Chapter Seventeen
She saw the significance of the words strike him, watched a long swallow roll down his throat.
Briefly, those glacial blue eyes slid across the room to where Cooper and Henry’s uncle were yet engaged in conversation.
Any moment now Henry’s uncle would get up and leave—and he would pass right by them on the way.
“Henry,” Grace said softly. “You can’t be seen here.
” Thus far his uncle might have some vague suspicions, but nothing concrete.
If he caught a glimpse of Henry in this very tavern on this very night, those suspicions would be confirmed.
They would lose what little element of surprise remained to them.
For a moment he stood stock-still. His fingers tightened upon her wrist. “You’re right,” he said. “I can’t. You can’t.”
She’d expected him to perform a quick about-face and make for the door. Instead he grasped her wrist tighter and headed for the stairs.
What on earth? “Henry—”
“Oi!” A rough voice cut across the din; a serving maid who had just come from a nearby table had paused to slant a glare at Grace, as if she ought to have known better. “Ye know the rules. Room fer the night’ll cost ye a shillin’.”
“Oh,” Grace said, on an awkward laugh. “That’s not—”
“Keep what’s left,” Henry said as he plucked a crown coin from the pocket of his coat and dropped it into the maid’s outstretched hand.
Grace’s mouth dropped open in shock as Henry nudged her back toward the stairs. “You’ve paid for a room?”
“I have got quite a lot to say to you, and I’d prefer privacy in which to do it.
” There was a growl in his voice, something just short of feral that lifted the hairs at the nape of her neck.
“I distinctly remember telling you that you weren’t to come here.
I distinctly remember also your promise that you would not. ”
“I couldn’t let you do something foolish,” she said defensively.
“No,” he said, his voice clipped. “Instead, you did something foolish.”
Apparently she had not moved quickly enough for his liking, for the moment they were obscured from the view of the tavern at large, he bent down, planted his shoulder in her middle, wrapped his arms around her knees, and hiked her over his shoulder like a sack of flour.
“Henry!” Grace braced her hands upon his back to steady herself as he began to climb the stairs. “Are you mad? Put me down!” A sharp jolt as the flat of his hand came down sharply over her upturned bottom. “Did you just spank me?” she gasped in dawning outrage.
“If you have to ask, clearly it wasn’t hard enough.”
Another sharp strike. Her skin tingled where it had landed, the scant petticoats she’d donned not nearly enough padding to soften the blow. “You blasted wretch!” She pounded one fist against his back. “I’m not a child!”
“Then cease behaving like one.” Another stinging slap to the fleshiest part of her bottom—but his palm lingered there in the aftermath of it. He was enjoying this, the bloody arse!
Grace kicked her feet, but the tight grip of his arm about her knees restricted the worst of her flailing.
“Ooooh, I am going to—” Another spank. She gritted her teeth through the initial shock of it and wilted as it passed into an odd sort of burn.
It wasn’t just her arse that ached any longer.
There was the unmistakable ache of arousal between her thighs, now, too.
She breathed through the heightened sensation, dropping her head down over his back as she struggled to pull her scrambled senses into some manner of order.
The sound of a door scraping open. A short, abbreviated shriek split the air.
Grace lifted her head once more. “What was that?” she asked.
“That room,” he said, his voice faintly disgruntled, as he closed the door once again, “was occupied.”
A hysterical giggle burst from her lips. “Henry. Be reasonable.” One more stinging slap, and Grace dropped her head once more with a disgraceful little shiver.
“No,” he said lightly—almost conversationally—as he opened another door.
“I don’t think I will. I think I have had quite enough of being reasonable for one lifetime, for all the good it has ever done me.
” He stepped over the threshold with a queer finality, a sense of purpose, a deliberate flouting of every convention he had thus far rigorously upheld.
A shudder raced up Grace’s spine. There was scrape of the warped wooden door across the floor.
The click of the latch falling into place resounded in her ears like a gunshot.
Her breath snarled in her lungs as he let her down at last. The jaunt up the stairs had tousled her hair, wrenched her bodice down even more.
One deep breath and her breasts would burst free altogether.
There was the sound of a friction match striking against something, then a soft glow of light from a lamp set atop a small table beside the bed. “Jesus Christ,” Henry said he turned to face her once more. He ran a shaking hand across his mouth. “Where the hell did you get that ridiculous garment?”
“It’s mine,” she blurted out. “That is to say, it was mine.” A remnant of the life she’d escaped.
She’d been years younger and half-starved when last she’d worn it.
Some of the stains had never fully washed out.
But she had kept it nonetheless, as a reminder of where she had come from and how far she had come since.
“It’s dreadful and ill-fitting.”
“It was perfectly suited to my needs.” The dress had been second-hand to begin with, and had hung on her thin frame when she’d last worn it at sixteen.
The bodice had been the most troublesome to fit into, but even that had been a blessing of sorts, since gentlemen who were wont to ogle bosoms were less likely to take note of faces.
She lifted her chin in open challenge. “I practically grew up in places like these,” she said.
“There is an apparel, a costume of sorts that renders one beneath notice. One must look the part.”
“Oh, you look the part.” This was tendered with a scowl so severe that Grace backed up a step, pinning her shoulders against the wall.
“Are you going to spank me again?” Her arse still tingled from those first few smarting strikes. And worse still, that heat that had kindled in her belly had yet to abate.
“I am giving it serious consideration.” His palm landed against the wall beside her head, and he loomed over her.
Unfettered aggression rolled off of him in waves.
Clearly, the introduction of the flat of his hand to her backside had done little to cool the white hot flare of his temper. “How long have you been here?”
“Just—just over an hour,” she squeaked. “I was in no danger.”
“You were in every danger,” he seethed, his voice pitched to a guttural growl.
“Every one! Every evil that could have befallen a lady in a place like this might have happened to you. For Christ’s sake, Grace, had it not occurred to you that you might have been recognized? You have been in my uncle’s house!”
“He wasn’t looking at my face,” she said, and cringed at the admission.
“Besides, I know his sort well enough,” she forged ahead as his scowl deepened.
“He’s not the kind of man to notice those he thinks are beneath him.
” She’d bilked men just like him dozens of times.
Hundreds. Easy pickings, really. “I was practically invisible even when I was an invited guest in his home. Here, I was no one at all.” Just a pair of breasts to ogle whenever she’d come by. He’d not glanced at her face even once.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. “I told you,” he said, in that same simmering tenor, “that I wouldn’t risk your safety or your reputation. Once was twice too often. You agreed.”
“I lied! You are too good, too honorable. You don’t know how this sort of game is played, Henry, and I do. I couldn’t let that passenger manifest fall into your uncle’s hands if I might have prevented it.”
“And you couldn’t.”
Her face fell. “No,” she admitted. “But, Henry, it’s not quite so dire as it seems—”
“I don’t care about that.” His head bent over hers, and a deep sigh squeezed itself from his lungs.
“Right now, Grace, I don’t care about any of it.
” His chin touched the top of her head, and she had the strangest sense that he was…
soothing himself. Reassuring himself. The salty, faintly spicy scent of his skin, misted with sweat, invaded her nose.
His fingers carried a slight tremble as they curled over her shoulder.
“You took ten years off of my life down there. I had to stand there and watch you do something mad, something so reckless and dangerous and damned foolish—” A gentle stroke at the back of her neck.
“Anything might have happened to you. Do not ever do such a thing again,” he whispered.
Oh. The anger—that was secondary. The fear had come first, cold and hard and shimmering with a thousand dark possibilities.
The anger was only the blast of heat once the worst of the fear had faded, and she’d caught the sharp side of his tongue and the flat of his hand because she’d rendered him helpless to come to her aid should anything have gone awry.
The part of her that was contrary and abrasive, the part that—beneath ordinary circumstances—would have continued to argue and justify and maintain the necessity of her deception, fell abruptly silent.
These weren’t ordinary circumstances. And Henry—Henry wasn’t Mama; content to send her out into the world to perform her thievery on his behalf with no thought to the consequences she might face.
He cared for her safety and her reputation. Perhaps even more than she ever had.
In this moment, he didn’t care that he’d lost what he’d come to retrieve, that his uncle had succeeded in obtaining a critical piece of evidence that would, in short order, be used to ruin him. He only cared that she had made it out of this particular scrape unharmed.
“I’m—”