Lords of Ireland II

by Le Veque, Kathryn

  “I’m the one who gave Richard entry into this house. I’m the one responsible.”

  For what? The ultimate betrayal of Aidan Kane?

  A sob lodged in Norah’s breast. “I don’t know where to start looking for them. I don’t know where—where he could have taken her. Rose, please. If you can think of somewhere, anywhere…”

  The girl chewed at her bottom lip. “He was bent on takin’ me to Noonan’s abandoned cottage. Tried to lure me there. If he wanted to… to hide Miss Cassandra, maybe…”

  It was the frailest hope, but it was all Norah had. “Where is it?”

  “Ten miles from here, to the west. Ride to the site of the gypsy fair, then head down the valley. There’s an overgrown road that turns left. The cottage is at the end. But even if you want t’ chase ’em, you can’t. There be no horses.”

  “There has to be one left. Oh, God, please let there be one left!” Norah raced toward the door, then paused, turned. “Find someone to go after Sir Aidan, Rose. Give him this book.” She thrust the leather volume and letter into the girl’s hand. “Tell him to start searching every road.”

  With that, Norah turned and ran out into the darkness that had mocked her from the moment it had stained the horizon this night.

  A danger that now had a name. A menace that had a face. That of the stepbrother she had never known. Richard. A man who had worn the most cunning mask of all.

  A beast who had honed her into the perfect weapon to cut out Sir Aidan Kane’s battered heart.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  A dozen horsemen thundered through the night, Rathcannon’s strongest, bravest retainers streaming behind Aidan, all grim-faced, all ready to confront the villain who had dared endanger their little mistress.

  Yet despite their presence, Aidan felt alone, imprisoned by his own fury, his own most hidden fears.

  Darkness.

  How many times had he embraced it like a lover, a cloak to hide all that was dark in his soul?

  He should have been glad that each hoofbeat carried him closer to the Thorned Paw, eager to confront the enemy who had been tormenting him since the night his daughter had almost slipped into the hands of someone who hated him. An enemy evil enough to embroil an innocent young girl and a beautiful, gentle woman into his cruel game.

  Aidan’s hands had been fairly burning to feel the bastard’s throat beneath them, feel his fingers crushing the life out of the animal who had stalked those Aidan Kane loved. So why was it that he felt clinging fingers trying to hold him back? Why did he hear a reproach in the rumble of thunder?

  Why was it that he kept hearing Richard Farnsworth’s mocking drawl, taunting him with words as precisely honed as an assassin’s stiletto?

  It was insane, this feeling danger that pressed on his chest more certainly than the stormy air.

  Farnsworth was annoying. But he was Norah’s stepbrother.

  Aidan had tried to accept Farnsworth because of Norah. To endure him. Yet Aidan knew instinctively that if he had been at a gaming table with the man, he would have caught Farnsworth trying to stir up trouble.

  What was it Farnsworth had said, with those eyes that seemed so guileless, hidden beneath their innocent mask?

  Consider me responsible for anything that happens to your daughter from this moment on….

  I would think a gambler the likes of you would know that life itself is one huge game, and the man who wins is the one willing to take the biggest risks….

  When your daughter is with me, I vow she’ll be as safe as if she were clasped to her mother’s own breast….

  They were the words of a pompous popinjay, weren’t they? A harmless if irritating fool. One who had bumbled, sending Norah to Rathcannon… and then turned up fortuitously with a stricken conscience after Cassandra had nearly been abducted.

  Why? Aidan was damned certain Farnsworth hadn’t come out of any devotion to his stepsister. Then why blaze his way into the wilds of Ireland? Ensconce himself in Aidan’s castle? Endear himself to Aidan’s daughter?

  Why?

  The thunder cracked, lightning shattering the sky into fragments of night.

  Before half-blinded eyes, an image danced; Farnsworth rising to his feet amid dinner, stretching his stiff leg. His eyes had been hooded, something simmering beneath the lids.

  How did you injure your leg? Cassandra’s innocent question jolted through Aidan, followed by Farnsworth’s reply.

  I was racing about on a slick road with a green-broke team of horses and an ill-sprung curricle when it overturned. Lay on a cliffside for three full days.

  No, this was madness, Aidan thought, leaning over his horse’s neck, urging the animal to greater speed. Surely he couldn’t believe… what? That Richard Farnsworth had more menacing reasons for coming to Rathcannon? Insinuating himself into Aidan’s life? That Richard Farnsworth had had more nefarious motives for flinging his stepsister into Aidan’s bed?

  Aidan’s mind filled with huge, dark eyes in a pale oval face, an uncertain smile tugging at lips that had never known a man’s loving until he had kissed her, deeply, thoroughly, and lost his own soul. From the beginning, there had been something incongruous about Norah and the lovely bonnet that had perched on her dusky locks. What was it Aidan had thought in those frozen moments when he had seen her in the carriage circle? That she looked like a child got up in her mother’s finery?

  What had Norah said when she’d been attempting to smooth over Farnsworth’s arrival at Rathcannon? That he had given her the gift of a trousseau. A nightgown fashioned of wispy lace and mist to tantalize a man’s desires. Delicate gowns to set off Norah’s quiet beauty, make a man want her.

  Gowns Norah never would have chosen herself.

  But Farnsworth had chosen them for her, bundled them into a trunk and sent her off to meet the husband he’d miraculously found to rescue her from the fate her stepfather had planned.

  Coincidence. Aidan’s fingers clenched the reins until the leather gouged into his gloved hands. This whole morass with Farnsworth was just coincidence. Just as it had been coincidence the night Aidan had sat by Cassandra’s bed and told Norah the tale of Cassandra’s necklace.

  The necklace.

  It’s lovely, Norah had said, a tender wistfulness clinging in a web to her voice. It reminds me of one my mother once had, with miniatures of her and my father inside.

  The necklace was a gift from one of Delia’s lovers…. One of Delia’s lovers…

  A sudden shaft pierced Aidan’s chest, memories of a rain-slick road, screams—Delia’s screams, Cassandra’s screams…

  What happened to the man driving the coach?

  We never found him.

  A carriage accident… I lay waiting for help for three days….

  It had been years since that storm-tossed nightmare. Eight years. If Farnsworth was indeed the man who had taken Delia on that wild midnight ride, he must have been planning his vengeance all that time. Honing it to hellish perfection. Seeking out Aidan’s jugular.

  Cassandra.

  He closed his eyes for a heartbeat, seeing Norah flinging herself into the arms of her beloved brother. Introducing him to a bedazzled Cassandra. Farnsworth bending over Cassandra’s golden curls with an attentiveness that would have bewitched any girl straight out of the schoolroom. Most painful of all was the memory of Cassandra staring up at the polished Englishman with an adoring light in her eyes.

  A hideous premonition jolted through Aidan, freezing his blood.

  Aidan drew rein on his mount, wheeling his massive stallion around. The rest of his men struggled to halt their horses, shouts of confusion echoing through the night as they battled not to crash into the riders nearest them.

  “What be amiss?” Sean O’Day bellowed, all but toppling from a gray gelding.

  “I have to go back to Rathcannon.”

  “But—have ye gone daft, sir? The villain you seek is at the inn.”

  Aidan hesitated, his gut clenched. What if he was wrong? What i
f the man he sought was at the Thorned Paw, and this crazed goose chase would only mean that his enemy had slipped farther beyond Aidan’s reach?

  “You go on. I’ll ride back alone.”

  “Sir, I—”

  “Just do as I command!” Aidan bellowed. Then he slammed his heels into his stallion’s sides, the powerful beast surging down the shadowed ribbon of road.

  It seemed an eternity before he reined his mount to a halt outside the castle doors. An eternity of uncertainty sizzling black poison through his veins.

  Yet the first glimpse of the haven he had made for his daughter by the sea filled him with a soul-crushing certainty.

  Tear-streaked, desperate, the chambermaid Rose was attempting to help Calvy Sipes onto a horse, the footman in obvious agony and barely clinging to the animal’s mane. When the girls’ eyes locked on Aidan, a shriek of relief tore from her throat and she abandoned the footman, running toward Aidan’s stallion, her skirt flying, her hand rummaging in her apron pocket.

  “Sir Aidan! Thank God you’ve come back!”

  The stallion danced on its massive hooves, but the girl flung herself against Aidan’s stirrup.

  “Where’s Norah? Cassandra?”

  “You have to help her! Th—They’re gone! Merciful Mary, he took… took the young miss!”

  “Who?” Aidan snapped. “Who took Cassandra?” But he already knew.

  “Mr. Farnsworth. My lady rode out after them. She left you this. Told you to hurry.”

  The little maid thrust something toward him with one hand.

  Aidan cursed at the writing, blurred in the darkness. Guiding his mount until it danced beneath the ring of light from a lantern, he wrenched open the book to the page marked by a note, his eyes raking down the paper.

  His breath stopped. His heart slammed to his toes. Bile rose in his throat as Richard Farnsworth’s words spilled their venom into Aidan’s veins. A devil’s bargain, a pact with hell.

  Three wagers…

  Sir Aidan Kane will take a wife…. That wife

  shall take another man to her bed…. Kane’s

  daughter will be abducted by a fortune hunter….

  They were diabolical in their perfection.

  His memory flooded with images: Norah, his miracle, his bride, Philip Montgomery in the garden, his hands all over her, pleading with her to let him become her lover, the danger that had lurked in that same garden, a predator waiting, trying to steal Cassandra away…. And Farnsworth, forever smiling that sly smile, taunting Aidan with his double entendres, his mocking quips, knowing… knowing what he had in store for the enemy he’d come to Ireland to destroy.

  Was it possible that Norah—his Norah—had any idea what she was a party to? That she had come here, knowing—

  No. The denial was swift, sharp, relentless. The mere thought that he might suffer betrayal at her hand was too hideous to contemplate. He dashed it away.

  He grabbed up the note, the book tumbling from his hands. What he read was even more hideous than the wagers themselves.

  “Where?” Aidan rasped. “Where did that bastard Farnsworth go?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe to Noonan’s abandoned cottage.”

  Noonan’s cottage—one more legacy of Kane treachery. The tenants had been flung out in his father’s time while the wife was in an agony of labor, the young husband shot when, in his desperation, he had dared attack his lord and master. The knowledge that Cassandra’s screams might even now be battering those same unfeeling walls was an irony that sickened Aidan. The knowledge that Norah had gone after his daughter alone wrenched his heart.

  What chance could his ladylight have against a monster like Farnsworth even if she could manage to find him in the storm-darkened wilds surrounding Rathcannon?

  It was as if he’d been hurled back to the moment he realized Delia had taken Cassandra. His daughter was lost somewhere in the vast abyss of night.

  Aidan cursed himself. Why hadn’t he dragged Sean and the others back with him? Injured, Calvy could barely cling to the horse’s back, let alone wrest Cassandra from Farnsworth if he could find them. Any man who might be of use was riding hell for leather in the opposite direction.

  “Rose, you have to go after Sean and the others. Bring them back to help me.”

  The girl trembled, her fingers knotting against her breast as she eyed Calvy’s horse with fright. “I don’t—don’t, know. About riding… horses…”

  “You can do it, girl. I know you can,” Aidan said. “Cass could be anywhere by now. I need Sean and the others to help me search every road and path.”

  With an oath, he turned and spurred his mount into the night-shrouded hills, his mind filled with images of Norah, so brave, so broken by her stepbrother’s betrayal; Cassandra, frightened, helpless. Again. Just as she had been the night Richard Farnsworth had imprisoned her in a runaway carriage, hurtling toward the cliffs.

  Aidan knew, with each beat of Hazard’s hooves on the turf, that Farnsworth’s prediction at the dinner table that night would prove right. Tonight he would dice with the devil. But the wager was far greater than anything Aidan had ever risked losing. His daughter and, Aidan knew with blinding certainty, the woman he loved.

  Lightning lashed the sky in whip cords of light, guilt filling Norah with each beat of her horse’s hooves. Every minute that slipped through her fingers tortured her with images of what Cassandra might be suffering at Richard’s hands.

  Worse still was the fear that Richard and Cassandra might be racing in some other direction, where they would vanish until it was too late. Too late to spare Cassandra unspeakable horrors, too late to save Aidan from the diabolical trap Richard had set for him.

  Cassandra… The thought of what might be happening to that bright beautiful girl right now didn’t bear thinking about, lest Norah go insane.

  And it was Norah’s fault—Norah who had stripped away Aidan’s layer of protection, Norah who had brought Richard into Rathcannon, leaving Cassandra vulnerable.

  Norah groped for the butt of Aidan’s pistol, the smooth feel of the weapon reassuring her at least a little.

  She reined in her horse, searching in the darkness for the road Rose had spoken of. She was just about to spur her mount on when a bolt of lightning picked out a narrow trace that might be a path, all but obscured by the underbrush struggling to reclaim it.

  Norah hesitated for a moment, then reined her mount down the pathway, praying that she wasn’t making yet another costly mistake.

  The path writhed, twisted, her horse stumbling over tangled roots that wound across the abandoned road. Panic coiled deeper into Norah with the certainty that, if she had taken the wrong turn, she might not be able to find her way back until daylight. Too late to aid Cassandra.

  She all but sobbed with relief the instant she saw a glimmer of light from deep in a hidden valley, the white hulk of a tumbledown cottage crouching in the crook of a hillside.

  Rotted, wood-framed windows peered out like empty sockets, blind the horror that might even now be taking place in the room beyond.

  Norah spurred her horse on faster, racing up to the building, flinging herself from her mount in the shadow of a dying hawthorn tree.

  Splintered wood sliced her fingers as she grasped the cottage’s door latch, flung the panel wide.

  In a heartbeat, the scene in the chamber seared itself into her mind. Cassandra, huddled on a musty pallet, her skin painted in hellish hues from the flickering oil lamp perched upon a rickety stool. Her golden hair tumbled about her face, bits of grass and leaves tangled in the strands, her gown a torn puddle on the dirt floor. Her chemise drooped over one shoulder. Silk cords bound her wrists, a nasty scrape bleeding on her elbow, a darkening bruise on her jaw.

  While Richard, stripped to the waist, stalked her with an expression of distaste on his handsome features.

  At the sound of the door crashing against the wall, Cassandra screamed. A stunned Richard wheeled to face the door, his haughty cheek scored w
ith the glistening tracks Cassandra’s nails had cut into his skin.

  His hand flashed toward the pearl-handled pistol pillowed on his cast-off clothing. But suddenly he froze, recognition and astonishment registering in his eyes as he took in Norah’s wind-tousled curls and the breeches that barely clung to her waist.

  “I’ll be damned,” he muttered, his lip curling in dark amusement. “Who would have believed it.”

  “Richard, have you gone mad?” Norah demanded. “Let her go!”

  “N—Norah!” Cassandra’s cry pierced her heart. The girl fought against her bindings, trying to get to Norah, but she was blocked by Richard’s tall frame.

  “Not so fast, my dear,” he said, taking up the pistol and jamming it in the waistband of his breeches. “We aren’t quite ready to receive felicitations as yet—even from the stepsister who made our romantic liaison possible. But as soon as we get the unpleasant business of our bridal night over with…”

  “No, you can’t be married,” Norah said. “You can’t—”

  “I intend to bed the chit first. In fact, I would already be finished with the infernal task if she hadn’t managed to lunge off my horse and nearly escape me. She led me the devil of a chase, but I caught her and dragged her back. I promise you, she’ll learn obedience once she is my wife.” His hand swept up to the scratches on his cheek.

  “I’ll never marry you!” Cassandra choked out. “Norah, please help me!”

  “Norah can’t help you,” Richard cut in with an ugly laugh. “Even if she was tempted, it wouldn’t be in her best interests to do so. Once your precious father discovers her involvement in the wagers I made, he will hate her. She’ll be cast off—utterly helpless, alone in the world. But you needn’t fear for Norah’s future, Cassandra. She will gain complete independence as a reward for her part in my plot—enough money from your dowry to set her up quite comfortably.”

  Norah gaped at him. He seemed for all the world like a clever boy who expected approval for some cunning trick he had played. It sickened Norah, horrified her.

  “Norah,” Cassandra breathed in a tiny, broken voice. “You—you knew about what he was going to do?”