Celeste Bradley - [Heiress Brides 03] (23 page)

BOOK: Celeste Bradley - [Heiress Brides 03]
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Swallowing, she circled once more, her gaze hard on the shadows within the cottages and the gaping door of the mill.

Someone was watching . . . someone who meant her harm.

Chapter Twenty-three

Graham rode Somers’s horse wildly, racing to and fro. There were two roads into the estate. He had no way of knowing which way Sophie had been taken, so he had to ride down all four tracks, east, west, north and south.

The roads were empty of life. The surrounding countryside was nothing more than a recriminating shamble of weeds, broken walls, tumbling cottages and a few hard-eyed and sallow farmers who only gazed at him blankly when he asked about a stolen woman.

His people surely didn’t think well of him. He only hoped that basic decency would keep them from concealing Sophie’s whereabouts.

But no one had seen her or a man fitting Wolfe’s description.

“No one comes here, milord.” Of course they hadn’t learned of the former duke’s death and his own ascension. Graham forbore telling them, for it could only harden them further against him. “No one ever comes here.”

“Er . . . right. Thank you.” Shamed and desperate at
once, Graham reined Somers’s horse about and tried another direction.

Finally, on the south road, he saw an amazing sight. A tiny child played in the middle of a ring of tumbled cottages—he dimly recalled passing them on foot early this morning—and she wore on her dirty, golden hair something he immediately recognized.

It was his favorite boyhood cap.

She went very still as he approached, then turned to run when she saw him reining in his mount.

“No, wait! Please, have you seen a lady?” The child slowed at his pleading tone, then turned to stare at him, one dirty finger in her mouth.

Graham dismounted and moved forward slowly, trying desperately to project harmlessness and not his desperate intention to tie her up in a sack until she told him where she’d found the cap. “I’ve lost my lady, you see,” he said softly. “She’s tall, with red-gold hair—”

The child nodded. Oh, thank God. Graham moved forward, dropping the horse’s reins and going down on one knee.
I am so harmless you could knock me over with one wave of your tiny, grubby hand
. “Can you tell me which way she rode?”

The little girl gazed at him with wide blue eyes, then slowly shook her head.
No
.

“You didn’t see her ride by?”

No
.

This was useless! The child hadn’t seen a thing. She’d probably found the cap on the ground. He ought to leap back on the damned horse and continue south!

Graham took a deep breath, fighting down his panic,
reaching for patience. “Little one, did you see my lady or not?”

She nodded.

“Where did you see her?”

The child raised her other hand, the one she wasn’t chewing on, and pointed neither up the road, north, nor down the road, south. Instead, her stubby little finger quite clearly indicated the cottage less than seven yards away.

“Oh.” Graham stood, brushed off his knees and walked six quick strides to the door of the place. “Sophie?”

Sophie looked up from spooning something into the mouth of a woman who lay in a poorly made bed in the cottage’s only room. “Oh, hullo, Gray. What do you want?”

Want? Well, to begin with, he wanted to run to her, drag her into his arms and kiss her blind. Then he wanted to shake her within an inch of her life for frightening him so. Then perhaps some more kissing. Yes, definitely more kissing. But there might be another bout of shaking later, as well.

“You worried me,” he said in low voice. “I didn’t know where you’d gone.”

“I’m on my way to London,” she said absently, now dabbing at the woman’s fevered face with a cloth. “I only stopped to help Moira here. Her husband’s in the city working in a factory. She’s all alone here with the children. They tried to take care of her when she became ill, but they’re so small . . .”

There were, he saw now, several more grimy blond
children in the room. It looked like dozens, but was surely more like five. Bloody hell, if he was their mother left alone with them, he’d have taken to his bed, too!

“Is Moira very ill?” He kept his voice soft, for the poor woman did look very ill indeed.

Sophie looked up with a quick smile. “She’s mostly exhausted, I think. There hasn’t been much food lately and I think she’s been giving hers to the children.”

“Sophie made food,” someone said.

Graham looked down to see that his roadside nemesis had entered behind him. She pushed back his cap on her head to gaze up at him critically. “You’re milord, aren’t you? The one that Papa curses when he thinks we can’t hear.”

He returned the look. “Given up on your vow of silence so soon? What a pity.”

“Graham, I’m so sorry,” Sophie said, shaking her head. “I didn’t know it was so bad here. I . . . I understand now, about Lilah, I mean.”

Graham met her gaze to see that, like a miracle, the shine of belief and trust had returned to her beautiful gray eyes. She hadn’t looked at him that way since he’d told her about gaining the title. Actually, she’d never looked at him in quite
that
way. Now it was as if her belief in him was not only restored but magnified by a thousand.

He had to swallow hard to send his heart back down from where it lodged in his throat. “Yes, well . . . er, what’s for dinner, then?”

She smiled. “I made a nourishing soup from the ham you left me and some dried peas.”

“And she found some carrots and bitter greens in the garden,” the little girl piped up. “We thought we’d ate them all!”

Sophie shrugged at that, looking slightly embarrassed. “I just happened to spot them under the fallen timbers,” she said. She gave the pot another stir. “There’s enough for another day, but I wish I had more ham. The children need meat.”

“Ah.” Graham backed toward the door. “I’ll be back in a pip and jiggle,” he told the little girl. “You start counting and don’t stop until you see me again.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You’d best hurry then, for I can only count a little. One, two, three, four . . . one . . .”

Somers’s Horse, as Graham had begun to call him, slanted Graham a disbelieving look when he tried to stir it to a canter. Then with a long-suffering sigh, the beast broke into a weary lope that still ate up the miles to the house.

Graham tied the horse back in its patch and climbed back through the window rather than bother with the key. In a few moments, he’d filled a cookpot with the last of the ham, all the jars of preserves and all the tea. He cast about for something more valuable to give them that they might sell for more food, but he feared that anything too precious might only bring suspicion down on them.

Then the shimmer of his own waistcoat buttons caught his gaze as he passed a mirror in the hall. Gold, of course. Only the best for the sons of Edencourt. He pulled them off one by one with a yank and a twist and
tossed them into the cookpot. They could be sold off slowly and no one would think much of it.

Then he carried it all right back out through the window. “Handy, that.”

The horse stared at him in frank dismay when he returned.

“Sorry, S.H., but we’re on an errand of mercy.” Graham grinned, feeling lighter than he had in a long while. “Besides, that little girl is counting to four again and again. We must get back before she drives Sophie round the bend.”

When he arrived with his ridiculous pot balanced on the pommel before him, one would have thought he’d brought Sophie diamonds and furs. Her eyes shone with delight when she saw the tea. “Oh, perfect! I’ll make some for Moira right away.”

Then she turned to Graham and pressed her palm lightly onto his loose-hanging waistcoat. “Your buttons?”

He shrugged and glanced away. “I can always find brass ones. It’s going to be a long winter.”

She looked at him for a long moment, her head tilted to one side. “You absolutely devastate me, do you know that, Graham Cavendish, Duke of Edencourt?”

Because he’d given up some buttons? He shook his head, not understanding, but she only smiled mysteriously. “Let me fix Moira and the children up with some tea and preserves. Then I think we’d better return to the manor.”

He blinked at her. “But we must get you back to London! You’ll be missed!”

She shook her head and pointed behind him. “That thing isn’t going to get us to London today.”

Graham turned to see that S.H. had abandoned him and was nearly out of sight, trotting stubbornly back to its patch of weeds, reins trailing in the dust of the road.

He turned back to her. “I can catch him.” Although he wasn’t at all sure he could.

She shook her head again. “You might persuade him to do it all again so soon, but I fear you’re going to have a much harder time convincing me.”

With that, she turned and strode briskly back into the cottage. The place on his chest where her hand had rested felt cold without her.

WOLFE SNARLED FROM
his hiding place in the darkness of the furthermost shack.

Foiled again. He almost had the gangling bitch—but he had no stomach for children, greasy little beasts. Besides, he probably couldn’t have convinced her to come away before someone raised an alarm. Watching from the shadows as the two nauseating do-gooders fed the moldy masses, he snarled.

He wanted to kill them both, preferably with something white-hot and painful. Unfortunately, killing
her
was far too obvious. Stickley would be the first to point a finger.

Something niggled at the back of his thoughts. It had been so long since his head had been clear of liquor for several days in a row that it took a bit of work to bring
the actual memory to the surface. He was clearly out of practice.

Then he had it. Sir Hamish’s will!

“Should three generations of Pickering girls fail, I wash me hands of the lot of you. The entire fifteen thousand pounds will go to pay the fines and hardships of those who defy the excise man to export that fine Scots whisky which has been my only solace in this family of dolts.”

The effort made his head pound, but Wolfe persisted. There was something there . . .

This was the third generation. One girl had already failed. One had married well, but her husband wasn’t a duke yet. It was entirely possible that he wouldn’t be by the time the Season ended. The last girl could still be stopped . . .

Then he had it.

“The entire fifteen thousand pounds will go to
—”

Fifteen thousand pounds. Not thirty thousand. Stickley had doubled the trust, by gum—and after all the girls failed, the will only required that fifteen thousand pounds go to the smugglers!

The rest would be theirs, his and Stickley’s!

All he had to do was to kill the Duke of Edencourt.

Stickley wouldn’t like it—but then, once a man had killed a duke, what was to stop him from swatting an insect like Stickley?

Chapter Twenty-four

There was no point in hurrying, so Graham and Sophie enjoyed the long walk back to Edencourt. The time was later than he’d realized. He must have spent hours riding up and down these roads. Even now the day was fading, mingling long blue shadows with slanting golden light.

Sophie’s hair fell unbound down her back, catching the light as the breeze played with the length of it. She walked with loose, open strides like the country girl she was, but her spine was straight and poised and her chin was high, like the elegant, polished “Sofia.”

“This is my favorite time of day,” she shared with him. “When the work is done and world starts to quiet.”

“Not in London,” he pointed out. “I know some people who are only now rising from their beds.”

They looked at other with matching grins. “Tessa!” they said together.

Sophie’s smile became rueful. “How am I ever going to return to Primrose Street?”

The very thought of this new, shimmeringly confident Sophie returning to be imprisoned beneath
Tessa’s heavy thumb sickened Graham. “Don’t,” he urged. “Stay with Deirdre. She’d love it, I know she would. She’s very fond of you, you know.”

Sophie frowned slightly. “She is?” Then she shook her head. “I can’t. I can’t live as someone’s permanent, useless guest for the rest of my life.”

He frowned then himself. “You aren’t her guest. You’re her family.”

She looked away, her gaze resting on the low stone wall alongside the road. “Hmm.”

They walked in silence for a time. Then Graham’s stomach rumbled, loudly. “We won’t have any supper,” he pointed out mournfully. “I gutted the larder thoroughly.”

Sophie laughed. “That was man-thoroughness. I imagine there will be different results from woman-thoroughness.”

He scratched behind his ear. “Could be. I’d never actually been in the kitchen before. I didn’t even know that larder was there.”

She gazed at him, her brow furrowed. “Graham, you do realize that a house that size has several kitchens, don’t you? And each kitchen probably has more than one larder?”

He cheered immediately. “Really? Because you ate my breakfast.”

She clapped a hand over her mouth, then ruined her guilty dismay by laughing out loud. “So that was why you gave me an extraordinary amount of ham! I assumed it was some sort of verdict on my unfeminine appetite.”

He smiled sideways at her. “Sophie, no one in their
right mind would ever dream of calling you unfeminine.”

She turned to him with a sudden, devastating smile. “Why thank you, kind sir!”

Graham, when he could breathe again and the dazzle had faded from his vision, couldn’t for the life of him remember what they’d been speaking of.

No matter. Perhaps it was enough that for now, at this moment, he was strolling along a country lane with the only woman in the world he would ever love: his valiant, clever Miss Sophie Blake.

Sophie’s mind was not so serene. She was forming a plan—a wonderful, terrible, frightening plan.

What if she took her charade to its farthest possible extreme?

What if she did more than steal two hundred pounds of dress allowance and travel money and pose as a poor but genteel long-lost cousin for a brief moment of freedom and change?

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