.
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу - страница 21
The thought of Gardner set Griffin to wondering what had become of him. He hadn’t seen him for some time, though he supposed that was to be expected given his relatively newly married state. One edge of Griffin’s mouth lifted in a mildly amused smile. It wasn’t as if Gardner could ask his wife to accompany him to the hell. Again.
Griffin schooled his features as he moved around the table slowly, taking in the hands that he was allowed to see without giving away what he thought of them. When he caught sight of a furtive movement just outside the entrance to the card room, he was careful not to frown and send some signal that had nothing at all to do with the game. He nodded politely to the players and excused himself just as Wick came into view again. The lad was not trying to attract his attention but appeared to be wanting Foster’s eye. The footman was staring straight ahead, unaware of the gyrations that were being employed to garner his notice.
Bloody hell.
Griffin stepped into the hallway, snatched Wick by his collar, and carried the boy away from the patrons mingling outside the card room to servants’ stairs at the end of the corridor. The boy did not struggle, but he did keep his hands tightly over his ears as if he expected Griffin to give them a good boxing.
“Explain,” Griffin said, setting him down.
Wick, still with his hands over his ears, launched into an explanation that was delivered so hurriedly that Griffin could not follow it. At the conclusion, the lad tried to make a run around him and dash up the stairs. Griffin hauled him back and kept him in place with one hand on each of the boy’s bony shoulders. It was the child’s distress that kept Griffin from launching into a lecture that included all of the reasons why Wick was not permitted to move among the patrons. “Again, if you please. This time with some respect for the cadence of proper speech.”
On the second telling Griffin caught words like help and Miss Cole and gentleman villain. There was no making sense of it, but at the end Griffin gave Wick his head and let him charge up the stairs.
Unlike the floor below, this short hall was deserted, and Griffin could hear sounds coming from Olivia Cole’s bedchamber that had been undetectable in the card room.
And…Oh, dear God above—was that smoke he smelled?
Wick came upon the door a beat before Griffin and rattled the knob. When the door didn’t open he beat his fists against it. Griffin reached around him and tried the knob himself, calling out for Olivia at the same time. When she didn’t respond, he pounded the heel of his hand against the door.
“Miss Cole!” Griffin rapped the wood hard. “Miss Cole!” He put a restraining hand on Wick’s efforts. “Find Truss. Tell him to bring the key. Hurry!” Griffin punctuated the order by throwing his shoulder into the door. Except for compression of his own muscle and bone, there was no give. Griffin ignored the pain and rammed it again. The door held and he went back to pounding. “Miss Cole!” Dammit! “Olivia!”
Olivia couldn’t move. She was pinned by the weight of the man on top of her. Over his shoulder she could see small flames spreading slowly across the pillow sham, fed by the draft from the open window. She tried to make him understand there was danger here, but he merely pressed a forearm across her throat and she was silenced. Every frantic look she cast in the direction of the fire, he seemed to interpret as merely an effort on her part to avoid looking at him.
His features, the ones she had briefly thought as handsomely molded, were twisted in a rage so profound that he was deaf and blind to everything at the periphery of his senses. She was not merely the center of what he saw. She was all that he saw.
He yanked at her shift. When the narrow blue ribbon sewn into the scooped neckline thwarted his attempt to rend the material, he shoved his hand under it. He groped for her breast, then finding it, squeezed with a viciousness that brought tears to Olivia’s eyes and the air rushing from her lungs. She tried to draw another breath, but his forearm lay too heavily across her throat. It seemed he was pressing harder now. She pushed at his shoulders and tried to turn on her side to break his hold. It took only moments for her to understand he would not be moved.
Her hands fell back to the floor. If she did not panic, if she did not exhaust herself, she knew he would need the hand on her breast or the arm across her throat to assist him in what was ultimately his intent. If he killed her first it would be because there was madness in his rage, not because it had been his aim to do so at the outset. He might kill her afterward, to silence her, but it was just as likely that they would die together, consumed by the flames that were now twisting and leaping across the bed.
Olivia sucked in a deep lungful of air as the pressure on her throat was lifted. She coughed hard, breathing in the first acrid eddies of smoke to reach her. She managed to gasp a warning between the choking breaths. “The bed!”
“So you do want it,” he fairly growled in her ear. “And comfort besides.” He mashed his mouth against hers.
She blinked. He had completely misunderstood. She tasted blood on her lip as he ground his mouth on hers and felt him separating her robe at her thighs. He lifted his hips slightly as he grabbed fistfuls of her shift and raised it to her hips. She tried to keep her legs together, but he jammed a knee between them. She beat her heels on his calves and at the back of his thighs as he fumbled with the flies of his trousers. At her sides her fingers scrabbled on the floor, searching…searching…
Griffin pressed his ear to the door, trying in vain to hear something above the sound of his own harsh breathing. Frustrated, he kicked at it. Once. Then again. Bloody hell. Where was Wick? Where was Truss? Where was the goddamn key?
Olivia’s fingertips found the edge of the towel that had been wrested from her hands. She tugged on it, first finding a finger’s worth, then a handful. She whipped it across the back of his neck and found the opposite tail with her free hand. Beyond his shoulder she could see tiny tongues of fire lapping up the bedcover and applied all of her resolve to this last effort.
Before he could guess what she was about, she quickly crossed the tails of the towel and exchanged them in her hands so that she could pull them as tightly as her strength would allow.
The immediate effect was to make him release his cock so he could try to break her hold. When he grasped her wrists and pushed he only succeeded in tightening the noose she’d fashioned. He clawed at the linen towel, his eyes bulging, but could not get even so much as a fingernail between his skin and the damp fabric.
Olivia applied steady pressure. The muscles in her arms and across her back trembled with the strain required to sustain it. From the hallway she heard someone call her name again. When she’d heard it before she’d had no voice to cry out. Now she hadn’t any strength to spare for the effort.
His face was ruddy, but no less so than hers. Olivia’s temples throbbed as the hot blood of exertion collected in her head. Her knuckles were nearly as white as the towel she was gripping. There was a similar whiteness at his neck where his skin was pulled taut by the linen garrote.
He was able to heave himself up but not able to dislodge her hold. The space he created, though, gave her the freedom to move out from under him. The towel twisted on his neck as she shifted to one side. When his arms gave way he collapsed face down on the floor, and as quick as that she was on his back, holding the tails of the linen like reins on a horse that she СКАЧАТЬ