Wilson, Gayle

by Anne's Perfect Husband

  "I won't marry you," she said to Travener. "And I don't believe that, even here, brides can be forced to the altar."

  "I wouldn't imagine you are the first reluctant bride to be carried across the Border. Or even the first who must be convinced to speak her vows. I hope, however, it won't come to that. You would be very foolish to imagine that you can resist my will."

  Despite the threat that might be more proper on the stage at Covent Garden, Travener's voice was almost caressing. And chilling. As if the thought of resistance excited him. The threat of violence was implicit in them, no matter the tone.

  Screaming or fighting him would probably make no difference to his determination. He sounded as if he might even like it. And, she had finally been forced to admit that it would probably make no difference to the Scots either. They have been paid quite handsomely...

  "I will not marry you, Mr. Travener, no matter what you say. You have proven yourself to be both a liar and a cheat. There is nothing you can do that will make me."

  He laughed. "Oh, believe me, my darling, before we return to England, you will be eager to exchange vows with me. And very grateful that I am still willing to marry you. And I will be, never fear."

  And yet she was increasingly certain that love had not precipitated this abduction. "Why are you doing this?" she begged, hating the note of despair she heard in the question.

  "Shall we simply say I have developed a passion for you that will not be denied. I'm sure your headmistress has warned you about man's baser nature. Or your guardian, perhaps?"

  It was as if she had left Fenton School with one person and arrived in Scotland with another. There was nothing of the charmingly diffident man she had considered little more than an engaging boy. A boy who believed himself to be in love with her. A boy she had dismissed as harmless.

  And at last, far too late, she had been forced to realize that Doyle Travener was neither. Neither harmless nor in love with her, no matter what he claimed. And that, she found, was the most frightening thing of all.

  ***

  "Little more than a hour ago, I should say. Less perhaps. I didn't see the lass, mind you, but he took a cup of mulled wine out to the coach while the hostlers changed out the teams. And he'd been pushing them hard, I can tell you."

  Not as hard as I have pushed mine, Ian thought, feeling a surge of triumph. Apparently the demands he had made on his teams had paid off. He was less than an hour behind his quarry and given the advantage Travener had enjoyed...

  Of course, the ex-lieutenant had also, of necessity, spent far more time at Fenton Hall. Ian had been inside only long enough to ascertain that Anne was not there and that Mr. Travener had indeed come for her. After that, he had not even delayed long enough to make the explanation Mrs. Kemp had so desperately pled for.

  Instead, as he had emerged from his two-question interview with the headmistress, he had simply thrown his promise to bring Anne safely back over his shoulder. And then he had encountered a small knot of little girls almost blocking the front hallway. Their eyes had been wide and frightened, their thin faces pale, but they had parted before him, like some biblical sea, opening a path to the door.

  From that point on, he had shown no mercy in his demand for speed from the horses he'd hired. And he had spared no expense in procuring the best the posting inns along the North Road could provide. His brother's coat of arms, emblazoned on the fast, open carriage he was driving, had been an extra prod to the hostlers' efforts. As had the money Ian had spread with a generous hand to reward them when they had finished a lightning exchange.

  As he had driven northward through the night, the countryside and the temperature had gradually changed. Despite its many capes, the woolen greatcoat he wore had long ago been penetrated by the dampness of the cold, rain-filled wind and his hands, covered by leather driving gloves, had gone numb from its chill.

  But he had come alone on this quest, of course, and he had no regrets about that decision. He could not know what he would find at the end of this journey, although he feared the worst. Whatever the situation that awaited him in Scotland, he had vowed there would be only three people who would ever know it.

  And only two of them would survive to see tomorrow's dawn, he swore grimly, urging the new team on with a crack of the whip. Although Ian Sinclair had not taken time to send for his brother, Dare's pistols resided beside him in their case, both of them primed and ready for the task that lay ahead.

  Chapter Sixteen

  "I'm looking for a woman," Ian said.

  When he had opened the door, the wind had blown the misting rain like a curtain into the public room of the small inn. The gust disturbed the even draw of the chimney, so that black smoke from the peat fire on the hearth swirled outward into the room. It mingled with the white that came from the clay pipes of the men who sat at the table in the center of the room, a game of draughts before them.

  "There be no women here."

  The player who had spoken was not the oldest, but he was undoubtedly the largest. And it was obvious by his readiness to answer a stranger's question that he was in some fashion their leader. Ian addressed his explanation directly to him.

  "The woman I'm looking for is my ward. She was kidnapped and brought north. I have followed her abductor's progress through the changing of his teams. However, since they did not reach the next inn on the main road, the owner there directed me here."

  "A fair clever bit of tracking you've done, then," the man said. "But I've told you. There be no women here. Not your ward nor any other."

  As he made his denial, he had lifted a beefy hand to scratch within his reddish-orange beard. Then, as if disinterested in further conversation, his mud-colored eyes left those of his uninvited guest and returned to the game.

  "If she is not here, then tell me where she is," Ian said.

  He raised the pistol he had hidden between a fold in the wide tail of his greatcoat, hoping that the dampness from the rain would not keep its powder from firing if he needed it.

  However, he had no intention of leaving until he had answers to his questions. And watching the eyes of the other men seated at the table, surreptitiously shifting between him and the man with the red beard, there was little doubt in Ian's mind that someone here knew them.

  As soon as he displayed the pistol, a breathless stillness settled over both the players and the watchers. After a long moment, the one who had spoken before again lifted his eyes from the board and focused them once more on the man in the doorway.

  "He said he was her betrothed. How are we to know which of you is telling the truth?"

  "Perhaps you should simply believe this instead," Ian said softly.

  He extended the pistol until his arm was perfectly straight, its muzzle directed at a lock of greasy hair that fell over the spokesman's forehead. The man's eyes didn't react to the threat, but they did remain fastened on Ian's, almost unwillingly, for a long heartbeat.

  "Clever tracking and all," he said finally, his voice almost sympathetic, "you be come too late to do the lass any good."

  Ian's heart lurched and then began to hammer. The air thinned around his head, but the hand that held the pistol never wavered.

  "I am not too late unless she's dead," he said. "Is that what you're telling me? That he has murdered her?"

  The man's eyes reacted to that, their porcine smallness widening in surprise. "She ain't dead, not as far as I know, but if you be planning to take her back to marry off to someone of your choosing... Well, then, she might as well be. Her prospects be dead, if you take my meaning. You needn't worry though. He plans to marry her all right. Just as soon as he can convince her to agree."

  There was a snigger from someone in the shadows by the fire, but Ian never looked up to seek its source. His eyes remained steadfast on the man with the red beard.

  "Take me to them," Ian said.

  "She said you'd pay."

  "You didn't believe her. What a shame."

  "Bird in hand," the
Scot said. Beneath the drooping mustache that covered them, the fleshy lips tilted in amusement.

  "In the years to come you should think about how much more you might have profited if you had chosen to protect a defenseless woman rather than aid a lying cur. And I hope he has already paid whatever he owes you. You'll find it difficult to do business with a dead man. And whether it's one dead man or two I leave behind tonight matters very little to me."

  Ian gestured toward the door with a small movement of the pistol. After a second's hesitation, the red-haired man pushed the chair he was sitting in away from the table and stood up. He towered a good six or seven inches over Ian's own six feet, and his weight would be almost double that of the Englishman.

  "I'll take you to them, but I tell you straight out, I'll have naught to do with murder in my house."

  "You don't, however, draw the line at abduction and rape?"

  The man said nothing. Nor did anyone else watching this scene unfold. It would be hard to argue that every man in this room hadn't known exactly what Travener was about.

  "Or do your scruples, such as they are, apply only to your own women?" Ian continued, feeling an overwhelming bitterness that none of them had attempted to help Anne.

  "I keep my women safe," the Scot said. "It's not me who claims to be that lass's guardian."

  Sickness stirred in Ian's stomach. Because it would be equally hard, of course, to mount a convincing argument against the validity of that accusation. After all, it was one he had made against himself countless times in the course of tonight's journey.

  ***

  The innkeeper had unlocked the door of the second-floor bedroom and then disappeared into the darkness of the hall. And when, after a long moment's hesitation, Ian had pushed it open, there was no gust of wind to warn the inhabitants that their privacy had been invaded.

  The fire that burned on its hearth was so low that the room was as cold as and far darker than the hallway in which he was standing. Inside the bedchamber's musty squalor, no candles had been lit, or if they had, they had long ago guttered out.

  It took another minute or so for Ian's eyes to adjust to the dimness. As they did, he held the pistol out before him, waiting for his target to materialize.

  The flickering firelight first illuminated a private supper, laid out on a small table that had been set before it. An untouched joint of meat lay on the platter, the grease in the congealing juices that were pooled around it iridescent. A loaf of bread had been broken into two portions, neither of which had been removed from the trencher they had been served on.

  Ian's eyes were drawn next, unwillingly, to the bed. They moved slowly across the flat, white expanse of its mattress. It was not until they had made that same journey twice that he could allow himself to acknowledge that it had no occupants. And acknowledge that his finger had closed over the trigger in anticipation of doing exactly what he had told the Scotsmen he had come here to do.

  Had Travener been sharing that bed with Anne, he would by now have been a dead man. Ian Sinclair, an officer and a gentleman, both by birth and by the royal decree of his King, knew he would have had no compunction in shooting the bastard in the back.

  Only when he had verified that the bed was empty did Ian remember to breathe, drawing air into lungs that had been starved for it by his sense of dread. And only now did the hand that held the pistol begin to tremble.

  In relief? Or in fear that he might yet discover something even worse than that which he had been expecting when he had opened the door of this room?

  Again his gaze began to move, carefully examining the thick shadows around the room's perimeter, even as his mind refused to contemplate what he was looking for. And what he found there was nothing he could ever have imagined. Not in any of those long hours during which he had relentlessly whipped his teams through the cold night and the rain.

  As his straining eyes focused on the scene that slowly emerged from the corner beyond the bed, the hammering of his heart, lodged now in his throat, threatened to choke him. Two motionless figures stood in the darkness, their postures painting a narrative of what had happened, one more vivid than if it had been told.

  The firelight turned Travener's hair to gilt. Perhaps that brightness was what had attracted Ian's eyes. They moved over the muscled width of Travener's bare shoulders and back. And then his gaze edged downward, over the pale buttocks, following the line of Travener's legs into the shadows that covered the worn, uneven planks of the floor.

  Drawn by a puddle of white that lay near Doyle's feet, his gaze moved again. And by fearfully tracing that pale spill of cloth upward, he found his ward.

  Anne was pressed into the corner, clutching against her breasts the other end of the sheet that trailed onto the floor. Above it, her exposed shoulders gleamed like pearl.

  Her right arm, the one not holding the sheet, was bent at the elbow, and held out awkwardly in midair. Finally Ian realized what she held in that hand. Her fingers were wrapped around the handle of a knife.

  The point of its blade was not directed toward her abductor. It was pressed instead against her own throat, the tip embedded so deeply that the smooth flesh was dimpled with its pressure. A trickle of blood, black in the firelight, seeped from the wound. It ran down the slim line of her neck and onto the swell of her right breast, clearly visible above the sheet with which she had tried to cover her nakedness.

  Frantically, Ian's eyes lifted to her face. It was as colorless as the cloth, marred by the marks of blows, which had already begun to darken. Her lip was swollen where it had cut against her teeth, and there was a spot of blood at the corner of her mouth.

  Her features were as rigid as if they had been carved from stone. Even with the noise of his entry, her eyes had not lost their concentration on the man standing less than three feet in front of her.

  Travener, too, was unmoving, both hands raised, their palms toward Anne. His fingers were spread as if, given the slightest opportunity, he was prepared to grab the knife she held. The firelight caressed the floss of golden hair on his forearms. And despite the pervasive chill of the room, it also glistened on a rivulet of sweat making its slow way down his spine.

  How long they had been like this, frozen in place by the sheer raw courage of the woman who held a knife to her own throat, Ian couldn't imagine. Nor could he guess what Anne might have said to convince Travener to stay away.

  It was possible that words alone had not accomplished that. The small stream of blood on her neck might well be the result of Travener's first attempt to take the knife from her. The fact that he was keeping his distance proved that, whatever had happened before, by now he fully believed her resolve.

  "Anne?" Ian said softly, reluctant somehow, despite his horror, to break her concentration.

  Travener did not turn, but at the sound of his voice, the girl's eyes shifted toward the door. The knife did not falter, nor did the pressure she was exerting lessen. Only by the widening of her eyes did she acknowledge the presence of a third person in the room.

  "I've come to take you home," Ian said, knowing the words were terribly inadequate to convey his intent.

  Her eyes moved back to Travener's face and then returned quickly to Ian's. This time they glazed with tears as they held on his. He knew he must seem only another part of this nightmare. A figment of her strained imagination. Someone she had conjured out of the shadows with her prayers.

  "It's over," he said reassuringly. "Put down the knife and come to me."

  He saw the depth of the breath she drew. The strength of its movement sent a shimmer of light running along the keen edge of the blade. And then another. And another.

  The hand with which she had held a madman at bay, ready to plunge the knife into her own throat, began to shake. She pulled the point away, and another surge of blood spilled from the wound as the tension on the fragile skin was relieved.

  Even after it was removed, her arm did not fall. It stayed in place, seeming locked in position. With
a visible effort of will she forced her elbow to straighten and her fingers to uncoil, allowing the knife to drop to the floor. Then, with the hand that had just released it, she gathered up the trailing sheet as if it were a ball gown.

  She ran across the room and threw herself against Ian's body. His left arm, the one that had received Travener's ball yesterday morning, closed around her. He ignored the pain, pulling Anne tightly against his side.

  He could feel her trembling, the vibrations as strong as those of someone in a hard chill. Without taking his eyes off her abductor, Ian lowered his head until his face was near enough to the tumbled curls to breathe in their subtle fragrance. And as he did, Travener finally turned around to look at him.

  "The gallant Major Sinclair," he said. "Again."

  Despite the pistol pointed at his heart, the blue eyes were derisive. The beautifully shaped mouth slanted sardonically, no longer arranged in the boyish smile he had worn like a badge of innocence through those weeks in London.

  "I suppose I should have known that when my ball didn't kill you outright, I could expect you to show up here. I wonder what it will finally take to put an end to your miserable existence."

  "Something more than your efforts, it seems."

  Travener laughed. "It would be the height of irony, I suppose, if your noble ride tonight to rescue your ward were to lead to your much-delayed demise."

  "The sweep and the mob were your doing, of course," Ian said, ignoring the other. "The highwaymen, as well?"

  "Whatever you're imagining, there was nothing sinister about those. Simply drama. A bit of masquerading. I had arranged to rescue Anne from both. Unfortunately, your interference left me with far too little to do. The second attempt was perhaps the more effective, but was damned difficult for me to appear heroic before Anne when you were doing such a masterful job of it."

  "And Mayfield?"

  "The story of Darlington's cowardice would have come out eventually. I simply gave it a small, timely nudge. I needed to speed things along."

  "To this?" Ian asked, his eyes falling to the trembling woman he held, before they rose again.