The Ravishing One

by Connie Brockway

  “Bob only chanced to mention Captain Donne’s appearance to me now because he saw Master Leighton come in and thought it odd that so many fellows were queuing up before luncheon. Bob’s words, not, I assure you, mine.”

  “Of course,” Fia murmured, her thoughts racing. She glanced down at the note James Barton had sent her the night before last. Then she had thought it merely James’s natural wariness. But now …

  “Milady?”

  She looked up. Porter was waiting. Abruptly she came to a decision. “I thank you, Porter, for both your loyalty and your diligence. However much appreciated, your concern is unnecessary. I am planning on leaving London, you see. Possibly as soon as this very afternoon, but then again perhaps not. My plans are most liquid, you see, and contingent on another’s whim. You may inform the staff.”

  Porter blinked once, but years of training stood him in good stead. “Of course, Lady Fia.”

  Fia was standing before her open wardrobe when Gunna came in bearing a tray laden with hot chocolate. The hunched woman looked around at petticoats, chemises, clocked silk stockings, and stomachers heaped on the bed, the chairs, the settee, and any other available surface in the room.

  “You’ve gone daft, then,” she said, nodding resignedly. “Well, no wonder. This city would drive a saint to sin and ye never were no saint, dearie.”

  “Hm?” Fia, her hand hovering above a silk faille underskirt, reached instead for the lisle print one beneath. “Oh, Gunna. Good.”

  Gunna set the tray on the dressing table. “What are ye doin’, lass?”

  Fia tossed four sets of stockings on the bed, frowned, and added another. “I’m preparing for my abduction.”

  “What?”

  Hearing the amazement in Gunna’s voice, Fia turned and smiled. It was seldom she managed to catch Gunna unaware. “My abduction,” she repeated calmly, and glancing at the mantel clock, continued, “which ought to begin any time now.”

  Gunna did not return her smile. In fact, the exposed and crumpled side of her face looked decidedly grim. “Ye better explain, Fia. And it better be good.”

  “I don’t have time.”

  “Ye better find time,” Gunna pronounced tersely.

  Fia didn’t want to get into an argument with Gunna. The old Scotswoman would almost certainly win and, in winning, convince her to abandon the plan that had sprung full-blown in Fia’s imagination when she realized that Thomas Donne planned to kidnap her in order to keep James Barton from her evil influence.

  She did not want to abandon her plan. What better way to accomplish so many things? She would obey her father’s directive and be absent during James’s meeting with her father, which might help serve to explain James’s—dear, honest James’s—miserable mien at that conference. This way she could also keep Thomas from interfering with the plan and, last but not least, extract a bit of sweet revenge on that righteous Scot.

  Fia opened her portmanteau and began stacking clothing. She must take care not to pack too much, lest Thomas’s suspicions be awakened. She turned, her eye alighting on a particularly frivolous, feminine, and extremely provocative robe of violet tulle. There was definitely room for that.

  “Fia …” Gunna’s voice rose in warning.

  She met Gunna’s gaze levelly. “You are not to worry, Gunna. The purpose of this abduction is to keep me from seducing someone, not to be seduced.”

  “Ach!” the old woman exclaimed. “I’d never thought to see the day Lady Fia Merrick acted the gull.”

  “I’m not being gullible. Nor naive.”

  Gunna’s one good eye peered at Fia. She was apparently satisfied with what she saw, for with a grunt she sank down onto the edge of the bed. “And who’s this saint who’s taken on the job of saving London’s poor men from yer evil clutches?”

  “Thomas Donne.”

  “Ach, no! Not that one! I’d soon as trust ye with a selkie. Ye’ve been smitten with him since ye were a lassie and I’ll no have ye puttin’ yerself in his hands.”

  “Gunna, dear.”

  “Don’t ‘dear’ me. Ye never got nuthin’ from ‘dearin’’ me as a lass and ye’ll find it works no better now that yer a woman grown.”

  “All right, Gunna,” Fia said, giving up her wheedling tone. “Here it is, then. You are going to have to trust me. If I leave with Thomas Donne I can make sure he doesn’t ruin my plans. Plans that will see us back to Bramble House. Plans that will once and for all sever my father’s influence over me. Over us.” She didn’t bother to tell Gunna about the proposed revenge.

  Gunna scowled and stroked her seamed cheek with her narrow fingers. “I don’t know.…”

  “It makes perfect sense. It is perfectly reasonable.”

  Gunna slapped her knee. “All right. I’ll go with ye.”

  “No! I mean, no. He’ll never agree to taking you with me and … and you need to stay here with Kay. And Cora. She might appear just as suddenly as her brother.” It was unfair to use Gunna’s affection for the children. But Fia had never learned the art of fighting for what she wanted by fair means.

  “Ah!” The old woman shook her head. “I don’t like it. Ye don’t know what that man is capable of.”

  “Not rape,” she said with absolute conviction.

  Gunna glanced at her sourly. “I was thinkin’ he’s not the sort that needs to force his way.”

  “He’ll not have his way with me,” Fia vowed. It did not seem to comfort the old woman greatly but at least she protested no more. And after Fia closed the latch on the portmanteau and set it to wait by the bedchamber door and Gunna had kissed her cheek and promised to watch out for Kay and finally left, Fia breathed the words she’d held in check.

  “But I surely intend to have my way with him,” she whispered.

  Chapter 11

  The square containing the MacFarlane town house was quiet. Early morning languor hovered over the empty, cobbled streets as sunlight warmed the broad back of a dray horse standing in its traces. Later, housemaids would venture out to scrub stairs and run errands, but now, at seven o’clock, they kept to quieter pursuits so as not to rouse masters and mistresses who had taken to their beds only a few hours earlier.

  Thomas vaulted over the stone wall encircling the town house’s back garden and landed on the privy roof. From there he jumped lightly to the path leading through the garden and looked with satisfaction at the back of the house. True to the pattern three days of reconnaissance had made known to him, the library window stood open. He looked up. Overhead the draperies in Fia’s boudoir fluttered in the window.

  He needed to keep Fia out of town until James was safely aboard the Sea Witch. He’d planned carefully, from the man waiting at the end of the alley with the closed carriage, to the notes he’d left Carr and James claiming he’d gone to France to purchase merchandise.

  Of course, when Thomas returned Carr would realize he had not bought any cargo and had no intention of scuttling his ship. Carr would then inform the authorities of Thomas’s status as an illegally returned deportee and Thomas would flee—leaving behind the dream he’d worked so hard to realize, the dream of reclaiming Maiden’s Blush from the ashes to which Carr had consigned her.

  He did not regret his decision. He owed James Barton a few dreams and more. Besides, even if Thomas could not supervise the restoration himself, he could still find a way back now and then. And if he never felt the joy of one final homecoming, well, he’d still have the satisfaction of knowing that his clan had returned to McClairen’s Isle.

  No, he did not regret his decision. But that didn’t make this, his proposed course, any more palatable. He’d never in his life mistreated a woman. And yet, in a few minutes he would abduct a woman from her home and keep her against her will.

  He took a deep breath, placed his hands on the library windowsill, and pushed himself up and over, dropping noiselessly to the carpet inside.

  “I say, most of Fia’s friends use the front door.”

  He froze. The accent
was undoubtedly Scottish, adolescent, and male. He turned.

  A young man, even younger than Pip, sat in an armchair. In his lap was an open book. He regarded Thomas with dark, thoughtful eyes beneath a tousled fringe of brown hair.

  Who the hell was this?

  Thomas arranged a smile. “I admit, I didn’t expect to find anyone here. Who are you?”

  The boy closed the book on his finger. “I believe that is my line, sir.”

  Gads, but the boy had panache. His self-containment, the slight dryness of his tone reminded Thomas of someone. No nervous fiddling, an exceptionally calm, direct—The boy reminded him of Fia. Impossible for them to be related. Except for a likeness of expression, there was no other resemblance.

  “You’re not MacFarlane’s boy, are you?” Thomas asked.

  The boy’s watchful air dissipated slightly. “You have the better of me, sir,” he said.

  Thomas broadened his grin, thinking. He needed to come up with a reasonable explanation for having entered through the library window, though surely a boy raised under Fia’s care would be used to the sudden, unheralded arrival of strange men. “I am a friend of your stepmama.”

  “I never call her ‘mama.’ I call her Fia. She’s only six years older than me, you know,” the boy said, a defensive note creeping into his voice.

  God spare him, yet another of Fia’s conquests!

  “It would be absurd for me to call her ‘mother,’ ” the boy went on, before adding thoughtfully, “though Cora calls her ‘mama’ sometimes, but only to tease her.”

  “Tease her?” The notion of anyone “teasing” Fia was so outlandish that for a moment Thomas forgot himself. “Who is Cora that she teases Fia?”

  “My younger sister. Horrible younger sister. Twits Fia something terrible. Not that I don’t empathize. Fia is such an easy mark, don’t you think?”

  Thomas glanced about, nonplussed, half expecting to discover this Cora in some other chair. Fia an easy mark? An object of childish torment?

  “Oh, don’t worry.” The boy had read his mind. “Cora is away at school. In Devon. The far side of Devon,” he emphasized with unmistakable relish.

  “I see.” But he didn’t. He should be upstairs, tying a scarf around Fia’s lovely mouth in preparation for tossing her over his shoulder and making off with her. Instead, he was chatting up a boy.

  The lad stood up and nodded in courtly fashion. “I am Kay Antoine MacFarlane.”

  “Uh, Donne. Thomas Donne.” Thomas glanced at the door leading into the hall. A maid was bound to show up soon.

  “Honored, sir.”

  “Likewise, Lord MacFarlane.”

  The adult veneer fell away and the boy grinned, his expression open and spontaneous in a manner Fia’s could never be. “Just ‘Kay,’ sir. ’Twas an honorary title my father held and one I don’t pine after. Being MacFarlane of Bramble House is enough for me.”

  Thomas found himself liking the boy and damning Carr for cheating such a decent lad out of his rightful home. The thought led back to his reason for being there.

  “Well, Kay MacFarlane of Bramble House, I’d best be on my way before we attract one of the servants.”

  “And what way is that, Mr. Donne?” The guarded quality reentered his eyes.

  Thomas held his hands out, palm up. “There’s this little bet Fia and I have made. I claimed I could enter her house and take the bouquet from the upstairs vase”—God, let there be a vase in the upstairs hall—“and that no one would see me, including Fia.” He shook his head ruefully. “Wouldn’t she love to know that I’d no sooner entered the house than was discovered by you?”

  The boy’s lips quirked in amusement. “Aye. Fia crows somethin’ awful when she wins, don’t she?”

  Crowing? Laughing? True, he’d heard Fia laugh many times—derisively, cruelly, scornfully—but never with the uncomplicated delight this boy was speaking about.

  “We lads must stick together, don’t you think?”

  Kay studied him. “Perhaps.”

  “Come now, Kay. Fia’s too used to winning. It’s time we poor frail males had the upper hand, isn’t it?”

  The boy nodded, the hovering smile just waiting to be born.

  “So what say you just go on doing what you were doing. Reading, was it? Something grand, I hope.”

  “The Iliad.”

  “Ah! Nothing grander. You just read on—only do so in your own room, Kay. That way, you won’t have to answer any hard questions later when Fia’s discovered she’s lost our bet.” He winked at the boy.

  “I suppose I could go to the kitchen.…”

  “The kitchen it is!” Thomas said, clapping Kay companionably on the back and feeling utterly despicable. “Go on. There’d be no living with her if she never lost, would there?”

  It tipped the scales in Thomas’s favor. The boy nodded in commiseration. “You have the right of it there, sir.”

  Thomas laughed and swung his arm about the boy’s bony shoulders, shepherding him to the door. Once there, he glanced both ways before giving him a little shove into the corridor.

  Kay was halfway down the hall before he looked back. “How long do I have to stay in there?”

  “Oh, a quarter hour,” Thomas answered casually, “mayhap a bit longer, just to be sure. You know, in case I dodge into some room to wait for a maid or a footman to pass.”

  The boy nodded. A minute later the servants’ door swung shut behind him. The smile vanished from Thomas’s face as he took the stairs to the second level. He remembered which room was Fia’s. He pushed it open and entered quickly, soundlessly shutting it behind him.

  He looked around, spying the arched entrance that led from the boudoir to the bedchamber. He padded across the floor and peered in, fully expecting to see Fia asleep in her bed, unwillingly anticipating the picture she would make with her black hair flowing over white linen and her skin dewy with sleep.

  She was not in the bed.

  He peered around the corner. She was sitting with her feet tucked up beneath her in a wingback chair, a piece of needlework on her lap. Needlework! And she was wearing a simple yellow day-gown, the neckline modest, the sleeves trimmed with treble bands of white lace. The fresh color of it became her as much as her usual dramatic palette of black and white, though in a subtler manner, setting her skin to glow softly and the rippling black of her hair to shining.

  She looked up. For a second her gorgeous eyes darkened, turning the brilliant blue dusky, like wood violet in shadow.

  “Captain Donne.” She showed only slight concern at his appearance, employing that unearthly trick she had of smoothing her features to impenetrable stillness. “To what do I owe this honor?”

  He moved quickly across the room, seizing her upper arm and pulling her to her feet. The needlework fell to the floor. Her brow puckered in extreme distaste, echoing his own.

  “I would dislike hurting you, Fia,” he spoke softly, “but I swear if you raise your voice I will render you unconscious.”

  She pulled her arm free, stepping back and challenging him with a scornful look. “I have no intention of raising my voice. What are you doing here?”

  He took a deep breath. “I may couch this in the form of a request, but make no mistake, Fia, it is not a request. It is a statement.”

  One dark, wing-shaped brow rose. “Pray continue.”

  “Will you come with me?”

  The humor Kay had described flickered to life in her extraordinary eyes. “Where to? Oxford Street to visit that new French mercer? Or Covent Garden—though, I daresay, the fruits have been picked over by now. Perhaps you’ve in mind an excursion to—”

  “I am taking you out of London.”

  Her humor faded. “I see. For how long?”

  “An extended period of time.”

  Did her alabaster skin pale? He thought so, and he noticed for the first time that she wore no cosmetics this morning. The paints and perfumes and salves that created the Black Diamond no longer concea
led her.

  Why, in all the saints’ names, had she ever covered such flesh with dross powder and paint? The tint of her skin was warm and translucent, as delicately shaded as the pink pearls he’d once purchased on an uncharted South Pacific island.

  “Then this is an abduction.”

  “Yes.”

  She gave a businesslike little nod. “I see. And do I have any say in this? Of course not”—she shook her head at her own stupidity—“if I had a say, and I said yes, this would be an elopement, not an abduction. Semantics are so very important, don’t you think?”

  She was purposefully trying to overset him. He’d seen her do it to a dozen men over the past weeks, catch them with false candor that concealed more than it elucidated.

  She moved closer, too close. She did nothing obvious as she had when disguised at Portmann’s masque. She did not touch him, though his body stiffened in anticipation and his skin prickled with a phantom sensation of her hand on his chest.

  “So little confidence, Captain. Has it not occurred to you that I might not be adverse to going with you?” she purred, a faint tantalizing smile playing about the corners of her lush lips. “Why don’t you simply ask me?”

  He caught himself just in time. She would say no and laugh. He saw it in the hard bright eyes that refuted the softness of her mouth.

  When he didn’t answer, a shadow of doubt dented her composure—slight but there. She’d expected him to ask her; she did not know how to take his refusal.

  “Ah well, then,” she said. “If you’ll be seated, I shall gather a few things and we’ll get started.”

  At his start of surprise she regained her mastery of the situation, bright and sharp and clean as a razor’s wounding. “Why … you don’t imagine this is my first abduction, do you?”

  A trilling little laugh. “Oh, heavens no! I count it an utterly wasted Season if I am not abducted at least once. Though”—her voice turned reproachful—“most of my abductors at least do me the favor of telling me how long I can expect to be gone.