Why would anyone want to do this to her? Try though she might—and despite her determination to do so, she hadn’t been able to dismiss the question from her mind—she couldn’t make sense of it. Was it some unlucky happenstance of time and place, as she had first supposed, or, as was seeming increasingly possible, was it a carefully executed plan directed specifically at her? She had spent Christmas in Yorkshire, in the bosom of her own family, choosing to go to Morningtide, her sister Gabby’s home, over a celebration with her husband and his mother. Her excuse had been an urgent desire to be with Gabby, who was all but bedridden by a most difficult first pregnancy. With both her parents dead—her abusive, unloving father, the Earl of Wickham, three years before, and his third wife, her beautiful but modestly born mother, when Claire was a mere infant—her two sisters, and now Gabby’s husband as well, were her family, as well as being the people she loved most in the world. The holiday had been the merriest she had known since wedding David, and she had enjoyed every minute of it. Then, a week after Boxing Day, she had reluctantly bowed to David’s wish that she join him and a party of guests at the enormous, drafty anachronism that was Hayleigh Castle, her husband’s family seat since the days of William the Conqueror, and set out. That had been two days ago.
Shortly before dark her traveling carriage had neared its destination. She had been aware of a not-unfamiliar lowering of her spirits as the reunion with her husband drew ever closer. The day was gray, cheerless, threatening rain, its bleakness a perfect match for how she was feeling. Then, in a dense wood not many miles from the castle, her carriage had been attacked. Without warning a band of masked riders had appeared out of nowhere, surrounding them, forcing the vehicle to halt. The coachman, fumbling for his blunderbuss, had been shot from his seat forthwith. The horror of that had scarcely sunk in when the carriage door was wrenched open and two burly men peered in. With the best will in the world to show courage, she had screamed as hysterically as her maid, Alice, a sweet country girl from Gabby’s household recruited to take the place of her own beloved Twindle, whom she had left behind to care for Gabby. Shrinking back into the plushly upholstered corner of the seat, she had tried to fight off the rough hands that reached for her. Her efforts availed her nothing. In an instant she was dragged from the carriage. She fuzzily recalled Alice being pulled out behind her; the maid’s screams had abruptly stopped just seconds before a foul-smelling rag had been pressed over Claire’s nose and mouth. After that, she remembered no more until she had awakened upon that bed in the room behind the farmhouse kitchen, quite alone.
“ ’Tis your last chance to behave like a sensible lassie, milady,” the leader called, bringing her back to the present with a jolt. Glancing up, Claire realized that she could no longer see him. He must have moved away from the edge of the cliff. Only his voice and the lantern’s glow that limned the cliff edge in gold told her that he was still near. Obviously he did not know of the path’s existence, or had forgotten it if he did. It was her good fortune that the crime had occurred in country she knew. She had spent the first months of her marriage at Hayleigh Castle, and David himself, in one of his even then increasingly rare charming moods, had shown her this path down to the windblown gray shale crescent of a beach.
The sea was roaring in her ears now as, inch by perilous inch, she crept closer to it. Through the fog she could see the curvy white lines of foam where the waves broke against the shore. Beyond that, the black vastness of the ocean blended with the black vastness of the sky so well that one was all but indistinguishable from the other.
She had only twenty or so feet to go, she calculated with a fresh surge of hope. Once on the beach, she would run as if all the hounds of hell were after her—which, by then, they might well be.
A tiny pinprick of light, warm and yellow amid all the cold blackness, shone briefly on the surface of the sea. Her eyes widened and her step faltered. The light was there, and then gone even as she strained to see. So fast did it appear and disappear that she was not quite sure her eyes were not playing tricks on her—until it flashed again.
Still staring in some perplexity out to sea, she at last arrived at the uppermost reaches of the beach, stumbling a little as she made the transition from slippery path to uneven ground. Frowning, she continued to probe the blackness for another glimpse of light. Then she gathered her sodden skirts in one hand to clear her feet and started to scramble over the rocks toward the beach proper. Had she imagined it? No, there it was again. There was no mistake.
Were her pursuers coming after her by boat now? she wondered, panicking anew. But no. A glance up confirmed that they were still above her, presumably searching the cliff. The yellowish glow of the lantern light through the fog was unmistakable.
But she had seen something. Perhaps it was no more than a fairy light, she thought, shivering as she clambered over another rock and at last reached the relative flatness of the beach itself. The moors thereabouts were legendary for elusive beacons sighted briefly in the dead of night, and fairy lights were the name the local folk gave them. Or perhaps it was a fisherman, late getting in. Or, more likely, smugglers . . .
A muffled crunch on the shale behind her was her only warning. At the sound, Claire’s heart lurched. She whirled, but it was too late: A man loomed behind her, a tall dark shadow just separating from the legion of shadows that were rocks and cliff and sea, close enough to touch. She was caught! She would be killed. . . .
She never had time to let loose the scream that tore into her throat before something slammed hard into the back of her head and she crumpled without a sound into blackness.
2
“That were simple enough.” James Harris’s voice was hushed but cheerful as he lowered his pistol. Hugh Battancourt, who instinctively caught the collapsing female around the waist to keep her from measuring her length on the shiny-wet shale, cast his henchman a sardonic look, which of course, thanks to the fog-shrouded darkness, James didn’t see.
“Simple indeed.”
“We’d best be loping off, then, before them that are with her come nosin’ around. Seein’ as how we’re not exactly the party they’re expecting.”
Hugh, having come to that conclusion on his own, already had the woman hoisted over his shoulder and was heading back toward the sea. As James had said, this particular part of the job, which in theory had seemed rife with possibilities for error, had so far been problem-free. Under the circumstances, he preferred not to tempt the gods of disaster any further than he had to.
A successful mission, after all, was one carried out in secrecy, with the enemy not finding out they had been bested until it was far too late.
“Wait to give them the signal until we’re well away from shore,” he said over his shoulder as, with a great deal of relief, he lowered his limp burden into the longboat that awaited.
“Aye, with any luck they’ll be thinkin’ the Frenchies have her safe.” James chuckled, clearly relishing the notion of pulling off so neat a scam. “At least, until they meet up with the Frenchies.”
For the past two days, Hugh had been suffering from a premonition that this, his latest mission, was destined to end badly. The premonition had arrived the week previous in the form of a toss from his horse, which embarrassing mischance had happened to him only a handful of times in his adult life, all just before some far more dire mischance had overtaken him. This particular spill had been spectacular, in full view of a courtyard full of snickering French lords and ladies, and had left him with, among other less tangible injuries, several badly bruised ribs. Despite the resultant stabbing pain in his midsection whenever he made an unwary move, and the corollary catastrophe he had learned such a fall invariably seemed to portend, he had nevertheless answered the call of duty when it had sounded upon his door.
That call had come in Paris, where, in his role as the mincing cher ami to the fabulously rich Louise, Marquise de Alençon, he had been observing with keen interest the return to Paris of Napoleon Bonaparte, along wit
h the straggling remnants of the French Army. The little general, apoplectic at finding his troops defeated by the harsh Russian winter, had already turned his rapacious gaze once again to England as he plotted fresh and, as he undoubtedly hoped, redemptive atrocities. As yet Hugh had not been able to ascertain just what form those atrocities were to take, although he did not doubt that he soon would.
It was his job, after all, and he was good at it.
Then an urgent message had arrived via the usual channels: Through a disastrous breach in security at the War Office, his identity, along with the identities of several other British operatives working clandestinely in France, had been uncovered. The acquisition of such information would be a major coup for the beleaguered French and a disaster of equal proportion for the British. According to Hugh’s source, the possessor of that information had not yet had a chance to reveal any details to the enemy other than the fact that he possessed it. The would-be informant was now in hiding in England, waiting to be plucked under cover of darkness from a certain Sussex beach and conveyed to France, where he would turn over the information to the interested parties for a fat fee. If the informant was not silenced in time, Hugh’s usefulness as a British spy would be over; his life would be over too, should the French catch him before he could get out of their country. There were roughly a dozen like himself whose lives and jobs were imperiled by the leak.
His mission: to intercept the traitor at the point of rendezvous, recover the information, then interrogate and subsequently rid the world of his prisoner.
In the forty-eight hours since the matter had been laid before him, he had ridden ventre à terre from Paris to Dieppe, boarded a leaky three-masted schooner under the command of a loyal privateer, crossed the storm-tossed English Channel, and gotten to the rendezvous point in time.
Only to find himself in the heroic position of abetting in the brutal bludgeoning of a woman.
He should have turned down the job. The tumble from his horse should have warned him. Indeed, it had, but he had thick-headedly refused to heed that warning. He could blame no one but himself, then, for subsequent events. From the outset, one thing after another had gone wrong. First, of course, there were his damned ribs. They ached like a sore tooth when they weren’t outright stabbing him, rendering him as ill tempered as Prinny when his corset pinched or, as a nice alternative when he rebelled against their rule, doubling him over with pain. Then there was the fact that it had rained from the moment he had left Paris. A cold, pouring rain, driven by high winds, that had turned the roads to quagmires and the fields to impassable swamps. On horseback as he’d been, there had been no respite from it. Raindrops had found their way beneath the turned-up collar of his greatcoat in a steady stream and wilted the once-curly brim of his beaver until it drooped soddenly around his ears. His disapproving companion, plain James Harris before they had gone to France and now (because of an excruciating French accent) known to all and sundry as his mute manservant Etienne, was another source of annoyance, and one moreover whose presence was almost as unwelcome as the rain. But, as James had opened the door to the bearer of the ill tidings and, by dint of sly listening at a closed portal, been privy to the lot, there had been no dissuading him from coming, short of murder, which Hugh, sneakily fond of the annoying fellow as he was, was loath to do. Finally, the privateer’s crew had been alarmingly undisciplined, the sea had been rough, and—the coup de grâce—a message had been waiting for him on board identifying the traitor as a woman. To whit, one Sophy Towbridge, a London high-flyer who had apparently purloined a packet of letters containing the information, which she hoped to sell, from her benefactor, Lord Archer, an elderly peer who still tottered around the War Office.
The revelation of his quarry’s gender had knocked Hugh back on his heels. He was supposed to interrogate and kill a woman? Hildebrand hadn’t told him that. But then, Hildebrand was a master at keeping certain select facts to himself when it suited him. He certainly knew that Hugh would have balked at doing violence to a woman, war or no war.
But, having acted in the teeth of the cosmos’s repeated attempts to dissuade him, here he was, saddled with the mission. Now, in the interests of his country’s security, to say nothing of his own, he had no choice. Hildebrand would have known that, too.
Damn Hildebrand. And Boney. And all the bloody Frogs. And the woman before him, unconscious and curled childlike into a ball in the bottom of the gig that was even now taking them back to the ship, where his job would be to relieve her of the incriminating letters she had stolen, discover what had prompted her to steal them and other details surrounding the crime, and then, when he knew enough to plug the leak at both ends, dispose of her like so much garbage.
Hugh hadn’t realized that he was cursing aloud until James, seated tailor-style on the woman’s other side as he shuttered the lantern he had just used to signal that all was well to the woman’s erstwhile companions, met his gaze and nodded agreement.
“Aye, and damn this bloody weather, too. We’re like to be frozen through before we get back to the ship—if we get back to the ship, that is.”
This dark afterthought was in apparent reference to the swelling waves that pitched the longboat up and down. Spray showered them like rain; the bottom of the craft was awash.
“We’ll not be lettin’ ye drown, Colonel, don’t fash yerself about that.” The nearest of the men working the oars addressed this remark to Hugh, shouting to be heard over the roar of the sea.
The fact that the sailor knew his military rank did not really surprise him. In another ringing endorsement of War Office security, all aboard the Nadine seemed to know that he was a British intelligence officer on a very important mission, as had been made clear to him from the moment he had set foot on the ship. Fortunately, the French vessel that had been scheduled to make this pickup had, thanks no doubt to the good offices of Hildebrand, not yet put in an appearance at the rendezvous point, and the escort that had accompanied Miss Towbridge to her destiny was now well out of earshot, which made discretion a little less imperative than it otherwise would have been. Still, he had lived in the shadows for so long that the fact that the sailors, seasoned smugglers all, seemed to a man cheerily cognizant of every detail of his mission made the hair rise on the back of his neck.
“Blimey!” James said as the little boat slid down the back of a wave into a trough as deep as a canyon.
With the plunge, Hugh’s thoughts were diverted to concerns of a more immediate nature. Glancing up, he saw the ship that was their destination rearing high above them like a spirited horse. Seconds later, the longboat shot up the back of another rolling wave. The sea was worsening, no doubt about that. He was glad that they would be back aboard the Nadine before the storm he feared was in the offing struck in earnest.
“Mmm.”
With his hand on the woman’s head, he felt rather than heard the soft sound she made. Glancing down, he watched her stir as more icy water sloshed over the side of the boat, soaking her anew. She was already lying in an inches-deep puddle. Hugh knew just how cold and deep it was, because he was sitting in it himself, cross-legged, one hand exploring her scalp to determine the extent of her injury, while with the other he held on to the side of the boat for dear life.
“Is she dead then?” James asked without noticeable regret, apparently having just then noticed Hugh’s digital exploration of their prisoner’s skull.
It was James who had clouted her over the head with his pistol when Hugh had walked up behind her on the beach.
“Not dead.” If Hugh’s tone was wry, James appeared not to notice.
The woman’s hair beneath Hugh’s fingers was wet, cold, and fine textured. It had fallen from its pins to straggle over her face like long tangles of silk thread, and in the darkness looked as black as the sea. She was both nicely shaped and easy to carry. He knew that too, almost strictly from touch, because after catching her as she collapsed he’d reflexively put his shoulder to her stomach and lifted her o
ver it—only to have his ribs exact a teeth-gritting price by the time he reached the gig.
He’d had to steel himself to ignore the knifelike sensation in his midsection as he had bundled her into the rowboat that, as the extraction had been accomplished so quickly, the sailors had still been in the process of securing. If the distance had been much farther he was very much afraid he would have been forced to let his pride go hang and pass the wench off to James, who’d been clucking like an old hen beside him for fear he’d do himself an injury all the way. He would have hated like the devil to pass the wench off to James.
The traitorous wench.
Hugh reminded himself of that deliberately, dwelling on the word with grim determination in an effort to steel himself for what he had to do. The slight body curled with helpless vulnerability before him belonged to one who was a danger to them all, a danger to England.
He would not even think of her as a traitorous wench. Just a traitor, gender immaterial.
The thought performed the necessary function of hardening his heart. Nevertheless, he could not help but be aware that her skull felt unmistakably feminine beneath his hand, her skin was soft, and her hair had a disconcerting tendency to curl around his probing fingers. Dammit to bloody hell, she felt like a woman.
Ignoring that as best he could, he continued the search. His efforts were rewarded when he encountered a warm stickiness just behind her left ear: blood.
“She’s bleeding.” His tone held no inflection. That it cost him some degree of effort to keep the label “traitor” rather than “woman” at the forefront of his mind was something that only he needed to know. Having determined that the injury did not appear to be life-threatening, he disentangled his hand from the clinging tresses. A glancing blow to the head would be the least of what would befall her now that she’d been apprehended, he reminded himself grimly. If the notion made him secretly queasy, then it was time to remember that he was, first and foremost, a soldier in time of war. No one had ever promised him that the things he would be required to do for his country would be pleasant, or easy.
Irresistible Page 2