If He's Dangerous

by Hannah Howell

  Before Argus could respond, Lorelei hurried the twins out of the gatehouse. As she rushed home to try and settle Miss Baker before her father hid himself away behind the locked door of the library and did not come out for days, she hoped Argus was suffering as she was. Constantly having her desires stirred to a fever pitch only to have everything end before it had fully begun was not a comfortable situation. It was only fair that the one who caused it share in the discomfort.

  Argus stared out the window watching Lorelei hurry up to the main house with the twins. He wanted to run after her, throw her over his shoulder, and bring her back so that they could finish what they had begun. That was madness. Taking the maidenhead of a duke’s daughter was the quickest path to standing in front of a vicar or a bullet. He was not sure which he would prefer at the moment.

  Shaking his head, he went back to his seat, sprawled on the settee, and slowly finished his wine. His body ached with unfulfilled desire, but he tried to think of it as a just punishment for his actions. Even if he ignored the fact that he had been close to relieving a duke’s daughter of her virginity in a parlor in the middle of the day, he could not ignore the complete lack of finesse he had shown as he had attempted it. He had pushed her down onto the settee, bared her breasts, and begun to shove his hand up her skirts all in an embarrassingly short period of time. He had not been making love to a tender virgin but ravishing her, his hunger controlling him. It would be comforting to blame the long time he had been without a woman for his actions, but it was a lie he could not tell himself. It was Lorelei and Lorelei alone who made him mad with lust.

  Her parting statement had made it clear that she was tired of being pulled close and then pushed away. He was tired of it, too, but he suspected her solution did not match his. He would keep her at a distance. Argus believed her plan was to pull him closer, yet he could not make himself think that it was because she wanted to try and trap him into marriage. Lorelei would never be so underhanded.

  That did not mean she would not want or expect marriage, however. She was a very highborn virgin. Such women did not take lovers, at least not until they were married, had provided the heir, or were widowed. He shook his head. Lorelei would never join the ranks of those women. Her passion was leading her now, and he, as the more experienced, needed to show some control. She was a woman you wooed and wed, a woman you planned a life and children with.

  It was a pleasant dream, one that caused him a pang of longing. Despite the recent happy marriages he had witnessed, Argus did not believe marriage could work for a Wherlocke, or a Vaughn. Nor could he marry a woman just to gain a few children. He already had two and he really did not need a legitimate heir, for he had nothing much to leave one. Money, but no estate. Most of his family had endured wretched marriages, ones that left husband or wife bitter and, often, heartbroken, and children with scars that never really healed.

  He admitted to himself that a marriage, a home and family, with Lorelei made for a nice dream. Argus knew it could easily turn into his worse nightmare, however. If she turned on him as so many other wives and husbands of his relatives had turned on them, and then left, he would be destroyed. He did not wish to think about what that said concerning his feelings for her, he just accepted it as hard, cold fact. And after what happened with his two sons, he had no wish to see yet another child tossed aside by his mother simply because he was a little different.

  As he moved to pour himself some more wine, he paused. The drink might dull the pain and fog the confusion he suffered, but it did not solve anything. It was time he made a decision about her and stayed with it. It was not fair to her to keep pulling her close and then pushing her away. Argus was amazed that she still spoke to him.

  He needed to look at the matter with eyes clear of need, of the passion he had for her. He had to look at whether he wished to gamble that he might find, as his recently married cousins had, that some Wherlockes could marry. It just required finding the right partner, the one who could live with what he and the rest of his family were and with what any child she might give him would be.

  “Damn,” he muttered. “It appears that what I really need to think about is whether or not I actually want to get married.”

  Chapter 10

  “Someone was here.”

  Argus looked at the signs of a campfire that Iago pointed to and nodded. For three days they had carefully ridden over Sundunmoor lands, regularly inspecting the more remote places where strangers might be able to hide themselves. This was the first sign they had seen that someone was sneaking around the duke’s lands.

  “Could be just a poacher,” he said.

  “Let me have a little wander around,” Olympia said. “Out here it may well be difficult to gather any memories left behind, but it cannot hurt to try.”

  “Do not go far,” Argus said as she began to walk away.

  “Nay. There is no use in doing so.”

  Iago grinned at Argus. “In other words, she is obeying you because she was not going to do that anyway.” He began to carefully look around the ashes of the fire. “If whoever stayed here were poachers then they had a very poor night. There is no sign of a kill here.” He wandered a little farther away from the fire, his gaze fixed upon the ground. “They also had horses, three of them. I have not got Bened’s skill, but, by the boot prints I can see, I would think there were also three men.”

  “The number is right,” Argus said. “Cornick always had two men with him.” A ghostly reminder of the pain Cornick’s two men had inflicted rippled over Argus, but he shook it away. “Men hired in London judging by the accents they had. Dockside, I would guess. So there is a connection to London there.”

  “Then Leopold’s men will find it.” Iago returned to Argus’s side, looked around again, and nodded. “Three men. Three horses. One fire. No sign of a fresh kill. Not poachers.”

  Argus looked toward the wooded area Olympia had disappeared into. “Might as well leave then. Did you see what direction they rode in when they left here? The ashes of the fire are cold and have been dampened down so it is almost impossible to know exactly when they left this place, but it might help to know where they rode off to.”

  “Into the wood.” Iago’s eyes suddenly widened. “The wood Olympia went wandering into.”

  Iago had barely finished speaking when Argus drew his pistol and went after his sister, Iago but a step behind him.

  Olympia frowned and looked around her. She had gone farther than she had intended to and would be hearing a lecture from Argus for it. There was no sense in continuing to look around, either. All she had found were faint echoes of what and who had passed this way. One very angry man and two men filled with a love of violence. There was enough to tell her that Argus’s enemies were in the area, however. The echoes of the men themselves closely matched the much stronger ones she had seen in the prison Argus had been kept in. One of the men had also spurred his horse too hard, the pain and fear of the animal leaving enough of a memory to tell her that the horses being ridden were not ones a poacher or poor traveler would own. It was not much, but it would have to be enough.

  She turned to go back to where Argus and Iago waited for her when, suddenly, all the hairs on the back of her neck stood up on end. Olympia spun around to look behind her just in time to see a large, ugly man on a horse. She had been so lost in her own thoughts that she had never heard his approach. Even as she turned to run back to her brother, the man spurred his mount forward, leaned down, and grabbed her around the waist with one thickly muscled arm, pulling her up to his side.

  “Not the one he wanted,” said the man, “but might be good enough.”

  “Bastard!”

  She squirmed, kicked, and pounded the man with her fists to stop him from dragging her up on his horse. Olympia knew that if he did, she would be lost. He cursed her with the rough speech of a London dockside laborer. His grip loosened when her fist connected with the side of his head, but before she could take advantage of that, he punched
her. Only the fact that she flinched away as he swung at her saved her from a direct blow to the face. His rough knuckles connected in a hard, sliding blow on her left cheek. The pain and the force of the blow made her head swim and allowed him to tighten his grip on her again.

  Just as Olympia feared that she was going to be taken away, Argus and Iago burst into view. She slumped in her captor’s hold, going completely limp. Argus fired his pistol and she heard a grunt of pain before she was picked up and hurled toward her rescuers. She hit the ground hard, Argus and Iago unable to reach her in time to catch her. As she sprawled on the ground fighting to remain conscious, she heard her attacker ride away.

  Leaving an armed Iago to stand watch, Argus knelt by Olympia’s side. “Ollie?”

  “Do not call me that silly name,” she snapped and then groaned when the simple act of speaking sent shards of searing pain slicing through her cheek. “The bastard punched me in the face.” She gasped when Argus began to slide his hands over her body. “Stop that.”

  “I am trying to find out if you have broken anything,” he said.

  “I have not, so you may cease to maul me. Help me up.”

  Argus cautiously moved her until she was sitting up and became alarmed when she just slumped against him. “Olympia?”

  “I just grew a bit light-headed for a moment. I am fine now.”

  She began to stand up and Argus quickly moved to help her, keeping an arm around her waist to steady her when she swayed. “Still light-headed?”

  “Nay. Now my head feels as if some monstrous weight has been set upon my shoulders and someone is pounding on it with a very large hammer. Oh, and a great many parts of me are beginning to complain about the hard ground they just met.”

  “I will take you up on my horse with me.”

  “That might be best. I do not suppose there is any chance that the wound you gave that man will prove to be a mortal one.”

  “Nay.”

  “Such a shame.”

  It broke Argus’s heart to hear her soft sounds of pain as, with Iago’s help, he got her up before him on his horse. He knew she was trying not to make a sound, but he easily recognized the strangled moans deep in her throat. He had made a lot of them himself not so long ago. She had hit the ground hard and, although he was as certain as he could be that nothing was broken, she had to be hurting in a lot of places. Argus wanted to travel slowly to try and keep her from suffering even more pain, but he also wanted to race back to the gatehouse so that her injuries could be immediately tended to. In the end, he compromised, holding her as steady as he could to lessen her pain.

  Half the way home they met up with Leopold, Bened, Wynn, and Todd. Argus told them what had happened and soon found himself with only Wynn to accompany him. Wynn had been left as a guard for him and Olympia. The others had raced back to where she had nearly been taken from them, all hoping that it would be easy to trail a bleeding man. Argus wanted them to be right, but instinct told him it would not be that easy, not even with Bened’s keen hunting skill at their disposal.

  Briefly he wondered if he was making Cornick into a greater foe than he actually was, one more clever and elusive, just because the man had bested him once. Then Argus inwardly shook his head. Cornick’s elusiveness could be no more than a keen sense of survival. Even men as thick as two bricks could prove to be very cunning when their lives were on the line. The inability to get any information on the man could be due more to the cleverness of his allies, especially if Leopold was right and this was a trouble caused by someone in the government. All he was certain of was that Charles Cornick would continue to hunt him, to either capture or kill him. Argus was the only one who had seen the man’s face.

  The sight of Lorelei walking up to the front of the gatehouse, even as he reined in before it, was a very welcome one, and not just for the usual reasons. She could help with Olympia. He recognized the girl with her as the one who had sat next to Iago at the dinner they had attended in the duke’s palatial dining room. As he dismounted, and then lifted Olympia into his arms, Lorelei rushed to his side.

  “What has happened? Was she thrown from her horse?” Lorelei asked as she followed him into the gatehouse.

  “No, she met up with one of the men we have been so assiduously hunting for,” Argus replied as he started up the stairs. “He tried to take her with him.”

  Lorelei ordered her cousin to go and get Max. To see the strong, beautiful Olympia bruised and being carried to her room like a child alarmed her. She hurried into Olympia’s bedchamber just ahead of Argus and pulled the covers back so he could lay her down.

  “I am not sure Olympia will want Max looking her over,” said Argus as he helped Lorelei take off his sister’s boots.

  “Her modesty will not be infringed, if that is what worries you. Max will have me tend to anything that might do that. But he is very good at tending wounds. We could call for the doctor if you wish.”

  “Max,” said Olympia. “Stop speaking as if I am not here.”

  “I had thought you had swooned,” said Argus as he brushed Olympia’s tangled hair from her face, careful not to touch her injured cheek. “Did he say why he was trying to take you?”

  “Just said that I was not the one he wanted but I might do.” She groaned as Lorelei began to tug off her coat.

  “Are you certain nothing is broken?” asked Argus.

  “Nothing is broken, but I believe everything is well bruised, scraped, and cracked. Damn but I wish your shot had hit the bastard’s heart.”

  “As do I.”

  With Lorelei’s help, he got Olympia stripped to her shift by the time Max arrived. Argus could tell by the faint sheen of sweat on the man’s brow that he had run down from the main house, but neither his clothes nor his hair look ruffled by the exercise. He quickly stepped aside when Max moved to examine Olympia. Argus watched carefully and felt his heart twist with sympathy at every wince and gasp of pain that escaped his sister. When Lorelei stepped to his side to clasp his hand, he returned the grip, welcoming the support. It was harder than he could say to watch his sister suffer.

  “Well, Lady Olympia, there is nothing broken,” said Max.

  “Said that myself,” she grumbled, but her voice was weak and a little hoarse, revealing the pain she was in.

  Max ignored her ill-tempered remark. “You will have to rest a lot and I will send a salve for all those bruises and scrapes. Ice for your cheek as well to hold down the swelling. I ordered some maids to prepare a bath for you in the adjoining bedchamber. It should be ready by now. Lady Lorelei can assist you in bathing now if you wish.”

  “I wish.”

  Argus helped Olympia get out of the bed. Lorelei quickly moved to his sister’s side, and put an arm around her waist to support her. The way Olympia shuffled out of the room, vainly trying not to lean on the smaller Lorelei too heavily, had him clenching his fists as he fought the urge to help. He turned to Max, hoping that talking about Olympia’s injuries and what needed to be done to help her heal would take his thoughts off the urge to rush to her aid.

  “She hit the ground hard when he threw her down,” he said.

  “That can easily be seen in the bruises that are already appearing,” replied Max, “but she is a strong woman.”

  After unthinkingly glancing toward the door to make sure Olympia was not there to hear that, Argus had to smile. “It is a good thing she has already left, for you would not want her to hear you call her that.”

  “Ah, yes, women can often misunderstand. I merely point out that she is not some frail, easily broken miss. Nothing is broken, but she will ache for a few days, everywhere. The bruises may not cover her from head to toe, but the mere fact that her body was thrown to the ground will cause all of it to ache.”

  “And she just has to endure?”

  “Yes, unless you wish something to stop her pain?”

  “Nay, she would not take it anyway. Some of those herbs Lorelei kept pouring down my throat should be acceptable to
Olympia.”

  “I will check the supply before I leave, and Lady Lorelei can show you how to mix them.”

  There had been a faint stress put on the word lady and Argus hid his wince. He had called her simply by her Christian name. Even in his mode of address he was failing to push her away, he thought with a flash of irritation.

  “Do not let Lady Olympia do anything too strenuous for a few days,” continued Max. “As I told you, since one cannot look inside the body, it is difficult to judge what abuse the bones have suffered. A break is easy enough to find, but lesser damage requires far more skills than I, or most doctors, have and nothing much can be done to fix them anyway. They have to heal on their own.”

  “I will do my best to see that she rests.”

  “Good. Stay here so that you can hear if Lady Lorelei calls for help, although I do not feel she will need it. Between Lady Olympia’s stubborn refusal to let unconsciousness intrude and Lady Lorelei’s determination, they should be fine, and your sister will feel better for having had a hot bath. The heat of the water will ease a few of her pains.”

  Argus started to show Max out, but the man waved him off. Walking to the door of the room where Olympia was bathing, Argus leaned against the wall and waited. After the struggle to help Olympia take her bath, Lorelei might welcome some assistance in getting his sister back to bed.

  Lorelei decided that Lady Olympia had a very impressive vocabulary. She washed the woman’s back as gently as she could but did not need all the muttered curses to tell her that the bath was causing some pain. Looking at the mass of bruises blooming brilliantly on the woman’s back, Lorelei was not surprised.