Cates, Kimberly (8 page)

"I expect you to honor your promise to a dying man. Not turn your back on a helpless woman who needs your protection."

Protection, hell. After what had happened in Juliet Grafton-Moore's bedchamber, it was
Adam
the woman needed protection from!

Adam's memory flashed—his own reflection captured in wide blue eyes, sweet lips he'd wager no man had ever tasted parting in a shocked gasp just as his mouth closed over them. A jolt of raw heat searing through his shameless attempt at manipulation, leaving him stunned and needing and, yes, damn it, scared as hell.

He jerked away from Fletcher as shame darkened his cheekbones, half afraid that the boy would suspect something in Sabrehawk's protestations wasn't ringing true. Blast, if Fletcher had an inkling of the depths Adam had sunk to, the hotheaded fool would be challenging
Adam
to a duel!

"I don't care if you scowl until you blister me!" Fletcher insisted. "You pledged your sword to Miss Grafton-Moore."

"She won't be needing it this evening. Even that surly mob of hers wouldn't be roaming about on such a miserable night, I promise you. Now, you can stand here in the rain all night if you want. I'm going into a warm tavern, dry out by the fire, and drink myself blind."

"I'll go back to guard the lady myself," Fletcher insisted, jaw jutting at that pugnacious angle that had tempted half of Christendom to take a swing at it.

Adam resisted the urge to grab him by the scruff of the neck and drag him inside the tavern. "Fine. Go sit in the rain like a half-wit. Just leave me in bloody peace!"

Adam turned his back on the youth and tramped the last few steps to a tumbledown tavern tucked beside a pawnshop that marked the edge of a seedier part of town. The dens Mother Cavendish's mob had sprung from.

It made him more than a little uncomfortable that he was stalking into the same tavern where some of those animals had doubtless drunk their pint of courage before they marched on a house full of women. But Fletcher had riled up his stubborn streak, and he'd be damned if he'd turn back now, like a green lad shamed into behaving himself.

He flung open the door, heard the sullen roar of those within. Instincts honed in years of battle had given him the ability to gauge the mood of any room he entered. This tavern was a cave filled with spitefulness and anger, edged with just enough cruelty to make Adam's fingers check the hilt of the sabre strapped to his lean waist.

He'd been in worse places. More dangerous ones. He preferred them. One step into a hell-hole, and a man knew where he stood—a heartbeat away from an honest dagger in the back. Here, violence and ugliness would be cloaked behind benign smiles and drooping lashes, in a place where nothing might be what it seemed.

Adam made his way to a scarred table and sat down, his back to the wall, his eyes scanning the room. He could tell the instant the rest of the occupants noticed him. A choked-off sentence. A forced cough. Elbows poking ribs, stubbly chins jerking in his direction.

More than one of the patrons looked vaguely familiar. And after a moment, Adam could feel the press of two dozen furtive gazes. He glared back, a cold warning that he was aware of the attention and alert to any movement. Sabrehawk's warning. One he had perfected in countless years of trying to discourage the foolish from seeking death at the point of his sword.

His ebony gaze clashed with that of a portly man who had been among the mob at Angel's Fall, and the coward all but dove beneath a serving wench's skirts.

But there were plenty of other culprits that weren't so wary. The half-pay officer who'd led the attack nursed his wounds in the corner with a half-dozen cronies. Percival's eyes shimmered with hate, and Adam was dead certain that the man was imagining his pistol-ball splitting the flesh of Adam's chest.

Ah, well. If the fool attempted to strike, it would be the last mistake he ever made. Sabrehawk's enemies claimed that he could hear the whisper of a dagger being pulled from a boot top on the other side of the city. It was the greatest gift any soldier could have—that fierce instinct as much a part of him as his dark hair, his sinewy hand. Never, in the years since Adam first took up the sword, had it failed him.

With arrogance born of that certainty, Adam surveyed the rest of the establishment, a motley collection of men and women who hovered beneath the gloss of respectability. Black sheep from merchant families, sailors doing their best to live up to their vile reputations. People smart enough to know they were scorned by decent society and mean-tempered enough to make someone pay.

It would be easy enough to raise a mob out of such rabble. Easy enough to goad them into a frenzy, Adam realized with a chill, recalling the cozy house just down the street, its tidy garden and doors not half thick enough to ward off the crack of one sturdy boot-kick.

He frowned, his gaze snagging on a caricature of a man across the room. More cadaver than human he was, bone-thin, yet wiry, his face carved with ivory hollows beneath eyes so pale they seemed milky as a witch's charm. An austere nose and thin lips slashed across that face, a smattering of thin black hair revealing glimpses of his scalp. But it was the fact that he sat, like Adam, alone in the crowd that was strangest, as if contempt had drawn an invisible circle around him.

A thin walking stick was leaned against the table at the man's side. Adam was dead certain it concealed something lethal—a sword-stick, probably so rusted it would shatter at the first blow, and so dull-edged it couldn't cut warm butter. Not that the man would be able to wield the weapon, anyway. Juliet could doubtless defeat him with a single wave of her parasol.

But, incompetent as the man seemed, his glare was obviously in working order. He leveled it at Adam with burning intensity.

What the blazes had he done to offend the scrawny cur? Adam wondered idly. The man hadn't been in the mob, of that Adam was certain. He would have noticed someone like that, wouldn't he? Adam grimaced. He'd have been lucky if he'd recognized his own brother in that mess. His whole awareness had been stolen by the golden-curled angel with her parasol.

A buxom serving-maid sidled up to him, her eyes huge beneath an off-kilter mobcap. "Eh, there, me fine sir, do ye be thirstin'?" she quavered, casting a nervous glance over her shoulder.

"Whiskey. A big glass of it."

"Aye, sir," the girl replied. But instead of bustling off in a swirl of threadbare petticoats, she lingered, hovering beside Adam like a jittery butterfly.

Adam cast an impatient glare at her. "What is it? Did I forget to say 'please'?"

The girl's cheeks went pale, and she twisted her fingers together. "They're whisperin' that you were at the Angel Lady's house today. That you sent Mother Cavendish an' her crew scramblin'. Be you that same gennelman?"

Perfect. Adam frowned. Doubtless Percival had sent the girl over to check out his identity before he blasted him to eternity. Surprisingly civil of the bastard. "I was at Angel's Fall. But I'm certain if you asked the
Angel Lady,
she'd tell you I'm no gentleman. Tell Sergeant Percival, over there, to blast away."

"P-Percival?" The girl's lips curled as if she'd just seen a dead rat floating in her bath water. "I'll not be tellin' him anything, the slimy, no-good cur! I just... just wanted to say thank you, sir, fer helpin'," she whispered in a tiny earnest voice. "The lady, she be so all alone. And kind. When my baby sister was sick, she... well, doesn't matter. Jest, thank you. When next ye see her, will ye tell her that little Janey's back at her mama's knee?"

"Pegeen!" the tavern keeper's bellow made the girl whirl around. "Ye'll not make me any coin standin' there yammerin'! Fetch out some drinks or go home!"

"Aye, Traupman! I'm comin'," the woman called, but she turned to flash Adam one last grateful smile before she bobbed a curtsey and dashed away. Adam stared after her, bemused. It seemed as if Miss Grafton-Moore had
one
champion in this mess. Something hard lodged in Adam's chest at the memory of the gratitude in the serving girl's eyes, and his mind crowded with images of his own younger sisters, headstrong termagants, every one, yet, the notion of them far from home, sick... frightened, alone. The mere thought scuttled a chill through Adam's veins.

He drove his fingers through the thick waves of his hair, as if he could scatter such thoughts to the wind. His sisters were daughters of an earl—illegitimate, though they might be. Their lives were worlds away from the hardscrabble existence of Pegeen and little Janey. Yet if circumstances had flung them into the snake pit that was London, wouldn't he have been grateful if there were someone like Juliet Grafton-Moore waiting to take their hands?

The thought was damned disturbing—bloody inconvenient. Far better to hold on to the opinion that the woman was a rattlepated fool. One who had tossed him onto the prongs of a dashed irritating dilemma. Keep his word to a dead man and drive himself insane, or walk away, leaving not only one wide-eyed angel behind, but the last tattered remnants of his honor.

Pegeen slid a glass of whiskey onto the table, and he flipped her a coin with a smile, then downed the fiery liquor in one gulp. When he opened his eyes over the rim of the glass, he caught the thin black-garbed stranger staring at him with a hostility hotter than the whiskey's burn.

The stranger got to his feet, rumpled frockcoat tumbling around lanky legs, one hand closing around the silver-headed walking stick leaning beside him. Those pale eyes fixed on Adam as he crossed the room.

Loathing, pure and cold, shone out of odd lashless eyes. "Is it true?" his voice rasped. "You are the man who was at Angel's Fall today?"

Adam's eyes narrowed. "And if I was?"

"I should kill you for what you did there."

Thunderation. That was all he needed. An offended starveling cur trying to sink its teeth in his ankle. Adam wanted nothing more than to shake free of the fool.

He slashed a scathing glance from the man's thinning crown to his shabby boots, letting contempt glimmer about a hard-edged smile. "Kill me? You are welcome to try it. Don't tell me you are one of the poor sots whose doxy has run away from home? Save your shillings, buy a decent wig, and I'm certain you can find another ladybird."

Hot color surged into those wasted cheeks. "How dare you even imply that I would soil myself fornicating with— with some sin-spawned slut! It is Miss Grafton-Moore who concerns me."

Why was it that the very sound of Juliet's name on the man's tongue made Adam's fists clench? "Miss Grafton-Moore is your concern, is she?" Adam repeated. "Just exactly who are you? And what have you to do with the lady?"

"My name is Barnabas Rutledge. Proprietor of the shop across the street from her establishment."

Adam searched his memory, recalling the painfully tidy shopfront beyond the wall of Juliet's garden. "The pawn- shop?" Adam grimaced in distaste, abhorring vultures of this sort who preyed on the desperate. "What's the problem, Rutledge? Afraid Miss Grafton-Moore's ladies will move away, and find somewhere else to pawn the jewels and trinkets their protectors gave them? You must be doing a lucrative business with Angel's Fall so near."

Rutledge bristled until Adam half expected that thin chest to explode. "I am only a neighbor. A friend to Miss Juliet. I wish only to save her from this madness!"

Adam had stayed alive by reading people's emotions. The flicker of an eyelash, the infinitesimal twitch of a lip could reveal much to one attuned to it. Barnabas Rutledge's pale eyes were almost feverish, his hands fitful on the head of his cane. Devotion. That was what it was. It seemed Pegeen was not the only one loyal to the lady of Angel's Fall.

Adam should have been amused by the absurdity of it all—this spindly crow of a man tripping all over himself because of a woman, flinging himself into the fray against a man who was five times his size. It should have been funny as bedamned. But it seemed as if Adam had lost his irreverent sense of humor somewhere in the rain.

Impatience surged through Adam, mingled with an odd twinge of possessiveness that made him mad as hell. Possessiveness where Juliet Grafton-Moore was concerned? Blood and thunder, he couldn't wait to be rid of her!

"If you have business with me, Rutledge, conduct it before I lose my patience. My affairs with the lady in question are none of your concern."

"Affair?" Rutledge's cheeks went waxen. "You stay away from her! After all the damage you've done—"

"Damage? From what I could see the least I saved her was a dozen more broken windows. And when that mob descended, matters could have been a lot worse."

"It couldn't possibly be any worse than you've made it, you fool! Miss Juliet is—is misguided. In terrible danger. And now, after what you've done—"

"You must have heard a mangled version of the tale, sir. I am the one who drove the mob
away
from her door. I didn't invite them in."

"It would have been more merciful if you had!" Rutledge raged, his whole body trembling in indignation. "You made Mother Cavendish a laughingstock. Aye, and all those with her. Simply flinging Miss Grafton-Moore out of the city will never be enough for those animals now. They'll make her pay for every lash of humiliation you dealt them—make her pay in ways you cannot even imagine."

"The devil they will!"

"I've heard them, blast you! Planning, plotting for two hours now! Heard the ugly things they are promising to do to her! If you had left things alone, Miss Grafton-Moore would have been frightened, would have fled. Then she would have been safe."

Adam snorted in derision. "That woman wouldn't turn tail and run if the devil's own army was charging her, cannonballs firing."

"What would you know of a woman like Miss Juliet? You—an animal of the flesh, a libertine! Yes,
Sabrehawk,
I heard all about you! Morals so debauched that your very name is linked to sin. A bastard, conceived by a nobleman's whore!" Rutledge's eyes burned with the savage satisfaction of a man who'd just delivered a death blow.

Red haze simmered before Adam's eyes, but the smile on his face never wavered. He'd been barely six years old when he'd learned that only a fool would give an enemy such a powerful weapon.