My Surrender (27 page)

“Charlotte! Run!” he shouted, throwing himself against the chains holding him.

“It’s over!” she cried, elated. He could hear her footsteps racing up the steps. “Everything is fine!”

“No!
Douglas is here!”

It was too late. Douglas slipped to the side of the door just as Charlotte burst into the room brandishing a pistol.

“Kit and Ram and the militia have secured the castle and St. Lyon is trapped in his library!”

She understood the second she saw him that something was wrong. She spun around, raised the primed pistol, and fired.

Comte St. Lyon’s castle, Scotland
August 16, 1806

“D
AMN!”
C
HARLOTTE EXCLAIMED.
The shot went far wide, ricocheting off the wall and sending a chip of stone flying into the man’s face…“Toussaint!”

“No, Miss Nash,” said the foppishly clad man, shutting the door. “I am afraid I deceived you. My name is Douglas Stewart.”

Her amazed gaze flew to Dand. His face twitched with ill-contained emotion, but his eyes remained coolly appraising.

Toussaint–Stewart smiled at Dand. “You really should have taught her how to aim a pistol.”

“I’ll rectify that oversight as soon as possible.”

The man pursed his lips. “Hard to do from the grave.”

“What is the point in killing me now, Douglas?” Dand asked, amazing Charlotte by how calm and reasonable he sounded. She did not move. She dare not draw any attention to herself.

“You heard her,” Dand continued. “Ram and Kit have found some pet soldiers somewhere and taken the castle. St. Lyon’s guests are doubtless flying like cunny before the hounds and St. Lyon is quite probably burning any incriminating documents he owns. Including your hero-making letter. And you are exposed.”

“Only to you,” Douglas said. “You die and no one knows I was here. Oh, I shall have to begin again, I grant you that. But I have waited this long, I can bide my time.”

He glanced at Charlotte. “Of course, she will have to die, too. But she always
was
going to die.”

“No,” Dand said.

“Yes.” Douglas’s hand whipped out, seizing Charlotte’s arm and dragging her forward. She fought, scratching and twisting, kicking at him, but he was not Dand; he did not care if he hurt her. He wrenched her arm behind her back and twisted, forcing a cry from her lips. She went limp in his grip, knowing that to fight further meant a broken arm.

“Let her go,” Dand said, his quiet voice lethal.

“Not a chance,” Douglas said. “You know, I actually believe you love the chit. What is this obsession you and the others have with these Nash women? Granted they’re pleasing enough to look upon, but when you are pleasuring yourself, one woman is as good as the next.” He frowned, a little petulant, a little offended. “How could this physical rutting take the place of what we had? What we were?”

“And what was that?” Dand asked. “A bunch of boys with wooden swords playing at being knights?”

Douglas’s mouth pleated angrily and he shoved Charlotte toward Dand, one hand tight about her throat, the other still holding her wrist between her shoulder blades. She gasped in the pain.

“Then say good-bye to your beloved, Dand,” he spat. Dand pitched himself forward only to be caught short by the tether of chain.

Charlotte searched about frantically, trying to find some advantage, and that is when she saw it, the little crumbles of mortar beneath the ring securing Dand’s right wrist. She met his gaze and then looked directly at the ring. He gave the barest of nods.

It was poor odds. But then, they were the only odds they had.

“Please,” she rasped as Douglas’s hold tightened. “Let me kiss him once more. One last kiss. Please.”

“Why should I grant you any requests?”

“Because you once loved him, too,” Charlotte whispered. “Because you once called him brother. And that should be worth something.”

Douglas stilled.

“Please.”

“Mercy?” He sounded doubtful but intrigued.

“Yes, mercy,” she said. “A noble nature can be merciful.”

“All right.” He grabbed her other wrist, wrenching it, too, behind her back. Then with a sound of contempt, he pushed her forward so that she stood within reach of Dand. She met his eyes, leaning forward, ignoring the pull of her arms in their sockets, bringing her lips gently against his. She kissed him with all the tenderness and hope in her heart.

“I love you,” she whispered against his mouth and hooking her ankle behind Douglas’s foot, pitched herself forward.

Her left shoulder popped. Agony speared through her arm and she was tumbling forward, Douglas falling after her, twisting, swearing, trying to regain his balance. She heard Dand, his voice raw with effort, then a roar of triumph and the clatter of chains and then Douglas was snatched away from her.

She landed on her knees and rolled, scrambling backward and turning to see what had happened.

Dand stood behind and over Douglas, the chain that had bound his right arm twisted tight around Douglas’s throat, his other hand still manacled to the wall. Douglas was gasping for air, clawing at the metal links digging into his flesh. Dand twisted harder, his face terrifying, feral in its cold ferocity. He pulled up and back. Douglas’s heels drummed uselessly against the floor as he sought and failed to find his footing. His arms beat less urgently now, the life draining from him.

“Dand! Let him go! You’re killing him!”

“He was going to kill you!” he roared.

She winced, cradling her arm as she stumbled to her feet. “Let him go! You’re not the murderer!
He is!”

Dand’s lips drew back in a snarl, his teeth bared. But awareness slowly seeped in his eyes as a panoply of emotions flickered across his face. He jerked one last time on the chain and Douglas went limp. With a growl, he suddenly loosened his hold and stepped back, breathing heavily.

“Are you hurt?” Concern etched his face.

“I’ll be fine,” she lied. Her shoulder ached abominably.

“There’s an iron bar behind the door. Can you get it?”

“Yes,” she answered, suiting action to words as she found the iron rod. She turned. “It’s only my—Dand!”

She was too late. Douglas, if he had ever been unconscious, was conscious now. He threw himself across the room, well out of Dand’s reach and scrambled up onto the north window’s sill, his eyes wild and his smile maniacal. “You couldn’t kill me any more than I could kill you. It’s the bond, you see. The brotherhood. It won’t be gainsaid.”

“If you make one movement toward her, I swear I will rip you to shreds, Douglas,” Dand said as he yanked savagely at the one chain still holding him.

“More hubris, Dand?” Douglas asked, eyeing her and the weapon she held, clearly trying to decide whether he could wrest it from her without further injury. She wasn’t certain he couldn’t.

She had been courageous enough. She could not be courageous any longer. Without thinking, she flew across the room and into the shelter of Dand’s arms. They enfolded her tightly. He made a gesture of invitation toward Douglas with his free hand. “Try me.”

“I think not. Not now,” Douglas said. “You’re too formidable. And I am not quite up to snuff, you see.”

He was babbling, his eyes darting about the room, edging backward. “Something will have to be done. About all of you. I just can’t think what right now. I have to make plans. Make preparations—”

He looked down. What he saw made him smile. He looked back at Dand. “Remember the ivy vines we used to climb at the old castle, Dand?” For a second his voice was eager, a friend reminiscing about the best of times. “Remember how it was? What a foursome we were! How valiant! How worthy!”

And without any further word, he threw his leg over the casement and disappeared.

Charlotte didn’t give a tinker’s damn. She was here, in Dand’s arms, and they were both alive. Against all odds, they had lived. She started weeping and then sobbing, and finally buried her face against his broad, bloodied chest and burst into full-blown tears.

“What is this, Lottie?” She heard him murmur tenderly into the crown of her head. “Why, I do begin to suspect you aren’t so tough after all.”

His gentle teasing brought her back to herself.

She was Charlotte Nash, one of Society’s most coming chits, as fly to the time of day as a woman twice her age, a fluent temptress, a naughty wench, and an acknowledged heartbreaker. She lifted her face and drew Dand’s poor abused mouth down to hers, meeting it in a deep and lush kiss. If it hurt him he didn’t seem to mind, his untethered arm tightened about her lifting her up, crushing her to him.

After a long moment, she drew back, a little breathless, a little dazed.

“Lest you are uncertain about what that was, what
this
is,” she said in a triumphant voice, “let me make it clear for you. You are mine.
Mine.”

“My love,” he answered. “I never doubted it.”

It was exactly like when they were boys and had escaped the abbey to play in the old castle ruins on the moors. The same type of stone, the same sturdy thick vines to grapple and swing from. The same sense of freedom and adventure and
rightness.
Except…there would be no other lads waiting for him at the bottom. No long companionable journey back under the star-splashed skies. Nothing.

All he had ever wanted was to go home. For things to be as they once were. Was that too much to ask?

He groped for a foothold on the heavy vine and slipped, catching himself at the last moment and that is when he saw it. Improbable. No,
impossible,
but there it was, just above him and a few feet over, shining in the early dawn light with all the grace and beauty of his long-lost boyhood, a yellow rose, a little dew trembling like a tear on one tenderly curving petal. With a sigh of wonder, he pulled himself up, stretching to reach it and felt the vine beneath him crack. He didn’t care.

He strained further out, his fingertips brushing the velvety bloom, stretching, stretching…He seized it and the thorns hidden beneath the glossy leaves plunged deep into the meat of his palm. With a gasp he snatched his hand back, having captured his prize.

It was beautiful. The one utterly perfect thing in a world of regret and disappointment—

With a sound like a sob, the vine beneath his feet gave way completely.

He never felt himself hit the ground.

Kit and Ram burst through the door, pistol and sword drawn. They found themselves in an empty room. Except for Dand, who was holding Charlotte as though he would never let her go. And kissing her.

Kit lowered his pistol and cleared his throat.

The manacled man raised his head. “You’re late,” he said tersely. “Charlotte could have been killed waiting for you two to make your appearance.”

Ram was the first to recover. He strolled into the room and looked around. “Sorry about that. We had the matter of some thirty of St. Lyon’s men to attend to, as well as the comte who, by the way, claims he knows nothing of any letter. Although there was a mysterious scrap of paper in his library fireplace. His guests, some of whom I suspect are on this soil without the proper documents, are fleeing in droves.”

“Good,” Dand said.

“You are, I suppose, Charlotte’s paramour, the mysterious Monsieur Rousse?” Kit asked.

“Yes,” Dand answered. “Now, if you would be so kind, I believe the keys to my shackles are on a hook outside the door.”

It was Kit who did the honors, returning with the key and unlocking the cuffs, obliging Charlotte to disentangle herself from him during the process. Freed, Dand grimaced slightly at the aches he was beginning to feel and feared he would feel a great deal more in the days to come.

“Better?” Kit asked consolingly.

Dand nodded.

“Good,” Kit said, smiling, and promptly knocked him out cold.

St. Bride’s Abbey
April 1807

“Y
OU’RE A SEER,
Brother Martin. A bona fide mystic.” Brother Fidelis, beaming with pleasure, clapped the wizened old herbalist on the shoulder.

Brother Martin, in the middle of tying a little silk bag filled with various herbs and flower petals, slapped away the rotund and benevolent monk’s hand. “I don’t know what you’re blathering about.”

“Well, you said that if we kept having weddings at the abbey we would end up having christenings and here we are today, about to have our very first christening! Isn’t it wonderful?”

“Fabulous,” the old crabbed monk snickered, but there was not much venom in his sarcasm. “Now, if you don’t mind, I promised this tisane for the baby.”

“Poor little wretch,” Fidelis said. “She must have an upset tummy.”

“She has,” Brother Martin declared, “her father’s disposition and her mother’s temper. I always said Dand Ross, or Andre Rousse, or Sir Ross, or whoever he’s fancying himself these days, was a limb of Satan and now his daughter is proving to be a twig from that same branch.”

It sat hard with Brother Martin that the boy they’d sheltered as an orphan might be some sort of Bourbon royal, though by his own words he admitted he could never prove it. What was certain is that he’d been knighted for his work on behalf of His Royal Majesty.

“The babe is perfectly beautiful,” sighed the smitten Brother Fidelis.

“Aye, she is that,” Brother Martin allowed with a little grunt. “Looks like her aunt Kate what with all that ebony fluff on her head.” Brother Martin had always had a soft spot for the handsome Kate MacNeill. “But with such parents the world had best beware. Now, come along before the little witch screams the rafters down.”

The two monks left Brother Martin’s herbalist shed, passing through the walled rose garden as they went. It was a fine day. The deep blue sky above their remote little valley sparkled, kissed with warmth. Around them the first blooms of spring were just beginning to show, little hints of color trembling on the tips of vines and canes sheathed in fresh green down, like deer antlers in velvet. The crusader’s yellow rose, the only one of its kind in all of Scotland, had not yet set its blossoms, but the promise was there in verdant new growth and glossy green leaves.

At the wall, Brothers Martin and Fidelis ducked beneath the low arched doorway and headed across the common. Even from here they could hear Dand’s brat squalling. She didn’t sound as if she was in pain. She sounded angry.

They hurried into the chapel where thirty pairs of eyes turned around. The boys and monks kneeling in the back relaxed. Lizette Barnes and Ginny Mulgrew, sharing a pew as well as Ginny’s carriage on the long trip up during which Lizette had learned Many Fascinating Things, breathed audible sighs of relief. The Baron and Baroness Welton, both wearing the superior look of those who have bet everything on a long shot and somehow managed to have been right, smiled weakly. The Marchioness of Cottrell, as swollen with child as a tick and as alarmed by the baby’s yelps as a rabbit by a dog’s keening, cast a desperately anxious look at her sophisticated and urbane husband, who answered her unspoken plea with murmured assurance that their anticipated darling, “would know from the beginning how to conduct himself. Herself. Their-selves.” And Colonel and Mrs. MacNeill traded moist-eyed romantic gazes, Mrs. MacNeill having just last week been certain enough to reveal to her brawny husband that they, too, were soon to be parents.

In the front-most pew, Charlotte sat with her howling red-faced baby on her lap, looking completely at ease while beside her, in direct contrast, hovered her husband, Dand Ross, looking completely nonplussed. For whatever reason, this afforded Brother Martin a great deal of satisfaction. He supposed he would be obliged to confess it later. Father Tarkin, most impressive in his clerical garb, stood at the foot of the altar beside a basin of holy water.

“Thank you, God!” the abbot muttered and motioned them forward.

Brother Martin, shadowed by Brother Fidelis, stomped down the center aisle decorated with nosegays of spring snowdrops and spring ephemerals. He made Charlotte’s side and without ceremony thrust the little bag of herbs under the baby’s nose. The baby inhaled deeply…deeply…deeply…and sneezed. Then, fixing Brother Martin with her mother’s gold-shot eyes, she wailed even louder.

“The poor little angel!” Brother Fidelis muttered, edging Brother Martin out of the way. “The poor little darling! There now, sweetling.”

The baby unlocked her basilisk gaze from Brother Martin and turned her attention to Brother Fidelis. Her face, screwed up in a tight little knot of discontent, relaxed. She gave a cursory wail and held out her tiny arms.

Brother Fidelis held out his.

With a look of surprise, first at her daughter and then at the round monk, Charlotte lifted the baby into his waiting arms. At once, the baby settled in with a last little grumble.

“Oh, my dearest,” crooned Brother Fidelis, bowing over his precious bundle. “None of these people understands, do they? There now. She only wanted a little cuddle.”

And the little girl, having pegged her first male conquest in what would prove a very long list of them indeed, sighed and closed her eyes.

Blowing out a deep sigh of relief, Father Tarkin motioned the parents—along with Brother Fidelis—forward to stand before the baptismal font.

“Now then, we are gathered here today to welcome into the Lord’s family this child. Have you a name for her?”

“Yes,” Dand and Charlotte replied in unison.

“And what is it?”

“Rose.”