Never a Gentleman (33 page)

She had tried to give it back. She knew it was too much. But her friend Radhika’s father had wanted to say thank you for shooting
the tiger that threatened his son. Grace had tried to tell him that she hadn’t seen his son. She’d only seen the tiger, all
hot yellow eyes and wide, snarling mouth, heading straight for her. Her shot had been instinctive and lucky. Her reward had
been six necklaces from Jaipur’s premier family of meenakari jewelers. One measly dagger paled in comparison.

She weighed the dagger in her hand. A weapon of deadly beauty. Not something she could take, though. She put it back and wrote
her notes to Lady Kate and Olivia Wyndham. And then on the way out, she impulsively picked up one of Diccan’s riding crops
that lay on the leather wing-back by the fireplace. Running it through her fingers, she thought of him sitting in her bedroom
chair, slowly tapping it against his leg. She didn’t even nod. She simply turned, the crop and letters still in her hand,
and exited the room, closing the door behind her. It was time to go home.

•  •  •

For the second time in a week, Diccan found himself staring stupidly at someone, certain he’d heard wrong. “What do you mean
Mrs. Hilliard isn’t here? I have brought guests.”

Guests whom he’d rather have left somewhere else, preferably in a ditch. The Thorntons, eyeing the house as if totting up
the cost of the furnishings; Geoffrey Smythe, leaning against the front wall as if he hadn’t the energy to stand alone; and,
waiting in the carriage, Minette, who had insisted she wait outside while he informed his wife of his progress from Brighton
to Newbury for the races.

He had spent the last week with Minette, trying to figure out just where she might have hidden a verse. Trying like hell to
figure out exactly what the verse was. He’d come up with nothing but an endless headache, a new loathing for French perfume,
and a surfeit of Thorntons.

The only success he did have was to learn that the Lions’ ultimate goal was to set Princess Charlotte on her grandfather’s
throne, fully expecting her to yield to their wishes when they did. Considering the fact that the princess was only nineteen
and had been kept in virtual seclusion much of her life, Diccan couldn’t discount the possibility of success. According to
Smythe, they had already succeeded in scotching the engagement Prinny had arranged for her to wed Prince William of Orange,
and now they had another candidate in the wings whom they felt to be more sympathetic.

All good information. Nothing, though, that told him anything about that bloody verse. Or just how the Lions planned to put
Princess Charlotte on the throne, besides murdering Wellington.

For now, though, he had to deal with a disaster of his own. “Where is Mrs. Hilliard?” he asked.

Roberts looked down his prodigious nose at Diccan’s party, as if he hadn’t been raised from fifth gunner to butler in the
course of a day. “Madame did not share her destination with me, sir,” he said.

He wanted her here, where she was safe. But if she refused, at least Babs was with her, Diccan thought.

“Who went with her besides her abigail?” he asked.

Diccan swore the damn butler gloated. “Schroeder was let go the day you left for Brighton.”

Diccan felt the ground drop away. “Who went with Mrs. Hilliard?”

“John Coachman and Benny, the second footman.”

Diccan wanted to throttle someone. The only comfort he’d had in the last week had been the belief that at least Grace was
safe. She was surrounded by people he and Babs had vetted. But she’d run off from them, not knowing that she was in danger.
He had to move. He had to get her back here. He had to pretend it wasn’t for her safety, or Smythe would become suspicious.

Giving a long-suffering sigh, he turned to his companions. “Why don’t you enjoy a bit of sherry in the salon. I’m sure I won’t
be long.”

Lady Thornton giggled, patting his cheek on her way by. “It seems your wife needs a bit of discipline, Diccan. It’s good you
enjoy dispensing it.”

Diccan kept himself from flinching by will alone. He was so tired of his borrowed persona. So ready to take Grace and disappear
where no one else could find them. But it would be fatal to repeat that amazing, miraculous
night he’d spent with her in his arms. If he found himself in Grace’s bed again, he damn well didn’t think he’d leave.

“Longbridge,” the first footman suddenly spoke up from where he stood in the shadows by the closed study door. “She said she
was going home.”

Diccan recognized the man as one of the people Babs had secured for him. He stepped closer. “What happened to Schroeder?”

The man shrugged, his handsome face perfectly passive. “Mrs. Hilliard said she wouldn’t need an abigail no more.”

Diccan just nodded, rubbing at his eye again. He had to get a message to Babs, who was undoubtedly making free with his bed
and brandy. He damn well had to find Grace. She couldn’t simply go off as if life were normal. Surely Braxton had delivered
the warning. Surely he was keeping an eye on her at least. It had been an entire bloody week.

“Why didn’t you go with Mrs. Hilliard?” he asked the footman. “It’s what I hired you for.”

The man shrugged. “Took the new second footman. Another ex-soldier. We figured he’d watch her.” Leaning to the side, the man
scanned the area. “Another thing, sir,” he said, reaching in his pocket. “Note came for you.”

The note changed hands. Diccan read it and cursed.

Checked names from other night. Carver clean so far. Gen. Dawes has questionable contacts, including Bentley. Be careful. Drake

And just what the hell was he supposed to do with that? He sure as hell couldn’t tell Grace. It would devastate her. But if
he kept it from her, she could be in even greater danger.

“Doesn’t do to have a wife who’s a loose cannon,” he suddenly heard.

He turned to see Smythe leaning against the doorway into the salon, a glass of whiskey in his hand. A blunt-faced man about
Diccan’s age with smallish brown eyes and thin, mousy hair, Smythe proferred a lazy smile. Diccan felt the subtle threat of
that smile to his toes. If he couldn’t control his own wife, how could they trust him to keep their secrets?

“Happened to one of my neighbors,” Smythe continued, sipping at his drink. “Couldn’t deal with her odd starts. Had to put
her away for her own good. Baroness Sanbourne. You’ve heard of her?”

He had. A gracious, quiet woman who had been devoted to her husband. Diccan had attended a funeral for her. Could Smythe be
saying there was more to it?

“Grace isn’t unpredictable,” Diccan drawled. “Just tedious. I know how to handle her.”

Nodding, Smythe straightened. “We’ll go along for moral support. Should be excellent sport.”

It wouldn’t be sport at all. It would be pure disaster. She’d left him. There could be no other reason for summarily letting
Babs go and fleeing to Longbridge. If it had been any other time, he might have given her the space. God knew she deserved
it. But she needed to be protected. And, selfishly, he couldn’t focus on his task if he constantly worried for her. Besides,
Smythe was watching to see how he reacted to Grace’s move. He was walking a tightrope.

And that was how Diccan wound up with witnesses when he next greeted his wife. He wanted to forewarn her. To explain, apologize.
To beg, if necessary. But when he rolled through the gates of Longbridge ten hours later,
he was accompanied by his so-called friends, including Minette, who kept acting as if she couldn’t imagine how she’d come
to be in this position.

“She is a cripple, yes,” the pretty blonde said, nibbling at her lip like a callow girl, “but I do not wish to hurt her, me.”

“Don’t fret about it, my dear,” Letitia Thornton said with a pat to the knee and a satisfied smile. “She knows who you are.
And this saves time, since we’re already on the way to Newbury.”

“We don’t have to take the chit with us, do we?” Thornton asked, inhaling a pinch of snuff that ended up all over his puce
waistcoat. “I cannot enjoy sport with a fish-faced woman in my business.”

“We’ll see when we get there,” Diccan said.

Longbridge itself was a surprise. When Grace had told him she’d been left the estate by an aunt, he’d envisioned the kind
of place his Aunt Armitrude inhabited: dark, pinched, as precise as a Dürer etching. Longbridge might have been an abbey at
one time, but a series of additions had muddied its provenance. Not the look, however. Made of buttery stone, it had been
expanded with whimsy.

The main block rose three stories with long mullioned windows, a colonnaded balustrade, and flanking wings constructed with
gothic arched dormers and a forest of chimneys. The gardens were a bit overrun, but in the gravel forecourt, a Neptune fountain
sent spray into the air.

“Oh, well done, Hilliard,” Smythe said, following Diccan down from the carriage. “It’s far more grand than your place. And
look at those pastures.”

How could he miss them? Fences enclosed emerald green grass that swept across the gently rolling Berkshire
landscape right down to the River Kennet. It would be the perfect place to breed and raise horses. Was that what Grace wanted?
She had never really said.

Another thing to tuck away for later, he thought, as he strolled up the steps to the pedimented doorway. His heart had begun
to thud, and his stomach ached with dread. He didn’t want to be here, especially now that he saw how special it was. He didn’t
want to sully Grace’s home with the people who called him friend. All he could hope was that in the fullness of time, Grace
would forgive him.

The door opened before he even reached it, to reveal the bandy-legged Harper glowering at him as if he were the vanguard of
an attacking French brigade.

“I wish to see my wife,” Diccan said.

Harper took a scathing look at Diccan and blocked the doorway with his considerable shoulders. “And why should I let you do
that, now?”

Diccan came within a hairsbreadth of picking the little man up and tossing him against the wall. “Because I’ll make sure you
and your wife never see my wife again if you don’t,” he growled low enough that only the two of them heard.

Harper’s glare hardened, but he stepped aside. Diccan strode into an Elizabethan hall with linenfold walls and a checkerboard
marble floor that glowed with light from the windows. “Where is she?”

Harper nodded toward the back. “Great gallery. If you hurt her…”

Diccan lifted his quizzing glass and stared him to silence before exiting toward an arching doorway, through which he could
hear women’s voices. He didn’t have to look to see that his friends followed. He could feel them like a miasma at his back
as he walked past a polished oak
staircase and walls of gleaming weapons. He could distinguish the women’s voices now: Grace and an Irishwoman; Mrs. Harper,
he assumed. And someone else, another woman with an exotic, lilting accent.

Walking down a short hallway, he stepped into the soaring, bright gallery that spread across the back of the house. His boots
echoed hollowly off the creaking wood floor. Above him stretched a brightly frescoed barrel-vaulted ceiling. Windows lined
the white-paneled south aspect, portraits and chairs, the north. A charming, inviting room that, oddly, seemed to fit his
surprising wife to a tee.

She was halfway down the room with two other women.

“Greetings, madam,” he called, pausing at the doorway.

At the sound of his voice, Grace jerked up from the packing crate she had been inspecting. Dressed once again in her ubiquitous
gray clothes and an oversized apron, she had been laughing. The light in her eyes died the minute she realized who had come.

“Diccan,” she said, stepping before the crate as if protecting it.

A woman almost as broad as Grace was tall took up a stance next to her, arms crossed.

“So this is y’r man,” Mrs. Harper all but accused.

“Not mine,” Grace said quietly.

The two words hurt more than he’d thought they could. Just beyond Grace stood another woman, slight and dark and exquisitely
beautiful, clad in a floating turquoise silk of the salwar kameez style worn by Indian women. She couldn’t seem to meet Diccan’s
gaze, but kept her attention on the crate she had been inspecting.

In fact, the hall was full of crates. It looked like the packing room of an import company.

“I didn’t expect to see you here, Diccan,” Grace said.

“No?” he asked. “What did you expect?”

She shrugged, the light glinting oddly off her hair. “I expected you would enjoy your life, as always. I thought it would
be a good time for me to retreat to my home here and settle some things.”

“Run away, you mean?”

Another woman would have flinched. “I might have chosen the word
escape
, but I imagine we understand each other. I simply needed to reacquaint myself with something that was all mine.”

He didn’t have to hear his companions enter. He saw it in the minute changes in his wife’s expression. If possible, she grew
in size and dignity. And he was about to diminish himself further in her eyes. He was about to cement his reputation with
people he loathed.

“Yours?” he asked quietly, not acknowledging the fact that they were no longer alone. Lifting his quizzing glass, he made
it a point to consider the room. “Exactly what is yours, madame?”

Grace never looked away. “Longbridge,” she said quietly. “My aunt left it to me.”

He nodded, struggling to maintain his composure. He was about to commit an unspeakable atrocity against this grave woman.
And there was nothing he could do to stop it.

He twirled his quizzing glass. “And you married me. I see it hasn’t occurred to you, yet, my dear. But then I imagine slogging
through the mud of Spain isn’t conducive for learning marital law.” He sighed, as if bored. “What was yours is now mine, Grace.
Your money, your horse, your servants, your house. You have nothing, Grace.
I
have it.”

He saw the blow strike home. He could almost smell it
on her. She had truly thought she could have a refuge from the inhospitable world of the
ton
in this bright, comfortable place. She had thought he would understand.