  He stopped, glancing at his new charge with deliberate boredom. “What do you suggest, dear boy? That we bring her back to the city with us? You were looking at me with such an outraged expression on your face that I assumed you disapproved of any lustful designs on my part.”

  “She’s an innocent.”

  “So
she is. As much as any woman ever could be. And that’s one reason we’re not taking her with us. She’s far too pretty. Let me give you a bit of warning—it doesn’t do to tamper with the middle classes. They’re alarmingly rigid. You can’t despoil their daughters and hope to get away with it. The lower orders are one thing—they’re grateful for the attention and benefits. The upper classes as well—they’re beyond rules. Ah, but the middle class is tied up in the most tedious knots of proper behavior, and even the young lady, as compromising a situation as she was in, would have very strict notions of propriety. You’d find yourself leg-shackled in no time, and I expect your father wants better for you. If Miss Pottle wouldn’t do, then I think it even less likely that he’d approve of the young lady upstairs.”

  “Damn it, man, you killed her father!”

  “Uncle,” Killoran corrected him dryly, having finally gotten it right.

  “We can’t just leave her here.”

  Killoran paused by the carriage, utterly weary. “If you’re so desperate to tumble her, I suppose I can content myself with the landlord’s brandy, even though I’m used to far better. I can wait for an hour or so.”

  “I should mill you down for that,” Nathaniel said angrily.

  “On whose account? That of the damsel in distress?”

  “My own honor.”

  “You’ll lose it soon enough,” Killoran said. He sighed. “What do you propose I do for the girl?”

  “It was by your act she’s alone and destitute—”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Killoran drawled. “After all, she came here in the first place.”

  “She’s not the one who ran her... uncle through with a smallsword.”

  Killoran’s smile was gentle. “I would say I’d already done her a great service.” He reached into his pocket and drew out a gold coin. The landlord was hovering close by, ready for just such an eventuality, and he caught the coin with a deft hand. “Make certain the girl receives it,” Killoran said in a deceptively pleasant voice.