Irresistible (40 page)

Then, seven years ago, they'd recruited him for the intelligence service. He'd been less than willing, at first, because he'd enjoyed what he was doing, and as a young and idealistic officer he'd felt a great weight of responsibility for his men, but they— Hildebrand most particularly— had talked him around with the argument that his country needed him. They'd had a specific assignment for him at the time: They'd wanted to throw him into a cell with a man they were holding on other charges but suspected of being a French agent. Hugh's job was to pose as a French sympathizer himself, make friends with the man, and get him to confide in him. As an inducement for the other man to trust him, they'd claimed that Hugh had passed military secrets to the enemy, and charged him with treason.

The ploy had worked. The man, thinking he had found a kindred spirit in Hugh, had talked freely. His job done, Hugh had been removed from the cell, only to discover to his dismay that among some of his fellow soldiers a charge of treason, even when it was dismissed, never really went away. Too proud to defend himself with the truth, he'd defended himself with his pistol and his sword and his fists instead. Still, when Hildebrand had come to him with another offer, Hugh had been all too ready to accept. This time he had stayed in the intelligence service, and had eventually come to realize that it was where he belonged.

But drinking while working as a spy was even more foolhardy than drinking when getting ready to ride into battle. So how, then, had he come by this head?

Curse it, where was James? What he needed, and right now too, was James's special concoction….

His hands were tied. Hugh registered that as he tried to roll onto his back from his side. At almost the exact instant, he realized that he was lying on a carpet rather than a bed— and someone was standing over him, looking down at him, a pistol held rather loosely in his hand.

"Awake, are you?" The face swam in and out of focus, but Hugh didn't need to get a better look at it to know who the speaker was: That blond hair turned into a shining nimbus by the candle that flickered on the night table near the bed was all the identification required.

"David. What the devil…?"

"Hullo, Hugh."

His ankles were tied too, and his knees. In fact, Hugh discovered as he tried to move, he was trussed like a Christmas goose. His head throbbed, his vision came in and out of focus, and his stomach churned, but Hugh had been in enough tight spots in his life that he had learned how to disregard little things like physical discomfort when necessary to focus on big things— like the threat of imminent death.

It was the horse. The horse. The thrice-damned horse. Last night he'd been thrown by his horse. It was a warning, as he should have known by now. How could he have let down his guard?

There was another man standing with his back to the door, Hugh saw, a big burly fellow in an oversized frieze coat and well-worn breeches who was obviously some kind of hired thug. A slouch hat was pulled low over his eyes, and, like David, he was armed with a pistol.

This was a tight spot, no question about it. As he recognized that he was in mortal danger, Hugh's thought processes simultaneously sharpened and cooled. He was bound hand and foot, lying on a musty-smelling carpet in a small bedroom that seemed at least vaguely familiar, and David was standing over him with a pistol. Suddenly everything came back to him in a flash: the mad ride back to London; Vauxhall Gardens; the blow to the head; Claire.

"Where's Claire?" If he felt a flash of stark fear— and he did— his voice revealed none of it. Knowing David as he did, though, he felt his heart begin to race. David was capable of inflicting pain for pain's sake, and Claire was vulnerable.

"You mean my wife? Right behind you." David made a negligent gesture with his head. Hugh, rolling over clumsily, found her with his eyes. She was crouched in a corner formed by the night table and the wall not far from where he lay, her once elegant coiffure now sadly disordered so that stray locks of black hair trailed over her shoulders and down her back, her hands obviously bound behind her though he couldn't see the rope. Her knees beneath the soft yellow muslin of her skirt were folded up so tightly against her body that they practically touched her chin, her beautiful thick-lashed golden eyes were red rimmed from the tears she had shed in the garden and huge with fear as they met his— and there was a fresh bruise purpling on her temple. Her lower lip was swollen and split, and a tiny rivulet of blood trickled from one corner of her mouth.

That kind of injury was the result of a backhand to the face. He'd seen it before; it was, in fact, fairly common among the camp followers who traveled with the army. The females among them came in for rough treatment more often than most of the officers cared to think about.

"You hit her." Hugh's whole body stiffened. His eyes promised murder as they slashed to David's face. Sheer blind rage coursed through his veins.
I'm going to kill you for that
, he promised David silently. But he managed to choke back the threat. If ever there was a time to be careful, this was it. "By God, you bastard, you hit her. What kind of man hits a woman?"

"As ever, cousin, you're a gallant champion for the world's whores." David strolled over to him again, careful this time not to get too close. "I'm sure they appreciate it, but it makes you look rather a fool. I suppose it's because your mother was one. It's a pity my uncle the duke didn't find out what she was before he married her. We all would have been spared much."

He glanced at Claire. "Did he tell you about his mother? She was pregnant with him when she married my uncle. She was of good family, too, which makes it all the more surprising. She took a lover and got pregnant, and when her lover died she married my uncle and tried to pass the babe off as his, claiming he was a seven months' child. She would have succeeded, too, if Hugh here hadn't looked so much like his real father. The Lynes are all fair, you see. He's the only blackbird in the bunch. My uncle suspected the truth because Hugh's real father was his good friend, and he wore his wife down until at last she confessed. Then he spent the next few years beating her senseless, until at last she did the decent thing and died."

David glanced back at him again. His eyes were full of malice. "You were what, thirteen at the time, Hugh? What a tragedy." He returned his attention to Claire. "My uncle would have disowned the bastard as well, but he couldn't face labeling himself a fool and a cuckold so publicly. So what we have here is a usurper. Hugh here has no more right to call himself Duke of Richmond than you do. I should be the duke. He doesn't have a drop of Lynes blood in his veins."

It had taken him a long time to come to terms with his family history, Hugh thought, but he finally had. To hear David relate it so mockingly would once have been more than he could bear, as David well knew. But Hugh was a man now, not the wild boy David had known, and while any mention of his mother, dead now these fifteen years, brought pain with it, talk of the circumstances of her life— and death— no longer filled him with blind rage. As for the duke— he no longer called him Father even in his thoughts— he'd died when Hugh was twenty-five. His last words to his heir had been to reiterate his belief that Hugh was not his son, and express his wish that Hugh meet with an untimely end before he could have a son of his own and thus return the title to the one who should rightfully hold it.

David, in fact.

Though Hugh had not admitted it even to himself for a long time, after the old duke had died he had done his best to make his ersatz father's dying wish come true. From guilt, he supposed. Only in the last couple of years had he truly come to believe, deep inside, that he deserved to be alive.

"Hugh," Claire said, her voice a raspy whisper that both worried him and brought him back to the present immediately. She sounded as if her throat had been hurt— what had the bastard done to her while he, Hugh, had been knocked out? As myriad possibilities presented themselves, he felt his muscles tighten and bunch, and willed them to relax. Fury was a luxury he couldn't afford at the moment. "David means to burn this house with us in it."

David smiled at Hugh.

"Oh, I'm going to shoot you both in the head first, of course. I don't believe in causing unnecessary suffering." There was a mocking note to David's voice. Then his gaze swung to Claire, and without warning he pointed the pistol at her smooth white forehead. Hugh felt his heart leap and his blood run cold. "You first. Stand up."

Hugh's muscles tensed, and he prepared to do what he could. If he was lucky, that would be to hook David's legs with his and knock him to the floor. It wouldn't save their lives— the thug would probably shoot him within seconds, and if he didn't, David, once he had recovered, surely would— but it was better than watching the woman he loved be shot before his eyes. With truly commendable self-control, Hugh held off, waiting for just the right moment, his eyes fixed on David's trigger finger so intensely that he broke into a cold sweat, hoping that he would have some warning, enough warning, if David actually decided to pull the trigger. Even as he focused on David's hand curling around the pistol, out of the corner of his eye he was aware of Claire, brave little thing that she was when cornered, as he knew from his own experience of cornering her, slowly standing up, giving David back icy stare for icy stare. Given David's particular nature— he was the type who, as a child, had enjoyed pulling the wings off flies— that was definitely the wrong thing to do, though Hugh could not help but mentally salute her courage in doing it. He'd found her boldness charming. David would want to crush her until she whimpered at his feet.

"David." He said the name sharply, as a distraction. It worked, postponing the inevitable a little longer. His cousin looked at him, and the pistol lowered. Hugh let his breath out in a quiet, careful sigh. He felt like a condemned man who had just been given a reprieve. "Tell me something: Why are you doing this?"

Seeming to lose interest in Claire for the nonce, David crossed the room to look down at him. He was dressed in a bottle-green coat and tan breeches, with his linen immaculate and not a hair out of place. Except for the pistol in his hand, he seemed completely as he usually did. There wasn't even a mad glitter in his eyes to explain what was going on in his mind. He looked perfectly sane, perfectly normal.

Perhaps he was. Hugh realized that this thought was scarier than the alternative.

"Oh, how about— you were kissing my wife in the garden."

Obviously David, or one of his thugs, had been watching them. Hugh felt another stab of stark fear penetrate his careful calm, then realized that it was for Claire. He'd faced death himself many times, and never turned a hair. But he was terrified for Claire.

"By the way, coz, I salute you for your address: You've been back in England for one month, and in that time you've managed to seduce my wife."

Hugh said nothing. He didn't think that telling David the truth of how he and Claire had met would accomplish anything at the moment except to further enrage David. He blamed himself for this entire debacle. He should have been more careful. With him there, in a public place, he'd thought her safe. Who'd have thought that attackers might be waiting for her in Vauxhall Gardens?

But this was not the time for self-recriminations. He had to focus if he had any chance at all of getting her out of there alive.

"This isn't about that." Hugh said it with absolute certainty. His instinct was to stall for time, and he was a great believer in following his instincts. They had saved him more than once. Sooner or later, James would miss him— but of course, even then, even if it was sooner rather than later, James would have no way of knowing where he was. "You don't care if she sleeps with me or fifty other men. You were trying to kill her long before tonight— you arranged the attack on her coach."

For a moment David simply stared at him. Then he gave a snort of laughter.

"So well informed as you are," he marveled. "I'm impressed, I must admit." He glanced at Claire, who was still standing, leaning back against the night table now as if her legs had grown too weak from fear or trauma to support her, and his expression changed, turning openly cruel. "She's quite a pretty thing, isn't she? And she came with a nice dowry, too. But the money's long since spent and the bloom is off the rose and you've informed me that you won't bankroll me anymore, so I've had to make alternate arrangements. The original plan was simply to arrange an accident for her that would permit me to take a new wife with a new dowry— actually, the one I had in mind was a real heiress, the Chalmondley chit, you might have seen her around town, buck-toothed as a rabbit but father's rich as Golden Ball— but Donen here and his band of incompetents let my wife escape. Imagine my surprise when she turned up unharmed. Nothing for it but to let the plan go fallow for a few months. A second accident right on the heels of the first would look too suspicious."

Donen? The leader of the band who had attacked Claire's carriage with the intent of killing her? Hugh's gaze slashed to him again. Silently he vowed vengeance. Marley had already felt his wrath. By now he should be in the custody of the Bow Street Runners— and this fellow would be lucky if he suffered a fate as benevolent as that.

All at once Hugh became aware of a peculiar smell. A smell that didn't belong in this long-closed room. An acrid smell. Hugh glanced in Claire's direction. She was staring straight ahead with the utmost concentration— and then he saw, with a jumbled burst of shock at her audacity, pride at her courage and ingenuity, and terror lest she be found out, that she was holding her bound hands over the candle flame, burning the rope in two.

Such was the angle at which he lay that he could see what she was doing quite clearly. He didn't think David could, or the thug at the door.

But both of them could smell.

David was saying something to Donen. Heart pounding like a drum, fear for Claire's safety so tangible that it left a metallic taste in his mouth, Hugh didn't catch quite what it was. Looking up at David as he finished speaking, Hugh hurried into speech.