Читать книгу Redemption Of The Rake - Elizabeth Beacon - Страница 12

Chapter Five

James willed the ringing in his head to subside and pushed the darkness away. He distracted himself from feeling awful by wondering where a vicar’s daughter had learnt so many unladylike curses. He hoped the imp on his other side was too busy wondering if he was dead again to hear and resolved to have words with the woman when they were free of an audience. He knew from the warning tingle at the back of his neck the man who had shot at him was out there. The worm was probably puzzling about what to do next, but James couldn’t dismiss him as that shot was so true that, if not for this iron-hard tree root and the impulsive girl who felled him, he’d be dead. He’d be dead meat if he was standing where he was when the shooter aimed and no doubt the man had a second weapon and nerve enough to try again.

How the devil had his enemies tracked him down? He’d thought it safe to be James Winterley when he had to come home with his tail between his legs. Nobody took a useless society fribble seriously and it was a relief to saunter through life as if he hadn’t a care in the world. If he was being honest, and it might be as well if he was considering how close to God he might be, he took perverse pleasure in living down to James Winterley’s raffish reputation. He’d been very young when he gained it; a confused and angry boy at odds with himself and the world. Fifteen years on from his riotous start to adult life as the Winterley boy, the spare half-brother, he could almost pity his younger self. Or he could if he wasn’t saddled with the low standards the boy set him so many years on.

This wasn’t the best time for chewing over past mistakes, but even that cover had failed him if the skill of the stalker so close he could almost taste him was anything to go by. He lay still as a corpse behind the coward’s shield of Rowena Finch’s glorious hair and delightful body and did his best to plan a speedy exit from this open space without either Finch girl getting hurt. It was more of an effort to keep his face blank when he felt a slender hand insinuate itself into his coat pocket and heard the rustle of hot-pressed paper under the fair Rowena’s searching hand. Not that, he wanted to shout at her. Don’t touch Virginia’s letter.

He managed to crack open his eyelids by the smallest distance and saw her wrinkle her nose in distaste at having to search a gentleman’s pockets. The sight somehow calmed the worst of his fears and that was a beginner’s mistake. Between one breath and the next a woman as full of life and promise as this could be dead as mutton. Why had he thought that one certainty of a spy’s life less true here? Raigne had cast a spell over him, but he should never have stayed so long. But how could he have thought it would be easy to give up his unseemly profession and live near here in peaceful obscurity either?

‘Got it,’ Mrs Westhope murmured as she bent close to cover the movement of her lips with a front of fussing over his injuries as she slipped the lethal little pistol out of his pocket with the finesse of the finest pickpocket in the land.

‘Take your sister and run, then,’ he muttered as urgently as he dared.

‘No,’ she whispered emphatically.

‘This isn’t some rustic coney-catcher ready to shoot me for my boots.’

‘Who is he, then?’ she asked as if she had a right to know.

‘None of your business,’ he grumbled so faintly she pressed closer, as if shielding him with her body was all the answer she need make to that grumpy denial.

Somehow he must fight the blankness that blow on the head threatened every time he tried to move. She was risking so much and all he really wanted was to reach up and cup her chin, see a flush of consciousness across her fine-boned cheeks and a softening spark of desire in those extraordinary cornflower-blue eyes of hers. He wanted her to bend an iota of space closer still and kiss him as if she meant it. Had that blow on the head truly driven all the sense out of it? Until now he hadn’t thought he had enough masculine idiocy left in his pounding head to lust after this luscious mixture of a woman, but now it was sending messages to the rest of him he didn’t want to hear. He must make her go, before she got killed, or noticed the state his body would be in if she didn’t move further away.

‘Get her out of here,’ he risked demanding loudly as he dared.

‘And risk whoever is out there attacking us? Don’t be more of an idiot than that blow on the head made you.’

‘Is he coming awake at last, Row?’

Hearing the panic under that question, James hesitated and Rowena seemed caught between admitting it and laying them open to his enemy, or denying it and making her little sister more disturbed by the whole business.

‘Wha...?’ he moaned artistically and made the decision for her.

‘Do be still and stay quiet, sir,’ the fair Rowena ordered so sternly he suspected she would prefer to slap him.

‘Who...?’ He gasped, as if fighting unconsciousness, and now at least he could snatch a glance round the wide clearing and take in the slender options available.

‘You saved my little sister’s life,’ Rowena proclaimed dramatically. He frowned under cover of her tumbling hair as she bent over him again to act out her fantasy heroine.

‘Da...?’ he managed. Maybe the watcher would believe him addled by the blow any listener must have heard, since it sounded like the crack of doom inside his head.

‘I think our patient is asking if you are truly unscathed by your latest misadventure, Hes. Show yourself to the gentleman, dear, and prove you’re truly in one piece, although you don’t deserve to be after what you did.’

For a moment James dreaded the fearless girl being cowed by her lucky escape. Even if it might stop her being so reckless next time she wanted to defy gravity, he didn’t want that. Then he caught the little devil peering at him over her grubby handkerchief with enough mischief in her eyes to supply the proverbial cartload of monkeys and had the deuce of a time not grinning back.

‘Good...’ he managed as if that was a small part of his worries taken care of.

‘Perhaps his mind was affected by that blow,’ the woman said hopefully. James thought that was taking drama too far, but it wasn’t her mind so she probably didn’t care.

‘I’ll never forgive myself,’ Hester wailed, then buried her head in her handkerchief to muffle the noisiest pretend sobs James had heard in a mercifully long time.

At least she was suffering for her art, he concluded, with a fierce frown at the elder sister to make his impatience clear. He spared a moment to wonder why Rowena’s tumbled mass of fair locks felt like a soft golden lure against his cheeks, then told himself not to be such a fool. It was hair, admittedly of the silken and shining kind, and as thick and soft as a lover’s wildest fantasy, but still a workaday feature most women of her age enjoyed in one form or another. Reminding himself that blow on the head hadn’t addled his wits entirely, he cleared his senses of Rowena Westhope and tried to use them on his enemy. Something told him the man was furious and impatient, and James couldn’t spring up and dash for cover without warning his co-stars, so he made as if to sit up to divert them from amateur theatricals.

‘No, sir, you must remain still until help comes. I couldn’t live with myself if you did some terrible harm to your poor head because I lack the wit to keep you lying quiet,’ the lovely Rowena said earnestly, fixing a steely gaze on him and daring him to argue.

‘Grab her and run when I say so, then,’ he demanded as softly as he could. Something in her wide blue gaze made him think it was highly unlikely the minx ever did as she was bid without an argument. Seeing a similar talent in the blue eyes her little sister fixed on him reproachfully, James shifted to test his reflexes. No better than satisfactory, he concluded, but they would have to do. ‘Now,’ he urged and wondered if he was about to faint and make this too easy for the shooter as he lurched to his feet.

He wasn’t giving in yet; not after all the years of warding off blows and knife blades in dark alleys where the likes of him lurked. He imposed his steely will on his wavering legs and managed to keep pace with Rowena and her wriggling captive. At least this way a shot would hit him first. They were too close for even the best marksman to be certain of shooting him and not one of Finch’s beloved daughters, and James sent a desperate plea to heaven to guard that good man’s offspring from a death James probably deserved and they didn’t. The hasty movement jarred his bruised and protesting head and spine, and he winced and waited for a kill shot to smash into him. Breath sawed in his labouring lungs as if he’d run a mile instead of a few yards. He thought for a moment he’d been shot and his body was keeping going in the long moment when terror blocked agony for mortally wounded men. He’d seen it, inflicted it even, yet he’d never felt it and by some miracle he still hadn’t.

There were no more hurts to his person than Hester Finch had inflicted by accident when they reached the opposite side of the clearing. They sank into the sheltering hollow of a mighty oak tree’s roots. It took the lack of any blood coursing out of any of them to convince him his foe hadn’t risked picking him off, then getting away before anyone could give chase. This was no time to sink into the leaf-cushioned sanctuary and give in to the headache pounding at his temples, though. No rest for the wicked, he reminded himself ruefully, and managed to cling to his right senses by a hair’s breadth.

‘You’re safe?’ he gasped as if he’d run a mile instead of less than fifty yards.

‘Aye, but how much do your enemies hate you?’ Rowena asked impatiently, as if all her talent for pretence had been used up.

‘Enough,’ he admitted. Hester patted his shoulder solemnly, as if to console him.

He couldn’t help the surprised guff of laughter it shocked out of him. She smiled wisely at him as if she understood his confused thoughts, which was more than her sister did from the impatient frown knitting her surprisingly dark brows.

‘Some of them dislike me almost as much as my friends,’ he joked. The girl’s silent sympathy took him closer to tears than a grown man wanted to be, especially with a deadly enemy nearby.

‘You can watch that way while I cover our backs,’ Hester’s unimpressed sister ordered him, expertly cocking his deadly little pistol, then turning away to ignore them both.

‘She would learn how to shoot before she went to Portugal with Nate,’ Hester explained with a shrug, as if that covered her sister’s ability to defend them to the death.

‘Nate?’ he managed lamely.

‘Her husband, he was a soldier,’ the child said matter-of-factly.

James supposed that was what a generation or two of war did—made death part of day-to-day life and cut off a young woman’s hopes and dreams in a moment. He risked a sidelong glance at the young widow and saw her intent glare into the middle distance, as if she’d cut herself off from them and her past. Somehow that moved him far more than the most delicate of flinches or a bravely blinked-away tear. The girl with the bluest of blue eyes he’d ever encountered had lost so much yet she had fire and courage enough to tie her knots and carry on. Wasn’t it about time he did the same?