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Authors: Joan Johnston

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BOOK: The Bodyguard
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Penthia was furious she had not borne him an heir, but Alastair was content that the title go to Marcus if his wife gave him no son. He had taken one look at the two identical little girls with their tiny noses and rosebud mouths, their blue eyes and black hair, and promptly lost his heart.

He had spent far more time in the nursery than any gentleman should. He had delighted in their first smiles, their first teeth, their first unsteady steps. His life would have been perfect if only Penthia had shared his pleasure in the twins. She wanted to return to London for the Season, but he would not leave the girls to go with her, and he did not trust her to go alone.

He had woken one violent, stormy night, with the branches of a giant oak cracking against the windowpanes and the wind whistling eerily in the ancient stone Abbey, and thought to look in his wife’s room to see if she was frightened by the storm.

A ragged streak of lightning had revealed her empty bed, the sheets tousled, the imprint of her head on the pillow. He had pulled on a pair of buckskins and his Hessians and gone searching for her, unsure what might have happened to her. He looked in the kitchen, in the drawing room, in the library, a sense of foreboding growing in his breast. He had finally gone to the crumbling east wing of the Abbey, where Marcus had his rooms, to enlist his brother’s help in searching for his wife.

And found them together in Marcus’s bed.

His wife had been naked, her breast glistening in the candlelight where his brother’s mouth had just released it. Thunder clapped overhead, a deafening ovation for his foolish love. Alastair would never forget the horrified look on Marcus’s face or the defiant glare in Penthia’s blue eyes.

“Why?” he had asked, the word torn from his throat.

“I wanted him,” she said.

“Marcus?” he rasped.

“Alex, I … she … I …”

He had seen the tears of regret in Marcus’s eyes and looked away before he could forgive his brother. It was an unforgivable act. He had turned and left, his Hessians
echoing on the stone floor as he escaped the wretched scene.

No one would ever know the effort it had taken to remain civil to his wife and his brother before the world, when inside him burned a rage so hot, a hurt so painful, he was eaten up with it.

Marcus had come to him, his eyes full of misery, wanting to explain, wanting absolution. Alastair had cut him off.

“There will be no discussion of what happened. Ever.”

Marcus had left Blackthorne Abbey shortly thereafter to join the army, and Alastair had turned to his daughters for solace. With them he could forget the pain for a little while. Regina and Rebecca were the one bright light in his otherwise bleak existence. He loved them with his whole being, and they returned his love in full measure. He had been able to bear the pain of his failed marriage and his brother’s betrayal because he’d had his daughters.

Until Penthia robbed him of even that joy.

She had begun to drink to excess not long after Marcus left Blackthorne Abbey. Alastair had stopped inviting company to the Abbey, because she embarrassed him and herself. He had thought she could do him no further harm, that she could not sink lower, until the night she came to the children’s nursery and found him holding one-year-old Regina in his arms, rocking her to sleep, while Rebecca lay in her crib nearby.

“You love those bloody twins more than you do your own wife,” she accused in a drunken slur.

“I loved you once, Penthia,” he replied.

“I never loved you!” she spat back. “I wanted to be a duchess. And I am. Duchess of Blackthorne. Hah! Duchess of some moldy old abbey. I hate it here! I hate you! And I hate those bloody twins!”

He did not know why she was so intent on hurting him, had not even realized he still could be hurt. “Go away, Penthia,” he said, putting Regina up over his shoulder and patting her back to quiet her agitation at her mother’s angry voice.

“Put that brat down, Alex, and attend to me,” Penthia demanded. “I am your wife.”

“You’re foxed, Penthia. Get yourself to bed.”

“I said get rid of that bloody brat!” She threw her empty crystal wineglass at him but missed, and the splintering glass ricocheted off the stone wall behind the rocker.

Regina let out a howl of pain.

Alastair lurched to his feet and felt his insides clench when he saw blood streaming from the child’s lip where a shard of glass had cut it.

His gray eyes glittered dangerously when he raised them to his wife. “Get out, Penthia. Before I put my hands around that lovely neck of yours and squeeze the life out of you.”

“The brat’s barely scratched!”

“A drop of my daughter’s blood means more to me than your whole miserable life.”

Penthia’s face flushed with rage. “No blood of yours runs through her.”

“What?”

“Regina is not your child,” she said in a voice laced with malice. “The twins are not yours.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said in a deadly voice.

She hesitated, her eyes narrowing, her features hardening before she said, “No? Then ask your brother.”

Alastair gave an agonized cry, as though he had been stabbed, and stared down at the wailing child in his arms. It was not possible that Regina was not his. He had not found Marcus with Penthia until after the twins were born. “You’re lying,” he said.

She smirked. “Am I? You’ll always wonder now. Are they mine? Or not? Look at their eyes, Alastair. Not gray like yours, but blue, like his. Because they’re your brother’s children.”

“Get out of my sight, Penthia. Leave now or I swear I will shut that lying mouth of yours forever.”

She lurched drunkenly for the door, shoved it open, and left the room.

Alastair daubed at the blood on Regina’s upper lip with a soft, lace-edged muslin handkerchief monogrammed with the letter
B
, for Blackthorne, until the flow stopped, and she had quieted in his arms. He settled back into the rocker and pulled her close and kissed her forehead. He laid his head back against the wooden rocker and felt the sting in his nose and the quiver in his chin. He gritted his teeth, but the moan escaped, squeezed his eyes shut against the threat of
tears, but felt the hot wetness on his cheek as one spilled.

Through a blur of tears, he stared down at the drowsy child in his arms and realized the effects of the slow-working poison Penthia had administered.

This child is not flesh of my flesh. My blood does not run in her veins. My wife lay with my brother and created her. She is no part of me
.

He stood and laid the child in the crib next to her sister. He could not kill the love inside him for the tiny beings. But his pride would no longer allow him to display it. How could he show love—for all to see—when these children were proof of his wife’s betrayal?

From that day forward, he had kept his distance from Regina and Rebecca. He had not stopped loving them. He had merely stopped wearing his heart on his sleeve. From that day forward, a drunken Penthia had delighted in telling anyone who would listen that the duke’s children were not his … they were his brother’s.

He had never confronted Marcus and demanded the truth. He had not wanted to know for sure. But he and his brother had become more and more estranged after Penthia’s accusation. And because he refused to deny his brother access to the children—
his
children—“Uncle Marcus” had a relationship with Regina and Rebecca that was far more loving than the one they shared with their “father.”

Recently, when they had been in London, the nine-year-old twins had stolen away to go sightseeing and vanished somewhere within the shadowed streets and
crooked alleys. Alastair had admitted to himself, when he thought they might be lost to him forever, how foolish he had been. Even if they were not his flesh and blood, they would always be the Duke of Blackthorne’s daughters. And he loved them.

When the twins were found unharmed, he had surrendered his pride and held Regina and Rebecca and felt their small arms around his neck and realized he no longer wanted to keep his distance from them.

But his transformation from distant parent to proud papa had occurred only days before he left for Scotland. If he died at sea, their memories of him would more likely be of the stern and unloving father he had been for the past eight years than of the joyful and loving man he had been for the past nine days.

If I survive this storm, I will put the past behind me once and for all
. He would be the sort of father he had always planned to be. And he would forgive his brother. If only the sea did not claim him first.

“Land ho!”

In the gray light of dawn, a rocky shore could be seen in the distance. Alastair grinned. He was going to survive. He was going to have a second chance at life.

“The mainmast is giving way!” a sailor shrieked.

A tremendous gust of wind had grabbed the sail and broken the mainmast in two as though it were a twig. The falling mast was headed straight for Alastair, and he dove out of the way as it crashed into the ship’s wheel.

There was no way to control the ship now. The wind
and waves were driving them toward the rocks, where the ship would certainly be broken into pieces.

Above the howling wind he heard a man yell, “Git ’im, Danny!”

Alastair instinctively ducked, and the blow that would have brained him landed on his shoulder instead. He whirled to find himself surrounded by the three malingering sailors. “What’s this?” he shouted.

“Someone wants you dead,” one of the sailors yelled with a grin that displayed his toothless gums.

They attacked him all at once, and although Alastair gave a good account of himself, he had no chance, not with the wooden pin one of them was using to bang away at his head and shoulders. He felt the knot forming on his forehead, felt his eye swelling closed, felt his lip splitting and the blood pouring freely from his flattened nose. Once they had him pinned down on the deck, Gums said, “Let’s finish ’im ’ere.”

“We was told to throw ’im overboard and let ’im drown,” the one called Danny said. “And that’s wot we’re goin’ to do.”

“I’ll take those fine boots first,” Gums said, yanking at Alastair’s Hessians. “And that jacket.”

“Wot’s left for me?” Danny protested.

“Help yerself to that waistcoat with the silvery threads and his shirt and trousers,” Gums said.

“But the shirt’s all bloody, and them trousers too!”

“Wot do I get?” the third man asked.

“Those are fine stockings,” Gums said.

They stripped him to his smalls and tied his hands
and bare feet, “Like a pig for roastin’,” Gums said with satisfaction.

“We’ll be lucky to outlive ’im,” Danny muttered, squinting up at the rain pounding down on them from the cloud-ridden sky.

“Let’s get it over with,” the third man said.

“Wait!” Alastair yelled over the wind. “Why are you doing this? Who wants me—” He felt a rush of terror as they picked him up and threw him over the side. A scream built in his throat as he started to fall, but the air exploded from his lungs in a grunting
oof!
when he hit the icy surface, and his mouth and nose filled with saltwater as the sea closed over his head.

Alastair experienced a moment of sheer panic before he realized the stupid ruffians had tied his hands in front of him. As he sank farther into the depths, he reached frantically for his feet to untie the knots.

But he had jerked reflexively when he landed, and the ropes had tightened in the water. He could not get free.

When his lungs seemed ready to burst, he broke the surface, gasping for air. A huge wave immediately closed over his head and twisted him back underwater.

Alastair forced himself not to fight the wave, and when it had gone, his body floated back to the surface, but much closer to shore. He had to get his hands and feet free, or he would be dashed against the rocks, where the wind and tide were inexorably taking him.

He took a breath and slid underwater, bringing his feet up where his hands could reach them, making
himself work calmly and methodically. It took several tries before he was finally able to loosen the knots. Once his feet were free, Alastair worked on the ropes that bound his hands, but there was no way he could get the knots undone.

Alastair heard a terrible crunching sound and turned to watch his ship sinking far beyond the shoreline. It must have hit some submerged rock farther out in the bay. He saw the three sailors heaving some barrels and a wooden crate over the side and then jumping in after them.

“I hope you make it to shore,” he said, teeth chattering with cold. “I’ll make sure you hang, along with whoever hired you to kill me.”

As he kicked his way toward shore through the choppy, icy sea, his mind kept returning to the question of who wanted him dead. The only person with whom he was in enmity was his brother. He could not believe Marcus …

Then it dawned on him who might want him dead.

After the Battle of Culloden, Alastair’s grandfather had been rewarded for his valor with Castle MacKinnon and the rich property that surrounded the stone castle in Scotland. The land and the castle, renamed Blackthorne Hall, had belonged to the Dukes of Blackthorne ever since.

Six months ago a young Scotswoman, Lady Katherine MacKinnon, had laid claim to being The MacKinnon of Castle MacKinnon. She had challenged the original patent from the English king to his grandfather on the
grounds there had been a living heir to The MacKinnon at the time the “conditional” grant was made. She had made no secret of her hatred for all things English, especially the Dukes of Blackthorne.

Alastair had been contesting the woman’s claim through his London solicitor without much success and had decided to go to Scotland himself. He had been on his way to meet the apparent imposter when he was thrown into the sea.

Perhaps Lady Katherine had decided to eliminate him in hopes that his brother would be less likely to fight her claim. If so, she was in for a rude surprise. He had no intention of dying. He would have his revenge on the lady and the three cutthroats who had done her dastardly work for her.

BOOK: The Bodyguard
6.51Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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