Trial by Desire (Carhart 2)

Only a cad would have removed his hands, would have kept his mouth from finding her breasts beneath that gown. Only a cad would have pushed her hands away as they undid the fall of his breeches. And only a true villain would have ignored the rising tide of lust that came up between them.

She slid on top of him; he clasped her waist tightly. She leaned her forehead against his. Their breath mingled, then their bodies. Ned could have let everything go in that first half a minute. He might have rolled her beneath him and held her tight, until he emptied all his fears inside her. But her hands clenched tight on his shoulders. For her, this was more than release. It was reassurance, proof that even the courts of the land could not make her into a small powerless thing.

She was a heated breath of air about him, a warm clasp around his member. Her hands pinned him in place. Only a cad would have taken that control from her.

Tonight, Ned was determined to be her hero.

And so he was.

CHAPTER TWENTY

RELEASE HAD NEVER SEEMED quite so relieving to Kate. After they had finished, after he’d kissed her and withdrawn from her and rearranged her skirts, he pulled her back onto his lap. She sat there, her cheek pressed against his, his arms clasped about her. Somehow, that act, primal and real, had jolted something loose inside her. She could think again, could face the prospect of an uncertain tomorrow.

“What do we do?” She whispered the words into his hair.

His hands splayed on her backside, caressing her still.

“We need to tell Gareth,” Ned said. “Send for him immediately, in fact. We’ll need to have our marquess here, to press our advantage.” He smiled slightly. “I shall enjoy using my cousin as a figurehead.”

A thousand doubts clamored up in Kate’s mind. “But—”

“Jenny was already suspicious of Harcroft, I think. And after the role they have played in this, they deserve to know. I would like them to hear it from you.”

“They don’t like me,” Kate said in a small voice.

“They don’t know you. They don’t know anything about you. Don’t you think, Kate, that it’s time you told someone besides me?”

She’d been hiding this side of herself for so long, she couldn’t respond at first. She wanted to, wanted someone else to know what she’d done—and she didn’t want to, all at the same time. If they rejected her for the person she wasn’t, it was almost as if it didn’t sting.

“Gareth respects people who get things done. He’ll take your side of things. Just tell him honestly what you’ve done, and what has transpired.”

Laid out logically like that, the thought was actually a relief. After all these weeks, she could finally tell someone besides Ned the truth—about Louisa, and about herself. It had been a confining secret. Perhaps it was best that it was about to be blown apart. She might have allies again. She nodded in agreement.

“And,” Ned continued, “I’ll need to get Louisa. We need to prove she went of her own accord, and she’s the only one who can convince the jury of that.”

Those words froze Kate. “But Harcroft will demand she return to him.”

“We can shield her from him for a little while yet. Gareth is a marquess. He has no legal claim on her, but in the public’s eye, if he places her under his protection, people will start to think. And the more Harcroft rages, the more society will see him for what he truly is.”

“That’s not what I meant. You’ve seen the state Louisa is in. What could she do? She won’t testify against Harcroft. She can’t even sit up straight when she thinks of confronting him. How can I ask her to speak on my behalf with him sitting there in the courtroom?”

“She’ll testify.” Ned’s voice went dark. “She’s strong. And I can convince her to give Harcroft a taste of his own medicine. I must get going if I’m to fetch her. It’s past dark, and she’s still twenty miles away.”

“Going?” Kate felt a cold flush wash through her. “Fetch her? You’re leaving now?” The words tumbled out before she had a chance to think them through. She knew rationally that he didn’t need to be by her side. But tonight of all nights, she wanted to be held. She wanted to know he was close. She desperately desired to know that she hadn’t been abandoned. It had, after all, happened before. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

He pulled back from her and met her gaze gravely. His eyes seemed impossibly dark in the night, and yet warm, like the charred remains of a log in the fire. “You know Louisa wouldn’t trust a hired man who arrived on her step. Hell, I wouldn’t trust anyone enough to send him, either. It has to be me.”

“I know.” Kate shook her head. “I know. But…” It was foolish to think herself safe when wrapped in his arms, not with danger threatening her so. And with her trial pending in the morning, it would be downright idiotic to suggest going herself, however much she wanted to.

She felt irrational, foolish and mulishly idiotic. Just not so much that she would actually say so.

He must have understood, because he smiled and tipped her chin so that her lips were inches from his.

“Kate,” he said. “I’m not leaving you. I am merely willing to forgo a great deal of sleep in the next few hours. This time, I am going to slay your dragons and leave them for dead. You can count on me.”

Trust him. He lifted her off him and then stood, adjusting his clothing. Something in Kate’s stomach jarred loose.

A great deal had changed since his return to England. She had thought trust was an evanescent thing, impossible to cabin. But whatever the stuff that their marriage was made of, it was not some dry and weightless thing any longer. It had taken root inside her, and it wasn’t going to blow away.

“Ned.”

He turned back toward her again, his face wary.

“Be safe,” she said.

A smile spread across his face, as if she’d given him an unexpected gift.

She wrapped her arms around her waist. It was as if she could feel his hands against her skin, even as he stood yards away. He looked up at her and grinned one last time. She memorized that expression, every last line of it. The memory of his smile was as good as an embrace, even as he walked away.

THE SHEPHERD’S COTTAGE where Louisa was staying was three hours’ hard ride from London on a good night. This night, Ned realized, wasn’t good. It was desperately dark out; only a sliver of moon lit the way, and even that pale lantern shone fitfully behind ragged, breathy clouds. Tiny, icy spicules of rain cut into Ned’s face as he rode out of the stables.

His mare’s hooves clopped dully, muffled by the rain. The streetlamps edging the cobbled roads of London cast globes of light, dividing the world into stark regions of harsh yellow and impossible shadow. But after half an hour, as he urged his horse on, even that dim illumination faded into nothingness behind him. The moon slipped closer to the horizon. He could make out nothing about him but the dim moonlit track, two muddy wheel-ruts carved through dying autumn grass. It rustled in the wind, rattling in the rain. His horse fell into a relentless canter; the wind rushed by his face, cold and numbing. It didn’t matter. There was no direction but forward; no possibility except success.

It seemed Ned had been riding for an eternity, suspended in night air. The horse’s rhythm pounded into his flesh, until he was nothing more than the fall of hooves against mud, and the whip of the wind about him. One hour faded into two, then crept up on three. The rain stopped; the wind did not.

He came to the point where the track turned off toward Berkswift and entered the woods. During daylight hours, the grove seemed nothing more than a scraggly copse of trees. Now he could feel the change in the night air immediately as the horse entered those shadows. The musky scent of earth grew thicker; the air felt colder when he drew it into his lungs.

The foliage had never seemed particularly dense in the sun. But the black leaves filtered out all but the most persistent light—and that came through in dark, waving blotches, shadows chasing each other across the uneven forest floor as the

branches overhead moved in the wind.

His mount shied and skittered, throwing her head in fear of those moon-tossed shadows. Ned patted the animal’s neck in a fashion that he hoped was soothing. There wasn’t much time to cater to equine sensibilities in his schedule. And while he’d chosen the animal for the speed and sureness of her footing, with these shadows about, she was almost as skittish as Champion.

A quarter-mile into the forest, an owl hooted. For one heart-stopping second, Ned felt his horse’s muscles tense in panic. He reached forward to give the animal another soothing pat, but before his gloved fingers landed, the animal let out a frightened cry. She reared up, and before Ned could regain his balance, she broke into a teeth-jolting gallop.

Ned sawed uselessly on the reins. The heavy leather strings cut into his gloves, but the mare had grabbed the bit between her teeth and was too frightened to pay the least attention. She stampeded along the unlit path, her sides heaving in terror. Branches crashed into Ned’s cheeks, little whippy things that left stinging lashes across his face.

“Hush,” he tried. And then, “Quiet.” Not that the horse could hear any of Ned’s attempts to calm her, not over the cacophony of breaking branches.