The Prince Kidnaps a Bride (24 page)

A
fortnight later, men clothed in black slipped through the darkness of the hushed forest, searching for the spot where tomorrow’s drama would play out.

One horse rode with them, and from atop that horse, Marlon called softly, “Your Highness, they’ve found it.”

Rainger recognized the tone in Marlon’s voice, and his heart sank. He followed Marlon to a spot overlooking a meadow full of grass that waved in the breeze.

Marlon pointed.

In the light of the half-moon, Rainger saw the trap duBelle had set for him. “Hell,” he said, and it was more of a description than an expletive.

“Perhaps there’s another way,” Marlon said. “Someone who can dress up to look like you—”

“No.” Rainger would win this battle with himself.

“We could catch Her Highness as they bring her here and rescue her before—”

“No.” Rainger comprehended Marlon’s worry only too well. “I won’t fail you this time.”

Marlon gazed down at Rainger and his voice rang with sincerity. “I have faith in you.”

“And I in you. Here’s what we’re going to do.” When he’d given his instructions and Marlon had gone off to direct the men, Rainger looked again at the trap.

Of course. It had to be this.

The one thing he dared not face.

Yet he had to. For his people. And for Sorcha.

“Your Highness.” Hubert held the door, but took care not to cross the threshold into Sorcha’s cell. “The court’s going hunting and they beg your presence.”

“Beg? Do they?” Sorcha didn’t turn to face Hubert. Instead she kept her gaze on the panorama visible from the castle tower. The black mountain peaks pierced the blue sky. The verdant green forests crept up the slopes. The distant fields awaited the first growth. “Richarte is a beautiful country—from a distance.”

“Please, Your Highness, I must deliver you to the great hall.”

“Yet the closer I look, the more apparent Count duBelle’s failure becomes.”

“Please don’t make me come in and get you.”

She didn’t doubt for a moment Hubert sincerely wanted no trouble. He’d been one of the castle guards under Rainger’s father.

Yet still she continued, “Behind the castle walls, holes gape in the thatch of the kitchen and the stable. Weeds choke the herb garden. The paths are untended.”

“Your Highness, please.”

She turned to face Hubert. “The castle was once beautiful and is now decayed. The servants wander about, stoop-shouldered and dispirited. Everyone hates Count duBelle.”

“Shhh!” Hubert glanced behind him in alarm. Count duBelle always sent Hubert to deliver his messages to her, and Sorcha knew why. Hubert could be trusted to speak and not touch. He was the man who followed Count duBelle’s instructions and planned the daring kidnapping right in the heart of Beaumontagne. He was older, battle-worn, and gray, and he never overstepped his bounds.

“Why don’t you rise against him?” Sorcha asked. “If everyone in the castle joined together—”

Hubert lowered his voice. “We can’t. I can’t. Do you know why I am head of the guard?”

She shook her head.

“The others in the guard... some of them died fighting for the king.” Hubert glanced behind him again and inched into the room. “Some of them died fighting Count duBelle’s little wars. Every year, another war... Last year some of them attempted rebellion. They wanted me to join them, but I’ve got a mother. She’s old. And two daughters. They’re young. I can’t take a chance—”

“I know,” Sorcha said gently. She did know. Every night she’d lain awake, waiting for some man to open the door and drag her into the darkness. Every day she’d listened for footsteps in the corridor and grown faint with fear when they stopped before her door. Yet nothing had happened to her... yet. Icy anticipation held her in its inescapable grip.

“When the rebellion failed, those guards disappeared... into the dungeons.” Hubert wet his lips. “Count duBelle’s dungeon is dark and deep. He’s famous for the tortures. The beatings. Sometimes he goes down to make sure they’re being carried out as he commands. Sometimes the countess goes with him, and when she returns, her eyes... they’re bright like new-minted coins. Every few months there’ll be a new head hanging on a pike at the crossroads. I try not to look, but sometimes I can’t help it. Sometimes I recognize a face, and even if I don’t, I recognize the expression.”

“Terror,” she said.

“No. Relief. Every one of them wanted to die.” Intensely he whispered, “What has to be done to a strong, healthy man to make him welcome death?”

She shivered. Was that what had happened to Rainger?

“Please, Your Highness, please come with me,” Hubert said. “If you don’t, I’ll have to force you.”

“Of course I’ll come with you.” She smiled at the hulking guard. “We don’t want to give them the pleasure of seeing me forcibly subdued, do we?”

“Not yet,” he muttered.

“What?”

He cleared his throat. He opened his hands, palm out. “I’m to tie your wrists.”

“Is the great Count duBelle afraid of a mere princess?” She spoke mildly, but her rage soared.

“I’m to tie your wrists,” Hubert repeated. “Please.”

He was so miserable she extended her hands without argument.

Taking the length of rope from his belt, he tied her wrists together. In a low voice, he said, “There’s a rumor that Prince Rainger escaped from Count duBelle’s dungeon. Is that true?”

“Of course it’s true. You know Count duBelle would never have released him.”

Hubert took a deep breath. A slight smile lifted his lips. “Then there is hope.”

“There’s always hope.”

“No. Not for a long time.” He stepped back. “Is that too tight?”

“It’s fine.” Actually, it was so loose she held it on with her fingers. She had no doubt he knew it, too.

He walked before her down the steep, winding stairs, telling her to avoid the loose boards, catching her when she stumbled. It was a strange, grim walk toward God knows what kind of dreadful fate, yet she was almost glad the waiting was over at last.

From the soaring arch ahead, she heard loud voices and shrill laughter.

“They’re at breakfast,” Hubert told her.

“A little late for a hunt, aren’t they?” she asked.

He hunched his shoulders, took her arm, and led her into the great hall.

The room where Count and Countess duBelle dined glowed with a thousand candles and glittered with the sparkle of gold: on the plates, the tapestries, the jewelry, even the thread on the uniforms of the serving staff. Yet beneath the scent of expensive perfume, a pervasive odor tinted the air, an odor like decaying teeth, like rat-infested walls, like rampant, rotting ambition.

The count and countess glittered, too—the countess wore rings so grand they weighed down her slender fingers. The count wore a gold chain with an ornate pendant and a large sapphire of such fire it glittered in the candlelight. They certainly had the looks and lineage to be royal, yet like the castle, they reeked of hidden rot.

Richarte’s nobility hadn’t joined them in their coup, and that left the count and countess to consort with people of low origins, overweening ambition, and—Grandmamma would say worst of all—poor manners. The count and countess had sunk to the level of their associates.

As Sorcha entered, the countess called, “Here she is. Our little sacrifice.” Julienne laughed as she spoke, a small trilling giggle like a schoolgirl enjoying a guilty pleasure.

Far more than the words, the sound of her merriment drove terror into Sorcha’s heart.

This was no ordinary hunt. Something was planned. Something horrible.

Count duBelle caught sight of her, waved her forward, and called, “Princess Sorcha, I trust you’ve enjoyed your stay at our castle.”

“It’s not what I’m used to.” She lifted her tied hands and showed them. Better to pretend indignation about the knots than to have them checked by another guard.

“It’s necessary. For your own safety.” At the ripple of laughter, Count duBelle shot a knowing smile around the room. “You see, we’re going hunting... for a prince.”

Oh, God. Oh, God. Her heart thumped with increasing speed and vigor. Her chest rose and fell as she tried to get her breath. “And my role is?”

“Why, Your Highness.” His smile chilled to the temperature of a glacial stream. “You’re the bait.”

“He’s going to try to rescue me and you’re going to capture him,” she said.

“I count the first time I captured him as the crowning moment of my life. It’s not often a man has two such”—Count duBelle ran his tongue around his red lips—“climactic experiences.”

She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of fainting. She would not. But as the blood ebbed from her brain, she looked around her with sharpened focus.

There. At the table. That man. He watched her with avid eyes like a weasel smelling blood.

That woman. As she laughed, it seemed her teeth lengthened and sharpened.

Another man. He watched her as if she were a fox and he a hound.

And the countess... she leaned back in her high-backed chair, toyed with her silverware, and smiled so happily she might have been a child offered a treat. Her blond hair was styled in a fashionable swirl. Her riding costume wrapped her lush figure in glorious blue velvet. Only her avid sapphire eyes showed a knowledge of what would happen to Sorcha. And to Rainger, her former lover.

Sorcha had fallen into a den of beasts and none of the other horrors she faced on the road—not the mean-spirited MacLaren, not the sly MacMurtrae, not the treacherous Godfrey—could ever hope to match these people and their corruption.

“Are you fond of him, your prince?” Count duBelle leaned forward and avidly watched her. “Do you like the scars on his back? I put them there. Did you know he’s afraid of the dark? I taught him that. I made him the sniveling coward he is today.”

“If Prince Rainger is such a coward,” she asked in a clear voice, “then why do you think he’ll take the bait and rescue me?”

Hubert took her arm and almost jerked her off her feet. “Come on!”

“Where are you taking her, Captain?” Count duBelle’s voice snapped like a whip.

“To the stables, Yer Lordship,” Hubert said, “to wait for yer pleasure.”

A great many of the men snapped their fingers in encouragement.

“Hey, hey, hey, Egidio, she’s going to wait for your pleasure!” one of the men at the high table called. “She’s a pretty tidbit. Your pleasure would be great.”

“His pleasure could be shared.” Julienne flushed a mottled red and the hand that gripped her cup curled into a claw. “Then we’d see how pretty she is.”

Sorcha cast a glance around the room. Handsome men. Pretty women. Vacant eyes. Lascivious smirks.

She looked at Count duBelle. At his sculpted face, his athletic body, his bloodshot eyes filled with the soulless desperate need to prove his domination.

She met the countess’s gaze and saw in her the lethal venom of a woman whose beauty had unfolded as an exotic blossom and now, day by day, withered into the humiliation of old age. In this lawless land ruled by one ruthless man, Julienne would do anything to retain her position as his lover, including flinging Sorcha to the pack.

Hubert jerked her again. “Move,” he growled.

She moved, taking care not to run, not to incite them to give chase.

Outside the great hall, she shuddered.

Hubert took a long breath. “She’s a rabid bitch, that one is.”

Sorcha hurried now, putting distance between herself and the court. “What awful people. They wallow in beauty and don’t know the difference between a palace and a pigpen.”

“I’m sorry, Your Highness. I’d help you if I could.” Hubert sounded wretched.

She touched him on the arm. “You did help me. You got me out of there in one piece. I’m grateful.”

“Ye don’t know what they’re going to do to ye.” Hubert’s feet dragged more than hers.

“I have an idea. But don’t worry. My husband will come for me.”

“That’s what he’s supposed to do, and they’re going to—”

“I know, but you don’t understand. He’s a different man than he was when he was your prince. He won’t let anything happen to me.” That she did not doubt. It didn’t matter that Rainger had tricked her or that she despised him or that he used her for her body to bring his heir into the world. Against all logic or hope, she knew Rainger would come to rescue her.
Would
rescue her. “Rainger will save me.”

“I know he will, Your Highness.” But Hubert’s bleak tone belied his hopeful words.

The stable was a madhouse of activity as the grooms and hostlers saddled the horses. Dust and cursing rose in the air, and Sorcha supposed her equippage would be chosen to ridicule her and her station.

She was right. The rough, humble cart resembled the tumbrel that carried French aristocrats to the guillotine. The horse that pulled it had huge hooves, sturdy legs, and a swayed back—an old, worn-out farm horse.