She broke free and groped her way along the carriage wheel, to double over, fists pressed across her stomach, and be sick with nothing in her. She had not eaten or drunk anything for a while, it seemed. This did not stop her from being abominably ill.
“I…we will not detain you further.” The lieutenant sounded about fifteen years old and appalled. He retreated in haste. The whole lot of them, in fact—men, horses, and musketry—seemed glad to quit the area immediately.
Hooves clattered on the roadway. Grey, still being Bavarian, scolded, “Adelina, if you would simply concentrate your mind, you would not be sick. You must think of other things.” He hid her from their view. Gently, he lifted her hair away from her face and held her upright, which was more than she could manage for herself.
“Fox Cub, that was one hell of a convincing performance.” Adrian sounded exhausted. He spoke German still. So wise, they were. The cadence of a language carries farther than the words. One of the gendarmes might linger to listen and hear their voices change if they started speaking French.
“It’s that poison we’re feeding her. Adrian, get me…Good.” Grey patted a wet cloth on her face. “Finished?”
She simply nodded. It was not that it was too hard to speak German. It was that she wanted to die.
“Drink this.” Grey set something to her lips.
Not again. She knocked the glass aside and heard it shatter on the ground. She was too weak and dizzy to run. She could only put her back against the coach and cover her mouth with her arm. It would do her no good. There was no fight within her.
“Goddammit, Annique, there was nothing in that but water.”
Adrian was lazily amused, as always. “He’s telling the truth. This whole area’s swarming with armed Frenchmen. We can’t clutter up the coach with unconscious females.”
“He’s not trying to drug you,” said Doyle, up on top of the coach.
“He leaves that to you, Herr Doyle. You are a sheep-swiving, swine-dog traitor, that is what you are.” German is a lovely language for cursing.
“Now, miss, a nice young lady like you shouldn’t even know them words. You folks going to mill around here for the next hour, chatting? Let me know so I can turn the horses loose.”
“We’re leaving.” Grey switched back to French. “Adrian, get in the coach before you keel over.”
“Ever obedient to your command, oh Exalted One.” The coach dipped as Adrian climbed inside.
Grey came close. “Annique…” He molded her fingers around a cup. He poured, and the cup got heavy and cold. “It’s water. Just water. God knows you don’t have any reason to trust me, but I wish you’d drink it.”
The reality of her helplessness closed in around her. They were such clever men, these three—hard and experienced and quite ruthless. Grey was the most dangerous of all. He made her believe he wanted to be kind. Every moment it was a fight to remember he was her enemy.
Perhaps he forgot also, sometimes. It was doubtless easier for the victor to ignore the realities.
She said, “I must drink, sooner or later. I have no choice.” The cup held clean water with no taste but that of a metal flask. She drank what he had given her.
His hand on her cheek was like a flower falling onto her. “The first time, when I drugged you, it was wrong. I should have told you. I should have let you fight me. I made a mistake.”
That soft touch. He had done that before. Memories were beginning to rise like bubbles to the surface of her mind. “I remember. I was lying beside you on a blanket. I wanted to touch you. I wanted—”
“It’s time we left.”
But she remembered. She had pressed herself against him and opened her legs and throbbed with mindless pleasure. “What did I do when I was asleep? What did I do with you?”
“You dreamed. The drug takes some women that way. It means nothing.”
Were they dreams, the heat and the hunger and the shamelessness? The drug takes some women that way. In the midst of many turmoils, she must add one more. She became wanton when she slept with the drug. Even her body betrayed her to these English. Truly, it did not seem fair.
“I remember. Almost.”
The hand slipped into her hair and held her. “Nothing happened. I’d tell you if we did anything.”
She had done nothing? She remembered the smell of him under her nostrils and crying out without any restraint and twisting, twisting herself upon him. “I do not think it was a dream. I was wearing one of your shirts. I wanted it off. I wanted…”
The wanting escaped out of her memory and swept across her. In the turn of a moment, her skin was avid for him. She had never known that skin could be hungry for the touch of another skin. She turned to nuzzle his wrist. To taste him. She did not notice she was doing it till he jerked his hand away.
He breathed harshly. “Let’s get you into the coach. You don’t want this. You just think you do. You’re drugged to the eyeballs.” Now he sounded exasperated. “And you’re falling asleep standing up.”
“Grey, we have to go.” That was Doyle.
Certainly he heard all of this, and Adrian, too, inside the coach. She might as well have been stripped naked, considering the privacy she had among these men. “I do not want you. And I am not asleep.”
“Then I won’t need to lift you into the coach. You can climb up yourself. That’s right. I’ve got you. Adrian, don’t try to help. You’re going to rip your shoulder apart.”
But Adrian carried her onto the seat anyway. It could not be good for him. She would scold him when she was awake. Grey put his arm around her. “Where are we?”
“Less than an hour from Dorterre.”
“Ah. I was here two years ago.” She tried to bring to her mind a map of this coastal region, but the image shimmered and melted away. She was not used to memories that did that. “I was in the smuggler villages. Hiding.”
Grey settled her close. “Good place for it. What were you hiding from, two years ago?”
“The Vendée uprising. The last one. It was…very bad. I could not believe French soldiers would do such things to French women and children. And I had been given such orders…” Confusion swirled in her mind. Fragments of pain. Memories. “I disobeyed my orders. I would not spy on those poor people, so I ran away and hid. Everyone was very angry with me.” She rubbed her face against her arm. “I talk with this drug. I will have to remember that.”
“Those aren’t state secrets, Fox Cub. The whole world knows what Napoleon did in the Vendée.”
“I should not say so much, anyway, when my head is not clear. Did you know you do not sound at all like yourself when you speak German? It startled me altogether for a moment. It is as if there is suddenly another person in the carriage. Do not do it again.”
“I’ll try not to. Why don’t you go to sleep.”
And she was falling into sleep once more. Had he given her more of the drug, or was she being dragged down by what she already carried within her?
“I remember what we have done together. I am almost sure it was not decent.” But she let him comb her hair back with his fingers and tuck a blanket around her and arrange her at ease along the seat. “I will decide what to do about it when I am awake. Perhaps I will try to strangle you once more. Though you have the most beautiful body imaginable. Like a large animal.”
Adrian murmured, “What complex and interesting nights you two must have.”
“Shut up,” Grey said.
When she was almost asleep, Grey pulled her against his chest, cradling her possessively. Her body was used to it. She fitted against him as if there were a place there formed especially for her.