The Capture of the Earl of Glencrae (7 page)

Chapter Three

D
ominic Guisachan, Earl of Glencrae, a highland laird accustomed to absolute rule, absolute command, stared at the diminutive female sitting in the armchair opposite and fought an irrational impulse to scowl. He had no idea what she was up to.

He rapidly replayed the exchange, but could see nothing in it to account for the determination that had slowly infused her, for the resolution he could see in her expression, in the set of her chin, the curve of her lips . . .

Nothing to account for the instinct that was screaming at him that he'd just, somehow, stepped into some snare.

What snare? It was his plan. And how could her
refusing
to agree to marry him possibly be a trap?

He shook off the feeling; perhaps it was some strange symptom of inexpressible relief.

He looked at the mantelpiece clock. It was nearly three o'clock. He and she had been talking for hours. He glanced at her. She didn't look overtired, but focused and aware. Engaged, alert, and subtly challenging in a way he found viscerally alluring—

He blocked the sudden awareness of his half-aroused state. Complications of that ilk he didn't need. “Very well. I accept your terms.” He paused, then tipped his head down the room to the desk before the windows. “If you wish to write a note to your parents, I'll have it delivered. As you've no doubt guessed, their house isn't far.”

“Hmm.” Her lips, rosy and full, firmed, then relaxed. “I appreciate the offer and would prefer to let them know I'm safe, but I'm not sure where they'll be—at home, or will they have gone to St. Ives House by now, or perhaps to Horatia and George?” She arched her brows, then met his eyes. “If you'll agree to have a note delivered in the morning after breakfast, I suspect that will be preferable. It will also give me time to think of how best to phrase it.”

He studied her face, wondering . . .

“No, I'm not imagining that I'll change my mind.” She regarded him measuringly. “And I'm assuming you realize that you can't send any note in my stead. It'll have to be in my handwriting. Anything else risks escalating the family's collective anxiety, and that's precisely what we need to allay.” She wrinkled her nose. “As best we can.”

He had been thinking of sending a note if she didn't, but . . . she was correct. “It's late.” He rose, set his empty glass on a side table, then looked down at her as she raised her gaze to his face. He hesitated. He didn't want to give her a chance to change her mind, but . . . “Sleep on your decision. If you're still of the same mind in the morning, we can discuss the matter further and work through the necessary details.”

“I won't change my mind.”

“Nevertheless.” Turning, he headed for the door; he needed to get out of there—to somewhere without any distractions, so he could think. Grasping the doorknob, he looked back at her. “I'll send up a maid to attend you. You should find all you'll need in there.” With his head, he indicated the bedchamber next door.

“Thank you.” She paused, then inclined her head. “Good night.”

He responded with a curt nod, then went out and shut the door. Releasing the knob, he stood for a moment, then shook his head. He couldn't understand why he felt so off-balance; he should be rejoicing.

He exhaled. Experience had taught him to distrust anything that came too easily, especially if it came via the hand of fate.
Everything
about the evening had gone far too easily, too pat, almost as if his plan had grown legs and run away with him—only to be brought up short when she'd rescripted their bargain.

Inwardly grimacing, he turned for the stairs. He could do nothing but accept her counteroffer and go forward. Too much was at stake for him to even waver.

Reaching the front hall, he strode for the servants' hall. He wasn't surprised to find lamps burning and his entire staff sitting about the central table waiting to learn of the outcome of his meeting with Miss Cynster, their prospective savior. The five numbered among his most trusted people: Griswold, his valet, Mulley, his majordomo, Brenda, the senior maid, Jessup, his coachman, and Thomas, his personal groom.

He halted, met their expectant gazes. Nodded. “She's agreed.”

A fervent “Thank God!” was the communal response.

“Brenda—go up and help her to bed. And please sleep on the truckle in the dressing room. I don't think she agreed just to sneak out later, but I don't want to take any chances.”

“Aye, m'lord.” Brenda rose, picked up a candle, lit it, and went.

Dominic looked at Jessup. “It seems we won't be needing the carriage again tonight. However, by dawn tomorrow I expect the Cynsters to have thrown a cordon around the entire town. I want you and Thomas to set out at first light and carefully check how tight it is. We're going to need to find some way through it, but initially all I want to know is that it's there, and what form it takes—how they watch, through whom, and where.”

“Aye, m'lord.” Jessup nodded, as did the much younger Thomas. “We'll put the carriage away and turn in.”

Dominic nodded a dismissal. As Jessup and Thomas rose and headed for the kitchen door, he transferred his gaze to Griswold and Mulley. “Despite her agreement, we should keep watch on the front and back doors through the night. Just in case.”

“I'll take the front,” Griswold said.

Mulley nodded. “I'll stretch out here, then.”

“Thank you.” Dominic turned and walked back into the house, canvassing his arrangements, looking for anything he might do that he hadn't already done. Angelica and her agreement to help him were too important—to him and to so many others—for him to risk leaving any opening or having any weakness in his plans.

He knew she'd agreed, yet his instincts weren't convinced, weren't yet ready to accept that, after all the dramas and mishaps, the missteps and unforeseeable calamities of the past five months, he'd finally succeeded in securing what he and his clan needed to survive.

He'd finally got a Cynster sister in his keeping and had persuaded her to aid him.

That the Cynster sister in question was the one of the three with whom, had he had the choice, he would have preferred not to deal was neither here nor there.

That she was already showing signs of being significantly more assertive and unpredictable than he'd anticipated was much more troubling.

A
n hour later, Angelica slid from beneath the crisp new sheets and freshly plumped feather-quilt on the countess's bed. Clad in the pretty, if modest, white cotton nightgown the maid, Brenda, had pulled from the chest of drawers, she slipped through the shadows to the window.

This room, too, had been refurbished. Glencrae, evidently, knew how to plan.

Quietly, so as not to disturb Brenda, who was peacefully sleeping on the truckle bed in the adjoining dressing room, Angelica slowly drew back the heavy velvet curtains, careful not to let the rings rattle.

Courtesy of Brenda's ready tongue, loosened by Angelica's assurance that she was indeed committed to helping Glencrae regain the goblet, she'd confirmed that everything he'd told her of the situation had indeed been true; if anything, he'd downplayed the seriousness, the devastation that threatened not just the clan but him as its laird.

She doubted she had as yet truly grasped how deeply the threat affected him. She didn't know that much about highland clans, but from what Brenda and he had let fall, Angelica had gathered that clan was like a very large extended family, one even more intricately interdependent than a family like her own.

If clan was family taken to the extreme, then Dominic's position was equivalent to Devil's taken to extreme . . . and Devil, and how he would feel if such a situation threatened the welfare of the entire Cynster family . . . that, she could imagine well enough.

Luckily for Dominic, fate and The Lady had arranged for her to be his helpmate. Easing back the latch on the casement window, she carefully pushed the pane wide. Breathed to herself, “Just as well for him that he got me, and not Heather or Eliza.” Heather wouldn't have wanted to do it, and nor would Eliza, for the simple reason that he wasn't their hero. They were also significantly less qualified for the role, being far less bold, adventurous, and inventive, and also less histrionically gifted.

Also far less steely in resolve, one quality that was going to be essential, both in the quest to regain the goblet and in her personal quest to capture the Earl of Glencrae.

Her natural confidence had reasserted itself. Nevertheless, she stood at the open window and couldn't explain the impulse that had driven her there.

Regardless, she leaned out, looked down and around. Fading moonlight shivered in the thick leaves of an old creeper; it covered the wall, reaching up and around the window, and had obviously been recently trimmed away from the window frame. For anyone with a little gumption, the old, gnarled stems provided ready access to the ground.

Looking further, she traced a path across a small square of overgrown lawn to a section of stone wall that, from its position opposite the rear gardens, had to border a main street. Old ivy grew in a straggling ladder up and over that wall.

If she wanted to escape, the path lay before her. If she wanted to leave her reckless bargain with Dominic Guisachan behind, run home, and keep her heart safe and intact, she could. It would be easy.

Bathed in the luminosity of the fading moonlight, she leaned on the windowsill and waited. Gave her heart permission to choose as it would, to consider again, to reassess.

She was fully aware of the risk she'd taken with said heart, with her life, with her future. Once Dominic had left, she'd waited for panic, or at least some uncertainty, to rise and swamp her, but neither had.

Drawing the old necklace free, she held up the pendant; in the faint light, it almost glowed. “He is my hero.” The words were nothing more than a breath as she turned the crystal in her fingers. “He needs my help—help only I can give. So no matter what his vision of our marriage, I will go forward with faith that, just as I will learn to love him, he will learn to love me.”

She remained at the window for several more minutes, then, finally tucking the pendant away, she drew back, quietly shut the casement, closed the curtains, and padded back to the bed.

She'd made her choice. For good or ill, she'd taken the first step, turning from the comfort and safety of her family to embark on her own adventure, her own quest for love; she wasn't going to refuse fate's challenge.

Sliding back beneath the sheet, she lay on her back and looked upward into the darkness. Boldness, confidence, and faith had got her through most of life's challenges to date. They'd get her through this one as well, and see her triumph.

The worthy things in life rarely came easily, but . . . “I'm not widely regarded as the most forceful, willful, and determined Cynster girl for no reason.”

Settling beneath the sheet, she closed her eyes.

Her sole regret of the evening was that she hadn't been able to send word to her parents. She knew they would be frantic, but, quite aside from the quibbles she'd advanced to Glencrae, real enough in their way, she hadn't wanted to write until she was absolutely certain that she knew what she was doing, and that she wouldn't need to be rescued; that missive might have been her only chance to alert them to her whereabouts. But now she was convinced that her path was correct, she would send them word in the morning.

She was trying to think of appropriate phrasing when sleep crept up on her and drew her gently down.

“I
don't understand.” Lady Celia Cynster clung to the hand of her husband, Lord Martin Cynster, and looked at Devil Cynster, Duke of St. Ives. “How can this be? The laird is dead. So who has taken Angelica?”

Standing before the fireplace in the drawing room of Martin and Celia's Dover Street home, Devil shook his head. “We assumed the laird was the instigator of the kidnappings, but perhaps he, too, was a pawn. Regardless, I've sent men to the posting houses on all the major roads leading out of the capital. If Angelica's been taken out of London, as Heather and Eliza were, we should hear something before dawn.”

It was the small hours of the morning. Standing beside Devil, Honoria, his duchess, gripped his arm. “I know it seems unlikely, but we should consider that she hasn't been kidnapped but left the soiree for some other reason. And no,” she continued, as everyone looked at her, “I can't imagine what reason that might be, but we all know Angelica—it's possible.”

Silence fell while the others, including Angelica's elder brother, Gabriel, and his wife, Alathea, considered Honoria's words.

Heather, Angelica's eldest sister, seated beside her fiancé, Breckenridge, pulled an expressive face. “If this had happened before we—me, and then Eliza—were kidnapped, would we have jumped to the conclusion that she—Angelica—has been kidnapped?” Heather looked around the circle of concerned faces. “Or would we have thought, as Honoria says, that she must have left the soiree for some reason and hasn't yet been able to send word?”

Alathea sighed. “There is that. Angelica is the last young lady I would imagine being kidnapped and the kidnapper managing to make away with her, not in such a setting. She would fight tooth and nail, and she's not one to be taken lightly.”

“She's far more . . . well,
physical
than either me or Heather,” Eliza put in from the chair in which she sat, Jeremy Carling seated on the chair's arm, his arm around her.

Devil glanced at the faces, met Gabriel's gaze, then looked at Martin. “We'll keep our searches discreet, just in case she turns up an hour from now with a perfectly reasonable excuse.”

“And we ladies,” Honoria said, meeting Celia's eyes, “will put our minds to thinking up some tale to cover her absence, just in case she doesn't.”