The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)(23)

For a moment she was certain that Rob was about to give the men a stern talking to. She suppressed a groan. Surely he ought to know by now that this would only make things worse for the woman they were bothering. Indeed, Mrs. Denny was eying Rob with a weary trepidation. She likely knew how to handle herself, it being her bread and butter to cope with men who were in their cups.

But Rob didn’t speak to the men at all. Instead he walked between Mrs. Denny and the table of rude men and then tripped over his own feet.

“A thousand pardons,” he said, all affability. Attempting to recover his balance, he somehow hooked one of his boots around the leg of a chair and sent the man who had been occupying it tumbling to the floor. When he reached out a hand to help the fallen man to his feet, he elbowed another man in the eye.

If she hadn’t seen how Rob usually moved, with a lazy grace and unconscious ease, she might have thought he was simply being clumsy. She narrowed her eyes. What followed was a flurry of apologies and back pats. Any bystander might have been under the impression that these men were Rob’s newest friends.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mrs. Denny disappear and return a moment later with a man who appeared to be the innkeeper. Rob, it seemed, had seen the same thing because he extricated himself from the tangle of limbs at the gentlemen’s table, this time doing no more damage than letting his forearm collide with one of the men’s noses, and returned to Marian.

“Time to leave?” she murmured, already getting to her feet.

He retrieved his purse from his pocket, dropped a frankly egregious quantity of coins onto the table, and headed for the door.

“Not a word,” he said to her when they stepped into the cold, bright winter day.

She remained silent until they were saddled and well along the path leading out of the village.

“I’ve narrowed it down,” she said. “Either you put poison into their drinks—”

“And you’d know about that.”

“Low-lying fruit, Rob. If not poison, which I doubt because that would look very bad for Mrs. Denny’s kitchen, then you picked their pockets, and in broad daylight, too.” She sighed and frowned at him. “They’ll figure out later on what happened.”

“They’d better. But by then we’ll be well on our way.”

“You’ll find yourself in a world of trouble on your way back to London.”

“I’ll take different roads.”

“I hope you got enough to make the risk worthwhile.”

“I hardly counted it,” Rob said. “There wasn’t time.”

“Count it now.”

“Mercenary,” he murmured, but he dug into his pockets and began sifting through an assortment of coinage. “One pound, eight shillings, thruppence.”

She tried not to look impressed. “You ought to deduct the four shillings you left your Mrs. Denny.”

“It seemed only fair to share with her.”

“Indeed,” she sniffed. “You defended her honor very ably. She’s lucky to have such a champion.” That made him laugh, for some reason. She ignored him. “She would have been perfectly willing to flirt with you without your having made such a spectacle.”

“Marian,” he said, a horrible knowing quality to his voice, “are you jealous?”

“Ha! What on earth could I be jealous of? I don’t want you to flirt with me.”

“I flirt with you incessantly.”

“You flirt with old ladies and inanimate objects.”

He laughed again, and she made the mistake of looking at him. He needed to put that smile away before he did some mischief with it. She had to change the subject immediately. “You’re surprisingly good at stealing things. I usually imagine pickpockets as small children, but you’re . . .” She realized she had no dignified way of ending that sentence. “Large.”

“So we’ve moved on to personal remarks, have we?” he murmured in a tone that was indeed flirtatious, and in order to avoid seeing what his face was doing, she turned her head as if to admire the brown and scraggy winter fields. “I was little and scrawny when I started, and simply kept my hand in the game since then.”

“But you’re educated. You’re literate.”

“Are you under the impression that all people who turn to crime are illiterate? Because if so, I’ll be sure to send for a looking glass at tonight’s inn.”

“No,” she said patiently, gritting her teeth, “I’m wondering when you had time to pick pockets if you were in school.”

“My adoptive parents sent me to school, but then they died, and then Kit’s family died, and neither of us were terribly pleased about it, so we decided to steal things from rich people. Or, really, I decided that. Kit was all set to burn down Cheveril Castle with the duke still inside, but I convinced him that I’d starve and die a miserable death if he were hanged for arson.”

It sounded like there were a thousand stories buried between those glib lines. There was loyalty and grief and a long friendship, and she wished she knew more about all of it. She found that she wanted to hear all the stories that Rob had to tell. “So you became highwaymen as a safer alternative?”

“It seemed a better use of our talents. It made perfect sense when I was fifteen.”