The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)(18)

“Thank you,” she said tightly. “They’ll do.”

“Are you going to bleed?”

She blinked up at him. “I’m uninjured. We established that last night.”

“Your monthlies. Will you be getting them in the next week? If so, we’ll need to buy cloths.”

She refused to blush. This man had seen her half naked and was presently abetting her flight from the law. The existence of her courses was surely no cause for embarrassment, especially since he did not seem in the least embarrassed and she refused to be outdone. “No,” she said. She had finished bleeding a few days ago, thank the holy mother and all the saints. She had thus far not needed the herbs Dinah had given her and which remained tucked inside the ticking of her mattress.

By now it was nearly noon and she had been awake for at least thirty hours, to say nothing of how poor her sleep had been the night before the robbery. The two pints of ale she thirstily drank at the inn must have been stronger than she was accustomed to, because she was all but swaying on her feet. The only thing keeping her awake was her nerves.

“We’ll take a room at an inn in the next town,” Rob said, as if reading her mind. “Now that we have baggage like respectable people, the innkeeper won’t throw us out on our ears.”

“I could ride until nightfall,” she lied, and then wanted to kick herself, because she was becoming increasingly aware that every muscle in her body ached. It was infuriating that she was so defeated by something as simple as riding a horse, something that had been as easy as breathing before months of illness and convalescence.

Rob was right that she needed to rest, but she didn’t like how he seemed to anticipate her needs and then act on them. She was dimly aware that what she was objecting to was simply basic consideration, but it had been a long day. It had been a long year, during which one of the few lessons she had learned was never to let anyone know that you needed anything. Need was only weakness by another name. And if someone could give you what you needed, they could just as easily take it away.

“Bully for you,” Rob said. “But I’m tired and the horses need to rest. We’ll stop at the next town, start again at first light tomorrow, and with any luck make it past Maidstone by tomorrow night.”

“Have it your way,” she said.

“Thank you, darling,” he said casually. The endearment made her skin feel hot, even though she knew it was too facetious to mean anything. He seemed to have found his way around titles and honorifics by simply reverting to the most appallingly impertinent mode of addressing her.

When they had been writing one another almost daily, she hadn’t tried to imagine what he looked like. There were certain facts one could glean from a person’s letters—class, education, intelligence, and even age, for example—but looks weren’t among them. Now she was seeing him in full daylight and had to admit that he was reasonably attractive, as far as men went. He was pleasant to look at, in a slightly weather-beaten sort of way. His voice was pleasant, too, a rough but lazy drawl that wavered between what she took to be an ironic impersonation of an upper-class accent and something that sounded almost like the real thing. Plainly, he had some education; she had guessed that much from his letters. He ought to be in a respectable trade, not doing . . . whatever this was.

They made their way through the crowds and back to the inn, fetched their horses, and rode in near silence until they reached the next village. At the first inn they saw, Rob smiled winningly and leaned across the counter and no doubt spilled all manner of foolishness into the ear of the innkeeper’s wife, and a moment later they were standing in a tidy little room that contained a bed, a washstand, and a fire.

She was very tired and her thoughts took a moment to catch up with her eyes. There was only one room, and only one bed.

“I assumed you’d prefer not to let me out of your sight,” Rob said, evidently guessing her train of thought, “hostages traditionally not being afforded much in the way of freedom.”

“Ha!” she scoffed. “I pity anyone who attempts to kidnap you.” For several hours, she hadn’t even thought about why he was there, why he was breaking bread with her, why he was shepherding her through the market and supplying her with clean clothes. Fatigue had a way of dulling the intellect, she supposed, but also she had simply accepted his companionship as right and natural. All those weeks of letters had tricked her into a familiarity that was purely imaginary. “You wouldn’t be here unless you wanted to be,” she said, realizing the truth of her words as soon as she spoke them.

“How unobliging of you. I was hungering for a new experience and I’d never been kidnapped before,” Rob said, shrugging out of his coat and flinging it onto the back of a chair. “Or perhaps I can’t get enough of your company.”

“You are a tedious flirt.” She spotted a folding screen propped in a corner and set it up so that it would shield her from view. The previous night, she had stripped naked right in front of him and he hadn’t paid her the least bit of attention. She remembered him handing her a handkerchief without even looking up from his cards. She didn’t know if this was due to tact on his part or simply because he was so used to being confronted with nudity that it had ceased to be interesting.

She didn’t entirely like either explanation.

“May I have one of the new shirts?” she asked. “I plan to bathe.” He handed her one of the shirts without comment.