Love and Fury: The Coltrane Saga, Book 4 (37 page)

As she finished her story, Alaina flung her arms around Gavin’s neck and pleaded, “Don’t be angry with me, please. He forced me.”

Gavin endured Alaina’s embrace, so as not to upset her further. “Did he know Briana wasn’t Dani?” he asked furiously.

She shook her head. “No. At least…he didn’t say anything to make me think so. But you know she’ll tell him everything.”

“No doubt,” he murmured grimly. He pursed his lips thoughtfully. There was only one thing to do, he knew that much.

He issued orders quickly while Alaina listened, nodding. The guests were to be called to dinner, served, and then ushered out of the house as politely but as quickly as possible. Excuses were to be made for his absence. A sick friend would do.

He left and hurried to the cottage, where he found Dirk Hollister sitting in the shadows before the cold fireplace, his head wrapped in a cocoon-like tourniquet, sunk in misery. A single candle offered scant light.

Gavin drew up a chair and sat down beside him, but Dirk didn’t even speak. He continued to sit, huddled, staring into the ashes of the hearth.

Gavin reached over and touched his knee. “Hollister?” Hell, did the man even have his sanity anymore? Gavin had been too busy to visit him. Maybe he was worse off than anyone realized.

Without turning around, Dirk mumbled, “Leave me alone.”

“I can’t,” Gavin was quick to inform him. “We’ve got trouble, big trouble. I reed—”

“Trouble?” Dirk cried in fury. “You think
you’ve
got trouble? I’ll show you trouble…” He pulled away the bandage around his head and turned so that Gavin had a full view.

“This,” Dirk declared, voice trembling with rage and pain, “is trouble! I’ve got to go through life looking like this…a goddamn dried-up grape!”

Usually, Gavin was hard-pressed to find sympathy for anyone. But in that moment he genuinely pitied Dirk Hollister. Here was a once-handsome man, who’d been turned into a side-show freak.

Dirk Hollister looked like a slab of overcooked bacon. His flesh was red and yellow and shriveled, and the doctor had bluntly declared that it would always be that way. He was scarred for life.

Dirk lifted red-rimmed eyes to Gavin. “I want you to know, you’d better keep me away from that bitch. Because if I ever lay eyes on her again, I’ll kill her, and nobody will be able to stop me.”

“No one will try,” Gavin said.

Dirk was surprised. “You mean that?”

Gavin quickly told him what had happened. With each word, spirit returned to that broken man.

“Your men are waiting for you to lead them,” Gavin said slowly. “I am going to make arrangements for a ship to take us to Greece. As soon as we can, we’ll load the gold and set sail.

“I want
you,”
he went on, placing an arm around Dirk’s shoulders, “to find Coltrane and kill him. Bring the girl to me and—”

“No!” Dirk cried furiously.
“I
want her. I’ll make her beg to die for what she’s done to me.” His body trembled with fury and longing.

“Bring her to me. Don’t touch her,” Gavin ordered. “When I’m done with her, I promise you can have her.

“Do it my way, he continued emphatically, and I will see to it that you leave France a rich man. You can do whatever you want with Briana later on. And you’ll never have to worry about money again.” He paused. “Do we have an agreement?”

Dirk held out his hand and Gavin took it. Their bargain was made.

They left the cottage and hurried out into the night…and whatever the night would hold for them.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Branch met Colt and Briana on the road, and the look he gave her made her cringe. He, stared at her with pure contempt, as though she had betrayed him. She couldn’t bear it.

Brokenly she whispered, “I did not want it to be this way. I swear I had no choice, Branch.”

He stared at her wordlessly.

Colt mounted the horse Branch had waiting for him, and then pulled Briana up behind him. “We’d better put some distance between us and Mason,” he told Branch. “There will be plenty of time to talk later.” He related only that Dani was, indeed, in a convent, and the woman behind him was an imposter.

“It was all a hoax, a swindle,” he explained, voice cracking.

Briana dared to speak up. “I will tell you all about it as we ride.”

Colt jerked around in the saddle and glared at her. How he wanted to hit her, the lying, conniving bitch. “Just keep still until I tell you to speak.”

After they’d ridden for a while, Colt demanded to know where Dani was. “I want to see my sister and find out what, if anything, she knew about all of this.”

“She knew nothing,” Briana told him.

Then Branch interjected, “Who the hell are you, girl? And how did you get involved in all this?”

“My name is Briana de Paul,” she said calmly, grateful for the chance to tell them even a little. “I worked as a servant for the deBonnetts. My father was their caretaker until he died, and we lived in a small cottage on the estate.” Then she rushed on to explain about the deBonnett money being lost, and Dani becoming a nun, and Gavin’s plan.

“The letter from Dani’s father,” she added, “came at just the time Dani was to leave to enter the convent. She knew nothing about the letter, so of course she knew nothing about Gavin’s scheme to claim her share.”

Tentatively, when they didn’t stop her from talking, she said, “I did as I was told so as to save my little brother. He’s crippled, and…” She trailed off, in tears, feeling that they didn’t even believe that much.

Colt insisted on riding to the convent, and Briana explained that it was situated on a mountain called
Jaune,
near the Italian border. She didn’t bother telling them that the mountain was thus named because in the spring and summer months the slopes were covered with bright yellow wildflowers.

“Going there would be a waste of time,” she warned. “It is a severe cloister, an order of nuns who remove themselves from the outside world and never leave the convent. They never allow visitors. Dani told me all of this. It is a very strict sect, and you will probably not be permitted to see her. Besides, she knows nothing about this, I promise you.”

Colt was rigid. “Just tell me which direction to head.” Nothing was going to stop him from seeing Dani. He was going to hear with his own ears that she knew nothing about this, that she would back him up legally to recover all the gold. And then, God help Gavin Mason.

“East,” Briana told him. “It is about a four-hour ride by carriage. I went there once to pray at the fountain outside the walls, where the waters are supposed to be holy. I took Charles with me, in hope of helping him.”

“And did it help?” Colt asked her.

“No,” she replied. Then she ventured, “Helping Gavin was the only way Charles could have the operation he needed in order to live. His spine was being crushed.”

Colt shook his head. It was all a lie, of course. She had been promised a part of the money involved and needed no persuasion. When she started to speak once more, he snapped at her to be quiet. He had other things on his mind besides listening to her attempt at self-justification.

They rode in the darkness for an hour, and then the road became narrow, rougher, as they began their ascent into the mountains. Colt and Branch decided they would stop for the night and leave again at first light.

With the horses tied, Branch discreetly disappeared among the brush to find his own place for the night, leaving them alone to fight.

Briana sat on a rock, staring into the blue-and-purple night. She heard the inviting sound of water rushing. A stream would be cold, but a bath was too tempting to resist.

She began walking toward the sound.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

She stopped but did not turn around. “I need a bath. I was tied in that hellhole for nearly two weeks. Maybe more, I don’t know.”

“I’ll go with you.”

She panicked. “No! I want privacy.”

Colt laughed, an ugly sound. “You didn’t want privacy those nights you seduced me. You were plenty eager to have me see you naked then.”

Briana swayed. She had to tell him the truth, and tell him now…

“Oh, I forgot,” Colt growled, reaching her side. “You have to be bought, don’t you? There
is
a difference between a prostitute and a whore, isn’t there? I imagine you command a very high price.

“Tell me,” he continued, “how much of a cut did Mason offer you? I’m curious to know how much it cost me to bed a woman like you. It’s a pity I can’t remember what it was like because—”

Briana slapped him.

Colt wasn’t fazed. He continued to gaze down at her, and when she raised her arm to slap him again, he caught her and slung her over his shoulder. Ignoring her cries, he carried her through the brush, all the way to the bank of the rushing stream, and dropped her into the frigid water.

Briana floundered, struggling to stand on the slippery rocks. The stream was waist-deep, and she couldn’t get her footing. She fell backward, the cold water closing over her, and she fought her way to her knees. “You bastard!”

Colt laughed. “Perhaps it’s best I
don’t
remember it. You’re probably no better than the average whore.”

Briana stopped shivering. His cruel taunts were like a great warming fire, filling her with deep rage. Yes, she had deceived him. But she had stopped short of coupling with him. He didn’t know that, but
she
did. The knowledge that she had outwitted Gavin and spared both herself and Colt that terrible degradation was one thing she could be proud of. And she
was
proud of it.

She had fallen in love with Colt, but now that love was turning to hatred. Despite his rage, he might have allowed her a chance to explain. She had suffered, too, by God. He wasn’t the only one.

She decided to ignore him, to keep her knowledge to herself…for the time being, anyway.

As the first shadows of night began to succumb to dawn, the trio moved from the quiet forest and on toward the convent. Briana spoke only once, to ask that she be allowed to ride with Branch. Colt grunted assent. We didn’t want her anywhere near him.

They rode in dejected silence. Colt attempted to dwell on thoughts other than the ones at hand. France, he acknowledged, was a beautiful country. The northern part was farmland, nourished by the waters of the Loire and Seine rivers. The south, where they were, offered an uninterrupted string of golden beaches fringed with palm trees, olive groves, and orchards.

Kitty had written Colt glowing letters about her life in Paris, describing the city as prosperous and gay. Travis had work to occupy him, and, denied his company much of the time, Kitty had become involved in studying art.

Impressionism, she had written Colt, was Paris’s gift to art and had brought an absolute revolution, a renaissance in painting. All the great Impressionist painters—Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and Pissarro—were French, she wrote.

Colt missed his parents very much, but he was glad they’d been given this opportunity to live in Europe. Of course, once this ghastly mess was sorted out, he would go to Paris to see them. And, he realized grimly, he was going to have to tell them the whole story.

He tried to brighten his disconsolate mood by promising himself to see all of France before leaving. The land, he knew, was divided between four great river basins and several mountain ranges. Besides the Seine River, flowing through Paris and winding north to the English Channel, there was the Loire in the west, known for the historic châteaux studding the valleys it flowed through. The Loire flowed all the way to the Atlantic Ocean at the north end of the Bay of Biscay. In the south, also flowing into the Bay of Biscay, .was the Garonne River, with its wide tidal estuary known as the Gironde. The Rhône River rose in the eastern Alps and wound its way south through valleys famed for their fine vineyards.

Colt looked toward the mountains in the north, the breathtaking cluster and slopes of the Alps, including the highest peak in all Europe, Mont Blanc, rising to more than fifteen thousand feet.

“Colt.”

Branch’s sharp voice brought him from his reverie, and he turned around. Branch was pointing straight up. “See what I see?”

There was a formidable wall of rocks ten feet tall and, beyond it, surely, his sister’s convent. It looked cold, forbidding. How could Dani… But there was no time to think of it just then.

The trail up was narrow and rutted with holes. In some places, the trail was bordered by nothing but a sheer drop down to death against the jutting rocks.

They reached iron gates, and Colt dismounted to peer beyond the gates to a courtyard. The ground was covered by pebbles, and here and there were marble benches and a vast array of marble religious statues. There were no shrubs or trees, and the scene was entirely severe.

Stretching to either side of the courtyard and situated just behind it was the convent. It was rectangular in shape and constructed of stones. The building covered about half an acre. There was a high, tiled roof above the two stories, and there were a dozen windows facing the courtyard, all of them tall and arched.

A squat building stood to the left, connected by a roofed walkway to the convent. There was a belfry at the top of that small building, and remnants of ivy clung in feeble desperation to the decaying rocky structure. Colt, Briana, and Branch could hear the sound of women’s voices singing inside it. Except for the singing, there were no signs of activity.