Page 9 of How to Tempt An Earl (Wed Within a Year #2)

G ood God… She’d not been offered in marriage but simply promised, like a prize of war. A reward to Vincent; a threat, a punishment, for her. Roan’s barbarism knew no limits. Kieran felt the tic in his jaw jump at the implication of her news. He’d seen Vincent. He was a brute of a man, his body thick with muscle, his eyes full of meanness.

Kieran ran his thumb over her knuckles, soothing and stroking. ‘I will not allow that to happen.’

He moved across the carriage to sit beside her and wrapped her in his arms. He understood better now the source of her fear tonight. It was fear that stemmed not just from the physical violence she’d witnessed but also from the long-seeded mental fear she carried with her. How awful this evening must have been for her, trapped inside here, knowing that her darkest enemy was outside, coming for her and what awaited her should her escape fail—should he fail, this man she barely knew.

‘Are you all right? Do you want to talk about tonight? Any of it?’ he murmured. They’d talked about the details of the subject: the men he’d killed in the alley; the brick through the townhouse window; and the almost instant conversion of benign, helpful footmen into a small militia.

‘Those men in the alley…’ she began haltingly.

‘Would have taken you and killed me without hesitation,’ he said sternly. ‘This is a game with no rules, with no sense of fair play.’

‘I know.’ Her voice was quiet. ‘But it is one thing to know it and another to have it directed at you in reality.’ She gave a sigh, part resignation, part determination. ‘I’ll do better. I must do better. I froze, if you’d not been there…’

‘I was there, so it doesn’t matter. Tonight was frightening, and what lies ahead will be frightening too. It’s all right to be scared, Celeste. We’ll get through it. For now, there is nothing more to be done except to recover. Rest, lay your head on my shoulder and sleep. You are exhausted. We’ll drive through the night and I’ll keep watch. No one will harm you—Horseman’s oath.’

She laughed a little at that and he was glad to hear it. The shock was passing. She stifled a yawn but she did as he’d instructed, her head finding its way to that indent between his shoulder and chest. ‘Horseman’s oath? What is that?’ she asked drowsily.

‘I’ll tell you when you wake up.’ He reached beneath the seat for a blanket and draped it across them both. ‘Things will look better in the morning.’

At least, he hoped they would. The pursuers would be off their scent, and all they had to do was survive three days on the road to Wrexham—no problem. He’d done such things before and more. He’d swum a prize horse and its rider to safety in the Irish Sea after a royal ship had gone down in a storm. He and Tambor had navigated the desert wilds of Algeria to meet with Bedouin chiefs in an attempt to pre-empt what was sure to be French presence in the region in the next few years. Both had been far more difficult than evading detection on British coaching roads. He had inns to support him if he needed them, he had supplies in the coach and a guaranteed safe haven waiting for him at the end of the road.

Kieran looked down at the chestnut head nestled against him. But a woman changed everything. Women always did. A little snore escaped her and he smiled. She was truly exhausted if she was so deeply asleep already. Perhaps, too, it was a sign of her growing trust if she felt she could sleep in his presence. She was right to give it. He would see her protected, and he’d proven it tonight.

He shifted his position to accommodate them both more comfortably and began to think. He did his best planning at night. The first item to decide was shelter. They wouldn’t use the inns: her protection outranked her comfort and he didn’t think he could safely offer her both. Stopping at inns would mean they could be tracked, remarked upon. She was too beautiful to escape notice and trying to hide that beauty only called more attention—the wrong attention—to her. Camping it would be. He could send his coachman to town for food.

He ticked that item off in his mind. Food was no worry. The coach actually converted into a bed. She could sleep inside, unless she wanted to sleep outside under the stars with him. He wouldn’t mind that. He liked sleeping beside a woman, falling asleep to her soft breathing and waking up to her soft warmth against him, although it was a luxury he didn’t indulge as often as he’d like. A Horseman couldn’t sleep beside a woman he didn’t trust. Otherwise, he’d risk ending up with a knife in the gut. To prevent that, he left his lovers long before sleep could claim him.

He stretched his legs and yawned, careful not to bestir Celeste, and let his mind wander its checklist. Food and shelter were accounted for. Privacy would be a different matter. Camping was an inherently intimate activity. There were no doors or screens to protect a person while bathing or conducting other ablutions. He hoped she wouldn’t mind the potential indignities.

He was encouraged by the story she’d told of her father’s dream to live in the Alps. Maybe she’d actually enjoy a few days’ camping. She was certainly hardy enough and brave enough to tackle the outdoors. She’d been brave tonight. It would be a long while before he forgot the sight of her at the curricle tonight, pistol in hand, determined to cover his own flight when he was the one who was supposed to protect her.

Yes, Celeste Sharpton was definitely brave. It was one of many things that made her so appealing and so dangerous to him personally. Mixing women and business had been disastrous for him. It was not hyperbolic to say even deadly. Common sense dictated he keep Celeste at a distance so that he did not repeat the errors of the past, primarily in assuming that trust was implied with intimacy, or to equate sex with intimacy. Intimacy was not a guarantee of one’s safety, an axiom that was more easily affected from afar. The closer people got, the more blurred the lines became.

And she would use him. She’d already admitted she’d run from Roan to warn the Horsemen but also to protect herself. She was using him as her shield. When that protection was no longer needed, she’d leave. She might not have said the words outright, but she’d said it in other ways, demonstrated it in other ways. She believed he’d leave her if she had nothing to offer him because it was likely she’d do that in his place. It was why she kept asking for his motives. She couldn’t conceive of someone simply doing something because it was right.

And yet, the lesson of keeping his distance was hard to learn with her. Despite his best counsel to himself, he didn’t want to keep his distance, not entirely. He wanted to know her; his body answered to hers, roused to hers, craved her in an almost palpable way when they were together. His body made it clear it wanted to be more than her bodyguard or her short-term protector. His body would like to be her short-term lover, even though that would require breaking all the promises he’d made about mixing business and pleasure. Her body had made it clear it would not mind, which made resisting the temptation that much harder. They were both willing to explore whatever lay between them.

Maybe it was possible. His mind argued for compartmentalisation: perhaps they could separate the two as long as he knew where the lines were drawn? Which begged the question of whether compartmentalisation was even possible. Could someone truly just have part of a person and ignore the rest? Could someone just give part of themselves? Could he? Compartmentalisation was a convenient argument but perhaps not a realistic one. That was how trust was betrayed—in thinking that parts of a person’s nature could be overlooked. In truth, reality was always still there, waiting to surface. Repressed reality was not an erasure of reality.

He yawned again, recognising the signs of a losing fight. He would not resolve this dilemma tonight. Sleep was coming for him despite his promise to keep watch and he let it take him. The world was safe enough for now.

* * *

She was safe. It was her first thought upon waking. Safe enough to wake up slowly, to gradually let her senses acclimatise to the world around her sense by sense. Was there anything better than knowing she was safe? She took in a deep breath. Yes, there was bacon and coffee. The delicious smells of morning. She must be dreaming.

Celeste sniffed again. It smelled enticingly real. There were sounds, too: men talking; was that a sizzle and a pop she’d heard? Surely, she was making that up? She sniffed again, savouring the smell. She opened her eyes, knowing that as soon as she did reality would come flooding back to her. And it did: the dancing in Soho; the flight from London; knowing Ammon Vincent was behind them somewhere, hunting her. But there was another man now, too.

The night of fear and flight had been tempered by Kieran’s presence, his cool head in heated circumstances. The night had been marked by his grip on her hand, the strength of his gaze when he’d looked at her, the power of his words: I admire survivors… He’d kept her going when she would have frozen, when she would have had nowhere to run. That she was alive and whole this morning was due to him. To repay his efforts, she’d fallen asleep against his shoulder, with his arm wrapped around her. How long had she slept like that? When had he laid her down? She hoped she hadn’t snored.

She wiped a hand across her mouth, another concern coming to her: she hoped she hadn’t drooled. She ran her tongue across her teeth. Ugh; she wasn’t…fresh. She needed to clean her mouth and teeth; she needed to wash.

Her conscience mocked her. You are on the run for your life. These are silly considerations.

Yet perhaps they were tokens of how safe she felt with Kieran—Kieran, who’d not shown pity when she’d told him her story. Kieran, who had instead insisted she was brave.

The smell of bacon beckoned. Her stomach growled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten since the piroshky last night. She smoothed her hair as best she could and stepped down from the carriage, prepared to meet the morning.

And morning had never looked so good. Or so…shirtless. She nearly missed the bottom step of the coach at the sight of Kieran’s broad shoulders and muscled back bent at a makeshift basin, washing. Her gaze drifted down his back to lean hips and to a masculine curve of buttocks encased in tight breeches. She’d not realised how tight those breeches were without a coat covering them. Without the coat, nothing was hidden and it created the wicked urge to want to see more, to see that exquisite derrière bared.

She might have spent the rest of the day staring at that exquisite backside if his arm hadn’t moved, drawing her gaze up the muscled length of his back to watch him wash, an intimate act that had her blushing.

‘Ahem, Miss Sharpton—breakfast?’ One of the outriders approached with a plate loaded with bacon, toast and, miracle of miracles, eggs.

‘Oh, thank you.’ She tore her eyes away long enough to take the plate. The bacon smelled delicious, but Kieran looked delicious. Kieran reached for a towel and turned round, shaking water droplets from his dark hair. He dried himself and she had to remind herself not to gape. This was the body that had defended her last night; the body that had shielded her from shattering glass; the body she’d fallen asleep against. He was an atlas of muscled ridges and planes, all directing the eye downward to where his sculpted iliac girdle disappeared into the waistband of his breeches and…a scar. The jagged line disrupted the perfection of him but added to it. Perhaps a little imperfection enhanced the masculine beauty of him; it was a reminder of the life he led and the dangers he faced. They were real—knife-tip real.

‘Good morning; I trust you slept well?’ He tossed away his towel and reached for his shirt, unfazed by being caught bare-chested. Something secret and knowing flared in his dark eyes. He’d caught her looking and appreciating what she saw. He’d caught her wondering how it would feel to trace the lines of his torso to their terminus. ‘I see Eric has offered you breakfast.’ He nodded to the plate in her hand.

She’d forgotten it for a moment. ‘Oh, yes. Eggs are a luxury on the road. Wherever did you find them?’

Kieran laughed and bent down to pour coffee from a blue speckled coffee-pot nestled in the fire, showing off the flex of his buttocks in the process. ‘We had them with us as part of our supplies. But they cracked during the journey last night. We had to cook them this morning or lose them for good. Eggs never last but they make a good first-day-out breakfast.’

He came to stand beside her, smelling clean from his ablutions and making her keenly aware of her own less than fresh state. He was making it hard to think. He was telling her their plans, and she ought to listen, but all she wanted to do was look.

‘We’ll take time this morning to rest. The horses need to recover, even though the timing is not ideal. I’d rather not travel the horses in the heat of the afternoon, but they put in a long night, and so did my driver. Bert will sleep this morning in the coach while you and I stretch our legs and take some target practice. Eric and Matt will patrol our perimeter. They’ll keep an eye out for any passersby, but we’re far enough from the road that we shouldn’t draw any attention.’

‘Of course.’ She nodded, her mind still trying to move past the sight of a shirtless Kieran while his mind had quite literally thought of everything for everyone. She eyed the wash basin covetously. ‘Do you think I might be able to wash first?’

Kieran grinned and followed her to the basin. ‘There’s soap—it’s mine—and a clean towel and washcloth. They’ll dry before we have to leave.’ He reached down and lifted a tin pitcher. ‘And there’s this. It should still be warm.’

Celeste gave a gasp of delight. ‘Did you say warm ?’

‘Unless you’d prefer cold water? There’s a stream not far from here; I could arrange it,’ he teased.

She cut him off with a playful punch to the arm—a rock-solid arm. ‘Don’t you dare arrange anything. Warm water will be just fine. Give me a moment to get my valise.’

He snapped his fingers and Eric ran up with her bag. ‘I’ve already thought of it.’

‘You really do think of everything.’ Although, she hoped he couldn’t read her thoughts at the moment. They were quite decadent. She rummaged for her toothbrush and comb. ‘You will spoil me.’

He took the bag from her when she found her items and set it aside. ‘You may feel differently in a few days. Most women would not consider camping with four men along the roadside spoiling.’

She was aware of him behind her. She could feel the heat of his body as he bent to her ear. She slid him a sideways glance and a smile, his playful tone spurring a little daring of her own. ‘Maybe I’m not most women.’

‘You certainly are not.’ His tone turned sober and his gaze lingered on her mouth, making her blood go hot with an attraction she was becoming unable to school. ‘Be careful what you’re asking for, Celeste. I might be inclined to give it.’

After last night, she’d be inclined to receive it. The blood, the violence, the fear had all served as reminders that life was short and possibly abrupt. There were no guarantees. Waiting carried its own danger of missing out.

Her body was all too ready to launch the argument that she didn’t want to miss out on whatever Kieran Parkhurst offered. Her mind was all too ready to support the argument with the logic that it needn’t mean anything beyond comfort, beyond simply celebrating life and what their bodies were made for. There would be no harm in that, only pleasure.

He took a step back from her, a rakish gleam in his eye. ‘Maybe you deserve a little spoiling. Take your time. I’ll clear the camp for you.’ He turned and raised his voice, giving orders. ‘Let’s give Miss Sharpton some privacy while she freshens up. All except you, Bert. You get to sleep.’ There was general laughter and rustling as his crew moved off. Another gift.

She’d not expected that; she had not asked for it. She wanted to fall into those kindnesses without fear, but to do so would be to enter the province of fools. She could not for a minute let herself forget that she’d bought these kindnesses with the promise of her list, or that safety was momentary. Ammon Vincent was out there and sooner or later he’d find her. For now, she had a few days on the road, a few moments out of time to enjoy a fleeting sense of freedom, and it was entirely up to her what she chose to do with it.