A Rogue of One's Own

She was still panting when she came to, and a high-pitched noise rung in her ears.

Her fingers were mindlessly smoothing the damp hair on his nape.

Agony of bliss indeed.

When he stirred and raised his head, she could feel him looking at her.

“Of course.” Soft irony tinged his voice. “I should have known that politics would please you best.”

Her hands flattened on his sweat-sheened back. His muscles were tense, he was supporting his weight, careful not to crush her.

Her belly felt sticky. He had been careful.

“You please me very well,” she whispered.

She strained to stay awake, to hear him tell her that she must not trust him, must not need him, but he remained silent until she was asleep.

* * *

He was lying on his side, his body protectively curved around the sleeping woman in his arms. His blood was still racing, his eyes and ears straining as though threats were hidden in the shadows, and he was ready for them. He would try and protect her from anything.

Of course, he was currently a threat himself. He felt her heart beating beneath his hand, his careless hand. Did she know she was in love with him?

He was painfully aware that he was. He had nearly lost himself in her when she had come undone. For a mad moment, he had wanted to do it.

He buried his face in her hair and breathed her in. Hubris came before the fall, they said. And he had fallen hard, and was falling still. It meant he could not stay in India. He had to make a new plan and it involved returning posthaste. And he had to do the dreadful thing and tell her everything. It was what a good man would do. He had not wanted to be good in half a lifetime, but now he did; he fair ached with it. Cecily, Rochester, India. He would tell her. His arms tightened around her of their own volition at the thought, as though to say they wanted to hold on to happiness just a while longer.

Chapter 30

The next afternoon when he arrived in his lodgings in Logic Lane, he had a letter from General Foster on his desk—it would be his pleasure to accommodate Tristan and his mother in Delhi until Tristan had set up a household of his own. The confirmation elicited no sense of relief, for at this point, he resented the idea of leaving Britain almost bodily. He still instructed Avi to purchase three tickets for a ship leaving Southampton in three weeks. It would give him enough time to settle his financial and administrative affairs and to oversee the production process at London Print. To lengthen his workdays as required, he decided to spend a few nights a week in the director’s apartment on the publishing house’s top floor. He resented that, too, for it would mean spending nights away from Lucie. He had, of course, not told her a thing this morning. Her eyes had been filled with an emotion that he, very selfishly, had not wanted to destroy. He would find a solution first; if he had to confess, he would not do so without being able to offer a solution along with the confession, whether she still wanted him or not.

Could he entice her to stay in the offices in London with him? Hardly. He wanted to bed her on silk, not another battered settee. Besides, she would balk at being taken away from her duties in Oxford. Only during their parting this morning, she had told him not to come see her tonight, as her work was weighing upon her.

He sorted through his remaining pile of mail. Another kindly threatening note by Blackstone, from the looks of it. He binned it unopened.

A cable from the editor of the Manchester Guardian. He set it aside on the important pile.

An envelope without a sender’s address, the handwriting distinctly female, nearly followed Blackstone’s letter. It wouldn’t be the first time a woman had ferreted out his current address and sent an unsolicited love letter . . . and then he did a double take. Cold foreboding trickled down his nape. It was the hand of his mother’s lady’s maid. Familiar from occasional correspondence when his mother had been too listless to write herself. He ripped the envelope open.

  Milord,

I write to inform you that my lady, the countess of Rochester, has disappeared from Ashdown last night, and there is no certainty of her whereabouts. There had been talk she might not be safe at Ashdown among some of the staff. I believe she would have wanted your lordship to be informed; your return had reawakened some of her strength. I hope this missive reaches you, as I have reason to believe that I am being watched. . . .

The letter was dated three days ago. It meant his mother had been missing for four.

“Avi,” he said. His voice was ice. “Get ready. We are going to Ashdown.”

* * *

Jarvis, his father’s valet—spy—bodyguard stood in front of the door to Rochester’s study, feet apart.

“You can stand aside now, or die,” Tristan said pleasantly.

Jarvis leapt out of the way as though he had found himself barefoot on hot coals, and Tristan strode into the office unobstructed. “Where is she?”

Rochester was behind his desk, assessing his crouching stance with narrowed eyes. “Tristan. How timely. I was about to send for you.”

“Strangely, a change in rules is not what I had expected from you.”

Rochester was observing his approach warily. “I told you I was watching you. And what I saw was the usual lack of cooperation—”

Tristan had walked straight around the desk and gone toe-to-toe.

“You gave me three months,” he said, thrusting his face close to Rochester’s cold visage. “They are not up.”

“There was no need since—”

“Where is the countess?”

“Sign this. And she shall be back.”

Rochester never broke eye contact, but his fingers were tapping one of the documents laid out on his desk. Tristan glanced at them, barely deciphering the script through the red haze before his eyes, but it was enough to understand that it was a marriage contract. Already signed and sealed by the honorable Earl of Wycliffe.

He stepped back and pulled the blade from his cane so fast, a high-pitched ringing sound filled the air.

Rochester stood still as stone, his eyes flitting from the sharp steel vibrating near his cheek to Tristan’s face. “You would not dare,” he said, his lips barely moving.

“Dare what,” Tristan said. “Slicing up Harry’s old carpet? But I think I do.” And the tip of the sword dug into Rochester’s beloved royal tapestry, right into the heart of the tree.

“No!” Rochester made a grab for the blade, before thinking better of it and going for Tristan’s throat.

Tristan was faster.

His father’s fingers were digging into his arm, trying to dislodge the fist twisting his cravat.

“Where is she?” Tristan demanded.

“This is undignified,” Rochester growled as he grappled.

Tristan gave a shake. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

A flick of his right wrist, and century-old silk threads parted like butter.

“I don’t know where she is,” shouted Rochester, his handsome features distorted with fury.

Damnation.

Bright hot anger was pulsing through Tristan, but his intuition was rarely wrong—his father was speaking the truth. His mother was gone, but not the way Rochester had planned.

Which meant the bastard had just tried to get him to sign his life away by bluffing. Which meant he was worried that his leverage over Tristan had significantly dwindled.

He released his father’s cravat. He did not lower the blade.

“What does her lady’s maid say, or is she gone, too?”

Rochester touched the tip of his tongue to the corner of his mouth. The look in his eyes was murderous. Tristan had to look more murderous, for Rochester to stay put and compliant like this.

“The wench had run off,” Rochester said. “We found her, but she claims she knows nothing, so we let her go.”

“And put her under surveillance.”

“Of course,” Rochester snapped.

Tristan made a mental note to seek out the woman, to see whether she had been harmed, and whether she did know something. She had tried to speak to him during his last visit, after all. Bloody Jarvis has deterred her, and he had let it happen.

The earl peered at the foot-long gash that Tristan had inflicted on the tapestry. “I shall cut your allowance to nothing for this.”

Tristan shook his head. “I have never seen you act as concerned toward a human being as you are acting toward this piece of cloth.”

Rochester’s upper lip curled with contempt. “People die,” he said. “Ideas and traditions and glory survive—long after your flesh has rotted into the ground.”

Tristan nodded. Spoken like a tyrant, then. True to their ancestors eternalized on the tapestry, who had gained and defended their titles and estates by cleverly using their underlings as cannon fodder in this war or that. Considering the same blood rolled in his veins, he could probably be a lot worse than he was: an outright monster in addition to being a careless libertine. Except that . . . he was not.

He was not.

He stared at the family tree, the swirling names of all those who had come before him, and knew in his bones that he would save a beggar in rags before he worried about saving a material thing. There was a rightness to the realization, an instinctive quality like that of drawing breath. He gave a bemused shake. Here in this study, before the now maimed tapestry, Rochester had tried to beat this instinct out of him, year after year. Had killed a kitten or two in between, too. He beat you out of shape, not into it.