“No,” she cried out, shaking against him. Her palms flattened to his chest. “Stop it, Sebastian.”
He couldn’t. He held her to him, made her listen, because he couldn’t shake the feeling that if he allowed her to walk away now, he’d lose her forever. And he couldn’t bear that. Even with the accusations in the report running through his mind, fury and jealousy wreaking havoc on him for the entire trip from Liverpool to London, he had been thinking of ways he could reform her, convince her to see reason. Keep her safe and at his side.
“I’ve been living a lie for years. I’ve devoted my entire life to duty and protecting Crown and country. I don’t know how to be different than who I am, but I do know that I love you. I love you, and I will change for you. I’ll do anything for you, buttercup.”
“Don’t you see?” She exhaled, her tone steeped in sadness as she touched his face for a fleeting moment. “I don’t want you to change. All I ever wanted from you was your love and your honesty. But you came to me in lies. Everything we shared emerged from your deceit. Do you think you can tell me the truth and everything else will fall into place, that I’ll swoon into your arms in gratitude? Because I can assure you it won’t. I won’t. I’m stronger than that.”
Of course she was strong. She was the strongest woman he’d ever known. He was in awe of her. “I’m telling you all this because I owe you the truth, Daisy.”
“The truth or your version of it?” Her eyes flashed as she faced him, vibrant in her ire. More beautiful than he’d ever seen her as she stood up to him. “Because as I see it, the truth is that you returned for me tonight believing the gossip and lies and whatever information you’ve received. You believed I had betrayed our vows. I cannot fathom what changed your mind, but I haven’t forgotten your words earlier this evening. You are a hypocrite, sir, to charge me with deceiving you when you are the greatest dissembler of them all. A hypocrite and a liar, and I want nothing more to do with you! Grant me the annulment I was meant to have.”
With that final, parting shot, she spun on her heel and quit the chamber. The door slammed closed, humming on its frame. He remained where he was, in the center of the chamber. He may as well have been in the middle of a bloody wilderness for all that he could find the answers for what to do next.
Because she was right. He was a hypocrite and a liar. And he didn’t deserve a woman as good as Daisy. He didn’t deserve her at all.
Unfortunately, that realization didn’t make him want or love her any less.
“Fuck me,” he growled into the night.
s the sun began to rise over London, Daisy reached a painful conclusion.
She’d spent the night pacing her chamber, struggling to make sense of the tumult within her. Shock had rendered it impossible to sleep. Her feet hurt. Her back ached. She was tired and emotionally drained and more confused than she’d ever been in her life. But she knew what she needed to do.
She was leaving Sebastian.
Her hands skimmed over her burgeoning belly. She needed time and space to decide whether or not she was leaving him forever. There was the babe to consider. He had deceived her, manipulated her, abandoned her.
What a fool she was, falling in love with a man who had merely been carrying out his duty. A man who had suspected her guilty of heinous crimes. A man who had believed the worst of her until it was too late. How naïve of her to have imagined he was the only person in her life who hadn’t used her for his own gain.
He had used her more thoroughly than anyone ever had.
His betrayal ran so deep she wasn’t sure if she could ever recover from it.
She was so caught up in her tortured thoughts that she didn’t realize she was no longer alone in her chamber until the distinctive sound of a gun being cocked rang into the silence. Heart in her throat, she spun about to find the last person in the world she could have ever imagined pointing a pistol at her.
Her lady’s maid.
A gasp tore from her as a fresh onslaught of shock barreled through her. Abigail, who had always been pleasant and polite and smiling, who had been her steadfast attendant, first as a nurse and later as her lady’s maid, was coolly training a gun upon her. She took an instinctive step forward, palms raised in supplication.
“Don’t take another step or you’ll regret it,” Abigail warned, her voice as cold and hard as the frozen ground on a January morning.
Daisy froze, her mouth going dry. “Abigail, what are you doing?”
“Returning you to your father. He’s waiting in a carriage below,” Abigail said with an eerie calm that belied the heaviness of the moment. As though Daisy wasn’t staring down the barrel of a gun. “Come along quietly, and you won’t get hurt.”
She shook her head, dread icing a path down her spine. “I don’t wish to go anywhere with him. I never want to see him again.”
“Ungrateful bitch.” Her lip curled. “Just like your mother.”
“How dare you disparage my mother?” The words rushed from Daisy’s lips before she could think better of them. But she was fiercely defensive of her precious mama’s memory—the only part of her that remained.
“I dare quite a bit seeing as how I’ve a pistol.” Abigail stalked forward. “You’re not worth much to me any longer, so you’d serve yourself best by shutting your mouth and doing as I say.”
Abigail’s tone as she had spoken of Daisy’s mother struck her then. Bitter, laced with rancor and hatred. Suddenly queasy, she flattened her palm over her belly where even now, her babe innocently grew. She would do anything to protect her child. Her instincts told her that obeying the other woman would be a grave mistake.
Her spinning mind suddenly recalled that she was not without a means of defending herself. As she’d paced the Axminster earlier, she’d discovered Sebastian’s forgotten knife on the floor and had slipped it into the pocket on her robe. If she could distract Abigail sufficiently, she had a chance of striking with the knife and knocking the gun from her hand.
Yes, she had to distract her. Keep her talking. Think, Daisy. Think.
“What do you know of my mother?” she asked.
“She didn’t deserve your father,” Abigail snapped. “She never loved him as I do. Now get moving to the door. We haven’t much time.”
Daisy hesitated, grappling with the elder woman’s revelation. “You love my father?”
“I’ve loved him for years.”
“And yet he turned you out without reference,” she was quick to point out.
“You believed it so easily, didn’t you? You ruined our plans by eloping with that blackguard duke, and I needed a reason to stay close to you.” Abigail’s eyes narrowed. “Now to the door with you! No more tarrying.”
Daisy feared she was going to be ill. “What plans?”
Abigail struck her head with the butt of the pistol. Pain laced through her. She stumbled, losing her balance, crying out. Tears stung her eyes. The woman before her, wild-eyed and stern-faced, was not the woman she had known for her entire life. It was as if a stranger had come to inhabit her body. But that was the gift, she supposed, of evil. It could hide in plain sight, waiting for the right moment to strike and lay low the innocent.
“Walk to the door,” the woman gritted, “or I’ll hit you even harder next time.”
Daisy forced herself to move. One foot in front of the other. Step by step. Think, Daisy. Distract her.
“What plans?” she asked again.
Abigail grabbed her arm and settled the pistol into her lower back, urging her to move faster. “You were to marry Lord Breckly to solidify your father’s position in the Irish Nationalist League. It would have been the perfect foil. Your father would have been rid of you at last, and his influence and power would have grown immeasurably. But you couldn’t obey him, could you?”
Dear God. Her father was a Fenian, and so was Abigail. It all began to make horrible, sickening sense. Why had she failed to see it before now? Sebastian’s government had suspected Daisy, and al
l along, the true conspirator had been her lady’s maid, the one woman she’d trusted more than she’d even trusted her own aunt.
She forced her dazed mind to churn up more questions, more diversions. “Why are you doing this, Abigail? What use has my father for me now that I’ve married another?”
“You’re leverage, of course.” Abigail pushed her forward so roughly that she stumbled again. She righted herself, the gun jamming into her back. “Wasn’t hard to dupe the English fools into believing I’d serve as an informant. They already suspected your father, and we knew it and used their suspicion to our benefit. Did you know they paid me five hundred pounds to tell them that you were colluding to gain Irish independence from English tyranny?”
They’d reached the chamber door, and Daisy’s heart hammered in her breast, a combination of what Abigail had revealed to her and the realization that she needed to act now to save herself. Whatever Abigail and her father intended for her, she knew without question that it wasn’t as harmless as Abigail would have her believe. Marrying Sebastian was the first time she had ever gone against her father’s edicts. She recalled all too well his red-faced rage the morning after her wedding. How furious he’d been that his bargaining chip had been stripped from his grasp.
No, she couldn’t wait any longer. The time had come.
She’d never considered herself brave. For so many years, she’d endured her father’s brutal beatings. She’d learned not to defy him, to conform to his wishes, to please him so that he wouldn’t strike her. She had played the part of doting daughter for his friends and business associates, and she had never once gainsaid him. Sometimes, he had hit her anyway, for perceived infractions. Afterward, he had always rewarded her with diamonds and kindness. It was a vicious cycle, and Daisy was going to end it.
Here. Now. Today.
She’d never been brave before, but now she had an innocent babe growing within her, and she loved that life more than she loved her own. She would protect her child with everything in her, fight until the last breath escaped her if there was no other way.
“Open the door,” Abigail commanded. “We’ll go to the servant’s stair. You’ll say nothing. If anyone sees you, you will smile and tell them that I’m ill and you’re seeing me to my rooms to make me a poultice. Belowstairs, they already think you’re an angel, so it won’t be hard for them to believe it. If you say even a word, I’ll—”
Daisy reached into the pocket of her gown with her left hand, her fingers finding the hilt of Sebastian’s blade. It was time. With as much speed as she could manage, she yanked her right arm from Abigail’s grasp and jammed her elbow into the other woman’s midsection. She withdrew the knife, raising it high, a primal scream tearing from her. At the exact moment that her blade connected with the meaty flesh of her opponent’s upper arm, the pistol fired.
Agonizing pain shot through her, but her knife had done its work. Abigail’s sleeve was torn, blood gushing forth from the rent fabric. Her pistol clattered to the floor. Daisy dove for it, knife still in hand.
Sebastian sat at the desk in his study. The flickering gas lamps illuminated the letters he’d only just begun to read. All of them had been penned in Daisy’s neat hand, forwarded from his various estates. Dozens and dozens of them. She must have written until her fingers ached.
How had he ever doubted her? Each fresh line he read was like a booted kick to the stomach. How deeply he had wronged her. By the morning’s light, he couldn’t blame her for telling him to go to the devil the night before. He was everything she’d accused him of and more. Worse. He had married her in lies, cleaved her to him in deception borne of his own inability to resist her, had left her without word or explanation in the name of duty, and had returned believing her in the wrong.
When the only person who had ever been in the wrong was Sebastian Fairmont. Eighth Duke of Trent, First Marquis of Selfish Arsehole. Daisy had always been true and good and undeserving of the situations in which she’d found herself. She’d been used, and everyone had taken advantage of her. First, her father, abusing her and using her as a lure for suitors who would better himself and increase his wealth, then her would-be suitors, and the League by ruining her, forcing her into a falsehood of a marriage. But finally, there had been Sebastian. He’d not only taken advantage of her every weakness, he had stormed past her defenses. She’d told him that she loved him.
And what had he done, coward that he was? He’d disappeared from her life.
As he flipped through her letters, he could sense her mood shifting. Her epistles began with hesitation and hope. As time went on, she began to enumerate all the things she knew would enrage him. Here, in black ink and paper, was all the proof anyone could require. Yes, these letters proved to him that Daisy had only ever been honest with him.
When he reached the final series of letters, he felt as if the wind had been knocked from him.
I write you with unexpected news. I am expecting your child. Though you’ve amply demonstrated your lack of sentiment for myself, I cannot help but hope you may be somewhat less reticent in regards to an innocent.
The letter dropped from his fingers, wafting to his desk without even a whisper of sound. A child. A babe. Daisy carried their babe. And she hadn’t told him. No, instead, she had demanded an annulment.
Dear God, had he been too rough with her last night? How could he have failed to realize what the small changes in her frame implied? He had noted the slight curve in her belly, the generosity in her breasts. But he had enjoyed it, never once imagining how life-altering, how beautiful and wonderful and fucking altogether glorious it all was.
A sudden knock sounded at his door, startling him.
He didn’t want to be wrenched from this moment of unadulterated celebration. This moment of realizing that his wife carried their babe within her body. His carelessness, his stupid bloody recklessness, had in the end, turned out to be his saving grace.
His child. Daisy’s child. Would it be a girl with golden ringlets and an infallible sense of bravery? Or a towheaded boy with moss-green eyes and a penchant for daring? His heart beat with a wild, uncontrollable rhythm. He felt complete for the first time. Replete. Not a part of him missing.
A babe. How bloody amazing. The notion awed him.
The knock sounded again, this time more forceful than the last.
No more avoidance. Give the devil his due.
“Enter,” he called.
But it wasn’t his butler Giles who opened the portal as he’d fancied it would be, and stepped over the threshold as he’d anticipated. It was Griffin. And he wasn’t alone. Sebastian stood, mouth going dry, gut tightening. His blood felt as if it leached from his body as he took in the four men flanking his best friend. Home Office brawn, it would appear, though none of their faces were familiar to him.
Surely they hadn’t come for Daisy. Carlisle had told him to see to her himself. He thought he had time, for fuck’s sake. Time to align all the information into a proper picture. Time to go to Carlisle with undeniable proof of Daisy’s innocence so that the Home Office could exonerate her once and for all.
“What the hell is this, Griffin?” he rasped, every last bit of the exultation seeping from his body. He could not lose her, would not lose her now.
“Where is Her Grace?” Griffin asked in lieu of answering. His forbidding expression was one of a man going into battle.
“She is abed in her chamber.” He strode forward. “Goddamn it, Griffin. Why are you here?”
“She’s in danger, Bast. One of our double operatives contacted me. We haven’t a moment to waste.” His friend’s tone was calm, but his eyes told a different story.
If a man as hardened as Griffin was worried, the danger was real. Everything inside him turned to ice. Daisy was in danger. Their babe was in danger. Christ. His hands were shaking. But there was no time to linger. They needed to act, to get to Daisy, protect her.
“We’ll walk upstairs while you tell me what the hell is going on,
” he demanded of his friend and brother in arms.
Shoulder to shoulder, they strode from the study, the four grim-faced men following in their wake. “Her lady’s maid is a Fenian,” Griffin said in low tones. “She is connected to Vanreid.”
Damn it. Sebastian scarcely recalled the lady’s maid, who had turned up at his household after Daisy’s departure from her father’s home. “You’re certain?”
Griffin nodded as they ascended the staircase, taking the steps two at a time. “She was the anonymous source feeding false information about Daisy to the Home Office.”
An anonymous source had been supplying information about Daisy. Damning and incorrect information. Why hadn’t that occurred to him? Of course. It all made perfect, bloody sense. And he had allowed the woman to enter his household, to remain close to Daisy. Close enough to strike.
A muffled scream sounded just then, followed by the report of a pistol. The air rushed from him. The scream had been Daisy’s.
No. No. No.
Sebastian broke into a run.
His heart pumping faster than it ever had, he took the stairs three at a time, racing down the hall. Dimly, he was aware of the pounding feet of Griffin and his men following in his wake. But he didn’t care. The earth could have opened upon itself and swallowed everyone but Daisy and himself, and he wouldn’t have given a goddamn.
Griffin appeared at his side, running to keep pace. “Damn it, Bast, let me go in first. I’m armed.”
Fuck. That was how much he loved that woman. For her, he would have run headlong into enemy fire without a weapon and without a second thought. For Daisy’s sake, it would be far better to allow an armed man into the chamber first. No one had a deadlier aim than Griffin.
Her Reformed Rake (Wicked Husbands Book 3) Page 28
