The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)(19)

With enormous relief, she stripped out of her dirty clothes. When they reached Little Hinton, she would burn it all. The water in the ewer was lukewarm, which was at least better than ice cold, and she set about using the flannel to scrub her face.

“Do you want soap?” Rob asked. He was on the other side of the screen, but less than an arm’s length away.

She did want soap. Badly. “Yes,” she said, adding a grudging “please.” She stuck her hand out from behind the screen and he dropped the cake of soap into it.

It was not very nice soap, smelling faintly of lye and crumbling as she tried to use it. As she washed, she heard movement on the other side of the screen. The thud of one boot hitting the floor, then the other. The rustling of fabric, the slide of leather over skin. Rob was undressing—of course he was; they were both planning to sleep. She tried not to think about it. She was getting very good at not thinking about things, but she was going to have to get even better if she meant to spend another two days in Rob’s company.

After she dried herself on the sheet of linen that hung beside the washstand, she pulled the shirt over her head. It hung past her hips, of course, but without a waistcoat it gaped in the front. She tried not to think about that, too.

Rob was already in bed, decently covered by the sheet and, thank heavens, wearing a shirt. He was on his stomach, with his arms pillowed under his head, facing the wall. She drew the curtains, casting the room into near darkness, then climbed into bed.





Chapter 8




Rob had every intention of sleeping for as long as his body would let him, but his mind had other ideas.

Thus far, he had done a decent job of pushing away any less polite thoughts he might have about Marian, but as soon as he recalled that she was half naked next to him in bed, all hope was lost. He just wasn’t going to let himself think about Marian and nakedness in the same sentence, because while he was usually all for complicating things with that sort of thought and indeed that sort of action, he didn’t think matters could rightly get more complicated than they already were with Marian. Attempting to dally with someone who had shot their spouse the previous day, and who—whether they realized it or not—depended on him for a safe journey perhaps merited a stronger word than complicated.

So he lay in bed, trying sedulously not to think complicating thoughts, which went about as well as it ever did. It might have gone better if he hadn’t been so bad at sitting in cold, dark rooms. Cold, dark rooms that he wasn’t supposed to leave. The walls began to creep in on him and the windows seemed to grow bars. He started to think that maybe the door wouldn’t open if he tried the handle, and that maybe if he stood, he’d find manacles on his wrists and—

He leapt out of bed, his heart racing. For no reason, of course. He was free and safe and all the other things a person could wish to be. Completely free, and mildly insane, apparently. This was nothing new, though, even if it had got a bit more dramatic in the last year.

He slid into his clothes, dressing as quietly as he could. It was already dark, but there was noise coming from downstairs, which meant—if this inn were like other country inns—it wasn’t yet past ten. There would still be people in the taproom, and if he was lucky there would still be supper on offer.

Marian didn’t stir as Rob threw on his coat and made his way toward the door, nor when he stumbled over one of the boots she had strewn in the middle of the floor, nor even when he tripped over the other one and let loose a volley of hissed profanity. He paused with his hand on the door latch, looking at her over his shoulder. Her mouth was half open and she had one arm flung out to the side, dangling off the bed, and it was the least dignified he had seen her, which—considering that he had also seen her standing in her shift, covered in blood—was really saying something. She looked her age, which he knew was only twenty-two or so, not so much younger than himself. He could imagine that she really was the same person who had written him all those letters—arch, wry, and a little silly. He was reminded, inconveniently, of how much he liked her.

Well, he liked a lot of people. He’d probably find some more people to like downstairs, most of whom had neither married nor shot a single duke, nor embroiled Rob’s best friend in a scheme that could have killed him. And with that cheering thought, he shut the door firmly behind him and made his way down to the taproom, which was indeed filled with people. The place smelled of tobacco, woodsmoke, and hops, and it gleamed with firelight glinting off the pewter dishes that lined the walls. It was warm, comfortably loud, and cheerful. Rob felt about eighty percent happier just walking into the room.

He settled himself in front of the fire, where a pair of fat spaniels promptly approached him with their tails wagging, acting like nobody had ever fed them in their lives. He scratched them behind the ears, which always gave a man an innocent look. Nobody could possibly be up to much of anything when they were making a fuss over a dog.

Then he insinuated himself into the nearest conversation at hand, in which two women and a man discussed a blowfly infestation of plague-like proportions on one of the women’s sheep farms the previous summer. Rob had never raised a sheep in his life and only seldom came closer to one than as muttonchops or a new coat. But when the older of the two women turned to him for support of her policy of shearing the poor, afflicted sheep and then putting them in a separate paddock, he knew enough to agree. She was old, and likely wouldn’t have any sheep at all if she didn’t know how to keep them.