Piers nodded, staring down at the mess he’d made of himself. His vest was stained with the man’s blood, and his bleeding knuckles were beginning to swell. “There’s a deer path that will lead you past a swan pond and the gardens. They’ll have to turn left immediately, and double back through the edge of the woods to find it.”
“Any other assassins would be daft to shoot into a hunting party,” Cecelia reasoned. “They’d never escape without leaking like a sieve.”
“Right. Too many witnesses with guns. Do let’s go.” Francesca lifted her skirts and all but sprinted up the hill with gazellelike agility.
Cecelia took an alarmed step toward her friend. “Don’t you want to join Francesca, Alex? I can easily stay here alone with the duke and help His Grace lift the brigand onto the horse.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” he growled. Lift the man onto the horse? What rubbish.
“Oh, it’s no bother. I might never be a dainty woman.” She held shapely arms and broad shoulders out for his review. “But I can carry my share of a body when called upon to do so.”
Lady Alexandra made a distressed sound.
“I’ll ruin the handsome side of my face before I allow a lady to assist in such odious work.” Piers looked from the countess’s determined stomp up the hill to the petrified doctor behind him and back to the Valkyrie offering to help with the heavy lifting. He’d met his share of peculiar women, but this trio simply beat them all.
And he was marrying one of them.
The two women stared at each other for a meaningful moment. “I can’t face those people,” Alexandra said finally. “You go. Send someone to find us should we not return directly.”
With one more hesitant glance, Cecelia followed Francesca, who’d already made it more than halfway up the hill.
Piers and Alexandra stayed silently concealed within the ruins until they were certain the party had dropped out of sight below the ridge of Tormund’s Bluff.
“Are you all right?” He reached to smooth away a curl that had escaped her chignon and caught on her mouth.
She jerked her chin to avoid his touch, tucking the bit of hair behind her ear with trembling fingers. “I’m quite well, all things considered. Shall we get on our way?”
Piers dropped his hand. Of course she was upset. He’d made her feel like a fool for not recognizing the groom in her own friend’s wedding.
Oh, and one mustn’t forget the part where she’d nearly escaped a bullet.
The gunman lost consciousness, and Piers belatedly wondered if he hadn’t beaten the man to death.
He hoped not. At least not before he extracted some information first. His hands itched to strike the man again.
And worse.
“Stay hidden until I have him secured,” he ordered.
Setting the gun on what was left of a hip-high wall, he fetched Merc and led the stallion to the unconscious plonker. The man was shorter than he, as most men were, but heavy-handed and rotund. Piers crouched down and verified that the gunman still breathed before he rifled through his pockets. He found nothing but a slip of paper, which he unfolded.
Falt Ruadh
Suspicion twisted in his gut. This had been no random act of violence. Not a robbery nor a ravishment.
This had been a hit.
The note was hastily scrawled in a language he was only familiar with because of his Scottish half brother.
Falt Ruadh
Scots Gaelic for “red hair.”
Red Hair. Uncommonly, all three of the women were possessed of some shade of the description. Lady Francesca’s a brilliant, fiery crimson. Cecelia’s a coppery gold. And Lady Alexandra’s a russet mahogany that took on the colors of the sunset when the daylight shone on it as it did now.
Hers was the least vibrant color, and yet the most captivating.
Christ. He berated himself as he lifted the blighter’s arm over his shoulder and hefted the bulk of him with his back.
What sort of man lusted for his fiancée’s bridesmaid?
He heaved the bastard over Merc’s saddle, and had to steady the animal when it danced sideways.
Better not answer that just now, he told himself as he retrieved a length of rope from the saddlebags. He used that and one rein to secure the gunman to the saddle by both feet and the arm that wasn’t broken. The knots weren’t pretty, but they’d hold.
Alexandra recovered the pistol from the wall and checked the cylinder for the remaining bullets.
Two shots left, if he counted correctly.
Piers reached out, palm open, expecting her to gladly surrender the weapon to more capable hands.
He should have known better.
She closed the chamber and lowered the pistol, though her thumb rested on the hammer. “I’ll carry this, if you don’t mind.”
“I do mind.” He motioned to the sack of shite he’d trussed to the saddle. “He’s perfectly secure. You’re in no danger from him.”
“I’ll carry it all the same,” she said resolutely.
He scowled. “Tell me you at least know how to use the blasted thing should the need arise.”
She didn’t react to his gruff tone and motioned for him to proceed. “Well enough. I practiced on snakes in Alexandria.”
Snakes in Alexandria. He snorted as he turned his back and led Mercury toward the path with one rein. Of course she did.
They walked along the cliff in silence for a long moment, as the waves crashed against the rocks below.
She maintained a wider distance than propriety dictated, keeping the gun next to her opposite hip.
Out of his reach.
She slid a nervous glance at him. “What was on the paper you found?”
Piers reached in his pocket, and extended the note to her. She scanned it quickly before returning it, her pale features remaining carefully impassive.
“I don’t know what it means.”
He could tell that it pained her to admit this.
“It’s Gaelic for ‘red hair.’”
He watched her for a reaction. Her expression remained smooth, tranquil even. But he was a man who’d been in the presence of animals for most of his life.
Even if her countenance didn’t convey fear, he read it in every tense line of her body. The distance she established. Her propensity to startle. The quickened rhythm of her breaths and the hoarse trembling barely concealed in her carefully modulated voice.
“Can you think of a reason someone would wish any of you harm?” he queried.
At this, she leveled him an anxious, searching gaze. “Can you?”
“I certainly intend to find out,” he muttered.
Her free hand crept to the cravat at her throat. She tugged and fidgeted with it as if to struggle for a few nervous swallows of air. That didn’t seem to help, so she pressed a glove to her cheek, then to her forehead, then dropped it back to her side to bury it in her skirts.
Despite the bracing breeze still carrying the scent of last night’s storm, a sheen of perspiration bloomed at her hairline. She had surpassed anxious and was leaving frightened behind her in the race toward true terror.
A strange and unprecedented urge welled within him, unsettling him almost as much as the sight of the pistol had.
The yearning was ludicrous—he wanted nothing more than to take her hands in his and smooth away her trembling. He wanted to … hold her, to offer comfort that he, himself, had never received.
He shook away the notion, landing on a constructive approach.
Misdirection.
“What snakes did you shoot?” he asked. “Some sort of cobra, no doubt.”
“Snakes?” It took several seconds for the glaze of confusion to clear from her eyes before she answered. “N-no, there weren’t as many cobras in Egypt as one is led to believe. Where our company camped near the lighthouse of Alexandria, we were mostly plagued with horned vipers. Th-they’d, um…” She took a shaking breath, lifting the gun hand to toy with her hair only to discover sh
e still held it. Guiltily, she lowered it to point at the ground.
Piers let out the breath he’d caught, using all his self-control not to snatch it from her.
“They were prevalent, these devil vipers?” he prodded, sensing she’d lost her place in the conversation.
“Yes.” She refused to lift her eyes. “Yes, and they matched the startling white of the sand, and so it was almost impossible to see them until it was too late.”
“I imagine you became quite the markswoman during your tenure there.” He said this just as much for his benefit as for hers, as she’d seemed to again forget about the weapon clutched in her hand.
“Actually, no, I didn’t have much use for my pistol once I adopted Anubis.”
“A dog?”
“A cat.”
He pulled up short, causing Merc to toss his head. “I’ll admit to not being the best pupil as a boy, but isn’t Anubis a god with a dog’s head?”
“Yes. But Anubis somehow looked like the statues of him … and acted like a dog.”
“How so?”
A twitch at the corner of her tight mouth compromised her frown. “She’d pounce on them, seizing the snakes behind their head and shaking the stuffing out of them. I know cats are predators. But I swear I’ve never seen the like.”
“She?” Piers echoed. “Where is this wondrous cat now? I should like to take a holiday to visit her.”
A fond half-smile softened her lips, though her voice contained a melancholy note when she said, “I left her with a little orphan girl named Akasha in Egypt.”
“What for? We’ve plenty of snakes in England she could happily slaughter.”
“I thought Anubis would get rather cold here.”
Piers gestured to the lazy summer grasses and the warmth of the afternoon tempered by sea breezes. “Plenty of felines seem to do well despite our climate.”
“Well, certainly, but they’re English cats, aren’t they? Anubis didn’t have any fur.”
Piers gave a melodramatic gasp. “A naked cat? I’ve never heard of such a thing.” He had, of course, but he’d begun to pull her away from the cavern of fear she’d been edging on only a moment ago.
“They’re called sphinx cats,” she said in the voice of a professor at a lectern. “They’re incredibly rare and are considered to be most holy.”
He clicked his tongue and chuffed. “You’re putting me on.”
“I’d never dream of it, Your Grace.” She finally brought herself to blink up at him, offering a shy, if shaky smile.
Somehow the sun shone brighter on the surface of the sea, and the wind caressed skin becoming more sensitive and heated by the moment.
Could one smile do such a thing?
“You misrepresented yourself at the train station.” Her tone was too mild for a reproach, and Piers wondered if she required conversation to divert herself from the fact that she was accompanied by a bloodstained duke and an assassin.
“Did I, Doctor Lane?” He injected uncharacteristic levity into his reply.
“But I am a doctor.”
“And also, it would seem, the daughter of an earl.”
She made an unrepentant gesture. “I didn’t want to dangle my nobility in front of a lowly stable hand, especially when he’d come to my rescue.”
“And I gather that Miss Cecelia Teague was your dashing escort Cecil?”
Something in the chagrin painted over her features informed him that she’d taken his point. “I was a woman traveling without a chaperone, who didn’t wish to give her information to a strange man. What’s your excuse for your uncourtly behavior?”
What he didn’t say was that he’d not wanted her to treat him like a duke. He’d enjoyed their banter. He’d been impressed by her uncommon—well—commonness.
He’d appreciated that she’d treated him, a scarred stablemaster, with more deference than she did now that she knew he was a man of power, wealth, and influence.
Piers said none of that, he merely lifted a shoulder. “At first, I thought you knew.”
“How could I possibly?”
“Everyone in the empire has heard of the Terror of Torcliff.”
“Yes … Yes, I heard them call you that.” She stiffened. “Why ever would they?”
“It’s a recent moniker, all told.” He gestured to the scar interrupting his lip. “According to local lore, I’ve been scratched by a werebeast—or a demon depending on whom you’re asking—and I’ve become the monstrous scarred duke who haunts the halls of the accursed Castle Redmayne, eating small children for lunch and virgins for dinner. I’m rather famous.”
He’d meant to be comical, but she stepped even farther away, her smile disappearing and taking the sunshine with it. “Perhaps you’re not as well-known as you think. I’d never heard of you before yesterday.”
“To be fair, it sounds as though you’ve spent a great deal of time out of the country and away from the ton.”
“True.” She acquiesced his point with a nod, and bent to pluck a tall blade of foxtail grass, worrying it with the fingers of one hand. “I’ve never been much for ton gossip.”
No, she wouldn’t be, would she? Piers gazed down at her for longer than was appropriate, able to do so because she’d become unduly absorbed with tying one-handed knots into the blade of grass.
As educated and well traveled as she was, she harbored an unspoiled air of innocent naïveté not often found in a woman of her age. Her eyes were the color of dark honey and shy as a fawn’s. Her shoulders curled forward slightly, not in an unladylike slouch, but enough to protect a tender heart.
The rest of her … well, her limbs were wound tight as a hare’s, ready to spring into the safety of the closest hedge should the need arise.
How had such a helpless lamb survived the perils of Cairo or Alexandria?
“Do you?”
It took him a moment to register that she addressed him, and not the blade of grass. “Do I what?”
“Do you eat virgins for dinner?”
He made a rude noise. “Good God, no, virgins are terrible fare at the supper table … Though mayhap I’ve indulged in a nibble of one or two for dessert. The villagers keep throwing them at me, and it does one good to treat oneself now and again.”
He directed his most winsome smile at her, ready to bask in her enjoyment of his levity.
She actually grimaced, turning her neck to stare uncomfortably out at the sea.
His grin died a slow and painful death. “It might surprise you to learn women once found me charming.”
At this, her head made another owlish swivel to meet his rueful gaze.
“That was, of course, before I became an unholy terror.” He motioned to his ruined features. “Perhaps I was just so devastatingly handsome they thought to humor me. Lord save us all now that I have to rely on my underdeveloped sense of humor and apparently nonexistent wit.”
“Oh!” She reached out to him, her face soft with guilt, dropping the knotted grass.
He readied himself for the pleasure of her touch, but her hand paused just before they made any contact.
“Oh no, Your Grace, no, please. Please don’t think my lack of … response has anything to do with … with your.” She gestured toward his beard. “I just … I’m not … erm…” Her words appeared to block her throat as she searched for a way to soothe his offense
“You’re not easily amused. I understand.” He overacted a magnanimous stature as he fought a smile. “Your high standards do you credit, my lady.”
He enjoyed the swift return of her color, as mortification replaced mortal fear. “That’s not it at all, Your Grace, I am quite easily amused … I promise…”
“More fool I, then, if it is so easily done, and I failed so utterly.”
She stepped closer, visibly vexed. “Please. It isn’t you at all. And I vow that your scars are not terrible, or terrifying. They’re rather dashing—charming. You’re charming, I meant to say—I—I’m just not…”
“You’re not yourself.” Something told him he’d gone too far, and her discomfiture was circling back to uneasiness and fear. “You’ve had a fright, Lady Alexandra. I only meant to tease you away from it.”
The worry drained from her expression, and her brows drew together as though she couldn’t decide whether to be relieved or cross with him.
“I’ve spent most of my life in the company of men,” he explained further. “And I’ll admit I’ve little to no practice in conversations with the fairer sex. And, I was absolutely lying when I claimed ladies ever found me charming.”
“Didn’t they, though? I should think they found you quite … erm … at least more than passing … that is … I’m sure they found you…” She swallowed audibly.
One of these days, she might actually be able to finish a sentence in his presence. “They found me obscenely wealthy, as well titled as a nonroyal can be, and—as most aspiring noble wives will tell you is an extremely desirable trait for a husband—I am most often abroad.”
“Certainly you won’t be now … now that you are to be a husband.”
Instead of answering, he made a great show of checking on the limp prisoner and patting Mercury’s neck. The footpath meandered closer to the cliffs before forking either toward the village, or back to Castle Redmayne, and he wished he could think of some other reason to avoid the question until their return.
“I don’t know. After Francesca and I perform our duties as Duke and Duchess of Redmayne and the Atherton line is secure, I might venture back out into the world. For now, it seems, I must see to my legacy.”
It was her turn to stare for a protracted moment. “You’re like no duke I’ve ever met.”
Piers was becoming accustomed to the way she blurted irreverent thoughts before considering their meaning.
“And you’re unlike any lady of my acquaintance,” he volleyed.
“I—I didn’t at all mean that as a slight.”
“And I was paying you the highest compliment.”
She ignored that, glancing away again. “I only meant to say, you’re more at home in the saddle or the stable than in any salon. You and Francesca will have that in common, at least.”
How to Love a Duke in Ten Days Page 8