Claimed by the Rogue (4 page)

His breath was a balmy breeze against her cheek, his lips a promise waiting to be fulfilled. Alarmed by how easy it would be to tip her face and match her mouth to his, she lifted her mask. “I must go back inside before I am missed.” Assuming her mother had not raised the hue and cry already. Since she’d stepped out, time had seemed to halt.

“Must you?” His hand wrapping lightly about her wrist stayed her. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Phoebe hesitated. Other than her morals, what had she possibly forgotten?

“I retrieved your mask. What favor shall I claim in repayment?” His gaze slid to her mouth, bringing a burst of heat blooming in her lower belly.

“Handsome as sin” took on sudden new meaning. Legs wobbly, Phoebe stepped back, nearly tripping on her heavy train. “A good deed is its own reward, is it not?” She’d been mistaken earlier. He wasn’t a pirate or a privateer. He was Mephistopheles, the Devil incarnate.

“Is it?” He flashed another blindingly beautiful smile. “Mind you, I
am
a pirate.”

The ballroom doors opened. Sound and light poured onto the patio. “Ah,
chérie
, I have found you at last.”

Heart plummeting, Phoebe pivoted toward Aristide as he stepped out.

He made his way over to join them, his black domino catching on the breeze, the sight putting Phoebe in mind of a bat rather than the raven prince he was meant to portray. An elaborately plumed mask covered all but the lower third of his face. The muscle jumping in his jaw confirmed he was not happy with her.

“It is nearing midnight. Your father is most eager to announce our betrothal.”

Feeling oddly bolstered by the stranger bearing up behind her, she answered, “Yes, I know. I have searched the four corners for you.”

Aristide’s gaze bore into her. “And yet I find you not within but out…here with…” He gestured with his gloved fingers rimmed in rings to indicate the pirate who’d stepped up to her side. “Will you not introduce our guest?”

Heart thrumming, she waited for the pirate to announce himself. Surely he didn’t mean to adhere to some silly midnight rule. Rules, for this man, hardly seemed to exist.

Instead he stayed silent. Left with no choice, Phoebe admitted, “I am afraid I have yet to persuade this gentleman to give up his name.”

Aristide’s sanguine smile slipped. “Let us have done with this farce. Unmask yourself,
monsieur
.”

Ignoring him, the pirate turned to Phoebe. His gaze locked upon hers, trapping her in a private world that seemed to contain only the two of them. “You are quite certain you do not know me…
Phoebe
?”

The unsanctioned intimacy rocked Phoebe to her core. More jarring still was how very right, how very
familiar
it felt to hear her name on his lips.

Gaze holding hers, he removed his hat and set it upon the post. Wavy dark hair stirred in the breeze, the unfashionably long tresses curling about his collar. From his left ear, a diamond winked like a small star. Brawny arms reached up to untie the silk ribbons holding his mask in place. The felt fell away. Colored light splashed familiar chiseled features: a high brow, slightly crooked nose, full mouth and squared jaw that Phoebe knew not only by sight but by touch. But it was his eyes to which she kept returning. A dead man’s eyes, a ghost’s eyes…

Robert’s eyes.

Eyes that despite the darkness she knew were the color of amber. Like a fly caught in that sticky resin, she was powerless to move or so much as look away and yet her numbed lips somehow managed to murmur, “This isn’t real… You are not…real.”

The specter shook his head. “This is real.
I
am real, a living man forged of flesh and blood,” he swore, his breath, his
living
breath, brushing across her lips, his eyes not the hollow, flat gaze of a ghost but enticingly warm.
 

There was but one way to be certain.
 

Phoebe lifted a trembling hand to his cheek. Sandpapery stubble grazed her fingers, a day’s worth of beard. His scent and warmth were wrenchingly familiar, the white scar splitting his chin a foreign thing. Too caught up to question how he might have come by it, she traced its thickness with her thumb. He flinched.

“Do I hurt you?” she asked, drawing away.

Expression stoic, he shook his head. “No, you but undo me with your gentleness.” His own hands remained solidly at his sides though the heaving of his chest, broader than she remembered, suggested that the self-restraint exacted a toll she couldn’t begin to comprehend.

Aristide stepped between them. “Phoebe,
arrêtez
!” The admonition to stop came in a whoosh of hot, brandied breath.

But Phoebe had no intention of stopping. If this was a haunting, she hoped with all her heart it might never end. Ignoring him, she moved to trace her ghost lover’s mouth, the lips that once had matched hers to perfection. Everywhere she touched felt neither airy light nor marble cold, but warm and solid and thrumming with life.
 

Letting her hand fall away, she took a step back, aware that not only her limbs but her whole body had begun shaking. Her ghost lover was no ghost at all but a flesh-and-blood man.
 

“Robert,” she said, almost a whisper, as if she were at prayer. In a way, she was.

He swallowed, a long ripple traveling the muscled column of his throat. “Aye, ’tis I, and I’ve sailed many a league to make my way back to you.”

He reached inside his open shirt and drew out a silver chain. Hanging from the end was yet another object she’d thought never again to see, the locket fashioned in the form of a padlock, its engraved casing an identical match to hers.
 

Phoebe took a wavering step away, the stone floor seeming to suck at her slippers, the night exploding into a swirling chaos of stars and stabbing lights. Suddenly the balcony seemed to be spinning.

“Phoebe!” Robert’s call came from a faraway place, an echo from the storm-tossed abyss into which she was fast falling.
 

For the first time in six years, Lady Phoebe Tremont fainted.

Chapter Two

Robert caught Phoebe against him. Hairpins pinged onto the stone flagging as he lifted her into his arms, her lithe form as slack as a sack of feathers. Head resting against his shoulder, she released a sigh.

The fiancé threw back his domino and tore off his mask. He wore his black hair fashionably cropped, the fringe combed low over his forehead, framing a florid-featured face more arresting than handsome. A stubborn mouth curved into a sneer. Deep-set dark eyes raked over Robert. He fixed his gaze on the Frenchman and glared back. Standing toe-to-toe, they took one another’s measure. Robert didn’t move save for the telltale muscle in his jaw which had begun ticking fiercely. Likewise the hairs at the neck of his neck stood at full alert. Phoebe’s fiancé was a stranger and yet Robert couldn’t shake the sense that they’d met before. That was ludicrous, of course. He could count upon the fingers of one hand the Frenchmen he knew. This one he would have remembered.

“So you are the brash young lover returned from the dead?” the Frenchman finally said.

“And you are the devoted fiancé returned from the card room,” Robert shot back, not a question.

“Aristide Bouchart, seventh Comte de Beaumont.” Black-shod heels clicked together. “I will take my bride now, if you please.” He stretched out arms which were well built but not particularly powerful.

Robert had no intention of relinquishing Phoebe, not now, not ever. “And if I do not please?”

A strained smile answered the challenge. “Then,
monsieur
, we find ourselves…at odds.”

“A score I shall look forward to settling in the very near future,” Robert assured him. If pistols at dawn proved the sole solution to securing Phoebe’s freedom, then so be it.

“Unhand my daughter, you rogue.”

The strident female voice ended their standoff. Both men turned to see the balcony doors once more opening.

Costumed as Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, Lady Tremont stepped out onto the terrace. A pudgy Elizabethan-era courtier followed, drawing the doors closed behind them. Apart from the red wig and white face paint, she was exactly as Robert recalled her—straight-backed, iron-eyed and fire-breathing.
 

Supporting Phoebe in his arms limited his salutatory courtesies to a spare nod. “Your ladyship will forgive me if I do not bow. Or ought I to say Your Highness?” he added in deference to her costume. Trust Phoebe’s mother to use her daughter’s betrothal as an opportunity to ascend to sovereign status.

Her penciled eyebrows shot to her wig’s hairline. “Bellamy, can it be you? But…you were to have drowned!”

He nodded. “Indeed, madam, it pains me to once again disappoint and yet I am quite alive as you can see. I am gratified to find you likewise hale and hearty.”

Her gaze narrowed. “Don’t think to cozen me with your honeyed words. You’ve never given a fig for my health and well I know it.” Her gaze dipped to Phoebe’s head resting against his shoulder. “Nor would it seem you greatly care for my daughter’s; otherwise you would not have intruded to spoil her chances once again.” Her gaze flickered to Bouchart and an anxious look eclipsed the scowl.

The Frenchman answered with an oily smile. “
Au contraire,
the present unpleasantness only fortifies my resolve to make your daughter my bride.” He glanced over at Robert. “That is, provided
Monsieur
Bellamy can be persuaded to part with her.”

Lady Tremont shifted to Robert. “Unless a surfeit of seawater has rendered you deaf, you heard well enough. Hand over my daughter or I’ll have my butler set the dogs on you.”
 

There’d been a time when the flimsy threat would have cowed Robert, but not so now. “I very much doubt you keep hounds at your town residence, milady. Now pray direct me to where we are least likely to encounter your guests…unless, of course, you do not care about what scandal broth is stirred,” he added, well knowing she dreaded social disgrace as others did plague and pestilence.

Silent ere now, Lord Tremont stepped up to them. He hesitated and then laid a hand on either man’s shoulder. “Let us defer any further argument until we can be private. I’ve bid my butler summon the guests into supper. As soon as the room is emptied, we shall bear Phoebe within and upstairs to my study. It is the one chamber kept locked at all times.”

Sincerely grateful for his lordship’s calm composure and sound sense, Robert nodded. “Thank you, milord.”

They stood in strained silence a moment more, waiting for the music to cease. It did, and seconds later a bell sounded. Several minutes more passed, taken up with shuffling footfalls, collective conversations punctuated by the occasional exclamation or titter and the swish of fine fabrics as the guests were herded away.

Wilson, the Tremont butler, poked his graying head out onto the balcony. “The room is clear,” he said in a low monotone. “I have posted two footmen outside the supper room doors with strict instructions to see that no one is permitted to leave until you have passed.”

“Good man, Wilson.” Lord Tremont turned back to Robert. “Shall we?”

Robert inclined his head. “Lead the way, my lord.”

Wilson held the door, and they filed inside. Other than the musicians packing their instruments, the chamber was deserted. Following Lord Tremont, Robert cut across the columned ballroom, Aristide and Lady Tremont bringing up the rear, their heels clicking on the parquet floor. The pier glasses interspersed among the four walls reflected their tense faces as they whisked past. A dollop of wax from the crystal chandelier caught Robert on the forearm. Lest Phoebe be similarly splashed, he stepped swiftly to the right.

The sudden jolting sent Phoebe stirring. Throat knotting, Robert dared a look down. When he’d first arrived, he’d glimpsed her from the breadth of the ballroom. Despite her mask and the densely packed crowd separating them, he’d known her on sight. Standing on the outskirts of the dance floor whilst she waltzed by in the arms of her fiancé had tested his fortitude—and his temper. The meeting on the balcony hadn’t been entirely contrived. He’d sought refuge there to clear his head before approaching her. Once she’d stepped out, it had been too dark to discern her in detail. Now, beneath the bright light of the massed candles and with no cover to conceal her, for the first time in six years he looked upon her in plain view.
 

She hadn’t changed, not really. Her face was the same flawless oval the miniaturist had captured so cannily, her complexion paler than he remembered but every whit as petal-smooth. Her bow-shaped mouth looked as luscious and kissable as he recalled it; likewise her cheekbones were the same high arcs, her chin somewhat less rounded. The only discernible difference was her hair. The cropped curls had grown into waist-length waves that slid over his forearm like a skein of wheat-colored silk.
 

Coming up behind him, Lady Tremont hissed, “I cannot imagine where or how you have been keeping yourself these past years, but once you set my daughter down, you are never to lay your paws upon her again.”

Dropping his voice, he replied, “That is for Phoebe to decide.”

A brace of footmen stood guard outside the supper room. Laughter and collective conversation filtered out from behind the barred doors. Robert had been a guest sufficient times to have a basic memory of the interior, and he remembered a certain side door used by servants for moving unseen and unheard between the private and public rooms. Lord Tremont headed toward it. Grabbing a candle from a bracketed wall sconce, he ducked inside the passageway and started up a steep flight of bare wooden stairs. Robert followed, keenly aware of the gazes boring into his back and the footfalls trailing his heels.