The Leopard Prince

“Eat them? Never!” He widened his eyes in an exaggeratedly horrified look that seemed to amuse her. That pleased him and he was puzzled. This silly conversation was like no other he could remember. Men took him dead seriously. Women were a little in awe of him. No one giggled at his words or attempted—

“Then what do you do with the eggs?” Her eyes were laughing up at him again.

He almost swore, he was so startled. Was Lady Georgina—an earl’s daughter for Christ’s sake—flirting with him?

He’d gone insane. “I’d take a pin and poke a tiny hole in each end of the egg and let it dry. I had a shelf next to my bed with a whole row of eggs, brown and white and clear blue. Blue as…” He trailed away. Blue as your eyes, he’d meant to say, but he remembered suddenly that this woman was his employer and he her servant. How could he forget that fact? Irritated with himself, he faced forward again.

She didn’t seem to notice his pause. “Do you have the eggs still? I’d like to see them.”

They’d rounded a bend in the road, and Harry saw that a tangle of branches blocked the way. A tree had fallen across the lane.

“Whoa!” He frowned. The lane was hardly wide enough for the gig as it was. It would be a devil’s job to turn the carriage around. What—?

Four men suddenly appeared from behind the tangled branches. They were big, they looked mean, and they each held a knife in their hand.

Shit.

Chapter Six

George screamed as Harry Pye made a heroic attempt to pull the horse around. The lane was too narrow, and the men were upon him in seconds. Mr. Pye kicked the first in the chest with a booted foot. The second and third overwhelmed and dragged him from the carriage. The fourth dealt him a horrendous blow to the jaw.

Oh, my sweet Lord! They were going to kill him. George felt a second scream clog her throat. The gig jolted as the horse half-reared. It was frightened and trying to run, stupid animal, even though it had nowhere to go. George frantically scrabbled for the reins on the floor of the gig, cursing under her breath and banging her head against the seat.

“Watch it! He’s got a knife!”

That wasn’t Mr. Pye’s voice. George chanced raising her head and saw to her relief that Harry Pye did indeed have a knife. He held a thin, gleaming blade in his left hand. Even from this distance it looked rather nasty. He was in a strangely graceful fighter’s crouch in the road, both hands in front of him. He appeared to know what he was doing, too. One of the villains was bleeding from his cheek. But the other three were circling, trying to flank him, and the odds didn’t look good.

The gig lurched again. She lost sight of the action as she fell and cracked her shoulder against the seat.

“Will you hold still, you silly beast?” she muttered.

The reins were sliding toward the front, and if she lost them, she’d never get control of the gig. Shouts and grunts came from the fighters, interspersed with the awful sound of fists hitting flesh. She daren’t risk looking up again. She held on to the seat with one hand to steady herself and strained with the other toward the slithering reins. Almost. Her fingertips grazed the leather, but the horse jolted, sending her back against the seat. She just kept her footing. If the horse would only hold still.

One.

More.

Second.

She dived and triumphantly came up with the reins. Quickly she sawed them, little minding the horse’s mouth, and tied them to the seat. She chanced a glance. Harry Pye was bleeding from his forehead. As she watched, an attacker lunged at him from his right. Mr. Pye whirled in a powerful move and kicked at the other man’s legs. A second thug clawed at his left arm. Mr. Pye twisted and performed some sort of maneuver, too fast for her to see. The man screamed and staggered back with a bloody hand. But the first man took advantage of the distraction. He hit Mr. Pye again and again in the middle. Harry Pye grunted with each blow, doubling over, valiantly trying to swing his knife.

George set the carriage brake.

The third and fourth men advanced. The first man punched Mr. Pye once more, and he fell to his knees, retching.

Mr. Pye was going to die.

Ohmygodohmygodohmygod! George scrambled under the seat and brought up a sackcloth-wrapped bundle. Shaking the cloth free, she clutched one of the dueling pistols in her right hand, raised it with a straight arm, aimed at the man standing over Mr. Pye, and fired.

Bang!

The explosion nearly deafened her. She squinted through the smoke and saw the man reel away, clutching his side. Got the bastard! She felt a thrill of bloodthirsty glee. The remaining men, including Harry Pye, had turned in her direction with varying degrees of shock and horror. She raised the second pistol and took aim at another man.

The man flinched and ducked. “Gorblimey! She’s got a pistol!”

Apparently the thought that she might be dangerous had never crossed their minds.

Harry Pye rose, pivoted silently, and slashed at the man nearest him.

“Jaysus!” the man screamed, holding a hand to his bloody face. “Let’s go, lads!” The thugs turned and dashed back the way they’d come.

The lane was suddenly quiet.

George heard the blood rushing in her veins. She carefully set the pistols down on the seat.

Mr. Pye still looked in the direction the men had disappeared. He seemed to decide that they were gone, for he lowered the hand holding the knife. Bending, he slipped it inside his boot. Then he turned to her. The blood from the wound on his forehead had mixed with sweat and smeared down the side of his face. Stray hairs from his queue stuck to the gore. He breathed deeply, his nostrils flaring as he tried to catch his breath.

George felt strange, almost angry.

He walked toward her, his boots scraping against the rocks in the road. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d brought pistols?” His voice was raspy and deep. It demanded apology, concession, even submission.

George didn’t feel like giving any.

“I—” she began firmly, strongly, even haughtily.

She didn’t have a chance to finish because he was in front of her. He grabbed her about the waist and yanked her from the carriage. She half-fell against him. She put her hands on his shoulders to keep from toppling over. He pulled her against him until her breasts were quite squashed into his chest, which, strangely, felt very nice. She lifted her head to ask him what, exactly, he thought he was about—

And he kissed her!

Luscious, firm lips that tasted of the wine they’d drunk at luncheon. They moved over hers in an insistent rhythm. She could feel the prickle of his stubble and his tongue, running over the crease of her lips until she opened them and then… Ohm. Someone was moaning, and it might very well be her because she had never, never, never been kissed like this before in her whole life. His tongue was actually inside her mouth, stroking and teasing hers. She was about to melt—maybe she already was melting, she felt absolutely drenched. And then he lured her tongue into his mouth and suckled it, and she lost all control and wrapped her arms about his neck and suckled him back.

The horse—stupid, stupid animal—chose that moment to whicker.

Mr. Pye jerked his head away. He glanced around. “I can’t believe I did that.”

“Nor I,” George said. She tried to pull his head back down so he would do it again.

But suddenly he picked her up and deposited her on the carriage seat. While she was still blinking, he crossed to the other side and jumped in.

Mr. Pye placed the still-loaded pistol in her lap. “It’s dangerous here. They may decide to come back.”

“Oh.”

All her life she’d been warned that men were slaves to their desires, that they held their impulses in barely controlled check. A woman—a lady—must be very, very careful of her actions so she did not put spark to the gunpowder that was a man’s libido. The consequences of a lady’s carelessness were never fully explained, but the hints were dire indeed. George sighed. How deflating now to find Harry Pye was the exception to the rule of male instability.

He maneuvered the gig around, alternately cursing and cajoling the horse. Finally he got it turned back the way they’d come and urged the gelding into a brisk trot. George watched him. His face was grimly set. There was no evidence of the passion with which he’d kissed her only moments ago.

Well, if he could be sophisticated, then so could she. “Do you think Lord Granville had those men attack us, Mr. Pye?”

“They attacked only me. So, yes, it could be Lord Granville. He’s the most likely.” He looked thoughtful. “But Thomas Granville rode up the lane only minutes before we did. He could’ve warned the toughs if they were in his pay.”

“You think he is in league with his father, despite his apology?”

Mr. Pye pulled a handkerchief out of an inside pocket and gently wiped her cheek with one hand. The handkerchief came away with blood on it. He must have rubbed his blood on her when they’d kissed. “I don’t know. But there’s one thing I’m sure of.”

George cleared her throat. “What is that, Mr. Pye?”

He tucked away his handkerchief. “You can call me Harry now.”

HARRY PUSHED OPEN THE DOOR to the Cock and Worm and was immediately smothered in smoke. West Dikey, the village closest to Woldsly Manor, was just large enough to boast two taverns. The first, the White Mare, was a half-timbered building with a few rooms and could be called an inn. Because of this, it offered meals and drew the more respectable business: passing travelers, local merchants, and even gentry.

The Cock and Worm was where everyone else went.

A series of dingy rooms with exposed beams that had caught more than one customer a nasty knock on the head, the Cock and Worm had windows permanently blackened from pipe smoke. A man could sit in peace here and not be recognized by his own brother.

Harry made his way through the crowd to the bar, passing a table of workmen and farmers. One of the men—a farmer named Mallow—looked up and nodded in greeting as he passed. Harry nodded back, surprised but pleased. Mallow had asked Harry for help back in June about an argument he was having over his neighbor’s cow. The cow kept escaping its enclosure and had twice trampled the lettuce in the Mallow’s kitchen garden. Harry had settled the difficulty by helping the elderly neighbor build a new wall for his cow. But Mallow was a taciturn man and had never thanked Harry for his trouble. Harry had assumed Mallow was ungrateful. Obviously, he’d been wrong.

The thought warmed him as he reached the bar. Janie was working tonight. She was sister to Dick Crumb, the owner of the Cock and Worm, and sometimes helped at the counter.

“Yeah?” she mumbled. Janie spoke to the air over his right shoulder. Her fingernails drummed an uneven beat on the counter.

“Pint of bitter.”

She set the ale down in front of him, and he slid a few coppers across the scarred counter.

“Dick in tonight?” Harry asked quietly.

Janie was close enough to hear, but her face was blank. She’d gone back to the drumming.

“Janie?”

“Aye.” She stared now at his left elbow.

“Is Dick in?”

She turned and walked into the back.

Harry sighed and found an empty table near a wall. With Janie it was hard to tell if she’d gone to tell Dick he was here, went to fetch more ale, or simply tired of his question. In any case, he could wait.

He’d gone stark, raving mad. Harry took a sip of his beer and wiped the foam from his mouth. It was the only explanation for kissing Lady Georgina this afternoon. He’d walked toward her, his head bleeding and his gut aching from the beating. He hadn’t been thinking of kissing her at all. Then somehow she was in his arms, and there was nothing in the world that was going to stop him from tasting her. Not the possibility of being attacked again. Not the pain in his limbs. Not even the fact that she was aristocracy, for pity’s sake, and all that meant to him and his ghosts.