by Jane Feather
Dante caught his scent and began another frantic whirligig at the end of the rope that Hugo now saw bound him. Someone swore and turned on the dog, a knife lifted.
ChSoe hurled herself across the lane and grabbed his arm, her teeth sinking into his hand. The knife clattered to the ground, six inches from Hugo.
He had it in his hand while the other two men were grappling with Chloe, flinging a blanket over her head, struggling to restrain her wildly thrashing limbs in the suffocating folds. Hugo sliced through the rope holding Dante, and the dog leapt for the throat of one of the men holding Chloe. He went down with a shrill scream of terror.
One down, one unarmed. Hugo sprang for the third man's back. His knife sank into his shoulder. The man spun around, a look of total surprise on his face, his hand flying to his shoulder. Hugo reached forward and yanked his knife out of his belt.
He had no way of telling whether he had disarmed his opponents or whether one of them might produce a pistol. Either way, he was still one against three, and the odds, even with Dante, were not good enough to stay around and ask questions. Surprise was his last card.
Chloe was still struggling with the blanket, and he simply picked her up, maneuvered her slight weight over his shoulder, and again dived sideways into the undergrowth. He had no desire to present a running target for a pistol shot, and he had a boyhood's knowledge of the rough terrain.
Dante crashed through the bushes at his side and Hugo was capable of one grateful prayer that this time the dog didn't consider him the enemy, for all his rough handling of his mistress.
Chloe had the sense to lie still despite her shock and the violently jolting progress. Her head and arms were still buried in the stuffy folds of the blanket and she'd seen nothing of what had happened. But she knew who held her and she could hear Dante, so she lay limp and tried not to sneeze.
There were no sounds of pursuit. Hugo slowed as they broke through the underbrush onto the driveway of Denholm Manor. Chloe struggled, trying to bring her imprisoned arms up to free her head.
"Keep still." It was a curt instruction and she opened her mouth to respond, but the words were lost in a hairy mouthful of blanket. She sneezed violently.
Hugo used a word she'd never heard before and increased his pace. Until they were safely behind his own locked door, he wasn't prepared to stop to unravel her.
Dante, tail waving furiously, bounded up the steps into the house, his exuberance clearly unaffected by his recent ordeal. Hugo slammed the door behind him and threw the heavy iron bolt that he rarely used. He carried Chloe into the library. Only then did he set her on her feet and pull the swaddling blanket away from her.
"Who was it?" she said. "Why would anyone want to kidnap Dante? Do you think they thought he was valuable… I know he's unusual, but…"
For a minute Hugo was taken aback. She hadn't seen herself as the target of the attack. But then, why should she? She had almost no sense of self-importance, and it probably made better sense to her that her adored dog should be coveted than that anyone should have designs on herself.
Her face was pink and hot, strands of hair sticking to her cheeks, her eyes wide with a curious wonder rather than fear. She tossed her hair back and sneezed again. Hugo's heart turned over. She'd suffered enough rejection in her lonely life without being told that her family intended her harm… that she was of value to her kin only in terms of her fortune. Desperately, he resisted the urge to bundle her into his arms.
"I have not the slightest idea why anyone should be mad enough to want that ridiculous animal," he exploded. "For God's sake, just look at you! You've been told once about running around loose in nothing but your nightgown. And where the hell are your shoes? You'll catch your death of cold! And what the devil did you think you were doing anyway? Why didn't you call me when you heard Dante barking?"
At the sound of his name, Dante pricked up his ears. His tail thumped.
Chloe could never later analyze why she did what she did next. Earlier in the evening Hugo had awakened her from the chrysalis of her girlhood. Then she had been assaulted and terrorized, rage and fear coursing through her. And then she'd been rescued as suddenly and as violently as she'd been attacked. It seemed to her now that nothing ordinary could ever happen to her again.
Following blind instinct, she flung her arms around Hugo's waist and looked up at him, her head on his chest, her eyes dark with emotion. "Please don't be vexed," she begged, the catch in her voice as richly sensual as anything he had ever heard. "Please, Hugo."
The last tenuous thread of his resistance snapped. His arms went around her; a cupped palm molded the curve of her cheek. "I'm not vexed," he murmured, adding almost as a prayer. "I wish to God I were."
"Kiss me." She stood on tiptoe, reaching her arms around his neck, her small hands cupping his scalp, pulling his head down to her.
Hugo inhaled sharply at the soft yet insistent command, and all the preconceptions of his universe tilted as her lips locked onto his with a hungry assurance that had no place in the world of seminaries. She tasted of milk and brandy, of innocence and experience, and her body in his hands was soft and sinuous, hard and determined by turns.
He moved a hand to her breast, closing over the soft mound, his thumb stroking the hard bud of the nipple beneath her shift. She shuddered against him and her mouth opened to him, her body arching as she thrust her breast against his palm.
Chloe was adrift, storm-tossed on a wild sea of sensation. It was as it had been earlier, with that first kiss, and this time she was determined not to lose the sensation, but to follow the path to its end. Her mind held no sway over her responses as she drank greedily of his tastes and drew in the powerful male scents of his body.
He lifted her against him, his mouth still joined to hers, and placed her on the couch, coming down with her. Her nightgown rode high on her thighs. Impatiently, he pushed it to her waist, bending to kiss her belly, to curl his fingers in the silky fleece at the apex of her thighs.
Chloe cried out softly as he parted the fleece and found the core of her sensitivity. She was aware only of a wild excitement, of delight swirling and raging through her veins.
He slipped one hand beneath her, lifting her as he pulled the nightgown over her head, letting her fall back naked on the faded velvet cushions. She shifted on the cushions, her eyes half closed, glorying in the feel of her nakedness, in the pulsing stimulation of arousal.
Her arms lifted to him and he came down on top of her, his mouth closing again over hers as their tongues warred, danced, plunged in a wild spiral of passion that excluded all but the urgency of desire. Her legs curled around him, pressing her opened body instinctively against the erect shaft rising against his britches. With the same instinct her tongue darted, dancing in the corner of his mouth, running over his lips in a tingling, tantalizing caress.
Hugo tugged at the waistband of his britches, and her hands were helping him, pushing the restraining garment off his hips, then running in greedy exploration beneath his shirt, over the narrow hips, enclosing the burning, throbbing root that lifted to her touch.
There was a moment when he paused on the threshold of her eagerly welcoming body, a vague sense of unease hovering at the edges of passion. He looked down at her. Her eyes were closed, her face lost in joy. Then the thick golden eyelashes swept up, and her eyes like a midnight sky carried both appeal and a passion that matched his own.
"Please," she whispered, lifting her hand to touch his mouth.
Delicately, he guided himself within the moist, tender portal. He checked when he sensed the resistance of her maidenhead, and his muscles strained under the effort of will. But her hands went to his buttocks, gripping with urgent demand, and he yielded with a soft exhalation of release. For a second Chloe couldn't breathe as a taut fullness stretched her body, and then it gave way and her low cry was more a sigh of relief than a cry of pain.
Hugo touched the corner of her mouth, stroked her damp temples, moved his hand to her
breast, sliding his thumb over the pliant, responsive peak. He felt her relax, supple and open, and he eased deeper.
Pleasure raced through her from one nerve ending to another. She began to move with him, reveling in the joy of fusion. The bud of joy began to blossom, her muscles tightened in expectation of she knew not what. Then he withdrew to the very edge of her body and she lay beneath him, taut as a bowstring. He smiled down at her, knowing how she felt, knowing how close she was to fulfillment. With great deliberation he drove to the very center of her self and the bud burst into full flower. It was a long time before she moved beneath him, shifting on the cushions as the liquid dissolution of muscle and sinew faded and she came back to a sense of herself and the world around her. Hugo's body was heavy on hers, his head turned away from her on the cushions. She touched his back, where his shirt clung damply to his skin, feeling suddenly shy.
Slowly, Hugo sat up. He looked at her face in silence, a devastated look in his eyes that terrified her. She opened her mouth to say something… anything to break the silence. But the words were stillborn under that brooding green gaze. Instead, she tried to smile.
Hugo rose to his feet. He stood beside the couch, staring down at her. He saw the wanton sprawl of her naked body-the pose of a body that a man has just left. He saw the smite-the seductive smile of a lover. Her voice was still in his ears, demanding her fulfillment. He could feel her hands on his own skin, arousing, tantalizing, insistent. He saw a girl v/hose trust he'd violated as surely as he'd violated her innocence, but he also saw a seductress-a woman who'd had no doubt about the power of her beauty or of how to use that power.
Thoughts and images tumbled in his head. He could see Elizabeth in her daughter, but Elizabeth had had no passion, no hungers. She had been as pure and fragile as crystal despite her husband's attempts to sully her purity.
But Elizabeth's daughter was also Stephen's daughter. A man of passions and deep hungers. And it seemed to Hugo, looking at the abandonment of the woman he'd just initiated, that her father's passions and hungers ran as deeply and as virulently in the daughter.
God help him, but she would have enjoyed the crypt.
The unbidden, loathsome thought brought bile to his mouth, and black spots danced before his eyes. He snatched up her discarded nightgown. "Cover yourself."
The rasping command was so shocking after the silence that Chloe made no attempt to take the garment from him. She lay unmoving, gazing up at him, dismay chasing the soft glow from the blue depths of her eyes.
Hugo dropped the shift on her belly. "Cover yourself." he repeated. "And then go upstairs to your room." He turned from her, pulling up his britches with shaking hands.
In shock and disbelief Chloe sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the couch. Then she just sat there, holding her nightgown on her knees, too stunned to move. Hugo spun around. "Did you hear what I said?" Roughly, he pulled her to her feet. "I told you to put this on." He picked up her nightgown, dropped it over her head, and pushed her arms into the sleeves. "Now go up to your room."
"I don't understand," she whispered, crossing her arms and hugging her breasts. "What have I done?" She quailed before the look in his eyes, where vipers of rage and disgust darted at her. "Get out! Now."
She ran from the room, Dante at her heels. Hugo stood staring into the empty hearth, his mind skittering. Perhaps it hadn't happened… perhaps in a brandy trance he had dreamed it. Brandy played such tricks sometimes, so that one didn't always know what was true and what was fantasy.
But denial was a child's trick to escape consequences, and after a minute he went to close the door Chloe had left open. He glanced sideways at the couch. There was a dark stain on the faded velvet cushion where she'd been lying.
He sat down at the pianoforte, staring bleakly out at the dawn breaking beyond the window. Chloe had not been responsible. Her seductive behavior had been that of a young girl trying her wings. She didn't know her own power any more than she knew not to yield to swirling emotions and hungers she'd never before encountered. It had been his responsibility to provide the control. A sharp snub would have finished the business once and for all… Instead…
Hugo picked up the brandy bottle and hurled it against the paneled wall.
Chapter 7
How, in the name of goodness, could three able-bodied idiots fail to lay hands on a seventeen-year-old chit'"
Jasper Gresham stared in disbelief at the three men huddled in the dawn chill of the stable yard at Gresham Hall.
"It weren't our fault, sir." Jethro Grant, the only man still standing upright, spoke now for his wounded companions. "It was that dog from 'ell, bit Jake clean through 'is arm; and we wasn't expectin' no man with a knife on the road neither." A truculent note entered his voice. "You didn't say as 'ow there'd be any guards on 'er, Sir Jasper. Ned's got a demmed great 'ole in 'is shoulder… beggin' your pardon, sir."
Jasper's eyes, unreadable, untouchable, slithered over the man facing him and Jethro shivered, cleared his throat, and his shoulders slumped a little.
"And whose knife did this mighty assailant use?" Jasper demanded quietly. "Don't make excuses for your incompetence. It was a simple enough task, and you botched it." He turned on his heel.
Jethro looked in panic at his wounded companions, then spoke up again, a slight shrillness to his voice. "Sir Jasper… sir, what about our purse? A guinea apiece, you promised."
Jasper spun around and Jethro shrank as the blank, shallow eyes seemed to flay him. "I pay for work done, not for the incompetence of a trio of fools. Get off my land."
"But sir… sir… Ned can't work with that hole in 'is shoulder, and there's kiddies to feed… six of 'em, sir, and another on the way."
"Get off my land, the lot of you, before I set the dogs on you!"
"Oh, Jasper, is that quite fair?" The hesitant question came from a woman wrapped in a shawl, standing to one side of the stableyard.
"Are you questioning my judgment, madam?"
Louise Gresham's rare moment of courage died as her husband looked through her. "No… no, of course not, sir. I wouldn't do such a thing… it was only-" She fell silent.
"Only what, my dear?"
She shook her head abjectly. "Nothing… nothing at all."
"You will catch cold out here, my dear. I'm sure you must have business to attend to in the house." His voice was silky but the command was no less clear. Louise scuttled out of the yard, averting her eyes from the three men she had tried to champion.
"Crispin, see them off the premises."
"Certainly, sir." As his stepfather walked away, Crispin pushed himself away from the wall against which he'd been lounging. He strolled into the tack room and returned, carrying a heavy whip. His eyes gleamed with amusement as the three would-be kidnappers stumbled in terror toward the gate out of the yard. He pursued them lazily, cracking the whip at their heels until they had reached the end of the long drive and stood beyond the gateposts.
"Good day, gentlemen," he said with a mocking bow, then retraced his steps, absently kicking the gravel over the blood so untidily shed by the wounded men.
His mother appeared out of the shadows as he entered the house. She thrust a handful of coins at him and spoke in a scared whisper. "Crispin, you must give this to those men. Ned's wife is about to have another baby, and if he can't work, there'll be no food…"
"Don't be so soft, Mother." Crispin glanced at the small pile of coins, guessing how long it had taken his mother to amass this pathetic sum from the pin money she managed to beg from her husband when in the direst necessity. He took her hand and dropped the coins into her palm. "If Sir Jasper discovers you're trying to meddle-"
"Crispin, you mustn't tell him!" Her hands flew to her worn cheeks and she looked in terror at her son.
Crispin shook his head with a dismissive contempt and stalked toward the breakfast parlor, where he would find his stepfather.
Louise stared after him and tried to remember her son in the days when he'
d been a loving little boy… in the days before he'd come to regard his mother through the harsh, derisive eyes of his stepfather. And not just his mother, she thought, turning to go upstairs. And not just the women they took to the crypt. The whole female sex it seemed. Poor little Chloe. She'd been such a bright, lively child despite her mother's illness and neglect. How long would it take Jasper and Crispin to break her too?
It didn't occur to Louise for one minute that her husband and son would fail in their plans for Elizabeth's daughter. Jasper wasn't going to be put off by one setback.
"Dog's come back, then," Samuel observed, lifting a steaming kettle off the fire as Hugo entered the kitchen. The back door stood open, filling the room with the brilliant sunlight of mid-morning.
Hugo winced at the dazzle and ran his hands through his hair. "Where is he?"
"Miss took him outside for a walk." Samuel glanced shrewdly at his employer and added an extra spoonful of coffee to the jug before pouring boiling water on the grounds.
Hugo swore and strode to the door. "Hasn't she got a grain of common sense? Wandering all over the countryside after last night!"
"Don't suppose she's gone far." Samuel stirred the coffee. "Not in 'er nightgown and wi' no shoes." He poured a mug of the thick black aromatic liquid. "Anyways, what about last night?"
Hugo didn't immediately answer. He turned back to the room, demanding in exasperation, "You're not telling me she's gone outside again in her nightgown?"
"Dog was in a powerful 'urry," Samuel offered in explanation, pushing the mug across the table.
Hugo took it, cupping his hands around its warmth, inhaling deeply of its fragrance. It cleared his head. "Any strangers around here yesterday, while I was in Manchester?"
Samuel nodded. "A fellow wantin' casual work. 'E fixed the 'enhouse roof… did quite a decent job."
"Could he have taken the dog?"
Samuel's faded blue eyes sharpened with intelligence. "Reckon so, while young Billy was havin' 'is dinner."
