Read Escape with A Rogue for Free Online

petal-soft, desire-warmed skin.
    He was naked and, like a kitten, she purred and stretched against him, as though trying to press every inch of her skin to his. Her nipples to his chest. Her hot, sweet cunny against his aching, rigid pole.
    “ Madeline .” Her name. It was all he could manage to say. Over and over. Spilling out of his mouth as though if he didn’t say it, she would disappear—
    “Travers.”
    Something shoved him hard enough to knock him into the next room. “Wake up, Travers.”
    “Huh? What?” It wasn’t a beautiful woman’s face hovering over him. The blurry hair he could see was coal-black and tamed in a long queue. A gaze from narrowed black eyes drilled into his forehead.
    Jago Wycliffe, the Cornish smuggler, had his bare foot propped on Jack’s bed. Instead of hammocks, boards and thin mattresses were used for the beds in the new cells. Wycliffe had pushed Jack’s shoulder and now his muscled arms crossed over his bare chest. “We’ve got to decide what’s to be done about that apty cock, Hammond Faulkner.”
    Jack shook his head, fighting to drag his thoughts from Madeline. His threadbare blanket had slid off him. He’d knocked his thin pillow off and it rested in the corner, propped against the iron bars that divided his cell from Beausoleil’s. Unlike the prisoners of war, they weren’t housed in one large barrack-type room. The militia had forced them to build their own cells in the cockcroft of Prison Block One, with walls of close-spaced bars, heavy timber floors, and iron-encased doors.
    ‘Apty cock’ was a Cornish term for ass. He was going to ask Wycliffe what he was talking about when Beausoleil leaned against the bars of his cell. “Piss proud this mornin’?” he inquired politely.
    Heat washed over Jack’s neck—it must have turned scarlet. He stared down at the ridge lifting his coarse trousers. “You’re as big a bloody fool as I am,” he muttered to it.
    “ My lady would be impressed—” Beau began on a wide grin.
    “Speaking of bloody fools . . .” Wycliffe shifted his foot from the bed and began to pace. He kept clenching his fists to flex his big biceps. “That ass Faulkner is planning to betray us and do a runner ahead of us. He does it and we’ll never get out. If he uses our plan, then our game is up. I’ve got to get out—I’ve a wife to find.”
    “So do I,” Beausoleil added.
    In the cell beyond Beausoleil, a huge man known only as “Black” gripped the bars and gave a rumbling growl like a caged animal. In all the months they’d been in the prison, Black had spoken only once—to tell them he was in prison for murder, but he was innocent. After that he hadn’t said a word. Hammond Faulkner’s cell was empty, as was young Simon’s. The seventeen-year-old had been the last of the English prisoners to arrive.
    “Guards took them both at dawn to be questioned by Captain Livingston,” Wycliffe grumbled.
    Jack scratched his jaw. At least he was wilting now below his waist, which meant he could put his mind back on the escape. “Faulkner won’t betray us. He wants out as much as we all do. He won’t tell Livingston.”
    “He intends to get that key from you, Travers, even if he has to rip out your belly to do it.”
    Faulkner? “He’s a forger, not a fighter.” The man was five feet tall, flabby, and weak. His skill was in replicating banknotes, official letters, and coins. That was what had landed him in prison. Faulkner was like a vole—small, scurrying, ready to run for cover at a frightening sound.
    “Don’t make the mistake of underestimating Faulkner,” Wycliffe warned. “He’ll try something. Are you keeping the keys on you?”
    Was this all a ruse to get him to reveal where he’d hidden the keys? “Think I’d be mad enough to do that?” Jack responded casually. “They’re well hidden. And safe.”
    Wycliffe shrugged. “That doesn’t mean Faulkner won’t try to stab you, thinking you’ll tell him where you