Twice Tempted by a Rogue (Stud Club #2)(2)

Standing unnoticed in the shadowed doorway, Rhys shifted his weight. An echo of bloodlust whispered in his ear. As a younger man, he would have hurled himself into the thickest knot of violence, eager to claw and punch his way back out. Just to feel the surge of his racing pulse, the slice of broken glass scoring his flesh, the tang of blood in his mouth. The strange, fleeting sensation of being alive.

But he wasn’t that young man anymore. Thanks to the war, he’d had his fill of both fighting and pain. And he’d long given up on feeling alive.

After a minute or two, the peripheral scrabbling defused. Once again the two louts faced off, huffing for breath and clearly hungry for more. They chuckled as they circled one another, as though this were their typical Saturday night fun. It probably was. Wasn’t as though life on the moor offered a wealth of amusements other than drinking and brawling.

Now that he studied their faces, Rhys wondered if the two might be brothers. Or cousins, perhaps. The taller one had mashed features, while the shorter sported a beaky nose. But their eyes reflected the same empty shade of blue, and they wore identical expressions of willful stupidity.

The shorter one picked up a low stool and taunted his opponent with it, as if baiting a bull. The “bull” charged. He threw a wild punch over the stool, but his reach fell short by inches. To close the gap, Bull grabbed a brass candlestick from the mantel and whipped it through the air, sucking all sound from the room.

Whoosh.

Beak threw aside his stool, and it smashed to splinters against the hearth. With Bull’s attention momentarily diverted, Beak dove for a table still set for a meal. Half-empty dishes and bread crusts were strewn over white linen.

Rhys frowned. When had old Maddox started bothering with tablecloths?

He stopped wondering about it when Beak came up wielding a knife.

“I’ll teach you to raise a club to me, you whoreson,” he snarled.

Everyone in the room froze. Rhys ceased leaning against the doorjamb and stood erect, reconsidering his decision not to intervene. With a brass club and a knife involved, someone was likely to get seriously injured, or worse. As tired as he might be of fighting, he was even more weary of watching men die.

But before he could act, a series of sounds arrested him where he stood.

Crash. A bottle breaking.

Plink, plink, plink. Glass bits trickling to the floor.

Thud. Beak collapsing to the table unconscious, rivulets of wine streaming down around his ears.

“Harold Symmonds, you’ll pay for that wine.” A slender, dark-haired woman stood over Beak’s senseless form, clutching what remained of a green-glass bottle. “And the tablecloth too, you great lout.” She shook her head and tsked. “Blood and claret will never come out of white linen.

“And as for you, Laurence—” She wheeled on the second man, threatening him with the broken bottle’s sharp glass teeth. Though he was twice as big as the barmaid and a man besides, Laurence held up his hands in surrender.

In fact, every man in the room had gone still. As though they all feared the harsh discipline this tiny barmaid might dole out. Interesting. To a man like Rhys, who’d spent several years commanding soldiers, that snap to attention spoke volumes.

Jabbing the bottle at Laurence, the barmaid backed him up against the wall. “’Twas your own master who brought that, you know.”

“This?” He stared at the candlestick in his fist. “It’s Gideon’s?”

“No, it’s the inn’s.” She wrenched the brass club away from the stunned brute and curled her arm, lifting it to eye level. “But Gideon delivered it. Hauled it and its mate all the way up from Plymouth just last week. The set came very dear, and I’ll thank you to keep your grimy mitts off the bric-a-brac.”

The thing must have weighed a stone, but it cost her no effort to heft the candlestick up on the mantel with one hand and nudge it back into place.

“There,” she said to herself, apparently satisfied with the symmetry. Standing back, she threw the jagged remnants of the bottle into the fire, and a wine-fueled blaze surged in the hearth.

The reddish flare illuminated the woman’s face, and Rhys got his first good look at her.

Holy God. She was beautiful.

And young.

And … and beautiful.

Rhys had never been especially good with words. He couldn’t have described exactly what it was about this woman that made her appearance so striking. He just knew he’d been struck.

She had pale skin and dark hair coming loose from a thick plait. Her figure was slight, yet feminine. Her eyes were large and wide, but to discern their color he would’ve had to stand much closer to her.

He wanted to stand much closer to her.

Especially now that she was no longer armed.

Fury radiated from her slender form as she propped her hands on her hips and scolded the assembly. “It’s the same damned scene, again and again.” Her tone was sharp, but the voice beneath it was husky, warm. “In case you haven’t noticed, this inn is all we’ve got in Buckleigh-in-the-Moor. I’m trying to build a name for this place, make it a respectable establishment for travelers. Now tell me, how am I to make this inn fit for the Quality, what with you overgrown clods destroying my dining room once a fortnight?”

She swept an angry glare around the room, silently confronting each offender in turn. When her gaze collided with Rhys’s, he noted the first crack in her veneer of poise. Her eyelashes fluttered. That was the extent of her visible surprise. The rest of her remained granite-still as she said, “And all this in front of a guest.”