Horace’s big hand around his arm. “Yes, I’m sure of it now.”
Jason waited, didn’t say a thing.
“I saw him hold Lord Grimsby’s horse once when I was in Eastbourne, in front of Mountbank’s Stable off High Street.”
“Lord Grimsby,” Jason repeated. “You’re sure?”
“Yes, Lord Grimsby had just spoken a few words to his wife, and was off to a tavern, once she was out of sight. I heard him yell something to this man. I’m sure it was our Mr. Kindred.”
“So,” Jason said, looking at the man now walking between Henry, Quincy, and Horace. “He’s not stupid, our dirty young man with his seedy-looking boots. He realized very quickly he could shift the blame onto Mr. Blaystock. He was quite smooth. Interesting.”
“Yes, it is. What are we going to do, Jason?”
Jason smiled down at her, saw her tongue slide over her bottom lip, sighed deep in his throat, kissed her hard, and stepped away from her. “What I’m going to do is try to keep my hands off you until we’re home. Er, Hallie, I meant to ask you, do you really want that chair to be at the foot of the bed?”
“You’re right. My gowns never land on the chair. I know, I’ll move the chair in front of the armoire. It faces the window and such a lovely view it is, don’t you agree?”
Jason stared down at her, fascinated and appalled.
“I’m joking, Jason. I’m joking.”
CHAPTER 37
“This one is too close.” Hallie kissed the long thin scar high on the inside of his left thigh.
“Yes, much too close,” Jason said, and tried not to think of her mouth caressing that scar he always noticed when he was bathing because it had been too close, of her palm now lying flat on his belly, fingers splayed. He was trying his best not to shudder like a palsied man. He said only, “Hallie.” Odd how whispering her name in moments like this flowed so steadily through him now, warm and strong. He said her name again because it felt so good, because her breath was warm against his flesh.
She looked up the length of his body to his beautiful face, stretched up to kiss his belly, then looked at his face again. “Not long ago I would have been alarmed that I was causing you distress. But not now.” She lowered her head, kissed the scar again, her touch so light he wanted to cry. “How did it happen?”
“What? Oh, the cut on my leg. James managed to get under my guard, poked his wooden sword into my belly, and I toppled backward over a log. A small and unfortunately very sharp branch was sticking up, and it tore right through my britches and got me.”
“Were you old enough to be mortified when your mother wanted to take care of you?”
“Oh yes, but my father saved me, bless him for all time, cleaned me up himself.” And he said her name again. “Hallie.”
She traced the thin scar over his right hipbone, the result of being thrown off his pony when he was six years old, he told her. Jason believed it was all over for him when she licked that scar, her fingers curling around him now, and he, quite simply, wanted to drum his heels against the mattress, and die. Thank God he wasn’t eighteen and still had a modicum of control over himself. Hallie, however, was orderly. She wasn’t to be hurried. After an eternity, she reached his chest. She was on her knees leaning over him, her hair loose, veiling her face, her fingers moving to the scar high on his shoulder. She lightly traced it. “This is the bullet wound.”
“Yes.”
“From five years ago.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me, Jason. Tell me what happened. I think it’s time, don’t you?”
When he remained silent, she leaned down and kissed the puckered scar. “The pain you must have endured. I am so very sorry.”
He felt a catch in his throat, felt a shot of pain so black, so very real, for a moment he couldn’t breathe. So long ago that pain, but he still felt it, felt the utter helplessness, and he knew it was payment owed for his appalling judgment. She must have seen that pain in his eyes because she kissed him, kept touching him, nibbling here and there until the pain receded. He wondered how she could ease him so quickly, so absolutely. He said, “She was going to kill my father. I couldn’t allow her to do that.”
“No,” she said, kissing him again and again, his throat, his chin, his mouth, “of course you couldn’t, no more than I could allow someone to kill my father, not if I could stop it.”
“She aimed at his heart. My father is about an inch taller than I am. He would have died instantly. That blessed inch saved my life.”
Her eyes closed though she could still see him throwing himself in front of his father, the bullet tearing into his flesh. She felt such intense, vicious hatred for this long-dead woman, that for an instant she knew what it was like to wish death upon another. It was a pity this woman was already dead and beyond her.
“I don’t understand. Why did she want to kill your father?”
He reached up his hand and pulled her hair back. He saw fury in her eyes, making them nearly black, and wondered at it. How could she feel so deeply over something that had happened so long ago, long before she’d known him? It was right and just that he remember, that he burrow into the leaching pain as he would a familiar old shirt. Perhaps he shouldn’t remember it with such stark clarity, but he did. “Her name was Judith and I was her cat’s paw. She was beautiful, but it wasn’t her beauty that reeled me in, it was her wit, her ability to surprise me, to make me laugh and shake my head at the same time. I wanted to marry her. I never saw her treachery until it was too late. I was a bloody fool.”
“Tell me,” she said, and sat back on her haunches, white and naked, her hair long and loose, falling over her shoulders to veil her breasts, her hands open on her thighs. “Tell me,” she said again.
Jason didn’t want to call up the memory that was still so hot and stone-hard inside him. He didn’t want her to know the damnable details of what he’d done, he didn’t want her to realize what a fool he’d been, to see the pathetic young man who’d very nearly destroyed his own family, but words came out of his mouth even as he shook his head. “It was all about the greed of three evil people, three people with absolutely no conscience. My father was caught in this storm’s eye.” He told her about Annabelle Trelawny, a woman who had fooled them all, including Hollis, about how James had nearly died as well. “He managed to kill Judith’s brother, Louis, but it was so close, Hallie.” He rubbed his shoulder, feeling again the instant the bullet had struck him, hurling him back against his father. “Corrie killed both women,” he said. “Saying it now, it doesn’t seem possible, but she did it, she first shot Judith, then Annabelle Trelawny, to save Hollis. I can remember the sounds of the bullets, and I thought how very loud they were, and I knew one of them had struck me, and I thought it very odd since I felt numb. Apart from it, really. I remember my father pressing his palm against the wound in my shoulder, remember him yelling at me, and I was so relieved he was all right. Then I remember thinking that with my luck the bullet could so easily have torn through me and still killed him, but that didn’t happen. I wanted to tell him that I was sorry for all the devastation I’d caused, but I couldn’t, the words wouldn’t come, and then, well, then I couldn’t do anything.”
“You nearly died,” Hallie said. She was stroking her fingers over his shoulder, lightly touching the scar.
“But I didn’t. My family was there, they were always there, and when I finally opened my eyes, they were so happy and relieved, told me over and over that I would be all right, that I would live. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. All those forgiving, beloved faces, the worry and love for me etched deep, the fear that I would die.”
“You couldn’t bear it because the blame was yours.”
“Yes, it was mine, no one else’s.”
“Tell me again how it was all your fault.”
“If I hadn’t been such a fool, so blind and full of my own conceit and invincibility, Judith wouldn’t have been able to draw me in, to make me her dupe. She wouldn’t have won.”
“You say she won? How could she have won, Jason? She’s dead. You’re not dead, your father’s not dead, James isn’t dead.”
“No thanks to me. They wanted our deaths, Hallie. They wanted the actual doing of it. Worst of all, they wanted the benefit from it. They were monstrous evil. Judith’s brother had knocked James out and tied him up.
