Page 48 of My Rogue, My Ruin
“I felt nothing,” she said, but her words sounded hollow. She knew it, too. Her eyes flashed with mortification and then with something darker and fiercer. Something he recognized immediately, because he felt it, too.
She tossed her head, defiant to the last, and attempted to turn the conversation. “Where did you go when you left the masquerade?”
Archer paused at the flicker of surprise in her eyes. As though her own question had startled her. “Home. Why do you ask?”
She lifted her chin a bit higher. “You left around the same time as Lord Maynard. Perhaps you may have seen something.”
Here it is—the perfect opportunity.He’d told Brandt he’d discover what Briannon knew of the Masked Marauder and quash it. “Lord Maynard,” he echoed carefully, though every muscle in his body tensed.
Briannon met his eyes. “Perhaps you saw someone…suspicious.”
“Do you not think I would have come forward with any informative accounts by now?”
The blunt question stumped her, and she cast her eyes down, her teeth buried in her lower lip. She seemed to be staring intently at his knees while thinking. But then she blinked, a small pinch between her brows, and released her lip. She slowly lifted her eyes and met his gaze again. “The bandit was also on your property a few nights previous. He waylaid my carriage.”
“Yes, I am aware.”
“I spoke to him,” she whispered, flushing.
“As you said earlier at dinner. What of it?”
Briannon breathed in sharply. “I looked into his eyes.”
Now would be the time to laugh at her. Accuse her of being a silly girl with an overactive imagination. “It seems this bandit affected you, Lady Briannon,” he said coolly, standing up from the bench. His wounded leg twitched again. Archer winced, and his hand went to his thigh before he could stop himself.
Briannon witnessed it. “Your leg,” she said softly.
“It’s nothing,” he said tersely. “My ankle is still sore.”
She hiked her chin. “So then why is your thigh bleeding?”
He went still, his eyes lowering. A minuscule red stain had blossomed on his gray trousers. The tenuous scab must have split, and the bandage wrapping it must have been too thin to absorb the weeping wound.
There had been an article printed in theTimesabout the attack on Lady Emiliah’s carriage. How their rescuer had shot the bandit in the leg. And Archer already knew Briannon’s penchant for reading her father’s papers.
Quash it. Fix this.He knew what he should do. To protect himself. To protect Brandt. Lord in heaven, how had things turned so bloody complicated?
“A scrape, nothing more,” he dismissed, not missing Briannon’s odd expression as if something astonishing had occurred to her. “Forget my leg. I’m more interested in your fond memories of the Masked Marauder. His voice, his eyes. One might say you recall them with remarkable ease.”
“Fear causes memories to sharpen,” she said, though the excuse rang false.
Archer grinned. “You were not afraid.”
They were four simple words, and as good as a confession. He’d said them before he could think. Or maybe he’d intended to say them all along. Archer truly didn’t know.
Briannon’s eyes went round and wide, her back ramrod straight. A rush of color flooded her cheeks. “My god. I’d thought…when you donned the mask and you looked so much like him, but…” Her mouth tightened. “Youassaulted Lord Maynard and his coachman? And that poor horse.” She bristled with confused fear as she stood, her hands trembling. “But…but you love horses. Howcouldyou?”
The fury he’d felt when he’d learned another man was impersonating him returned with new force. He hated Briannon thinking, for one moment, that he could have been so cruel, so despicably violent. It hurt him, he realized, that her opinion of him would be so low, sobase, and that alone was the basis for his next words.
“Culling the excess from privileged fops is not the same as beating a man senseless and murdering his horse. What I’ve done in the past is nothing like what this cowardly pretender is doing for his own gain.”
The things he was admitting to could not be undone. He knew this. Knew it was rash. And yet he could not stop himself.
“What you’ve done in the past,” Briannon repeated slowly. “So itwasyou, then, who stopped my coach? Robbed me.” Archer swallowed hard and nodded. “But…why?”
Her eyes were disbelieving orbs, fascination and fear warring in their depths.
He had never anticipated the need to explain himself to anyone, or to answer that question.Why?He had promised himself and Brandt that he would be meticulous and stealthy, careful and precise. He would take trinkets and coin purses from those who would be able to return home and replace what had been taken, and he would give every last farthing to those who needed it most—men, women, and children, struggling to put food on their tables, coal in their stoves, clothes on their backs, and shoes on their feet.
