Escape with A Rogue Read Online Free Page A

Two
     
     
    “Her ladyship came back. The pretty one with the posh voice who offered to hide you under her skirts.”
    Beausoleil’s quiet words hit Jack cold—along with the memory of Lady M.’s nervous yet sultry voice advising him to slip beneath her skirts. The weight of the sledgehammer in his hands brought his arm swinging down. Lash welts on his back scraped against the coarseness of his shirt, and his muscles screamed as he tried to stop the misaimed stroke—
    “Jesus!” Beausoleil dropped the wedge and leapt back. “You almost smashed in my skull.”
    “Your own damned fault.” Jack let the iron head of the hammer thud against the slab of granite they were standing on. With the rest of work party of prisoners, he and Beausoleil were breaking up granite into rectangular blocks, using sledgehammers and chisels.
    “When did she come back?” he growled. “She wasn’t in the market this morning.”
    He’d wanted to feel relief when he hadn’t seen her. He’d wanted to believe he’d frightened her back into sense and she had gone away.
    Of course that would be entirely unlike the Lady Madeline he remembered. She had been an extremely stubborn and determined young lady. The kind of woman who took charge. The sort of managing female he had never liked—before he had met Lady M.
    Gusts of wind dropped into the quarry, whipping at the prisoners. Jack glanced up. Clouds massed along the ridge above—black clouds that stretched wide as though ready to gobble up the land. A storm must have flung itself up against North Hessary Tor. Rain spattered, cold on his sweaty face.
    Beau flexed his shoulders. “Every day, while you were in the Black Hole, she came.”
    Damn his soul for the flicker of delight that came with learning that.
    A soldier glanced over—Blenchley, the head guard he’d evaded on the day Lady M. had first come. Blenchley had been reprimanded for letting Jack get out of his hands. Pure hatred now flashed in the guard’s eyes.
    A long time ago, Jack would have answered the vicious glare with an act intended to prove his power. He would have crushed a man like Blenchley under his boot.
    Now he had no choice but to obediently heft his hammer to his shoulder. The guard was armed and he wasn’t. He couldn’t throw his life away. Not when he had Lady M. to protect. The problem was that he couldn’t protect her if he was in prison, but he refused to involve her in his escape.
    “Fetching thing, isn’t she?” Beau repositioned the iron wedge in the fissure the last pounding had made.
    Fetching? She’d haunted him for his ten-day stay in the dark of the Black Hole. He was tormented by the memory of delectable, pink lips that pursed and frowned and curved into smiles that could turn a grown man into a baying, lust-driven fool. He could still smell her perfume. She had touched it to her neck. All the time he had been warning her to walk away from him, he’d been breathing in her field-flower scent as though his life depended on it.
    Alone in the dark of the cachot , he’d had to shake his head at a woman who thought to dab herself with scent while plotting to break a worthless rogue out of gaol.
    But he could not push desire for her outof his head. It had been his constant companion, making his breathing ragged, his heart pound. It had sapped his strength and flooded his mind at a time when he needed to think. All his life, he’d been able to control sexual need—he’d seen what happened to men who were consumed by it. Yet Lady M. had shattered his control ever since the first moment he’d laid eyes on her.
    It had been two years ago, when he had left London to escape the Crown. Crown agents suspected him of funding traitors. It was not true—he had been set up by his former business partner, Stephen Bells. He had changed his name, walked away from his fortune, and found work as a groom at the country estate of Lady Madeline’s father. Jack had walked away from his wealth to punish