To Rescue a Rogue Read Online Free PDF Page B

brothel, perhaps. A simple business proposition, and no repercussions if he failed to perform, which seemed likely enough.
    How long was it since he bedded a woman?
    Before Waterloo.
    He didn’t count The´re`se.
    Yes, he should visit a whore. Otherwise, heaven alone knew what might happen. The cure, especially now, required him to live on the edge in almost constant need of opium.
    His body needed the beast to function. It punished shortage with pain of mind and body and rewarded every dose with blissful ease. After each dose the beast whispered that without it, he’d never know such peace….
    He jerked his mind away from that pit.
    He’d chosen life—desire, distress, pain, and all. He couldn’t wait to be free of the three small doses he took each day. Each night, he built his strength, forcing his body to accept that it could live without the beast as it had for most of his life.
    Every night his mind and body screamed. Every morning he greeted the foul dose like a drowning man gasping for air.
    He could feel the need now. A shiver of discomfort, an awareness that all was not well, as if he’d eaten something rotten and would soon vomit.
    It should be worse at this hour, but when he’d gone to find clothes for Mara, he’d coaxed a little more of the drug from Salter, arguing that he needed it in order to see Mara safely home and then deal with Berkstead. Salter hadn’t balked him, so his reasoning must have made sense, but deep inside the beast had purred in victory.
    Salter was his chosen guardian of the door to hell. From the day he’d been able to leave his bed, burly Salter had doled out his allowed amount of opium and accompanied him everywhere to prevent him from obtaining extra. He’d recently started to go out alone, testing his ability to resist the temptation available for pennies in every druggist’s shop.
    Laudanum for the headache and the toothache, or for calming a fretful baby. For the agony that came after being kicked in the head by a horse, then charged over by an army of others. He’d be dead if so many corpses hadn’t cushioned him.
    One day he’d be able to sit in a room with opium on the table and ignore it. One day. That was his Holy Grail. Now he shivered at the very thought. Any benefit from the extra dose was fading fast, but when he returned, he’d tell Salter never to let him change the pattern again, no matter what the circumstances.
    No retreat. No surrender.
    The horse stopped and he realized that he was back at the stables instead of in nearby Rennie Street.
    Dare let Adam take the horse and then walked back down the lane, hoping the groom didn’t notice he hadn’t gone directly into the house. It was ridiculous to be worried about what a groom thought, especially when all the servants knew about Lord Darius’s little problem.
    As he walked to Rennie Street he focused his fragmenting mind on his quarry. He burned to hurt or kill this Berkstead but Ruyuan wouldn’t approve. Ruyuan’s Taoist philosophy said to achieve action through minimal action. Hardly the English gentleman’s way of dealing with a villain, but he’d promised Mara the cur would live. If Oriental disciplines couldn’t restrain him, that would.
    He arrived in Rennie Street and considered the unbroken terraces of tall houses. He didn’t know the number. He made out an arched tunnel built through two houses to the back and entered its pitch-dark maw. The exit looked lighter by contrast, and when he emerged, moonlight shone on something white. Mara’s dangling rope of sheets.
    A flicker of something stirred and he recognized the temptation to mischief.
    He made his way to the rope and tugged it. Strong enough. He climbed up and then pulled himself over the sill into a dark room. It could be a coal cellar for all he could tell, but smells of dirty linen, snuff, and pomade spoke of a man’s room. He pulled in the