Kasey Michaels - The Return of the Prodigal

“Trust me, Rian Becket,” Lisette said, uncorking the bottle, holding it in front of him. “You’ve just to tell me where we are going. I will get you safely home.”

He reached for the bottle with his shaking hand, silently cursed himself for being weak, and took a deep swallow.

WITH THE THANKFULLY once again compliant Rian settled in his bed and sleeping soundly, Lisette wrapped her cloak more firmly about her and walked across the cleared area around the small country inn, heading for the cover of the trees. She didn’t look left or right, but only kept up her measured pace, her heart beating quickly as she rehearsed what she would say.

If the men were here, if the increasingly difficult to manage Rian Becket had not succeeded in losing them.

“ Mam’selle? Mam’selle Beatty? ”

She glanced behind her, to make sure no one could see her from the inn windows, and then stepped to her right, deeper into the stand of trees.

“I feared you may have lost us,” she said, looking at the three men in her papa ’s employ.

“We do not become lost so easily. But it was to be Petit Rume, mam ’ selle ,” Thibaud, the tallest of the three, said. Scolded.

Lisette looked at him levelly as she lied. She was, alas, becoming a very accomplished liar. If she wasn’t already well on the path to Hell for sleeping with Rian Becket without benefit of vows, she would say an extra rosary for this new sin. “The Englisher changed the route,” she told Thibaud. “He takes us to Calais, where he says he has friends.”

“Christ’s teeth! Friends? Our man is in Calais? It was thought the coast of England, for certain. This makes things easier for us. I have no taste for the Channel in an October storm.”

“You stupid man. How easy to cross from Calais to the English coast! Dover, this place called Folkestone—so many more. Praise God the nuns forced geography on me, yes? If I am to be followed by fools.”

“Fools, is it?” The man took a step forward, his hands drawn up into fists. “I have followed the man since before he spilled his seed into your mother. But women are good for that one thing only. If you were not your father’s daughter…”

“But I am, and he would tie your guts in a bow around your filthy neck if any harm were to come to me,” Lisette reminded him, her chin high even as her insides quaked in fear. “You’d be wise to remember that. Wiser still to get yourselves to Calais ahead of us, rather than to continue to follow, and perhaps be seen.”

“You keep him drugged with Loringa’s potions. He looks nowhere other than beneath the skirts you lift for him so he can poke you like some cheap whore.”

Before she could consider the consequences, Lisette slapped the man, hard, across the face. “You are a dead man speaking to me, Thibaud.”

Thibaud grabbed her wrist and squeezed, hard, as he brought his face, and his foul breath, to an inch away from her nose. “I would be so much better, you know. With two hands to stroke you, to tease you until you cry out in your great pleasure. Listen! I can already hear you. Thibaud, Thibaud, my magnificent prince! ”

The two men behind Thibaud laughed as Lisette struggled wildly to be free of him.

At last he let her go, pushing her to the ground, where she remained, struggling to breathe. Was it monsters like this that Geoffrey Baskin had handed her poor mother over to that day?

Thibaud stood over her, his huge fists jammed into his hips, his smile gone. “We do what we do, mam’selle whore. We do what your papa has ordered, and take no orders from women. A woman once cost us much, didn’t she, my good friends, and that will not happen again.”

The other two men mumbled their agreement as Lisette finally dared to get to her feet, careful now to keep her distance.

“My…my maman? That’s who you mean, don’t you? Because Geoffrey Baskin coveted her?”

Again, Thibaud laughed, the roar of that raucous laughter causing more than a few of the slumbering birds above them to stir, fly away. “Is that the story he tells? Ha! Then, yes, that’s how it was. Yes, little whore, the gospel according to your so holy papa .”

Before Lisette could react, Thibaud had hold of her wrist again, painful now from how tightly he had held it the first time. But she was so angry; she didn’t care about the pain. “Don’t you dare mock my father and his love of my mother!”

“I mock nothing. But I don’t die twice for the same mistake.” Thibaud leered down at her. “Bah! I am too old for this! The past is gone. Is it not enough to be fat and happy now, my friends, to die in our beds, with two pretty young trollops tucked in beside us? But enough! Go! We will follow as we were ordered. God curse us for it, we always follow.”

Lisette wanted to stay, insist Thibaud explain his words, but she had already said too much, perhaps heard too much. Enough to reinforce her growing misgivings about what she had already been told this past year since her papa had taken her from the convent, enough to cause her nervous concern over what she had already done.

Because, somewhere between the plan and the execution, Lisette had decided that she would do this her own way, send Thibaud to Calais, and proceed to Ostend with Rian Becket, without these three men dogging her steps.

But none of it because she had begun to question her papa . No, most certainly not!

And, please God, not because, as she was sure the lout, Thibaud, would declare, she was a stupid woman who had begun to care too much for the sad and injured and so beautiful Rian Becket.

CHAPTER FIVE

RIAN WOKE SLOWLY at first, and then all at once, as he realized he was somehow lying in a bed, not riding in that damned, badly sprung coach. He sat up, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, the fading light of the small, dying fire in the grate slowly separating that darkness into light and shadow.

How had he gotten here? The obvious answer was that he’d been carried, like some sleeping infant.

“That settles the thing,” he muttered, squeezing hard at the bridge of his nose. “No more laudanum. My head feels like I spent the night living in a bottle.”

He climbed out of the bed, but not before realizing that Lisette was not sleeping beside him. Where, exactly, were they, he wondered. Where were his clothes? More importantly, where was Lisette?

“Lisette?”

“Here, Rian Becket, at the window,” he heard her say, and he turned toward the sound, barely able to make out the heavy draperies that were closed tight.

“Hiding?” he asked, pulling back one side of the drape, to see her fully dressed in her plain gray gown, and perched on the window seat, her knees drawn up to her chin. “Or did my inconsiderate snores chase you?”

She had her arms wrapped about her legs, her chin on her knees, and was looking out into the darkness rather than at him. “I thought someone should stand watch,” she told him, at last unbending herself and lowering her bare feet to the floor. “The Comte ’s men could still find us, for all your clever maneuverings. Which, by the way, have maneuvered us into this sorry inn and to its damp sheets. And the mutton at dinner was tough and stringy.”

“Then I’m happy I missed it, even though I’m starving. A thousand apologies, your grace. I had no idea you were more accustomed to luxury.”

“You mock me,” she said, brushing past him, having gathered up her half boots from the window seat.

Her mud-crusted half boots. Not the dried mud he would expect from their walk to the stable yard, but mud still fresh, wet. He could smell it.

He took the half boots from her hand. “You’ve been out walking?”