Page 48 of Go, Rogue

Chapter

19

Catherine is exhausted but she isn’t sleeping. She lies awake in bed and ruminates, while McGann once again places his bedroll on the floor. She wants to tell him to come lie beside her, to feel the warmth of his arms and bury her face in his chest.

But they’ve only agreed to a fake marriage. And fake married people do not sleep in the same bed as truly married people. So, she watches him instead. He lies on his side, and the full moon casts its silver glow through the window, illuminating the outline of his back and broad shoulders.

She remembers the first time she came to Nowhere for her fighting lessons, arriving straight after a ball. Luckily, her fiancé Pembrooke hadn’t been in attendance that evening, so she hadn’t needed to stay long. She’d complained of a migraine to her mother and then slipped away, to the tavern instead of back to Chester House.

She twists in bed while she thinks about that night and how it was another time she didn’t tell her family where she was going. Another time she thought of herself before them.

She turns onto her back, restless, only to then stare at the ceiling.

“Menace,” comes McGann’s voice from the floor. “Can you not sleep?”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ll try to be quiet.”

He snorts at that, uncharitably, she thinks, although she’s smiling. She really does have a hard time remaining quiet or still.

“Why don’t you tell me,” he says, “what it is that’s got your thoughts all turned about?”

“I was remembering when you taught me to fight.”

“Aye? What about it in particular?”

She turns back to him, watching the moonlight trace his features as softly as a lover’s touch might.

“How I arrived that first evening. So excited to begin.”

“I recall. You read the Gaelic right off the walls. Shocked the hell out of me. And you were dressed in the most ridiculous—”

“I’d been at a ball!” Catherine interjects.

“So you said at the time.” She can just make out his smirk in the dark. “But it was still the most ridiculous contraption I’d ever seen. Layers upon layers of—whatever the bloody hell that was.”

“Lavender silk tulle,” she says, a little wistful sigh in her voice. “Embroidered tulips at the hem and waistline.”

“Aye. And so wide you could barely fit through the door, much less down the stairs.”

“It was a beautiful dress.”

“Nay,” he says. “It was just a dress, worn by a beautiful woman. One who had no business, mind you, in a tavern in Covent Garden with the likes of me.”

“Perhaps,” she says, remembering how he looked when she first entered the bar. “But what if I told you I think you’re beautiful too?”

He makes some harrumphing noise, but she lets the memory wash over her anyway. How she left the Ball and made her way to Nowhere via a hired hack. How nervous she was that night, her palms sweaty beneath her gloves, her heartbeat thumping insistently in her chest.

She was afraid of entering the tavern, afraid someone might recognize her. So she stood outside in the dark, questioning her decision to be there at all. But she needn’t have bothered, because as soon as she made her way inside, all she saw was him and none of the rest of it mattered.

The whole of the ton could have walked in the doors at that moment and she still wouldn’t have left. Not with the sight of Andrew McGann, leaning against the back wall, waiting for her.

How is it, she remembers thinking, that he can make a lean look like that? Feral and dangerous and inviting all at once.

How could a lean make her stomach flutter?

It shouldn’t, the idea is ridiculous, but her stomach didn’t care what her brain thought, because as soon as she walked into the room and caught the glint in his emerald eyes and the languorous tilt of his body, she felt like she’d drunk too much champagne and spun about a Maypole.

“You’re here,” he said to her, as if he hadn’t expected her to come. She nodded, still feeling light-headed, dizzy almost, as she made her way into the empty main room of the tavern. It was beautiful inside, definitely not what she’d expected from the nondescript building tucked away at the end of an alleyway in Covent Garden. The outside was bog-standard dull, but the inside was magnificent. The long, polished bar was made of a rich, warm mahogany. Behind it, stacked on glass shelves, were bottles upon bottles of whisky, amber liquid that glimmered in the candlelight. The ceiling was coffered and inside each square was a different plaid pattern, painted in rich, deep hues.