Leaning down, he placed Robert into the small vessel bobbing gently with each break of the incoming tide, and the two oarsmen immediately saluted. With one last look up and down the deserted shoreline, William began to push the boat back into deeper water. He strained and heaved, helping it forward, and the oarsmen steered with smooth, sure strokes which skimmed the rolling waves with gentle splashes.
“We are deep enough now, Standish,” Robert growled, his frequent glances toward the open, unprotected beach speaking volumes about his unease. “Hurry up…and get in the boat.”
“Eager for cold meat pasties and warm ale, are we?”
“After years of army rations, that would be quite a treat.”
“Very well then, your highness, I—”
CRACK.
The first rifle shot rang out like a thunderbolt, but it wasn’t until the wooden edge of the rowboat splintered mere inches from his hands that he understood the game. Oh, for God’s sake. The bloody idiots had decided realistic meant shooting a genuine bullet so close to him he’d practically felt a wind brush his face? Breaking each of White’s toes wouldn’t nearly be enough. Nothing less than castration would do now.
“Christ!” said William. “Ambush! Get down!”
In the space of a few minutes, two more bullets whined overhead, ricocheting off the boat and spattering into the water. The oarsmen swore, clearly aware they were an easy target as they fought against the current and the waves wanting to shove them back toward the beach. Robert moved from his wooden seat to kneel in the hull, his face twisting in pain as he reached out.
“Standish,” Robert barked, then coughed. “Give me your hand…and get in the...fucking boat!”
“No! Save yourselves! Get out of here,” he replied, pushing the boat as hard as he could. Not needing to be told twice, the oarsmen began a frantic dip and glide, and the boat pulled away.
“Standish!”
Pretending not to hear his friend’s cry, William turned and swam back toward the beach. The marksmen would be getting a piece of his mind when he got to them; realistic was one thing, but they had been dangerous and bloody irresponsible. What if he’d actually been hit?
The moon came out from behind a cloud just as he reached thigh-deep water, giving everything an unnatural pearly glow. Staggering out of the waves, his limbs cramped and his clothing a heavy hindrance, William knelt to get his breath back. When he looked up, another bullet whizzed past, grazing his shoulder and hissing as it hit the wet sand.
Oh, that did it.
Almost shaking with anger, his shoulder burning like he’d been stung by a swarm of angry bees, William stood. But instead of a team, he stared straight into the face of a roughly-dressed man now standing no more than twenty feet away. “Where is the rest of your unit? And what the bloody hell is wrong with you? I know you had certain instructions, but this has gone beyond ridiculous. You’re not actually supposed to shoot me!”
The man tilted his head, and smiled in a way that iced William’s blood.
“Au contraire, monsieur marquis,” he replied, his thick French accent caressing the words. “My instructions were very clear. You must be stopped at all costs.”
Christ. Hell Fuck.
William swallowed hard. “What? How did—”
“As many men have discovered in their lives, pillow talk is never a good idea. Although it’s fair to say Mademoiselle Samantha would tempt a saint to sin. Ah, those curves. And that mouth is made to please, no? She is a fast learner who grows more skilled at her work by the day.”
Shock froze him to the spot. No. That was bloody impossible. Samantha wasn’t one of them. He knew that. She was an innocent party in all of this. “Liar.”
“Mon dieu! She has succeeded even better than we thought. Did she whisper sweet words of love in your ear? Beg you not to go after she spread her thighs for you again and again? Ha! The women, they lure men to destruction with their bodies because it always works. And Mademoiselle Samantha spreads her thighs for everyone.”
“Bastard!” William snarled, clenching his fists and advancing closer so he could tear the would-be assassin apart. Surely he couldn’t have any bullets left in his rifle…
The Frenchman laughed, threw the rifle away, and withdrew a pistol from his jacket. “Au revoir forever, monsieur marquis.”
Then he fired.
Chapter 11
Samantha sat rigidly in the hackney, willing it to go faster.
Of course today, instead of ducking and diving and generally attempting to cause an accident at every corner, the blasted driver was a courteous man who actually stopped or slowed down for other carts and carriages. And she needed to get to Alexander as soon as possible. His most recent note lay crumpled in her hand, the parchment almost unreadable, but that didn’t matter. The brief message was imprinted on her brain.
Come to Langley House, as soon as you get this. News.
Had they finally returned from France? Could William have safely brought Lord Robert home and even now be standing in Alexander’s library, ready to sweep her up in his arms and promise never to leave her again?
The thought made her stomach lurch in anticipation, and she held a scented handkerchief to her nose. If only she didn’t feel quite so ill. This morning when she’d swung her legs out of bed to get up, a rush of dizziness had nearly made her topple face first onto the floor. A cool cloth pressed to the back of her neck had helped her head, but not her temper. It would be just her luck to have picked up some horrid illness now, after being perfectly fine the nearly five weeks William had been away. Nothing said “I love you and missed you and can’t wait to hold you close again” like fainting or decorating someone’s shoes.
Finally the hackney came to a jerking halt, and she swallowed hard several times before climbing down and pressing a coin into the driver’s hand.
Hurrying up the steps, Samantha then practically elbowed a grim-faced Wallace out of the way as he opened the door, running as fast as her stomach would allow until she burst into the familiar first-floor library.
“Well?” she demanded, for once not even caring about windblown hair, an askew bonnet or cream pelisse flapping like duck wings. “What is the news, Alexander? Do you have a note for me, or are they finally home?”
“Samantha...” a hoarse, shaky voice began, and she turned in startled concern.
“Aunt Jane? You sound like you should be tucked up in bed! And Stephen and Caroline, what are you doing here?”
“They are here because I asked them to come,” said Alexander in the most remote tone she’d ever heard, and a shudder of unease rippled through her body. His opulent library felt oppressive at the best of times, but the beloved faces around her were unusually blank, the atmosphere in the room so heavy she wanted to cough and clear her throat.
“What is going on?” she asked, far more tentatively. “Has poor Lord Robert taken a turn for the worst? Have they been delayed again?”
“No. We were not delayed again,” said a dull, slurred voice. “Even the British Army…gets its act together...once in a while.”
Samantha’s gaze jerked toward the corner of the room, and her hands flew to her mouth. The broad-shouldered man settled awkwardly in a padded Bath chair with a blanket draped over his legs might have been Alexander’s twin, except his skin was bronzed, he was horribly gaunt, and had a deep, vicious scar stretching halfway across his face.
“Lord Robert?”
“For my sins,” he replied, and took a long swig straight from the near-empty brandy bottle cradled loosely in his hands.
“But if you are home, where is William?”
“Sam, perhaps you should sit down,” said Stephen woodenly.
Hysteria surged through her body. Swallowing hard again, she took several deep breaths and concentrated fiercely on remaining calm and composed.
“I don’t want to sit down,” she said, enunciating each word. “I want to know why everyone looks so very, very sick. I want to know why a badly
injured man is nearly blind drunk in the corner of this library. But most of all I want to know where my William is. Someone better tell me. This minute.”
Lord Robert cleared his throat. “Lady Samantha, I’m sorry, so terribly sorry to tell you...” His voice cracked, and he coughed then winced. “Just as we were leaving the beach to row out to Southby’s ship...we came under fire from some stragglers on the beach. I’m not sure who they were. A French patrol perhaps...or deserters with a grudge. We left after dusk, you see.”
“A patrol? Deserters? But Calais is supposed to be safe. Friendly to Englishmen.”
“It should have been. Our intelligence stated…that kind of enemy activity...occurred no more than sporadically…in the area.”
“I don’t want to know about intelligence that was obviously anything but. I want to know about William! Was he injured? Did he swallow an ocean of seawater getting you out to the ship? Oh my poor darling, how awful, I must go to him at once,” she babbled wildly, the thought of him alone in his chamber, bruised, battered, and without someone to lovingly comfort him far too much to bear. Why hadn’t someone from Hastings House sent word? Surely it had been obvious how she felt about William.
But instead of a chorus of agreement and reassurance, the silence strained and stretched. Suddenly she knew with dreadful certainty Lord Robert’s story remained unfinished. Trembling, she reached out for the back of a chair to steady herself.
“There is something else, isn’t there.”
“Everything happened so fast,” the colonel whispered. “Standish had just put me in the vessel. He started to push us out into deeper water…when the first shot rang out. I yelled at him, again and again. Get into the fucking...excuse me...get into the boat, but he wouldn’t. Just kept pushing us out…’til the oarsmen could row by themselves. Then he said we must save ourselves...to go without him.”
A horrified cry tore from Samantha’s throat. “What?”
“I know. It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard...I yelled at him again. But he turned around…and swam back toward the beach.”
“While the men were still shooting?”
Lord Robert nodded. “Yes. I don’t think they were trained marksmen. They were good, but not quite accurate. A little slow to reload. Standish made it to shore without being hit—”
“And then what happened? He managed to escape? Oh, so that is why he isn’t here! He saved your life right under the noses of the French, got away, but had to wait for the next ship. How very, very brave. Surely His Majesty will commend William for such courage.”
Again, her words were met with the dreadful, heavy silence, and her heart began to thump so fast it threatened to leap from her chest.
“He...he did get away?”
“No,” said Lord Robert, agony flashing across his face. “A man ran down onto the beach...with a pistol. He shot Standish. I saw him fall...just before we rounded the headland.”
Black spots danced in front of her eyes. Samantha swayed, the solid anchor of the chair in front of her the only thing keeping her upright. But her mind balked at allowing the two words to be put together. It was impossible. William couldn’t have been shot. That wasn’t supposed to happen. He was supposed to come home, hale and hearty, and hold her in his arms.
“Is he...is he...dead?” she choked out, almost physically unable to form the words, even though she needed to know the answer more than she needed to breathe.
Lord Robert closed his eyes briefly. “We don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Oh! Oh yes! I remember. You were tucked in the rowboat he put you into, far, far away from danger. My William saved your life and you abandoned him to the French!”
“No! It wasn’t like that.”
“Liar!” she shrieked, agony stabbing her with the force of a thousand knives. “It happened exactly like that! Everyone thinks you are such a brave hero, but you’re a coward. You could have turned back, but you left him…”
Lord Robert’s face lost all color and became even more haggard, a moment of bittersweet triumph. Yet his remorse wasn’t enough, not against the icy chill creeping through her body, suffocating her heart and soul. The room went blurry and gray, but before she hit the floor a strong arm hooked around her waist.
“We’re all hurting badly right now,” Stephen muttered unevenly as he pulled her against his side. “I didn’t know matters had progressed so far between you and William...but don’t say anything you may later regret.”
“Regret?” she croaked, sagging against her cousin. “How can you say such a thing...weren’t you listening? He left my William!”
All at once a terrible sound filled the room, a chilling, keening wail, as if a body was being torn in two. Samantha put her hands over her ears to block it out, wishing someone would make it stop, but it carried on for an eternity. And her throat hurt.
People moved and voices flew back and forth across the room, some loud and angry, others anxious and one soothing. But she couldn’t make out what they were saying, it was like watching a play from behind a thick glass wall. Exhausted, she slipped free from Stephen’s hold and slumped to her knees on the thick rug. Soft feminine arms tried to gather her into a gentle embrace, but she shrugged them away, her skin too tight and sensitive for touch.
William had been shot.
Images of him ran in her head like a series of paintings. Riding in Hyde Park. Dancing at Almack’s. Laughing as they ate cream cakes in Lady Havenhurst’s awful drawing room. Him knocking out Sir Francis. But most painful of all, one of her curled up naked against him, her head on his chest while he twisted a blonde curl around his finger. Smiling as he kissed her. Scowling as he warned her against any other man in his absence.
William had been shot. And might be dead.
The suffocating darkness closed in again, and she knew no more.
He was burning.
Hell was an agony of pain and fire, and the devil himself was stabbing him viciously with a pitchfork. Groaning, William tried to roll away to protect himself, but not only did his limbs refuse to work, his skull was repeatedly bashed with a club in punishment.
“No more,” he rasped, almost ready to do or say anything for a quick, merciful death instead of this prolonged torture.
“Try not to move,” said a brisk voice with a strong burr of the Highlands. “I’m nearly done, laddie.”
Interesting. Lucifer was a Scot, and spoke in a low, even tone. While his nationality wasn’t overly surprising—it seemed every man from north of the border had a streak of diabolical a mile wide—the lack of thunder in his voice was. Then the pitchfork stabbed again, immediately followed by the fire, and he wondered why he was even thinking about the devil’s bark when his bite was a million times worse.
“...there. My apologies, I ken removing bullets is nasty, but you’ll want to keep your arm, I expect.”
Confusion at the kind words was enough to force William’s eyes open. Shockingly, he wasn’t trussed up over a rocky pit of flames, but lying on a narrow bed in a semi-darkened chamber with a cool sheet tucked around him. A short, balding man attired in brown buckskins and coarse linen shirt covered by a blood-splattered apron was peering at him from behind silver-rimmed eyeglasses. And there wasn’t a pitchfork in sight, just several sharp knives, some long tweezers with curved ends, a metal bowl with blood-soaked cloths, and a bottle of dark, strongly scented alcohol.
He coughed. “You are not who I was expecting.”
The man quirked an eyebrow. “Oh aye? Who were you expecting?”
“Someone bigger. Redder. Cloven hoofs and pitchfork.”
“Ha! Connie lass, did you hear that? Our patient thought I was the dark one himself. Ah, but you Sassenachs are a bloody odd lot.”
“Stop laughin’, Dougal,” said a plump, silver-haired woman with an unmistakably cockney accent from the corner of the room. “It’s hardly surprisin’, the way you’ve been pokin’ and proddin’. Forgive my husband, sir, I know you ain’t a pincushi
on, but someone who’s been in some right bad trouble. And don’t you fret about us. We’ve been helpin’ the army for years, workin’ on the, ah, what do they call ’em, love?”
“Delicate matters,” said Dougal. “Like lads who get shot on beaches in the middle of the night. Just as well they got word to us in a hurry, the constable of Calais gets a giant pole up his arse about Englishmen. I reckon his family have been around since the dawn o’ time, and still hold a grudge about Joan of Arc. Your name isn’t Henry, is it? We can’t guarantee the safety of Henrys around here.”
William’s lips twitched, despite his burning arm and aching head. “Not Henry. My name is…Will. And I don’t think a Scot can ever throw stones about holding grudges.”
“Ha!” chortled Connie, clapping her hands. “Right you are, Will. Must say, you sound posher than the boys we usually get. You hail from the West End?”
“Guilty. Although I think the Home Office is trying to crush it out of me.”
Dougal snorted. “The Home Office would crush the life out of anyone. Except me damned cousin. He loves it. Maybe you know him? Everybody there calls him White. He’s an odd rooster.”
A genuine laugh escaped. No wonder Dougal had seemed vaguely familiar. What White might look like if he improved his wardrobe and lost the last of his thinning ginger hair. “I have heard of White, yes. Odd rooster is about the best description possible. And don’t worry, I won’t ask his real name.”
“I’d only tell you if you were dying, laddie. But if you do see him, tell him Dougal and Connie send their regards. And that he still owes us five pounds, six shillings, and no, we won’t forget.”
“I promise,” he said solemnly, wincing as his shoulder began to throb.
“Oh, poor love,” said Connie. “That arm is goin’ to hurt for awhile. Dougal cut out two bullets up near your shoulder, and you got grazed further down by your elbow as well. Desk duties for you, I think. And plenty of rest. We gave you a little laudanum to help you sleep last night, and you can have some more this evenin’. You’ll need your strength for tomorrow mornin’, that’s when they are sendin’ a barge for you. Come along, Dougal, let’s leave the lad be.”
Tempting the Marquess (The London Lords Book 3) Page 15