To Taste Temptation (Legend of the Four Soldiers #1)(9)

He began to run. His footfalls were as quiet as the cat’s, but he kept to the edge of the dark shadows near the stables. He hated to be found out when he stole into the night. Perhaps that was why he didn’t bother with a valet.

He passed a doorway, and the stink of urine wafted into his nose, making him veer away. He’d never seen a city—a small town, really—until he’d been ten years old. Three and twenty years later, he could still recall the shock of the smell. The terrible stink of hundreds of people living too close together with no place to dispose of their piss and shit. As a boy, he’d nearly heaved when he’d realized that the trickle of brown water in the middle of the fine cobblestone street was an open sewer. One of the first lessons Pa had taught him as a lad was to hide his waste. Animals were canny. If they smelled the odor of people, they’d not venture near. No animals, no food. It had been as simple as that in the great forests of Pennsylvania.

But here, where people lived cheek by jowl and let their waste pile into corners, where the reek of man seemed to hang like a fog that had to be fought through, here in the city it was more complicated. There were still predators and prey, but their forms had warped, and sometimes it was impossible to tell the two apart. This city was far more dangerous than any frontier with wild animals and raiding Indians.

His feet carried him to the end of the mews and to an intersection. He dipped across the lane and continued running down the street. A young man was entering the gate of a town house—a servant returning from an assignation? Sam passed him not a foot away, and the man didn’t even turn. But Sam inhaled the smell of ale and pipe smoke as he ran by.

Lady Emeline smelled of lemon balm. He’d caught the scent again as he’d bent over her white hand this afternoon. It wasn’t right. Such a sophisticated woman should have worn patchouli or musk. He’d often found himself overwhelmed by the smell—the stink—of society ladies. Their perfumes hung about them like a fog until he’d wanted nothing more than to cover his nose and choke. But Lady Emeline wore lemon balm, the scent of his mother’s garden. That dichotomy intrigued him.

He loped across the entrance of an alley and jumped a foul puddle. Someone lurked here, either for shelter or in ambush, but Sam was past before the form had time to react. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the lurker peering after him. Sam grinned to himself and picked up his pace, his moccasins brushing soundlessly on cobblestones. This was the only time he almost liked the city—when the streets were deserted and a man could move without fear of bumping into another person. When there was space. He felt his leg muscles begin to warm with his exertion.

He’d deliberately chosen the rented house next to Lady Emeline when they’d come to London. He’d had a need to find out how Reynaud’s sister had fared. It was the least he could do for the officer he’d failed. When he’d discovered that the lady enjoyed introducing young girls into society, asking for her help with Rebecca had seemed like the natural thing to do. Of course, he hadn’t told her the real reason that he was interested in London society, but that hadn’t mattered to him. At least until he’d actually met the lady.

Because Lady Emeline wasn’t what he’d expected. Somehow, without realizing it, he must’ve imagined her to be tall like her brother and with an equally aristocratic air. The aristocratic air was indeed there, but he was hard-put not to smile when she attempted to look down her nose at him. She couldn’t be more than a couple of inches over five feet. Her shape was nicely rounded, the type that made a man want to cup her arse in his hands just to feel the feminine warmth. Her hair was black and her eyes just as dark. With her rosy cheeks and snappish voice, she might’ve been a saucy Irish maid, ripe for a flirtation.

Except she wasn’t.

Sam swore softly and halted. He braced his palms on his knees as he panted, trying to catch his breath. Lady Emeline might look like an Irish maid, but in her elegant clothes and with an accent that could cut ice, no one in his right mind would mistake her for one. Not even an unsophisticated backwoodsman from the frontiers of the New World. His money could buy a lot of things, but a woman from the highest tiers of the English aristocracy wasn’t one of them.

The moon was beginning to set. Time to go home. Sam looked around. Small shops lined the narrow street, their overhanging upper stories looming above. He’d never been in this part of London before, but that wouldn’t stop him from finding his way back. He started at a slow jog. The return journey was always the hardest, his initial freshness and energy blown away. Now his chest labored to draw breath, and his muscles began to ache at the continued exertion. Then, too, the areas where he’d been wounded made themselves known, throbbing as he ran. Remember, the scars groaned, remember where the tomahawk sawed your flesh, where the ball burrowed next to bone. Remember that you are forever marked, the survivor, the living, the one left to bear witness.

Sam ran on, despite aches and memories. This was the point that separated those who would continue from those who fell by the wayside. The trick was to acknowledge the pain. To embrace it. Pain kept you awake. Pain meant that you still lived.

He didn’t know how much longer he ran, but when he again ducked into the mews behind his rented house, the moon had set. He was so weary that he almost didn’t see the watcher in time. A man lurked, big and solid, beside the corner of the stables. It was a measure of Sam’s tiredness that he nearly ran by him. But he didn’t. He stopped and slid into the shadows of his neighbor’s stables. He peered at the watcher. The man was barrel-shaped and wore a scarlet coat and a battered tricorne, fraying gray about the edges. Sam had seen him before. Once today, across the street as he and Rebecca had left Lady Emeline’s house, and yesterday as Sam had entered his rented carriage. The shape and the way the man stood was the same. The man was following him.