Duchess of Sin (37 page)

“I suppose.”

“Then I have an idea.”

Caroline peered at Anna warily through her tangled hair. “What sort of idea?”

“Well, surely anything is better than just sitting here waiting for our fate like a pair of ninnys! Help me unroll that wool
and bring it over here.”

“Oh!” Caroline’s eyes widened with sudden excitement. “I see.”

They ran over to drag the spools of wool back to the doors and spun the cobweb-like fibers across the threshold. “If we can
bind them up in it, we’ll have an instant to hit them over the heads with the crates and then run,” Anna said.

And if it did not work—the scoundrels would probably kill them. But maybe at least Caroline could get away, if Anna created
enough theatrics. She was good at that.

Once they were finished with their task, Caroline crouched by the wall with her crate lid, and Anna started pounding on the
door again. She had nearly bloodied her hands by the time they finally heard footsteps, and the metallic grind of a lock sliding
back. As she stumbled
backward, the door flew open, and a burly man in a rough brown coat appeared there.

He did not look happy as he stalked into the room, closer to the wool. From the smell, Anna deduced they interrupted him drinking
gin and eating onions.

“Here, wot’s going on?” he said. “You two had best quiet down!”

“Now!” Anna shouted. Caroline brought the lid crashing over his head, and he collapsed heavily to the floor, entangled in
their web of wool.

Anna grabbed Caroline’s hand, and they ran out of the room. They were halfway down the stairs when a man appeared at the bottom.
She couldn’t see his face, as he was illuminated from behind by a lamp, but he was no rough bully. He was tall and lean, clad
in a finely tailored dark coat and well-tied cravat.

In two steps, the tall man was upon them, catching Caroline around the waist and lifting her from her feet. Her hand was torn
from Anna’s.

Anna screamed as Caroline kicked and twisted. The man just tossed her over his shoulder as if she were another bundle of wool
and threw out his arm to block Anna’s way.

“Why did you take them both?” he said, his voice filled with cold fury.

And Anna heard with shock that it was Grant Dunmore. Elegant, gorgeous, charming Grant, now a street brawler and a kidnapper?

“You,” she gasped. He just stared down at her in the shadows, holding on to the wriggling Caroline.

Another man appeared behind him. He held the lamp in one hand and a bottle in the other. It was George Hayes, their mother’s
cousin.

“They were both there when the hired men broke in,” George said. “What else could they do? Leave Caroline to sound the alarm?
Kill her?”

“Maybe if you hadn’t hired such incompetents, this wouldn’t have happened,” Grant said tightly. He slapped Caroline across
the bottom. “Be still!”

“How dare you!” Caroline shouted. She pulled at Grant’s hair.

“Those men worked cheap. That’s the important thing,” George said, sounding infuriatingly amused. “Once Adair takes the bait,
we can let them go with no harm done. Except to your pretty hair, it seems, Dunmore.”

With a shriek of fury, Anna lunged at Grant. “You bastard! I won’t let you hurt Conlan.”

Grant caught her with his free arm and pushed her down the stairs toward George. “Blast it, George, take this one. I can’t
handle them both.”

George dropped the bottle, which didn’t break but scattered drops of wine everywhere, and grabbed Anna before she could fall.
Like the ruffian upstairs, he stank of liquor and onions, and his teeth were stained wine-red as he leered at her.

“I told you the Blacknall girls were little hellions,” he said with an unpleasant laugh. “I’ve had my eye on this one for
a long time.”

Anna spit at him, and he slapped her across the face. Her head snapped back, stars whirling in her brain, but he had to let
go of her for that blow. She ran, yet only got two steps before he caught her again.

“That was not a good idea, lovely Anna,” he said.

“Lock her in that closet,” Grant said. “I’ll take care of Lady Caroline.”

“Gladly,” George said, dragging Anna against his body. Disgustingly, she could feel his erection pressed to her hip. Rather
than filling her with fear, making her remember that would-be rapist solider, it made her even more angry. She was consumed
with fury; it blotted out all else.

“And leave her alone,” Grant said. His voice rang with unmistakable authority. “Adair is the goal here, remember.”

George scowled, but he nodded. He was a weak man at base, used to taking instructions from those who were stronger. He took
her arm in a bruising clasp and hauled her along a narrow corridor. “You spilled my wine, you little bitch,” he muttered in
her ear. “You’ll pay for that.”

He shoved her into a cupboard set in the wall and slammed the door after her, turning the key in the lock. She was utterly
alone, closed in darkness and silence except for a small, steady drip of water. And the pattering of what sounded horribly
like rats’ feet.

Anna leaned back against the damp wall and wrapped her arms tightly around herself to ward off panic. She did hate the dark,
but even worse was the worry about Conlan and her sister. Above her head, she heard a scraping noise, a crash, then all was
quiet again.

She closed her eyes and remembered the night that Conlan took her to the tavern. She thought of the music, the dancing, and
the light, and held them to her heart fiercely.

“Under dark and moonless sky, he rode into the night,” she sang hoarsely, hoping it would help keep the fear away. She licked
her cracked, dry lips and went on louder, bolder. “To see his love o’er the way. The smell of flowers in the air, he passed
not a care, across a bridge o’that sad day.…”

Caroline landed hard on the pile of wool as Grant dropped her. She immediately ran as far from him as she could, pressing
herself against a stack of crates. She watched in numb horror as he pushed the groaning, half-conscious ruffian out the door
and closed it behind him. Grant braced his fists on the wooden panels, his shoulders heaving as if he struggled to hold on
to control.

“
You
are the one behind all this,” she said. “How could you?”

How could any man who showed such pride and tenderness over
The Chronicle of Kildare
be so cruel? That made no sense, of course. Plenty of men who loved art and literature had been cruel despots. But she had
never imagined that of Grant Dunmore.

Philanderer, maybe. User of women, of course. Not kidnapper.

“You weren’t supposed to be involved in this,” he said.

Caroline gave a bitter laugh. “And that is supposed to make it better? The fact that you intended to snatch away only Anna?”

“I did not intend for anything like this to happen at all.” He pushed back from the door and turned to look at her. His handsome
face was drawn and haunted-looking. “I only wanted what should have been mine.”

Caroline was utterly confused. “What should have been yours? How will kidnapping my sister and me correct that?”

“You can’t understand. You have always been sheltered and secure.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” Caroline said.
She slid down until she sat on the wooden floor and drew her knees up to her chest as she wrapped her arms around them. “Tell
me.”

He leaned back against the door and crossed his arms. At first, she thought he would just ignore her, but he said, “When I
was a child, my father died, and soon after, my mother discovered his fortune was lost to gambling and ridiculous moneymaking
schemes. It’s a pathetically common tale, but my mother was very proud. She sold everything she could to hide her situation
from her friends. In the end, she had to do what she most dreaded.”

Caroline, pulled in by this rare glimpse of a strange and enigmatic man, straightened her legs out on the floor in front of
her. “What was that?” she whispered.

“She went to her family.”

“Isn’t that what families are for?”

“Your family, perhaps,” he said with a rueful laugh. He sat down on the floor near her, but not so near that she could kick
him. “When my mother married, she broke with her old Irish Catholic family. She took me with her to Adair Court to try and
reconcile with her brother, Conlan’s father. She cried and begged, but it was no use. He told her that she had betrayed her
family and her homeland, and he sent us away. As we left, I saw Conlan coming up the drive on his pony. That was
his
home, his place. His father who betrayed my mother and left us humiliated.”

Caroline could not fathom how that would feel. He was quite right—she was sheltered, despite all her reading, despite all
she had seen in the Uprising. Her parents had loved her and her sisters, and she couldn’t imagine anything that would make
her mother cast her out of Killinan. Despite all Grant had done, all he was still doing as
he held her in this freezing warehouse, she felt a twinge of something like pity.

But she knew that he would not want her pity. He was proud, like his mother. “What happened then?” she asked.

“My uncle did relent somewhat and gave my mother money to go abroad where she could live more cheaply. We went to Italy, and
she died there when I was thirteen. My uncle then agreed to pay for my schooling, when he was pressed by some of my mother’s
old friends. I went to Trinity and managed to make my way from there. But he refused to ever see me, to let me be part of
Adair at all.”

“Until you tried to take it from his son,” Caroline said quietly.

Grant leaned his head back against the crate with his eyes closed. She had never seen such pain on anyone’s face, carved deep
in bitter lines on his beautiful face. “Adair
belonged
there, he was part of it. Part of Ireland, of its people. I wanted it. That was all.”

“It was his by right!”

“And I was a coldhearted English bastard to try and take it,” he said. “So I’ve been told. All I could think about was the
way my mother cried as we left Adair that day, the way they turned their backs on her, and we had nothing. We belonged nowhere.”

And he still did not. Caroline could see that, feel it as cold as that winter wind on her skin. Despite his place in Society
and all the ladies in love with him, he belonged to nothing. Maybe that was why he loved the
Chronicle of Kildare
so much—for what those ancient pages represented.

She couldn’t help herself. She reached over and gently took his hand.

His eyes flew open, and he stared at her in astonishment. She thought he might fling her away and turn back to that fearsome
harshness. Then, slowly, he laid his other hand atop hers.

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” she said. “You don’t have to go on as you have. You don’t need Dublin Society. Take your
books and go and study them. Find Ireland in those pages, and you will see that you are truly a part of it, too.”

“Caroline,” he said. He gave her a gentle smile, heartbreaking in its sweet sadness. “You think scholarship is the answer
to everything, don’t you?”

“No, not everything. But so much that we seek can be found in the pages of books, if we take the time to look.”

“Time is the one thing I don’t have. My cousin will kill me for hurting your sister, and quite rightly. I’ve made too many
mistakes.”

“We all make mistakes. Yours have just been more spectacular than most.”

Grant laughed. “What would you suggest I do to atone then?”

“Well,” Caroline said, “the first thing you should do is let Anna and me go. And push George into the Liffey. He’s caused
my family problems for years. He’s no fit ally for anyone.”

“And then?”

“And then—I don’t know. Perhaps you should find a sensible wife and take her to your country estate. You could study, write
books, and run your farm there.”

“Is that what you would do? If you could have any life you wanted?”

She had never really thought about it, and it gave her
pause. What would she do, if she could do anything? If she was not bound by the strictures of being a woman. If she had not
already set her course with Lord Hartley. “Yes. I would live somewhere quiet and pretty, where I could read and raise a family.
Where I could just be—me.”

“Ah, but you know who you are,” he said. “I think I haven’t even started learning who I might be, except for my evils.”

Caroline reached up to gently touch his cheek, tracing her fingertips over the angles of his face and the sad hollows under
his eyes. “I think there is more to you than that.”

Grant’s eyes narrowed as he studied her. Slowly, as if he fought against something inside himself, he leaned toward her, and
his lips touched hers, lightly, tenderly. A sudden feeling of bizarre
rightness
shivered through Caroline, as if this was what she had been waiting for forever.

Then the world exploded. The door burst in, its stout wood and iron locks splintered. Grant shoved Caroline away and blocked
her body with his. She glimpsed Adair, who looked like an enraged bear. His face was dark, his eyes burning.