Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
“I’ve been searching for you for months, you thieving wench.” Lord Wigsby stalked toward her, step by heavy step.
“I-I’m not. I didn’t.”
A lie. If he searched her things, he’d find the jewels in her bag. The reason Inez had run the first time.
Her shoe squelched as she stepped in a puddle of the spilled liquid. Honey formed a sticky crust on her fingertips.
“Hanging’s not good enough for you. I’ll have you drawn and quartered.”
His sweat smelled foul. Dimly, her mind working only on the edges while her brain was preoccupied with fear, Inez wondered how Bessie could stand the smell of him. Did she burn pastilles while she pleasured him? Did she hold her breath?
“I didn’t do anything. I didn’t mean any of it.” Without thinking, she switched into Portuguese, the language of her birth.
“Speak English, you filthy foreigner. You’re all the same, and I’m sick of it. Lying beggars who come here to steal from your betters, from honest Englishmen. But only the stupidest of whores would steal from an English lord and think she could get away with it.”
As if English lords were a superior being because they’d been born to the accident of a title, or she any less human because she had been born with dark skin. Inez flushed hot with anger and humiliation.
“You have mistaken me for someone else.” She pressed out the English words, straining to free them of her soft accent, still present after all these years on the isle.
“Oh, I know you. I remember how you tried to tempt me, twitching your tight little arse as you went about your business.”
He stalked her as she retreated. Inez wondered how far until she hit the wall and was trapped. If she bolted for the servant’s stair, would he pursue, or would he find such egress beneath him? He was a man much attached to the privileges of his station, if not the obligations.
She’d never tried to lure this man. She’d been terrified of him.
So had his daughter.
“You’re the reason Priscilla left.” His red-veined eyes narrowed to slits.
“You helped her, I know you did. You whores always stick together. You let her be carried away by that jackanapes, and then you stole all her jewels—all my jewels. Cleared out the house, like the filthy, foreign rat you are. My butler told me everything.”
The butler in that house would lie at will if it gained him anything; he was more craven than his employer, and just as greedy and cruel. Inez wondered how much moveable property the butler had absconded with and blamed the servants who fled the house that awful night.
“Which is it you regret more, your lordship? The loss of your daughter, or the jewels?”
Oh, foolish to taunt him, but the words leapt to her lips before Inez could stop herself. Balanced on the edge of death, she was finally bold enough to speak the truth.
“Your daughter left because you were cruel. She escaped you to find love, true love. Priscilla asked your blessing, don’t you remember? She would have listened if you were reasonable. But you were not.”
“You dare speak to me of my daughter! You aren’t fit to pronounce her name.
Helping her elope, and stealing from me to boot?
I’ll see your hands chopped off.” Spittle spewed from his mouth, so frothed was he with rage.
His face mottled red, and veins bulged above the white stock at this throat.
If he had apoplexy and expired here on the stained rug, would Inez be held accountable?
She turned to bolt, but Wigsby snaked out a fleshy hand and closed his fingers around her wrist. A low cry escaped her.
“Run, and I’ll have the watch down on you all. I’ll flush the filth from every corner of this wretched place, and your little whoring friends will have nowhere to go.”
Inez fought to tug her arm from his grip. She moaned as the pressure on his wrist threatened to snap the bones.
“Where are the jewels? I want back what you stole from me, you bitch!”
“Priscilla took them. So she could run away and be free of you.”
“I sent a man to hunt down her and her doltish husband. They weren’t smart enough to cover their tracks.
” At last, he had her cornered against the small occasional table standing at the end of the hall.
The edge pressed into her back. His sneer turned feral.
“They have nothing. They’ll always have nothing—I’ll make sure of that for crossing me. But you.”
He wrapped his other hand around her throat. His fingers were thick and fleshy, dirt caked around the nail beds and knuckles.
“I don’t trust the law to deal rightly with you. Think I’ll have to do it myself.”
The scream had no time to rise. Inez grappled at the manacle around her neck, but she was so much smaller.
She writhed and kicked out her feet, trying to connect with his swollen belly, his thighs, his groin, any soft part she could injure.
He wrapped his hands all the more tightly and squeezed.
She gagged, and he smiled. A gleam of lust and madness entered his eyes.
A shattering crack pierced the growing fog in her mind, and the hold on her neck slackened.
Inez staggered back, hands to her injured throat, sucking in air.
She blinked. A cloud of white bloomed around his lordship’s head, like a halo.
He made a stuttered, cut-off sound and swayed on his feet, shaking his head.
“Damn it. That should have dropped him.” An angelic voice spoke at her ear.
Inez blinked again. She must be seeing things in the throes of death. “Joseph?”
She moaned and tilted toward him, as if the world had shifted. He was warm, solid, and real. He smelled like horse.
“Would have dropped him, if it were earthenware instead of porcelain.” Joseph shoved the broken top of a decorated jug into her hand, the handle still attached.
“If he gets past me, use the edges. Go for his eyes or under the throat, here.” He tapped the side of his arrogant jaw, the soft skin beneath.
He was smooth-shaven, as usual, and the lean column of his throat, part and parcel of his splendid maleness, had her staring, stupefied, for a frozen second.
“You attacked a lord!” Wigsby bellowed. “I’ll have you hanged right along with her, you cur.”
“Oh, I’m not done. You attacked a defenseless woman.” Joseph turned and drove his fist into his lordship’s fleshy cheek.
She wasn’t defenseless, Inez thought hazily, clutching the broken top of the porcelain jar to her middle as she pressed against the small side table and watched.
She had him. She had never been one to watch bare knuckle boxing, thinking it a brutal sport, but there was something beautiful in the way Joseph moved with controlled, lethal grace.
His opponent was a brawler, a bully who relied on his size and weight to carry him in a match, but Joseph had technique.
His lordship, who outweighed Joseph by at least two stone, most of it fat, swung wildly, throwing his bulk around.
Joseph ducked his broad swings and landed his punches with precision.
Belly. Ribs. A flurry of jabs to the face, then another deep blow in the gut.
The strength and fury of him was magnificent. A hot flush moved from her throat to her breasts and down to her belly.
His lordship snorted out air and stumbled backward. “I…will…kill…you,” he huffed.
“In my sleep, I don’t doubt. Coward.” As his opponent lunged forward, trying to catch him in a bear hug, Joseph ducked and delivered two blows to Wigsby’s stomach, where his coat gapped open over an embroidered waistcoat.
Each fist summoned a grunt of pain, and the other man halted, hanging in the air, panting.
“Mercy?” Joseph said, though the cold set to his face told Inez he’d rather not.
“Mercy,” Wigsby wheezed, swaying on his feet.
“You don’t deserve it.” Joseph turned to regard Inez, and the granite line of his jaw softened. “Are you—”
“Cuidado!” The malicious smile alerted her first, before the meaty arm rose in the air. Inez threw her porcelain weapon over Joseph’s shoulder, aiming for Wigsby’s face.
Her missile bounced off him, but it slowed him a beat from delivering a rabbit punch to the back of Joseph’s neck, the blow that even Inez knew could fell or kill a man.
Joseph feinted to the side instinctively, his reflexes faster than hers, and his lordship’s fist grazed his temple.
A spurt of blood arced in the air, and Inez swallowed a scream.
Joseph, his face pure vengeance, turned and chopped the side of his palm into his lordship’s windpipe.
Wigsby clutched his throat, gagging, his face purpling as he sagged to his knees.
He swung one arm convulsively, trying even then to grab Joseph’s ankles and bring him down.
With a contemptuous lift of his lip, Joseph curled his fingers, drew back his arm, and drove his fist against the side of Wigsby’s head.
The hairpiece tilted and fell along with its master, and his lordship keeled face-first onto the floor.
“’E ain’t gettin’ up nowise soon,” remarked Titus. He was one of the bully backs Mother Vesta kept to look after her girls and occasionally usher out a gentleman patron who became rowdy or demanded services he hadn’t paid for.
Straightening from his position leaning against the wall, some distance down the hallway, the large man came forward and observed his lordship’s prone form with interest, then gave Joseph an admiring look. “Ye got in some good cracks, that ye did. Regular Jack Slack.”
“Nowhere near champion level.” Joseph winced as he flexed his hands. Both of his knuckles bled freely, skin scraped raw. “Damn his fancy buttons. I think I cracked a bone.”
“Ice them fives for a time, onest or twice, then wrap ’em.” Nero, the second heavy and a match for Titus in sheer bulk, came forward from the stairs. “And a raw steak for the glimms, so ye don’t show up black and fright off the ladybirds,” he advised, tapping the side of his head near one eye.