He turned to leave and Roxbury commanded, “Wait!” When the man looked back at him, he asked, “You could have sold the memorandum to the French for far more than what is in that bag. Why didn’t you?”
A bitter smile curved the handsome mouth. “There may be blood on my hands and I may be a thief and a robber and live by my wits, but I am no traitor to England.”
Roxbury nodded. His gaze considering the man before him, he said slowly, “You’re very clever and bold; I could use a man with your talents. Would you be interested in working for me?”
The intruder chuckled, shaking his head. “I work for no master, your grace. You’d find that I am not easily brought to the bridle.”
“And do you think that men like Lord Thorne are easily brought to the bridle?” Roxbury asked curiously.
The intruder hesitated, then shook his head decisively. “I’m sorry to refuse you, your grace,” he said with a hint of regret in his voice, “but Lord Thorne and the like have something I will never have. I would be of no use to you.” And then he was gone.
Roxbury stared at the opened French door through which the man had disappeared. It never occurred to him to raise the alarm and, thinking of the precious memorandum resting in his safe, he decided that it had been a fair exchange, after all. Roxbury admired the boldness of the man, and oddly enough he wished his intruder well. There was, he mused, no reason for anyone to know that gold had been exchanged for the memorandum. It would be, he thought wryly, their little secret.
Seating himself behind his desk, he rang for his butler. There were messages to be written and delivered and he reached for his quill and ink bottle.
It was a few days before Jack and Garrett returned to Sherbrook Hall and related the amazing events in London. They came to call late one fine May afternoon and found Marcus and Isabel entertaining their guests, the Earl and Countess of Wyndham and Mr. and Mrs. Charles Weston, on the terrace. Garrett was vaguely familiar with both Lord Wyndham and his lady, and he had met Charles upon more than one occasion over the years. Daphne was new to him and he was instantly charmed by her friendly nature.
Jack had met both his cousins previously, but as with Marcus, they were almost virtual strangers and he had not yet met their wives. Introductions were made, congratulations were offered on his inheritance, refreshments served, and in no time everyone was at ease, chatting like old friends.
Isabel noticed immediately that both men seemed more relaxed and lighthearted and she puzzled over what had transpired in London to bring about this transformation. Once the niceties were dispensed with, unable to contain her curiosity any longer, she demanded, “Oh, Jack, tell us what happened! What did Roxbury say about the stolen memorandum?”
“Yes, do tell us,” encouraged Charles. “Isabel and Marcus have brought us abreast of the situation, and we have all wondered how the loss of the memorandum will affect the war.”
Jack hesitated, thinking of the stranger’s admission to Roxbury that Whitley was dead. His gaze was uneasy as he took in the expectant faces of the women. “Uh, perhaps I could speak privately with the gentlemen,” he finally muttered. “It, uh, isn’t a topic for the ladies.”
“Oh, pooh!” exclaimed Isabel. “We already know all about it, so there is no reason to think it is something only fit for the ears of gentlemen. I was abducted, Jack! I have just as much right to know what is going on as Marcus does.” She gave his arm an impatient yank. “Now tell us. What happened?”
Marcus grinned at him. “You’ll find that there is very little you can keep from intelligent women. You might as well tell them; they’ll get it out of us eventually.”
Jack capitulated. “By Jove! It is the most amazing thing,” he said excitedly. “The very night I arrived, Roxbury had a visitor.” He glanced at Isabel. “We’re convinced it was your ‘gentleman.’ ” His eyes gleamed. “Can you believe it? The fellow gave him the memorandum! He said he might be a thief, but he wasn’t a traitor! So the French didn’t get their hands on the memorandum after all.” Looking around from one astounded face to the other, Jack laughed. “Yes, you may stare. I did when I woke in the morning and Roxbury told me that all was well. I didn’t know whether I was on my heels or my head.”
“The deuce you say!” burst out Marcus incredulously. “If he was going to turn it over to Roxbury, why the devil did he go to all the trouble of abducting Isabel and stealing it from us in the first place? We’d have turned it over to Roxbury.”
Jack shook his head. “I don’t know.” He frowned slightly. “The man confessed to knowing that Whitley was dead. Knowing Roxbury, I’m positive that there is more to the matter than Roxbury is telling me, but the main thing, the most important thing, is that the memorandum is back at the Horse Guards where it belongs and Wellesley’s plans are in full swing.”
Alone in their private rooms later that night, Isabel said to Marcus, “I know it is unfeeling of me, but I cannot be very sorry that Whitley is dead. He was a bad man.”
They were seated on a balcony just off Marcus’s bedroom, enjoying the soft spring air, Isabel sipping a glass of warm milk, Marcus toying with a small glass of cognac.
Marcus nodded. “He probably didn’t deserve to be murdered, though.”
“How can you say that?” she demanded, outraged. “Marcus, he was trying to destroy Edmund’s life and he was going to sell that memorandum to the French! Of course he deserved to be murdered!” She thought a moment, then added fiercely, “Or hanged.”
Marcus couldn’t argue with her logic and said, “You’re right. Whitley got precisely what he deserved.”
Satisfied that Marcus felt just as he ought, she asked, “What did you think of Jack’s news?”
He shrugged. “It sounds like a Banbury tale to me. That fellow went to far too much trouble to simply hand the memorandum over so tamely. I think Jack is right. Roxbury isn’t telling all he knows.”
There was silence for a few minutes as they each mulled over what Roxbury might be hiding. Finally Isabel said, “It is very strange, isn’t it?”
Marcus nodded and, tired of Jack, Whitley, and the whole affair, he said, “But enough of that ... have I told you how very much I love you?”
She giggled. “Not for the past fifteen minutes.”
“How remiss of me!” He rose and scooped her up into his arms. “I love you, Isabel,” he said huskily.
“Oh, Marcus! I love you!”
Kissing her, he carried her to his bed. “And now,” he said with a husky note in his voice, “I intend to show you exactly how very much I do love you.” And he did.
Marcus woke several hours later. Isabel was curled warmly next to him and for a moment he let himself revel in her nearness. He thought about waking her with a kiss and making love again, but despite his best efforts, his thoughts kept slipping away to Roxbury and the stranger who had returned the memorandum.
Deciding sleep would be impossible for now, Marcus slid from the bed and slipped on his dressing robe. Strolling to the balcony, he stared out at the darkness.
Where was Isabel’s abductor? Marcus wondered. What sort of dangerous mischief might he be planning at this very moment? He stared for a long time into the night, his thoughts on the stranger, trying to understand what drove a man to do what he had done and why. A yawn took him. Enough of this useless speculation. Everything had ended well, he reminded himself, the gentleman had even, one might say, acted like a gentleman... . And that was the end of it. Like a shooting star the man had blazed into their lives and was now gone, never to be seen again. But as he turned away to rejoin his wife, Marcus had the unsettling notion that they’d not heard the last of Isabel’s “gentleman”... .
If you enjoyed SURRENDER BECOMES HER,
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Rapture Becomes Her
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He was going
to die, Barnaby thought incredulously. He was going to drown in the middle of the night, in the midst of a storm sweeping across the English Channel, and no one would ever know what had happened to the most recent holder of the title Viscount Joslyn. He would have simply vanished.
A crackling bolt of silver lightning snaked across the black night sky and through the heavy rain, Barnaby glanced desperately around trying to get his bearings, searching frantically for something to use to save himself, but all that met his gaze was roiling seas. There was no land or sign of rescue to be seen. He was going to die, he thought again as the brightness from the lightning vanished and he was left alone in the blackness. Fighting to keep afloat in the churning water, he admitted that there would be some in London who would rejoice at his passing and heading that list would be his newly met English cousin, Mathew Joslyn.
Mathew had been furious that the title, long considered his, was going to an American and with it the Joslyn family fortune and estates. “A bloody, half-breed colonist, Viscount Joslyn? It is an insult!” Mathew snarled at their first meeting three months ago in October in the London solicitor’s office.
Barnaby didn’t blame Mathew for being angry. In Mathew’s shoes he might have felt the same way, but he wasn’t about to allow the slur to pass. “You are mistaken,” Barnaby drawled. “It was my grandmother who was half-Cherokee.” He smiled, showing his excellent teeth. “But I warn you—you would be wise not to use that term again in my hearing. As for being a colonist ...” His black eyes full of mockery, he continued, “I think you forget that America gained her independence from Britain a decade ago. I am a citizen of the United States.”
“Very well,” Mathew snapped, his cheeks faintly flushed, “but it is insupportable that someone like you should think to step so easily into command of my great-uncle’s estates. Good God, man, you don’t know the first thing about running an estate like Windmere. You’re little more than a backwoods upstart!”
Barnaby held on to his temper with an effort, thinking that it wouldn’t help his cause any if his first act as Lord Joslyn was to throttle his cousin. He took a deep breath and, letting that last comment ride for now, said curtly, “I would remind you that I am not uneducated and that I have been overseeing my own plantation in Virginia for a number of years. I’ll grant you that Green Hill is not as vast as Windmere—there will be differences, but I’m quite capable of managing Windmere.”
Mathew’s lips tightened. “Perhaps, but you are a fool, if you think that someone with a grandmother who is a half... uh, part savage will be eagerly accepted by the ton as Viscount Joslyn.”
“Considering the situation with France, you should be more worried about the fact that my grandmother’s father was a Frenchman,” Barnaby retorted. The expressions of horror on the faces of those present at this new abomination had Barnaby biting the inside of his cheek to keep from grinning. His gaze swept the handsome room and with his foes momentarily silenced, he rose to his impressive height and walked to the door. His hand on the knob, he looked back at Mathew and said softly, “Upstart I may be, but I’ve never lived in the backwoods and you, sir, can go hang—and for all I care, take the damn title with you!”
It had been a pleasurable moment, but as he lifted his face above the next wave and the cold seeped deeper into his bones, Barnaby tried to remember the events leading up to his present predicament, but his thoughts were sluggish and erratic. Like a serpent curling around its prey, the icy water was inexorably draining the life from him and with every second, his will to survive wavered.
It would be so easy, so simple, he thought, to let the storm have its way, so easy to stop fighting and allow himself to be pulled down into the depths... . A wave slapped him in the face, startling him and shattering the seductive song of death that crooned in his head.
With a curse, he renewed his struggle to stay afloat in the darkness—if only for a few seconds longer. Ignoring the stinging pain at the back of his head, knowing they would only weigh him down, he vaguely remembered freeing his knife fastened at his ankle and then jettisoning his boots and heavy greatcoat, along with his jacket within minutes of hitting the water. He’d held on to the knife for a while, until he realized it was hampering his ability to swim, and then reluctantly he’d let the waves take it. Those memories did him little good because he still had no idea how he had ended up in the Channel, yet oddly enough he knew he was in the English Channel. But when or how he had gotten there, he had no inkling. His mind was blank—as much from the lethal cold as the blood he had lost from the wound on the back of his head.
He frowned. How the devil did he know he had a wound? And how did he know that the wound had bled? Again he had no answers and as his head slipped beneath the onslaught of another wall of water the urge to end it, to let the cold and the Channel have its way, was nearly impossible to resist.
But as his friends often pointed out, he could be stubborn as a mule, and with a powerful kick of his long legs he surged up above the waves. He wasn’t, he swore, with a fierce grin, going to make it easy for anyone or anything to kill him. Another streak of lightning lit the black sky and in that moment, Barnaby spied something that made his heart leap: several planks linked together bobbed in the water not six feet from him. He half recognized them as being a section of the floor of the yacht he had inherited along with everything else owned by the late Seventh Viscount Joslyn. Fighting his way toward that beacon of hope those boards represented, he struggled to think where the yacht had been moored and then it came to him: near Eastbourne on the Sussex Coast. But what in the hell had he been doing there?
He had no time for further thought, all of his focus was on surviving, and though it seemed that it took him hours to reach those planks, in mere minutes, his fingers brushed against the slippery wood. Getting himself out of the water took longer, the tossing waves and the shifting, slick surface of the planks thwarting his efforts, but finally, he was able to heave himself aboard the makeshift raft.
Gasping for breath, he rolled over onto his back, and his face pelted by rain, he stared up at the black sky. He was freezing, his teeth chattering, his body shaking from the cold, and he suspected he had traded one form of death for another. Exposure would kill him as sure as a hangman’s noose, but he wouldn’t die, he consoled himself grimly, by drowning. And that, he thought as he drifted into unconsciousness, was a victory of sorts.
“Is he dead?” asked Jeb Brown ghoulishly above the shrieking wind and rain whipping around outside the best room at The Crown. It was a pleasant room with high, open-beamed ceilings and a gleaming oak floor covered here and there with cheerful rag rugs, the space dominated by a huge bed, impressively draped with a rich green silk canopy. A fire glowed orange and gold on the brick hearth; soft yellow light from several candles lit by Mrs. Gilbert, the widowed owner of The Crown, flickered about the room and, despite the snarling storm, cast a cozy spell.
Mrs. Gilbert, her liberally streaked gray hair half hidden beneath a muslin cap, gave a sharp shake of her head. “No, he’s not dead. Half drowned and near frozen, but not dead.”
Jeb looked to the other occupant in the room, a tall, fair-haired youth wearing breeches, boots, and a leather jerkin over a billowy long-sleeved shirt. Looking beyond the boy’s garb, closer inspection revealed that the slim shape and finely etched features belonged to a young woman, her thick silvery-blond hair pulled back into a queue tied with a bit of black ribbon.
“I tell you, Miss Emily, it was pure luck I spied him,” Jeb said, his wrinkled fisherman’s face full of wonder. “With the storm and all, it’s black as midnight out there, and if it hadn’t been for this bloody big bolt of lightning at the very second I was looking in his direction, I never would have seen him.” He shook his head. “Good for him that we had run tonight else we’d be finding his body washed up somewhere along the shore—if we found it at all.”
Emily Townsend nodded and walked closer to stare down at the man Jeb had pulled from the waters of the Channel. �
��He was indeed lucky,” Emily said, her gaze running over the man who lay still and silent beneath Mrs. Gilbert’s examination. His hair was black, his skin so dark it was almost swarthy—except for the worrisome blue cast to his lips. From what she could see, he was an exceptionally tall, fit man—and a stranger to all of them.
Mrs. Gilbert muttered, “He had the devil’s own luck, I’d say.” Looking up from her examination, she added briskly, “And most likely will recover with no ill effects.” Her hand on the cold, damp blankets that Jeb had wrapped the stranger in once he’d dragged him on board his boat and stripped off the wet clothes, she glanced over her shoulder. “Miss Emily, you need to leave the room now,” she ordered, “and let Jeb and I put this nightshirt on him and get him into a warm bed.”
When Emily hesitated, Mrs. Gilbert’s plump face softened and she said, “I know you have dozen of questions to ask Jeb, but go fetch those hot water bottles I left in the kitchen.” When Emily’s jaw took on that mulish cast they all knew so well, Mrs. Gilbert said firmly, “It wouldn’t be proper for you to stay. By the time you return, we’ll have him snug and warm between the sheets. Now go.”
Emily snorted at Mrs. Gilbert’s determination to treat her like some gently born miss just out of the schoolroom. It was true, she was gently born, her father had been the local squire until his death seven years ago, but she’d turned six and twenty months ago and was no child. And, she reminded herself, if it weren’t for her, Jeb wouldn’t have been running a load of contraband from France tonight and the stranger wouldn’t have been found. She had every right to remain, but from past experience she knew that there was no arguing with Mrs. Gilbert and reluctantly she left the room. Never one to brood, by the time she reached the inn’s kitchen she was smiling. No one, she admitted ruefully, as she picked up the hot water bottles and accepted the heated brick thrust into her hands by Flora, the middle Gilbert daughter, no matter what age or standing, disobeyed Mrs. Gilbert. Even her cousin, the dissolute Squire Townsend, was known to scamper away like a schoolboy to escape a tongue lashing by Mrs. Gilbert.
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