My Dangerous Duke (22 page)

Oh, what have I gone and done?

Stunned it had actually worked, she slunk from the stair-stool and backed away from the bookcase, wide-eyed.

Pop!

Far above her, the top shelf of the bookcase suddenly jumped out—just a bit—but enough to startle her.

Kate stared up at it, her heart in her throat, torn between astonishment and delight. “Hullo,” she murmured under her breath.

Ever so cautiously, she tiptoed forward again, creeping back up warily onto the little wheeled stair. As she approached, she discovered that the top shelf of the bookcase concealed some kind of hidden drawer.

One she knew she had no business peeking into.

Oh, but she could not help herself!

I’ll bet Rohan doesn’t even know it exists,
she reasoned. He made no bones about the fact that he was barely interested in the contents of his family’s library. He would probably be glad she had found it for him.

With a surge of the same rash boldness that had inspired her to kiss him last night, she reached up into the hidden compartment and blindly felt around, for it was too high to see into, even if she stood on her toes.

Something is … up here.
Her fingers closed around the leather bindings of a book.
Hmmm.
Heart pounding, she took hold of it and pulled it out.

A cloud of dust promptly rained down on her.

She waved it away with a cough, only glancing at the brittle tome she had liberated before reaching up again to find several more illuminated manuscripts.

What she had discovered appeared to be the oldest pieces in the Kilburn collection. They looked many centuries old; she could smell the cedar lining of the hidden drawer where they had been hidden, safely protected from the ravages of time.

No wonder they had been concealed. They were extremely valuable. Priceless, she thought in scholarly excitement.

Rohan probably had no idea of the kinds of treasures hidden away in the great library that his ancestors had assembled over the centuries. She couldn’t wait to show him what she had found.

Her discovery was so exciting that maybe it would make him forget all about her foolish blunder of last night. A splendid change of subject.

With eager reverence, she carried her discoveries over to the large library table.

She stole another sip of tea, then set the cup carefully aside, well away from the precious artifacts. Taking extra care in handling the centuries-old books, she pulled the white fichu out of her neckline—she was wearing, today, a lovely but again ill-fitting French silk walking dress from the fashionable lady’s traveling trunk.

Using the delicate cloth like a handkerchief to protect the brittle pages, she opened the first book she had unearthed:
On Dragons.

“Oh, how wonderful!” she murmured to herself, gazing at the wildly colored illustrations of giant reptiles, winged and breathing fire.

The Chaucerian English was going to take some work to decipher. She would have to see what reference texts she could find in the collection to help her work out the captions, but for now, the pictures fascinated her.

The next page showed a silver-armored knight astride a galloping white steed. Armed with a lance, he was shown charging at a hideous, horned dragon that loomed over him, its black, batlike wings outstretched.

The knight in the picture had a winged ally of his own, however. In the sky above him hovered none other than St. Michael the Archangel again, her old friend from the duke’s family chapel.

Come to think of it, she mused, wasn’t that white Maltese cross on the little knight’s pennant another detail she had noticed in the chapel?

She turned the page and stopped at the next colorful picture of a dragon holding its egg in its claws. Some sort of curious symbol was depicted inside the rounded contours of the egg. Kate furrowed her brow and leaned closer, studying the symbol on the dragon’s egg. A tingle of faint recognition ran down her spine.

I’ve seen this before.

The symbol showed an eight-spoked wagon wheel, with a flaming torch in the center. Beneath the wheel was the Latin motto,
Non serviam.

Easy enough to translate: “
I will not serve.”

Yet the drawing of that mysterious symbol filled her with an inexplicable sense of dread.

She straightened up again, not sure at first what made the sight of it so unsettling.

Resting her elbows on the table, she stared out the window across the room, but her thoughts drifted off a million miles away, across the sea …

Eyes burning from the dust, she rested her face in her hands, idly rubbing her brow and racking her brains about where she had seen that ill-omened symbol before.

Painful thoughts of her late mother, vague, wispy remnants of memory, floated through her mind. For a long moment, Kate sat in stillness, simply listening to the tick-tock of the grandfather clock. Her mind traveled back to her childhood days aboard her father’s ship …

All of a sudden, she drew in her breath, lifting her head. She stared straight ahead with a stunned, unseeing gaze as it all came flooding back.

I remember.

For a moment, she could hardly breathe for sheer, stunned disbelief. Then she paled.
Oh, God. I have to tell Rohan.

Her embarrassment was suddenly swept aside, irrelevant in the magnitude of what she had remembered. She closed the dragon book with a jerky motion, suddenly loath to touch it. Her heart took up an ominous drumming rhythm, but she jumped up from her chair.

Already in motion, she swiped the book off the table, tucked it under her arm, and strode out swiftly into the corridor, where she found Parker and Wilkins lounging over their casual game of cards.

The two still served as her minders, but lately, they shadowed her at a more permissive distance.

“Where is His Grace?” she asked at once, marching toward them.

“Practicing, Miss. In the Hall of Arms. But you can’t go in there—”

“I must see him.”

“He is not to be disturbed.”

“It is extremely important!”

“What’s wrong?” Parker asked.

“You look like you seen the ghost,” Wilkins offered with a grin.

She glanced grimly at him. “Something like that.”

The ghost—of another key childhood memory. Who she really was was finally starting to come back.

Wilkins’s jaunty smile faded at her somber look. The two men exchanged a guarded glance.

“Please. I have to see him.” She swallowed hard. “He will understand. If he doesn’t, I’ll take the blame.”

“Very well, then. This way.” Parker beckoned grimly, starting down the hallway.

Hugging the dragon book to her chest, Kate followed, shaken to the core.

Chapter 11

K
ate’s guards led her into a wing of the castle she had not seen before. After a short walk down the corridor, they ushered her into the Hall of Arms, a vast stone chamber, cathedral-like, with a high vaulted ceiling and a row of tall, narrow, pointed windows down one wall.

“He’ll be down there, through that archway, miss.” Parker pointed. She nodded her thanks.

Still holding the dragon book, Kate uneasily crossed the empty Hall of Arms, glancing around at all the odd equipment for physical training arranged throughout the chamber. There was some sort of elaborate and hazardous-looking obstacle course, and one wall covered in scaffolding with various platforms to be climbed. The opposite, windowless wall was covered in straw-stuffed targets of all shapes and sizes, some on wires and other mechanical devices to provide moving targets for practice.

Iron dumbbells, leather punching bags. Knotted ropes here and there suspended high over the stone floor. A ten-foot wall for men to scale standing by itself in the middle of the room.

In the far corner was a rack laden with classical sporting pieces—javelins and discuses. A fight pit was cordoned off with ropes and filled a few inches deep with sand, to make the footing even more difficult, she gathered, as she passed.

Approaching the archway Parker had indicated, Kate braced herself for whatever she might find in the shadowed space ahead. Upon stepping through the arched doorway, she found herself in a narrow cloistered passage overlooking a square stone chamber, dimly lit by a couple of torches.

Crossing slowly to the waist-high wall of the arcade, she peered down into the room below and held her breath, staring in mingled dread and desire when she saw him.

Rohan was battling invisible foes, wielding the large, lancelike weapon she had seen in his hand that first night in the great hall. His long hair flowed around his shoulders, wetted with the sweat that streamed from him and made his body gleam with rippling, raw power. He was bare-chested, wearing only loose black trousers that draped his compact buttocks and muscled thighs gracefully.

His bare feet were silent on the flagstones as he lunged, leaped, and spun about, the torchlight flashing crimson on his long, wicked blade.

Kate watched, riveted by the play of shadows and gold torchlight that slid over his sweat-slicked body, gliding across the sleekly muscled contours of his back and massive shoulders, his powerful chest and chiseled abdomen as he thrust, swung, jabbed, then spiraled up to parry an imaginary blow, only to gouge again with precision perfectly balanced with killing force.

His blade sliced through the air with naught but a deadly whisper, each slashing arc of his weapon, like his honed body, under his exquisite control.

In constant motion, he wove through the changing patterns of his regime with a beautiful—an almost otherworldly—prowess, a creature of elegant savagery.

He attacked again with a low war cry, but then suddenly went motionless, standing in a sure-footed stance below her, his chest heaving.

Slowly, he looked up, as though he had felt her there. Kate found herself looking into the eyes of a predator; she held absolutely still.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded in a low tone, breathing hard. He lowered his weapon.

“I-I did not mean to intrude …”

The brooding, skeptical look he sent her brought back her sheepishness over last night all in a rush.

“I-I wouldn’t have bothered you if it weren’t important.”

It had better be,
his wary glance replied. He brought his weapon back up and rested it over his shoulder. “Very well. What is the matter?” He turned away and walked toward the small table in the corner of the chamber, stretching his neck from side to side and loosening his taut shoulders with a large shrug.

His unenthusiastic reception rather worried her, but Kate hurried along the cloistered arcade, heading for the few stairs that led down into the sunken stone chamber.

After that display of devastating capability, he was decidedly intimidating at the moment. She wondered if this rigorous practice was his way of burning off the frustration of their wanting each other.

She wished she had not done that last night, but looking at him now, she doubted any woman alive would blame her. Nevertheless, she could see he was annoyed at the interruption. As a result, the prospect of admitting to the rude way she had snooped in his family’s library suddenly did not sound as easy as she had first anticipated.

It did not help matters that his glorious display of warrior prowess had scrambled her wits with wild longing. Her heart pounded, but she reminded herself she had come here with a purpose. She dropped her hungry stare from his mouthwatering physique, for she did not get the feeling right now that he would appreciate her gawking.

Pull yourself together.

With a stern mental effort, she kicked herself back onto the task that had brought her here in the first place.

Fortunately, she somewhat managed to clear the haze of lust out of her brain before she reached the bottom of the shallow stairs and strode across the chamber, carrying the dragon book.

He was standing at the small table in the corner, and as she approached, he smoothly closed the lid of the mahogany case resting there—but not before she glimpsed the array of cunning weapons and razor-sharp tools cradled in the box’s velvet-lined interior.

She blanched, then looked up quickly at him, but his closed expression did not invite questions.

She held her tongue as he locked the case and set it on the floor. “What did you want to talk to me about?” He picked up a small towel lying on the table and wiped the sweat off his face and throat, then his chest, which was still heaving from his exertions.

He turned to her as she neared with newfound caution, stopping a short distance away. “I have to show you something.”

He tossed her an inquiring nod. “What is it?” The darkness had receded from his eyes, but it was not gone entirely.

Bravely, Kate went closer, joining him beside the table. “Here.” She set the dragon book on it while Rohan dragged his fingers through his hair, shoving his long, sable locks back from his face. Tendrils of his hair still clung to his hot, damp skin.

The heat radiating from his big, hard body and the musky male scent of him had a maddening effect on her senses, which she strove to ignore.

“I think I know why someone might be after my father, if he’s still alive.”

“Really?” He glanced sharply at her.

“And,” she added, “I finally remembered where I first heard about Valerian the Alchemist.”

His fierce stare homed in on her.

“This symbol.” Flipping through the pages until she found the illustration with the dragon egg, she tapped it with her fingertip. “I’ve seen it before. Do you know what it means?”