Chapter 1 #3
She didn’t dare look back. Propelled by terror and desperation, Rosaline climbed with all her strength.
A rough hand encircled her ankle and pulled.
Losing her grasp on both Orion and the ladder, she clutched at handfuls of empty air as she fell backward with a frantic cry.
Instead of landing on the ground in a crumple of twisted limbs, she was yanked around the middle by a burly arm that controlled the rest of her descent.
He had her turned around and imprisoned against the ladder with his far superior weight before she could take a breath.
Both hands tightened on the wood next to her shoulders, locking her arms down.
Where he’d put the gun, she could only guess.
The pallid glow from the city slanted across half his face, painting his features in stark contrasts of light and shadow.
He was exactly like his voice. Male. Hard. Dangerous. Dark. Gritty.
Panic was making her light-headed. Or perhaps it was his scent, both overwhelming and not altogether unpleasant. Something like cedar, stringent soap, and…earth baked too long in the sun.
“Let me go.” The words had been meant as an order but were released like a plea.
“Not until you explain to me how a little urchin like you got all the way the fuck up here.”
Lord but his mouth was foul.
He narrowed obdurate dark eyes at her, his lip lifted in the semblance of a snarl.
“What were you after, little girl? Because only whores and thieves sneak around houses like this in the middle of the night, and I didn’t purchase a whore so…
” His huge, warm body moved nearer to hers as he leaned down to take her measure.
If he got any closer, he’d find what she had in her pocket.
But the cup wasn’t the only thing she’d hidden there.
Reaching down, she snatched the knife and pressed it against his middle. “Let me go or I’ll—”
“Honey, that’s a bread knife,” he said with a wry, caustic sound as he easily swiped it from her hand. “What did you plan to do, butter me with it?”
Rosaline’s throat went dry. That drawl. Deep and crooked. Lazy almost. Nothing like the crisp tones of her countrymen. It was harsh and weathered at the edges, like the man himself.
His breath stirred in her hair as he lowered his head to say, “You want to tangle with my rough, weathered hide, you’ll need something sharper’n that.”
Something primal and electric sparked through her. It tasted like fear, but without the cold, metallic paralysis. The same thrill. The same tension in the muscles. A similar giddy, hysterical recklessness that screamed at her to run…or react.
React how?
Confused. Overwhelmed. Weak and trembling with cold, Rosaline did her best not to collapse into the warmth of his body. He was the danger. Not the savior.
She was just so cold.
A yowl both feline and masculine saw Rosaline suddenly released.
Orion had leapt from the top rung of the ladder and landed on the man’s shoulder. The kitten stopped his fall by digging his claws in as deep as he could and sliding down the length of the man’s bicep, shredding both shirt and skin in the process.
The stranger flapped the offending arm, doing his best to disengage the clinging beast sunk deep into brawn.
A string of subsequent curses blistered Rosaline’s ears and struck her dumb as he grabbed the kitten with hands much too large for such tiny bones.
“The fuck off me, you prickly little shit.”
“No!” Rosaline sobbed as he tossed the little creature aside. She wheezed out a relieved breath when she saw that Orion had been aimed at an overstuffed chair and landed on all fours without incident or injury.
The wrath she saw in the gunslinger’s eyes as he turned back to her sent her scrambling back up the ladder. It broke her heart to leave Orion to face the monstrous American on his own, but if she stayed, she damned not just herself, but every single person she cared about.
And they’d been through enough.
“Hey! Git back here.” Instead of following her up the ladder, he went for something on a side table. His gun?
Spurred by that thought, she dashed over the bookshelves and shimmied out the window right before the entire observatory flared with light.
He’d turned on the gas lamps. Now he could see her well enough to pick her off the ledge with his remaining bullets.
A cold jolt on her foot made her realize she’d lost a slipper, but she didn’t have the time to care about that.
With the nimble bounds of a fleeing deer, she made her way around the ledge with impossible speed.
She would rather meet her fate at the end of a fall than from the violent lance of a bullet.
Diving through her window, she turned to latch and lock it, hazarding a look back across the way.
The observatory glowed with golden light, but no huge American stood in relief against the glass, pointing a pistol between her eyes.
He hadn’t followed her up the ladder. Hadn’t chased her across the ledge.
Dropping out of sight, she drew the drapes and held her breath.
Could she really have just gotten away with it?