Read The Perils of Pleasure Online
Authors: Julie Anne Long
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Historical, #General
The Perils of Pleasure (4 page)
“Then we are even, as I saved yours, Mr. Eversea. Release me, please.” She shifted her eyes, which gave her a view straight up into his nose. Reluctantly, she shifted her gaze back to those unexpectedly compelling eyes and gave a minute, reflexive tug at the same time.
His grip budged not a hair.
“Ah, but you were
paid
to save my life, Miss Green
way. I saved your lovely hide voluntarily. Which means your act was commerce, and mine was . . . ” He paused. “ . . . virtue.”
To his credit, that last word did arrive with a whiff of irony.
“Correction, Mr. Eversea—it
would
have been com
merce, if I had been paid. I was instead
fi red
upon for my services, and this, I hardly need point out, would not have happened had I not rescued you from what was very likely your just deserts.”
She’d meant to goad him. This was a bad sign. It meant he’d managed to stir either her temper or her pride, both of which were formidable, and either of which could cause an inconvenient tipping of her pre
cious equilibrium.
It meant she had begun to panic in earnest.
“In short,” she continued quickly, “you are bad luck, Mr. Eversea. I would prefer to be on my way without hurting you, but regardless, I shall go. And I assure you that I know a
variety
of ways to hurt you, despite our current . . . ” She gave another minute tug of her wrists; they budged not at all. “ . . . position.”
Hmm. Well, she could drive her knee into his—
Almost absently, Colin Eversea planted both his booted feet around her feet, trapping them.
Damnation.
They were so close his knees were virtually between her legs. It was perhaps the most intimate she’d been with any man in . . . well, it wasn’t as though she’d actu
ally kept
count
of the days.
The corners of the devil’s mouth turned up into a faint, hard smile.
“You might very well have a point regarding my cur
rent physical condition, Miss Greenway. But I’ve lately learned that desperation is astonishingly motivating. Care to take the measure of my desperation?”
She’d seen any number of desperate men in her day; desperation, in fact, kept her in blunt. But none had looked quite like this. Or spoken quite like this. With obvious intelligence, or a penchant for irony, or a gen
tlemanly menace.
“You
need
me,” he pressed a few heartbeats later. It was a guess on his part, and a good one. “My family is wealthy.”
“I need you to
release
me,” she corrected.
“You need me because my family will pay for my safe return,” he corrected bluntly. “They shall be . . . happy to have me returned alive to them, regardless.”
Interesting hesitation. “You don’t sound convinced.”
His smile was rueful, but this time it reached his eyes. “I’m not. At least, I’m not certain they
all
will be happy. But I
am
certain you will be
paid
to return me to them. For we’ve honor, you see. We Everseas do.” More irony. “And something tells me it’s urgent that you’re paid.”
“Mr. Eversea, more specifi cally, it’s urgent that I am paid very
quickly
. I haven’t time to waste on—”
“Ah, once again we are in accord, then, as it’s urgent that I return to Pennyroyal Green quickly. It’s begin
ning to feel a bit like destiny, wouldn’t you agree, Miss Greenway?”
Mrs.
, she almost corrected. Though it hardly seemed relevant anymore.
“
Why
do you need to return urgently?” she de
manded instead. She wanted a fact, something convinc
ing, by way of collateral. She wanted proof his urgency equaled her own.
“I need to stop a wedding in Sussex. And I need to prove my innocence before I do it.”
Oh
,
for God’s sake.
Excessive sentimentality ought to be a hanging offense.
“Oh, really. Who is this paragon?” He wasn’t the only one who could construct a sentence out of irony. “I imagine her name is Louisa.”
“She’s not a paragon. She’s a flesh and blood woman. And she belongs with me.”
The words were terse.
The sun rises in the east. It’s dark at night. She belongs with me
. Same tone. There
was an odd, faint answering echo of pain somewhere inside Madeleine when she heard them. She took in a deep breath.
“If this is true, whom is she marrying instead?” There was no pain her sharp mind and a sharp retort couldn’t blunt.
Another of those funny, brief hesitations followed. “My brother Marcus.”
Ah. So he’d decided to be honest, as
that
confession could not have been pleasant for him.
For her part, she’d decided to be relentless. “So it’s your brother who has the family money.”
This was clearly a little too accurate, as his grip on her tightened infi nitesimally.
“My brother had the advantage of not being in Newgate.”
“Presumably because he didn’t stab a gentleman to death in a pub?”
She’d gone too far. His eyes went dark, his mouth opened abruptly, and it occurred to her too late that she might not like to make this man truly angry. But then—
But then he surprised her. He closed his mouth over whatever retort he’d planned, his brows came together in a sort of puzzlement, and he studied her for an un
blinking moment.
Before her eyes some sort of realization gradually lit his. That frown tilted up at one corner and . . .
Damned if it didn’t become a nearly
tender
smile. As though he understood something about her she didn’t quite understand yet.
“Presumably,” he said, and his words were gentle now. “Then again, as I said before, neither did I. It’s just that I simply cannot seem to
prove
it.” Self-deprecating humor in the words. He was actually trying to
soothe
her.
A wee taste, then, of Colin Eversea’s vaunted charm. It enveloped, sliding in through chinks she didn’t know she had. Madeleine hadn’t the faintest idea how to de
flect it. She stood, for the first time in longer than she could recall, without the upper hand.
It was terrifying.
With some difficulty, she tore her gaze away. Ah,
that
did the trick. Her wits recongregated and presented her with a triumphant realization. “Have you any sisters, Mr. Eversea?”
He went still, clearly surprised. And then his head went back a little on a genuine, appreciative little laugh. Acceding a point.
“Yes, I have two sisters, as a matter of fact. Which is how I know very well that women aren’t quite the fragile, helpless creatures most men think they are. Or they would like men to think they are . . . when it suits them.”
It was both an acknowledgment and a warning, and somehow it was just the right thing to say.
Quite unexpectedly he released his grip at last and took a step backward, his palms up.
And just when she was growing accustomed to that Newgate smell.
She rubbed at her wrists eloquently and stared up at him. Not a trace of guilt altered his handsome face.
Damnation
. She stopped rubbing, as her wrists weren’t really troubling her.
“Have we an honorable agreement to help each other, then?”
Oh, not
this
. It never failed to amaze her: men and their bloody frivolous attachment to the notion of honor. Her own notions of right and wrong were in
stinctive and, in truth, quite fl exible.
“Yes,” she humored, tamping impatience. She could revise her version of an honorable agreement at any time, she decided.
“Shall we shake hands, then?” There was a glimmer of something about his mouth.
Ah.
And now she knew he’d been a devil. She wasn’t eager to give her hand or any of her other limbs back to him, and he knew it. Still, he might as well know she wasn’t afraid of anything. She thrust a hand out, he closed his large warm hand over hers and gave it a firm shake as though she were any gent, and he released it as though the touch of a strange woman’s bare hand moved him not at all; while her thoughts, for a shock
ing instant, were altogether vanquished simply by the heat of his fingers closing over hers.
“No one knows about the window,” he guessed.
“Of course not.” she said shortly, when she could speak again.
“You brought in the lamp so no one would guess at the existence of a window.”
She heard the bemusement in his voice. She ignored it. He wouldn’t be the first man to attempt to under
stand her, to marvel at her, and there wasn’t time to indulge him. It wasn’t a game to her.
“Can you climb?” she said curtly instead.
“I can climb,” he answered just as curtly.
She leaned the broom aside and cast a dubious look up at him. Colin Eversea was conspicuously tall and broad-shouldered and—well, conspicuously
Colin Ever-sea
. No doubt the moment the two of them managed to squeeze their bodies out of the window, an abandoned broadsheet with his image sketched over it would blow up to wrap their ankles.
And no doubt they were clutched as cherished me
mentos in the hands of all of those filtering back to their homes, either disappointed or rejoicing in the fact that they hadn’t seen a hanging, but knowing it was a day they would never forget.
Then there was the matter of his clothes—that dark coat sewn of superfine and cut by Weston, from the looks of it; a silk cravat, limp, but silk nevertheless. Those boots of his were gorgeous, made by Hobby, no doubt, and no worse for being worn behind prison walls. The sheen of them would easily draw the eye of any opportunistic thief, who would follow them up Eversea’s legs to that decidedly memorable face, and then there would be trouble.
Still, a horned sketch was one thing. The living, breathing man was something else altogether.
“Your coat will have to—” she began.
But Eversea was a surprisingly quick study. He stripped off his coat so those brass buttons wouldn’t wink like beacons for thieves.
“And the—” she began.
But he was already working the cravat loose, and then the waistcoat came off, too, with an alacrity that made her blink despite herself and started a peculiar heat up in her cheeks. It had been some time since she’d seen a man, let alone an attractive man, matter-of-factly strip off articles of clothing.
Colin Eversea folded his clothes into a bundle, bent to scoop up both of the cords that had bound him a moment ago, bound up the trappings of his life as a gentleman, then slung them over one shoulder and an
nounced, “I’ll go fi rst.”
She could grow to loathe that arrogant demand in his voice. It hadn’t been a suggestion. And it was a clear indication he didn’t trust her.
Madeleine was disinclined to take orders from anyone, but she was practical, and arguing required time. “Very well,” she said curtly.
Colin tugged the window out of its frame; it came easily, and in rushed a gust of foul, warm air. The row of barrels stood before them like the plump backsides of guards.
“Mind the barrels,” she ordered sotto voce, and then Colin Eversea pulled himself out into daylight, all of about eight minutes after someone had tried to kill Madeleine Greenway.
nm
t was a near thing. Colin could just barely angle out of that window, and that was because there was less of him now than when he first went to prison. He squeezed between two foul-smelling barrels the height of his hip, used his arms to lift himself out, the frame scraping his shoulders as he did.
Once upright, he found himself standing in the shad
owy light of a narrow and—from the look and smell of things—
very
dirty alley. He blinked in the wan sunlight.
Sunlight
. Once again it rushed at him: Good God. He was unbound and alive and—
But where in God’s name were they? The
rookeries
?
Colin’s eyes were arrested by a glint against the dirty, peeling wood of the building before him. The glint, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a pair of eyes. The eyes belonged a man who from head to toe was nearly the same indeterminate color as the fi lthy wall. He was sitting on the ground, a bottle clutched in his fist, and was gazing up at Colin in a sort of fond wonder.
“Well,
good
mornin’, guv.” He sounded mildly
pleased. Doubtless, he considered Colin one of his more benign hallucinations.
Colin hesitated. “Good morning,” he answered po
litely. Habit of breeding.
The man beamed. Four teeth, Colin counted. Like the aftermath of that first bowl of ninepins.
Colin glanced over his shoulder just as the top of Madeleine Greenway’s glossy dark head appeared through the window along with her pale hands, and then her muslin-clad torso began to wriggle through.
“OHHhhhhh . . . !”
The filthy man was all delighted, singsong insinuation. He gently put down his bottle and applauded Madeleine’s appearance the way he might the conclusion of a very satisfying puppet show.
Colin moved swiftly to help her out of the window, another force of habit, thinking perhaps to cup her elbow? Take her hand? But something like surprise or uncertainty flickered over her face. She glanced at his extended hand, her fine dark brows diving in a little frown.
He retracted the hand, abashed, and a little insulted, and amused at himself for feeling insulted.
Madeleine Greenway got herself upright, shook out her skirts and instantly began assessing her surround
ings. She had a few splinters in her glossy hair, shrapnel from the fired shot. He was tempted to pluck one out to present it to her as a souvenir, but her hands were brushing them out of her hair before he could surrender to that unwise temptation.
“Wait . . . Might I . . . might I ashk a question of ye, guv?” The request from the man against the wall was wistful.
Colin’s eyes darted to Madeleine, who looked poised to bolt. “Very well.”
“Ye’ll need to come closher.” The man crooked a languid, fi lthy finger. Once, twice.
Colin glanced back at Madeleine, and he gained an impression of snapping livid dark eyes, fair skin, and very pink cheeks.
Impatience
, it might have said be
neath her image on a woodcut.
Colin leaned over. “Yes, sir?”
That filthy hand came up to entreatingly grip his shirt. “Tell me . . . ” His friend wondered mistily. “Yer doxie . . . wash she . . . wash she . . .
good
?”
“Was she
good
?” Colin was all stern indignation. He paused eloquently. “Good God, man. I don’t pay her to be
good
.”
It took a moment for this to soak through the gin.
And then the man released Colin’s collar to slap his thigh and he gave a great shout of phleghmy laughter. His breath was like the vapors of hell, and Colin reared back, but he couldn’t help but laugh, too. God, it felt good to laugh at something ridiculous.
The man stopped laughing abruptly. “Ye’ve very fi ne teeth, guv,” he said shrewdly.
Well, then. Time to be off.
“Take his hat,” Madeleine Greenway hissed.
She
wasn’t amused, judging from the color in her cheeks.
“What? Why . . . ? Oh. We can’t just take his
hat
,” Colin protested, also on a hiss. Though he heard how ridiculous it sounded even as he said it.
“He’d rather have gin than a hat.” She knelt, held a penny up before the man’s eyes, watched them light, then snatched it back. “For your hat,” she said fi rmly.
“Take it, me dove,” he said with tender gallantry.
She left the penny next to the man’s knee, snatched the hat from his head, and gave it Colin, who took it gingerly.
“A hat full of lice,” he said. “Your very first gift to me. I shall cherish it.”
“It looks clean enough,” she said darkly, and turned on her heel, walking away from him. “Put it on.”
Colin sniffed at the hat tentatively; shockingly, it didn’t reek. He patted it down over his head; it fi t, and then some, covering him to his eyes. Still, he was aware that his own shirt was as blinding as a sail on a frigate in this particularly grimy neighborhood.
He followed her to the end of the lane, dodging a large and suspicious-looking puddle. In this part of London it could be a puddle of nearly anything at all, none of it good.
Colin glanced over at his prickly new partner, want
ing details about her, getting them only in fragments out of the corners of his eyes, as she was moving too quickly. He noted her shoes, flashing beneath her hem as she walked: good brown leather walking boots, in fine condition and of current fashion. She wasn’t suffer
ing from poverty, then. Her dress was a shade of light muslin, and also fashionable—he knew these things, as he had sisters, after all, and had delivered more than one detailed order to the modiste for one of his mis
tresses. The dress was conservative without being plain: two frills at the hem, snug sleeves, a tasteful fi chu of some sort wrapped about her throat and tucked into the low rectangle of the bodice. Then again, he doubted anything would succeed in looking plain on this crack
ling woman. She looked clean, if not entirely crisp. Her skin was very fair and fine-grained; even in this grimy, filtered light it was luminous. Two tiny, almost imper
ceptible round scars sat low on her jaw. Pockmarks. Her mouth was generous, a soft pale pink.
He inventoried her features, one by one, in quick
glimpses, and knew regret that such singular beauty— and it
was
beauty—should exist seemingly exclusive of charm. She seemed a creature comprised of intent and resentment.
They reached the end of the alley and both stopped abruptly, doubtless arrested by the same thought. Sol
diers would be fanning out like the aforementioned lice all over London, looking for him. And Colin had been a soldier. He knew they had their flaws, soldiers did, but most were dogged, because that’s all they knew how to be, and many were ruthless.
No doubt his family was being thoroughly ques
tioned by authorities right now. An image of his father, Jacob, strutting with glee, restored to his usual state of enigmatically confident bonhomie at having once more cheated fate, bloomed in Colin’s mind. He almost smiled. But that image opened a door on a great rush of impatience and longing. For his family, Louisa, Penny
royal Green. All the things he loved, had been denied, had thought to never see again. And in that moment he didn’t think he could bear another second of the world thinking he had done murder, and his lungs seized.
Moments later he took in a deep, long breath just to remind himself that he breathed free air. “Have you any more blunt, Miss Greenway?” Impatience made the question curt.
He, of course, had nothing, because he’d paid the hangman to bind him more loosely and tug on his legs to kill him faster, and that was the end of his blunt. That thought made him look down at his legs now with a sense of vertigo. He could still feel the ghost of the shackles on them, feel the chafe of his boots where they’d ringed his ankles, but he could still
feel
his legs, and this meant he was alive.
He hadn’t realized he’d so accustomed himself to the idea of dying that he now needed to accustom himself once again to living. The sensation wasn’t comfortable. It was akin to circulation returning bit by bit to blood-deprived limbs.
He glanced up then and caught Madeleine Green-way’s dark eyes on him, an unidentifi able expression fleeing from them.
“I
would
have had more blunt,” she said meaning
fully, sharply turning her head back toward the street. He did like her voice, he decided—its richness and con
fidence. Even if the resentment in it was all for him. “But now I haven’t enough for a hackney to take us to the Tiger’s Nest. And we can’t have you walking these streets looking like . . . like . . . ”
She concluded her sentence by shaking her head roughly, as if to clear it of a nightmare.
Perversely, this amused Colin.
He
was the nightmare in question. He looked like a damned gentleman. And this was the problem, when this had never before in his life been anything other than an asset.
A hackney rolled by the end of the lane as she spoke, the privacy and speed of it a taunt to the two of them who stood trapped there in the gray, filthy lane. A tattered broadsheet came cartwheeling gaily across the ground and made a landing, graceful as a swan, atop that puddle.
colin eversea,
it said in large dark letters. Right above a boldly inked woodcut of the scaffold.
Well, then. Colin jerked his head away from that. But the view at the end of the alley was hardly better. Like a droplet of blood, a red-coated soldier appeared in the crowd.
And where there was one soldier, there were typically more.
His heart gave one sickening thud, and then contin
ued on considerably accelerated.
“Your coat,” Madeleine Greenway said, her voice low with urgency.
Without thinking, Colin handed over his corded bundle, and he watched, half bemused and half with a sort of pleasure, as her quick hands worked it open, un
folded the coat, and pulled—and pulled and pulled, as the tailors at Weston were rigorous and thorough and the threads unwilling to give way—a brass button free.
She closed it in her fist triumphantly. “We’ll pawn this.” She turned on her heel and returned to their now hatless friend against the wall.
“I knew ye’d return to me, me dove,” their friend said sentimentally.
Madeleine knelt. “Do you know of a fence near here?” She kept her voice low.
If she’d asked the question in Pennyroyal Green, anyone might have pointed out Gerald Cutter’s fence. It was built of stone from crumbling castles and drift
wood collected from the sea and sagged like Gerald Cutter’s jowls, and it did very little to actually keep the sheep in.
But this man said:
“Ah! ’Twould be McBride. Heesh a . . . ” His hand waved in front of him for a bit, as though he was clear
ing a fogged windowpane in order to see his next word. “ . . . a possecary,” he finally produced triumphantly. Spittle rained out with the
s
. “’E ’as a fl ash ’ouse, ’e ’as.”
Madeleine brushed the spittle out of her eyes in a businesslike fashion and said nothing. She seemed at a loss as to what a possecary might be. Colin was at a loss as to what a flash ’ouse might be.
“An apothecary?” Colin translated, winning a look of surprise from Miss Greenway. But if there was any
thing he knew well, it was gin-speak. And whiskey-speak, and ale-speak, and champagne-speak, and the like.
“S’what I said, sir.”
“Where can we fi nd McBride?”
“’Ave yer another penny?” he asked shrewdly. “Me dove?” he added fl irtatiously.
“Sadly, no.” She said this with no hint of regret. “But I
may
bring another to you if you tell us.”
“
’Tis
sad t’ be wi’out pennies, ’tisn’ it?” the man commiserated fervently. “Verra well. McBride, ’eesh in the nexsht street. Near the lass wi’ the . . . ” Another el
oquent swipe of the hand through the air, as though he were trying to catch an elusive butterfly. “ . . . posies.” A fresh shower of spittle emerged with the
p
.