Linda Needham (4 page)

“
Who,
Miss Finch? Tell me now, else you’ll find your delicate little ankles manacled once again and yourself on the way to Coldbath Prison!”

“
Please
, my lord, I’d never forgive myself if he was injured.”

“Tell me, Miss Finch.”

Tears that Hollie hadn’t wept since her father died now came in huge, drowning gulps.

“My name is actually Hollie Finch…MacGillnock, my lord.”

“What the devil do you mean, Miss Finch?”

“The man you’ve been looking for, is…”

“Is who?
Tell
me, dammit all.”

Hollie took one last, long breath of fortitude and prayed for the best.

“He…he’s my husband.”

H
usband.

Charles felt his heart thud and then stop. He took a sharp breath to start it again, but there was still a cold lump in his gut.

Married. The woman was married. She should have said earlier that he’d stolen her from her husband’s side.

But the man hadn’t been there; she’d been alone in her bed when Summerwell found her. Her coward of a husband had doubtless fled down the back stairs, leaving his innocent wife to face the consequences of his folly.

Bloody blazes!

“Spindleshanks is your husband, madam?”

“Alas, my lord, he is!” She was weeping into
those rusty iron chains at her delicate wrists, and they suddenly seemed horrific.

Christ, how he hated this. A woman weeping in his office.
This
woman.

“What is your husband’s name?”

“MacGillnock, of course.”

“His Christian name, madam?”

“It’s, it’s—” The bastard’s name became a flood of weeping and clanking as she snuffled and wiped her nose. “It’s Adammmmmmmm.”

The coward. “Adam MacGillnock,” he said, hating the stabbing taste of it on his tongue.

“Yes.” She gathered herself up on pitifully wobbling legs, her face beautiful even streaming with tears, her shoulders sagging now, her fingers laced together among the folds of her nightgown and the lank chain. “I’ve told you all I know. Now you must let me leave, my lord. I’m so very tired. To the inside of my heart I am.”

“Not quite yet, Miss…madam—” He couldn’t bring himself to say
Mrs. MacGillnock
; the name didn’t suit her in the least. Miss Finch did. She was far better than MacGillnock; so magnificent in her defense of her rotter of a husband, in her foolhardy attempt at perjury to save his lousy skin.

“But you promised, my lord! I’ve just betrayed the man I love and for what purpose? Do you mean to keep me here at your mercy?”

The man she loved—it set his teeth on edge to
hear it. That she would waste her life and her love on a man like that. Not that he cared a whit about the woman’s private life; he merely detested injustice, and that was the case here.

“You’ll be free to go as soon as you tell me where he is.”

“Gone.” She sniffled and shook her head, making all that cascading gold shimmer down her back.

“Gone where?”

That brought a little whimpering sound. “I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

Bloody hell, he’d never had a bit of luck with weeping women. He usually sped off in the opposite direction, but this one made him want to dry her tears, to soothe her fear. To apologize, for God’s sake!

“When did you see him last?” he snapped, because like an utter dolt he was reaching into his breeches pocket for a handkerchief, offering it to her.

She caught her lower lip with her perfect white teeth, snuffled again, and started to reach for the linen, but the chains dragged her hands down. Bloody hell.

“It was three loooong nights ago. Very late. I don’t know where he’d been.”

The meeting at Rennick’s mill. “What did MacGillnock look like when he arrived home? What was he wearing?”

“His shirt.” Another sob shook her shoulders.

“Trousers and a leather waistcoat, like always. He was tired and hungry.”

He lifted her chin and dabbed at the dampness in her eyes. “What did he do then?”

“We’d been two whole weeks without seeing each other. So I fed him supper, and then he took me upstairs, and we—Oh.” It was a tiny but telling sound and made his teeth hurt. She blushed absolutely everywhere he could see, leaving him to imagine all the sultry places that were hidden just beyond his jurisdiction.

“Well, he was gone when I woke up the next morning.”

The thought of Hollie Finch warmed to her ears and naked and tangled up in cool linen sheets unbalanced his thinking and brought a roaring heat to his groin. Though he hadn’t a single claim to her.

“You haven’t seen him since then?”

She shook her head. “He tells me very little about what he does and where he goes. He says that I’m safer if I don’t know.” She blinked her huge eyes at him, the innocent green of springtime, fringed by spiky, gold-tipped lashes. “
Am
I safer, my lord?”

“Great God, madam, look at yourself. You’re standing in a magistrate’s office, manacled and in your nightgown, defending an indefensible husband, and you can ask such a question?”

She stiffened and frowned at him, in full possession of her earlier outrage, her voice husky
and low. “Do you intend to torture me just to discover that I know nothing?”

His head had begun to ache, right at the base. This was still careening out of his control.

“How long have you been married, madam?”

Her face crumpled suddenly, and she swabbed her sloppy eyes with her sleeve, nearly clouting herself with the shackle.

“Two months, my lord.”

Two bloody months. Bloody hell, now he was nursemaid to the muddled heart of a newlywed bride deserted by her unworthy swine of a husband. More weeping and wailing, a gushing spigot of emotion. As though she were—

Holy hell! A wildfire swept and through his chest, a jealous outrage that filled him with horror.

“Are you with child, madam?”

She dropped her hands and stared at him, wild-eyed. “Me?” It was a yelp, obviously an idea that the woman hadn’t yet entertained.

Great Christ, he hoped to hell she knew where babies came from. The guilty thought pulled his attention to the young boy asleep upstairs, and to the unprovable claim on his name.

He couldn’t remember a night that had disintegrated so swiftly and surely. Triumph turned to absurdity. He’d captured not Spindleshanks at all but the man’s magnificently unruly wife, who’d only stirred up more questions with every new answer.

And there were boxes and barrels of questions waiting for him to unravel in his library. He’d be days sorting through it.

Days and nights with Miss Hollie Finch MacGillnock.

Bloody hell! “Come,” he said, starting for the door.

“No.” She plunked her lovely backside down on top of his desk, stuck her shackled hands primly into her lap, and thrust out her defiant chin. “I’m not saying another word to you or taking another step until you’ve released me as you promised you would.”

“I can’t do that quite yet.”

“Then I’m staying right here.”

“Like it or not, madam, since you refuse to tell me the whereabouts of your husband, you and I have an appointment in the library.”

“I told you I don’t know where he is.”

He stalked back to her. “Then you haven’t thought hard enough, Miss Finch.”

He had intended only to lift her onto his shoulder and carry her off to find the key to the manacles, but her waist was small and curved exactly for his hands, and her breasts were shockingly warm beneath the flannel as they tucked themselves neatly inside the arc of his thumbs. So perfectly weighted, so buoyant, that his heart took off like a New Year’s rocket.

“How dare you, sir!”

How, indeed?

“I’m a married woman!”

“You’ve made that eminently clear.” He bent his knees and hauled her lightness up over his shoulder, trying not to think about the shapely, flannel-covered derriere that loomed at his cheek.

“I’m going to scream.”

“Please do.” Then he wouldn’t be thinking quite so precisely about her wriggling, or how he could manage to spend another moment conducting an interview with her dressed for bed, while he imagined her in his own, writhing beneath his hands, begging for his touch.

Bloody hell! He gritted his teeth and then shouted, “Mumberton!” as he reached the hallway with his comely baggage and her threats.

“My husband will come after you for manhandling me, Everingham.”

“That’s a chance I’ll have to take.” It also sparked an astounding idea—an unsavory strategy that just might bring Spindleshanks finally to justice.

Though it might also bring about his own madness if he didn’t take care with its execution.

“He’s big, you know,” she said against the back of his neck, a steamy little burst of anger that leaped down his back and lodged itself in his groin, becoming a bolt of pure, hot, uncivilized lust for her.

“So I’ve heard. Mumberton!” Charles was halfway down the stairway to the servants’ hall
when the man appeared on the landing below. He stopped cold, his eyes saucer-wide.

“Blazes, my lord! What have you got there?” Mumberton blinked quickly and then straightened his thin shoulders. “You can’t really mean to do this!”

“Do what, damn it?”

“Do…” Mumberton indicated Miss Finch’s wriggling derriere and Charles’s hand spread so possessively across it to keep her still and in place. “Miss Finch.”

The woman propped her pointy elbows on the ridge of his shoulder and whipped around to Mumberton. “That’s
Mrs. MacGillnock,
if you please, Mumberton. And if his lordship tries anything at all, believe me, he’ll regret it—exactly where men most regret their injuries.”

Charles was quite sure of her aim. Though, God in heaven, she was willowy and finelimbed. He could tell that easily through the flannel, warm flesh and scented invitations. But she belonged to another man—a cowardly bastard who sent out his wife to fight his battles. Still, she was a duly wedded and bedded bride. And he’d long ago made it a rule to stay clear of married women and their unpredictable husbands.

“My lord, do you hear that? She’s a married—”

“Yes, Mumberton, but she’s still shackled. I want the key.”

Charles had always kept his private affairs away from the eyes of his household staff, but in
recent years he’d lost interest in those shallow dalliances, and had begun to yearn for something more. A wife. A child.

Are you my papa, sir?

“Put me down this instant!” The woman pedaled her feet and he staggered sideways, then caught his balance with his hip against the newel.

“Hold still, madam. The key, Mumberton, before she wakes up the entire county.” Charles held out his free hand, but Mumberton was still staring raptly up at Miss Finch’s backside with a perfectly blended expression of scandalized horror and deeply male appreciation that Charles resented.

“Keys, my lord? Oh, yes!”

“Now, Mumberton!”

Mumberton scowled, muttered beneath his mustache as he dipped into his coat pocket and drew out the key, then sniffed his dissatisfaction. “Here, my lord.”

Charles grabbed the key and set the woman on her feet, but held fast to the appealing curves at her waist to keep her from taking off down the hall and into the night. “And make up the West Room.”

“The lady’s staying here tonight?”

“No, I’m absolutely not staying here, Mumberton.” Miss Finch fixed her fury on Charles and pointed a finger at him in a clatter of iron. “You said we had an appointment in the library.”

“It’s two o’clock in the morning, madam. We’ll
sort this out tomorrow in the clear light of day.” When his head was less cluttered and the woman was wearing a decent gown and garments that would keep her from bobbing and swaying.

“Oh, no, you don’t, Everingham! You promised to let me go home if I confessed. I’ve done just that and I’m not staying here another moment!” The lunatic woman gave a sharp yank to the side that would have sent her tumbling down the stairs if Charles hadn’t grabbed the chain between her wrists.

“That’s enough, madam.” He stooped and hoisted her over his shoulder again before she could protest. “The West Room, Mumberton. And hurry.”

Charles tightened his grip on her backside, which only intensified his irrational need for her, and took the stairs two at a time, not certain what he would do with her once he got up there.

“I might have known all those rumors of your sins and your debauchery were true, Everingham!”

“Debauchery?” Charles would have laughed, because he was long done with that facet of his life, but the boy’s face came back again: his supposed son’s, the product of his past—knee-high to him, with huge, dark eyes, chin upturned and quivering.

Hollie hadn’t actually ever heard anything vile about Everingham’s morals. On the contrary,
society ladies seemed to clamor for the privilege of his attention—at least according to the items she’d devoured about him in the gossip columns. Once or twice she’d even allowed herself to imagine herself on the man’s arm at a ball, smiling up at him, dancing inside the circle of those strong arms.

“Hold still, madam.”

And now she was his prisoner, draped over his shoulder like a sack of barley and on her way to the West Room. Which was no doubt some specially designed garret jail, a tiny, stifling tower belfry with no windows and bats instead of rats.

She shivered and stopped struggling to be free, because fighting against him only made him tighten his grip around her hips, which wasn’t exactly an unpleasant sensation. His hands were brutishly large, his fingers brazenly familiar where they strayed in his single-minded mission. But most shockingly inexcusable of all, they were gentle and so very hot.

She was, after all, supposed to be a married woman. And with any luck, the ruse would gain her freedom tomorrow morning.

“I can walk myself, my lord.”

“Yes, but you won’t in the direction I prefer.”

With his hands planted where they oughtn’t be, the beast carried her down the upstairs hall, across the landing of the grand marble staircase that rose from the cavernously echoing foyer below, and finally paused at the last door in the
hall. In one smooth swirl, he lifted her off his shoulder and set her on her feet on the woollen runner.

“In here, madam.” He opened the door, fitted his broad hand to the small of her back, and ushered her inside, as possessively familiar as ever.

She went reluctantly to her cell, expecting the worst. But the room was palatial and inviting, deeply saturated with forest hues, rich wines, and autumn maples.

Flames burned in the hearth—Mumberton had been very quick in his preparations—producing a smooth blanket of dark orange that touched the drapes and the polished mahogany and the fine carpet that she curled her toes into as she stood amidst all this shimmering splendor.