Escape with A Rogue by Sharon Page Page B

control—because she was doing it to free him—she’d failed. Why did her head have to feel like it was full of fog now ?
    “All those questions you must have asked drew attention to you,” Jack said softly. “There’s Tom Delve and now the carriage driver. Lady M., even though you paid them, you’ve put yourself in their power.”
    She recoiled. “By betraying me, the driver loses a fortune.”
    “Three pounds was enough to get him drunk. And now he has a carriage to sell, taken from a woman not likely to raise the alarm.”
     “What a stupid fool—to be content with just enough for a night’s drinking!”
    “Three pounds buys him a lot more than that.”
    His pointed comments had to be a sign that anger toward her was still simmering inside him. Jack has always seemed so happy in the stables. He’d told her he loved the freedom of his life—the horses, the sedate routine of his life, the beauty of the estate that sprawled around him. She’d been responsible for caging him up.
    He’d let her kiss him, then had pushed her away.
    Did he hate her? She could look at his face, but she just couldn’t tell . . .
    Her arm still hurt from the pistol shot. She was still trembling from it. “That wicked wretch of a driver.”
    She felt her spine crumbling and she strode in a circle rather than let her body wobble. Fog seemed to spin around them, mocking her. They could not walk on the road and the moor was a treacherous hell when blanketed by fog. There’s no escape, except death. She stopped. “Dear God. What are we to do?”
    Strong arms went around her. “Come. You need this.”
    Jack held her against him. With the white mist surrounding them, Jack’s face became her world. In the middle of scratchy, dark stubble, his beautiful pink-bronze lips parted. All she had to do was tip up her lips and be swept into hot pleasure again.
    Their kiss before had been . . .
    His mouth had tasted like . . .
    Oh heavens, his mouth had tasted like sin. If Adam had been the one to tempt Eve to fall, he wouldn’t have needed fruit. All he would have needed was a mouth as delicious and earthy and smoky as Jack’s.
    But she sensed his tension. His muscled arms were stiff against her, his body rigid. As though he was holding her when he didn’t want to.
    Of course he didn’t—
    His mouth slanted over hers unexpectedly. She shut her eyes and tried to fall willingly into another heated kiss.
    This time in her head, she heard the explosion of her pistol again. Felt the sudden, expected shock to her arm, and knew again that horrible moment of fear and regret when she’d realized she’d sighted down a barrel, and shot at another human being.
    Thank heaven her shaking had made the shot go wide. And thank God, all the angels, and every saint, that Jack’s assailant had turned and run rather than force her to draw out one of her lethal blades.
    My God, she could have killed him.
    We are on the wrong side of this.
    She’d been a hair’s breadth away from being a murderess . The horror of it was like a bog—it sucked her down so suddenly she almost fell. She pulled away from Jack’s mouth. “ Don’t. Don’t kiss me again. Don’t reward me for almost killing a man.”
    Jack clasped her chin and he held her firm, so she could do nothing but meet green eyes—eyes glowing with inner fire.
    “He would have shot me—or you, I fear—without hesitation,” Jack said. “You have nothing to blame yourself for. A man who lives a violent life asks for what he gets.”
    The cold way he spoke brought panic in a surge. And, inexplicably, anger. “I thought I could do this without breaking a law. What is the point of getting you out, if we commit worse crimes trying to prove you innocent?”
    Her voice had risen desperately at the end. It sounded alien, even to her.
    “For God’s sake, woman,” he growled, and she could almost taste the frustration exuding from him. “I’ve been trying to tell you this all along. This isn’t the