Siege of the Heart (Southern Romance Series, #2) (9 page)

He had no answer to that.

“I thought so.” She snorted softly. “Mr. Dalton, you saw me fight. You know I can. My life is mine to gamble how I choose.” She mounted up. “Are you coming with me to save your sister?”

Solomon swung into the saddle himself, still too stunned to speak. How in the hell had he not realized the truth before? The features that he had mistaken for weakness were stunningly beautiful. Oh, she was no finely-dressed girl from about town, corseted and...

Everything fell into place.

“That’s how I didn’t noticed you!” He reined in his horse. “In the town. You were dressed as a
woman.
”

“Could you stop saying ‘a
woman
’ with that tone of betrayal?” Her voice was sharp. She looked over her shoulder at him and reluctantly wheeled around to face him when he did not move.

“Why should I not feel betrayed?” he asked her finally.

“Why
should
you?” she shot back. Her brow was furrowed. “What, of all the things we have done, depends upon my sex? Do you think that some sort of feminine magic tracked down your lies? No! I observed, I followed you, I paid attention, the same as any spy.”

“You were in disguise.” Wait, no, the pants were the disguise. He could not tell down from up anymore, it seemed.

“Every spy is always in disguise, and what you so readily overlooked might have been spotted by someone else. Old ladies are particularly...observant.” Her face grew cold.

“Someone found you out once,” he guessed.

A sullen shrug was the only answer, but when he gave a crow of laughter, he saw a smile tug at her lips. She gave a sigh.

“Mr. Dalton, I assure you that I am just as capable of a mad rescue mission as any man.”

“Well enough,” Solomon said after a moment. His mind did not sit quietly with it, but the same mind pointed out that his companion
had
, in fact, proven herself. “But I have a good deal of questions.”

“So do I,” she said softly, smiling over at him. Her look was so open, that the next words hit him like a punch to the gut: “Such as, for instance, why those soldiers called you Horace and why they seemed to recognize you.”

He stared at her, his blood running cold. His instincts screamed that she was a predator, dangerous as a jungle cat and just as poised to leap. When she had told him that she used no feminine trickery, it had surely been a lie, for no man would smile like an angel and ask questions like a high inquisitor.

Surely she was no angel, but a demon such as he had never faced, for even as he stared her down and fought the urge to pull out his rifle and shoot her, he wanted nothing more than to crush her in his arms and kiss her. His blood was heating, his pulse racing, and it was all he could do not to think of her with that linen shirt torn open and his mouth on her skin, her moans in his ears.

He took a deep, shuddering breath, and had the sense that she knew exactly what he had been thinking. What he had not seen, for she was looking away now, almost demurely, unless one knew her, was whether there had been an answering spark in her eyes.

Really? Was that what she wanted to know? He wanted to laugh until he could not breathe any longer. She was his jailor, and she surely knew she was taking him to his death. Any woman who could take such joy in his presence as she seemed to must indeed be the devil. Never mind that he found more ease in her company than he did with anyone else.

Of course, it was rather distracting how he kept wondering about the curve of her hips, or whether he could circle her waist with his hands. Her legs, he noted with a shiver, were quite long enough to wrap around his waist...

He was going completely insane.

“Mr. Dalton?” she prompted him, and he tried to remember how to breathe.

“The answers to your questions will be given. As I promised.” He was trying to shut her away, and it almost worked, but even as he urged his horse forward, he could
feel
her curiosity surge in the air between them.

“I saved your life. You know my secret.” Her voice was soft, but he was damned if he could hear a single speck of coquetry in it. “All I want from you is the truth, Solomon. You have mine.”

“The truth is the only thing I have left,” Solomon said. He looked over at her, and saw her hazel eyes big with pity. He did not want pity, and he no longer wanted her suspicion. He took a deep breath. “I can swear to you, in all truth, that I never gave one single word of information to the Confederacy. No battles, no troop movements, no names. Nothing. I promise that, Amb—Violet.”

She looked ahead and urged her horse into motion with a quick snap of the reins, her jaw set. As he came up alongside her, he saw that she was shaking, and that in the shifting moonlight which filtered through the trees, her eyes were shining with tears.

“Thank you,” she said finally. “You owed me nothing, truly. I should not have asked.”

“If someone had killed Cecelia...” Solomon said finally. He paused. “It would drive me mad. I could not rest until I had vengeance.”

“The day comes,” she told him, “when you begin to wonder how long vengeance can carry you.” She said the words so softly that he might not have heard them at all, and he did not know what to say in response.

They rode in silence for a time, and Solomon could only think of the press of her body against his, her labored breathing as she took down the man who would have killed him. She had not been a creature of modesty and sweetness then, but neither had she shown the cunning of a temptress. She simply
was
, this woman, like Clara in her courage and yet utterly different.

He could smile, at least, to think of what Clara might say about a woman in pants.

The thought of Clara, waiting for Jasper and Cecelia to be returned to her, was almost too much to bear. Solomon’s hands clenched around the reins and it took all of his willpower not to yell his fury at the sky.

“We’ll get them back,” Violet said softly.

Solomon jumped. He had almost forgotten that she was there; she did not seem real, so how could she ride next to him in the darkness?

“You can’t know that.”

“No,” she agreed. “I cannot. But I can tell you that they truly wish your sister no harm, for if they did, she would be harmed already. I can also tell you there is a hesitation in them. They
wish
to hate your friend more than they actually do.”

“You saw all of that in the middle of a battle?”

“I’m a
woman
, remember?” Her voice was wry, and yet as cold as deepest winter. “I know what it is to be at the mercy of men. The very tall one, who had her on his horse, he keeps them in line, I think.”

“And the rest of it? Feminine intuition also?”

“I know how to see things,” she said stiffly. She had noted the bite in his tone. “I always have. I see the connections between people as clearly as if they were floating in the air. I have always heard the words no one said. What troubles me about you is that none of the jumble of things fits together. You are penitent, Solomon, as if you have something to atone for, and yet you carry yourself as a man of honor. It seems, from the stories they tell in the taverns, that you turned a Confederate soldier to the Union cause.”

She looked over at him, raising one eyebrow.

“Jasper Perry is a very stubborn man,” Solomon said finally. “I doubt any man could turn his mind unless he wished it to be turned.”

“I see.” What she made of this, and how she fitted it together with his guilt, he did not know.

“But he had seen too much,” Solomon said, knowing he was verging into dangerous territory and not caring. “Even a single battle is enough to shatter the world as it once was. And after being locked in that hell, to return to your home and find that the fires are still burning inside you, and there is another hell waiting for you at home, one made of helplessness and waiting and fear. They do not know what the soldiers endured, and we can keep them from knowing, but they cannot hide from us what they went through.”

He looked over at her, and she met his eyes, trembling. She, he thought, had also seen both. She knew the hells that raged inside for years after. She too had been scarred and remade by this war.

She also knew that he had not been speaking of Jasper.

H
e was going mad. Solomon sank down beside the campfire and tried not to groan aloud. It would not do for anyone to find out he was insane—for this particular madness could not explain his defection, and that was only
one
of the reasons he could not let Violet know.

She did not like him to call her Violet. She blushed when he did, as if the sound of her name on his lips carried every lustful thought like a promise. She could hear, in that single word, how he wanted to kiss along the tiny portion of her collarbone he could see, following it to her shoulder, running his fingers up from the delicate wrist, over the tender skin of her arms. She seemed to see, for she shivered when his gaze fell on her as he spoke, that he wanted nothing more than to run his hands through her hair and watch her eyes drift closed; he wanted to feel the weight of her in his arms. He wanted her arching against him with pleasure, lost in it. ‘Ambrose’ was her armor. ‘Ambrose’ did not make her blush, and Solomon break out in a hot sweat.

It was better to think of her as Ambrose, for Ambrose was the spy the Union had sent. The man had one purpose: tracking down traitors and bringing them to justice. To call his captor Violet was to pretend that she was not going to walk him to the gallows. The more he thought on it, the more he understood how dangerous she was.

She was, in truth, the perfect spy. Hiding her woman’s voice, she spoke little enough. Instead, she left others to fill the silences, and Solomon wondered how many of her captives had spilled their confessions out for just that reason; he nearly had a dozen times. When she did speak, it was misdirection and wit cloaked in a disarming candor, as if the deception of her clothing left her no other lies to tell, and she had a way about her, as Jasper did, of showing the world by the set of her shoulders and the worry in her eyes that she was honorable to a fault.

Of course, also like Jasper,
to a fault
was the wild unpredictability of where the honor would strike. Jasper, Solomon knew now, would sacrifice himself for Cecelia if the need arose. And Ambrose, well... The honor in those eyes was quiet, compassionate. Conviction inspired mimicry, and men would tell her their confessions, only to find that the honor they found was altogether a fierier thing than they had guessed.

The thought that consumed him these past two days, was that she did not
mean
to be dangerous, not in these ways. She was good at her job, quick to discern the truth that no one in Knox had seen, even when she coaxed it from their own lips. She had bested him in stealth, and if she was not so good a brawler as Robert Knox, well...neither was Solomon. She did not use her gender as false armor, tempting him to indiscretion with ruby lips and murmured endearments. In fact, Solomon would have bet money that if she had brought him back to stand trial at once, he would never have learned the truth about her.

He could not imagine that now, any more than he could free himself from the wonder of what she was. Every dangerous facet made him want to laugh aloud in amazement. The way she kept her weapons clean, fingers graceful and precise, the careful way she moved so that her clothing never hugged her slender form, the way she spoke, taming her natural inflections with careful pauses. All of it was born of deception, and none of it was the deception men feared in a woman.

It made her, unfortunately, all the more desirable. When he was awake, Solomon looked away so she would not be disquieted by his staring, and yet images of her flashed through his mind, beyond his power to control. He imagined her body, pale and slim and perfect under his hands; he had always been one for buxom women until now, and yet he was captivated. But, those images, the images he had become used to pushing away as a gentleman, were nothing compared to the strange twist in his chest when he thought of her smile, or the way he sometimes saw her brush a lock of hair away from her eyes...

“You’re staring off into nothing again,” her voice said now, and Solomon felt it like a shiver all over his skin. He wanted to be close enough to feel her breath as she spoke. He wanted...

Well, never mind what he wanted.

“It has been a...difficult...few days,” he said simply. If she could lie without lying, then so could he.

She laughed, not so much with mirth as with commiseration. “I suppose it has.”

“Why are you still here?” Solomon asked her, knowing he was jumping over the sort of conversation they had cultivated, and not caring. “Why are
we
still here?”

“To save your family,” Violet said, as if she did not quite understand the question. “I made you a promise.”

“To a plan you told me was nearly suicidal! And it was a plan that failed. Why have you not hauled me back?”

“Because I
promised.
” Her voice was strident. “And I didn’t promise to try to rescue them, I promised to do it.” This time, there was humor in her smile. “Foolish of me.”

“You’re not foolish.”

“That’s... Well, that’s just wrong.”

“Violet...”

“Ambrose.” Her voice was tight with anger.

“We’re alone.”

“Sometime soon, we won’t be. I’m not Violet. Not anymore.”

“Do your parents know where you are?” he asked her quietly, and when she flared up, he held out his hands to calm her. “Not...like that. Violet—Ambrose—my mother has never said it, not once, but it nearly killed her not to know if I lived or died. I was gone for a year, missing, and she had to wonder.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said softly. “They aren’t worried, though. My mother passed away when I was small. Along with my younger sister. My father thinks I’ve gone north to work at the mills.”

“It was good of you to give him something to believe,” Solomon said, and she smiled.