TheCharmer (27 page)

"My princess, if only that was you at my door. Why don't you come calling anymore, darling? What did I do to offend you?"

Truth be told, he knew why. He'd lost the passion. One day he'd woken up without feeling the thrill of the chase, the hunger for the game. Cards were just pasteboard and ink. Green felt suddenly seemed bilious rather than filled with emerald promise.

The knock came again, along with a high querying voice. A female voice, calling him by name. Ethan blinked in surprise. "Is it you, my love?" Well then, he had best answer after all. He could think of no women to whom he owed anything, unless it was some old lover seeking either renewal or vengeance. Either way, it was a change from the bare walls and empty decanter.

He stood, wavered a moment, then shuffled to the front hall. It was a fine hall, guarded by an even finer door. He wondered idly if it was worth anything. The latch was beyond him for a moment, but he mastered it at last. Bloody good brandy. Too bad it was gone.

Ethan opened the door and flinched from the bright light of day. "Morning already?"

Something shoved him backward as it pushed by him. "It is afternoon, Mr. Damont. Well past tea. You missed the rain entirely."

"Oh… tea." Abruptly, fierce longing seized Ethan. Tea and cakes, fresh from baking. "I like the ones with the little seeds."

"Oh, for pity's sake. You're drunk."

"Not willingly," Ethan protested, still blinking to clear the jangling glare from his vision. "Couldn't let the bastards get the brandy, you know."

"No, I don't know and I don't care." The door closed, shutting out the day with a crisp bang. Ethan sighed in gratitude. After a moment the after-glare receded and he found himself confronted with a very angry person in mismatched clothing. Angry or scared. Possibly both.

A woman—he was nearly positive she was female—in need of help, if he was not mistaken. He'd been a gentleman once, of sorts. Ethan reached deep to find if any shred of chivalry remained. Oh, there it was.

"Please, come in," he said gallantly.

"I am in." She folded her arms and glared at him.

She was pretty, if you liked them dark and pale. And thin. And rather scary.

Ethan found himself standing straighter, pulling himself together as if in answer to some unspoken challenge. He swallowed and hoped his breath wasn't too brandied.

"How may I be of service, dear lady?"

She tugged her cap free of her hair, letting it fall halfway down her back. "I'm not a lady."

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There was something about the cliché of being manacled in a dungeon beneath a castle that really annoyed Collis. Of course, it wasn't really a dungeon. More of a storage cellar, with a number of crates piled high along one wall, stacked so high they required brackets and chains to keep them from tumbling down.

Nor was it truly a castle, merely an overdecorated arms factory not far from the East India docks.

But the manacles were real enough, cast of cold iron and uncomfortably tight on his right wrist and his left as well, theoretically. He was hanging at arm's length from one of the brackets jutting from this wall. The Prince hung from another such bracket about six feet away, looking rather like a bloodied side of beef in a tattered and stained nightshirt. The Prince wasn't moving.

Collis peered at him again, trying desperately to note any sign of life through his own battered and swollen eyes. If he looked anything like George did, two black eyes were the least of his worries. George had been beaten beyond recognition. His face was bruised and bloodied, and Collis had been watching blood drip slowly from George's hair for the last hour. Head wounds could kill, or render the victim mentally damaged forever. Collis was very worried.

And Rose was not here. He knew he ought to be more worried about his monarch than his partner, but it was all he could do to contain the breathtaking fear he felt inside at thoughts of Rose's fate. The men who had taken them had been foul brutes, low hired scum who might have taken Rose for themselves as a sort of fringe benefit.

Ironic that he hoped mightily that she was being held prisoner by Louis Wadsworth instead, as he was. The fact that she was being held elsewhere might even mean that she was being treated better than they, perhaps even like a guest—

It was a fruitless fantasy, but he couldn't bear to think otherwise or he wouldn't be able to think at all.

While he waited for George to wake—perhaps yet another fantasy—he tested his manacles with all his strength, stopping only when he saw the blood begin to drip down his left arm from his own abraded wrist It was difficult to care about injuring that piece of dead wood, but slicing a vein and bleeding to death would do none of them any good.

A chain clanked, not one of his. Turning his head, he saw George rolling his head and blinking his eyes. "Sir!" he didn't dare address him properly, for it was still possible that their captor knew not who he held. "Sir, are you well?"

George cleared his throat and tested his swollen, broken lips with the tip of his tongue. "That ith a thtupid quethtion. Of courthe I'm not well." He shook his head and blinked rapidly. "I lotht a bloody tooth!"

Overcome with relief, Collis laughed aloud. George looked at him sourly. "Not amuthing. At my age, every tooth counth!"

"No, sir, it isn't amusing. But it is very good to hear that they didn't knock your brains from your skull, sir."

"Humph. Bloody well feelth like it." His speech was becoming clearer by the moment. And more recognizable.

"Sir, it might be wise if you try not to sound like yourself. I don't think Wadsworth—" He had to be careful. There was no way to know if they were being overheard.

"You don't think he knowth that you hired me to help you steal his planth?"

Collis snorted. "Exactly." Good old George, sharp as ever. Thank every god ever named. He'd even altered his voice, turning his refined fruity tones into something nasal and high.

"Where's our—ah—other friend?"

Collis ground his jaw. "I don't know."

"Are you sure that friend was taken?"

Collis closed his eyes, the image of an overwhelmed Rose going down fighting burned onto his inner vision forever. "Yes."

"Ah." The Prince fell silent. There was no need to say more. They both knew the fate that could befall a woman in unfriendly hands.

It seemed Collis had not been too far off to think them overheard, for shortly they heard the sound of a key in the lock of the great double doors. Someone had been waiting for them to awake, it seemed.

The doors slid sideways along rails to stand alongside the walls. Collis flinched against the sudden brightness, the light shooting through his pounding head like a lance. He blinked rapidly, trying to clear his vision as if seeing what was coming would help him fend it off.

It might have been late afternoon, for the sunlight slanting along the hallway outside had that peculiar golden tint that indicated sunset neared. Through the shimmering bars of floating dust motes stepped a figure all in black—Louis Wadsworth, clad like a highwayman in head-to-toe ebony silk.

"Oh, dear. Did I look that ridiculous?" George whispered.

Very nearly
, Collis wanted to say, but the man was a prince, after all. "Shh, sir."

Louis strutted toward them, his hand at his hip as if he fancied himself toting a sword as well. Collis would have rolled his eyes if they hadn't been nearly swollen shut. Then he remembered his missing Rose and became serious indeed.

The factory was well guarded, but Rose thought not impenetrable. She could just see over the wall from her stance atop Damont's shoulders. The main building was somewhat unnecessarily decorated in a rather medieval fashion, giving the entire establishment a castlelike appearance. This was reinforced by the many smaller brick structures that scattered at its feet like a small, grim village. The wall surrounded it all, enclosing a cobbled yard in the center.

Most important, there was a drain in the courtyard; she could see it from here. She jumped down to tell Ethan her plan.

"The sewer? Are you sure?"

"Yes. The storm drains run beneath the streets, mostly. If we follow the road into the factory back the way we came, we'll find another grate. We can walk right beneath the wall!"

He looked doubtful. "Then how will we get into the factory proper? The place is packed with workers. They won't leave until it is too dark inside to see."

"They won't simply use candles or lanterns?"

Ethan looked appalled. "Do you have any idea how expensive that would be, to light an entire factory?"

"Oh, true." She frowned at him. "You have surprising facets, Mr. Damont."

The corner of his mouth twisted. "Did you think I was born a gambler?"

"Sorry." She chewed her lip. "I hate to wait one moment longer, but I think we must. The sun will set soon. It will be much easier to get past the night watch."

"So you say." Ethan was looking stubborn. "Why don't we simply call the magistrate and tell him Collis is being held against his will?"

Rose waved her hand at the fortress behind them. "Do you know who owns this place? Louis Wadsworth, that's who!"

Ethan grimaced. "Wadsworth, eh? Nasty sort. Gets very mean when he loses."

"No need to tell me that. And he is the magistrate for this district, so it would do us no good to seek help from the law."

Ethan pushed himself off the wall with a sigh. "So we find the grate."

It didn't take long. Finding the grate was simply a matter of circling the factory in an ever larger spiral. Of course, the factory grounds were vast. Rose cast a look back at a lagging Damont. "You truly ought to get out more."

His answer was a gusting laugh and a wave onward. At last—though less than a quarter of an hour later—she spotted a likely grate in a small side street. There was still enough sunlight for Rose to see that the narrow stream in the bottom of the tunnel was flowing away from the factory. "This is the one." She looked around them.

The cobbled side street was deserted for the moment, although it might be filled soon with homeward-bound factory workers. "Quickly, help me pry it up."

The grate came up more easily than the older ones in the inner city had. She only hoped the tunnel below was correspondingly modern. "Down we go then," she said to Ethan.

He bowed. "Ladies first."

It was a short jaunt back up the tunnel to below the factory. This tunnel was purely storm drainage, fortunately, with very little filth in view. Rose halted when she saw daylight seeping through from above. "How do you know we're under the right grate?" Ethan wanted to know.

"Listen," she said. "We could hear the stamping mill from where we stood at the wall, remember? It's even louder down here." The rhythm of the heavy stamper seemed about to come down directly upon them, in fact.

"All right then. Now what?"

Rose sighed, frustrated. "We wait. The workers will be leaving soon. After that, there will hopefully only be a few watchmen left."

"So how did Collis anger this Wadsworth fellow anyway?"

Rose seated herself on a vaguely dry spot. "I'm afraid I can't discuss it."

Damont plopped down beside her. "You can't discuss much, can you?" Ethan sighed heavily. "Well, I'm hungry and I'm bored, so I'll talk, shall I?"

"I'm hungry as well, but I am not bored." She shot him a black look. "Yet."

"Well, then I'll talk about our mutual friend. Luckiest sod I ever knew. He shouldn't have been much higher than me, by his birth. His mother had connections, but his father was naught but a lieutenant colonel in the army, albeit a highly decorated one."

Damont leaned back against the grimy wall of the culvert and rubbed his head. "Yet there he was, heir to Etheridge and a title. Just the sort of
haute ton
snot my father sent me to school with—so I could make valuable connections, you see—and handsome and talented to boot." He chuckled reminiscently. "He was a right tool, he was. And somehow, it all seemed a bit unfair."

He didn't look at her, but she could feel his attention on her nonetheless. "Did you ever wonder how Collis could be in line for Etheridge from his maternal uncle?" he asked.

Rose shook her head. She'd thought it odd but had dismissed it as some part of the aristocratic world she was unfamiliar with. People had been conspicuously silent on the topic, now that she thought about it.

Now here was Ethan Damont, being deceptively casual, virtually panting to tell her. This ought to be interesting indeed.

Rational information-seeking aside, she was mad for word of Collis's safety. Word of his past would have to do.

"He told me once, when we were boys. Since his father was not aristocracy by any means, that meant his mother married vastly beneath herself. I've heard since that she was intent on having him for her husband. A real love match. Uncommon, that."

Not in her world. They seemed to shine all around her, like mirrors to show her what she would never have. Agatha and Simon, Dalton and Clara, James and Phillipa. Her lips quirked. What
was
Kurt putting in the pudding? "So you're saying Collis should have been the last one to inherit, correct?"