by Rebecca King
Not seeing the joke, Emmeline’s gaze slid over each of the men seated around the table but none of them explained what they found so funny.
“We all work together,” Oliver said eventually. “It is just down to one of us to make most of the decisions about who goes where and does what when our boss, Sir Hugo, isn’t around.”
Emmeline began to pick nervously at the piece of bread Oliver put onto a plate and then slid across the table toward her.
“What is it you do, exactly?”
“We work for the War Office,” Oliver replied a little cautiously.
“Doing what? We are not at war,” Emmeline countered, refusing to be put off by his reticence.
“We work for a small branch of the War Office. Most of us have fought in the battlefields at some point during our military careers. When the war was ongoing, we fought smugglers, French spies and the like. Now that is over, we have turned our attention to more domestic crimes, like the Smidgley brothers,” Harry explained carefully.
“But we still work for the War Office. We have had special training in working undercover, and don’t really talk much about what we do. Our organisation is clandestine, so we cannot tell you much about it. What we can tell you is that we were called in when the magistrates in Leicestershire and Derbyshire found themselves unable to cope with the number of women who kept vanishing from their counties. We deal with gang crime mostly, the majority of which is carried out in London. You know, pick pockets, thieves, that kind of thing. However, like I have said, we were called in to help the magistrates because they had no idea how to investigate numerous crimes of this nature.”
“The kidnaps were all done by one person then.”
“Yes, the kidnaps were all carried out by one gang,” Oliver replied.
“The Smidgley brothers,” Emmeline whispered.
She almost envied the men their adventurous lifestyles – until she contemplated having to actually challenge the thugs who had stormed into her house. With a shiver, she tugged her shawl tighter about her shoulders and turned her attention to the men.
“The work here is different,” Rhys said quietly.
“How?” Emmeline asked.
“Our work is harder in the countryside,” he replied thoughtfully. “It’s more complicated.”
“I don’t see how,” she protested. “Surely, it should be easier?”
Rhys shook his head. “In London, there are plenty of back alleys and places for us to hide in. The buildings are so crammed together that there is always some place we can hide. We can often go out in disguise as market traders, or chimney sweeps and like, and nobody gives us a second look. Out here, everyone knows everyone else. There is little or no chance of going undercover. You know what village life is like. If there is a new face spotted, that person is watched practically everywhere they go. The gossips make it their life’s mission to find out everything there is to know about that new arrival. They don’t stop until they are the first to know everything and are the first to spread the word.”
Harry nodded. “It makes life for us incredibly difficult.”
“Which is why investigating the Smidgley brothers is so hard,” Emmeline nodded.
“Yes. We cannot pretend to be estate workers because the estate workers will know we don’t belong there. We cannot pretend to be villagers because the villagers will do everything possible to try to find out everything about us. If we try to keep ourselves to ourselves, our secrecy makes us stand out. We are doomed to failure before we start.” His frustration at the situation they faced was evident in the ferocity with which Oliver tore into his bread and began to munch at it.
“Is there nothing you can do?” Emmeline asked carefully.
“Yes. Not work in villages unless we have to,” Harry growled.
Emmeline’s smile widened.
“Tell her,” Jasper urged suddenly, his eyes twinkling with mischief.
Oliver sighed, but blatantly ignored his friend for a moment or two. Instead, he selected an apple from the fruit bowl in the middle of the table and began to crunch noisily on it.
Emmeline didn’t think he was going to speak.
Eventually, Harry sighed. “If you don’t, I will.”
Oliver glared at him. “Over the course of the last year or two, several of our men have fallen.”
“Fallen? You mean were killed?” Emmeline looked around the men who all slid knowing looks between them. “How?”
“No. They weren’t killed, not as in dead.” Oliver shook his head.
Emmeline found herself copying him. “I don’t understand,” she murmured.
“They married.”
“Several of them.”
“Practically every month a man fell. And married.”
Emmeline nodded sagely as she looked at the men seated around the table once more. “That’s good then, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” Oliver muttered with a heavy sigh. “They have, along the way, tried to leave the Star Elite, our organisation, but their specific skills were still needed so they never really leave. Take a colleague of ours; a fine gentleman, a wonderful warrior who everyone can trust implicitly. He had to guard someone; a young woman called Rose. By the time the investigation was over, he was married, and has-” Oliver squinted at Harry.
“Six.”
“Six? Six – children now,” Oliver continued. “Because he is a good friend of Sir Hugo’s, he agreed to help our boss should we ever need it. He was then joined by one or two other men who married, and they now operate a branch of the Star Elite in one of the rural counties.”
“They formed a local group so the men who are married and have wives and children are able to continue working for us yet live closer to home. Like we have told you, most of our work involves long hours, often undercover and overnight. It makes marriage and raising a family impossible unless the men are living close to home.”
“It also helps that they are familiar with the villages in their area and are able to investigate crimes on a much larger scale using their skills they have learnt from the Star Elite. The magistrates are therefore removed from investigating the crimes and are often all too willingly are happy to just oversee the trail of whatever criminals the Star Elite arrest and put behind bars. It has worked so well that the hierarchy in the War Office have sanctioned the establishment of more regional branches of the Star Elite.”
“So everyone can now marry,” Emmeline said innocently.
Several of the men found this extremely funny and began to snigger.
“No.” Oliver burst out before rolling his eyes. “Good God. It isn’t like some sort of race. No. It just means that if someone finds a wife and wants to marry, they can either settle in whatever county the wife lives in or can go home to whatever county they come from. They can join a regional branch of the Star Elite, which will probably be closer to home than London. Invariably there will be some travelling involved in the work they do, but they will be based closer to home and don’t have to work from our main base in the War Office. But marriage is a choice.”
“It is just that without the regional branches of the Star Elite for married men to join if they wish, marriages would be impossible because of the length of time couples would be apart. Raising a family would be difficult. Some men happily live and work in London still, or live on the outskirts, but others who hail from, say, Oxfordshire, can join the Oxfordshire branch if they wish and make life easier for themselves,” Jasper said.
“So, there you have it. Now you know about the inner workings of the Star Elite, I warn you now that you must never discuss our organisation with anybody.” Oliver looked over his apple at her and sighed when he saw her blink at him. “Please.”
“Who would I tell? Do you know something? I don’t think anybody would believe me about you even if I told them. Why, in all my days, I have never heard of such an organisation. Of course, everyone has heard of the War Office, just not this Star Elite. However, thank you for telling me because I
did wonder who you were and why you seemed to be able to work with such authority and not annoy the magistrate.”
“The magistrate is waiting for us to tell him what to do,” Oliver warned. “He won’t appear unless we send for him.”
“So what do I do now? Now that you have two of the thugs behind bars, surely you don’t need me to lure out the Smidgley brothers, do you?” Emmeline’s voice rose to a near-squeak. Her stomach dropped her to her toes when Oliver began to nod.
“Yes, we do. For now, we eat. Then we are going to send some of the men off to keep watch over the Smidgleys, and then you are going to settle in here while I read some of the reports the men have left. Then, later, we are going to decide what we are going to do to bring this investigation on a little bit, but that can’t involve you.”
“How long do I need to be here for?” Emmeline asked.
“Do you need to be anywhere else? Is there a loved one nearby who will worry for your safety if you are not at home?” Oliver stared intently at her as he waited for her to confirm whether she had a suitor or not. He had no idea why it should bother him so, but it did. He had no idea what he would do if she said that she had a loved one, an intended, who would worry himself sick until he heard from her again.
“No.”
“Sure?”
“Why, yes, I am sure,” Emmeline replied, wondering why he was asking. “What does that matter?”
“We don’t want them making a great hullabaloo with the locals about your disappearing,” Jasper growled.
“Well, I am off,” Harry announced suddenly, shoving back from the table and striding across the kitchen to the door. “I will replace Callum and be back later.”
“I am off to replace Will,” Rhys declared before he followed him.
One by one, the men left the room until Oliver and Emmeline were left alone.
“Now what?” Emmeline asked.
“Now, I will show you to your room and then we are going to go through a few manoeuvres you could use should anybody try to accost you.” Oliver shoved away from the table and watched his colleagues ride out of the yard. For a moment, he wished he had the authority to order one of them back to show Miss Elkins everything she needed to do to thwart a physical attack, but he knew it wouldn’t do him any good even if he tried. His colleagues had made it perfectly clear that he was on his own with the delightful Emmeline Elkins, and that was undoubtedly going to lead to trouble.
“Damn,” Oliver hissed.
“Pardon?”
“Nothing.” Oliver sighed and turned toward her. “Let me show you to your room and then I will meet you outside in the yard.”
Everything that happened in the next half hour went by in a blur. Emmeline was shown to a room at the rear of the property which overlooked a large stable block. She barely had the chance to unpack her belongings before Oliver slammed out of the house. She watched through the window as he hurried across the yard and slid open two huge barn doors before disappearing inside. Taking this as her cue that he was ready to show her what she needed to know, Emmeline hurried out of the room.
“Oliver?” she called seconds later when she appeared in the barn doorway. She stopped and peered into the gloom but there was no sign of him. It was so dark inside, that she couldn’t see a blessed thing. More importantly, she couldn’t hear him either. “Hello?”
Wondering if she had missed him, Emmeline turned to look at the yard behind her. She didn’t get the chance to utter a squeak before a hand slammed over her mouth and she was lifted off her feet. Within seconds, she found herself standing in the middle of the darkened barn.
“Do you see how easy that was for me?” Oliver growled.
If he was honest, even he was a little shaken by how swiftly he had managed to snatch her. Although he had only taken her a couple of feet, she was still somewhere she hadn’t wanted to be, and she hadn’t made any noise.
“Jesus. Don’t do that,” Emmeline hissed. “That scared me.”
“It was meant to,” Oliver replied. “Do you now understand how Caroline and all those other women came to be snatched so readily? If you were walking down the street, and there weren’t all that many people nearby, nobody would notice you had gone.”
Emmeline felt sick. “But how did they get those poor women out of the area?”
“How do you think they intended to get you out of the area?” Oliver countered. “Think about those two thugs who turned up this morning at your house. They would have been seen if they had carried you screaming and kicking down the road. However, if you had been walking down a narrow country lane, with nobody nearby, that carriage could have pulled up, those men could have reached out and snatched you just as easily as I have just now, and you would have been dragged inside the carriage and carted off within seconds. You would vanish almost instantly. There are thousands of carriages like theirs up and down this country. Nobody would think anything of seeing something like that rumbling through their village.”
“It’s horrifying,” she whispered.
“I don’t mean to scare you, but I want you to be aware that you cannot stop them if two of those thugs arrive to fetch you in a carriage like theirs again. There are, however, certain things you can do to make any attacker’s life difficult,” Oliver assured her with a grin. “Besides use your skillet.”
“Like what?” Emmeline almost dreaded to ask but was curious. She wanted to know what she could do because the possibility of being snatched by a real kidnapper was horrifying. Oliver had done it with such silent precision that she hadn’t stood a chance, and it was terrifying to think that someone – anyone – could do it again.
“I need to know, Oliver,” she prompted when he continued to stare at her as if doubting the wisdom of showing her.
“I know, but I just don’t want to worry you unduly. You are going to be safe with us,” he murmured.
Emmeline offered him a sad smile. “But you are not going to be around forever. I have to be able to look after myself when you are gone.”
Something began to tighten in the centre of her chest and made her eyes water. It took a few moments for that wild stinging in her eyes to disappear. She knew what caused her tears. The thought of the men riding off to continue their investigation and leaving her alone in her house was something she dreaded. Until now, Emmeline hadn’t realised just how much of her life had been taken up worrying about her sister. Now that Caroline was no longer around, Emmeline had no idea what she was going to do. It was a sobering thought because she knew the prospect of finding a more fulfilling life was dire, not least because to fill it with anything meant she had to find someone to share it with. That was going to be impossible now that she had met Oliver because she really didn’t see anybody ever matching up to a man like him.
Oliver was strong, capable, dependable, of that there could be little doubt. But he had a dangerous lifestyle and a yen for adventure that had, over the course of time, given him an aversion to the burden of marriage. That, as far as Emmeline was concerned, put them worlds apart, even though it did little to stop the attraction she felt for him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
An hour later, Emmeline was struggling to prise Oliver’s hand off her wrist. She huffed and puffed and bent over so his arm was stretched across her while she tugged and pulled. He grinned and held her firmly seemingly with little effort while she struggled to get him to loosen his grip. Eventually, as he held her, she studied the tightness of his fingers on her wrist and tried to think about her situation logically.
“Logic is the answer to everything,” he murmured, as if reading her thoughts.
Emmeline stopped struggling and frowned at him. “How do you do that?”
“What?”
“Read my thoughts like that.”
“It is easy. You stopped struggling and were looking at my fingers as if trying to figure out some complex problem. It doesn’t take a genius to know what you are doing. If you panic and struggle you are apt to lose any fight. It is b
est to remain calm and put as much logic into your efforts as brawn.”
Emmeline looked down at herself ruefully. “But I don’t have much brawn.”
“No, you don’t,” Oliver agreed with a thoughtful nod. “So that means you have to rely on logic a little more than most people, doesn’t it?”
“But if I don’t have brawn, how will logic work against someone who is twice the size of me?” she asked warily.
Oliver positioned her so she stood before him. At the very start of their session, he had made it clear that he saw her as nothing more than a doll he could push around at will, and it was really starting to irk her. She wished that, just once, she could win one of their skirmishes because right now, she was starting to feel more than a little useless.
“If I came up behind you and grabbed your arms, which let’s face it is what most attackers would do, you have two choices. You can bend forward, but if you took your opponent’s weight with you, you would be likely to fall onto the floor with your attacker on top of you. That is the very last place you want to be. However, if you straightened your arms and kept them rigid and at shoulder height, it is impossible for any attacker to drag your arms behind you and tie you up or force you to go with them.” They practiced what to do a couple of times. Emmeline nodded when she thought she had a proper grasp of what to do.
“Now, if an attacker is behind you, stomp down on their feet as hard as you can but without moving your arms. Go on.”
“What?” Emmeline turned to look over her shoulder at him, carefully ignoring just how blessedly close he was. “You want me to stomp on your foot?”
“Yes. Try it,” he urged.
“Sure?”
Oliver grinned. “I can take it.”
“Are you sure?” Emmeline grinned with sudden relish.
This time, when Oliver made a grab for her, Emmeline locked her arms and forced herself to push them forward when he tried to tug them behind her. By locking her arms, her back straightened, forcing her shoulders back against her attacker. It made her go rigid. Once she was far less pliable, she stomped down on Oliver’s foot and forced all her weight down through her hip. She wasn’t off balance and was able to alternate her feet, so Oliver was constantly stomped on.