Page 9 of The Duke of Swords (The Highwaymen #4)

RUTCHESTER STRIPPED OFF his clothes in his room, bundling them up as he did so. If it were winter and there were a fire, he’d toss them in there, but he’d have to bring them along. He went over to the water basin, and saw that the rag there was missing.

He looked about for it and found it, sticky.

His face twitched. He felt like breaking something else.

Somehow, he resisted. Instead, he did as best he could to clean himself with water and his own hands.

He wasn’t certain when he’d decided to kill Fateux.

It might have been the moment his hard cock slid into her wet cunt.

Perhaps that was a strange time to decide it, but he thought it was then.

At that moment, he’d suddenly felt a rage toward the man for taking this from him. This—his first and likely only experience with a woman. It should never have been this way, and it was a travesty.

He’d allowed it to happen, and he wasn’t sure why that was, either.

There was something about Fateux, something familiar, something comforting. It was a strange, awful kind of comfort, however, a comfort that felt bitter. It was a feeling of home, nevertheless.

But Rutchester’s home had been a nightmarish place.

Even so, everyone craved home, did they not?

Perhaps that was why Fateux had to die. If he was a surrogate father figure, he was a father that Rutchester had sought out in the image of his first father. That man had to die, and this one did, too.

He had known, as the rage filled him, that killing Fateux was exactly the thing to do.

But he hadn’t exactly intended to do it right then, he had to admit.

Some part of him had known he would do it, but the whens and the hows had been ephemeral.

And then Fateux had found him, outside the inn, in the stables, haggling with a stable hand about getting a horse. Rutchester had intended to leave.

Fateux cajoled him to go for a walk with him, and they had walked out into the dark fields surrounding the inn.

Rutchester had walked faster. Fateux had kept pace.

He’d talked. God, the man had always talked so much.

Rutchester had heard little of it. He felt as if his head was buzzing full of a hive of bees. He felt as if parts of him were getting free and taking wing out of him, as if he could not contain himself.

“You made me do that,” he remembered saying. “You made me into the thing I hate.”

Fateux had said something, Rutchester didn’t remember it exactly, but something along the lines of the fact that Rutchester had done it himself, that he had chosen it, that there had been no gun to his head.

And that was when Rutchester stabbed Fateux.

He always had knives on him. He often even carried a blade, something long and ancient, the feel of the scabbard hitting his knees when he walked steadying. The blades always felt like safety to him.

This had just been a knife though, a short dagger, kept in a sheath on his belt. He yanked it out and punched it into Fateux.

And one thing tended to be true about Rutchester after he started stabbing something.

He kept stabbing.

For longer than he rightly needed to.

This was like that.

If he’d had the presence of mind to have planned it, he might have found a shovel first. Then he could have buried the body and it might have been likely that no one ever knew what became of Fateux. As it was, however, someone would find the body. Which was why he needed to leave.

If he’d had a shovel, he would have dug and dug, and the hard work, the physical exertion, would have bled all the rest of that energy out of him.

But there had been no shovel, so he went back to her.

He sat down on the bed, covering his head with his hands. How had it happened?

But this feeling was common for him. He often felt as if he didn’t rightly decide to do things, that they simply happened and he watched himself do them.

By the time he’d registered what he’d done, it was too late for regret, too late to stop himself, too late for anything at all except self-recrimination and shame.

But there was no time for such things.

He must away.

He was a duke and he would likely not be pursued for the crime, but if a mob of angry peasants found a body, it wasn’t out of the question that they’d string up the man with blood on his hands in a spontaneous frenzy.

He dressed in clean clothes and bundled up his belongings. They’d been traveling with trunks, but those were still in the carriage. They’d only brought what they’d need for the night inside. No sense loading and unloading heavy trunks for a one-night stay.

Once he was sure he had everything, he left the room and went to Miss Smith’s door.

He rapped on it.

She opened it immediately. She was clean and dressed, her hair plaited tightly into a neat braid. “Ready?” she said, her voice almost bright.

“Yes,” he said. “You?”

“Mmm,” she confirmed.

They set off out of the inn together. They’d started off the journey with Fateux’s own horses and driver, but they had changed them out at the inn last night, hiring a local driver at the same time.

Rutchester opened his purse and roused sleeping stable hands, offering them ridiculous amounts of coin if someone would drive them and attach the horses for travel. When he met with resistance, he offered more coin.

It was all sorted rather quickly.

They were on their way.

Inside the carriage, he sat on one side and she sat on the other, hands folded together in her lap, gazing at him with a look on her face that he vaguely recognized as a kind of grateful worship.

Fuck.

How had that happened?

How had she come to see him as her savior?

He was the devil himself and he had violated her.

On the other hand, it didn’t seem as if anyone in her life had treated her better than the devil might treat a woman. Her own father had sold her off to Fateux. He knew about that, actually, how a small bit of kindness could spark devotion in a soul who had never known anything but abuse.

But he didn’t deserve that from her.

“I shouldn’t have brought you with me,” he said, and his voice sounded rough, as if he’d been shrieking for hours. Had he yelled when he killed Fateux? He had no memory of that.

Her face fell. She was hurt. She thought he was rejecting her.

Damnation. “Not because I don’t want you around me. Shamefully, I do. Because it’s not good for you. It’s confusing. You deserve a clean break from me and Fateux and all of this.”

She looked up at him, and her lower lip trembled.

He didn’t think, he acted. He vaulted across the carriage and pulled her onto his lap, wrapping his arms tightly around her, tucking her against his girth. She was so small, so fragile, and he simply wanted—

It was the wrong thing, and he knew it immediately, but it was done now.

For her part, she rubbed into him like a kitten, cheek against his chest, letting out a whoosh of air in relief.

He shuddered. He put a hand to the back of her head and soothed her, his hand moving down over her braid.

She shuddered, too, seemingly in answer.

Then, they both began to shake together.

The shaking went on for some time. He became belatedly aware of the fact that his face was wet. Tears were streaming down his face. When he heard her breath catch, he knew she was weeping, too.

He tried to say something.

Words didn’t come to him.

He settled for reaching down, gently, and tucking his knuckles under her chin. He tilted her face back so that he could gaze down at her. With his other hand, he carefully wiped at her tears.

But this only seemed to make her sob more freely.

He pressed his lips to her forehead and then leaned his head back against the back of the carriage and tried to stop his own tears.

Eventually, she spoke. “Please,” she said.

He let out a ragged breath. “Please what?”

“Keep me,” she said.

He looked down at her, eyes narrowing, shaking his head.

“I k-know I’m r-ruined and not… I understand you couldn’t marry me or anything like that. You’re… oh, Lord, you’re a duke, and I am the daughter of a knight. But—let me be your mistress. Dukes keep women, other women besides wives, and you seem to… to want me.”

His lips parted.

“You don’t have to think of me as a mistress, even, if I’m not worthy of such a thing.

I supposed duke’s mistresses are fancy courtesans with dresses and painted faces and elegance.

I could be… There are w-words. Not proper words that I’m meant to even know, I suppose, but I do know them. Let me be your whore or your—”

“Stop,” he gasped.

She cringed.

“Never call yourself that word,” he choked out, and he crushed her against him again. “The devil take me, Miss Smith, I should never have touched you.”

She flattened one small hand against his chest. “Well, but you did .”

She was right.

He had soiled her, and now she was his responsibility.

That didn’t mean, however, that he needed to keep at her in that way, even though…

He shrank from it, the fury of his desire for her, the way it had made him lose control, to do such a horrid thing, such a disgusting thing. He had never thought he’d be this sort of man.

“Attend to me,” he said in an even voice, “you shall be cared for, and no more worries on that score. But there is no reason for you to think you must buy that from me by taking me into your bed.”

“Buy it,” she echoed.

“I am going to tell you something that I don’t share with anyone,” he said.

“I can count on my hand the times I have spoken frankly about it. It is not a topic I enjoy speaking about. But I think…” He let out a breath, trying to summon the words for it.

It was so difficult to talk about, that was the thing, precisely because there seemed to be a lack of proper vocabulary for it.