Always a Temptress (3 page)

Bastard
, she kept repeating to herself, although of any insult she could rain on her brother’s head, that would certainly be the most unlikely. Edwin truly was the one and only Duke of Livingston, holder of all titles and privileges, born to the strawberry leaves, and certainly happy to remind you if you forgot.

He was nothing like their father, who had been a good duke, a responsible man loyal to his people and generous to his community. That duke had truly been mourned when he died. When Edwin went, Kate had the feeling there would be a lot of show and no sincerity.

The problem was, he still had the power. And that meant, since he was head of her family, he was the male legally in charge of her life.

She worked for hours, tearing the coach apart like a starving woman looking for the last bit of cheese. She unearthed two blankets, a writing desk, a tiny bottle of scent she didn’t use anymore, three vinaigrettes from Bea’s stash, and a stale hunk of bread from behind the cushions.

To that pile she added a handful of coins and a small sewing kit she’d been looking for since the Countess of March’s soiree six weeks ago. But no weapons. No escape. No hope. Except she refused to believe that. She would go mad if she considered the places Edwin might want to incarcerate her.

She must have finally fallen asleep, sitting in the well with her head on the ruined seat. All she knew was that when she woke it was deeply dark. It took her a moment to realize that she had been alerted by a change of speed. They were slowing and turning.

Had Edwin had her brought to Moorhaven Castle? Would he have the effrontery to drag her back home kicking and screaming just as he was burying his uncle in the family vault? For heaven’s sake, the Archbishop of Canterbury was supposed to preside. If it was Moorhaven, though, Diccan would be there. It was his father they were burying.

Closing her eyes, as if that could keep the darkness at bay, Kate assessed her options. She loathed the idea of putting her fate in someone else’s hands. Especially a man. That had never exactly worked well for her in the past. But she could trust Diccan. No matter the risk to his social standing, he would speak out against Edwin.

The coach ground to a halt. Kate could hear the jangle of harness as the horses settled. She heard men’s voices, and the creak of the coach as the driver swung down from his perch. She heard the hollow caw of a raven.

And then, nothing. No movement. No voices. No appearance by someone who would offer explanation. Obviously a move orchestrated to heighten her terror. Considering how dark it was inside the coach, it was working.

Well, she’d be damned if she showed Edwin how frightened she was. Even as her stomach threatened revolt, she straightened her clothing and tidied her hair. Stuffing the horsehair back into the cushions as well as she could, she perched herself in the center of the seat and laid her hands in her lap, a duchess come to call. Except this duchess had a quiver of large, very sharp hat pins tucked in her hand.

She settled herself just in time. The door swung open, and a homely, carrot-topped man in an old fusiliers uniform reached in a hand. “If you’ll come out now nice ’n easy, ma’am.”

“Not ma’am,” she said, assuming her haughtiest posture. “Your Grace. And if you lay a hand on me, I’ll hurt you.”

He guffawed. Kate stayed put.

“Go on, then, Frank,” another man called from beyond Kate’s sight. “Haul the old girl out.”

Frank sighed and reached in. Kate struck like an adder, sinking the hat pin deep into the meat of his hand.

“Jesus wept!” Frank shrieked, hopping back. “Now, why’d you go and do that?”

Kate didn’t bother with a reply. She just glared. “You can tell my brother he can come collect me himself.”

He didn’t answer. He just tried to sneak in past her reach. She struck again. He howled. His companion laughed.

“It’s nothing personal,” Kate assured him. “I just believe that a man should do his own dirty work. Now go get him.”

Frank shook his head, as if Kate were mad. “He ain’t gonna like it.” But he shut the door.

Kate turned forward. She didn’t want the men to realize how fast her heart was beating, or the fact that it was only through force of will that she still sat there. She wanted to run. She knew, though, that she wouldn’t get four steps. So there she sat, a queen on her way to tea in a ravaged coach.

Suddenly the door was yanked open again. It was all Kate could do not to jump. She didn’t, though. Proud of her composure, she turned to face her brother, or whatever henchman he’d sent to represent him.

She froze. It wasn’t Edwin at all. For a moment, she couldn’t say a word. She could only stare, sick with betrayal.
Not him
, she thought.
Not again
.

“Harry,” she drawled, hoping he didn’t see how lost she suddenly felt. “Imagine seeing you here.”

Harry Lidge made it a point to look around the disaster she’d made of the carriage. “What the hell have you been doing?”

Kate didn’t bother to look. “Redesigning. You know how easily I bore.”

He offered a hand. “Get out.”

She didn’t move. She hated the fact that his hair gleamed like faint gold in the lamplight, that she could see even in the deep shadows that his eyes were sky blue. He had grown well, filled out into a strong man. A hard man who had survived the wars with fewer scars than most. He was no longer the boy she’d known, though, and it showed in more than the web of creases that fanned out from the corners of his eyes. It showed in the unforgiving rigidity of his posture, the impatient edge to his actions.

But maybe that was just for her.

“I don’t think I will,” she told him. “Not until you explain yourself. Are you working for Edwin now, Harry? I certainly hope he’s paying you as much to kidnap me as my father paid you to desert me.”

His expression, if possible, grew colder. “You don’t get to ask questions, Your Grace. You get to answer them. Now get down before I drag you out bodily.”

“Go to hell, Harry.”

Harry didn’t answer. Faster than even she could react, he reached in and yanked her out of the carriage. When she shrieked and fought, he tossed her over his shoulder and turned for the building Kate could only see as a deeper shadow in the darkness. She lifted a hand, ready to drive a pin in his back. He swung her around, never letting her down. His expression flat and cold, he wrapped his hand so tightly around hers that it drove the pins into her palm. She instinctively opened her hand, and they fell. She saw Frank scramble for them.

“You bastard,” she rasped, her hand bleeding and hurt. “Put me down!”

Harry didn’t bother to answer, just swung her back over his shoulder with a grunt as if she weighed fifteen stone, and stalked up the stairs into the building.

Kate was breathless with rage. “Stop this! You’re being ridiculous!”

He didn’t even slow. “Shut up, Kate.”

She tried to answer, but the position cut off her air. She struggled, but it did no good. Harry hauled her into the house, up a dim, grimy set of stairs, and into an even grimier bedroom, where he proceeded to dump her on the bed. She bounded back as if the mattress were on fire and scrambled to her feet.

This wasn’t Moorhaven. It wasn’t any place she recognized; it was a wreck of a room that looked as if it hadn’t been inhabited this century. Suddenly she was truly afraid.

“When did you start doing Edwin’s bidding, Harry?” she demanded, straightening her clothing with her uninjured hand. “Are you under the hatches, or do you need another promotion?”

“I don’t work for Edwin,” he said, his voice dripping ice. “I work for the government. And I have the dubious pleasure of keeping you here until you give us some answers. Where is it, Kate?”

Her hands stilled. She found herself blinking like a child. “The government?
Our
government?” She laughed, angry that she sounded shrill. “Pull the other one, Harry.”

He took a threatening step closer, his rugged features as hard as granite, the forest green of his Rifles uniform off-putting. “Oh, I think you know perfectly well what I’m talking about. Just before he died, the Surgeon told us. You’re mixed up with the Lions. Do you have it, Kate? Do you have the verse with you? Because if you do, we’ll find it.”

“The verse?” she echoed, stumbling back from him, only to have her knees fold and land her back on the bed. “You mean that poem we’ve been searching all over creation for like a lost Easter egg?
That
verse?”

He merely tilted his head.

“I don’t have your bloody verse,” she snapped, still feeling pathetically overwhelmed. And then the second betrayal sank in. “You believed the
Surgeon
? A man whose favorite pastime was carving poetry into people’s foreheads? Are you mad?”

“Not as mad as you if you think I’ll fall for your stories again.”

He stepped back toward the door, and it was all Kate could do to keep from reaching out to beg him not to lock her in. She could barely breathe in this room. It was infested with shadows and dark corners, just a candle away from darkness.

“Don’t,” was all she could say.

Harry stopped, his eyebrow quirked with disdain, but she couldn’t get another word out.

“What?” he asked. “No clever quotes? No Latin or Greek or German, Kate? What happened? No more ignorant farm boys to impress?”

She found herself blinking again. He couldn’t believe that of her. Hadn’t he loved that game as much as she? They’d once spent hours teasing each other with arcane quotes and elaborate curses in as many languages as they could learn.

She shook her head. “I certainly see no one here I want to impress.”

She didn’t recognize Harry anymore. She’d known him once, an open, easygoing son of the earth with a brain too big for farming. She had loved him once, with the passion reserved for a first love. She’d seen him as the hero who would save her from her father’s plans.

But he hadn’t saved her. He had betrayed her. And over the last ten years, grown into this implacable, humorless, spiteful man.

“Now then, Your Grace,” he said as if to prove it, his voice a razor. “You can make this easy or you can make it hard. Your luggage is being searched. If we don’t find the verse there, you’ll be searched. You can cooperate or not.” He shrugged. “Until then, you can consider yourself my prisoner.”

“I told you,” she repeated, rising to her feet like a doomed Mary Queen of Scots. “I wouldn’t recognize the thing if it came up and asked me to dance. Now stop being such an ass and let me go. I need to get back to Bea.”

She was furious to hear a note of pleading creep into her voice. At least it stiffened her spine, so she could brace her feet on the floor and confront the enraged stranger she’d once known so well. Or thought she had.

He shrugged and turned for the door. “No.”

“You don’t understand,” she said, stepping closer to him. “Bea can’t simply be abandoned. She isn’t strong. She’ll fret herself to flinders worrying about me.”

“Don’t be melodramatic, Kate. She was with your staff. Nothing’s going to happen to her.”

“All violence isn’t physical, Major.”

“You don’t leave till I get what I want. Your hand is bleeding, Duchess. You might want to see to it.” He smiled. “And consider the consequences of your own violence.”

Kate clenched both of her hands. “Diccan will kill you for this.”

He stopped, his stare implacable. “Diccan told me to take you.”

Kate wondered whether shock really had a sound. She thought she heard a whirlwind; she thought she heard the echo of a cold void. “Don’t be absurd.”

Diccan would never do this. He would never threaten her with imprisonment. He knew…no, she realized, he didn’t. Only Bea knew. But Bea wasn’t here.

She snapped out of her reverie just in time to see Harry step through the door. She grabbed him by the sleeve. “Damn you, at least get a message to Bea.”

“I told you,” he said, his voice cold as silence. “Give me the verse and we’ll see.”

She bit back a sob of frustration. “You’d torture an old woman just to get back at me?”

It was as if she’d snapped some restraint in him. Suddenly Harry spun around and advanced on her, forcing her across the room until her back was pressed against the peeling, dingy wall. He kept crowding her with his body, battering at her with the fury in his eyes.

“
I’m
not the one doing anything,” he snapped. “I’m certainly not betraying my country.”

“And you immediately assume I am.”

She was trembling, the cold wall damp against her back. Her first instinct was to cower, to throw her arm up to protect herself. She knew too well, though, that cowering only made it worse. She held perfectly still.

“Yes,” he all but snarled, too close. Too angry. “I do.”

She had nowhere to go. Harry loomed over her, heating the air between them. She wanted to spit at him, to laugh and walk away. But inexplicably, caught like cornered prey, her body suddenly remembered. It wouldn’t move; wouldn’t fight. It began to soften, to open, to
want
, and she hadn’t wanted in so long she’d forgotten the feel of it.

Even if she didn’t want Harry, her body did. It remembered how she’d hungered for the scent he always carried, horses and leather and strong soap. It remembered how he’d touched her with the raw wonder of an explorer. It remembered how it felt to trust those guileless blue eyes enough to offer him her virginity.

It only lasted a moment, that sense of elation, before she remembered exactly what it was she had once wanted. Before she found herself fighting the urge to curl into herself and hide. And that made her angrier than ever.

Somehow she must have betrayed her momentary weakness, because suddenly he was smiling like a wolf. “On the other hand,” he murmured, leaning even closer, too close, only small inches away, “maybe you want me to find it myself. Shall I look for it? Should I strip you until I can see every inch of the skin you bared for that painting? Should I search you, slipping my hands under your breasts to make sure you haven’t tucked it inside, where it would be warm and damp?”

She couldn’t think. She couldn’t tell if it was fury, fear, or arousal, even though her nipples tightened with his words and a light flared in her belly. She couldn’t breathe because he was taking the last of her air.