Her Only Desire (33 page)

He grasped her shoulders and pushed her back to arm's length. “You're saying yes? You'll be my wife, truly? You've come to your senses at last?”

“Yes!” She nodded zealously. “Yes, I do want to marry you! I love you, Ian. I love you, and if you still want me, then nothing can keep us apart.”

He stared at her, imprinting on his memory exactly the way she looked right now, in this moment, so that he would never forget the love on her face, his future in her eyes.

“If?” he whispered. Then he drew her slim body into his arms and held her hard.

He could feel her trembling, and he kissed her cheek in choked silence. “You are so dear to me,” he said brusquely, closing his eyes.

A long time ago, he had given up hope that real love could ever come into his life.

Now he had this beautiful, magical woman in his arms. Somehow she had become as precious to him as his own flesh and blood.

He kissed her head, trying to becalm the towering seas of emotion in his breast. The pitch and swell of it was still so unfamiliar. So much happiness made him feel odd.

She pulled back a small space and smiled at him, caressing his cheek.

She started to speak, but then a distracted look flicked over her face.

She furrowed her brow and turned toward the window. “Do you hear that, Ian? That dog?”

As soon as she said it, he registered in vague annoyance the sound of a dog's vicious barking. It sounded as though it was coming from just outside Knight House.

He glanced toward the window, then looked at her again. “Ah, never mind that,” he began with a smile, but then he stopped, listening more intently. He went very still. “That sounds like Hyperion.”

God knew, Hawk had had that dog forever. It had been a pup with them when they were boys.

He suddenly frowned. “That dog hasn't barked since King George was last in possession of his wits,” he murmured.

Something's wrong.

“Let me check on that.”

She released him without argument as he rose and crossed to the bank of windows. He scanned the courtyard below.

Sure enough, the big old dog, normally so placid, was racing back and forth along the tall, black wrought-iron fence that girded the grounds of Knight House. Good Lord, the Newfoundland was barking through the bars and snarling like a rabid wolf, trying to get at something.

Or someone.

Ian's eyes narrowed.
Intruder?

At once, his stare swung to the leafy park, trying to spot the object of the dog's frenzy.

His gaze homed in on a dark-clad man, and then he froze.

Horror spiked through him.

Disbelief.

Matthew.

“Ian, what's wrong?” Georgie cried as he whirled away from the window, ashen-faced, rushing for the door with his heart in his throat. He barely heard the question.

“Ian!”

“He's got my son.”

“
What?
Who?”

He was already out the door, not wasting one second to explain.

Barreling into the hallway, he flew down the curving stairs and through the marble entrance hall, bursting out the front door.

“My lord?” Mr. Walsh exclaimed, running out after him in alarm. “What is amiss?”

“Send for the constable!” he shouted as he pounded toward the wrought-iron gate, Armageddon in his eyes.

CHAPTER

         
FOURTEEN
         

W
hat in the world—? Someone had Matthew?

Throwing her Indian tunic on over her yoga clothes, Georgie stole the briefest of glances out the window bay but saw nothing strange except the frenzied dog. She was not sure what was going on, but she had never seen Ian react like that before.

Still barefoot, she rushed out of the music room mere seconds after him. When she arrived outside, she found the normally placid courtyard of Knight House in a state of frantic commotion. The servants had left their posts, Hyperion was still barking loud enough to wake the dead, and from inside the house she could hear Bel screaming for Robert to help them.

“It were a Gypsy, ma'am!” one of the maids nearby was shrieking. “A Gypsy's tried to steal the little master! Sally and Scott were playin' hide-and-seek with him in the park and now they've vanished!”

“What?”
Looking past the chaos to scan the park, Georgie suddenly spotted a wiry, dark-clad man in a low-brimmed hat as he came tearing out from behind a stand of trees that had obscured their view. Horror seized her as she saw that he had lifted Matthew off his feet and with one arm hooked roughly around the boy's waist, the other clamped over his mouth, the man was running with him, full speed, toward a waiting horse.

Matthew struggled, trying to kick his way free as his feet dangled well above the ground. Then Ian burst into view only a few steps behind them, and gaining. She was sure her heart had stopped as she watched him sprinting across the green in an explosive burst of speed.

He dove at them just a few yards away from the horse, tackling the man with the brute force of a runaway stagecoach. Marquess, boy, and would-be kidnapper all went crashing down to the soft green turf.

Ian grabbed Matthew, picked him up bodily by the back of his short coat, and tossed him out of the heap, shoving him toward Knight House.
“Run!”

The boy went flying clear of the fight and sprawled on all fours in the grass, but bravely stumbled to his feet and obeyed his father's order. Sheer panic stamped across his face, Matthew went racing toward safety as fast as his little legs could carry him, but then he halted in childish uncertainty, turning back to look for his father.

Seeing his sire engaged in a brutal fight, the five-year-old began crying as he stood alone in the park.

Georgie was already on her way. Jagged pebbles under her bare feet turned to soft grass as she raced toward him, her sights fixed on nothing else.

She didn't even hear the shouts, or look for Ian, or notice her cousin Robert tearing past her with a rifle, let alone his order to her to get back inside. Her instincts heeded nothing but the crying child, and nothing deterred her until she reached his side and had the small boy in her arms. Not even stopping to ask him if he was all right, she picked him up and ran back to Knight House with a strength she did not know she possessed.

Ignoring her straining lungs, Georgie did not stop until they were inside the gates again. Mr. Walsh and the children's head nurse crowded around at once, the heavy-set woman taking the boy from her. Georgie's knees were wobbly, but when Mr. Walsh urged her to come back into the house, she refused.

Gripping the fence, she stared through the wrought-iron bars at Ian in savage pursuit of the would-be kidnapper once again. The man had gotten to his feet and was trying to reach his horse, but Ian clearly had no intention of letting the blackguard get away. He was taller, with longer strides, and more than that, he was enraged.

As she watched their renewed chase, riveted, something deep inside Georgie suddenly prayed he would not catch the man. Ian had rushed out with no weapon, and what if that low criminal had a gun?

Robert, fortunately, had managed to grab a weapon before leaving the house and now rushed to Ian's aid. With an innate anticipation of each other's movements ingrained in them from the rugby fields of their boyhood, Robert took up a position to head the man off. Bringing the rifle up smoothly to his shoulder, the duke took aim at the criminal's chest, but with Ian hot on the man's heels, just a few steps behind, he held his fire.

Caught between the two, the criminal veered to the left trying to escape the pincers they had created for him, but this shift gave Ian the two-second gain he needed.

Once more, his relentless pursuit ended with them both slamming down onto the earth. But when the assailant whipped out a knife and slashed at Ian with it, Georgie's mind was taken right back to the horrific battles she had gone through with her brothers in fleeing Janpur.

The hair on the back of her neck stood on end. Dear God, Ian was a diplomat. A peacemaker. Unlike Derek and Gabriel, he had not spent the past few years in constant combat. Sheer dread paralyzed her.
Oh, please, don't take him away from me.
Dizzy with horror, she clutched the bars of the fence harder, neither able to watch nor to turn away.

Robert ran over and planted himself nearby as Ian arced his body clear of another wild swing of the villain's dagger.

“Drop the knife, you bastard, or I'll shoot you where you stand!” the duke roared, taking aim again.

But Ian grabbed the man's wrist on his next swift lunge and pivoted smoothly, jerking him off balance. He banged the man's forearm over his knee with a shattering blow that made him release the dagger with a bellow of pain. He elbowed the man in the face, and a closer struggle ensued.

Though Robert stood at the ready, he dared not pull the trigger for fear of hitting his friend.

With both opponents now reduced to bare fists, their struggle devolved into the most brutal fight that she had ever seen.

Though Georgie had noticed the man's jet-black hair and swarthy countenance, she did not realize just what they were dealing with until she heard the would-be kidnapper let out a curse—in Marathi.

Her jaw dropped as it sank in now that Queen Sujana's hatred had followed them all the way across the sea. With awful memories of the battles that had left poor Major MacDonald dead and her brother wounded, Georgie grasped the fact that the man whom Ian was fighting was no Gypsy child-stealer, as the maid had naively claimed, but one of the maharani's trained assassins!

Just then, Mr. Walsh appeared by her side and tried to pry her away from the fence before she saw something far more terrible. “Miss, you must go back inside!”

“Leave me alone!” she cried, wrenching free of him just in time to see the Indian attacker curve his hand into a hooked claw and gouge at Ian's neck as if to tear his throat out.

But a change had come over her gentlemanly diplomat.

Savagery in him had come unleashed. His knees were muddy from the turf, his shirt was torn, his face streaked with a smear of blood, his hair wild. The angry flush in his cheeks made his green eyes burn with an unholy light.

He had jested in the past about the brutal Norman warlords in his ancestry, but now he proved their spirit in his blood as his vicious fight against the maharani's agent climbed toward a crescendo.

Kneeling on top of his kicking, thrashing quarry, pinning him down with his greater weight, Ian planted his knee across the assassin's neck as though to hold him immobile until the constables arrived. But then the Indian man wrapped his powerful hands around Ian's throat in a crushing stranglehold, striving to choke the life out of him. He tried to pry the hands away, but as the seconds ticked by, nothing could dislodge their ruthless grip.

He drew his elbow back and smashed his fist into the man's face half a dozen times in lightning-fast succession, but the massive blows with which he battered his opponent barely stunned the hardened killer.

As Ian gasped for air, his face turning redder, he must have realized that his time was running out. Georgie watched the scene unfold with horror, knowing all too well from her own battles with asthma that a person couldn't live for more than a few moments without air.

Then she saw Ian reach for the castoff knife that he had forced his foe to drop earlier. It lay on the ground nearby.

Still holding the man down and fighting for breath, his searching hand scrabbled around for the weapon, and when he found it, his fingers flicking around its hilt, he wielded it without a shred of mercy. Arcing the knife upward, he plunged the blade into the base of the assassin's throat.

He left it there, wrenching back to gasp for breath as the assassin's hands suddenly fell away from his neck.

The man stopped flailing; his body went limp. He hadn't even had time to scream, and in seconds, he was dead.

Georgie looked on in open-mouthed disbelief, relieved to the core of her soul, but scarcely able to comprehend that the diplomat Marquess of Griffith had just outfought a trained assassin and had slain him in broad daylight, there in the middle of Green Park.

Still more about him that I didn't know…

Ian moved off his dead attacker, and the lifeless body rolled a bit to be rid of his weight. Still kneeling on the ground, he sat back on his haunches and rested his hands on his thighs; he dropped his head back, his chest heaving.

Hawkscliffe walked over to them slowly and nudged the prone man with the muzzle of his rifle.

The two lords looked at each other in grim silence, remaining like that, frozen in a fearsome tableau, as the stout-hearted constables came rushing onto the scene with Mr. Walsh hurriedly pointing the way.

Georgie stayed where she was, ashen-faced, both hands pressed against her mouth.

Throughout the park, frightened onlookers were staring from a safe distance.

Mr. Walsh finally got a leash on Hyperion and made one of the footmen drag the still-agitated dog back inside. In a sharp tone, the butler ordered the rest of the staff back to their posts as well.

Meanwhile, Bel hurried over to Georgie and curved a comforting arm around her waist. “Come, dear. Let's go inside.”

“He killed him,” Georgie told her.

“I know. It's all right. It's over now.”

“Captain! Two bodies here!” one of the constables called from over by the thicket around the stand of trees.

Georgie let out a sob at the grim discovery, but Bel tried more firmly to bring her inside. “Come, now. We've seen enough.”

“No, I have to talk to Ian. Just let me see if he's all right.” She did not wait for Bel's response, but slipped back out through the wrought-iron gate and ran into the park, toward the knot of men loitering near the body—Ian, Robert, and a few constables.

As she approached, her gaze swept over Ian's big, powerful form, scanning for wounds. He was a bit bloodied and bruised, and still trembling slightly in the aftermath of violence, but he appeared for the most part unscathed.

“I know his face from Janpur,” he was saying to the others as she joined them.

“What's left of it, y'mean,” one of the constables muttered as they covered up the body and then carried it off without ceremony to be loaded into their wagon.

“Don't worry, Griff, we're going to get to the bottom of this,” Robert said, the rifle now resting across his shoulder.

“You've got to get Georgiana and Matthew out of London,” he answered forcefully. “Queen Sujana tried to have me poisoned before I left Janpur. Her agents raided my room and stole this locket to help them locate Matthew. Don't you see what this means? We killed her son and now she's come after mine. Who knows how many more of her men she's sent after us? Her agents nearly killed Gabriel. I thought it had ended there, but I see now I was wrong. My son's in danger, Hawk. So's your cousin. I want them far away from here, under guard. You have to take them someplace safe.”

“Damien's estate ought to be remote enough. It's only a few hours from here. You know how to get there?”

“Yes.”

“I'll send Lucien to you, as well. He's always useful in these situations.”

Ian gave him a grim nod, then coughed and rubbed his throat, still recovering from his near-strangulation. “Frankly, I'd welcome the help.”