low sound vibrated from William’s chest, something between grief and rage. “You bastard.”
Jasper tightened his grip and hauled the girl closer, holding the shard at her neck. Mercy screamed. Fury and fear clawed at William; he raised his arm, found his aim, and took the shot. Jasper recoiled with a look of shock. Thick hands released their grip on the child, and she scampered away to her mother.
He stared in shock at the smoking pistol he held. He’d had his share of fights in the gambling houses of London, but he’d never shot a man. The report still echoed in his head, followed by the thud of a limp body. A dead one.
He’d truly become a monster now, and yet he felt strangely detached. The women cried behind him, the child and the mother. Not Mercy, though. She stared at him with something akin to shock. Naturally, she would be horrified. He would be horrified, too, if he didn’t feel so damn hollow. So cheated. This man had taken buckets of blood, bodies of it, and barely paid him back at all. His vision was blurry and his morality in tatters.
William turned to the group, and a huddled mass of white nightdresses shrank back. Regret churned his stomach. He would never hurt them; didn’t they know that? But neither could he protect them.
A small, pale hand touched his arm and lowered it. He hadn’t even realized he’d still been pointing it toward a blank space.
“It’s over,” she said, and he heard relief in her voice. If she had any fear, she refused to show it. Her innocent eyes, her graceful neck, her tattered gown, they were all a facade. A feint, to confuse her opponent. She was not weak. She was stronger than he.
He stared at her, bemused. Even though her calmness was directed against him, he drew strength from it, as if she might hold the key. As if she could save him from himself. The idea was lunacy but only fitting, considering he was mad. Definitely mad, when he felt a stirring attraction to the slim body in a too-large nightgown. The breasts and hips, clear beneath the thin, damp cloth, formed the body of a young woman. Of course she was. If they had played together, she couldn’t be much younger than he. The town hadn’t stopped growing, stopped changing, just because he’d left.
“You aren’t going to cry, then? Or scream at me?” Like her mother was doing. He could barely hear her. All his senses were attuned to Mercy.
“No,” she said simply.
“Why not? Don’t you grieve him?”
“You were just trying to protect my sister,” she said, and he knew it wasn’t an answer to his question. He could see that from her eyes. She didn’t grieve her father, and considering the man’s treatment of the child, he supposed he couldn’t blame her. He wished he could have felt nothing when his parents died. He wished he could feel nothing now.
“What will you do?” he asked curiously.
“The same thing we have always done. He brought in some money, but he spent more of it on drink.”
Yes, William understood that. His family had once prospered, under his grandfather’s reign. He remembered a kind, wrinkled face. He remembered shouting behind closed doors with his father. And he remembered a startling change in lifestyle when his grandfather died. Where had the money gone? What had his father done with it? By the time William had inherited, the accounts hovered just above zero. And after the so-called solicitors had run through them, he’d found nothing but debts.
Strange to think they weren’t so different, the lord of the realm and the daughter of the town drunk. Although they hadn’t been so different as children. She’d played the princess at the highest point in the abbey while he had fought through dragons to rescue her.
A legacy of riches. Beware the ghosts and witches.
He could rescue her now, the way he’d imagined on the old turrets of the abbey. A life of penury awaited her, or worse. He could change that, though his motives were the opposite of pure. The violence of this night should have quelled any desire, but instead he felt it raging back, the lust he’d felt for her as an adolescent youth. And now? He wanted her body, yes, but also her courage, her strength. He wanted her softness, too, and comfort and family and all the things he no longer deserved. An honorable man would leave her here, but hadn’t he given that up when he killed a man?
“Come with me.” It should have been a plea, but it came out a command. He wasn’t strong enough to retract it, not when he wanted her acquiescence. This wasn’t a test for her, but him, to find out exactly how low he would sink in his fall from grace. If his body had any say in the matter, he thought grimly, it would be very far indeed.
Beck followed as wails came from the barn. “My lord.”
William stopped beside his horse, staring into the gray hills.
“Back there,” Beck said. “My lord, it was murder.”
His heart squeezed tight. Murder. “He was going to hurt her. You saw it.”
“He was drunk and unarmed but for a piece of glass. You came to the house with a pistol. It will look like revenge. There are limits to what the law will accept, even for a peer.”
William paused, swallowed. “No. There aren’t.”
A part of him wished Beck was right, that someone would punish William for what he had done, that someone would protect this young woman from his misuse. But that part of him was very small and William spoke the truth. That was the problem with being an earl, even a poor one—there was no one to stop him.
The young woman crossed the marshy grass in her thin nightgown—already halfway to translucence in the rain. She faced him with a blankness he recognized in himself. Shock at what had happened. Acceptance of what was to come.
Sweet little Mercy Lyndhurst, and here he was to defile her.
The last time he’d seen her she’d been a waif of a girl. Now she was all woman. And why shouldn’t he take her? He could have her and help her at the same time.
A poor excuse.
He examined her, struggling for detachment. Already the rain was clearing some of the fog from his mind, allowing rays of sanity to peek through. The thought of going home alone to the empty cavern of a house chilled him. He might as well be a stranger in his own lands for all that he knew anyone here.
He was selfish to take her this way, but concern whispered, too.
What would she do here? Jasper may have been a poor excuse for a caretaker, but a young woman with no means could starve in the next cruel winter. She deserved better than him for a rescuer, but he was all she had.
Another excuse. The simple truth was, he couldn’t quite bring himself to leave her here, in a place that reeked of death.
“Did you send the note?” he asked suddenly. He didn’t know where the idea had come from, but he knew the answer even before she nodded.
She’d sent the note, because she knew there was trouble. She’d used code from their childhood, so that he would understand. And that was as good a reason to take her as any—there were very few people he could trust.
Just her, perhaps.
As he knelt, she placed her slim foot in his hands. She weighed almost nothing
