He backed up a dozen feet and deposited Cora inside a shrubby alcove. Her fingers dug into his arm with unexpected strength. She looked up at him with fretful, swollen eyes. “What are you doing?”
Bending close, he whispered in her ear. “Getting our horses. I’ll be right back.”
She gave him a short nod before shrinking into the shadows. Guy chafed at the meager protection, but it would have to do.
He rejoined Danforth and, with a few hand signals, they set out in opposite directions, intent on surrounding their quarry.
As they closed in, Guy began to decipher the intruders’ whispered argument.
“We must do something, you old fool,” one intruder said.
“They’ll return, don’t ye worry,” said a rougher but equally low voice.
Guy knelt down. He located the two dark silhouettes huddled against a large tree trunk about twenty feet away. To his left, he spotted Danforth, who nodded his readiness, but his assessing gaze lingered on Guy.
He set his jaw and waited for Danforth to turn away before swiping the moisture from his forehead. Backbone, Helsford, he chided himself. Don’t turn into a piss-in-your-pants cub like last time. Make the kill; retrieve the horses; get out of France. His chest rose high and then folded down on a long exhalation.
Danforth looked back at him, waiting for the signal. He gave it, and they both pulled lethal knives from hidden sleeves in their boots and stepped forward as one. Silent. Intent. Deadly.
“I’ll never forgive you if my little mite dies in there,” the smaller but no less sturdy silhouette muttered.
Guy and Danforth halted.
Little mite? Cora’s brother mouthed to Guy.
A memory flashed so swiftly through Guy’s mind that he couldn’t latch on. It hovered teasingly out of his reach.
He frowned and motioned to Danforth for them to move closer.
“Stop your blathering, woman,” the other silhouette grumbled. “The two gents will take care of them toad-eaters, if Miss Cora hasn’t already.”
Guy eyed the two until recognition dawned. The hard knot of tension eased from his shoulders, and a smile danced across his lips. Danforth stared at the silhouettes, shaking his head in disgust or amazement; Guy couldn’t be sure which.
He and Danforth stood less than five feet behind the bickering couple. Near enough to lunge forward and dispatch them with a single slice of their blades. His blood beat in thick waves at how close they had come to eliminating Cora’s beloved servants.
They put away their weapons. The rush of energy that always prepared him for a kill took much longer to sheath.
An amused smile cut across Danforth’s face. “Listen to him, Dinks.”
The maid yelped and lost her balance. She would have landed on her bum had it not been for her companion’s quick reaction.
“Unhand me, you old goat,” Dinks sputtered, righting her tangled cloak.
“Bah,” Bingham said. “Next time I won’t save your contrary woman’s pride.”
“Quiet,” Guy warned, his gaze skimming their surroundings.
Dinks crossed her arms over her broad chest and carried on in a lower voice, “As if you’ve never been caught unawares.”
The coachman shuffled from foot to foot, eyeing his counterpart with anger and a hint of chagrin. “Ye just won’t let it go, will ye?”
Guy shook his head. The servants’ familiar squabbling—something he hadn’t heard in a long time—washed over him and tightened his chest.
“Never mind about that.” Dinks sent the coachman a dismissive wave and rushed toward Guy, urgency lacing her words. “Did you find Miss Cora, my lord?”
“We have her, Dinks,” Danforth interjected. “We stashed her in the woods when we heard your whispering.” He looked to Guy. “I’ll get her.”
Guy nodded, his attention fixed on Cora’s servants. Something about this entire situation left a hollow feeling in his gut as if someone had removed a vital organ and failed to tell him.
“Would either of you care to explain why I found your mistress in Valère’s dungeon?”
“Dungeon?” Dinks whispered, her face crumpling.
Bingham slipped a massive arm around the maid’s hunched shoulders.
Guy steeled himself against their distress. “Yes. I overheard Valère’s man asking her for information. Did he find out she had been feeding society intelligence to Somerton?”
Bingham’s lips disappeared inside his mouth, and Dinks averted her watery gaze.
Their refusal to answer his question reminded him of their unfailing loyalty toward their mistress. It had always been thus, even when their role was more caretaker than protector.
Guy had always found their devotion endearing. Until now.
“Never mind,” Guy said. “Why don’t you tell me what the two of you are doing here? Is Jack with you?” Guy peered into the gloom, looking for Cora’s lanky footman.
“Jack went for help. We kept watch,” Bingham said.
Dinks sniffed and straightened her shoulders, forcing Bingham’s supportive arm to fall.
The coachman scowled.
“It took us a few days to pick up that Frenchie’s trail,” Dinks said. “Once we knew where he’d taken Miss Cora, we sent word to Lord Somerton straight away.”
Bingham scowled. “Didn’t I just say that?”
Before Guy could question Dinks further, Danforth emerged from the dense undergrowth, carrying Cora in his arms.
Dinks ran forward. “Miss Cora!” she exclaimed in a rough whisper.
Cora’s head lolled against Danforth’s shoulder. Her dry, cracked lips turned up in a reassuring smile.
A tear ran down Dinks’s once beautiful face. After a decade of service to the deBeaus, she had allowed her trim, svelte lines to expand into a more fulsome figure. “Oh, no.” She tentatively touched Cora’s arm. “What did that rat-bastard do to our little mite?”
Danforth cleared his throat. “She’ll be fine, Dinks.”
Cora’s thin, trembling hand slid over Dinks’s larger one. “Don’t fret, dear Dinks.”
Guy’s vision blurred. Leave it to Cora to try to comfort others at a time like this.
“We have only a few hours to make the coast,” Danforth cut in. “We need our horses.”
“They’re safe, m’lord,” Bingham answered with a slight bow of deference. “The black and chestnut were restless and wouldn’t calm down, so Jack took them to the creek bed not far from here. The mare you brought is tied up with our horses just beyond the tree line.”
Guy clapped the older man on the shoulder. “Thank you, Bingham.”
Red faced, the coachman glanced at his mistress and mumbled, “Miss Cora would have my hide if I neglected my duties.”
Guy looked back toward Valère’s chateau. Apprehension crawled beneath his skin. Instead of escaping with one prisoner, they now had four innocents to get to safety. Given the exact set of circumstances, he would have made the same decision, yet leaving their original target behind scraped against his conscience.
Cora drew his gaze for the hundredth time. The fact that Somerton had sent him and Danforth here to retrieve a female spy, and the only female in Valère’s dungeon happened to be Cora, struck him as entirely too coincidental. However, he found it hard to reconcile his childhood friend with the elusive Raven, known for her ability to seduce secrets from the most reticent of French agents.
As he watched, Cora’s eyelids finally gave up their exhausted battle and lowered shut. Guy released a relieved breath and shut out the mystery of Cora’s imprisonment. God willing, she would sleep through the grueling ride back to the coast.
A hound bayed in the distance.
Everyone froze; no one breathed.
Another howl rent the air.
Then another.
Dammit. Men they could elude for a time, but trained dogs would lead Valère right to this misfit group. “To the horses,” Guy quietly ordered.
They scrambled toward the t
hree horses tied up nearby. Once Guy was seated, Danforth lifted Cora up into his arms.
She stirred, tensed. “What’s wrong?”
Guy accepted a wrap from Dinks and draped it around Cora. His heart pounded, but he spoke with calm reassurance. “Nothing, sweetheart. But we have a hard ride ahead of us.”
The hounds bayed again, and her fingers dug into his shoulder. She buried her face in his neck. “I’m ready.”
Guy glanced back to make sure the others had mounted and then kicked his steed into a fury of swirling leaves and flying dirt.
Four
A few days later, Cora found herself ensconced in Somerton’s library at his spacious London town house. She sat in the corner of the soft leather sofa with a kerseymere lap rug over her legs and a pretty lemon-colored shawl draped around her shoulders.
The bandage covering her right eye was still an annoyance, but she had finally become accustomed to viewing the world through her one-eyed perspective. Although she was looking forward to removing the bandage in a few days, she wasn’t anxious to reveal her disfigurement. Her hair would grow back, and the burns and bruises would heal, but the scar would remain forever etched upon her face—a constant reminder of her imprudent arrogance.
Peering around the familiar room, she adjusted the sling securing her left arm to her chest and ignored the three large men strategically stationed around her. She could feel their curious stares and imagined she could hear the interrogating questions lining up in their heads.
Although she had prepared herself for this meeting, she had no wish to begin. Pulling in a calming breath, she tunneled her finger beneath the bothersome turban to scratch her itchy scalp. She hated wearing the ridiculous adornment, but Dinks insisted, since they hadn’t yet cleaned up Boucher’s handiwork.
Her reluctant gaze shifted to Guy, the Earl of Helsford, as he was now called after his father’s passing last year. With his broad back facing the room, she got a good look at his unfashionably long black hair trailing from a leather thong at his nape. She toyed with the blunt ends of her own hair peeking from beneath her turban and experienced a momentary pang of envy.
Their years apart had wrought compelling changes in his physique. On the few occasions he had visited her sick room, she hadn’t been able stop herself from drinking in his sheer masculinity. Then, as now, power radiated off his body in disturbing waves that both attracted and rebuffed. The angular set of his jaw, the tempting fullness of his mouth, and the stillness of his warrior stance left her feeling awkward and ugly and completely enthralled.
But she also recognized the hollowness hovering behind his watchful eyes. Something horrid lurked in the dark cavern of his gaze, something strong enough to rattle the cage he had carefully erected around his emotions. What past event drew him so completely from the present that she had to prod him several times to return?
She sighed softly, frustrated that time and distance hadn’t dampened her curiosity about him. As with many times in the past, she would either uncover the answers she sought or banish the question from her thoughts. The option she took depended entirely on how it affected her primary goal of finding the man who killed her parents.
Her hand slid to the pendant hanging from her neck. I haven’t given up, Mama.
“Thank you for meeting with us,” Somerton said, interrupting her thoughts.
Her former guardian’s commanding crystalline gaze settled on her, as disquieting as always. She had never feared him, but the intensity of his study had an unnerving effect on her.
Somerton continued, “Would it not have been better for us to come to you?”
Cora smoothed her hand over the lap blanket. “I needed a change of scenery.” How did one explain the feeling of walls closing in on oneself? She had wanted, needed to come to the library. Her chest rose high, and she took in the peaceful smell of old tomes and burning coals that tinged the air. The library had always been her favorite place in the house.
Soon after their parents’ deaths, she and her brother Ethan had been conveyed to their new home at 35 Charles Street. During those first few months, she would sneak downstairs at night and curl up in Somerton’s large overstuffed chair near the fireplace.
Sometimes she would read until the wee hours of the morning; sometimes she would cry herself to sleep. And sometimes she would stare listlessly into the dying embers of the fire and wonder what awful deed she had done to make God punish her so.
Cora shrugged off her old demons and angled her head toward the room’s occupants. Across from where she sat, Ethan balanced on the edge of her old favorite chair. Restlessness vibrated off her brother in thick, tense waves. His striking resemblance to their father comforted and unsettled her in the same breath.
In vivid contrast, Somerton, watchful and silent, anchored himself in front of the grate filled with burning coals. His broad shoulders and thickly muscled body made him an imposing figure. Many who did not know her former guardian would label him cold and unfeeling. Cora knew better. Somerton had honored his best friend’s request to look after his two young children when it would have been easier to ship them off to a distant relative. He had given her everything she had needed and more, including the resources to avenge her parents’ murders.
Somerton moved to stand before her, his hands clasped behind his back. “We will take this as slowly as you wish. But I need to know how you came to be in Valère’s dungeon.”
And with a single question, the interrogation began. Cora had given careful consideration as to how much of her eleven-day imprisonment she should reveal to these men whom she loved beyond measure. There were pieces of her tale that must remain locked away, events she daren’t relive, sacrifices best not disclosed to loved ones.
Her gaze fell on her immobile hand, noticed her thumb tucked between her first two fingers. She gritted her teeth. For many years, she had controlled the telltale sign of her unease. Not once while she was in prison had the weakness appeared. Why did it surface now?
She unlocked her fingers and allowed the blood to stream back into her thumb. She glanced at Guy to make sure he hadn’t noticed her reversion to old habits, and released a breath when only his back met her gaze.
Cora raised her chin before addressing Somerton. “I would prefer to get this over with as quickly as possible.” Even with dread tingling through her body, culminating in damp pockets on her palms, she somehow managed to hide the growing anxiety caused by her inquisitors’ stares.
“As you wish, Cora.” He resumed his place by the fire.
Cora began emptying her mind of past, present, and future doubts. She wrestled her thoughts into a logical—and safe—pattern of events, and then inhaled three deep breaths. The familiar exercise, one she had used many times since arriving at Charles Street, steadied her fragile nerves.
Still, she hesitated. Her gaze flicked to the unmoving figure by the window.
Noting her concern, her brother said, “Cora, you may speak freely in front of Helsford. He’s been privy to our family’s secrets for years. You know he is more like a brother than friend.”
For you, perhaps.
For her, brotherly feelings toward Guy had ceased during her last summer in England, three years ago. The same summer her guardian and mentor deemed her ready to cross the Channel to find the man who murdered her parents.
The summer her childhood friend became her living hell.
“Remove the mask, Cora.”
Cora bit back a sharp retort, unwilling to comply with Guy’s demand. The black silk mask she wore to conceal her identity provided a small measure of protection against his dark, probing gaze.
He stalked closer, looking more beautiful and dangerous than she could ever remember. And she remembered everything about him.
“Perhaps you need assistance,” he said.
She could tell from the tone of his voice that his protective instincts were fully engaged. Always sensitive to her welfare, he would not understand her attendance at Mrs. Lancaster
’s masked ball. No one would, really, except Somerton, but then he was not keen on her presence here, either.
Why, tonight of all nights, did Guy have to return to England? Had he already learned of her purpose for coming to the masquerade? She studied his expression and decided he had not. His features reflected determination and a guarded curiosity… and a compulsion to admire the indecent amount of flesh rising above her crimson bodice. No, if he had known why she was dressed in such a revealing gown and what had caused the flush across her cheeks, he would be hauling her out of here like a misbehaving child.
She glanced around the small sitting room she had ducked into earlier to compose herself. It was free of other guests, and Guy’s broad shoulders blocked the French doors leading out to the small terrace. She set her jaw, knowing he would not relent until he had his way. “That won’t be necessary, you beast.”
She tugged on the ribbon holding the mask in place and felt a wave of vulnerability wash over her. She, too, had transformed in the intervening months. Would he like what he saw? Would she measure up to all the exotic ladies he had met during his travels?
The mask fell away, and a new intensity sharpened his features. “You’ve changed.” He stepped closer, his gaze traveling over every square inch of her face. The backs of his fingers caressed her cheek. “Matured.”
His voice—a richer, deeper, more languid version of the one she recalled—burrowed beneath her skin, causing chill bumps to cover the surface. The warmth from his hand made her want to lean into his touch and absorb his strength. She would need it now—more than ever.
Instead, she tilted her head away the slightest bit to break contact. “I should hope so.” She pulled on her gloves, praying he did not see her hands tremble. “Is that all you have to say after spending a year and a half abroad? Have you no ‘It’s nice to see you again, Cora’?”
She did not wait for his answer. “Now that I have done as you have ordered, perhaps you can explain why you were spying on me.”
He blinked. “I wasn’t spying on you.”
Lady's Revenge Page 3
