A Woman’s Innocence Read online

  “She don’t act very friendly,” said one of the drunken men as he stumbled closer to the horse.

  Sam chuckled. “She just don’t like an audience, right, Emma?”

  Suddenly he twisted and snaked an arm around her. She found herself hauled into his lap, her back and her knees supported by his arms. She caught the hood quickly, letting it reveal her profile, but not her hair. They were face to face, her hands pressed flat against his chest. To her surprise, his heart wasn’t even beating quickly. She looked into his eyes and saw that every trace of familiarity had vanished, as if he weren’t Sam Sherryngton anymore.

  Where had he learned such skill? He was pretending, and she would have to save herself by doing the same.

  She let her hands run slowly up his chest, trying not to feel every hill and valley of muscle. Unlike his, her breath was coming much too fast, whether from fear or excitement she didn’t know. With an imperceptible shrug, she let the cloak slide back off one shoulder, and it took her loose dress with it, revealing the bare skin of her collarbone. Sam looked right at it, where she wanted him to, and he licked his lips.

  She gave a slow, satisfied smile.

  “Ye blokes better point us to a room,” he breathed hoarsely.

  His mouth was so close that she almost gave in to the wild impulses that so easily ruled her. But she was not that woman anymore. She wouldn’t kiss him, even if it was playacting. He had only taken her from one dangerous situation into another.

  There was genial laughter as the drunken men gathered around, and Julia gave them an exaggerated wink. Sam dismounted first, then reached up to grip her waist and lift her from the horse, making her feel like a dainty thing, instead of a woman who came up to the bridge of his nose and easily towered over two of the three onlookers.

  “She’s a long one,” one of the men said with obvious awe. “Girl, can I have ye after he’s done?”

  “I already paid for the night,” Sam said easily, settling his arm over her shoulders. After removing his saddlebag, he flung a coin to the youngest man. “Take care of me horse, and I’ll see there’s more of that for ye.”

  The man bobbed his head enthusiastically. “I’ll be waitin’ at the stables out back, guv’nor.”

  After the door to the tavern opened, the stench of smoke and cheap beer and unwashed men surrounded them as they went inside. There were other women here, too, serving drinks and letting themselves be pawed. When Julia had gotten into scrapes, she’d pretended to be a boy to avoid just this sort of thing.

  One of their escorts called in a loud voice, “Tate, ye got any rooms left for the bloke here? He’s payin’.”

  A spectacled man behind the bar looked up slowly, without interest. “Pay now, then wait in line.”

  There was a line? she thought with resignation.

  She’d been in worse places. But she hadn’t been wanted for treason then, hadn’t had an execution lying in wait for her. A single mistake now would be deadly.

  She let herself brush languidly against Sam as he haggled with the barkeep over money. His hand slid from her hip down over her backside, all while he kept talking. It had been a long time since she’d allowed a man such familiarity. She’d wanted to be a different person, a better person—and instead she’d just been broken out of jail and was now posing as a prostitute. But she was free.

  The barkeep pointed up the stairs, and Julia led the way. When she looked up, she stumbled to a halt. Though the rickety wooden stairs led to a second floor, there was another couple waiting at the top, pressed intimately against the wall as if they weren’t going to bother waiting for a room.

  Sam leaned into her and spoke in a low voice. “There are several rooms up there, and the barkeep assures me he doesn’t tolerate anyone using more time than he’s paid for.”

  Julia grimly climbed the stairs. It didn’t help when Sam’s hands rode her waist, squeezing.

  There was no corridor to speak of, just three doorways off a landing. They were forced to wait several stairs from the top, where everyone below could see them as if they were the nightly entertainment. She could feel the pairs of eyes, some curious, some envious.

  Sam stepped onto her stair, crowding her, and leaned back against the wall. She didn’t look at the couple moaning nearby, only stiffened her shoulders and stared at Sam without expression.

  “I’ve just paid for you,” he murmured.

  His outward expression was annoyed, though his eyes hinted at reluctant amusement. He nuzzled her neck, his mouth hot against her skin. “No one’s going to believe you inspire my lust by the way you’re acting.”

  After everything that he and his fellow soldiers had done to her, how could he expect it to be easy for her to even pretend she liked him? He slid his arms beneath her cloak and gathered her against him. He was wider than she remembered, hard with the muscle of a soldier.

  “Relax,” he whispered, pressing a kiss to her cheek. “The secret is to think like a prostitute, to become her. Such a woman wouldn’t care about those men below. She’d only want to earn her money and not starve to death along with her children.”

  That got her attention, and she angrily lifted her face to his. Though his eyes seemed remote, his face was laughing with the faintest leer—a man anticipating satisfaction.

  She leaned in and bit his ear, satisfied when she felt his jolt of surprise. “I’ve spent much of my life pretending to be what others wanted me to be. You have nothing to teach me about acting.”

  She let her hands trail up his arms, across his broad shoulders, up his neck. As she touched his face, she felt the rasp of a day’s growth of beard. Pulling his head down, she pressed his face into her neck, hoping he remembered to keep the hood of the cloak over her head. He smelled good, like soap and the outdoors. She knew how she must smell to him, and it gave her a small measure of satisfaction. She ran her hands up through his hair and arched into him. When he groaned, she felt the slightest bite of his teeth into her neck and shuddered at the surge of unwelcome pleasure.

  But she was a prostitute now, and accepted his advances, although somewhere in the back of her mind the faintest warning fought to be heard. She told herself that this wasn’t Sam, but a nameless customer giving her the money she needed to survive. She nipped at his ear again. With a moan, he caught her knee and pulled it up to his waist, leaning into her in a provocative manner.

  But a prostitute wouldn’t be feeling the excitement that slowly expanded in her veins until it burned through her. And he must be feeling it, too, for as she writhed against him, she felt the hardness of his erection pressing intimately between her thighs. She slid her face into his neck, turned to rub her cheek against his, and before she knew it, his lips were but a breath away from hers. As they paused in stillness, his heart finally betrayed him, pounding against her breasts.

  She looked up into his eyes and saw the same surprise she was feeling. And then she leaned in and kissed him, a soft gentle pressure of her lips.

  Chapter 3

  At the stunning touch of her mouth, Sam’s world tilted and upended. He had taunted her into this, teasing, touching. Somehow everything he was supposed to be concentrating on ended up falling away beneath the onslaught of Julia’s willing body. She was hot in his embrace, her mouth parted against his as she sucked on his lower lip. She knew what to do, how to touch him.

  When her tongue entered his mouth, he groaned and ground his hips against hers. Far away, he seemed to hear a door opening and closing, felt the brush of people moving past them, and all he could think was that he was one step closer to fulfillment.

  From below, someone gave him a push, and he caught the banister with one hand and held Julia with the other.

  “Ye’re next!” a man insisted. “Hurry it up!”

  Dazed, Sam realized another couple waited below them on the stairs. Julia blinked up at him blankly, and he pulled her up the last of the stairs and into a small room lit only by a few guttering candles on a wooden crate. There was a chai
r with a broken back, and a cot scattered with dirty bedding.

  She stumbled into the center of the room, then stood tall as she turned to face him. He leaned back against the closed door, staring at her for a moment. Where had his legendary control gone? He could not claim to be immersing himself in his part, not when it was Julia he’d kissed, Julia he’d spent his lifetime dreaming about, even when his dreams had finally made him bitter. And now he was a wanted man.

  “Speak softly,” he ordered in a husky voice, then cleared his throat. “A servant will be up with a tub, and I don’t want him overhearing us.”

  “A tub?” She let the hood slide to her shoulders and pulled out the string that held her hair back. “It wasn’t difficult to tell I needed one.”

  He hadn’t thought how she might take his offer of a bath. He should let her think the worst of him, but he heard himself saying, “I thought it might make you feel better after your confinement.”

  She shrugged, and he knew she didn’t believe him. He was regretting the ruse he’d forced upon her, because he was painfully aroused, and it was proving far out of his control.

  “I know that this masquerade got out of hand,” he said. “I couldn’t come up with anything else for this situation. I didn’t think you’d mind, being that you aren’t a—” The word suddenly stuck in his throat as he realized what he was implying.

  “A virgin?” she coolly finished for him.

  “I didn’t mean it the way you’re thinking,” he said.

  “So how did you mean it?” she asked, her hands dropping to her hips, the cloak falling back from her shoulders.

  “I simply meant that you’re not naïve, that you’ve traveled enough to have seen some of society’s darker elements.”

  “Then you’re lying to yourself,” she said. “And what excuse do you have for your reaction—that you’re not a virgin?”

  He folded his arms across his chest and regarded her with an equanimity he was far from feeling. “I’ve played all sorts of parts.”

  “And there’s a part of you that willingly joined right in,” she countered, looking pointedly at his groin.

  “I can’t exactly control that,” he said between gritted teeth.

  “You can’t?” Her wide eyes blinked innocently. “But you’re in control of everything else, aren’t you—my pursuit, my imprisonment, and now my rescue?”

  “Julia—”

  There was a knock at the door, and Sam cursed under his breath as she replaced her hood and walked to the bed. She sat down on the edge, touching nothing but the cloak. Two servants entered carrying a tub full of wrinkled linens and soap, and promised to return with hot water. They leered as Julia playfully showed them her ankles. The servants returned twice more, carrying steaming buckets. Sam tossed them each a coin when they were done, and finally he and Julia were alone.

  She stood up and let the cloak drop behind her. He thought she’d snap a remark at him, but suddenly she just looked tired and resigned.

  “Please turn around,” she said.

  He nodded, then took the chair and straddled it, looking out the small window into the dark night. Clothing rustled, followed by a splash as she entered the tub.

  “I shouldn’t have taken out my frustration on you,” she said stiffly. “You did rescue me from jail.”

  “I helped put you there.” His voice came out harsher, guiltier than he’d meant to reveal. “You’re innocent.”

  She said nothing for several minutes. As he listened to the gentle slosh of water, he pushed away thoughts on what she looked like, what she was doing. Why should he so easily be seduced by her beauty, her spirit, when he was still so angry with her? He was drawn to her with the same power that had held sway over him for at least sixteen years.

  “You didn’t come to this conclusion about my innocence on your own,” she said coolly.

  He closed his eyes. “No.”

  “What changed your mind? Didn’t you want to see me beheaded?”

  “I never wanted that.” He gripped the broken back of the chair until his knuckles ached. “When Nick showed me the evidence, half the reason I participated was to shove his so-called evidence in his face, proving him wrong for once.” He lowered his voice. “But you seemed to be behaving like a traitor would, traveling north to stop a witness from testifying against you.”

  “I behaved just like myself!”

  A sopping washcloth hit the back of his head. He caught it as it fell, and tossed it over his shoulder in her general vicinity.

  “I told you why I went to see Edwin,” she continued. “His mother had died. My brother thought it would ease the blow if I delivered her personal possessions to Edwin myself.”

  Sam gritted his teeth. “Did you hear what you just said? Your brother thought.”

  Julia froze, the water cooling all around her, her wet hair making her shiver. “What are you implying?” she said calmly, controlling her sudden urge to chatter her teeth. She sank a little deeper in the tub, staring at the back of Sam’s head.

  “It was Lewis, Julia,” he said in a low voice.

  “What about him?”

  “Your brother deliberately sent you north to Edwin Hume.”

  There was a pain in her stomach she didn’t want to feel, so she ignored it even as it grew deeper, harder. “Of course he did it deliberately—my governess had died.”

  “He did it because he knew we would follow you, that we’d assume you were determined to prevent Edwin from testifying against you, that you were going to kill Edwin for his betrayal.”

  She wanted to put her hands over her ears to keep from hearing the hurt he inflicted with each raw word. “You’re lying,” she said, barely able to catch her breath. Her shivering seemed to consume her. Lewis may not be the best of brothers, but he couldn’t be capable of murder!

  Sam sighed. “Julia, when I left you in jail this morning, I went back to Edwin’s house to question him further. Something didn’t make sense.”

  “You mean my innocence?” She let him hear every drop of bitterness in her voice.

  “You came north for the sake of your governess, yet Edwin had claimed this was just a story you’d both worked out to explain the two of you being together. But a witness saw his face when you broke the news of his mother’s death. The witness swore that, from his expression, Edwin hadn’t known his mother would be dead.”

  “I don’t know what he knew,” she said angrily, rinsing the last of the soap from her body. “It’s obvious he was guilty because of the way he lied about me.”

  “So I wanted to talk to him again, to find out the truth. When I got there, someone had already shot him.”

  She closed her eyes as the cold seeped so deeply into her bones that she thought she’d never feel warm again. Was there anything left of her childhood memories that hadn’t been tainted? Forcing herself to stand on wobbly legs, she wrapped a towel around her, then stepped out of the tub. “So Edwin is dead.”

  “Yes, but he was able to speak to me before he died. He said that your brother had paid him to lie, that your brother had had him killed. Lewis is the real traitor.”

  She stood motionless, shivering as water streamed down her shoulders, her thoughts racing chaotically through her head. She calmly wrapped a towel about her hair. “Edwin lied to you.”

  “Julia—” He glanced over his shoulder at her, then looked away. “That’s not something you lie about when you’re dying.”

  “Someone who hates me enough to implicate me in such a crime would have no problem hurting me even more by implicating my brother. You’ve known Lewis your whole life. Surely you can see—”

  “Don’t you remember what Lewis was like?” he interrupted wearily. “He did his best to make his servants—to make us miserable. You were just a little girl, and I didn’t want you to believe the worst about your brother.”

  Though she was unsure of the truth, she couldn’t just accept such a horrible accusation about Lewis. He wouldn’t allow his own men
to be killed, then blame it on her. She spread the cloak across the cot and sat on it. She wore only the towel, because the thought of putting her jail smock on again made her sick.

  “Sam, regardless of what you think, Edwin must have lied one last time. I’ll prove it.”

  He turned around to face her and she let him, her back straight. His gaze dropped to her bare arms, her bare legs, before returning to her face.

  “There’s a dress for you in my saddlebag.”

  “Thank you. You’ll need to turn around again. After I’m dressed, we’ll discuss my plans to find the real traitor.”

  He did as she asked, and she rooted through the saddlebag. He’d brought a dress, a chemise, even petticoats and drawers, but no corset—not that she’d complain. And the dress even buttoned up the front, so she wouldn’t have to ask for his help.

  She fastened the last button beneath her chin. “You can turn around now.”

  He came toward her, and though he was leanly muscled, his size seemed to take up so much room. He caught her by the upper arms and gave her a little shake.

  “You have to live in the real world, Julia. This is not some afternoon excursion you can plan. You’re wanted for treason, and the government will send every police officer it can after you.”

  “Then why don’t you just leave me?” she said angrily, pushing away from him. “This isn’t your concern, is it?”

  “I’m making it my concern. And besides, you may be wanted for treason, but now I’m wanted for murder.”

  She stared up at him. “What are you saying?”

  “Two constables found me standing over Edwin’s body. They think I murdered him to keep him from testifying against you.”

  “You didn’t kill him, did you?”