His Mask of Retribution (10 page)

A knock sounded at the door and Callerton came in, bringing with him the damp smell of the night. Callerton’s eyes went to the bottle of brandy that sat on the table and the half-full glass beside it.

‘Misbourne?’ he asked.

Rafe gave no answer. He moved to the table and filled a clean glass with brandy before passing it to Callerton.

The two men sat in silence for a few minutes before Callerton said, ‘It’s Marianne Winslow, isn’t it?’

‘I had to see her.’

‘Hell, why?’

He shook his head, not understanding the answer to that himself, knowing only that the compulsion gave him no peace. Nor had he revealed to Callerton what had happened in the warehouse or the alleyway. He drank down his brandy.

‘She’s his daughter, Rafe. And if you’re going after him, then you can’t dally with her.’

‘I’m not dallying with her.’

‘Aren’t you?’ Callerton demanded and topped up both their glasses. ‘Are you denying that you want her?’

‘I don’t deny it. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to act on it.’

‘Christ, you could have your pick of the women in London. Why does it have to be her?’

It was the same question that Rafe had been asking himself.

‘She could ruin all of this for you. One word in her father’s ear, one point of her finger, and it will be you, not Misbourne, hanging from a scaffold. You have to stay away from her.’ Callerton drank his brandy down in one go. ‘Unless you’ve changed your mind over Misbourne.’

‘I cannot do that,’ said Rafe. ‘I’ve dedicated my whole life to finding that bastard.’

He wanted Marianne. And he wanted her father’s head on a plate. And he knew he could not have both.

Callerton was right. He needed to stay away from her.

Chapter Seven

M
arianne sat in the corner of the drawing room of her father’s town house that evening, the library book lying open but unread upon her lap. At the other side of the room Lady Misbourne was playing patience, the cards making a soft slapping sound as she placed them down upon the green baize of the card table. That, and the slow steady ticking of the clock upon the mantelpiece were the only sounds within the room.

Marianne was thinking of the highwayman and his kiss. She was also thinking of what he had said about the justice he meant to deliver to her father. She closed her eyes and saw again her father kneeling in the dirt on the heath with a bloodied lip and cut cheek.
Her own father.
She bit her lip and felt her cheeks burn with shame and guilt and confusion that she could be attracted to any man who had done such a thing. Now that her blood had cooled and that amber gaze was not upon her, the scent of sandalwood not in her nose, she felt a little sick at her behaviour. She had seen how the highwayman had dealt with the men in the rookery, and those in the graveyard. He would not hurt her. But he had already hurt her father, and promised much more, and nothing that she said seemed to convince him of reason.

It was true that he had saved her, in the alleyway and in the burying ground, but he was the one who had abducted her in the first place. And it wasn’t as if he had not been honest from the very outset over his hatred of Misbourne. Perhaps the document was just an excuse to torture her father. Maybe it didn’t even exist at all.

Or maybe her father was right and he was delusional. He was certainly dangerous to her father. She realised now too late that she had been wrong in the answer she had given within the room of the circulating library. He made her forget her fear; he made her reckless and emboldened with this madness of attraction she felt for him. A man who could have such influence over her, making her forget who she was, making her behave in ways that she had never thought possible, was definitely dangerous to her too. Betrayal. For that’s what it was, she thought miserably, whatever she chose to do. She was betraying her father. But if she revealed the highwayman, it would be a different kind of betrayal. She’d be betraying the one man who had saved her.

No matter what else she imagined, the cold hard truth was he was a highwayman, a stranger, a man who was threatening her father. There was no real choice to make when she thought of it like that, not if she had any semblance of a care for her father. And once she had told her father the truth... Maybe they would not hang him. Especially if she were to speak up and tell them how he had saved her. She closed her eyes and could not bear to think of what they would do to him. She could not afford to let herself think of him at all. Her duty was to her father. She felt sick to the pit of her stomach, but she knew what she had to do. Closing the book on her lap and setting it down on the small table by her side, she rose to her feet.

Her mother glanced up from the cards laid out before her.

‘Is Papa still in his study?’ Marianne asked in a carefully controlled voice.

‘I believe that your brother is with him, my dear.’

‘If you will excuse me, Mama.’

Lady Misbourne gave a nod and looked down once more to her cards.

* * *

Marianne made her way slowly towards her father’s study. She was doing the right thing, the thing that any dutiful daughter should do, but her heart felt heavy and there was a lump in her throat that she could not swallow down.

Her slippers were silent against the marble tiles. She paused outside the study, taking a deep breath, steeling herself to the task. The door was slightly ajar, and her mother was right about Francis, for she could hear the murmur of both his and her father’s voices from within. Marianne reached her hand to the doorknob and heard the words her brother was speaking.

‘I told you that a bullet would not keep him from his pursuit of the document for long. He says he’s coming for you and it seems to me that this highwayman is a man very much of his word.’

She froze where she was, her ears sharpening, and listened.

‘Not if I find him first,’ her father said in an
angry tone.

‘Is a document really worth your life?’ Francis asked.

‘Yes,’ replied her father more quietly, the anger replaced by sadness. ‘I would give my very life that it never existed.’

The shock of it hit Marianne hard. The blood in her veins seemed to turn to ice. She stared at the dark-mahogany panels of the door and could not believe what she was hearing. There was a cold prickle across her skin and a terrible sinking feeling in her stomach.
Betrayal.
The word whispered again in her head.

‘What is in it?’ Francis asked softly. ‘Why will you not trust me enough to tell me?’

‘It is not a question of trust.’ There was the slightest pause. And when her father spoke again there was such a hard horrible quality to his voice that she barely recognised it. ‘Do not ask me of it ever again. I will not be questioned. In this house, my word is law. Do you understand, boy?’

‘I understand,’ said Francis. ‘For your sake I hope your precious document is stored somewhere safe. Because whoever that highwayman is, he’s coming for
it
, as well as
you
.’

She heard the chink of an empty glass and then her father’s irate voice. ‘Well, do not just stand there. Ring for another bottle of brandy.’

She slipped away, hurrying to the staircase. She was halfway up when she heard the bell ring, but she did not stop, just walked briskly until she reached her bedchamber. And when she got inside she turned the key in the lock and stood with her back against the door, her hand clutched around her stomach.

Her father had the document, just as the highwayman had said. And he had not been prepared to ransom it for her. Even though he knew the dark secret that she hid from the world. Had she not heard it with her own ears, she would not have believed it. Even now, she could barely take it in. After all that had happened. After all he had promised. He had said that he loved her. He had said that he would only ever have her best interests at heart. He was her
father.
The one person she trusted over all others. And he had lied...just as the highwayman had known.

* * *

It was on the night of the new moon, two nights after he had kissed Marianne Winslow in the circulating library, that Rafe stood within the shrubbery of the garden facing Misbourne’s town house. The night was clear and cold enough for him to see his breath before him, as if he breathed smoke into the night. There was no moon to relieve the stark blackness of the sky, only a scattering of small twinkling stars. He watched the house, just as he had watched these three hours past. Biding his time. Waiting for the right moment.

Every window was in darkness, each one shrouded by a blind. Rafe knew exactly what time Misbourne had gone to bed. He knew that Lady Misbourne had retired half an hour earlier and that they kept to their own rooms. Callerton, positioned in his watching place in the mews to the rear of the building, had told him that the only light still burning was that in Marianne’s bedchamber at the top of the house. He knew that the candles in her room would burn long after she fell asleep. And he thought of her, despite all his best intentions not to. A woman that feared the darkness of a room, but not that of the night. A woman of mystery and secrets. A woman who he could not seem to get out of his head. He closed his eyes and turned his thoughts to a still summer’s night fifteen years ago. The pain of it made him wince, but when he opened his eyes there was nothing in him but the cold hard rage of determination.

He moved his fingers to check the leather scabbard strapped beneath his coat and the hunter’s knife that was in it. The pistol was ready and loaded within his pocket and against his ankle, on the inside of his boot, he could feel the cold press of the narrow metal strip that would slide beneath the window jamb. With one sleek vault he was over the metal fencing that enclosed Leicester Square’s garden and moving through the shadows of the night towards Misbourne’s town house.

* * *

Marianne could not sleep. So she did what she always did when she was too restless and uneasy for sleep. The maid snored softly in the truckle bed beside her own, oblivious to the flicker of the candles as Marianne stole quietly across the bedchamber. She knew exactly which floorboards to avoid. She knew just how to open and close the door without a single sound. Silent as a ghost, she made her way down the back staircase to a world below that was so close and yet so distant from her own. The kitchen.

It was a place that an earl’s daughter should never inhabit. The least likely place a monster from the night would ever seek her. The only place she could be truly alone, just for the shortest of times, to think. And Marianne desperately needed to think.

She sat at the kitchen table, barely noticing the cold stone beneath her bare feet or the goosepimple of her skin beneath the cotton of her nightdress. In the days since her eavesdropping she had hardly seen her father. Hardly spoken to him. She could not look him in the eye, for fear he would see the truth in her own.

She stared at the scrubbed wooden surface before her, knowing that she could not avoid him for ever. She was going to have to face him sooner or later. And although she was angry with him, there was also sadness and a nagging need to understand.

Lifting the branch of candles, she rose to return to bed.

Her feet were silent on the stairs, the flames of the candles flickering and sending her shadow dancing against the wall. The darkness of the main hallway was broken by the slim band of light beneath the door to her father’s study. All of London slept, but not Marianne and not her father. There was no Mama to interfere and fuss. And there was no Francis. She took her hand from the banister and walked across the hallway to her father’s study.

* * *

The quiet knock sounded at the door and Rafe tensed, his eyes shifting to the clock that sat beside his candle on Misbourne’s desk. Two o’clock. Callerton had not given the signal to warn of Linwood’s return and he knew that Misbourne would not knock at his own door. There was no time to clear away the piles of papers or to even slide the drawers closed. No time to react before the door opened.

‘Papa,’ a familiar voice murmured. And Marianne stepped into the room.

Her gaze raised and she saw who was standing behind her father’s desk and the clear evidence of what he had been about. Her eyes widened, but she did not scream.

Rafe’s heart was beating too fast. She had not pointed him out to her father before. But this was different. This was an invasion of her father’s castle. He waited for her to call out, or to snatch up the bell and ring it. He should have turned and climbed back out of the window. He should have run and disappeared into the darkness of the night while there was still time. But he just stood there, his gaze locked on hers.

Her eyes were black, her face as pale and beautiful as the vision that haunted his dreams. They stared at one another and those few seconds seemed to stretch to an eternity of torture and uncertainty and the attraction that was between them rippled and roared. And then she lowered her gaze, quietly closed the door behind her, and Rafe released the breath he had been holding.

She stood where she was, keeping the distance of the room between them. Her hair was long and loose and glinting silver in the candlelight. Beneath the long-sleeved shroud of a nightgown he could see the peep of her bare toes. Her gaze moved to take in the papers scattered across the desk and the drawers that hung open before meeting his own once more.

‘I would ask you what you are doing here searching my father’s study in the middle of the night, but I already know the answer.’

‘He will not give the document to me, so I must take it.’

‘Steal it, you mean.’

‘No.’ He shook his head and looked her directly in the eye. ‘It is your father who is the thief. I seek to take back that which he stole.’

There was an uneasy expression on her face. He waited for her usual assertion that he was wrong, that Misbourne was the best of men and would not do such a thing. But she said nothing.

The silence seemed to hiss between them.

‘You make no defence of him?’ He raised his brows.

He saw her bite at her lip before she glanced away. And when she looked at him again she said, ‘Have you found it?’

‘No.’ His eyes held hers as he moved from behind the desk and walked slowly towards her. He did not stop until he was standing directly before her, so close that his boots were almost touching her bare toes. So close that he could smell the scent of her, so sweet and enticing.

‘What is written on that paper that, if my father did have it, he would go to such lengths to hide it, and that you will risk so much to find it?’

But he could not tell her what was written upon it, even had he wanted to. ‘What has changed that you suddenly believe me?’

‘Nothing has changed,’ she said, but she would not meet his gaze and he knew that she was lying.

‘If the document were in your possession, what, then, would you do with it?’

‘The document is the evidence I need to see him hanged.’

The candles within her hand flickered wildly as if a tremor ran through her.

‘Whatever my father might have done...’ she bit her lip and her eyes held a haunted expression ‘...he does not deserve to die.’

‘On the contrary, Marianne, for what your father did he should burn in hell.’

She closed her eyes at the brutality of his words and he felt the sting of his conscience.

‘You would understand if it was your father,’ she said.

‘It
was
my father.’ His voice crackled with the anger and bitterness that came whenever he thought of what Misbourne had done. ‘And my mother too,’ he added, and the anger rolled away to expose the ache of grief in his soul.

‘What do you mean?’ She stared up at him, as if she could see the truth in his eyes.

‘I should go. Your brother will be home soon.’ But he made no move to leave. The air was thick with tension, with desire and attraction and everything that was forbidden between them. His gaze lowered to the nightdress that skimmed against her body, knowing that she was naked beneath it. And despite the situation and who her father was, he felt his body respond. He reached out, taking the branch of candles from her, and set it down upon the occasional table by their side. Then he took her hand and felt her cool slender fingers in his.