Black Sheep Read online

  She turned in his arms, laying her cheek against his chest, letting the softness of his shirt absorb the remainder of her tears. “I don’t think my bottom can bear your sort of fondness.”

  Leverton smiled into her hair. His hand stroked the length of those long, blonde curls, flowing so softly down her back. His fingers lingered just above her hips, playing lightly along her spine just above her buttocks. He imagined he could feel the heat that scorched her just a little further south. He was almost certain he could smell the female scent of her, unaroused for now, but his fingers traced tiny circles upon her skin as he ran a mental gauntlet of all the ways in which he could change that.

  “Do you think your lips could bear it?” he asked.

  She sniffled. “You shouldn’t kiss your employer. I think there are rules somewhere.”

  “When you’re the boss, you get to make the rules,” he reminded her, raising his hand to the top of her head just so he could stroke all the way back down her again. He could feel all the tense, maidenly stiffness within her minutely easing with each pass of his hand.

  “I don’t feel very kissable,” she whispered.

  “Trust me,” he replied. “I have kissed dozens of women. Without a doubt, you are the most kissable of the lot.”

  Her expression turned slightly irritated, but then his hand left her hair, stroking down over her hips to cup her bottom. She tensed all over again, but he was gentle, soothing as he caressed the sides of her hips and thighs, gradually moving onto more tender areas with only the gentlest of touches.

  “My nose is running.” She tried to duck her head when he let his hands glide up her waist to her back and over her shoulders, caressing the slope of her neck before cupping her chin between thumb and finger, tilting her lips to meet his.

  “I consider myself forewarned,” he replied, and kissed her anyway. Just once. Softly. The tenderness of his mouth barely more substantial than the fluttering caress of moth’s wings. Then again, only a tad harder, coaxing her mouth to open to him, giving him leave to invade. His tongue dipped into her, mimicking the gentlest of lovemaking and offering her a whole new mystery to become enchanted by.

  She sighed softly into him, tentatively attempting to kiss him back as she copied the motions of his mouth.

  Leverton bent, his hands flowing back down her body to cup her bottom. This time, no longer mindful of her gasp as he caught her, his fingers dug into the weals there, lifting and pulling her tight up against his hips. She mewed into his mouth, but rather than catch his wrists or struggle to break away, she twined her arms around his shoulders and her wriggle was all hip. He pumped twice against her, a parody of mating that his tongue copied as they fell together into the corner.

  Her bottom must have made sharp contact with the wall because the next thing he knew, her hands had shifted from his neck to his chest, and instead of pulling him hungrily closer, she was pushing him hard away. Their lips broke apart, and she gasped.

  “Sorry,” he panted, the pulse of his blood pounding in his temples and significantly lower still where the confines of his trousers had just become incredibly damned... confining.

  Growling, he slipped his hand up the small of her back, lifting her away from the wall. “Is that better?” he asked, already trying to find her lips again and, failing that, to bury his face between the mounds of her sweet breasts. The bodice of her shift was held closed to him by a single, thin ribbon. He pulled it with his teeth and breathed in the heady scent of her as he dropped kiss after kiss down into the valley between her breasts.

  She smacked him in the chest, twisting her face away as she protested, “I barely know you.”

  “By all means,” he chased her lips. “Let’s get to know one another better.”

  His hands caught her bottom again, that hot little bottom that bucked her up against the full front of his erection. He could feel the welcoming heat between her thighs, and his fingers dug into her flanks, already trying to hike her skirts high enough for him to encounter bare skin.

  For a woman with such a pronounced limp, she was remarkably agile and twisted all but bonelessly right out of his arms. He almost dropped her flat on the floor, but somehow, she landed on her feet.

  Her bad leg tried to buckle under her, but she stiffened it and using the wall for balance, she limped a short distance away from him. Pressing her fingers to her lips, she then licked them as if savoring the taste and the feel of his kisses. She pulled the front of her shift back over her naked breasts, and then lay her hand over her womb, and then she eased herself up to stand straight. When she turned to face him again, the blue of her eyes had turned smoky with arousal, and just the sight of that was enough to send a pulse of raw need humming back through to the core of him.

  For a second, he thought she was about to reach for him. Elspeth slapped his cheek instead, a light, two-fingered tap which nevertheless startled him back into some semblance of self-control.

  “Don’t do that again,” she said shakily, already touching her fingertips back to her swollen, flushed lips.

  He bent over double, struggling to will his erection away as she snatched her dress from the floor and fled from the den. Groaning once, he shook his head. “I make no promises.”

  * * * * *

  “Stay back from the edge,” Leverton said as he searched the nearby cemetery for any signs of movement. Well past noon and completely exposed in an empty pasture with the sun of the day square upon them, there was no way to hide what they were about to do. Fortunately, the cemetery was vacant of anybody breathing enough to be curious. With the village of Penny’s Weight just through the trees, he knew that could change at any time. But more than that, what was making him nervous was not knowing where Jack might be.

  Glancing quickly around, he then knelt down to pound one of the wooden stakes he’d brought deep into the ground. Tying one end of the rope firmly around it, he tested the stability as best he could and prayed that it would hold his weight. With Elspeth, however, he wasn’t about to take any chances.

  “All right,” Slipping the handle of the hammer through his belt, he joined Elspeth at the edge of the hole. Side by side they stood, trying to peer through the darkness and find the bottom, but the sun had already slipped past any angle capable of cutting through the shadows. From the surface, all he could detect was the faintest grayness of fallen bricks, and a few dark bumps and straight angles that hinted at manmade objects below. The blackness made it hard to judge the distance, and Leverton slowly uncoiled a length of rope, hoping he’d brought enough.

  “Ready for this?” he asked. He needn’t have asked; he could already feel her trembling, and not from fear.

  “Can I go down first?” she asked, circling the jagged rim in case she could see the bottom better from a different angle.

  “Only because you aren’t strong enough to lower me down ahead of you.” He took the pack she was carrying over one shoulder and without a word, tossed it into the gaping hole, letting gravity carry it unerringly to the bottom.

  “Hey!” Her fists found her hips. “Our lunch was in there!”

  There was a dry clatter as the wooden torches within that sack hit the stone floor. They both bent over, but the darkness had completely swallowed the sack and there was still no bottom to be seen.

  “Try not to do that,” Leverton told her. Theatrical, yes, but it did as he’d intended it.

  Elspeth was completely sober, having lost all traces of her smile as she straightened again. “Right. Good plan. Don’t drop me.”

  “I’ve no such intention.” Turning her to him, he wrapped the rope twice around her waist before delving deep into his one youthful foray as a sailor when it came time to make the knot. He looped the longer stretch of rope, then hesitated. “Let’s see... the little brown eel comes out of the hole... around the reef...” He looked from her waist to the lengths he held in each hand, trying to remember which was supposed to be the ‘reef’.

  Holding still, Elspeth watched hi
m change his mind on which direction to twist the rope. “You do know what you’re doing, right?”

  “Absolutely.” Giving up on both eels and reefs, he simply made the most secure knot he was capable of and, hoping it was tight enough, backed up until he found as good and sturdy a foothold as was possible in an empty sheep’s pasture with nothing more stable than grass clumps to grip onto. He wrapped the remaining rope around himself, using his own body and weight to anchor it. “All right now, ease yourself in and I’ll lower you down.”

  Holding onto the rope with one hand, Elspeth carefully lowered herself to sit on the edge, her feet dangling into the darkness. As she rolled cautiously onto her stomach, transferring both hands to grip the rope so tightly that her knuckles whitened, she met his eyes again. She looked slightly scared but mostly excited as she said, “Seriously, Leverton. Don’t drop me.”

  His response was a grunt as she slid backwards off the edge and he took her full weight. His feet slipped in the grass a few inches before the side of his forward boot butted solidly up against a half-imbedded foundation stone. It wiggled slightly, but the muddy ground held onto it.

  “Oh, my heart, but this is daring!” she said, the rope creaking as she dangled there, ever so faintly swinging in the empty air.

  “I’ve got you.” He grunted, slowly letting the rope out hand over hand. Thankfully, he’d had the foresight to knot the length every few feet, just in case. But as ten feet became fifteen and then twenty without her reaching the bottom, Leverton could feel his hands beginning to tremble, and more and more he found himself relying on those knots to keep his grip secure. “Are you there yet?”

  “I think I can see the bottom,” she called back helpfully. “Twelve feet more, maybe.”

  “Thank God,” he puffed, slowly letting out another two feet of rope.

  “What did you say?”

  “No more sausages for breakfast. Just fruit. Fresh fruit,” he panted, his arms trembling, only belatedly realizing some sort of pulley system would have been better. With every foot of rope that he fed into the hole, she seemed to gain twenty pounds.

  “Are you saying I’m fat?” She must have changed the direction of her head. She might even be looking up now because he could hear her voice—and the instant irritation that filled it—quite clearly.

  “No,” he groaned through clenched teeth. “How... much further?”

  “About twelve feet.”

  “You said that three feet ago!”

  “Yes, well... three feet ago, I think I might have been wrong. And don’t you yell at m—eek!”

  Leverton grabbed the rope tightly, holding her where she was. “What’s wrong?” He could still feel her moving on the line, but she was quiet for several heartbeats. “Elspeth?”

  “Oh, nothing. The rope got wrapped over some sort of statue. I thought it was a snake, that’s all. Hold on.”

  He clung to the rope, the trembling of his arms intensifying into shaking as he waited while she jerked and gyrated on the other end. “Elspeth...darling...please don’t take this the wrong way...but you weigh half a ton here, sweetheart.”

  “Oh, dash and bother.”

  “What?” he groaned, his foot slipping a little against the rock.

  “I’m caught!”

  The weight at the end of the rope began to thrash slightly, adding at least two stone more to what he was holding onto. “On...” he grunted, “...what?”

  “A spear, I think. My dress! Oh. Oh, dash and bother, I’m totally exposed.”

  “Really?” In the split second of mental imagery that followed—twin lily-white legs, slightly splayed and kicking as they dangled there at the end of his line—Leverton learned something about himself. Not only was he was totally shameless, but he was also genetically incapable of holding onto a rope while the image of a lady’s naked appendages splayed in any kind of position lingered anywhere in his mind.

  The rope slipped.

  Elspeth shrieked as she plummeted, and the rope sliced right through his fingers, burning through his skin as if it were made of razor blades. He lost a full knot of distance before his hard grip stopped her free fall, but the momentum of catching her jerked him right off his feet and headfirst right into that hole.

  Fortunately, Elspeth dropped only four feet before landing on her previously discarded pack. Leverton, however, dangled thirty feet above the floor on ruined hands that burned and throbbed and, he noticed as he slipped helplessly down to the first knot, bled.

  “Oh, hell!” he swore, already recognizing the trembling in his arms for what it was. He snapped his flailing legs together and tried to catch a knot between his booted feet but slipped anyway, leaving a three foot smear of blood and skin all the way down until the very next knot caught him.

  “Leverton!” Elspeth cried. The rope yanked and twitched in his grasp as she struggled to get out of the knot. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” he lied through gritted teeth.

  “Are...” Her breath caught, trembling slightly in her uncertainty. “Are you sure? You were...screaming.”

  “I most certainly was not!” He grit his teeth again, slowly trying to shrug out of his coat without accidentally dropping it.

  “I never said it wasn’t a... masculine scream,” she said, defensively. “Not at all high-pitched or...or...” she faltered, “girlish.”

  “Elspeth!” he snapped, and then forcibly made himself stop. He took a deep breath, counted to three, and then tried again. “Elspeth.”

  “Yes, Leverton?” She sounded very meek.

  “Please find me something soft to land upon. One way or another, I’m about to come down.”

  Trying to balance as much of his weight as he could on the knot between his feet and taking one hand from the rope at a time, he used his teeth to try and wrap the sleeves of his coat around his ruined hands.

  Below him, she finally managed to untie herself from the line, which, thankfully, stopped jerking with each move she made.

  She turned in a full circle, her eyes sweeping frantically through the limited light until she found the pack. Grabbing it, she looked back up at him and then down at the cut-stone floor, trying to gauge roughly where he might land. There was a hurried crash and clatter as she shoved things out of the way: urns and metal cups, loose bits of rock and wood. He was looking down at her from beneath one arm, wondering exactly where that spear might be, when he saw her draw an ‘X’ in the dirt of the floor. Glancing back up at him one last time, she then placed the pack upon it.

  “Okay, I’m ready. Fall now, if you must.” She backed away, wringing her hands a moment before sweeping back in to grab the pack again. She quickly emptied out the torches, kicking them hurriedly aside, and then placed the cloth back on the ‘X’. “Try to land on your feet,” she called up at him, wringing her hands again. “You’ll break your legs, but at least it will soften the subsequent blow to your head.”

  Not sure whether to groan or laugh, Leverton eased himself down another knot. “That’s all you could find?”

  “In all the excitement back home, I’m afraid I completely forgot to pack my mattress,” she said, sounding hurt again.

  A shadow passed over them both as the light from above was blocked. Raising his head, Leverton looked up, but all he could see was the shape of someone’s head and shoulders as he stared back down at them.

  Below him, Elspeth shielded her eyes with one hand, squinting as she tried to make out features. “Mr. Holcomb?”

  Out of the frying pan...

  Here it came. That low and unamused laugh that chuckled up out of his throat. Leverton looked up, trying his best to smile. “Good afternoon,” he called cheerfully. “I don’t suppose you’d mind giving me a hand up, eh?”

  Jack Holcomb didn’t move. He simply looked from Elspeth to Leverton, clinging to the rope with his jacket wrapped around his hands, and then without a word reached down with one arm to grasp the rope.

  Or at least, Leverton thought he was goin
g to grasp it. It took several blinks before the shiny metal sliver that extended from Jack’s fingers formed itself into a visually recognizable knife.

  “Jack, no!” Elspeth screamed.

  He might have screamed, too (a thoroughly masculine sound, this time), but he was too busy swearing and half-falling, half climbing hand-over-hand down that rope to be sure. He had no idea how short he cut the distance between himself and the ground before the rope suddenly snapped and he was airborne. He prepared himself to break his legs. He was not at all prepared to crash into Elspeth, who tried to catch him.

  Her arms snapped around him as they both fell backwards, smashing into a stack of chests that broke even as it arrested their fall. They might have been softer than the bare rocks, but probably not by much.

  At least his ankles were fine.

  “Uph!” Elspeth gasped into his ear, and neither one of them moved.

  “Are you...okay?” Leverton finally managed to ask, but before she could answer, the light shining in on them from above suddenly dimmed, dropping them significantly into darkness.

  Both Elspeth and Leverton looked up as Jack lay a board across the other half of the hole above them, blocking all but the tiniest sliver of light that filtered in through the crack between the two planks.

  Elspeth’s hands caught at Leverton’s shoulder, but otherwise she didn’t move. She barely even breathed, not until they heard the soft, scratching rasp as Jack began to shovel up enough dirt to completely cover the wood, burying them alive into that midnight black chamber of stone and rubble.

  Crawling off of her, Leverton felt his way along her body until he found the stack of chests. He caught her hand, pulling her bodily into his lap. “We’ll be all right,” he lied. He held her tightly, staring in total shock as that sliver of light got shorter and shorter. “I promise you, we...we’ll be all right.”

  To his complete surprise, although her body felt as stiff and panicked as...well...his no doubt did, her voice was completely calm. “Of course we will.” She fumbled in the darkness until her hand patted lightly against his cheek.