Cardiff Siblings 01 - Seven Minutes in Devon (40 page)

Damnation, he couldn’t think like
that. He’d only cause himself more problems if he let his thoughts
run rampant, not that he had an inkling as to how he would stop
that very thing from happening.

There was the possibility, of course,
that someone else had taken off Kingley’s lead. This possibility
was no less haunting. Why would someone do such a thing?

Standing there in the growing dark
wouldn’t do any of them any good, and David needed someone to see
to the cut on his arm.

“
Let’s head back,” Aidan
finally said.

The three of them and Kingley headed
out of the trees, making for the main path where they could still
hear a lone voice calling out for Morgan on occasion.

They’d almost reached the end of the
thickness when he heard something else that set his blood to
boiling: none other than Emma Hathaway calling out into the
woods.

“
Morgan? Please answer me,
Morgan.”

And then there were other feminine
voices.

“
We’re coming for
you.”

“
Call out if you can hear
us.”

Aidan cursed beneath his breath and
turned to Deering. “Get Burington and the dog back to the house
safely. I’ll take care of the ladies.”

Then he took off in the direction of
their voices. They were on the main path, but deeper in the woods.
He cut across at an angle, hoping to catch them before they got too
much further.

“
Keep calling out to her,
ladies.” It was Emma again. “She’ll hear us. I know she
will.”

“
Emma Hathaway, what in
God’s name do you think you’re doing out here?” Aidan bellowed. He
didn’t care who else was with her. It didn’t matter.

“
Morgan!” she cried,
willfully ignoring him.

“
Emma!” He increased his
pace, ready to throttle her as soon as he reached her. “Stop where
you are.”

“
I think you should listen
to Mr. Cardiff,” one of the other ladies said, loudly enough he
could make out every word.

He gained ground on them with every
step. “She should, if she has any sense of
self-preservation.”

“
I’m trying to find your
sister,” Emma shrieked just as he came through the bushes upon
them.

“
You were supposed to stay
at the house,” he growled. For a moment, he passed his eyes over
the rest of them, but his fury at having Emma out here clouded his
mind so that he couldn’t decipher who else was with her. “All of
you. It’s dark, and it’s too dangerous even for the men to remain
looking for Morgan.”

“
You’re quitting?” Emma
spluttered. “You can’t give up yet. We could get torches or
lanterns—”

“
It’s too dangerous.” It
took every ounce of restraint he possessed not to take her by the
upper arms and shake her until her teeth rattled. It was bad
enough
he
knew he
was quitting on Morgan. He didn’t need Emma to remind him of that
fact.

“
But we can’t leave her
alone out here all night.”

“
She wouldn’t even be out
here if you hadn’t put the idea in her head that she could become
more independent.”

Emma blanched at his rebuke. As well
she should. Aidan didn’t truly believe that. He was just lashing
out at anything he could. It was just his worry for Morgan, but
that didn’t mean Emma deserved his treatment of her.

Even in the bit of moonlight shining
down over the path, the paleness of her skin seemed to intensify,
which only caused Aidan’s pulse to race faster than it already was.
Cold sweat covered his skin. What was he doing to Emma? He loved
her, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself from trying to hurt
her.

“
Miss Hathaway?” Niall
stepped into the path beside Aidan. “Are you ladies all
right?”

He hadn’t realized Niall was
there.

“
Yes, my lord,” she said.
But she never took her eyes—her huge, brown, downturned, hurt,
heartsick eyes—from Aidan. “We’re just worried about
Morgan.”

There was no one to blame for that but
Aidan. He’d put that look in them. He’d caused her pain. After all
of these years, finally, Aidan had achieved some small amount of
the revenge he’d sought ever since that one day.

He wanted to be sick. Bile rose in his
throat, and he was sure he would lose the contents of his stomach
at any moment. What had he become? What had he done?

“
We all are,” Niall assured
her. “But we’re going to have to trust that she’ll be all right
until morning.”

Emma sniffled, which caused Aidan to
hate himself just a bit more than before.

“
But…”

“
But nothing.” Niall put
out both arms for the ladies to take. “Come along. We can’t stay
out here waiting for someone else to be hurt.”

“
Someone’s been hurt?” one
of the other ladies said. “Oh, heavens.”

As a group, the lot of them made their
way back along the path toward the main house, leaving Aidan
behind.

He watched them, debating for a moment
whether he should go with them or ignore his own counsel and
continue the search. But then Emma stopped and looked back at him,
and her tears twinkled in the moonlight.

All he could do was shake his
head.

She turned around again and followed
after the others, leaving Aidan alone to ponder his descent into
madness.

“
Did anyone check near the
river?”

The silence which fell over the
drawing room after Lord Roxeburghe’s question was heavy and thick,
like syrup. Emma heard every breath taken, every shift of fabric
upon a chair, every swallow. She wished someone would say
something, anything, so her thoughts wouldn’t go back to Morgan at
the river.

But no one spoke. No one moved, until
Aidan thundered to his feet and stalked from the room,
intentionally tossing over a chair as he went.

Emma started to follow after him until
she remembered that, yet again, he hated her. He blamed her for
Morgan’s disappearance, as irrational as such a thing may be. Which
only meant that for three years, he had apparently blamed her for
what had happened in the river.

The knowledge of why he’d hated her
for so long didn’t ease the ache that had filled her gut since
they’d left the hermitage this afternoon. If anything, it only
intensified the sense of emptiness, the hollow pang that had been
consuming her. How would he ever come to love her? She couldn’t
fathom a life without his love now, but it seemed it was to be her
fate.

At last, David cleared his throat.
“We’ll split into teams again in the morning and begin the search
anew—starting at first light. We should all try to get a good
night’s rest, however difficult such a prospect may be.”

They filed out of the drawing room,
talking quietly in small groups as they went, and Vanessa came over
to sit beside Emma on the settee.

“
Come,” she said. “You
won’t be any use to Morgan tomorrow if you don’t rest
tonight.”

Emma couldn’t calm the thoughts that
were racing through her mind. “I’ll just go out and check on
Kingley once more.”

“
Kingley is fine,” David
said from behind her. “We’ve already seen to that. He doesn’t need
you.”

Kingley may not need her, but Emma
needed him. She needed someone or something she could hold onto,
someone whose neck she could wrap her arms around and have a good
cry, someone who wouldn’t think any less of her for doing it. “I’ll
just be—”

“
You’ll just be off to
bed,” Vanessa cut in.

Emma looked from her sister to her
brother-in-law, hoping one of the two would see things her way, but
neither gave her any sign they would aid her cause. Instead, she
let them help her to her feet. Vanessa walked with her all the way
to the ladies’ wing. After the door closed behind her, it was a few
moments before Emma heard the sound of her sister’s footsteps
heading in the opposite direction.

Of course, now there was Fanny to deal
with. She allowed the maid to assist her in changing out of her
gown and into a nightrail. For the maid’s benefit, Emma even got
into her bed, tucked neatly beneath her counterpane…but she had a
book with her.

“
Leave the candle, please,”
she said sweetly, so Fanny wouldn’t think anything was amiss. “I’m
hoping to finish this book tonight.” She might have said it too
sweetly, because the maid narrowed her eyes before bobbing a
curtsey and closing the door behind her.

Emma tried to read for a few minutes,
because she couldn’t go out so soon. She had to be sure no one in
this wing of the house would hear her, or they would surely try to
stop her. But reading proved impossible. She couldn’t force her
mind to focus on the words on the page. It kept jumping around from
thought to thought, and in a wildly erratic manner, no
less.

She wished she could take Serena with
her, but that didn’t seem such a brilliant plan of action. Someone
might hear her when she went to Serena’s door, and that was a risk
she just wasn’t willing to take.

When finally she heard nothing else
coming from the corridor, Emma threw off the coverlet, pulled on a
wrapper, picked up her candle, and padded as quietly as she could
to the door.

Before going fully out into the hall,
she peeked around the doorway to both sides, making certain she
wouldn’t be seen by a random houseguest who was up too late at
night. She didn’t see anyone, and the footmen had already been
through to extinguish the wall sconces, so she took a full step
out.

The risk of being caught and sent back
to her chamber like a naughty child weighed so heavily on her mind
that she hurried through the corridors and down the stairs faster
than she ever would have otherwise. Most times, if she attempted to
avoid detection, she would take the servants’ stairs and halls in
order to get to where she was going. But the servants were the ones
most likely to be up and about at this hour, so she used the main
pathways.

Finally, she reached the door to the
east gardens and escaped outside without being detected. She’d been
most concerned, perhaps, about the possibility of Aidan poking his
head in and impeding her progress. When she stepped out into the
cool, night air, it was as though Kingley had been waiting for her,
like he knew she would come. She’d barely closed the door before he
let out a bark and ran to her side, jumping up
excitedly.

Emma dropped to her knees, set the
candleholder carefully on the ground, and wrapped her arms around
him, drawing him into an embrace. He let out a series of happy yaps
and shoved his head into her hands so she could scratch his
ears.

“
Where did Morgan go,
Kingley?” she murmured, not that she expected him to answer. He was
just a dog. He didn’t really understand her, no matter how smart he
might be and no matter how quickly he’d learned to guide her
friend.

But that was just the
thing—he might not understand her question, but he
did
understand that
Morgan was his responsibility. He would never have left her
willingly.

Even if, as had been prodding at her
mind, Morgan had removed Kingley’s lead and tried to shoo him away,
he wouldn’t have left her. In their training, it had become
increasingly clear that he knew there was something different about
Morgan, that he knew she needed his protection in addition to his
guidance.

Morgan hadn’t tried to hurt herself
again. There wasn’t a doubt in Emma’s mind.

And she hadn’t gotten lost or
innocently separated from Kingley.

Someone else was involved. Someone
else had taken Kingley’s lead from around his neck and convinced
him to leave Morgan.

Which meant that someone had to have
done something to Morgan. Someone Kingley trusted, no
less.

She couldn’t sit around and try to
sleep while Morgan could be hurt…or dead, however grim the thought
may be. It wasn’t a possibility. Especially not now that she had
realized, beyond any doubt, that someone had intentionally meant
harm toward her friend.