by Julia Ross
“But what if I’m some kind of villain?” he asked at last.
“Your uncle is the Duke of Blackdown. Your elder cousin is Lord Ryderbourne. If that doesn’t place you beyond reproach, Rachel is certain that you’re a gentleman of honor. Is she wrong?”
“That a man’s noble relations guarantee his good behavior?” He smiled with real amusement—and the shadows fled as if Oberon might yet command the sun to make the world laugh. “London disproves that idea every day.”
“No doubt,” she said. “I’m not very familiar with the habits of town gentlemen.”
“Yet you come to me, when I’m very much the town gentleman. Do you expect me to drop everything in order to help you?”
Suddenly exhausted, as if the musty ranks of books had robbed her of energy, Sarah plunked herself down on the trunk.
“Why not? I doubt that you have anything much better to do.”
“Of course, I’m a member of the idle classes.” Wry irony settled at the corners of his mouth. “My time is obviously my own to indulge as I wish.”
“Yes, I imagine so.”
“And are you always this blunt with strangers, Mrs. Callaway?”
“No,” she said. “Of course not. But Rachel helped you once at some risk to herself. Any true gentleman would honor such a debt.”
“There is no debt.” He tugged out another book and flipped casually through its pages. “Your cousin was very well paid for her services at the time.”
“She was paid?” It seemed unreal. Perhaps he meant that Rachel had been given a gift of some kind. “Then I must appeal to your gallantry, sir. I assure you that I wouldn’t approach you like this, were I not quite desperate.”
“There’s no family member or close friend who can help you?”
“I’ve no living family other than Rachel, and I can’t trust any of our acquaintances in this.”
“Then there’s no Mr. Callaway?”
“Captain Callaway. I’m a widow.”
His fingers rested quietly on the leather binding for a moment, before he set the book back on its shelf.
“My husband died two years ago,” she added. “He was considerably older than I. He’d been wounded at Waterloo and carried the shards of metal in his spine for twelve years. He lived for only a few months after our wedding.”
“I’m so sorry,” Guy Devoran said.
The concern in his voice was almost her undoing. Sarah gripped hard at her reticule. “I haven’t told you this to gain your sympathy, sir. Merely to explain my situation.”
“Condolences can only ever be offered,” he said gently. “There’s no obligation to accept them. You’re not usually a resident of London, I take it?”
Sarah smoothed one hand over her green skirts. To think for even a moment about her past only made this conversation the more bizarrely fantastic. It was absurd, a madness, to imagine that Mr. Guy Devoran would help her.
“No, I teach botany and dancing and geography at a Young Ladies’ Academy in Bath.”
“But you came up to town specifically to seek me out, because your cousin mentioned meeting me some thirteen months ago?”
“You spent a whole day together,” she said, “in most unusual circumstances.”
“A day on a yacht, during which we barely exchanged two words. And now you tell me that she was using a false name.”
“Only to protect her reputation should you or your cousin prove less than honorable, and spread wild tales about your adventure together.”
“Yet now her faith in my good nature—from that one encounter—is so absolute that you’re certain I will aid you in whatever so disturbs you?”
Swallowing her trepidation, Sarah nodded.
He met her gaze as if he accepted it, but his smile spoke only of withdrawal. As if beneath a keen natural vigilance he must rein in deeper, more mysterious impulses that she would never be able to fathom: impulses that somehow amused him, but would always scatter his attention.
“You can hardly expect me to believe that,” he said.
Betraying color flooded over her cheeks like the tide. He was cousin to a future duke. He was desperately, heart-stoppingly attractive. Yet he belonged to a class that was essentially unknown to her: the hereditary aristocracy of England, who played, danced—and ruled—as if there were no tomorrow.
Young, handsome, eligible, he was the kind of man she would never normally expect to talk to privately, even as the relative of a pupil.
Sarah tamped down her runaway pulse and erratic heartbeat. Unless she risked everything, he would dismiss her out of hand.
“Nevertheless, that is the truth, Mr. Devoran.”
He slipped his gloves from his pocket and eased the fine leather onto his fingers. The neat movements were both strong and sensual, as if he took wicked pleasure in the simplest of gestures.
“But why won’t your cousin help you herself, Mrs. Callaway?”
Sarah stood up, feeling as if she were about to step—arms outspread—off a high cliff to plummet straight into the sea.
“Because Rachel has disappeared, sir, and I have very good reason to believe that she’s been abducted.”
CHAPTER TWO
SILENCE SEARED, LIKE THE SHOCKED VOID AFTER LIGHTNING.
He cupped her elbow to drag her back into the corner.
“Abducted?” His attention was absolute now. “You have proof of this?”
She steeled herself to face his obvious skepticism. “Rachel’s last letter betrayed such fear that I left Bath immediately and caught the next available coach to town. It arrived in London very late, so I took a room in a hotel that Rachel had recommended. But when I went to her lodgings first thing the next morning, she was already missing.”
“She was living here in London?”
Sarah nodded, disconcerted by his passion. “Yes. Why not?”
“No reason at all, of course. Where were her rooms?”
She felt in her reticule, pulled out a scrap of paper, and gave it to him.
He glanced at the address, then thrust it into a pocket. His gaze was shadowed, as if his eyes had opened on darkness.
“So you went to this place in Goatstall Lane. How long had Miss Mansard lived there?”
“For several weeks, though she hoped to find new employment soon. She’s a governess.”
“God! A governess! Are you quite certain of all this?”
“Yes. Why? Though they wouldn’t let me into her rooms, I thought the location quite respectable.”
“No doubt. She lived there alone?”
“Of course—apart from a maid-of-all-work, who came in during the day.”
“So you don’t think that she fled town of her own accord?”
“Rachel would never have gone away without first sending me her new direction.”
He spun about to stalk away. Vitality radiated from his long strides. “And from this you deduce that she’s been abducted? By whom?”
“I don’t know.”
His boots resounded on the wooden floor. “You have great faith in your cousin’s reliability, Mrs. Callaway.”
“I’ve known her almost all of my life, sir. Rachel would never have written to me as she did unless she had cause for real alarm.”
“So what frightened her so badly?”
Discomfort flamed painfully over her cheeks. “She was being persecuted by a gentleman…a visitor to the house where she held her last post.”
“When was this?”
“Last spring—in February and March.”
He stopped dead, his back taut. “Your cousin was working as a governess then? Where?”
“For a Mr. Harvey Penland in Hampstead. He’s a widower with six children. Rachel was happy there for almost a year, until this admirer destroyed her tranquillity.”
“She described him?”
“Not in any great detail, but Rachel’s very lovely, Mr. Devoran. Gentlemen always notice her.”
“So I recall.” Winter could not have sounde
d colder. “Did she encourage this man’s attentions?”
“When she first met him, perhaps. She even thought she was a little in love—but then he began to frighten her.”
His spine like a ramrod, he stared up at the top rows of books. “When did they first meet, exactly?”
“Some time in January, I think. But by the end of March she was quite desperate to escape his notice. Fortunately, the whole family spent Easter in Devon, so Rachel hoped her persecutor would forget about her while she was away. Instead, when they returned to Hampstead, he only became more importunate. So she made an excuse about an illness in her family—though we have no family left, of course—and fled to those lodgings in Goatstall Lane.”
A small muscle worked at the side of his jaw. “Yet she was still afraid of this man?”
“He threatened her with…with physical retribution. She was sure he would hunt her down.”
“And now you think this mysterious villain has abducted her?”
His incredulity battered at her, as if the bright, dismissive wave of his disbelief swept the floor from beneath her boots.
“Yes,” Sarah said stubbornly. “I do think so.”
He stood with his back to her, his head bent, as if he sought answers in the gold top of his cane. Dark hair curled over his ear. A rigid tension marked the line of his shoulder and arm.
The air felt thick with suppressed emotion: fear, anger, grief? Sarah’s heartbeat echoed into the silence.
“I cannot find her alone, Mr. Devoran,” she added desperately. “I don’t have the resources, nor the skills, nor the courage.”
“But why the devil come to me?” He spun about. “I think you’re not telling me everything, ma’am.”
She stepped forward, fingers clenched. “Perhaps not. But then, neither are you, sir.”
His nostrils flared. “Really? In what way?”
“You just said that you barely exchanged two words with Rachel that day on the yacht. That’s not what she told me.”
“Indeed?” Ice seemed to have congealed in his voice.
“It was a whole day. Rachel wrote that she chattered on like a magpie. Lord Grail was her employer then, so she’d thought her position quite secure. Yet when the family left her alone in that port while they visited relatives nearby, she feared she’d been abandoned there without funds. She was worried enough to write to an employment agency here in London. You must remember!”
“She’s supposed to have told me all this?”
Sarah sat back down on the trunk. “Perhaps Rachel seemed only garrulous and silly to you, but she wrote me a long letter all about it. A letter full of joy and…and triumph! Did she in fact make so little impression on you?”
“It would certainly seem so.” A shadow cloaked his expression, though his gaze remained fixed on her face. “But none of this explains why you think I will help you now.”
“Rachel said you were ineffably kind.” Sarah choked back her rush of anxiety and rage, and glanced down at the pile of books on the trunk. “She said you made her laugh.”
“Did I? I had forgotten. But our situations are not quite equivalent in this, are they, Mrs. Callaway? You are the suppliant. I am the one being importuned.”
“Yes.” Feeling stiff and awkward, she picked up a volume at random. The prospect of help was sifting away like dry sand through clenched fingers. “I didn’t mean to harangue you, Mr. Devoran. I’m sorry.”
“Not at all!” He smiled with a kind of remote courtesy. “You’re understandably distressed about your cousin’s disappearance. But aren’t you at all concerned about the impropriety of approaching a stranger like this?”
“I’m a widow, sir, not a young girl. With Rachel’s happiness and possibly her safety at stake, I have very little choice.”
He remained silent for a moment, his expression closed, contained, as if he ruthlessly reined in his natural male restlessness.
“So the choices, it would seem, are all mine,” he said at last.
The leather cover in her hand was embossed in gilt. The gold outline of a bullheaded monster glowered up at her from one corner.
“Theseus chose to enter the Labyrinth to face down the Minotaur,” she said. “He didn’t have to do so. He volunteered.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Embarrassment burned up her neck. She set down the book and stood up. “I’m sorry. But you mentioned the Furies, sir.”
Guy Devoran laughed. “And so invited a deluge of random Greek associations?” He stepped closer to glance down at the cover. “Where are you staying, ma’am?”
“Brockton’s Hotel. It’s not far from here.”
“Yes, I know it.”
She almost grasped his arm. “Then you will help me?”
His eyes met hers. Sarah gazed back into a heart of black flame.
A hot disturbance eddied through her veins, a quickening, like an onrushing ocean wave. She felt suddenly light-headed, as if he had mesmerized her, as if loose strands of her hair sang faraway songs of enchantment.
A bell rang.
Voices echoed from the outer shop.
The spun-sugar threads of the spell snapped in two. Though her heart still danced a frenzied fandango, Sarah dropped her hand and stepped back.
He had already looked away toward the sound. “If secrecy is so essential, you must leave right now,” he said quietly. “Which room?”
“Room?”
Guy Devoran glanced back at her and smiled. “At Brockton’s: a modest but decent establishment, as recommended by your cousin, suitable for young ladies traveling alone.”
“The last one in the north hallway at the top.”
He turned away to pull down a thick tome. He began to study it, almost as if he were no longer aware of her.
“Then I suggest that you return there,” he said, “while I think about it.”
She was dismissed. The loss of that vibrant attention stabbed like a knife.
With her blood on fire, Sarah slipped into the main part of the bookstore. An elderly couple was talking to the man at the counter. Using the bookshelves as a shield, she hurried to the other entrance and stepped out into the street.
It was raining. She had left her umbrella at the hotel. For no reason she could fathom, hot tears began to burn down her cheeks.
GUY closed the book with a thud. He thrust it back on the shelf, then stared blindly at the spine.
The scent of green apples dampened by rain—fresh and crisp and sweet to the tongue—eddied among the stuffy smells of the bookstore.
If he glanced up, would he still see her, frowning with apprehension? The green skirts and modest cloak. The proud tilt to her bonnet. The sensually rounded figure. The firm chin and changeable hazel eyes, glaring up at him beneath long, sandy lashes, like the eyes of a tigress.
Mrs. Sarah Callaway possessed a striking face, compelling without being beautiful: the opposite of her cousin, Rachel Wren—no, Mansard.
As if to mock his memory of Rachel’s cool, pale skin, flecks of brown rioted over Sarah’s cheeks to meet in a frantic dance on the bridge of her nose. More freckles cavorted over her perfect little chin to race along her jaw like a flock of tiny sparrows. Even her earlobes were speckled, as if finely crumpled autumn leaves had been mixed into cream.
My maiden name was Sarah Hargreaves. You once met my cousin. She was calling herself Rachel Wren—
Sarah probably had no idea that any man who saw all those little freckles would burn to touch them. From her straightforward manner, she probably thought she was plain.
Rachel, of course, had always known that she was beautiful, even when she carried a mop and bucket.
Guy dragged his palm down over his mouth. He had not even known that Rachel had a cousin. Especially one so very upright and interesting and…freckled!
The very proper teacher of botany and dancing and geography possessed very lovely skin, shaped delicately over lush female flesh. For all her lack of flirtation, Sarah Callaway wa
s hiding what he suspected was a wanton mass of hair, not entirely successfully pinned back in a knot beneath her bonnet.
He cursed under his breath. Was Theseus really expected to plunge, sword in hand, back into the Labyrinth?
The hazel eyes had seemed stunningly honest, yet almost every word that she’d told him was a pack of lies. So either the redheaded schoolteacher had not been entirely frank with him, or her cousin had fooled her very seriously. And, as he knew to his cost, Rachel was perfectly capable of skipping out on a relationship without leaving any forwarding address.
Thus he very much doubted the reality of any villainous abduction.
He almost doubted the existence of the room at the end of the hallway at Brockton’s Hotel, and even of the late Captain Callaway.
Guy had definitely begun to question the motives of this dappled lady with the self-possession of a queen, who might have danced, like autumn, directly out of summer.
He would, of course, help her anyway.
Though he would make a few inquiries first.
UMBRELLAS sprouted around her like mushrooms as Sarah hurried back to the hotel. She ordered hot tea, then ran up the stairs to her room. It was small and mean, the cheapest the hotel had to offer, and lacked a working fireplace. But the long summer days were busy stealing time from the night, so she did not need a fire.
At least Brockton’s was safe and decent, as even Mr. Devoran had acknowledged.
An impeccable reputation was essential, of course, if a young lady with no other prospects was to keep her employment and not starve. Especially a widow who had just run out on her teaching post with no guarantee that Miss Farcey would ever take her back.
Sarah tugged off her bonnet and stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were angrily rimmed in red. Her lashes burned like dry grass. The lady of misrule, her hair a damp mass, like a tangle of spun copper.
It was hard to remain respectable when one possessed such riotously wicked hair and skin that betrayed one’s every emotion, however fleeting. Without her bonnet she looked like a loose woman who had dipped her head in a dye pot.