Much Ado About Rogues

She and René had always thought they weren’t worthy, weren’t good enough, had not been smart or clever or, yes, lovable enough. That somehow they had failed their wonderfully heroic father, had been a source of grave disappointment to him. But that hadn’t been it at all.

Things. People meant nothing to him. They were only the tools he needed to get him things. Her mother may have been the exception, but even she hadn’t been able to divert him from his first love, his true delight. Things, locked up underground in a cold stone room. Things, the hunt for them, the taking of them, the knowledge that now they were his, seen only by him, touched only by him.

She and her brother had thought their father a hero, dedicated to the service of his adopted country, doing his best to help rid France of the hated Bonaparte and set the monarchy back on the throne. They’d wanted only to help him, make him proud of them.

While he’d seen them as two more tools. Inferior tools at that.

And for this man, this unnatural man, she had turned her back on her one true chance of happiness? She’d cut Jack out of her life so effectively that even if he still believed he loved her, he could never forgive what she’d done.

What she’d done because the Marquis de Fontaine had told her it would be best for everyone if Jack never knew. That had been his punishment.

Now it was hers.

“Tess?”

She was sitting on the hearth rug, staring into the dying fire, and didn’t turn her head at the sound of his voice.

“I’m all right, Jack,” she said quietly.

He sat down beside her, wrapped his arms around his bent knees. Was that to keep himself from touching her? Could he still want her, after all he’d told her? “It’s all right if you aren’t, you know. None of what you’ve heard tonight could have been easy to hear. If there had been another way…”

“No, I’m glad you told me. I only wish I’d known years ago, when René was alive. We could have gone, left him to his collection. After all, we were never really necessary to him, were we? And our mother? Do you think she knew, Jack? Did she die knowing how unimportant she’d been to his happiness?”

“He may have lived long enough now to regret how he’s lived his life. All he’s lost. I know you’ve already considered this. Sinjon trained the man in the skills he then eventually employed to kill René. An old man, no longer seen as being useful to anyone, put out to pasture as it were, while the evil he spawned thrives? A man like that has a lot of time to think, to look back across the years, and try to make at least one thing right.”

“You think he’s somehow repented or some such ridiculousness? You want me to forgive him, is that it? You think I’m that generous?” Tess asked, still looking into the fire. “I can’t do that.”

“No, I suppose you can’t, at least not just yet. Sinjon has to know that, too. But you’re his legacy, Tess, all he has left. Everyone else is gone. Those things he spent his life collecting mean nothing compared to a child’s love, how he’ll be remembered when he’s dead.”

Tess turned to look at him at last, knowing something Jack didn’t know. “Do you really believe that? That he cares how—how I remember him?”

“The closer to death, the more a person realizes the need to be remembered, even mourned. He’d have to know that once I’d heard of his death that room downstairs would have to be emptied, his collection returned to the rightful owners, or at least turned over to the Crown. I lied to you this afternoon. There’s only one way into the cellar rooms. You were going to know the truth about him one day, one way or another. And one thing more, Tess. Sinjon has unfinished business.”

“The Gypsy,” she said her hands tightening into white-knuckled fists.

“Have you read Frankenstein, Tess?” When she shook her head he explained. “You should, it’s quite the talk of London right now, nearly the equal to the attention Byron received for his Don Juan.”

“Jack, I don’t see what a book has to do with—”

He held up his hand. “No, let me finish. Frankenstein is rather a cautionary tale. In attempting to create perfection, Dr. Frankenstein instead managed to breathe life into a monster. The Gypsy is your father’s creation and, right now, his legacy. I think he’s decided it’s his duty to destroy the monster. No, let me correct that. He plans to lead me to the Gypsy, so I can destroy the monster for him while he watches. While you watch.”

A single tear escaped Tess’s eyes. “Everything he does has a hook in it somewhere, doesn’t it?”

She leaned her head against his shoulder. He put his arm around her. It felt like coming home. The feeling wouldn’t last. It couldn’t. There were things that could be explained, forgiven. What she’d done to Jack wasn’t one of them. She’d chosen her father over him, believed her father’s version of what had happened that night in Whitechapel rather than his, sent him away even before he could offer his own version of that last night. Yet, if only that had been the end of it there might still be a way to mend what she’d broken. But there had been more, so much more. Impossible to forgive.

“I want you, Tess,” Jack said quietly. “I know we can’t have what we had before—what we thought we had before. But what we did have was good while we had it, wasn’t it? I can help you make the world go away, at least for tonight. I know what you need, because I need it, too.”

Release. He was offering her release. That was all, no more than that. Anything else they’d thought they’d had never really existed. If it had been real, the past four years wouldn’t have been spent apart.

He stood up, reached down his hand to her. Dare she take what he offered? If her life had been empty before, how could she bear it when he left again? But it wasn’t forever that he was offering her. Only tonight. Was one night not nearly enough… or too much?

She hesitated.

He was Black Jack Blackthorn. A proud, complex man. He wouldn’t offer twice.

She looked up into his dark, handsome face and put her hand in his.

SHE WASN’T AS he remembered her. He’d initiated a girl four years ago, but a woman filled his arms tonight. Her body still slim, but more lush, the sweep of her hips somehow more welcoming. Her breasts heavier, even her nipples not those of a girl, but a more dusky pink than he remembered, and even more receptive to his touch, quick to pucker, to stiffen with her desire.

He took her first with his hand, pushing into her as she ground against him, calling out her pleasure as he found her center and exploited it with his stroking, pinching fingers. He bent over her, urging her on, watching her face as the tension rapidly built to a fever pitch, drawing her body taut as a bowstring before the pleasure washed over her, wave after wave, until there was nothing but sweet, boneless release.

Only then did he kiss her, only then did she wrap her arms around him, returning his kiss, burrowing into him, skin to skin, heartbeat to heartbeat. Only then did he dare to love her as he wanted; slowly, with infinite care, learning her again even though he’d never truly forgotten.

There had been other women since her. Four years was a long time, and he’d had needs. But that’s all they had been. Never Tess, never what he’d found with Tess. Never this need to know, this never-ending journey of discovery that made each time feel like the first time. Her soft sighs. Her low cries of pleasure. The way she touched him, knew him, stirred him. How his heart could feel close to bursting when he knew he’d pleased her, how his pleasure intensified because he had pleasured her. The way she breathed his name just as he took her over the top… took him with her.

He kissed every soft, fragrant inch of her, soothing her, rousing her, taking her mind away from everything but the pleasure he was giving her, taking from her. Long strokes along her rib cage, trailing over the flare of her hips. Dipping between her thighs, raising her up to him, opening her, capturing her essence.

Only then did he move to cover her, bracing his upper body on his arms, watching her face as he slowly sank inside her. She slid her arms and legs up and around his back and held on tight, her chest rising and falling rapidly as she looked up at him, her eyes gone dark in just the way he remembered. Now, those eyes signaled to him. Yours, Jack. All yours. Take me now. Take everything I have as you give me all you have. Now.

He knew her rhythms, as she knew his. He knew that everything else had served to build to the next few moments, this most intimate melding of mind and body.

He began to move. Watching her, as she watched him. While inside his head, a part of him was chanting I love you, I love you, I love, love, love…

She slept in his arms as he watched the dawn beyond the windowpanes, reliving the past few hours. His silent words haunting him, keeping him from sleep.

He’d thought it was love all those years ago, believed it was love. Her smile, the way she had of biting on her full bottom lip when pondering a problem, her scent, which had never failed to move him. The way just thinking about her had made the world around him seem new and clean and hopeful. The way she looked at him, which made him believe he was a better man.

Their months together had been the best of times.

He hadn’t known anything was missing, that they’d lacked some certain elemental piece that would hold them together in the worst of times.

Jack had been alone all of his life, even as a child, never feeling that he belonged, that he fit anywhere. The bastard, yet somehow more the bastard than his brothers, different from his brothers. But he’d never known what it meant to be really alone until Tess was lost to him.

Now she was in his arms again, and he would have savored the completeness of it if not for the realization that the feeling could only be fleeting, that the dawn had come, the glory of the night was over and nothing had really changed. Nothing could change until and unless Sinjon was found, until and unless Tess found some sort of needed peace in her feelings about her father.

As his mother’s bastard son, Jack could understand that need for understanding better than Tess could know. But now was not the time to travel that well-worn ground again. His mother was a complex woman, in her way perhaps even more complex than Sinjon, and her motives doubly obscure. Like Tess, all he could do was learn to live the life he’d been given, play the cards he’d been dealt.

Careful not to wake her, Jack slipped from the tester bed and pulled on his clothing, his shirttail untucked, carrying his shoes with him as he slipped out of the room, his mind already engaged in the next step—his and Tess’s removal to London.

With any luck, Will and Dickie had picked up the man’s trail, making the mission easier. But Jack didn’t put much faith in luck.

Leaning against the wall, he pulled on his shoes, deciding he’d first visit Sinjon’s secret room. The man had taken much with him, but there was still much Jack might find useful.

The sounds of delighted laughter and running footsteps had him turning around in time to see the small, dark-haired child emerge on the second-floor landing just ahead of Emilie, the old woman’s face flushed from the exertion of racing down the narrow stairs.

“Jacques! Vous coquin, reviens ici! Jacques, viens à moi cet instant. Jacques—Oh, Jésus, Mary et Joseph, c’est toi!”

The boy stopped in his headlong flight to look up at the tall man standing in the middle of the hallway, blocking his way.