The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)(62)

By now he was incoherent with want, his cock painful, his mind frantic.

“You can do as you please,” she said lazily, and he tore open his breeches with a desperation that would surely mortify him when he thought back on it. When he got a hand around himself, he groaned. She regarded him, curious and a little hungry, watching his fist move as if studying how he pleasured himself. The idea of her touching him instead, as she had the last time, made him need to squeeze the base of his erection to hold off his climax.

“Stop,” she whispered, and he groaned as he complied. “I think you ought to kiss me while you do that.”

He opened his mouth to argue that such a thing would result in his promptly coming all over her, then realized this was probably what he wanted more than anything else in the world at that moment, so he braced himself on one forearm and kissed her. His erection slid against her sweat-slick belly and he had to bury his face in her hair to muffle the sound he made.

“Can you . . . will that work for you?” she asked.

He nearly laughed. “Darling, a swift breeze would bring me off right now,” he said into the soft skin where her neck and shoulder met.

“Prove it,” she said, her hand on the small of his back, urging him on.

And so he did as he was told, thrusting into the warm space between their bodies, feeling her lips on his throat and one hand splayed at the base of his spine, the other tangled in his hair.

Afterward, he collapsed half on top of her, trying to catch his breath.

“Get off me, you oaf,” she said, pushing at his shoulder. But when he rolled to his side and looked at her, she had a smile playing over her lips.

He found a cloth so they could clean themselves off, then got back into bed beside her, pulling the covers up to their chests.

“What’s this one?” Marian asked, skimming her fingers over his shoulder, her touch disappearing as she reached a scar. “It’s larger than the rest.”

“Pistol shot. And it’s not the largest. That would be the scar on the back of my calf from a dog bite.” He slid the covers down, exposing his flank. “This is just a knife wound, but it festered and . . .” He trailed off, noticing that her face had gone pale and her body stiff. “Ah, yes. It’s all a tad gruesome.” He covered himself up, feeling like he ought to have known better than to take Marian on a tour of his grisliest injuries. “I apologize.”

“No, you daft clod. It’s not gruesome. Nothing about you is gruesome. I simply hadn’t realized that you had been shot in the chest.”

“It’s really more my shoulder than my chest, and I was assured by the surgeon that it was as good a place as any to be shot. It looks much worse than it was.”

She trailed her fingers down from his shoulder and across toward the center of his chest. “That’s where I shot the duke,” she said.

Rob took her hand and held it in place. He didn’t know whether she was distressed by the memory of what she had done, or by the fact that if she had been a few inches off the duke could have walked away.

Her eyes were dark and hard. “Somebody could have killed you,” she said. “I find that idea completely incompatible with my happiness.”

Oh. He kissed her knuckles, because there was nothing he could trust himself to say.

“They weren’t the first to try. But I’ve been lucky.”

Marian—there was no other word for it—growled. Then she appeared to come to a decision. “What’s this one?” She placed a finger over his left eyebrow.

“Fell out of a tree and hit a branch on the way down.”

“And this one?” This time she tucked a strand of hair behind his ear and touched his temple.

“That’s one of about six I got jumping out a window. A miracle I didn’t break a bone.”

“You jumped out a—”

“You, madam, are in no position to judge my means of exiting buildings. Nor, frankly, are you in a position to judge any of my riskier ventures. Capering around town past midnight on your own. It gives me gooseflesh just to think of.”

“Poor Rob,” she teased, and then yawned.

“Go to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.” He dressed silently before slipping out and returning to his own cold room.





Chapter 29




Marian had never been particularly fond of carriage travel. At best, it meant being cooped up in a small space with no means of escape and no useful means of occupying one’s time. In the winter, when traveling over heavily rutted roads, it also meant being jostled about to a bone-rattling degree.

But it was amazing how quickly a few hours passed, even in a bouncing carriage, with someone whose conversation one enjoyed. She and Rob already knew the basic outlines of one another’s lives, and now all that was left was to shade in the detail. Marian had never imagined that this process could be anything but tedious.

“Now, her father was the best fence in all of London,” Rob was saying, “and he did all his business with this scrap of a child by his side. Betty was eleven, maybe twelve, when Kit and I first met her.”

“And you must have been all of seventeen.”

“Yes, exactly. I was a man of the world. I could not believe I had to do business with a little girl.”

“The indignity.”