Pale Moon Rider by Marsha Canham Page B

claws.
    “You are referring, of course, to my meeting with Colonel Roth,” she said quietly. “No doubt you are curious to know what we discussed.”
    The silence stretched past half a minute, then a minute. She was suffocatingly aware of his intense scrutiny, and somewhere in the pit of her stomach, butterflies were starting to beat their wings and fly in panicked circles.
    “Do go on, mam’selle,” Tyrone invited quietly. “You have my full attention.”
    She bit her lip nervously before she complied. “We discussed you, of course. He is quite obsessed with the idea of capturing you. In fact it—it was his idea that I meet with you tonight. Everything,” she admitted, “the robbery, everything was his idea in the beginning. He ordered me to ride out tonight, as he had on the three previous nights, with instructions for me to make contact, to appeal to your mercenary nature, or, if need be, your— your ’cavalier sense of self-indulgence’—those were his exact words—whichever I thought would be more likely to succeed in winning you over to my cause.”
    Renée saw the seemingly casual movement as he folded his arms across his chest and propped a shoulder against the wall. “Dare I ask which one you felt was more apropos?”
    “To be perfectly honest, m’sieur: neither. Almost everything I told y ou was the truth.”
    “Almost?”
    What she said next, the sound of the words themselves coming out of her mouth, was as strange and startling to her as if she were sitting at a distance, hearing someone else speak. The idea, the outrageous notion, had been there all along, lurking at the back of her mind, but to actually say the words, and to say them with such astonishing confidence …
    “What I did not tell you, m’sieur, was that although the colonel may think he is being clever and cunning using me this way, it is I who hope to be able to turn this trap he wishes to set for you … against him.”
    Again he said nothing through a long, throbbing pause, and somewhere out in the darkness a dog began to bay at the moon. It was a hollow and mournful howl laden with scorn for all of man’s more foolish machinations, prime among them being the thought that Renée d’Anton could place her fate, and very likely her life, in the hands of a thief, a murderer, a phantom of the mist.
     
    Tyrone Hart was not a man given to overt displays of emotion. He prided himself, for that matter, on his ability to show absolutely no reaction whatsoever, be it rage, contempt, hatred … or surprise. In this instance, however, he was grateful for the darkness, for he was certain his eyes had widened and his jaw had gone slack and his face had warmed a shade or two beyond ruddy.
    He had come to confront her about her meeting with Roth at the inn, but he had not expected her to admit it so casually, nor to neatly turn the tables by suggesting it was her intention all along to double-cross the colonel.
    If Dudley had been standing there to give him advice, Tyrone suspected it would be to climb out the window and ride away without looking back, and frankly, he could think of no logical reason not to do exactly that. It had not required a smack in the head with an iron pan to figure out the French minx had been part of some elaborate trap from the outset—for the two thousand pound reward if nothing else. Equally obvious to him was the likelihood that the jewels did not exist and that the coach she wanted him to stop would be carrying a swarm of eager Coventry Volunteers with their muskets primed and loaded.
    Just because the invitation had come wrapped in satin and moonlight did not mean the devil had not sent it.
    Devil indeed. He had not known what he had expected to discover hiding beneath the cloak and shadows, but a tangled waterfall of silvery curls had not been of the first order. Nor would he have foreseen legs as long as sin, skin as pale as moonlight, and everything displayed before him in a shape-molding wisp of silken