JMcNaught - Something Wonderful (62 page)

Snatching it up, Alexandra whirled around and let out a stifled scream as she collided with a hard masculine body. "Tony! Thank God it's you," she cried.

"What the devil's wrong?" Tony said, gripping her shoulders hard in his anxiety as he steadied her. "Camden said Jordan's vanished and you saw a man hiding in the trees."

"I found Jordan's tankard of ale right here and a gun on the ground near it," Alexandra said, her voice and body trembling with terror. "And I saw a man I think was the same one who was trying to kill Jordan the night we met."

"Go back to the clearing and stay in the light!" Anthony said sharply. Snatching the gun from her hand, he turned and ran down the path, vanishing into the deep woods.

Stumbling over a thick root growing across the path, Alexandra raced back to the clearing, intending to get help rather than find safety. Wildly, she looked around for Roddy or John Camden, and seeing neither she ran straight toward one of the cottagers who had taken a brief respite from the shooting contest and was staggering toward the ale table in the same state of cheerful inebriation as the rest of his fellows. "Yer grace!" the man gasped, snatching off his cap and starting to execute a bow.

"Give me your gun!" Alexandra demanded breathlessly, and without waiting for him to hand it over, she snatched it out of the stunned man's hand. "Is it loaded?" she called over her shoulder, already racing toward the path.

"Shore is."

His breath labored from a long sprint down the path to the forester's cottage, Tony put his ear to the door, listening for sounds. Hearing none, he cautiously tried the latch, and when it stuck he reared back two paces and rammed his shoulder against the door with enough extra force to send it flying wide open. Off balance because the door had opened so easily, he staggered into the cabin, stumbled, and stopped short, his mouth falling open in shock. His mother was seated stiffly upon a chair in front of him. And beside her, sitting on the table, was Jordan. In his hand, Jordan was holding a gun.

It was pointing straight at Tony's heart.

"W-what the hell is going on?" Tony burst out, panting

Tony's arrival demolished the last slender hope Jordan had clung to that Alexandra and his cousin had not conspired to end his life at this party. In a soft voice of deadly menace, he said to Tony, "Welcome to my party, cousin. I believe we're still expecting another guest this evening to make the party complete, aren't we, Tony? My wife?" Before Tony could answer, Jordan added, "Don't be impatient—she's bound to come looking for you, thinking I've been safely disposed of, won't she? I'm sure of it." His silken drawl suddenly became clipped. "There's a bulge in your pocket which is undoubtedly a gun. Take off your coat and throw it on the floor."

"Jordan—"

"Do it!" Jordan bit out savagely, and Tony slowly obeyed.

When Tony had dropped his coat on the floor, the point of Jordan's gun shifted slightly to the left, indicating the chair lying on its side by the shuttered window. "Sit down. And if you move an inch," he warned with frightening calm, "I'll kill you."

"You're mad!" Anthony whispered. "You must be. Jordan, for God's sake, tell me what the hell is going on."

"Shut up!" Jordan snapped, his head tipped toward the sound of footsteps on the cabin step. More than anyone, his rage was directed at the girl he had been obsessed with for over a year—the scheming liar who had made him believe she loved him, the little bitch who had lain in his arms and surrendered her eager body to him; the beautiful, laughing, unforgettable barefoot girl who had made him believe that heaven was a stream with a picnic blanket beside it. And now, he thought, with a wrath he could barely contain, she was about to fall into his clutches.

The door creaked open, slowly, a few inches; a familiar lock of mahogany hair peeked through the opening, then a pair of blue eyes that widened like saucers as her gaze riveted on the gun in his hand.

"Don't be shy, darling," Jordan said in a voice so low it was a deadly whisper. "Come inside. We've been waiting for you."

Expelling her breath on a rush of relief, Alexandra pushed the door wide open, stared at the fallen thug, then rushed forward as Jordan stood up. Tears of fright streaming down her face, she wrapped her arms around him, the gun in her hand forgotten. "I knew it was him—I knew it! I—"

She cried out in surprised pain as Jordan wrapped his hand in her hair and viciously yanked her head back. His face only inches from hers, he bit out, "Of course you knew it was him, you murderous little bitch!" and with a cruel jerk of his wrist, he flung her sprawling onto the floor, her hip landing painfully on the gun in her hand.

For a moment, Alexandra simply sat there, staring at him through fear-widened eyes, unable to assimilate what was happening.

"Are you afraid, sweetheart?" he jeered smoothly. "You should be. Where you're going, there are no windows, no lovely gowns, no men—other than a few jailers who'll avail themselves of your delectable little body until it becomes too gaunt to interest them. Hopefully, it will hold their interest longer than it held mine," he added with deliberate cruelty.

"Don't look so surprised," he said, misinterpreting the reason for her shock. "I've bedded you because it was necessary to keep up the sham of the unsuspecting husband—not because I wanted you," he lied, feeling an almost uncontrollable urge to murder her for her treachery.

"Jordan, why are you doing this?" Alexandra cried, then recoiled in terror from the blaze in his eyes when she called him by his given name.

"I want answers, not questions," Jordan snapped. Estimating that it might be another ten minutes before Fawkes realized he was missing and last seen heading in this direction, Jordan relaxed against the table again, his weight braced on one foot, the other swinging idly as he turned toward Tony. "While we're waiting," he invited smoothly, pointing the gun at him, "suppose you fill in some details for me. What else has been poisoned in my house?"

Tony's eyes lifted from the gun in Jordan's hand to his relentless features. "You're mad, Jordan."

"I wouldn't mind killing you," Jordan said thoughtfully, raising the gun higher as if he was about to do it

"Wait!" his aunt screamed, casting desperate glances at the empty doorway and beginning to babble. "Don't hurt Tony! H-he can't answer because he d-doesn't know about the poison."

"And I suppose my wife knows nothing about it either," Jordan inserted sarcastically. "Do you, my dear?" he asked, the barrel of the gun shifting toward Alexandra.

Disbelief and fury drove Alexandra slowly to her feet, clutching her gun in the folds of her skirts. "You think we've been trying to
poison
you?" she breathed, staring at him as if he had kicked her in the stomach.

"I
know
you have," he countered, enjoying the anguish he saw in her eyes.

"Actually—" Bertie Townsende drawled from the doorway, his gun pointing straight at Jordan's head, "you're wrong. As my hysterical mother is undoubtedly about to confess,
I'm
the one who conceived these effective—admittedly, not successful—plots to rid us of you. Tony hasn't the stomach for murder, and since I have the brains of the family, if not the legs, I've handled the planning and the details. You look surprised, cousin. Like everyone else, you assume a cripple can't pose a significant threat to anyone, don't you? Drop your gun, Jordan. I have to kill you anyway, but if you don't drop it, I'll kill your charming wife first, while you watch."

His body coiled like a tight spring, Jordan tossed his gun down and slowly came to his feet, but Alexandra suddenly sidled up against him as if she mistakenly believed there was safety there. "Move away!" he snapped under his breath, but she clasped his hand in an outward display of terror and simultaneously pressed a pistol into his palm.

"You'll have to kill me, too, Bertie," Tony said softly, standing up and starting forward.

"I suppose so," his brother agreed without hesitation. "I intended to eventually, anyway."

"Bertie!" his mother cried. "No! That's not what we planned—"

Alexandra's gaze riveted on the man on the floor, she saw him slide his arm toward Tony's coat and, behind him, another man stepping into the doorway, slowly raising a gun. "Jordan!" she screamed, and because there was no other way to protect him from three assailants, Alexandra threw herself in front of him at the exact moment two guns discharged.

Jordan's arms automatically clasped her to him as Bertie Townsende collapsed, shot by Fawkes from the doorway, and the bandit on the floor rolled over, clutching the wound in his arm inflicted by Jordan's gun. It happened so fast that it took a moment before Jordan realized that Alexandra was suddenly very heavy, a dead weight sliding down his body. Tightening his arms, he tipped his chin, intending to tease her about fainting
after
everything was over, but what he saw struck stark terror in his heart: Her head had fallen back, lolling limply on her shoulders, and blood was streaming from a wound at her temple. "Get a doctor!" he shouted at Tony, and lowered her to the floor.

His heart hammering with fear, he knelt beside her, ripped off his shirt, and tore it into strips, binding the ugly wound in her head. Before he'd half finished, blood had already soaked and spread around and through the white linen, and her color was rapidly turning an ashen grey.

"Oh my God!" he whispered. "Oh my God!" He had seen men die in battle countless times; he knew the signs of a hopelessly fatal wound, and even while his mind was recognizing that she would not live, Jordan was snatching her into his arms. Cradling her against his chest, he ran down the path, his heart hammering in frantic rhythm with the refrain pounding in his heart:
Don't die… don't die
…
Don't die
…

His chest heaving with exertion, Jordan burst into the clearing, carrying his limp, beloved burden. Oblivious to the stricken faces of the cottagers, who stood in quiet, watchful groups, Jordan laid her gently in the carriage Tony had evidently told someone to pull up at the edge of the woods.

An old woman, a midwife, took one look at the bloody bandage around Alexandra's head and the deathly pallor of her skin and, as Jordan raced around to climb into the seat, she quickly felt for Alexandra's pulse. When she turned back to the cottagers gathered around the carriage, she sadly shook her head.

The women whom Alexandra had helped and befriended a year ago gazed lovingly at her still form in the carriage and, as Jordan drove off, the soft sounds of weeping began to fill the clearing. Only ten minutes before, it had rung with the gaiety she had brought to them.

«
^
»

T
he defeated expression
on Dr. Danvers' face as he stepped into the hall outside Alexandra's bedchamber and closed the door made agony scream through Jordan's brain.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly to the distraught group waiting in the hall. "There was nothing I could do to save her. When I got here, she was already beyond hope and beyond reach."

The dowager pressed her handkerchief to her lips and turned into Tony's arms, weeping while Melanie sought her husband's embrace. John Camden's hand came to rest consolingly on Jordan's shoulder, then he took his sobbing wife downstairs to join Roddy Carstairs.

Turning to Jordan, Dr. Danvers continued, "You can go in now and say your goodbyes, but she won't hear you. She's in a deep coma. In a few minutes—a few hours, at most—she'll slip away quietly." At the expression of raw anguish on the duke's face, Dr. Danvers added gently, "She'll feel no pain, Jordan, I promise you."

A muscle worked spasmodically in Jordan's throat as, with a look of wordless, impotent rage directed at the innocent physician, he walked swiftly into Alexandra's bedchamber.

Candles burned beside her canopied bed, and she lay as still and white as death upon the satin pillows, her breathing so shallow it was almost imperceptible.

Swallowing past the lump in his throat, Jordan sat in the chair beside her bed and gazed down upon her beloved face, wanting to memorize every line of it. She had such smooth skin, he thought achingly, and such incredibly long eyelashes—they lay like lush, dark fans against her cheeks… She wasn't breathing!

"No, don't die!" he cried hoarsely as he grabbed her limp hand, frantically feeling for a pulse. "
Don't die
!" He found a pulse—thready and faint but still there—and suddenly he couldn't stop talking to her. "Don't leave me, Alex," he pleaded, holding her tightly. "God, don't leave me! There are a thousand things I want to tell you, places I want to show you. But I can't if you go away. Alex, please, darling… please don't go away.

"Listen to me," Jordan begged urgently, somehow convinced that she would stay alive if she understood how much she meant to him. "Listen to what my life was like before you hurtled into it wearing that suit of armor— Life was empty. Colorless. And then you happened to me, and suddenly I felt feelings I never believed existed, and I
saw
things I'd never seen before. You don't believe that, do you, darling? But it's true, and I can prove it." His deep voice ragged with unshed tears, Jordan recited his proof: "The flowers in the meadow are blue," he told her brokenly. "The ones by the stream are white. And on the arch, by the arbor, the roses are red."