He took her mouth again and the minute she moaned, he thrust his tongue deeper to wield her passion. He breathed her, tasted the heady wine on her lips, and savored her. His mouth twisting, bruising, rousing, his tongue plunging through her like a brand, searing her, having her. The kiss was more than merely bending her to his will. He wanted total possession and to punish her for making him desire her.
He clasped the soft flesh of her bottom and pulled her against him, making her aware of his arousal. She pressed her soft body into him, driving him insane with need. He stood on the precipice of desire. Any longer and they’d both be lost.
Somehow, he managed to push her away, his breath bursting from him in ragged blows. “Does Sunderland kiss you that way?”
He opened the door, looked both ways.
“And what of me?” she hissed. “Isolation your master. Is that my punishment because you choose to wallow in mourning, personifying honor and duty to a woman who no longer exists? Oh, how you will wander around with your mantle of invisibility. Like a speck of dust floating in the air that will never be seen because it prevails to hide in darkness.”
She twisted free and stumbled out into the hallway.
The door snapped shut behind her, the curtains rustled and stilled, and the room went quiet. He leaned his palms against the hard rough plank of the door as her steps faded away.
Juliet. Sweet, beautiful Juliet who’d captured his heart…and his soul. And he’d never see her again.
Chapter Twenty-Two
A sergeant ushered Joshua into the colonel’s office where Faulkner stood with his hands clasped behind his back. His pretense of calmness did not fool, Joshua. The colonel was tense. Warning bells clanged in Joshua’s head.
“Meet Captain Snapes. He has shared some interesting information with me.”
Joshua raised an eyebrow at the British captain sitting in the corner. The man who had incited Onontio’s attack on the Hayes’ household. Nothing to recommend…bulging cheeks, sloping chin, piggish mouth.
Yet his pig-like eyes flicked with keen interest, analytical, disciplined and something else he assigned to grasp—fanatical. Joshua’s gut sunk with a leaden feeling. Had someone seen Juliet leave his quarters the night before?
Legs planted wide, the colonel said, “He has seen you going in and out of General Horatio Gates’ tent at Saratoga. Guards, put him in irons.”
As the guards fell on him, Joshua roared an awful warrior’s cry, hoping to alert Two Eagles. He punched one guard in the nose, heard bones crunch, soaking him in a shower of blood. Joshua broke free and swerved his elbow into another guard’s windpipe. The guard convulsed and fell back. The rest backed off. Not surprising. These were not seasoned frontiersmen.
The opened door was ten feet behind. Ten steps to freedom. Out the window, over the roof, a leap to the parapet and over. Once in the woods, they’d never find him.
Two guards down, six to go. Just as their bodies crashed together, Joshua grasped one flailing arm and broke it in two. He stopped and hit the next guard with a colossal right that came all the way up from his planted feet, and felt his fist drive right through and beyond. From his sinking body weight, he whipped his head from under his moving hand, allowing the momentum to carry him onward, shoulder first into the man behind him.
He booted a guard between the legs, and the man’s head wrenched downward at the same time Joshua’s elbow sailed upward, doubling the power of the blow. He targeted another savage blow at the head of another soldier, shattering his jaw with a high cracking sound.
He glanced at Snapes and Faulkner cowering together. Joshua danced, too shrewd to allow more to get behind him. He jerked his elbow, fracturing a man’s ribs, the hammering force hurtling his assailant through a glass bookcase. Leaping to one side and then to another, Joshua outpaced them, owing his supremacy to his hard-bitten experience as a boxer.
“Guards!” Faulkner screamed out, and from nowhere, more guards piled in the office and fell on Joshua.
Before he could wrench free again, ten men seized him and wrestled him to the floor, one of them giving him a short, hard jab in the stomach, and as he doubled over, another brought his fist down on the back of his neck. Joshua crumpled to the floor, his breath coming in short, painful gasps while the guards handcuffed, and then shackled to his legs, a two-foot metal bar to which a thirty-pound weight was attached. They stood him up, eye level with Faulkner who watched with a deep gratifying smile.
“There is a mistake. It must have been someone else,” protested Joshua.
Joshua did not flinch when the colonel struck him.
“The main mistake was allowing an infiltrator under my nose performing firsthand exploration for days. Are you shallow of mind to forget your resistance speaks volumes?”
The colonel dropped in his chair behind his desk and steepled his fingers, examining Joshua like a rare insect. “You used my cousin, didn’t you?”
A chill touched the base of his spine. His question implicated Juliet by association. She would be taken prisoner or hanged.
“I’m waiting, Mr. Hansford.”
By acknowledging her innocence, he signed his own death sentence. “Yes. She was easy prey. She had told me she was related to you. When I saw her taken prisoner by Onontio, I used her desperate circumstances as an opportunity to gain entry to the fort to scrutinize your defenses.”
Faulkner slammed his hand down with such force that it sounded like a gunshot and startled his aide so badly, he pinched his fingers in the desk drawer. “Get the Indian he came here with.”
Joshua swore beneath his breath. Now Two Eagles was incriminated. Had his friend heard his warning?
