Fire at Midnight (33 page)

Rachael rushed the rest of the way down the stairs and dropped to the floor beside him. Framing his face with her hands, she drank in his beloved features. All the nuances that made him who he was were evident in his face. They had always been there. If only she had read his eyes and ignored his words!

His face was thinner. The full mustache and dashing beard were gone. He looked younger, more vulnerable, although he still had a formidable quality about him. What she had mistaken for the ravages of conscience on Jacques’s face was the toll Jacques’s abuse had taken on his brother.

“What has he done to you?” she asked, her eyes welling with tears.

Sebastién shook his head in rejection of her pity while he drew her to him with a strength that surprised her. Their conversation in the tavern played through her mind, including the amorous overture he had made to her. Had he been testing her? She knocked at his arm and pulled away then rose to her feet and stood looking down at him.

“I must be an endless source of amusement to you,” she scolded. “How could you play such a mean-spirited trick?” Rachael felt the urge to box his ears, and said so. “I am not certain an apology will suffice,” she added in a chastising tone.

“Did I offer one?” Sebastién leaned back as he regarded her, eyes glowing with amusement.

“Nor did you offer any aid while I made a complete fool of myself in the tavern!”

“You did not seem to require my assistance,” he taunted, smiling.

“Scoundrel!”

“You called my brother far worse,” he reminded her. At the memory, he tipped his head back and his chest rumbled with laughter.

The underside of his chin had been scraped raw by a dull blade, and the loss of the beard looked recent. “What sort of mischief are you up to? Why do you go about masquerading as your brother?”

The amusement left his expression. “I fancied a change,” he replied. “The latest news from Paris is that facial hair is no longer considered
de rigueur.
“

Her narrowed eyes conveyed her displeasure over his evasiveness.

“You see before you a changed man,” he said. “The razor made all the difference,
non?”

Rachael frowned. “I doubt that the removal of your beard has improved your character,” she dryly observed.

“After all, a rodent without its whiskers is still a rat.”

“
Touché,”
he conceded lightly.

Had he escaped? Didn’t he trust her enough to confide in her? With a ragged intake of air that was almost a sob, Rachael lifted her hand and tilted his head back with gentle fingers while she inspected the rough wake of the blade.

Her gaze moved over his face and then strayed to survey the storeroom. There was nothing to indicate that the dim, airless basement littered with bolts of silk and unmarked crates had served as a hideout. She voiced her thoughts aloud, attention riveted upon Sebastién while she waited for an explanation.

He said nothing, only turned away and began examining a swollen, discolored area below his right ankle. Why was he being so distant and secretive? Rachael wondered.

“Were you injured by the fall?”

“Non,”
he replied in a detached voice as he probed his inflamed ankle. “Rat bite.”

Rachael edged closer and gingerly touched the seeping wound, discovering puncture marks at the center of the livid flesh.

“How long has it been?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, with a bemused shake of his head. “I was bitten the night I was arrested. I do not know how long ago that was.”

Rachael nodded. She knew all too well the agony of days that passed seamlessly into nights. “The rats at Bedlam …” She shuddered at the memory, unable to speak of the experience.

“My attacker fares well.” Sebastién swept an arm around Rachael’s shoulder and gathered her close. “He grows fat on the scraps he steals from me, and has retained his foul temperament. And his whiskers,” he wryly concluded as he stroked his naked chin.

A low chuckle escaped her. “How do you know which one attacked you?” she asked with a dubious sideways glance. “Have you given them all names?”

“This one is bolder than the rest. I know the look of him. Man or beast, if you wound me, I will remember you.”

His fierce expression made it obvious his words held a deeper meaning.

“We can take comfort from the fact that your pet rodent has not taken fits and died,” she said. “It might have passed a sickness to you.”

He pursed his lips in a grim smile. “I planned to summon Jacques and leave my mark upon him at the first sign of fever,” he confessed.

“Yes, and he would have tried you for that, too, with the imprint of your teeth as evidence,” she joked.

“In that event, I should seek to mark him where it will cause him the most embarrassment should he be asked to display his evidence.” A malicious grin molded his generous mouth, and wicked lights danced within the depths of his eyes. He rubbed the underside of his chin. “Well worth the consequences,” he mused. “They can only hang a man once.”

Sebastién sobered and lowered his head as the gravity of his words destroyed his mood. His hands trembled and he glanced up at Rachael before crossing his arms in an elaborately casual manner.

“They cannot hang a man they cannot find.”

His head came up at her words, and his jaw tightened. He reached for her, and then drew back, denying himself the contact. In a display of frustration, he pounded the floor with a fist.

“Nothing is ever as simple as it seems, Rachael,” he said finally, scowling.

Despite several opportunities to reveal his identity to her at the tavern, he had chosen not to do so. “You never intended to let me know it was you and not Jacques, did you?”

His answering gaze was as cruelly direct as his reply.
“Non.”

Rachael flinched at the brutal admission. “Why?” she asked, resenting the wary intensity in his catlike eyes as he regarded her. Her despair quickly escalated into anger.

“I
will
have an answer, damn you! Why would you allow me to believe you were Jacques? I’ve gone for days without sleep. I abandoned Tarry to search for you. I’ve made inquiries of dodgy strangers. I’ve paid bribes. I was prepared to beg your brother to allow me to see you. I’ve thought of nothing but you!”

“Then you’re a fool,” he interjected, without heat.

“Is it your plan to make me hate you so that I will not grieve for you?”

Sebastién’s eyes narrowed. She had struck a nerve.

“Selfish bastard!” Rachael exclaimed. “You are the fool if you believe I will abandon you now. It was your will to win me, Frenchman, and you’ll not escape the consequences of it!”

“You no longer hold any interest for me,” he churlishly replied. “It’s true, you were a challenge, but the challenge was met.”

He was trying to protect her, but if he stayed true to this course, he would destroy them both. Rachael eyed him with mounting skepticism.

“I demand to see the mark.”

His reaction was swift and under different circumstances, she might have found his profoundly insulted air amusing.

“What?”

“You heard me. I demand to see the mark,” she repeated.

“Pour quoi?”

“Why? Because I don’t recognize you. My Sebastién would fight for his life. My Sebastién would consider me reason enough to want to live.”

He seemed to have no answer for that, and his silence enraged her even further. “It must be difficult for you to know where one deception ends and another begins. I think you’ve become so adept a liar that you fool even yourself!”

“What do you mean by that?” he demanded. A telltale flush of crimson had fanned across his cheeks.

Impulsively, Rachael seized his face between her hands and kissed him with all the angry passion inside of her. She felt his ragged indrawn breath of surprise and the sudden leap of his pulse beneath her fingertips. The stubble of his new beard chafed her skin as she ground her lips against his.

Although she feared he might reject her, her lips formed an exultant smile when he groaned and wrapped his arms tightly around her, as if afraid that she would withdraw from him.

Sebastién crushed Rachael against him, clinging to her as he parted her lips with the thrust of his tongue and tasted her as if he drank from the sweetest fountain, their breaths mingling as their mouths fused hungrily.

“Don’t claim you don’t love me, Frenchman,” she whispered breathlessly. “Your own lips betray you.”

Sebastién stared into Rachael’s eyes, composure completely eroded. He darned his fingers in her heavy hair and pulled her head back. His brows were hawklike above his flashing eyes, and there was a cruel set to his mouth.

Gripping the back of her head, Sebastién held Rachael immobile as his mouth hovered over hers, and she could feel the play of his breath over the sensitized skin of her lips. His unsmiling, aggressive intensity alarmed her, and she flinched, suppressing the urge to wrench free of his hold and retreat.

Sebastién swept her hair back and rested his hand on her shoulder, fingers splayed and angled toward the delicate buttons of her frock. Elegant fingers toyed with the first of the shiny glass buttons near her throat.

“How shall I express my affection?” he cooed in a low, menacing tone. “Shall I tumble you here among the silks?”

Ignoring her gasp of indignation, Sebastién snatched at a button with a ferocious tug. It popped free and hit the slab floor with a dull chink. Rachael dodged when his fingers moved to the next fastening.

Her throat burned as tears welled and clumped in her lashes, obscuring her vision. She blinked and felt moisture spill over onto her flushed cheeks. After all the perils she had faced, why, at this moment, did she not care whether she lived or died?

Sebastién abandoned the buttons and swept Rachael into an unyielding embrace, arching her back as he bent and captured her mouth in a ravening kiss that felt like a brand. He buried his face against the soft flesh of her neck, breath warm against her throat. His arms folded around her, drawing her impossibly close. Through it all, she remained pliant but unresponsive.

Aware of her lack of response, Sebastién paused and looked at her closely then uttered a bleak sound of frustration and pushed her away. Cupping his face in his hands, he sank to the floor.

After an endless moment, his open palms slid wearily down the length of his aristocratic, fine-featured face, as if in covert removal of a mask.

“I cannot hurt you, even to keep you safe. God help me,” he said, muffled voice sounding shaken. “How will I convince anyone of the truth when I cannot even convince you of a lie?”

“It is enough to know that you do love me,” Rachael whispered. She lowered herself to the floor beside him. “You’ve escaped. We’ll leave England—”

“There was no daring escape, and no pardon,” he said, manner brusque. His expression softened when her face fell. “My first thought was to find you and take you to France,” he confessed. “I would have kidnapped you again.”

“Kidnapped? I would have gone willingly. I would go with you now,” she urged. “You can as easily flee your jailers as return to them.”

“I must return to the cage tonight,” he said, with a flinty look that warned her he would not negotiate the point.

“You seem willing to compromise me in every way but with the truth. How can you love a woman you do not trust?”

“I trust you with my life,” Sebastién said earnestly. “This has nothing to do with trust.” His face twisted with despair. “You would not be driven away, would you? I wanted to spare you further danger …”

“I have learned tenacity, if nothing else,” she said wryly and rested her head against his shoulder.

“You would be safer if you had fled this place believing you had escaped Jacques,” he said.

“There are things I treasure more than my safety.”

“There is nothing I treasure more than—”

Sebastién stopped himself, eyes sweeping over Rachael as his expression hardened with resolve. “My freedom is by arrangement. I am only free while Jacques is gone to fetch the magistrate south. It was my plan to circulate among his men as Jacques, to learn what I could. Perhaps one of his men saw the ledger before it was destroyed. But my impersonation of my brother did not reap the results I had hoped.”

“I denounced you in front of everyone in the tavern,” she recalled with a groan. “I ruined your plan.”

“You did not denounce
me,”
he reminded her. A shallow smile softened the lines around his mouth.

“You cannot intend to simply surrender and allow your brother to murder you!”

Something in the directness of his gaze heralded an unpleasant revelation.

“Rachael, I am not free,” he said. “My activities are being observed. If I attempt to leave England, I will be shot. Anyone caught with me or assisting me will be imprisoned. If my identity is revealed while I am outside the cage, I will be shot. The official explanation will be that I tried to escape.”

She shuddered. He might have been killed had she recognized him and acknowledged him in public.

“Jacques plans to accuse you of killing James, but James is safe in London,” she said. “You cannot be condemned for a crime we can prove never took place.”

Sebastién looked Rachael fully in the face, expression wary. “Who told you your brother is alive?” The line of his jaw tightened when she hesitated.
“Eleanor Faraday Falconer
,” he bit out.

He spoke the name as Jacques had said it to him, with discrete emphasis. The shadow he cast on the opposite wall wavered in the feeble light, like a ghost trapped in the room with them.

“How long have you known?”

“She disappeared before I could confront her,” he said bitterly. “Jacques accused me of killing her.” He swore under his breath.

Rachael recalled the fight between the brothers the night Sebastién had been arrested, and now she knew what had precipitated his violent assault upon Jacques.

“You must not judge your mother too harshly. She was desperate to know the son she had lost.”

“The son she
abandoned
.” The correction was cutting.

“Perhaps she has suffered her share of misrepresentation,” Rachael argued. “She vouched for your good character to me, even when she was your ‘housekeeper.’” As she rested against him, she felt tension surge through his body. His features were rigid.