I Married the Duke (12 page)

“Here!”

He swung his head up. A yard away she was grabbing the sword from the ground, but her cloaked shape wavered, doubled, blurred. Luc shook his head. The ruffian hit him with the crate again. It caught him on the shoulder. He went down and his stomach heaved.

The horse’s tread sounded farther away. Bolted.

The man grunted as he lifted the empty crate again.

“No!” She ran at his attacker with the sword.

Luc rolled onto his side, over his shoulder, his useless right eye to the ground. Someone howled. He shook his head, grappling with sight, looking for the man with the crate.

She’d gotten there already. He was bleeding from beneath his arm and shouting, and he’d dropped the crate. Another of the attackers grabbed her from behind and twisted her arms behind her. The sword clattered to the street. The wounded one stumbled toward her, cursing.

Luc struggled to stand, to make his body function. Nothing would act. They were pulling her back, dragging her heels, bearing her to the ground. The bleeding man was upon her, grabbing at her skirts. She kicked viciously.

Luc shoved to his knees, made his limbs perform. The sword lay inches from his hand.
Blessed woman
. She had kicked it to him.

He lunged for the weapon. Lurched to his feet.

He struck her attacker with the flat. The other released her, shouting, and ran. Her attacker staggered away, groaning and hurling curses back as he fled.

Abruptly, except for the woman, the alley was empty.

Luc’s head swam. He stumbled. She grasped his arm. Then her arms were around him, pressing her body to his. Everything was astoundingly hazy.

“Don’t
fall
.” Her voice was strained, her arms tight.

She was holding him up?
Preposterous
. But the alley was a tunnel of blackness, his limbs heavy and ears ringing.

“We must go to a more populated place quickly,” she said. “But if you fall I am not strong enough to pull you to your feet again.” She shoved her shoulder beneath his arm, banded her arm about his waist and pushed him forward.

Luc blinked, and a fuzzy spot of light became a torch ahead, then a lantern before a door. Then another. His head throbbed and whirred to the music now filtering up the street. He blinked again, then harder, and more came into focus. His shoulder ached like the devil. He focused on the woman beneath his arm. Her hair, bound into a knot and uncovered, glimmered like fire.

He pulled away from her.

Arabella stood shaking. “But are you—”

“Yes.” The street rocked. He grasped her arm and drew her along. They turned a corner to a street with lanterns before each door. People clustered around a pair of jugglers, flaming torches flying between them. Captain Andrew pulled her around the crowd into shadows and swung her to face him. His eye was ablaze.

“Goddammit, what were you thinking to walk about town alone? Where were you going?”

Arabella could not control the shaking that had taken over her body. “To dinner.”

“Dinner?”

“I was hungry.”

“You were—”

“Hungry! I haven’t eaten an entire meal in weeks, and with the wretched coins you insisted on giving me for doing what I should not have done, I intended to eat.” The explanation tumbled from her tongue. “After this morning I could not risk dining at the inn and encountering you because I do not wish to do things I mustn’t again. But . . . I was hungry.”

His gaze seemed to swim. He stretched his hand out to her and she flinched.

He dropped back a step. “I— Forgive me.”

“How can I presume to forgive you for anything when you have just now saved me from those men and my own poor judgment? You are absurd.” She did not want to be beholden to him. Her insides twisted with panic.

“You were not afraid,” he said in a strange voice.

“On the contrary.” Her knees were water. She had been unutterably foolish, thinking only to escape him and of nothing else.

He came toward her, but he only took her hand and wrapped his around it.

“You are safe now,” he said simply.

“I do not wish to be in your debt,” she said, because they might as well have the truth between them.

“That is perfectly clear to me,” he murmured beneath the music of a fiddle nearby. “You were brave. If you’d had Stewart’s bone saw and pewter jug at hand, you would not have even needed my help.” A smile lurked at his beautiful lips. His fingertips came beneath her chin and he tilted her face up. “As I am now in your debt as well, shall we call it even?”

She nodded. He studied her for a silent moment, then with a tight breath released her and turned away. A trickle of crimson stained his neck cloth.

“You are hurt.”

“No more than I have been many times before.” He gestured her from the shadows. “Now I believe it is time you had that dinner you sought.”

“I’ve lost my appetite. I didn’t see everything that happened when . . . What did they do to—”

“Nothing,” he said shortly. “Come.”

She went at his side along the narrow streets. People strolled arm in arm or lingered by doorways of overflowing establishments. All were celebrating.

They came to the brasserie near the inn. He opened the door for her and she saw his grimace of pain.

She halted. “I will not dine until you have seen to your wounds.”

“Blackmail? Miss Caulfield, you were wasted to have been born anything less than a duchess, in truth.” There was something very strange in his gaze as it dropped to her mouth.

“Perhaps I shall someday marry a duke and fulfill my potential,” she said with a forced smile. “Until then, however, I make an exceptional governess.”

“I have no doubt.” His voice was low.

“Your wounds?” she said briskly.

His mouth tilted up at one end. “Or a nanny, if not a governess.”

His half smile made her feel peculiar inside and out of control. Everything about him made her feel out of control. She made rash decisions because of him.

She moved away from the door into the street. “My nanny was a wonderful woman.” She must remain light, speak of nothings, then there would be nothing between them. “I remember little of her; she died when I was three. But I remember her black hair and—”

He grabbed her wrist and turned her around to him. “I don’t wish to know about your nanny.” He spoke low beneath the sounds of merriment all about. “I don’t wish to know anything more about you at all. I am nearly mad with wanting you in my hands, and the madness worsens with every word you speak.”

“About my
nanny
?”

“About anything. Everything.” His gaze covered her, and like in Plymouth it was both bemused and commanding. “You have only to move your lips and I want you.”

“Then I shall be silent!”

“I don’t imagine you can be silent, and it wouldn’t matter anyway. I would still want you, though perhaps less acutely, admittedly.”

“You speak to me as no man ever has. So frankly. As though—” As though in making his intentions clear he was putting the decision to act upon them in her hands, as he had that morning on the beach. “I wish I had never met you,” she said.

He spoke with quiet intensity. “Destiny, it seems, Miss Caulfield, is a contrary master.”

Destiny?

She whirled away from him and into a stream of people moving along the street. The music of trumpets and drums and pipes were suddenly upon her, firelight dancing off walls and glittering brass and sparkling fabrics. Revelers were laughing, talking, and singing as they jostled along. But the music was familiar now, rich and free. She caught a glimpse of the players, a Gypsy band, unmistakably different from the townsfolk and farmers with their dark skin, thick black locks, and the shimmering gold loops in the men’s ears and on the women’s wrists. She had danced with her sisters every summer of her girlhood to music at the Gypsy fair. They danced the very day the old soothsayer told them their fortune and Arabella declared she would someday wed a prince. That it was her destiny.

Dreams. Fantasies. Like the fantasy she chased now, rushing to a castle to find a prince and instead falling into the hands of men who would hurt her because she was alone.

She wove her way against the crowd, knowing he was following. He would not allow her to go alone now. She squeezed between people, holding her cloak close and peering into faces, not seeing the men who had attacked her, her heartbeats wild. The band drew closer on the street and the crowd pressed her back. Hands grabbed at her in passing. She dragged her cloak free. Her head felt dizzy, disoriented. She could not stop trembling.

He grasped her arms and blocked the crowd from her. Revelers complained with good-natured laughter and went around him.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded. He touched her only where he held her arms, protecting her with the shield of his body. She looked up. His face was shadow and light.

“I don’t know what cruel twist of fate brought you to me, duchess,” he said roughly. “But I would rather a moment of madness with you now than the promise of sanity for a lifetime.”

“I . . . Please.” Her breaths were short. “Do not ask of me what I cannot give.”

“For what exactly do you believe I have asked?”

“I will dress your wound and then you will leave me alone and that will be an end to it.”

For an instant his grip tightened. The crowd had thinned, the music fading into the darkness. Nearby, the brasserie patrons laughed and drank wine in the warm night.

He took her hand and without speech led her. The inn was close, the rhythmic whoosh of the river meeting the sea mingling with the Gypsies’ music. He led her there, releasing her hand only when they came to the door of the inn and gesturing for her to go before him. She climbed the stairs, breathless and fashioning the words she must say to put him off.

When they came to her bedchamber and he opened the door, she turned to face him.

“I must retrieve a lost horse now,” he said. “We will depart for Saint-Reveé-des-Beaux early. Until then, I wish you a good night’s sleep, Miss Caulfield.” He bowed and went swiftly down the steps.

T
HE NIGHT WAS
still warm and the festival celebrations continued undeterred by the approach of midnight. But the careful, thorough search through Saint-Nazaire’s quieter alleys cooled Luc’s blood and distracted him from the pain in his shoulder and his aching head. He carried with him pistol and dagger, and his sword, which he had cleaned in those first moments after leaving her at her door when he still doubted that he could in fact walk away.

The trail of blood from the place where they had attacked her was not difficult to follow. A handful of coins passed to a prostitute in a slatternly house by the docks revealed the wounded man lying on a pallet in an upper room. His shirt and coat were crimson with blood. He did not open his eyes when Luc spoke to him.

Luc gave the woman a few extra coins for burial expenses and sought from her the names of his companions. She did not know them. They were sailors and foreigners, she claimed. She had not seen them before tonight.

He continued on until the dark town had finally gone to bed. His search awarded him nothing. The other three men had vanished.

There was nothing left but to find his horse. It had returned to its master’s stable and stood nervously outside the paddock, reins dangling to the ground. He soothed it, climbed into the saddle with extraordinary discomfort, and turned back toward the inn.

In the inn’s stable, the little governess stood in the golden circle of a candle’s light.

He removed his mount’s bridle, saddle, and blanket and drew the animal into a stall. Then he shut the half door and allowed himself to look at her. She stood straight and proud, the pale oval of her face framed by the hood of her cloak.

“Clearly you have learned nothing from your adventure this evening of the dangers of wandering about alone at night in this town,” he said.

“I was not ignorant of the dangers of such ‘adventures’ before tonight, Captain,” she countered. “Though never four men at once, it’s true.” Her voice wavered but her chin inched up, as though to deny that such encounters had ever distressed her.

Luc’s chest felt inordinately tight.

“I see you found your horse,” she said. “I presume it did not require the entire four hours you were absent to do so.”

“I lingered for a spell at a watering hole,” he said. “Drink, you see, can be useful to dull undesirable—ah—desires. When one drinks alone, that is. When one drinks with a beautiful governess it can have quite the opposite effect, as we already know.”

She came toward him until she stood nearly touching him. Luc’s heart beat hard. She reached up, slipped her slender hand about his neck and went onto her toes. She tugged on his neck.

He dipped his lips to hers. Her kiss was firm and deliberate.

She released him swiftly and took a step back. “You have not been drinking. There is no scent of spirits about you.”

“Witch.”

Her hood had fallen back and the cornflowers were wide. “You went to find those men.”

“Would you rather they went free?”

“I would rather you did not again endanger yourself on my account.”

“There was little danger. I am not unknown for my skill with sword and pistol. Wooden crates notwithstanding.”

“Do they not teach wooden crate fighting in pirate school?”

“Not the one I attended.”

“You hadn’t sufficient skill with a sword to protect your eye in the duel you fought with Lord Bedwyr.”

“A curiosity, that mistake. As he would have admitted if he weren’t trying to impress you.”

She paused. “Was the moment of madness you spoke of a curiosity too?”

“No.” He struggled against that madness pressing at him now. She was like no other woman. Without flirtation, she was direct and forthright and vulnerable all at once. And beautiful. So beautiful that despite the wretched night he’d had, he still ached for her. “Rather, the regular state of things lately.”

Her eyes were wary. “I am doubly in debt to you now.”

“I don’t expect payment.” He backed away from her. “I don’t want payment. Your debt is hereby cancelled.”