Leslie Lafoy (32 page)

And if Lucinda thought she was going to cheat him out of all those rare and beautiful dreams when he was so very close to achieving them …

“Simone,” he murmured, his chest tight, his heart aching as his blood ran cold. “Please, darling. Please don’t tell her that I love you.”

Chapter 18

The Duke of Ryland’s butler announced him at the threshold to the man’s study and then stepped aside, giving Tristan a clear view of the room and the two male occupants. The duke sat at his desk and the ever attendant Haywood leaned against the fireplace mantel looking none too happy to see Tristan. Neither had a weapon in hand. A definite positive in the situation. The desktop, however, was covered with any number of normally innocuous items that could be made lethal in an enraged heartbeat. Tristan advanced anyway, determined to get the matter done.

“From the looks of you,” the duke said, leaning back in his chair, “I gather you’re not here to invite us to play cards at your club.”

“No, Your Grace, I’m not,” he admitted, stopping between the pair of red leather chairs in front of the desk. And since there was no point in trying to dance up to the issue, he added, “I’m here to inform you that I believe Lady Simone has been kidnapped.”

“What!” Haywood cried, taking a half step forward.

As the duke sat in silence, taking Tristan’s measure, he went on, saying, “Along with my sister. It appears they were taken by force from the conservatory in my stepmother’s house just over an hour ago.”

“We have to notify the authorities, Dray. I’ll go right—”

“An inspector with Scotland Yard was with me when we discovered the scene,” Tristan assured them. “He is, as we speak, mobilizing what official resources can be brought to bear in finding Em and Simone.”

“All right,” the duke said crisply, leaning forward, his eyes hard and dark, “now that we’ve dispensed with the formal notification and conveyance of the most basic facts … Who has her and why?”

“The who is most likely my stepmother. The why…” Tristan shook his head. “I could make a couple of guesses, but that’s all they’d be.”

Haywood swore under his breath and then asked, “Do you have any idea of where she might be holding Simone? And your sister?”

Jesus. Of all the questions
 … “If I did, I’d have been there already.”

Haywood took a step forward, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. The duke held up his hand to stay his friend. “Of your couple of guesses for why,” he said calmly, “give me the odds-on favorite.”

“To use as bait,” Tristan supplied, distilling the matter to its essence. “Lucinda wants me dead and she’s using Em and Simone to lure me to wherever she’s decided the deed needs to be done.”

Haywood glared at him. “Drayton’s told me about the latest chapter in the Lunatic Lockwood saga, and it seems to me that there’s a great deal of conjecture in your accusations. You don’t have a shred of hard evidence or physical proof against Lady Lockwood, do you?”

“And therein, Mr. Haywood, lies the reason that she hasn’t been arrested and charged. Why she’s free to commit further mayhem.”

“It could be,” the man went on, “that she simply recognized inevitabilities and had the prudence to invest accordingly.”

“It could,” Tristan allowed. “But, given Lucinda’s basic inclinations, it’s far more likely that she expedited the deaths to make her investments profitable on her timetable.”

“Are you telling us,” Haywood said slowly, “that you became involved with Simone while knowing that you could be your stepmother’s next intended victim?”

It wasn’t, Tristan reminded himself, that he hadn’t anticipated the question, or never faced it before. No, the demoralizing aspect of it was that he hadn’t thought of a very good answer yet. Which meant, now that he was on the spot, there was nothing to do but serve up the absolute truth and the humiliation be damned.

“I’ve discovered,” he began, “a number of less than sterling qualities about myself since having met Simone. The most troubling of them is that when I’m anywhere near her, my intellectual ability drops to that of a mud brick. And despite knowing that, I can’t stay away from her.”

Considering the circumstances that had required the confession, the duke’s grin wasn’t what he’d expected in the way of reaction. Haywood’s grumble didn’t disappoint, however. But grumbling while tossing a gold crown down on the desk in front of the duke … Clearly there’d been a wager on something and Haywood had lost.

Even as Tristan was pondering what to say next, the duke chuckled. “It’s happened to the best of us, Lockwood. Welcome to the club. There’s nothing to be done about it but muddle on as best you can.”

He had no idea what
it
was, but he didn’t like the notion of being viewed as a bumbler. When this entire debacle was over and done, when he had Simone and Emmaline safely back home … Being considered a muddler wasn’t going to do much to help his petition for Simone’s hand. “Despite what the present situation suggests, I’m quite competent. I’m a successful businessman. I’ve amassed a personal fortune. I’m—”

“In love with Simone,” the duke supplied quietly.

Damnation. How had the man guessed that?

“And until you learn how to manage the rest of your life in light of that fact, you’re going to feel as if your whole world has gone off the rails. It’ll all come right at some point, but initially…” He shook his head. “Mud-brick stupid. What a perfect description. I remember it well. If not necessarily fondly.”

“Yes, but the worst you did,” Haywood observed, “was destroy the wall. You didn’t get Caroline kidnapped.”

“Actually, as I recall that whole time, I cruelly ended our affair and abandoned her to a horde of idiots and hangers-on. Neither of which was a particularly kind thing to do.”

Tristan cocked a brow. “I’m sure there will come a time, Your Grace, when I’ll appreciate knowing that I’m not the only clod in the world, but at the moment, it’s of very little consolation. I’m more interested in bringing Simone and my sister safely home.”

“And what is it, exactly,” he asked, “that you think you can do at this juncture?”

“Be prepared to meet Lucinda’s terms.”

Haywood dryly added, “Throw yourself on the sword and all that.”

“Yes,” he replied, wondering why the man harbored such a deep disdain for him, “if that’s what’s required.”

The duke half-smiled and shook his head, asking, “Has it occurred to you that Simone would make an incredibly
dangerous
hostage?”

“Yes.”

“Frankly, Lockwood,” the man went on, rising from his seat, “I’m more worried that I’m going to have to hire a barrister to defend her on a murder charge than I am with the possibility of having to effect her rescue.”

In a perfect world
 … “I’d like to be as calm about the outcome, Your Grace, but—”

“Of course,” he said, opening a desk drawer. “Understandable,” he added, taking out a revolver. He tucked it into the waistband of his trousers and, buttoning his suit jacket to conceal it, came around the desk. “You haven’t lived with Simone as long as we have. Assuming that Lady Lockwood would send her demands to your residence, I suggest we go there and wait for their arrival.

“Haywood?” he asked, pausing beside Tristan to look back at his friend. “On the off chance that she sends them here, would you be willing—”

“Certainly.”

And with that promise, Simone’s brother-in-law motioned toward the door of the study and smiled. “Shall we?”

Enlisting the man’s help hadn’t been the reason he’d come here, but knowing that he couldn’t very well decline it, Tristan nodded and followed the man out the door, through the foyer, and down the front steps.

“A point of information, Lockwood,” he said once they were in the carriage and on their way. “In the eyes of Cyril Haywood, no man is ever going to be good enough for Simone.”

Well, it was good, he supposed, to know that it wasn’t a purely personal animosity. “Does he love her?”

“Rather like an older, adoring, utterly-blind-to-her-faults brother. He’ll come around in time. When he sees Simone happy in her life with you.”

“You’re assuming that she’ll agree to marry me.”

He shrugged and nodded. “I’m also assuming that you’re going to ask for her.”

And they were both assuming that Simone was going to come out of the misadventure alive and not furious with him for having gotten her tangled up in it. But if the gods of good fortune deigned to smile on him … “Would you be opposed to our marriage?”

The duke snorted and chuckled. “Would my opinion one way or the other make the least bit of difference to either one of you?”

“Probably not,” Tristan admitted. “At least in the short run.”

“Then I don’t see much point in standing in the way. And since you’ve already had the wedding night and apparently found yourselves sufficiently compatible to pursue the honeymoon in the days since, I consider a wedding something of a mere formality at this point.”

They’d already had their wedding night. It was an interesting notion. That first time with Simone certainly hadn’t been anything like what he’d imagined a bridal night would be. Always in his visions there had been a great deal of awkwardness, coaxing, and no real satisfaction beyond that in getting the deed done so the marriage was official. And truth be told, he hadn’t ever expected the days and years that came after it to be any more satisfying than that first night. A title, a wife, an appropriate number of children, a productive estate, all of his duties to Society perfunctorily, joylessly, fulfilled.

“What do you think, Tristan?”

“That until I met Simone my life was one of miserably low expectations.”

The duke laughed softly. “I’d suggest that you keep some of your expectations low. She’s a terrible cook. If left to her own devices, she’d simply wander about and call whatever she found to eat a meal.”

Like the street child she had once been. Tristan considered the world outside the carriage and firmly put his hopes on the fact that grazing for food wasn’t all that remained of her survival instincts.

*   *   *

Damnation, her head hurt. She couldn’t open her eyes. If she even tried, they’d pop out of her head, and then where would she be?
Blind,
she answered herself. Not that she wasn’t blind with them closed, but at least this way it was a matter of choice and not a permanent crippling.

Jesus. Her brain was a wreck. As though her eyes really could pop out. And there were certainly more important things that she needed to be thinking about. Starting with … with … Well, her whole body ached. Especially her arms. Probably, her sluggish mind suggested, because they were tied behind her back. And her right one hurt worse than the left because she was lying on her side and it was underneath her.

Her feet … She focused on the sensations of her ankles. Well, there was one bright spot; her feet weren’t bound at all. Oh! An even brighter spot! They hadn’t searched her! Her knife was still in the gartered sheath. She could feel the hilt pressing into her calf.

Buoyed by hope, she went back to analyzing the world beyond her closed eyes. Only her hands were tied and she was lying on her side on …

A floor? Yes, it was hard, cold, bare. And, judging by how her nose tickled, dusty. But not bone-numbingly cold as stone usually was. So it was most likely a wooden floor. In the home of a bad housekeeper.

A bad housekeeper?
As if that tidbit of observation mattered. Where the house was, was probably more important to know. Then again, it might not even be a house at all. It could be a warehouse. Or a nice stable.

No, it wasn’t a stable. She didn’t smell even a hint of hay or horses or leather. Warehouse? If it was, they were far away from the docks, because she couldn’t smell the river. And, now that she was noticing things a bit more clearly, she didn’t feel the damp in her clothes, either. Other than that paltry amount of deduced information … There wasn’t any other real choice about it all; she was going to have to chance an actual look. She lifted the lashes on her left eye the tiniest bit and just long enough to make her heart race.

She swallowed and instantly wished that she hadn’t. Holding her breath as fire scraped raw skin all the way down to her lungs, Simone resisted the urge to whimper, refusing to give the woman on the other side of the bed so much as a dram of satisfaction.

How the hell one could feel dizzy lying on the floor?… She drew in a slow, steadying breath and willed her mind to work through the puzzle of her predicament. Her arms were tied and she was lying on the floor of what seemed to be a bedroom. Since there weren’t any carpets on the floor that she could see, it was likely a bedroom of a poorer person or a room at a less than stellar inn.

And given the brightness of the sunlight she’d glimpsed in her quick peek, it was still fairly early in the day. Which wasn’t all that important except to make her wonder if enough time had passed for anyone to even notice that she and …

Emmy! Her heart pounding, Simone opened her eye again and took a longer look. No, the dress hems that she could see on the other side of the bed weren’t Emmy’s. Emmy didn’t wear black bombazine. Simone glanced up at the underside of the bed and then, relieved, went back to pretending that she was still unconscious.

She was on the floor. Emmy was on the bed. Lucinda was seated in a chair on the other side of the room. It had only been an hour or two since she and Emmy had been taken from the conservatory.

Now that she knew all that, what was she supposed to do about it? Wait for rescue? Yes, Tristan would come for them, no doubt kicking down the door in the process, but how long would it take for him to get there? And how would he know where they were and which door to kick in? Unless Lucinda was going to send him a note with directions …

Well, now that she thought about it, odds were that that might be just what the woman had in mind. An invitation of sorts.
The pleasure of your company is requested at … wherever … and if you don’t show up, both your sister and your lover will die.

As plans and plots went, she had to admit that it certainly had a nice theatrical quality. Why Lucinda would go to all the trouble, though … A bullet fired from a carriage racing past the warehouse offices would be just as effective and considerably easier. Tristan dead was Tristan dead.