Sweetest Little Sin (27 page)

“LADY Louisa?” Faulkner shook his head. “What makes you think she came here?”

Jardine ground his teeth in frustration. He’d lost her. How could he have lost her like that?

He’d followed Radleigh to a village in the next county, watched him knock on the door of a private house and be admitted. A private house that stood next to the church. A rectory? What could Radleigh want with a vicar?

He swore under his breath as Radleigh emerged with an older man. After exchanging a few heated words, they left together in Radleigh’s curricle.

Jardine followed them, cursing, all the way back to Radleigh’s house. The notion that leaped to his mind was scarcely tenable, yet what other explanation could there be? Did Radleigh intend to force Louisa to marry him? Was this vicar complicit in the plan?

When Jardine checked Louisa’s room, she wasn’t there, although she’d pulled the curtains around her bed so that no one could tell she was missing just by looking through the peephole.

Dammit! Where could she be?

He shouldn’t have left her alone, even for a second, out there in the dark. Someone must have been watching, but who?

Panic rising, he’d searched the house but not found a trace of her. Finally, he asked at the stables and heard the strange tale of Louisa going off in a cart with Radleigh’s secretary and an unknown woman. They’d headed in the direction of the village.

The only establishment open at this hour was the Bird in Hand. Before he’d had a chance to ask for Louisa, he’d caught sight of Faulkner in the taproom and collared him.

Now, he glanced at the head of operations, who remained expressionless, as always. He stabbed a finger at him. “I hold you responsible for this. Lady Louisa’s missing, and Radleigh came in last night covered in blood.”

“You would be unwise to leap to conclusions on that score,” said Faulkner. “She’s a resourceful woman. Perhaps she’s doing a little digging of her own. Perhaps you don’t give her sufficient credit for taking care of herself.”

“And perhaps you would like me to slowly disembowel you with a fruit knife,” snarled Jardine. “She is a gently bred female and you were totally out of order sending her into Radleigh’s sphere. You will help me find her, or by God, you’ll wish you were—”

He stopped. His eyes narrowed. The near-feral side of his nature prowled very close to the surface. Faulkner knew something. He could smell it. “Where is she?”

Faulkner snorted, shrugged his shoulders. “How should I know?”

Jardine sniffed out a hint of uncertainty. Silkily, he said, “Do you know how I operate in the field, Faulkner?”

“Can’t imagine.”

“If I have to kill, the kill is always quick and clean and silent. But sometimes . . . Sometimes the slow, inexorable infliction of pain is necessary, isn’t it, to extract information? I think this might be one of those occasions.”

A flicker of emotion shook Faulkner’s stern features. “You forget who you’re talking to, Jardine. Your position would not save you if you harmed me.”

“And nothing on this earth will save
you
if you have caused harm to one hair on that lady’s head.”

Jardine lunged for Faulkner, who put up his hands. “All right, all right! She is upstairs, in my bedchamber.”

“Tending to one of my operatives.” Faulkner waved a hand, his face ashen. “Go up, go up. It’s the second floor, first on the right.”

Jardine took the stairs, two at a time, and kicked open Faulkner’s door.

A girl with tangled blond hair lay on the bed. She looked vaguely familiar, and her injuries made his stomach rise up, not with revulsion, but fear.
That animal.

He moved toward the bed. Ordinarily, he’d have more compassion, but he couldn’t afford delay. He touched her hand, then squeezed it gently until her good eye opened a crack. Her head tossed a little, and he had to repeat his question twice.

“Where is Louisa?”

Her torn lips moved silently, then came a scrape of sound. “Radleigh . . . took her.”

“Christ!” He turned to go, but her hand shot out to grab his wrist. He looked back.

“Smith. Smith’s here.”

The effort seemed to have taken all her strength. She was white to the lips, and her good eye fluttered closed.

No more. Jardine charged downstairs to Faulkner. “Louisa’s not there. You tell me where she is, old man, or—”

The genuine shock on Faulkner’s face stopped him. “But . . .” Faulkner kneaded his wiry eyebrows with a thumb and forefinger, then looked up at Jardine. “Dear God. She wanted a pistol—”

“Where would Radleigh take her?” Jardine rapped out the words.

Mutely, Faulkner shook his head.

“You are a dead man, Faulkner.”

Jardine was gone on the words.

LOUISA woke with a painful throb in the back of her head that was so severe, darkness threatened to overtake her once more. Tears gathered in her eyes as the motion of the carriage she rode in exacerbated the pain. The scant light that filtered into the vehicle hurt her eyes, and the image of Radleigh sitting opposite her blurred and swayed.

It took all her strength to muster the will. She opened her mouth and screamed, and the sound tore into her skull like hot shards of glass.

Nausea welled, threatened to rise. She clamped her mouth shut and breathed in and out deeply through her nose to quell the sick feeling. She
would not
cast up her accounts in front of him.

“There’s no one to hear you.” Amused, Radleigh surveyed her critically. “Otherwise I’d have made sure you were gagged.”

Her wrists were bound. He’d left her feet free, but in soft slippers she couldn’t do much with those.

Radleigh’s slow, wide smile made her stomach churn anew.

“Saunders has been very sly, hasn’t he, my dear? I must say, I never knew he had it in him. He was very loyal to you for a time. But pain, I find, makes most men weaken. Very soon, they can’t tell you what they know fast enough. Eventually, they betray everything they hold dear.” His smile grew. “It makes
women
do all sorts of interesting things. As you will see.”

She thought of those locks of hair, and of Harriet. The damage he’d done to Harriet’s body would heal, albeit leaving scars. But the nightmare of enduring what Harriet had endured . . .

Panic all but choked her. She
couldn’t
. She’d do anything to avoid that fate.

Yet, the only knowledge she could offer Radleigh in return for her freedom was that she’d been working for Faulkner, that Harriet had been working for him also, that Jardine wanted that list of names on the government’s behalf. That her brother’s name would be among those listed.

Betraying any one of those people was out of the question.

Through stiff lips, she forced herself to ask, “What do you mean to do with me?”

The carriage slowed and swept around a bend. The hard hazel eyes glinted.

“Why, Lady Louisa, I mean to marry you. What else?”

Oh God.
But she would not show him fear. Pointedly, she looked down at her bound hands. “I regret to say that I believe we should not suit.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “Do you know, I’m beginning to think you’re wrong about that.”

“You’ll never get away with it. No clergyman would marry an unwilling bride.”

A cynical expression fell over Radleigh’s features. “How odd that I needed only to travel to the next village to find just such a cleric.”

He patted his pocket. “I have the special license right here.”

Desperate, she licked her lips. “I shall make an outcry. One of your guests will come to my aid.”

“Unfortunately, a rumored outbreak of typhus in the village has sent my guests fleeing for the hills and my servants hurrying home to their families. There will be no one in my house except you and me, the vicar, and the witnesses we need for the ceremony.”

He flicked a glance over her. “A pity you are so shabbily dressed for your wedding day, my dear, but it cannot be helped.”

She’d worn a simple dimity gown and a straw bonnet when she’d wed Jardine, and he hadn’t cared a button.

She curled her lip. “You are so fastidious? I wonder that you could bear to be seen with such a rag-tail specimen as I.”

He waved a careless hand. “It’s a closed carriage, after all.”

A sense of unreality shimmered around her. He couldn’t get away with this. He was mad.

The suspicion that Radleigh truly was unhinged and not simply evil crept into her brain. Such a wedding as he proposed would never stand up to challenge given Radleigh’s coercion and her prior marriage to Jardine, but legal challenges took time. One day as Radleigh’s wife would be one day too many.

“My brother is a duke. He will never take your word or the word of a corrupt clergyman or a hundred witnesses over mine. He’ll move heaven and earth to sunder this marriage. He’ll destroy you.” If Jardine didn’t beat Max to it.

Radleigh’s smile tightened. Her logic made some impression, then. To any but the most irrational mind, it must.

Clearly, he’d been caught unawares by this latest development with Harriet and had made his plans hastily. He’d thought he had time on his side, but now that Louisa had seen his handiwork, there was no point in continuing to woo her.

His alternative scheme was flawed. He was off balance, and although that made him more dangerous, it also made him more vulnerable.

This marriage was vitally important to Radleigh. How could she use that?

Louisa stiffened.
She could bargain to get that list.

She licked her lips. “Perhaps we might come to an arrangement.”

They lurched over a rut in the road. Radleigh gave a faint smile, spread his arms along the top of his seat. “You are in no position to bargain.”

“Oh, but I think I am.” She tried to give him a relaxed smile, but she wasn’t sure if she succeeded. “I cannot see this marriage will work the way you want it to unless you have a quiescent wife. And it so happens that you hold a certain piece of paper which is of great interest to me.”

His head jerked up. So he hadn’t guessed why she’d betrothed herself to him. He didn’t know of her connection with Faulkner, then.

“For that list,” she continued, “I would be prepared to wed you.”

Shock flared in his eyes. “I’ve rarely heard of such altruism,” he drawled. “Who told you about this document?”

It was easy to tell half-truths convincingly. “Your latest victim managed to tell me. She was looking for the list when you caught her, you see.”

A gleam came into his eye. He crossed his ankles. “Was she, indeed? It seems everyone is after that precious document.” He fingered his mouth a little, thoughtfully. “I should have killed her, of course. But that damned busy-body must needs spoil my fun.”

No doubt he meant Saunders. How had the secretary managed to make him stop?

With heavy irony, Louisa said, “She might yet die of her wounds, if that’s any consolation.”

“Well, that is something,” Radleigh admitted.

She couldn’t quite believe she was having this conversation.
As long as he wants me as his wife, he won’t hurt me.
She held fast to that thought.

“Do you agree to my terms?”

He sighed. “Oh, very well. I agree to your proposal, Lady Louisa. I’d shake hands on it, but . . .” He indicated her bindings with an airy wave of his hand and laughed.

Perhaps she wouldn’t wait for Jardine to take Radleigh into custody. Perhaps she’d shoot the blackguard herself.

“A pity I sent Beth and all my guests away,” he mused.

“We could have made quite an occasion of it. However, now that I have your agreement,
you
will have the opportunity to rest this evening and make yourself presentable. I shall content myself with anticipating our wedding night.”