A Loving Scoundrel by Johanna Lindsey Read Free Book Online Page B

and go back to bed.
    It didn’t look as if he would. It was starting to look as if he was going to stand “guard” out there in the hall all night. She could almost hear the prison door slamming shut on her and she was getting a queasy, sick feeling in her belly.
    With desperation creeping up on her, she went to look out the window for herself. Malory’s sigh had been accurate. It was not an avenue for easy departure, not without a rope. No tree nearby to jump to, no ledges of any sort to use to climb down with.
    They could rip up the sheets to make their own rope, which she wouldn’t even have thought of if the nabobs hadn’t done that earlier in the evening, but a glance about the room showed nothing heavy enough to use as an anchor to support Malory’s weight. Hers maybe, but not his. The bed might work, but it was just a small one for a single guest and had a wooden frame that could break. They’d probably make too much noise trying to move it next to the window anyway.
    When it finally dawned on her that the servant might be waiting for the lamp to go out, Danny could have kicked herself. Her drunk “employer” might not worry about the lamp, but why would the sober “driver” want to leave the light on to sleep, unless he wasn’t planning on sleeping? She hoped that was what the servant was thinking, and sure enough, about ten minutes after the light went out, he moved off down the hall and back down the stairs.
    All the while, Malory had been trying out a wide assortment of snoring sounds that would have caused Danny to bust a gut laughing if she hadn’t convinced herself they were going to be stuck there all night. The servant definitely distrusted them, or else he wouldn’t have stood outside their room so long. But it could have been worse. He could have gone to wake his employer, they could have checked to see if anything was missing from their house, and there’d be no talking her way out of having her pockets filled with Heddings’s jewels.
    She moved over and told the nabob, “He’s finally gone. We’ll give him a few minutes to go back to bed.”
    “Then what?”
    “Then I pick that lock open and we get the ’ell out o’ ’ere.”
    “You know how to do that?”
    She snorted. “Course I do, and I carry m’own picker.”
    She pulled a thick pin out of her hat and went to work on the door. Piece of cake. Bedroom doors usually were.
    Within seconds she was saying, “Come on. And we’ll use the front door. Since they already know we’ve been ’ere, leaving it unlocked won’t matter.”
    She didn’t wait to see if he was going to follow her. The moment she was outside she took off at a run and didn’t look back or stop once until she reached the trees. Only then did she pause, but merely to catch her breath and her bearings. It took a moment to spot the coach lamps through the thick foliage. Malory caught up to her then.
    He took her arm to lead her the rest of the way to the coach. She tried to jerk it away but that effort just made him put his arm around her shoulder. He obviously didn’t trust her to turn over the jewels now that they were safely out of Heddings’s house.
    Without the danger of having a servant holding a gun nearby, she couldn’t handle being this close to Malory. She’d put his arm around her earlier when they’d walked up Heddings’s staircase and had felt nothing but her fear. This was nowhere near the same thing. Now she was feeling the length of him pressed to her side, his muscular thigh, his hip and his hard chest, feeling how perfectly she fit under his arm, feeling the heat coming off him—or was it her heat? She was remembering just how bleeding handsome he was, even though she couldn’t see his face in the dark of the woods. She was remembering those sexy blue eyes moving over her in the coach, as if he could see right through her disguise.
    If he stopped right then and there and turned her toward him, she would have been mush for whatever he