Perilous Pleasures by Jenny Brown Page A

out his own purse. He fumbled with it and pulled out a fistful of sovereigns. “Here,” he said gruffly. “To pay for his funeral.”
    The woman examined the gold pieces, looking stunned, and then scrutinized his face as if searching for signs of madness. Finding none, she stuffed them into her pocket and fled.
    His curtness to the grieving woman shocked Zoe. Must the Dark Lord’s heir be a stranger to all human emotion? And yet, gruff though he’d been, he’d also been so generous.
    When he’d dried his hands, Ramsay tore off his filthy shirt, and donned one a servant had brought him. Then, without another word, he strode out of the inn.
    He’d left her alone—again. And this time he hadn’t made her promise she would wait for him. Surely, it was time to make her escape. There was no reason to stay with him any longer. She’d be mad to wait meekly for his return. He was almost certain to blame her for his failure to save the boy. He’d already told her she’d weakened his magical powers by assaulting his chastity. When he came back, he would rage at her or devise some terrifying punishment.
    But she couldn’t abandon him now, fool that she was. She’d seen anguish in his eyes when he’d washed the boy’s blood from his hands. He’d wanted to save that stranger’s child so badly.
    The world was very wrong to think she’d been granted good sense in the place of good looks. A sensible woman would have already left Lord Ramsay without a backward glance. But she couldn’t find it in herself to do it.
    She settled herself in a chair in the parlor to wait for him, but, as the minutes turned into hours, and he didn’t return she began to worry. Had he changed his mind after all, and gone on alone with his journey, abandoning her here to keep himself safe from the assault of her dubious charms? But no, a quick check reassured her that their post chaise still stood in the courtyard.
    So he must still be somewhere in the area, avoiding her as he dealt, alone, with his pain. But try though she might, she couldn’t free herself from the feeling that she must find him, that some catastrophe threatened the two of them, which made it essential that she not abandon him. She sensed him out there, desperate and bereft—and calling to her for help.
    It could only be wishful thinking. She must be the last person on earth he’d want now. And yet, like a sleepwalker, she saw herself get up and fetch her bonnet. Then, ignoring the pain in her thigh and her lame ankle, she set forth into the twilight to look for him.
    I t took a while to find him, but as she approached a tumbledown cottage a good half hour later, Zoe sensed Ramsay was nearby, though peer as she might through the fading light, she could see no trace of him. It was only as she came around a curve in the road by an old stone byre that she saw the flash of something golden glittering in the wan northern light. She hastened toward it. And then she saw him.
    He was sitting by the byre, huddled into a ball, with his knees drawn up to his chest. He looked like a small boy, despite his height, and was holding his bronze knife before him, staring at it as if it alone could save him.
    She’d never before seen him with any look on his face but anger or disdain, or, at best, a mild, distant amusement. But the man before her was not the man she’d known until now. The pain on his face was so strong that, without thinking, she walked over and gently put her arm around his shoulders, as she would have done had he been one of her pupils at school who’d just received some dreadful news from home.
    He twisted out of her grasp, his face livid. “Don’t touch me! Haven’t you done enough damage to me already? I couldn’t do anything for the boy but watch him die. His guts were spilling out and I couldn’t even still his pain.”
    â€œIf it was like that, then no one