Kasey Michaels - Much Ado About Rogues

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.

“Maman?” he inquired, his huge green eyes wide in his cherubic face. His curls were thick and black as night, his cheeks flushed from the excitement of his escape from his nurse. And then his face lit in a smile and he was off again, his sturdy legs taking him past Jack. “Maman!”

Jack turned to see Tess drop to her knees on the carpet as the boy ran into her open arms. She held the child tightly against her, her hand cradling the back of his head against her as she looked up at Jack, her eyes pleading with him for—God, who knew what she was thinking?

“Jack,” she began, his name a plea for understanding, he supposed. He didn’t wait around to find out. With one last disbelieving look at the child, he whirled about and bounded down the stairs, through the foyer, all but wresting the door from its hinges and leaving it swinging open as he blindly made his way down to the gravel drive.

He didn’t know where he was going. Just away. He had to get away. Where she couldn’t follow, where she couldn’t find him, couldn’t see what she’d done to him.

His son . He had a son. Goddamn her—he had a son!

TESS RUSHED THROUGH her toilette as Jacques chattered and danced about the bedchamber all unawares. Emilie stood by wringing her hands, blaming herself for turning her back on the boy when he was so determined to visit his Maman’ s bedchamber as he was accustomed to doing each morning.

The appearance of the tall man hadn’t made any impression on the child, except to remind him to ask Tess yet again for the whereabouts of his beloved grand-père .

Grand-père . Jacques was the light of her father’s life, and had been since the day he’d been born. The man who had mostly ignored his own motherless children while they were in the nursery was now this stranger who would stand at Jacques’s bedside, watching him sleep. His smiles were all for Jacques, and he’d bring him treats, bounce him on his knee and tell him silly stories when he thought no one else could hear.

It was Jacques who felt the hugs, received the kisses. Jacques who could so easily slip his hand into his grandfather’s and go on adventures in the gardens. Jacques who had somehow, at last, been more important than things .

Jack had been right, and he’d been wrong. Jacques was to be the keeper of her father’s legacy, the one he wished to guard, the one who must remember him with love, mourn him. He would live or die the hero, as the man who had at last put a stop to the Gypsy. Not for René, not for her, but for Jacques. And for himself… with Sinjon Fonteneau, there was always a hook.

“It’s all right, Emilie,” Tess assured the woman yet again, even as she struggled to do up the front-closing buttons of her morning gown with trembling fingers. “And probably for the best. We were wrong to hide Jacques from him. We’ve been wrong about too many things, and for far too long.”

The nurse only sniffled into her handkerchief.

“Come along, my love,” Tess said then, holding out her hand to her son. “Running is for outside, in the sunshine.”

“Jacques’s ball?” the boy asked eagerly as they made their way downstairs, bravely jumping down the last two steps and turning for the kitchens and the box near the door to the gardens, the one holding his prized striped ball.