“You’ve seen Scorpion, Miss Jane. You’ve spent time with him. Do you really think he’s the kind of man who’d share the woman he’s fallen in love with? His problem is he doesn’t seem to realize it just yet, and he won’t listen when I tried to point it out to him. But he’ll come to it soon enough when he sees another man put a hand on her. ”
“If she’s really safe then why are you willing to race up north to rescue her?”
she said, unconvinced.
His smile was slow and charming. “Maybe I just wanted the chance to spend time with you. ”
She allowed herself an inelegant snort. “I own a mirror, Mr. Donnelly. ”
His smile vanished. “Perhaps you do, lass,” he said finally. “But you must be half blind. And the name’s Jacob. ”
And before she realized what he’d intended, he’d moved across the carriage and sat beside her, his warm, big body pressed up against her, and he’d taken her nervous hand in his.
Miranda curled up in the corner of the coach, her cloak wrapped tight around her. They would be gone for three or four nights, Lucien had said, and yet he refused to let her bring Bridget. The trunk that had been packed for her was both ominously small and mysterious. She had no idea what was inside it, but clearly there wasn’t much.
She’d done her best, played her cards well, but she had to face facts. She had lost. Lucien always held the stronger hand, and there was only so much skill could do against a master player. He was taking her to his degenerate friends, the final proof of how little she truly mattered. Any hopes she’d had of a real connection had finally died.
He rode outside, a good thing. She would have had a hard time keeping up her bubbly conversation during the ride, which he’d told her would take most of the day. Instead she could try to think if there was any way of escape.
He’d told her it would never be rape. Perhaps he only meant with him. He would offer her up to his friends, and she had no idea what would happen if she struggled. Perhaps it would only sweeten the game for them. She’d refused to struggle with St. John—she would hardly give a bunch of jaded aristocrats that pleasure.
She could escape, perhaps. She’d given Lucien every sign that she was cowed—if he glanced away for even a minute she could run.
Her chances of success would be slim. She had no money, and he would find her easily enough, and then all he had to do was lie if someone tried to help her. Tell them she was a runaway bride. Or a madwoman. Or he could simply kill anyone who offered to assist her—she had no real knowledge of the depths his infamy could go. So the only people who could truly help her would be her family, and they had no idea where she was.
Author: Anne Stuart
Even Jane didn’t know exactly where they were headed. She could direct her family north, but Lucien had taken back roads, and Jane would have little information.
Oh, they would find her eventually. But not soon enough.
If he’d joined her in the coach she might have been able to make him change his mind. Perhaps he knew that, and stayed outside for that very reason. It was just as well. Pulling up her skirts, she took out the knife that was strapped to her calf.
It was a nasty-looking weapon, part of a display of armory used during the Civil War, though she wasn’t sure if it was by the Roundheads or the Royalists. Either way, it was about a foot long with a nice point, even if the blade was sadly dull. She’d slipped it out of the display in the third-floor hallway. It hadn’t been dusted in what looked like decades, and there were so many weapons adorning the walls that Lucien would never realize something was gone.
If worse came to worst, she’d stab him.
Oh, no place on his body that would actually kill him. In the arm or leg or something, just enough to shock him and hurt like hell and give her time to get away. She’d considered smashing a ewer on his head as she had with St. John but Lucien probably had too hard a head to make that work. But he could bleed if she stabbed him, she had no doubt.
She tucked the blade back in the garter. Getting into the carriage had been tricky, as dismounting was bound to be, but the groom had handled the honors and Lucien would be busy with other things. Like planning her total subjugation by deviates.
The Heavenly Host! Heaven spare her. She had no fear of blood sacrifice or black masses. She’d heard the stories, much expurgated, from her own family. Both her father and grandfather, the notorious Francis Rohan, had been active in the Heavenly Host, and unless they’d greatly changed in the last twenty years they were nothing but a group of bored aristocrats playing games with God and sex, dressing in outlandish costumes and cavorting. She had no quarrel with their silly doings, as long as they kept their grubby hands off her.
She considered the vain hope that her brothers had lied to her, that they had followed in the family footsteps and joined that group of degenerates, and would, upon discovering her identity, rescue her, but she doubted it. She knew them too well, and none of them would have any patience with that kind of playacting. The Heavenly Host would hold no interest for them. Benedick and Charles were happily married, and Brandon was such a prig he’d be horrified.
So she could fight, she could run, or she could stab Lucien. While that was definitely the most appealing, she somehow doubted she’d have the courage in the end. Because, appalling, toad-sucking, slime-dwelling bastard that he was, she.
She what? Didn’t want to hurt him? That certainly wasn’t true—she’d like to bash him in the head. She was fond of him? Hardly. One couldn’t be fond of someone who skulked around like a Shakespearean villain. Pitied him? Not likely. He was much too strong to be pitied.
Lusted after him? Perhaps she would say yes, if she were to be honest with herself, but she was fighting it, fighting her own weaknesses. So he was good at making a woman shiver and tremble and dissolve. It was a skill and nothing more. She needed to remember that.
But she could also remember the way he held her as she cried. The expression on his face when he thought she wasn’t looking. The way they were so oddly in tune, when they weren’t at war.
If he’d just stop being such an arrogant bastard she might start to care for him. Might stop wanting his head on a platter.
But she was much too wise a woman to fall in love with a man who was only intent on vengeance against her family and thought of her as nothing but a weapon. She was too smart to love a man who couldn’t love her back, no matter how easy it was to fall under his spell.
Wasn’t she?