“Who am I doing this for?” Dobson’s head tipped to the side. He seemed oblivious to the fact that his knee was digging into her abdomen and his forearm was pressed tight against her neck. They could have been discussing china patterns in the drawing room, and the nonchalance of his tone frightened Charlotte far more than anything else. “For myself, first. You’ve had your nose stuck up in the air since you came here. Nothing has been good enough for you. Shire House hasn’t been good enough for you.” He leaned his weight into the arm he held against her throat. The foul scent of his breath clogged her nostrils and she gasped for breath, her body writhing and contorting against the floorboards. Just as her vision began to darken completely, Dobson sat back on his heels.
She gasped and sputtered, sucking in air and crying out when her chest burned as though on fire. “I’ll give you whatever you want.” The plea tasted sour in her mouth, but she had no other option than to beg for her life. Hating him, hating herself, she whispered, “Please don’t hurt me. I swear on my mother’s life I will not tell Gavin.”
“Hurt you? I am not going to hurt you.” Dobson rocked back on his heels and stood up. Wiping his sweating palms on his vest, he straightened the lapels on his jacket and leered down at her. “Well, no more than I already have. But this will be child’s play compared to what he has in store for you.” The butler made a tsking sound and wagged his finger at her. “You never should have tried to run from him. He’s giving me a fortune for your return. I’ll never have to open another door for the likes of you and your husband again.”
Charlotte thought she had been afraid before. It was nothing compared to the terror that consumed her now. Her blood turned to ice, chilling her to the bone. She felt all the color drain from her face and her fingers, even though she willed them not to, trembled violently when she raised them to her lips.
How could she have lulled herself in a false sense of security? Paine was not a man who gave up easily. He had seen two wives dead and buried. He wanted a third by fair means or foul. What was he going to do with her? What was he going to do to her?
Months had passed since that day in his garden when she spurned his advances and he laughed in her face. A sane man would have moved on. A reasonable man would have forgotten, if not forgiven. But the duke was neither sane nor reasonable, and Charlotte shuddered to think what fate awaited her if she were delivered into his hands.
“No. No, you do not understand. You can’t do this, Dobson. Whatever he’s paying you I’ll double it. I’ll triple it,” she said wildly. Reeling onto her elbows she scrambled back and bumped hard into a chair. With Dobson standing between her and the door there was nowhere else to go. Nowhere else to run.
But she would be damned if she surrendered willingly.
“Get up.” Dobson nudged her leg with the toe of his boot. “The carriage is waiting. We can do this the hard way or the easy way. I would prefer the former, but I do have orders to bring you to him in” – he smacked his lips together suggestively – “working condition.”
Squeezing her eyes shut, Charlotte forced more tears to fall. “Please don’t do this,” she whimpered piteously. “I’ll give you anything you want.”
Another nudge, harder this time. “I said get UP.”
“I can’t. I… I feel like I am going to be ill. You have to help me.” Curling one hand over her stomach, she hunched forward and extended the other. She heard Dobson sigh, grumble something unintelligible under his breath, and tried not to cringe when she felt his cold, clammy skin slide against hers.
For a moment she considered screaming, but what good had it done her so far? Taking a deep, even breath she allowed Dobson to pull her to her feet. He released her hand and she swayed back and forth, bracing her fingers to her temple as though dizzy.
“There is no time for this,” he growled impatiently. When he reached to jerk her towards the door, she attacked.
Gavin knew something was wrong.
The feeling hung over his head all day. It followed him like a dark, heavy cloud threatening rain. He may not have felt the drops, but he knew the cloud was there nevertheless, and his wariness grew by the hour until he finally stood up and excused himself in the middle of one of most important business mergers of his life.
The lord with whom he had been attempting to negotiate an alliance with that would benefit both of them greatly in the months to come stood up, his jowls quivering in indignation when Gavin gathered his coat.
“What is the meaning of this?”
“My attorney will handle the rest of the details.” Gavin paused at the door to look pointedly at his lawyer, a tall, slightly built man in his forties with a nervous tick and a mind just shy of genius. “I will return tomorrow to sign the contracts.”
Lord Hansel Burn, an earl of considerable wealth accustomed to getting exactly what he wanted when he wanted it, was not satisfied in the least. “Now see here, Graystone. It’s you I am doing this deal with and it bloody well better be you I get, not your lackey. Now kindly take off from the door and sit yourself down so we can settle this like gentleman.”
“Ah, see, that is where you are wrong.”
“Wrong?” The earl’s forehead creased.
“I am not a gentleman.” Ignoring Burn’s request to return to his seat, Gavin stepped out of the opulently decorated drawing room and into the hall. “And with all due respect, if you believe my signature underneath yours means I will be taking orders from you, you can take that pipe you have not stopped smoking for the past two hours and shove it up your arse. Good day to you, Lord Burn. Timothy, see that everything is handled accordingly.”
“Yes sir.”
The earl’s eyes threatened to bulge out his head when Gavin slammed the door behind him. “Is he always like this?” he asked, turning to the attorney in disbelief.
“Oh yes,” Timothy said, nodding vigorously.
“Well where the bloody hell is he off to in such a rush?”
“Home, I believe. He’s a newlywed and is quite taken with his wife.”
“Is he now.” Leaning back in his chair, Burn rubbed his chin and hid the grin that tugged at the corners of his mouth with the palm of his hand. Having been more or less happily married to the same woman for twenty-two years, the earl fancied himself a knowledgeable man where matrimony was concerned. Even so, it had taken him quite a while to figure out that if you wanted to keep your wife happy, their needs always held priority over business. The fact that Graystone seemed to know this already made him a smart man, and Burn liked working with smart men.
“Go on then,” he said, nodding to papers scattered across the desk between them. “I do not have all day. Draw up the next contract. Does Graystone want an eight or ten percent commission on this one?”
Timothy didn’t bother to glance at the list in front of him. “Twenty,” he said. “Mr. Graystone takes twenty percent across the board and not a shilling less.”
“Smart man,” Burn said, repeating his thought out loud. “No wonder he’s going to end up richer than the rest of us combined, devil take him. Very well. Fifteen it is.”
Timothy didn’t blink. “Twenty.”
“Eighteen.”
“It was a pleasure to meet you, Lord Burn.”
“Oh, sit down,” the earl grumbled when Timothy began to gather up his papers, “and have a glass of scotch. If you and Graystone are going to insist on robbing me blind you might as well be civil about it.”
Hiding a grin of his own, Timothy sank back down into his chair. He had come to work for Gavin three weeks ago, and in that short amount of time his respect and admiration for his employer had grown to epic proportions. People often asked him why he thought Gavin was so successful. The answer, to Timothy’s mind, was simple enough.
Gavin was not afraid of failure.
He was a man who knew what it was like to go hungry. He had done it before, and was prepared to do it again. He carried that nonchalance with him into every meeting. It frightened and intimid
ated far more than any words or actions ever could, and as a result he almost always got exactly what he wanted.
Only Timothy and Ernie knew that Gavin was beginning to dictate more of his responsibilities. This was not the first meeting he had left early, nor would it be the last. Timothy would often catch him staring off into space, a vague smile on his lips, and knew he was not thinking of the business at hand but rather of his wife.
He would never hand over the reins completely – of that Timothy was certain – but there was a shift taking place. An unspoken rearranging of priorities. Timothy only hoped one day he would find someone who put the same light in his eyes that he saw in Gavin’s. Until then business would be his mistress, a mistress he had willingly inherited from his employer.
Pulling a contract from beneath the pile of papers, he pushed it across the desk towards the earl and offered a quill freshly dipped in ink. “Your signature, my lord.”
Releasing one long, suffering sigh Burn bent his head and signed.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Charlotte went for Dobson’s eyes.
Curling her fingers she clawed mercilessly at his face, stabbing and scratching at the soft, doughy flesh until blood trickled down her wrists and stained the sleeves of her dress a dark, ugly crimson.
Dobson howled in agony. He wrenched himself from side to side but Charlotte clung to him with all the tenacity of a feral dog, unhooking her claws only when he managed to get a fist between them and plowed it into her stomach.
“My eyes!” He staggered blindly away, upending a small wooden table. It crashed to its side, splintering on impact. “You bitch! You’ve blinded me.”
Ignoring the pain in her abdomen, Charlotte darted forward, wrapped her hands around one of the spindly legs jutting out from the broken table, and wrenched it free. She tripped over the hem of her skirts and stumbled, but managed to right herself without falling. Holding the table leg in front of her like a club, she waved it at the butler’s mangled face. Tears she hadn’t even realized she was crying streamed down her cheeks, mixing with the blood splatter from the long, vicious gouges in Dobson’s cheeks to create a macabre watercolor.
She swung the leg. Dobson tried to jump back, but with his eyesight compromised he moved clumsily. She brought it down across the arm he raised to protect his face and the impact of wood against flesh sang through her entire body. Dobson cried out in pain. Charlotte felt only grim satisfaction.
“Bastard,” she hissed. Raising the leg she waved it menacingly in the air. The butler cringed, tripping over his own feet in his haste to get away. He landed sprawled in a heap, pinned between a bureau with a long scratch mark running down the length of it and the wall. He did not try to get up. Charlotte was not surprised by his cowardice.
It took a coward to attack an unarmed woman. A coward to plan something so devious. A coward to attempt to carry it through. She tried not to think of what would have happened if he had managed to get her out of the house and into the carriage. Instead she thought of why Dobson would ever do such a thing, and when no answer immediately presented itself she could not help but ask.
Still keeping a tight grip on the makeshift club, she rested it over one shoulder and kept her gaze pinned on the butler. He may have appeared outwardly defeated, but she was not about to let herself be fooled by him again.
“What did I do to make you hate me so? I have done you no wrong. I have never been unkind to you.”
Squinting up at her out of the eye that wasn’t swollen shut, Dobson said, “Your husband never should have purchased Shire House to begin with. If not for him, none of this would have happened.”
“But why?” she persisted. Her hands unconsciously tightened on the club, her knuckles turning white. “Without Gavin, the house would have fallen into complete ruin.”
“Because it was not his to buy!” Dobson’s face darkened to a deep, incensed red. “It should have been mine. It all should have been mine.”
Charlotte shook her head. Devoid of pins, her hair tumbled in a long tangle of curls down her back. With her torn and bloodied dress, bruised throat, and swollen eyes she imagined she looked quite a fright. Her body ached. Her chest burned. She wanted nothing more than to soak in a hot bath for the next three days straight, but she couldn’t leave without knowing what had pushed Dobson over the edge into insanity.
Nothing he said made sense. As head butler Dobson was given a comfortable salary, but he never would have possessed the means to buy Shire House outright, a fact he surely must have been aware of. “I do not understand.”
“Of course you don’t.” Turning his head to the side, he spat on the floor. His saliva was the color of blood. “You are a woman. As weak and spineless as the rest of them.”
“Funny,” she said softly, “you did not seem to find me weak and spineless a few moments ago.”
He flushed. “You caught me off guard, that’s all. Underneath that pretty face you’re just like my mother. A helpless, cowering, pitiful excuse of a human being who couldn’t give her son what was owed to him by birth!”
A piece of the puzzle fell into place. “You truly believe Shire House is rightfully yours, don’t you?”
“Because it IS mine!” Dobson shouted. He started to get up on his knees, but one pointed swing of the chair leg had him crouching back down. “It is mine.” He spoke in the sullen tone of a child. “It was always meant for me since the moment I was born. He didn’t have any other children, did he? His wife was barren. Serves the bitch right. Always walking around here with her nose up, barking orders left and right.”
Charlotte nearly dropped her club. “Lord Shire was your father. You… You are his son.”
“His illegitimate son,” Dobson said scornfully. “My mother could have made him claim me, but no. I was an accident, she told me. A mistake made after Lord Shire went up to the servants quarters looking for someone to tup after a few too many glasses of wine. To cover it up she married the butler before she began to show. He had had his eye on her for years, never knowing what kind of a slut she really was. Shire House should have belonged to me! I grew up inside her walls. I cared for her when I came of age. I loved her as no one else ever did, and what is my reward? Bowing and scraping to the likes of your husband, a man without an ounce of blue blood in his veins!”
So much hate, Charlotte thought dazedly. It had festered inside of Dobson all of his life. Hate for his mother. Hate for his father. Hate for those who had what he could not. It was a wonder he managed to hold onto his sanity for as long as he did, and despite the pain of what he had put her through she could not help but feel a stirring of pity.
“I am certain your mother provided for you the best she—”
“What do you know of it? You, a lady who married a commoner! Your husband is nothing.”
Ignoring the protesting ache and pull of her muscles, Charlotte drew herself to her full height and lifted her chin. “He means something to me, and that is all that matters. I am sorry your life did not turn out as you hoped, but we all have choices to make, and you will have to answer for yours.”
Dobson glared at her. “I have no one to answer to, least of all—”
“CHARLOTTE! CHARLOTTE, WHERE ARE YOU?”
At the achingly familiar sound of Gavin’s voice, Charlotte forgot Dobson existed. Her knees wobbled and she was forced to lean against a desk. At last, she thought. It is over at last. The chair leg clattered to the floor. Relief came in a sigh, one that threatened to turn into a sob before she choked it back and called out, “In here! Gavin, I am in here.”
She heard his pounding footsteps as he raced through the house. The door to the parlor was swung open so hard it crashed into the wall and plaster rained down in white powdery flakes. Gavin did not even seem to notice. He had eyes only for Charlotte, and when he took in her disheveled appearance he released a vicious curse the likes of which she had never heard before.
“Who did this to you?” His eyes wild, his face pale, he kicked asid
e what remained of the broken chair and pulled her against the length of his hard body, cradling her as though she were made of delicate glass, which at the moment it felt as though she was. She wrapped her arms tightly around him, clutching at the folds of his jacket as she inhaled his scent.
“I am so glad you’re here,” she murmured, burrowing her face into his chest. “I was so frightened.”
He touched her gently, his hands running down the length of her spine before traveling up her arms and across her ribcage as though to ensure himself she was all in one piece before he cupped her cheeks. She stared up at him, her eyes swimming with unshed tears, and he swore again. “All of the blood—”
“It isn’t mine. Well, most of it isn’t,” she amended.
“Who?” he repeated harshly. “Tell me who did this to you.”
Charlotte did not speak. She simply pointed.
“Dobson?” The shock in Gavin’s voice was mirrored by the shock on his face. He gazed slack jawed at his trusted butler, seemingly unable to move, before Charlotte felt a hard shudder wrack his body and he released her to throw himself at Dobson.
The butler screamed like a stuck pig and then there was only the sound of flesh hitting flesh, furious curses, and mewling whimpers.
“Gavin, stop. You are going to kill him. Gavin, STOP!”
Breathing heavily, Gavin whirled away from Dobson. The butler appeared unconscious but alive. His nose was grotesquely broken, as well as his jaw. It hinged crookedly off to one side, and Charlotte averted her gaze.
A vein pulsed in Gavin’s forehead. His hands, streaked red with blood, were still curled into fists. His chest rose and fell in time with his raggedly drawn breaths, and the pain in his eyes reflected the pain she felt in her body. “He hurt you.”
“Yes,” she acknowledged with a nod, “he did. Have him arrested. Have him sent away so I never have to see him again, but do not kill him. I do not want his death on your conscience.”
Runaway Duchess (London Ladies Book 1) Page 24
