Formidable Lord Quentin (26 page)

Quent held Bell and let the harridan go. Even if Mrs. Boyle
was a thief and a blackmailer, he wasn’t in the habit of beating up women.

Bell tried to let Quent comfort her that evening. But as
much as she loved him for keeping her company and for distracting her with
kisses, the polite lady she’d been had vanished. She could no longer bury years
of fury and fear under the artificial dignity of her title, and she couldn’t
sit still now.

Uncle Jim had made his bed. She felt no sorrow over his
illness or the probable faithlessness of his choice in wife. And if he’d been
passing himself off as earl all this time, she had even less sympathy for his
poor choices.

But dumb animals shouldn’t have to suffer for what their
human owners did.

Her skin stretched tight and thin over all her roiling
emotion. She’d wanted to pummel Hiram until he told her where Dream was.
Instead, she’d let Quent bribe him—not anywhere near as satisfactory as kicking
sense into the clown. She needed to run, to ride, to shout and scream.

Only it was much too late in the evening to dash across town
to verify Hiram’s claim that Dream was here, in London, close enough for her to
touch. She’d pleaded with Quent to be taken to the docks, but even she knew it
was a ridiculously dangerous idea.

Instead, they’d sent word to Nick and Fitz to stop them before
they sailed in the morning as they’d planned. Sending messengers just wasn’t
enough. She was about to come apart attempting to contain her frustration.
After all these years of cool composure, she felt as if she would burst at the
seams.

Bell wrapped her arms around Quent’s broad, comforting
chest, and let him carry her off to bed. He made love to her with heartbreaking
tenderness, and she clung to him afterward, as she’d never clung to Edward—and Quent
let her. With her head resting on his broad shoulder, feeling him breathing
evenly, she could appreciate having a partner to lean on occasionally.

She still didn’t sleep well. She had nightmares most of the
night—horrifying visions of Dream breaking her legs trying to escape, of Kit
riding off and falling to his death, of her sisters screaming. Even Quent’s
comforting arm didn’t protect her from dreams. This was the reason she’d
learned to bury fear and anger—they were unproductive. And still, she couldn’t
let them go.

In the morning, she rose at the break of dawn to gather her
riding habit.

“What the devil?” Quent grumbled from beneath the covers
when she stumbled over a chair leg and woke him. Looking surly with his square
jaw darkened with beard stubble, he surged from the bed in all his naked glory.
Seeing that she was already half dressed, he growled and grabbed for his own
clothes.

Bell wasn’t so far gone as not to appreciate the ripple of
abdominal muscle when he reached for yesterday’s linen. Nor was she blind to
the fact that he had to struggle to don his breeches over his morning erection.
She just refused to act on lust when she had other matters on her mind.

“You’re not going to the docks, Bell,” he grumbled. “I’ll
hire a few grooms, bend Hiram’s arm, and we’ll spring the horses from their
pens before breakfast. There’s no need for you to dirty your shoes. The wharf
is no place for a lady.”

She continued pinning up her hair. Arguing was pointless. If
Dream was stabled in some run-down pen, in danger of being sold at market, Bell
would find her. She had been stunned that Dolly would have gone so far as to
bring the horses across the Irish Sea to hide them from her. She feared Hiram
was lying, but she would take no chances.

“We should wait for word from Nick that he’s on his way,”
Quent said, yanking on his waistcoat. “We can find the animals and take them to
Wyckerly for you. Taking a carriage to the docks is foolish, Bell. Let me ride
down with my men.”

Bell pinned her hat to her hair and yanked on her spencer.
Giving him a steely look, and picking up her gloves, she merely replied, “I’ll
send Butler to hire a carriage for me. You do as you like.”

She didn’t expect him to understand that she was holding
herself together with pins and string. She didn’t precisely understand it
herself. All these years, she’d told herself that a horse was a horse, a beast
of burden, and she ought to be missing her father more.

She was pretty certain now that she’d been lying to herself.
Her father hadn’t been there to comfort her when she cried. Dream had. Her
father hadn’t provided the prizes to feed her sisters. Dream had.

Taking her sisters away had ripped out her heart. Taking
Dream had seared the wound and made it certain that she’d never love anything
again. Abandoning Dream when the mare needed her . . . wasn’t worth thinking about.

She was not her father. She could not desert her family as
he had done. And family included her horses.

Behind her, Quent struggled with his boots. Bell drifted
down the staircase, looking for Butler.

He was oddly unable to be found. The buffet had been set as
usual, so he had to be about. Bell caught a maid carrying in a platter of
sausage and asked her to send Butler up. The maid curtsied and ran down to the
kitchen.

Butler still didn’t appear.

Fretting, Bell was about to pull on her gloves and find a
carriage on her own, when Quent clattered down, still unshaven but ready to
ride. He grabbed a cup and poured coffee, swallowing the steaming liquid in a
few gulps that made Bell wince.

“You win,” he said. “I’ve sent Butler for a carriage. We’ll
stuff Hiram in it with you, and we can let him go once we find the horses.”

Bell stared at him in shock. “
You
sent Butler for a carriage?”

“Naturally. I sent for him the instant you made your
preference clear. Are you going to eat any of this food or are we heading out
now?” He grabbed a piece of toast and folded it around a handful of bacon.

“Naturally?” she asked dangerously. “What do you mean,
naturally
? Butler is still my servant,
is he not?”

Quent raised the slash of his dark eyebrows and finished
chewing before replying. “He’ll soon be
our
servant, unless you want to bring my people over here. Sharing is what
marriage is really about, dear heart, not who spends funds on what.” He looked
up as Butler arrived in the doorway. “All set?”

The taciturn servant bowed respectfully. Quent grabbed her
arm and dragged Bell toward the door, unaware that he was within an inch of
being stabbed by the knife Bell snatched from the sideboard.

“You do not know who you are dealing with,
dear heart,
” she muttered.

“I’m very afraid that I do,” he retorted. “But that’s not
stopping me now. Let’s test our mettle by stealing stolen horses, shall we?”

***

Quent was almost reassured that Bell had grabbed a knife
as they left the breakfast room. It was a nice sharp meat knife and should
intimidate Hiram nicely if he developed any ideas of escaping once they let him
out of the stall.

Not that Hiram seemed in any hurry to run. Their prisoner
had been bribed with a healthy purse, given good food and ale, luxurious
blankets, and a roof that didn’t leak, even if he had been in a locked stable.
Quent had arranged for servants to deliver warm water and clean linen so the
man almost looked respectable when he climbed up on the driver’s seat. Quent
lashed Hiram’s fists behind his back and tied him to a rail, but it was an open
carriage. Bell could still hear him if he cursed.

Since he’d left his horse back in Essex, Quent had asked for
a loan from the Duke of Fortham’s stable. Lady Anne, the duke’s daughter, kept
a formidable array of animals and grooms and had gladly loaned him what he
needed. It had been all Quent could do to persuade Anne to stay home and not
come rescuing horses with them. The duke would remove his head if Quent had
taken his only child down to the docks.

Trailing a train of rough grooms, Quent rode beside Bell’s
carriage. He tried to ignore her furiously stiff posture as they progressed
past farm carts entering the city to sell their wares and servants hurrying to
market. At this hour, most of Mayfair’s fashionable residents were sleeping.
Quent hoped her ire would disperse once she had her horse in hand.

The fishermen and sailors on the dock were up and about as
the strange progression of grooms and carriage wended its way down the
cobblestones. Rude whistles and calls followed Bell, and Quent had to grit his
teeth. Bell seemed impervious.

She had
raced
horses—as
an innocent young girl, riding astride, surrounded by drunken gamblers. Quent
still had a hard time grasping that the Virgin Widow standing on a pedestal
well above the rest of London could be that reckless girl. But he’d seen
glimpses of the hellion lately. He had to adjust his mind to the notion that he
wasn’t wedding a lady who would sit properly in her parlor where he put her.

At this point, he was so far gone that he might even adjust
to the thought of Bell wearing men’s breeches. But he was a selfish, primitive
male. Letting other men see her magnificent limbs was a different matter
entirely.

As they drew closer to the warehouses and animal pens, Quent
leaned from his horse to consult with Hiram and confirm their destination.
Quent kept his hand on the pistol hidden beneath his coat while he scanned
their surroundings. He wanted anyone watching to know they were armed. He
simply didn’t want Bell to see it. Foolish of him, probably, since she was the
one carrying a knife and hiring armed footmen.

At a nod from Hiram confirming that they’d arrived at the
proper location, Quent directed his men to surround a paddock filled with
horses to be sold at market. The stench of dung was so thick, it was hard to
breathe. Quent cast an anxious glance to Bell’s ramrod straight figure on the
carriage seat before sidling his horse up to the side.

“This the place,” Hiram said. “They buy up all the sad
cattle in Ireland and haul them here, where the wealth is. Dream’s get should
fetch more than we got paid for ’em.”

“You mean the horses have already been sold?” Quent asked in
shock, not looking at Bell for fear he’d lose his temper.

“We couldn’t pay to transport them now, could we?” Hiram
asked indignantly. “And the doc was refusing to physic Jim unless we paid his
bill, so we needed the ready.”

“And you thought you’d sell Dream and grab your money before
I claimed what was rightfully
mine
,”
Bell added with dangerous sweetness.

Quent held up a cautioning hand to her.

Hiram just glared. “They’re there. Just go buy ’em back. You
got enough blunt to buy the lot.”

Quent dismounted hurriedly, catching Bell before she could
climb down on her own. “We’ll find them,” he reassured her, swinging her down
from the carriage. “And if we don’t, we’ll hang Hiram, how’s that?”

“Not good enough,” she muttered, stalking toward the nearest
building, leaving Hiram volubly protesting that he wasn’t a thief.

***

Quent hunted down the man in charge of the paddocks, but
as Bell had feared, the records were incomplete and on the verge of illiterate.
One did not deal in undocumented Thoroughbreds without blurring a lot of lines.
Stalking out of the grubby office, Bell returned to the paddocks.

Heart in her throat, she climbed up on the rail to better
see the animals milling in the filthy pens. The odor of horses and manure, the
nickering, and anxious side-stepping, brought back memories both good and bad.
She fought tears and heart-pounding hope as she scanned the collection.

Ancient nags ready for the glue factory mixed with
yearlings, underfed mares, and temperamental geldings. In a different pen were
the stallions. She wanted to adopt them all. Damn blasted selfish men, treating
intelligent animals like insects to be walked upon. She’d take any one of those
horses before she’d take a man.

Quent climbed up beside her. “What am I looking for?”

Perhaps she’d keep this man, though. His calm rationality
steadied her shameful temper. Bell enumerated Dream’s markings, from the white
arrow on her forehead to the darker brown patch on her left haunch. Quent
climbed down and spread the word with the grooms they’d brought with them.

The stable manager ambled out and Quent enlisted him in their
search. The man cast a glance to Hiram, simmering on the carriage seat, and
nodded. “Stolen, is she? The owner will still want his costs plus transporting.”

“He’ll get it,” Quent agreed without twitching. “And we’ll
give you coin for your time, if you help us search.”

Bell didn’t care how he spent her money in this case. She
climbed down from the fence and entered through the gate as if she were a
proper lady, although the wild Irish rebel threatened to emerge as the animals
pressed around her. She wanted to scream her fury and send the lot stampeding
into the street.

It was akin to hunting a needle in a haystack—worse, because
the horses shifted as they walked through them. Her damned long skirt was a
nuisance in the filth. She wanted her riding breeches.

She couldn’t wear breeches anymore.

If she was carrying Quent’s child, she wouldn’t be able to
ride either.

She nearly tripped and stumbled with the shock of that
thought, which did nothing to pacify her pounding heart.

A sharp note whistled from outside the pen, but Bell only
dimly registered it. She’d spotted a white arrow on a skinny bay to her right.
She smacked a black rump out of her way, nudged past a gelding that didn’t want
her to pass, and chanted over and over, “Little Dream, come.”

The mare finally lifted her bony head and looked. Bell
wanted to weep at the mare’s frailty. She elbowed the gelding until it
sidestepped, and then she was there . . . in front of her baby.

So many memories . . . so much pain. She
almost didn’t dare touch. But how could she not? It would be like refusing to
hug an infant.