Page 93 of Gentleman Jim

“How long is it to Market Barrow?” she asked.

“Some seven or eight miles.” St. Clare’s lips brushed over her hair. “When we arrive, you’re to stay close to me. Do you understand?”

“You mustn’t worry about me.” Before leaving the house, she’d tucked the Queen Anne flintlock into her reticule. It had been a long while since she’d fired a pistol, but one didn’t forget, surely.

“Of course I’m worried,” he said. “If anything should happen to you—”

“It won’t, I promise. I’ll stay right with you the entire time.” She set a hand on his midsection. The buttons of his cloth waistcoat brushed over her palm. Her stomach fluttered. There was something extraordinarily intimate about being with him this way, inside a darkened carriage, enfolded in his greatcoat and sheltered by his arm “Did Lord Allendale have anything to say about your going out?”

“He retired early.”

“He doesn’t know?”

“About this Father Tuck fellow?” St. Clare frowned. “No. I didn’t tell him. There seemed little point.”

“I hope that after tonight there will be something worth the telling.”

Some forty minutes later, their rickety carriage finally rolled into the yard of the legendary hedge tavern in Market Barrow.

Maggie drew back the edge of a moth-eaten curtain to peer out the dirty carriage window. She admitted to a certain disappointment. The tavern was nothing like she’d envisioned it would be. This was no shadowy den of thieves from a gothic novel, but a small, obscure stone building located alongside the highway amidst a tangle of trees and brush.

“The Crossed Daggers,” she read aloud from the swinging wooden sign as the carriage came to a halt. “How ominous.”

“It’s certainly not the Hart and Hound,” St. Clare said grimly. He moved to open the door, but she forestalled him.

“A kiss for luck?” she suggested.

He stilled. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“I am,” she admitted.

“It’s dangerous, Maggie.”

“Yes, dangerous. Like a cross-country gallop on a hot horse—a jump over a tall gate or a leap across a too-wide ravine.” She hadn’t ridden in ages, but she well remembered that feeling of speed and daring, of utter abandon. It called to her primitive Honeywell soul. “I’ve been wrapped in cotton wool for too many years. Locked away inside Beasley Park. The night you returned to me is the night I came alive again. There’s no going back now.”

He bent his head. “No. There isn’t.” He kissed her, hard and fierce.

She clutched weakly at his greatcoat, her heart thumping heavily as his sinful mouth claimed hers.

It was he who ended the kiss, a blaze of fire in his gray eyes. He drew her hood up to veil her face before opening the carriage door. “With me,” he said.

She nodded, and when he leapt down, she allowed him to grasp her waist and lift her out of the cab as easily as if she were a bit of thistledown.

He set her gently on the ground, tucking her hand in his arm. “Keep an eye out,” he commanded Enzo.

The tiger dipped his head.

“Will he be safe out here?” she asked.

“Safe enough.” St. Clare led her across the yard to the tavern’s darkened entrance. There was no one about save for a portly man in an oilskin coat. His hat was pulled low over his face, obscuring his features as he mounted a rather depressed-looking chestnut horse.

Maggie suppressed another shiver. She clutched her reticule close to her, feeling the reassuring weight of the flintlock within it.

It was nearly as dark inside the tavern as it was without—and darker still as the heavy wooden door slammed shut behind them on hinges that were desperately in need of oiling.

At the sound, every man in the room seemed to look up. And there were a great many men present. Three grizzled, white-haired fellows were hunched over a table in the corner, nursing tankards of ale. Two slightly younger men were near the fire, smoking pipes. And yet another group—younger still—huddled at the high wooden counter of the bar.

Their faces were uniformly sinister in the shadows cast from an overhead oil lantern that swayed on a chain. And most sinister of all, the barman—a hulking figure with a balding pate and a crooked nose that looked as if it had been broken at least half a dozen times.