The Stanhope Challenge - Regency Quartet - Four Regency Romances (33 page)

Jack did not blink. “She came to me.”

“She is not of her right mind.”

“She is sane as my banker.”

“If she married you, she is not in her senses.”

Jack stood and even from ten paces away, he loomed, more than ten inches taller than the little man. “We married each other, Pinrose. I have the license in my pocket and the vicar’s statement with it.”

“They are frauds.”

Jack’s nostrils flared. “You are the fraud. The liar. The cheat. The thief. The tormenter of men. The brutalizer of women. To even think you lock a young woman in her rooms and demand she marry Benjamin Trayne so that the two of you could abscond with her inheritance.”

The men in the room inhaled collectively, a collective sign of outrage.

Pinrose turned to them, a finger tapping the table. “I wish to join this venture.”

Jack’s father coughed. “Pray tell, man, if these gentlemen decide to take your offer, what will you use for collateral until the first of July?”

“Property.”

“Which,” John Stanhope asked, “property?”

“My offices in Lombard Street. A house in Park Lane.”

“How interesting,” John said with dispassion, then removed from his inner frock coat pocket long papers tied with blue deed ribbons round the packages. He flattened them and pushed them toward Hampton and Roe. “The deeds to your office in Lombard Street and the home of your charge, Emma Darling,” he said slowly articulating his barbs, “now my daughter–in–law, Emma Stanhope?”

“How do you have them?” Pinrose croaked.

“I bought them, man.”

“From—“

“Your creditors. Who else?”

Pinrose gazed at the others round the table. “Ridiculous.”

“Is it?” the earl taunted him. “Have a look.”

Pinrose grabbed the papers. “I-I cannot imagine how—”

“No imagination necessary,” the earl announced with a feigned smile at Pinrose.

“This is an outrage.”

Jack nodded.

His father did too.

Pinrose blanched, his mouth opening and closing like a beached fish. “I have other means.”

“Do you?” asked Jack, and removed from his coat pocket other papers. “Gentlemen, please see here I have bought the loans Mr. Pinrose has made in the last six months. Intending to come into a bit of money to pay them all off, Pinrose?”

The little man reached down the table. “Let me see those!”

“Ah, ah, ah!” Jack pushed them toward Hampton and Roe.

“This is robbery! Hateful! You cannot do this!”

“But we have,” the earl said with blithe charm.

Pinrose picked up his top hat and gloves. “I will speak to my lawyers. I shall see you in hell. Both of you.” And with that, he stormed out.

The door bounced off its hinges as the investors muttered about the dastardly behavior of the man who had just left. No one regretted his departure.

More than an hour later, their investment agreement signed, Jack and his father climbed into Jack’s
brougham
once more.

“A glorious afternoon, I would say. What think there, my boy?”

Jack scowled. “Where was Trayne?”

John waved a hand. “Matters not. He gave Pinrose his proxy and their scheme failed.”

“But why wouldn’t Trayne show?” The joy of their victory over Pinrose sharpened Jack’s alarm.

“Cowardice. Laziness. Any number of poor circumstances. Do not worry.”

But Jack did. The meeting was to have been profitable, eventful, dramatic. Why would Trayne purposely miss what he would assume would be a triumph?

Jack fretted all the way to his townhouse. Some fear nagged at him, tore at his joy of the afternoon’s successes.

When the two men stepped inside Jack’s foyer and doffed their coats, his butler handed Jack a note. “For you, milord.”

“From whom?” Jack turned it over and over. Cheap parchment. No crest.

“A boy from the streets brought it, milord. Looked like someone might’ve hired him on the spur of the moment.”

That explanation alone seared Jack’s mind. “What the hell?” He worried as he read the note once, then again.

The script was scribbled, the penmanship ugly. The words uglier.

“You have my debts, but you do not have Emma. We do.”

Two evenings later, Jack slid from his weary horse in front of Durham Manor and stumbled into his foyer. Exhausted, he’d ridden north like the wind. He was half out of his mind with worry for his wife.

As Simmons pushed a whisky into his hand, Cook bustled to the kitchen to warm soup and bread for him. Jack sank into the hall chair and asked about Emma. “When did she disappear? Have you found anything of hers, here or—?”

“Milord, you know she’s gone?”

Jack rubbed his forehead, the pain in his head as big as the one in his heart. “I do. I’ve had a note. She’s been abducted.”

“Abducted! I told Cook she would not run away. I knew your wife was happy here.”

Nodding, grateful for his servant’s appreciation of Emma’s true character, Jack drank a hefty draught of a strong Scots brew. “When did she go missing?”

“Not certain, my lord. I am beside myself with where she could’ve gone! Out she went to the village, each day after you and his lordship went to London. She’d take a basket of breads and jellies from the kitchen, herbs, too, and out she would light.”

“Why in hell would she…?” Jack began, then realized he knew her thinking. She was going down to the cottages of the tenants and taking them food and seeing to their needs. Just as she wished to help orphans, her hope to aid other disadvantaged had led her to this end.

“She’d go for hours. Come home at suppertime, milord. But then the third day, she didn’t come home. Do you know what happened to her?”

“I’m not certain. But I have a few suspicions of where she might be.” Two places Trayne owned, one not far from here seemed more probable. “Tell one of the footmen to go fetch the sheriff in Durham. I need his help. Tell him to bring a few men with him, too. I’ll pay for their services.”

“That I will, milord. Come now, eat and we’ll get a bath sent up to your chamber.”

But liquor and food did not take the more vital hunger from Jack’s heart. And hot water only brought back memories of sharing a bath with his wife.

By the time the sheriff and three villagers appeared in the front hall, Jack was freshly bathed and attired, ready to lead them on the thirty-mile journey to Trayne’s grandmother’s cottage near the village of Stanley. Now, eight o’clock at night, the trip would take at least two hours, maybe more.

The sheriff, a kindly man whom Jack had known since a boy, was aghast at the tale of abduction of his wife. “I say, milord,” Howard Rufus exclaimed, arms akimbo in Jack’s drawing room, “we’ll catch this bastard. Cut off his balls for you.”

Jack winced. “I may beat you to the honor, Rufus.”
And if he has hurt my Emma, if he has done more than that, I will murder him outright.
“More whisky, men, before we go?”

“No, milord,” the three replied in turn.

The biggest of them, the Durham smithy, grinned with evil purpose. “If I have more of that, good sir, I’ll not be riding straight.”

“I tell you, Mark,” Jack told the giant whose hands measured two of Jack’s, “when we return with my wife, I’m giving all three of you the wealth of my cellars for the next year.”

“Ah, milord, what your new wife was doing for us was right enough to tell us who she is and what she be about,” Mark Smith replied. “She’s a lady, all right. Me wife told me so. We’ll get this bastard who put his hands on her and make him wish he never set foot in Durham.”

“Here, here,” Jack clinked glasses with each man and within minutes, they were out the door and on the road, the late March winds cutting through their coats like chilling knives.

****

Emma sat in a corner of the rough stone cottage, her supper, an unsavoury mutton stew rumbling in her stomach, her hands tied to a most uncomfortable reed chair. Benjamin Trayne had had the decency to allow her privacy to attend to delicate matters, removing the bands to her ankles with which he hobbled her. But for most of the past three days, Emma had sat with her arms bound loosely. At night, Trayne tied her to the posts of the tiny wooden bed. With occasional pins and needles from her confinement, she grew testy and challenged him. Short of provoking him to violence, she antagonized him with questions he never answered about his plans for her future. Baiting Trayne kept her from a more agonizing habit of pondering what her husband was doing and how he’d learned she was gone. Over that, she argued with herself mightily.

Would he think I have left him?

How could he? Not after the intensity of the intimacies they’d shared.

But he’s not a man to value women. Nor even trust them.

Why wouldn’t he trust her?

Why, indeed. What had she done for him, except offer him money he would not take? Promise him she would not bother him, but leave him once their vows were said and he’d taken her virtue?

Trayne offered no insight into his plans, either. He, deluded man that he was, remained under the illusion that she and Jack were not married. The fact that she had no wedding ring confirmed his conclusion. Indeed, her wedding ring sat atop the dressing table in Jack’s bedroom. She’d placed it there that last morning before going down to the village, fearful she would lose the ill-fitting ring while on her errands.

“And you’d not have a license, either,” he said, leaning over her that first evening he’d abducted her from the Durham forest road. “That old vicar in Durham is a surly cuss. He’d not move his carcass for anyone, especially a reprobate like Jack Stanhope.” Trayne had laughed in her face, his rancid breath forcing her to wince and turn away. She did not disabuse him of the fact that the Durham vicar was a young man now and whatever had happened to the older one he referenced, well, she was not about to lead him down that path of discovery, was she?

She recoiled at the image of what Jack would do when he returned home to find her missing, the ring upon the table and she gone without explanation.

Oh, Jack. How well do you know me? Would you think me capable of that?

“What do you intend to do with me, Benjamin? I cannot continue to live like this. Trussed like a chicken, I grow weary and weak.”

“Be quiet. You’ll know soon enough what we plan. Daniel will come soon.”

“Daniel conspired with you to do this to me?”

“Who else?” He gloated.

“Who else would collaborate with the likes of you?”

He sneered and flexed his fingers in a menacing gesture. “I should shut you up.”

“Touch me and you never will again.”

“You’ll not be so high and mighty if I take you here and now.”
His blue eyes narrowed as they danced over her body.
He leaned over her once more, his weasel face and rodent’s breath making her go still with repulsion. “Did Stanhope have you?”

If she said yes, Trayne might recoil. Or not. She dared not chance it. Rather, an opportunity might come to escape him. It must. Realizing now she should not test his mettle, she held her tongue and glared at him.

He came closer, his nostrils flaring. “You don’t smell too grand, my pernickety lady. Quite a comeuppance, is it not, to be at a man’s mercy?” He licked her earlobe.

She shivered and swallowed a retort.

He grabbed her hair, pulled back her head and smashed his mouth on hers.

She bit him.

“You bitch!” He reared back, his lower lip bleeding. He staunched it, staring at his fingers.

Outside, an owl hooted.

A dog barked.

Trayne stepped backward and picked up his musket against the far wall. “Don’t worry. I will return to teach you manners.”

The door slammed and she groaned in fear and frustration. What to do?
What to do?

She had long ago noted where he kept the kitchen knife. Seizing upon his absence, she rose in a half crouch to jump with the damn chair behind her toward the table where the big butcher knife lay. She stood aside the table and stared at it. How to get it in her hand? It was too far into the middle of the table for her hand to reach.

She stood, her legs aching with the effort, and stretched toward the center. She whimpered in frustration. She stretched again, hooking her chin over the knife handle and pushing it toward her, splinters from the rough wood digging into her skin.

At the edge of the table, she spun and grasped the handle. Success had her breathing hard in triumph.

Outside, a dog was yapping wildly.

Oh god. Let him attack Trayne. Please.

Concentrating on grasping the knife with the cutting edge just so, she twirled it toward her. If she could just get the blade to the right angle, she might be able to saw the rope off her wrist and…

The door flung open and banged against the hinges.

“What the hell are you doing?” Trayne screamed at her. But instead of rushing forward to examine her, he turned and slammed the door behind him. He scrambled to push a beam into the bar and secure the door from any intruder. But someone pushed and shoved against the wooden mass and Trayne’s efforts to shoot home the beam were in vain.