To Catch a Bride (8 page)

Rafe watched, the language flowing over him like water through a dry bed of stones. He’d learned a little Arabic from a book on the voyage out here, but their speech was too rapid for him to pick up more than an occasional isolated word. But you could pick up a great deal about people from simple observation.

She scolded the boy the way mothers the world over scold errant children, yet she was far too young to be his mother. In any case he was obviously Arab and she, just as obviously, was not. So—

“You didn’t!” Rafe blinked as her voice cut into his thoughts. She stared at him, with an odd expression. “I don’t believe it.”

“Believe what?” he asked her.

“He claims you told him a bedtime story!”

Rafe looked vague. “What?” He wasn’t going to admit a thing.

“ ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.’ ”

“I don’t speak Arabic—how could I tell him anything, let alone a story?”

“Opennn sesameeee,” Ali chimed in with a grin. Wretched brat.

Rafe stood and briskly scooped her into his arms. “Now that you’ve satisfied yourself that the boy is unharmed, I have questions for you. You, boy,” he said severely. “Go to sleep.”

“Opennn sesameeee,” Ali responded happily.

Rafe kicked the door shut behind him. He carried her across the room. Again the spurt of anger flared deep within him. There was nothing to her, nothing. Nothing but skin and bones and defiant courage. And eyes full of knowledge . . .

Dammit, he was aroused again. He dumped her on the sofa. She held her bound hands up. “Aren’t you going to untie me?”

“No.”

“Don’t you trust me?” Her face was all shadows and angles.

“Not the least little bit.” His nose still ached. So did other parts. He turned away, ostensibly to light a lamp, but also to have a stern word with his unruly body.

He returned, the lamp lit, and found she’d wiggled herself into the far corner of the sofa and was sitting with her knees up to her chest and her bound wrists hooked over them. A small defensive knot.

He put the lamp where it would light her face and keep him in shadow. She glowered at him, her face streaked with dirt. She looked about fifteen.

According to her grandmother, she was nineteen, almost twenty. He tried to imagine her cleaned up and in a dress. Yes, nineteen would be about right. With the eyes of a woman much older.

“How old are you?”

She planted the small decided chin on her knees and said nothing. The silence lengthened. Rafe said nothing. Silence, he knew from his time in the army, could be both a tool and a weapon.

The lamplight glowed on the silken, sulky mouth, the most feminine part of her. No, not the most feminine. His palm remembered the softness he’d felt between her legs. He folded his arms, doing his best to blot out the memory.

He didn’t need this. It was entirely inappropriate. He’d been sent to find this girl, not lust after her.

“None of your business.” She watched him suspiciously, hostile, braced for trouble, trying very hard not to let him see how afraid she was.

Rafe frowned. Why was she still afraid? He’d told her several times he was here as her grandmother’s agent. He’d come to rescue her. He’d assured her several times he wasn’t going to hurt her. And she knew damned well he hadn’t hurt Ali even though he’d caught the boy trying to rob him.

But she seemed more nervous than ever. Even as he thought it, the answer came to him; she must have noticed the state he was in. Dammit.

“All appearances to the contrary, you are perfectly safe with me,” he said in a firm voice. “I don’t hurt women, either.” He moved to another chair farther away.

“Tell that to my bruises.”

“I’m sorry, but I had no idea you were a woman. If you will come sneaking into people’s houses dressed as a criminal bent on assassination . . .” He shrugged.

“So you’re not sorry at all, then, are you?”

He gave her a look. “I am a man of my word. Your grandmother wouldn’t have sent me if there was any danger of me hurting you.”

She snorted. “I don’t have a grandmother. Untie me.”

“I said I was sorry, not that I was stupid.”

She muttered something explosive sounding in Arabic.

“To be sure,” He settled back in the chair. “Now, if you’ve finished maligning my character and antecedents, I will tell you about your grandmother.”

“I told you, don’t have a grandmother.”

“Then I’ll tell you about Lady Cleeve, the Dowager Lady Cleeve, grandmother to Miss Alicia Cleeve, to whose portrait you bear an amazing resemblance.”

She glared at him over her knees.

He smiled. “That’s right, my prickly little captive audience, you have no choice.”

She gave a long-suffering sigh and closed her eyes.

“I met your gr—Lady Cleeve at a friend’s wedding.”

He told her about Lady Cleeve, how he’d met her for the first time at Harry’s wedding in December. “At first she was just some old lady sitting beside me at the table. Imagine my surprise when she turned out to be Allie Todd, my grandmother’s oldest friend.”

The green eyes remained closed but a faint frown wrinkled the smooth brow. She was following the story.

“Granny always called her by her maiden name, Alicia Todd,” Rafe explained and the frown disappeared. “I presume you’re named Alicia after her.”

Her eyes remained still shut but the quality of silence had changed.

He continued, “Granny used to read me bits from her letters. They weren’t like normal letters. They were exciting, full of stories about snakes under beds, and tigers eating goats and people—they hunted down the man-eaters riding on elephants.”

He could tell she was interested, despite herself. “Those letters made a small boy dream of traveling to India for adventure.” He glanced up and she instantly shut her eyes.

He continued, “When Sir John, her husband, died, Lady Cleeve came home to England. That was eight years ago. She found everything had changed, most of her old friends gone, died, mostly.”

He added coolly, “My own grandmother was among them.” His voice never wavered.

He’d never spoken of his grief before and he wasn’t going to start now. He’d been at school at the time, and nobody had thought to tell an unimportant small boy his grandmother had died. Not until weeks after the funeral, when he was sent to Axebridge in the school holidays instead of to Granny’s, as usual. And when he’d asked why, his father told him because his grandmother was dead, of course.

Quite as if Granny hadn’t been the only person in the world who cared about him . . .

But that was in the past. Rafe didn’t dwell in the past.

He took a sip of brandy, then continued. “Lady Cleeve planned to come to Egypt—she hadn’t seen your father for some years—but the war delayed her, and then, just as it became possible and her arrangements were finally in place, she got word of his death.”

He paused, gathering the words to explain the unexplainable. “She didn’t know about you, didn’t know you were alive. I don’t really understand why.”

She hugged her knees to her chest and said nothing, her face set and hostile as if she didn’t care about any of this. He couldn’t imagine what her life had been like the past six years, but he couldn’t blame her for being angry and untrusting.

“She’d had a letter some years before from your father, you see, in which he told her his wife and daughter were dead. It didn’t explain much—I suppose he was incoherent in his grief.” He shook his head. “Lady Cleeve thought he meant
you
were dead. She told me to tell you she grieved terribly for her little granddaughter namesake. Before that she always sent you letters and presents, remember? A golden-haired doll?”

She didn’t move a muscle, was determined not to acknowledge a word. Stubborn little creature. He admired her strength of purpose, even if he didn’t understand why she didn’t simply say, “Thank you very much, yes, take me to my grandmother, please.”

He would bend her to his will in the end. She would come back to England with him; she had no choice.

She was no longer simply an excuse to leave England or a favor for his grandmother’s oldest friend. He could not, would not leave this courageous little scrap, this woman dressed as a boy—hiding in dirt and rags and anger—to her fate.

Somehow, in that violent exchange on the floor, this wild little beauty had got under his skin, as no woman had.

This was now a personal challenge.

“Apparently your father had always been a poor correspondent and after your mother’s death, the letters were even more infrequent and bare of any personal references. And then he died.”

He waited, but still she said nothing. He continued, “For the past six years your grandmother thought she was alone in the world, no family, only some distant cousins and a few remaining friends.”

It didn’t compare to how alone her granddaughter had been. The way she sat bunched defensively in the corner of the sofa gave testimony to that.

“A few months ago Lady Cleeve received a visit from Alaric Stretton—perhaps you remember him—the famous traveler and artist? He called on your father several times.”

She didn’t flicker an eyelash.

“Lady Cleeve had first met him in India years ago. He visited your father a month or two before his death, and he gave Lady Cleeve a couple of keepsakes. These.”

He rose and opened the brown leather folder for her to see.

Ayisha stared at the pictures that had caused all this trouble. There was Papa, looking exactly as she remembered him, stern, a little aloof, serious. And there, on the other half of the folder, her own thirteen-year-old face looked back at her, a little anxious, a little dreamy.

She remembered Mr. Stretton well. Tall and lanky and blond, with kind blue eyes. He’d told her stories of his travels to keep her still while he sketched. Stories entranced her.

But she wasn’t that girl any longer. Stories could weave a trap . . .

The Englishman continued in that deep voice, quiet yet so compelling. She wished it wasn’t. She hadn’t meant to listen to any of this, but that voice . . .

“Lady Cleeve realized it was not you who’d died, but another daughter, perhaps a baby. And so she asked me to come out here to search for you. And, here you are, found at last, like a long-lost heroine in a storybook.”

Ayisha stared at the picture of her father and her much younger self. Her stomach churned, and her jaw ached from where he’d punched her. She shivered, feeling suddenly cold.

He noticed and fetched a blanket, wrapping it carefully around her shoulders, tucking it in to make sure she was warm.

She hardened herself against him.

He wasn’t the sort of man who’d hurt a woman deliberately, but she wouldn’t make the mistake of trusting him.

He was dangerous in other ways.

“Your grandmother is lonely, Alicia. It is the dearest wish of her heart to find you and bring you home to Cleeveden.”

She wouldn’t look at him.

He leaned forward and his voice was like rich dark coffee as he said, “Come with me and you will never go hungry again. Your grandmother will ensure you will never want for anything—ever again. And when she dies, you will inherit her house and her fortune.”

She didn’t move a muscle. He must not know she cared.

He went on, “She is an old woman who needs you. All she wants is to bring you home and love you.”

Ayisha was silent for a long time.
To bring you home and love you . . . you will never want for anything again.

Oh, he was a sorcerer indeed, with that deep, persuasive voice of his. Had he read her mind, that he’d given voice to the dearest wish of her own heart: to have a home of her own, to be loved. To be part of a family.

“It is a terrible thing to have no family,” she whispered finally. “To belong to no one.” She remembered those first achingly miserable months of aloneness, before her cat had befriended her.

“I know.” The Englishman knelt and began to untie her bound feet. “I’m glad you’ve decided to be sensible. If we leave for England in the next two days, we should be in England by Easter. It’s early this year—in March.”

Ayisha bit her lip and stared at the big hands deftly unknotting the fabric that tied her. They were not a gentleman’s hands, not a scholar’s like Papa’s.

Oh, she wanted to, wanted to accept his offer, to go to this grandmother who offered her love and a home, a home in England, that green and pleasant land where Papa had always said he would take her . . . In time for an English Easter. An English spring.

It was a fairy tale he offered her, but she was not the fairy-tale princess of the story.

She looked at his hands: warrior’s hands, or a horseman’s, nicked and scarred and tanned and strong. Those same hands had punched her on the jaw and bound her hand and foot, she reminded herself. They could probably choke the life out of her without straining. If they knew what she had kept secret all these years, what would they do to her?

She closed her eyes tightly against the lure of those blue, blue eyes. They were frightening, those eyes, the way they never shifted from her, seeming to look straight into her soul, inviting her to trust his words, trust him, give herself over to his care . . .

It was like looking into a deep pool and knowing it would pull you down and drown you, but wanting to jump in anyway.

And the worst thing was, she did want to. She wanted to believe him, to believe that somewhere there was a loving grandmother who wanted her, loved her, offering her a home, a place in the world, safety . . .

But she’d had a home, love, and safety once, and they’d melted away like a puddle in the sun. She and Mama had thought Papa was a god, all protective, all powerful—and yet he’d left them with nothing. Less than nothing. Worse off than before, because they knew how good life could be . . .