Chapter Ten

 

 

 

 

 

For the second time Juliet ran away from Grant as if the hounds of hell were nipping at her heels. Or to be more accurate, one hound. One very big, very menacing, very hungry hound.

When he had kissed her back she’d feared he was going to devour her whole...but what had frightened her even more, what had scared her absolutely witless, was how much she’d loved it.

She’d loved the weight of his mouth on hers and the bold way he’d swept his tongue between her teeth. She’d loved the taste of him; a touch of peppermint with just a hint of coffee grounds. She’d loved the possessive way he had run his hands through her hair. And she’d especially loved the throaty growl he’d made when she bit his bottom lip.

Shoving between two older women wearing feather plumed hats, she ran down the hall as fast as her gown would allow. Knowing her lead was only slight at best and nonexistent at worst, she skidded into the foyer and dashed out the front door, taking the wide marble steps two at a time.

The late evening drizzle had turned into a downpour and rain lashed at her face in a cold, icy spray as she sprinted down the walkway and leaped over a small wrought iron fence. Her ankle turned when she landed and she fell hard on her hands and knees in a patch of wet grass, the pistol she’d stolen from Grant flying out of her hand in a graceful arc before landing with a loud ker-plunk in a stone fountain topped by a smirking cherub.

“Bloody goddamn dress!” she cursed, yanking at her skirts in frustration. This was exactly why she preferred breeches! So when she stole jewelry and was caught by a runner and had to flee for her life she didn’t land face first in a pile of sod.

Clenching her teeth against the sharp pain radiating from her ankle, she half ran, half staggered towards the long row of carriages lining the street just as Grant’s booming voice tore through the night. 

“JULIET! I KNOW YOU’RE OUT THERE. TURN YOURSELF IN!”

Aye, good luck with that, she thought with a sneer. After all the trouble she’d gone through to get herself free, did he honestly believe she was just going to walk up to him with her head bowed and her arms held out? She’d rather die than spend the rest of her life locked in a cell.

Blinking rain out of her eyes, she managed to hobble behind a glossy black brougham pulled by two matching grays. Flattening herself against one of the back wheels, she dared a quick glance around the side.

Grant stood silhouetted in the entryway, his towering frame casting an insidious shadow that reached all the way to the bottom of the marble stairs. His head swiveled left and right as he looked for her. She held her breath, silently willing him to go back inside. With her twisted ankle her chances of outrunning him were slim to none. She was trapped...just like one of the rats she and Eddy used to catch in the bottom of old grain bins.

They would lure the rodents with bits of moldy cheese and sell them to the baker in Highmarket Square. Little did the fancy ladies in their plumed hats know they were getting a bit more than they bargained for in their mincemeat pies.

Taking a deep breath, she turned back around and considered her options. She may not have been able to run, but she could still defend herself. Would defend herself if it came down to it. She didn’t want to shoot Grant. Not because of their kiss or any attraction she may or may not have felt towards him. Of course not. She didn’t want to shoot him for the same reason she hadn’t wanted to shoot him in the bookstore. One runner after her was bad enough, but if she took the life of one of their own she knew she’d have all of Bow Street breathing down her neck.

She’d also been telling the truth in Lady Dashwood’s bedroom. She did not hurt those who did not deserve it, and even though Grant was a ruddy pain in her arse, he was only doing his job. As he’d so kindly pointed out, she was the criminal. It was his job to catch her and turn her over to the magistrate for sentencing.

So why the devil had he kissed her?

Later, she told herself as heat flared in her belly. You can think about that later. Right now you need to focus on getting out of here alive.

She snuck another peek around the carriage and felt a quiver of alarm race down her spine when she saw him walking slowly down the steps. Whipping back around before he saw her, she let her head fall back with a dull thud, the quiet sound causing on the gray’s to swish its tail in annoyance.

Shite.

Shite. Shite.

Shite.

What the devil was she going to do? Short of crawling under the carriage, there was nowhere else for her to go and it would only be a matter of time before he figured out where she was hiding. She shuddered to think of what he would do when he caught her. Bind her arms behind her back and drag her straight to Bow Street, most likely. Would he kiss her again?

Focus, Jules!  

Right. She needed to stop thinking about kissing and start thinking about a way out of this mess. Shaking her wet hair out of her eyes, she bit down hard on the inside of her cheek as she mulled over her limited possibilities.

She supposed she could always stab him. A little knife wound never hurt anyone. But that would require her to get close to him and she feared if she did he would be able to easily overpower her, big lummox that he was. Maybe she could steal a carriage…but all he had to do was jump on a horse and he’d chase her down in a matter of minutes. Blast and damn. Why couldn’t he save them both the trouble and just give up? He was certainly taking his time descending the stairs. She glanced around the side of the carriage again, and her eyes narrowed when she saw a willowy blonde standing in the doorway.

She was saying something to Grant. From this distance Juliet couldn’t hear the words being exchanged, but whatever the blonde said caused his mouth to thin. He shook his head sharply and then pointed at the door, a clear indication he wanted the woman to return inside, but she refused. After a standoff that lasted for the better part of five minutes and was punctuated by rapid arm movements from both parties, Grant eventually turned around and stomped back up the steps.

Before he stepped through the doorway he paused and cast one last, searching glance over his shoulder. For an instant it seemed as though he was staring straight at her...but then with another shake of his head he stepped over the threshold and the door swung closed behind him.

"Phew," Juliet gasped, her knees trembling with relief as she sagged back against the carriage. That had been close.

Too close.

All that currently separated her from a cold cell in Newgate was a pinch of luck, a dash of ingenuity, and a passionate kiss. She felt like a cat that just been saved by one of its nine lives. A very cold, very hungry, very wet cat.

The rain had plastered her hair to her head and soaked her dress all the way through to the skin. It continued to fall in great slicing sheets, mercilessly pummeling the rooftops of the carriages. She needed to get back to St Giles. Back to her bed and a hot meal and a glass – better make it an entire jug – of wine. But when she tried to put weight on her left leg it nearly buckled.

Right.

Her ankle.

Grimacing, she managed to crouch down and untie the laces on her boot. But that was as far as she could go. Her ankle had already swollen to nearly twice its size and was quickly turning a bluish black color. Thumping her fist against the cold ground in silent frustration – what else could go wrong tonight?! – she grabbed onto a spoke in the wheel and used it to haul herself back up to her feet.

Grant may have gone inside, but there was no telling when he would return. She thought of his parting words inside the bedroom, and the shiver that coursed through her had nothing to do with the cold.

The question is not if I’ll find you. The question is when.

Before their kiss it hadn’t been personal for him. Now it was, and she feared he hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said he would chase her to the ends of the earth. He was, after all, The Wolf. Chasing down prey was what he did best. And she’d just placed herself at the top of his hunting list. Twisted ankle or no twisted ankle, she needed to make herself scarce.

You’ve deal with worse pain than this, she told herself. Like the time she had fallen off a ladder trying to reach the third floor bedroom of a wealthy baroness and snapped her arm right in half. Now that had hurt. Yeti had taken one look at her white face and broken arm cradled awkwardly against her chest and immediately sent for a doctor. Or at least what passed for a doctor in St Giles. He had set her arm - she still shuddered whenever she thought of it - and wrapped it in a sling where it had remained for the better part of two months.

She'd been twelve.

When she was fifteen she fell through some rotten floorboards and ended up with a large iron nail sticking out of her hand. Eight years later and she still had the scar. 

And then there was the time she'd been pinned down to her bed by someone she thought she could trust. That had hurt far worse than any physical ailment.

But she didn't think about that. Or him.

Not anymore.

Needless to say, she’d taken her fair share of lumps over the years. Not exactly unexpected, given where she had grown up.

Juliet was not an English rose who had been lovingly cultivated until she bloomed and blossomed into a beautiful, delicate hothouse flower. She was a weed. A weed that had managed to not only grow between the cracks in the cobblestones, but to thrive. She was tough, and she was hard, and no matter how many times she was trampled or kicked, she always came back, because to really kill a weed you had to yank up the roots...and her roots were as deep and as strong as her unyielding spirit.

Although a fat lot of good her roots did her when she was stuck on the wrong side of London with no means of getting back home except a slow, torturous hobble through the rain.

Well, she thought, inwardly bracing herself, best get hobbling. But she'd no sooner taken three painful steps than a deep, familiar voice emanating from the shadows had her jumping straight up in the air like a scalded cat.

“I take it the robbery went well?” Bran drawled as he stepped out from behind a carriage.

"Whore in a handbasket!" she cried when she landed hard on her left foot. Arms wind milling, she hopped up to Bran and punched the middle of his chest with no small amount of force. "You bloody bastard! You nearly scared the shite out of me!"

"Do ye kiss your mum with that mouth?" Blue eyes bright with amusement, he caught her arm when she tried to take another swing at him. "Easy there, Jules. One is allowed, but I can't ‘ave a woman beatin’ up on me. I've a reputation to uphold."

"I'll give you something to hold," she hissed.

"What's crawled up your skirts?" he demanded, ducking easily to the side when she took a half-hearted swipe at his head with one of her knives. Flickering gas light illuminated his lean countenance, revealing the dark slashing brows and the crooked nose and the hard jawline covered in stubby brown whiskers that she knew so well.

There was no one she trusted more than Bran. No one closer to her heart than Bran. No one who knew her more than Bran. He was her friend. Her brother. Her confidant. Which was why, when her lower lip trembled and tears threatened, she allowed him to pull her into his arms and hug her tight against his warm chest.

"There now," he said, a flicker of surprise drawing his dark brows together. "What's gotten me Jules in such a state?"

"I - I couldn't find the r-ring," she said between watery sniffles.

"Typical woman." His teeth flashed white in the soft glow of the light as he grinned down at her. "Crying over a piece of jewelry. It'll be all right, lamb. Chin up. No piece of flash is worth yer tears. No matter how pretty it is. Or how much blunt we could’ve gotten for it," he muttered under his breath. 

"I'm not upset just because of the bloody ring." Although it did sting that after all her time and effort she'd come up empty-handed. "I think I wrenched my ankle. Or maybe I've broken it. I don't know."

"Your ankle? Let me see." Concerned, Bran knelt down. She held still as he gently ran his hands down the outside of her boot to check for swelling, but when he tried to pull it off she yelped and jumped back.

"Don't do that! It hurts."

He sat back on his heels. "It could be broken," he said grimly. "It's hard to tell. Either way, we need to get ye home and get that boot off before the swellin’ gets any worse. Can ye walk?"

Dashing at the tears on her cheeks, Juliet didn’t bother to contain her snort. "If I could do that do you think I'd still be standing here?"

"Now that ye mention it,” he said, rubbing his jaw as she stood up. “Why are ye standing out here? And ‘ow the devil did ye hurt your ankle in the first place?"

"I was running and I...tripped," she said evasively.

"Running from?" he prompted.

She looked away, not wanting to see his smug I-told-you-so expression. "I ran into a bit of trouble in the ballroom."

Literally.

"What sort o’ trouble?"

"The Wolf, all right?" she snapped, small hands curling into fists as her gaze swerved back to Bran. She glared fiercely, daring him to mock her. "I ran into The Wolf."

Or rather he ran into me.  

"Grant Hargrave is ‘ere?" Bran's head snapped towards the manor.

"Don't worry,” she sighed. “He went back inside."

"That don’t mean ‘e will stay there. Come on." He grabbed her arm and started to pull her along behind him, but stopped short and released an ear-blistering curse when she cried out in pain. "Yer ankle. I forgot." His brow furrowed.  "I'll just carry ye, then."

"Carry me?" Her eyes widened. "The devil you - Bran!" she squealed when he picked her up off the ground as if she weighed no more than a sack of potatoes and slung her over his shoulder. She pounded her fists against his back. "Put me down, you smelly ox!"

Ignoring her, he looked left and then right to make sure the way was clear before walking quickly across the street. The glow of the gas lights faded away as they left Berkley Square behind. But even as the decadence and opulence of the West End was slowly replaced by the rot and decay of the East, Juliet had a feeling this wasn't going to be the last time she saw Grant Hargrave. Their paths would cross again. She was certain of it. She just didn't know where...or when.