Page 12 of The Passionate One (McClairen’s Isle #1)

Rhiannon stared at the still quivering blade. Some hand had grown sloppy with drink, she thought breathlessly. Had she not moved …

Ash tore off his silk mask, looking beyond her, his gaze hunting through the assembled crowd. A gasp followed his revelation and was pursued by the rumbling of a hundred voices.

“It’s that Merrick fellow!”

“Merrick? The fellow staying at the Fraisers’?”

“Merrick. Ash Merrick. Carr’s son—”

A flicker ignited in the cool depths of Ash’s dark eyes as he searched the faces turned toward him. He was not drunk, he was pretending, Rhiannon thought. And all those things he’d said, all those words he’d played upon …

“What sort of a game is this?” she heard Edith Fraiser exclaim. The company parted and she sailed forth, her skirts bunched in fists on either hip, her face rouged with concern. Purposefully, she stomped toward Merrick, bypassing the knife without a glance.

With a start, Rhiannon realized that her foster mother, as well as the vast majority of those present, was unaware of how close that blade had come to separating Rhiannon’s spirit from her flesh.

“Is that really Mr. Merrick, then?” Edith demanded.

“Aye, madame,” Merrick murmured in a low, distracted tone. “And I, too, would like to know what game this is.”

He turned and suddenly his face wore a lopsided smile. “Ala th … I mean alas … I am revealed!” he called, bowing inelegantly. “And since I am revealed, I insist my cohorts suffer likewise. Unmask! Unmask!”

With a drunken shout, Phillip tugged until his mask came off. “Me, too!” he cried jubilantly. “Revealed, that is!”

The others followed his example. Around them, Lady Harquist’s astounded guests stared, snickered, smiled, and finally laughed. Even Lady Harquist, seeing how well the fake acrobats were received, allowed herself a moue of self-congratulation.

True, a few ladies sniffed—these, confirmed sticklers—but overwhelmingly the crowd approved. A spattering of applause even broke out and Phillip’s father, hunched and crippled with gout though he was, banged his cane upon the floor in approval.

“This your doing, Mr. Merrick?” the old man demanded. “Good for you, sir. Our society is grown stale of late. We’re wanting a bit of piss to shine the pewter!”

With a debonair swoop of his hand, Ash saluted the crowd and then ruined the gesture by staggering sideways and tipping into the wall. His shoulder hit the paneling with an audible thud. He stayed there, canted against the paneling, his face six inches from where the knife protruded. He cocked his head and studied it.

“What’s this? What’s this?” he muttered.

He was drunk after all, Rhiannon thought and then castigated herself for being disillusioned.

So? She’d mistook a spark of reflected light in his pupil for keenness and the candle-made shadows beneath his cheeks for taut alertness. She’d supposed his words filled with meaning when they were filled only with mead. She averted her eyes from him. They felt hot and she would not cry. She had no reason to cry.

Ash craned his head around and, seeing her, smiled stupidly. She winced and then, realizing how unfair she was, forced a smile. It was no part of his fault that she’d dressed him as her knight and that the shining armor did not fit.

His expression betrayed a momentary puzzlement and then he pointed at the knife. “You were standing here, weren’t you, Miss Russell?”

“Yes,” she answered. “What of it?”

Curious partygoers, finally alerted to the presence of a knife in their hostess’s linen-paneled wall, had gathered in a loose semicircle around them.

“He thinks someone hurled a knife at Miss Russell,” a lady said.

A snort of masculine contempt. “Some bungler missent it. Accident.”

“Probably one of Watt’s fool friends,” an older man declared. “Not a grain of sense amongst the lot.”

A low murmur rippled through the assembly.

“What’s that Merrick fellow doing now?” a lady near Rhiannon asked.

“Who cares? Just let him stretch the cloth tight across those shoulders once more and I’ll be counted content,” a low feminine voice whispered in approval.

“Handsome creature, is he not? Dark as a storm-tossed night,” another lady concurred.

“Aye and I’d be tossed right enough … if I could arrange to meet him of a night,” came the throaty rejoinder.

Rhiannon bit back a reply. It was no concern of hers what these trollops thought. Ash finished his scrutiny of the stiletto and turned. His gaze lit on her.

“Begad! I have it!” he declared with an air of sudden inspiration. “Someone here has mistook this tasty morsel for his dinner!” He pointed at her. Dozens of eyes followed his gesture with amused interest.

He clucked his tongue. “Now what knave would seek to use a knife on what is so clearly … finger food?”

Heat raced up Rhiannon’s throat and burned in her cheeks. Several of the men caught back their laughter, and smiles were traded behind the shield of lace handkerchiefs and widespread fans. He was easing the tensions that had grown in the overheated room, Rhiannon realized. Relaxing them. Why?

“Come now,” Ash said, “someone must claim this knife. Where did it come from, friend rogue?” He hailed the wiry acrobat who’d clambered on Phillip’s shoulders.

She’d forgotten Phillip. She looked around. Her fiancé was no longer sitting on the floor. He’d disappeared.

“I do not know where that comes from,” the gypsy answered. “I was concentrating on the knives. My knives. That sticker isn’t a Romany blade.”

Ash jerked the blade from the wall. “True,” he said. “No gypsy threw this pretty steel.”

He ran his fingertip along the blade, testing the edge. He withdrew a finger marked with a thin red line.

“And as we all can attest, the only reason a blade leaving a Romany hand would hit this wall is because that is where the gypsy wanted it. Why would one of them do that, do you suppose? It’s a far bit too early for them to be expressing disappointment in the tips.”

Laughter met this unassailable observation. Merrick sighed gustily, squinting at the knife. “Whose then?”

He lurched toward Rhiannon and without warning grasped her upper arm, pulling her near. His grip was strong; his body exuded the remnant heat and scent of his exertions. Earthy. Masculine.

His dark face moved close. His rum-soaked breath sluiced over her face. She should have been disgusted and part of her was, but another was not. Another part of her wanted to discover if his mouth tasted of the drink, if drunk he could still make her knees grow weak with his kiss, if his body was as hot as it seemed.

“Who do you think flung that knife, miss? And why? Did someone think to make symmetry on that lovely face of yours with a twin scar?”

“I’m sure it was an accident.” She pulled back; it would be too easy to lean forward.

“Aye. Accidents.”

“Here now, Merrick!” Phillip’s loud salutation broke over their heads like a thunderclap. He appeared behind them, lowering over them like a convivial giant.

He swung one of his huge arms around Rhiannon’s shoulders and another around Ash drawing them both together in an embrace that brought them within inches of each other. “It won’t do any good, Merrick!” he said, fondly ruffling Ash’s black hair.

“What won’t do any good?”

“Fussing over that damned sticker won’t divert anyone’s attention from the fact that you owe St. John two hundred pounds!” At this, Phillip crowed with laughter.

“That’s right, Merrick,” St. John said, making his way toward them. “Your disguise didn’t last the hour you promised.”

“What’s this about a bet?” one of the gentlemen asked.

“True, sir,” Phillip said. “Mr. Merrick here bet St. John that he could cozen you all into thinking him one of these gypsy knaves for just as long as he wanted. Well, he lost and now he can stay and take his comeuppance.”

Phillip exerted another powerful squeeze on his hapless prisoners. Ash was no proof against Phillip’s strength. He stumbled toward Rhiannon who, manhandled in a like manner on Phillip’s other side, toppled forward. Ash’s hands flew out, catching her around the waist and steadying her.

His touch set her afire. She swallowed, willing herself not to react, not to flush, not to melt.

Even through the thick satin material, his touch burned her. So little a thing, so harmless, and yet, it stirred her blood, incited riotous visions. Visions she had no right entertaining.

She was worse than any flirt; she was a right molly, a slut, but that knowledge did not stop her from hating it when he took his hand away. She looked around in a panic, anywhere so she wouldn’t have to encounter his eyes, and found Phillip watching her.

“Th ass right.” His handsome golden head bobbed with soggy approval. “Make up. Be friends.”

“Why should they?” St. John’s humorous voice intoned. “She’s the author of his loss. ’Twas she who called out Merrick’s name. She revealed him.”

“Did she, now?” Phillip asked, eyeing Rhiannon proudly. “What do you think of that, Ash Merrick? I think I ought to collect half the winnings.”

“Not bloody likely,” St. John said before Ash could answer. He leaned in close, his mouth inches from Rhiannon’s ear, but though he whispered close to Rhiannon ’twas Ash his gaze fixed on.

“Best watch that girl, Merrick,” St. John advised. “She’ll be the ruin of you.”

Ash blinked at St. John, a vague smile on his handsome face. “Unless I’m wrong, I believe she already has been.”

He smiled throughout the rest of party. He smiled as he drank his way through an additional two bottles of port and he smiled as he traded suggestive sallies with Margaret Atherton. He smiled as he danced and he smiled as he counted out two hundred pounds into St. John’s plump, gloved hand. And he smiled, by God, as he saw Rhiannon’s confusion become disappointment then hurt.

When dawn stained the sky with her orchid-colored blood, he smiled and accepted Lady Harquist’s offer of a bed. He was smiling as he staggered from the salon, and when he turned the door handle to the bedchamber, he was smiling still.

Because while tomorrow his obligation to his brother might make him a cheat or a thief or even a murderer, here, tonight, in this place, he was a congenial rascal, a bon vivant. A smiler.

But when the door shut behind him and he leaned his head against its panels, his smile died. He’d lost two hundred pounds because of her. Raine rotted in a French prison and he played fast and loose with money that could buy his freedom. And why? Because someone had thrown a knife too near her and he’d immediately concluded that her life was in mortal danger and he must save her, revealing himself—and losing his bet—in the process. At least he’d had enough presence of mind to mask his concern beneath a facade of drunkenness.

He should be strung up and gutted. One minute of lucid thinking would have shown that it had been an accident just like the highwayman having targeted Rhiannon’s carriage had been simple ill luck.

Ash had searched the countryside without finding a trace of the robber. And the reason for that was simple: He’d found none because the bounder had fled. There was no malevolent assassin lurking about waiting for the opportunity to kill a penniless girl.

Ash sneered. Either the two accidents had been just that, unconnected misfortunes, or someone in Fair Badden wanted Rhiannon dead. And who would that be, and why?

He was the worst kind of fool, one who needed to romanticize simple lust. He’d spent most of the week trying to get drunk enough to lose his erection. It hadn’t worked.

He closed his eyes, willing the liquor in his blood to erase the taste of her soft mouth, the fragrance of her dark hair … Six more days. Then she’d belong to that big, congenial boy.

Ash’s hands clenched at his side, as he forced one last smile around his teeth. He had to get out of here. He had to get out of this damnable place, these terrifyingly defenseless lambs. The wolf should slink back to the black forests and leave the sheep wholly innocent of what had, for some short weeks, moved undiscovered amongst them.

He could leave now. There was no real reason for him to stay. He pushed himself away from the door. He would leave now.

Except that someone had thrown that knife. At her heart. He knew it.

He twisted, pounding his fist against the door. The stiletto had impaled the paneling at chest level. It stood at right angles to the wall. Someone had hurled it with deadly speed and precision.

He cursed roundly and viciously, but in the end it didn’t affect his decision. He’d stay until she was another man’s concern, another man’s responsibility.

Another man’s.