My Lady Series Bundle (14 page)

Their illustrious code name had been Hellagon. Regardless, they had been called surreptitiously as the Queen’s Archangels by the clandestine people in the offices at 13 Whipple Street. The pretentious naming had adhered and until the last throes of Napoleon’s demise one need only mention the Archangels on French soil to obtain a pale and fearful reaction.
Yes,
Drummond considered pragmatically, he had done his job skillfully and even exceedingly artful at times, managing over the years to deliver them through alive. Barely.

His gaze flicked casually to Harrison, the reclusive Earl of Ravenscar and the only man present who was near to his own middle age. Together, he and Harrison had operated in the macabre world of espionage for more than eight years. His gaze followed the movement of Harrison’s leather gloved hands dealing the next round. Harrison’s hands were perpetually gloved now, hiding the acid burns from their last spying operation gone awry, just as Harrison’s voice was now a permanent rasp from those same acid fumes.

Damnation,
Drummond cursed silently. He'd nearly lost Harrison in that last fateful debacle. He still questioned seriously who had betrayed their team. Who was it that nearly cost Harrison his life, had cost Radford, Duke of Sutherlin an eye and Brynmore, Baron of Duneagan the hearing in one ear?

He felt every day since that time that he had better find the traitor before Harrison did. Harrison was set for his own style of dark vengeance and it was nearly as if Harrison knew who the betrayer was. Nevertheless it was unlike Harrison not to confide in him, he reflected, if he did indeed know. And all of this coming to pass well over a year before, so now it seemed to him like so much muddied water beneath the proverbial bridge.

C
hloe hurried down the rain soaked cobblestoned street on London’s notorious westside. She knew that she should not be in this crime trodden area of London. Especially at night . . . alone! Only what choice did she have? What choices had she ever had where her twin sister Lia was concerned?
Sacred Buddha help her
, she knew that she should not, but she did, damn Lia’s evil heart to the devil. Especially this time for using her little baby, Sebastian, against her.

She must . . .
must
get Sebastian back, Chloe thought, fighting tears of anguish over her son’s fate at the hands of her sister. Only it was also fear now because someone was following her and she was not even close to the assigned drop off place where she was supposed to meet her contact. Anxiously, she checked the small package hidden in the inside pocket of her cloak. The package Lia had forced her to take.

Chloe had no idea what the package contained. She never wanted to know. She never wanted to know what price she was paying to get her son back from her own sister! How could Lia be her true sister, she agonized, for the thousandth time in her short life?

Chloe turned a sharp right corner. Immediately, she stopped and hugged the wall with her back pressed to some unknown building on the corner of the alley she stood in. The dogging footsteps had stopped also and she nearly wished that she could hear them again it was so ominous. She was praying that they would pass her by, not really even following her. But now? She looked down the obscure darkness of the alley which held a sickening sweet smell of rotting garbage. What should she do? She could hardly make herself go down the alley. She did not want to go down there.

Tap . . . tap . . . Tap. Tap. Tap.
Buddha save her
, it was the footsteps again! Chloe held her breath hugging the wall.

“You will
not
get away from me this time!” a harsh voice rasped out of the rainy obscure darkness.

Chloe screamed and her cry of terror was cut short by a damp leather-gloved hand clamped harshly over her mouth. In that same second she was jerked away from the wall to collide with a tall immovable shape. She was too terror-stricken to struggle, yet it would have been impossible because the man had a muscular arm clamped around her waist from behind.

“Fate, my little bitch, Lia. Never underestimate fate,” the man hissed in a sinister and gravelly voice.

“
N-n-n!”
Chloe garbled in a scream beneath the relentlessness of the gloved hand covering her mouth.

She was bodily dragged, stumbling in front of the man, toward the sound of an approaching horse and carriage. Her mind was stricken with the fact that this man thought she was Lia. Better he left her raped in the alley, she thought hysterically, than believe she was Lia!

The carriage and horses came to a high-stepping halt in front of them with Chloe’s frantic hopes of rescue dying quickly, when the rasping man called to the driver, and then he threw open the carriage door. There was no chance for escape. Not that her terror-stricken limbs would have allowed it because the man did not loosen his hold on her, but carried her with him up into the carriage as though she were a mere after thought of weight.

Once inside the carriage with the door slammed shut it was even darker than the black rainy night outside. Still, Chloe thought, this could be her chance because surely the rasping man would have to release her now, and then she would scream her true identity at him until he listened!

“I expected you to fight me more, you traitoress
souillon!
”

Slut!
He had called her a slut in French and his angry voice was dripping revenge on the horrible naming. Chloe found the will then as she struggled to free herself, but the man subdued her too easily. He wrested her more onto his lap and brought what felt like a silk scarf around to gag her mouth! Then he used another silk wrapping to bind her wrists together behind her back before he shoved her off him and into a corner of the carriage.

She did not know where he was inside the dark carriage as she struggled to stay upright on the bouncing carriage seat while shameful sobs wracked her, making anguished whimpering sounds beneath the gag. How could she tell this man who she was if he gagged her?

“Really, Lia . . . crying? You must imagine me noble,” the man whispered harshly in his rasping voice. “I am not, souillon!”

Chloe choked hard because out of the blackness he was suddenly there beside her. He pulled the weight of her cloak down off her shoulders while his other gloved hand tugged her heavy skirts upward with a jerk! Would he rape her now? She tried to use her legs, the only part of her free to fight. Only after two small kicks he clamped his big hands over her thighs with her linen drawers scrunched beneath as he dragged her lower limbs upward until they were on the carriage seat. His weight settled immediately between her legs, pressing down until she could not move. She whimpered like a frightened trapped animal.

“No lacy drawers, Lia? You take your pretense too far, little
pussy
.”

OhBuddha-Buddha.
Chloe jerked her head from side to side frantically, but still the rasping man used his big hands to tug at her drawers, pulling them relentlessly downward over her squirming hips. She could not breathe! She could not catch a single breath beneath the gag.

“Where is the knife and pistol that you always carry, you little bitch?
Damnation.
” Lord Harrison Ravenscar cursed in a haggard rasp.

It had taken him a few moments to realize that the venomous Lia had fainted. How could that be? From what he knew of her through all of his sources, if Lia were not a woman she would be sporting balls. Harrison shook her, noticing instantly how small and fragile she felt beneath his hands. What a dangerous illusion that was, he thought with a sneer. According to the surveillance reports he managed to obtain on her, this woman beneath him would have no compunction about taking on an entire military squad single handedly. And she did! He had followed her continuing career closely for the last two years until he had lost track of her two months before. Right after she'd been placed, as the assassin of six German field officers in a bordello in Prague. Six men dead without a thought.

How could she faint?
Harrison shook her again uselessly before he released her to lie limply on the carriage seat. A particularly sharp rocking motion of the moving carriage threw him off balance and harder into the cradle between Lia’s thighs. His groin nestled instinctively along the contours of her exposed sex. He could feel the heat of her cunt through his pants.

“Christ,” he cursed savagely before he was able to lever himself away. He knelt between her outstretched thighs, while disgustingly, he had to catch a labored breath.

It was the bitch’s fault beneath him that he was reacting this way. He'd not been with a woman for more than two years. Not since Lia had set up the betrayal where he’d burned his hands and throat so severely. And now, she was going to pay! She was going to endure his scarred hands on her body. She was going to crawl . . . she was going to beg him . . . she was going to fuck him until she was his slave, and then and only then, was he going to walk away from her. Leaving her with what she had become. It was better than killing her. Much better, he thought, as he began to search her again for the knife and pistol he knew she must have.

However he did not find them, nothing but a small package in her cloak and a gold locket around her slender neck. Frustrated, he began to rip her demure serviceable dress down the front. He simply could not believe that she did not have a weapon concealed somewhere.

“M-m!”
Lia was awake and Harrison sneered, pulling the heavy black dress away from her shoulders as he held her wriggling thighs between his knees. He reached his hand upward and snatched back the carriage curtain allowing the light from the driver’s lantern to spill across the carriage seat.

A corset? The Lia he had studied intimately but had only seen at a distance once, would never wear something so staid and so English. She must be thoroughly into her undercover character, he mused, as he reached for his thin-bladed assassin’s knife that he always carried in his boot. Lady Chloe Sang, the royal stepdaughter to a deceased Asian ambassador, was her undercover character at the moment. However, Ambassador Sang, while he'd lived had been honored at Westminster court on more than one occasion for his international negotiations. What a cover, for his sly Lia, and still he could not fathom how she was pulling it off. He only knew that from the moment he'd chanced to see her at the Carlton Hotel he had vowed that she'd just made her second major mistake since turning traitor to the Archangels spying team.
Brazen bitch
, coming to England. It was time. She was his!

“N-mm-mm!”

Harrison grasped the whalebone stays between Lia’s softly pillowed breasts with one gloved hand and drew his knife down with his other hand. He could feel the inner slopes of Lia’s breasts heaving against the back of his gloved hand as he cut the corset free. Her breasts spilled out of their confinement. They were plump ivory moons with areolas no rounder that a halfpenny, making the spiked pink nipples in their centers appear larger. The buxom flesh jiggled and arched upward with each of her agitated movements beneath him as she whimpered and tossed her head.

He had her bared except for her stockings, garters, and half-boots. He chuckled in a sinisterly lewd manner and deliberately ran one of his leather-gloved hands back and forth over each of her breasts in a smearing motion, while she tried unsuccessfully to squirm away from him.

“You are mine now, Lia.
All
mine,” he hissed with the snakelike voice he had. It was all that she'd left him. Then he lowered his hand to pet the ebony curls covering her cunt and she screamed beneath the gag.

C
hloe recovered consciousness reluctantly and if it was not for the discomfort in her arms, a nagging ache dragging her from the black cocoon of oblivion she wanted to hide in, she would not have wakened at all. She moaned over the numbing pain and found her mouth dry and still gagged. That realization sent panic rushing through her and with it she tried to move and found that she could not.

Her arms were tied above her head to a post!
A bedpost digging into her bare back. She twisted her body trying to refocus her cloudy gaze on anything and found that she could barely stand on the tips of her toes from where she was tied.
“Ah-hh,”
she groaned fearfully beneath the gag.

“Ah, my ebony-gilded souillon, so you are awake.”

Chloe lifted her head and saw a man sitting in an elegantly padded chair two long paces in front of her. He had rasped! This was the rasping man. He looked and was dressed like an English nobleman. He was handsome. He was older with rich dove-gray streaks of silver in his wavy jet-black hair. His eyes were shards of black ice, cold and calculating. His face was planed and masculine. There was not a drop of softness in the man. She was doomed unless she could convince him to remove the gag.
Buddha save her most worthless soul . . .
she prayed to faint again.

“What did you do with your tattoo, Lia?” He stood then and stepped swiftly toward her grabbing her chin into his gloved hand. “Do you think to fool anyone by cutting it away?” he asked as his free hand clamped over the lower curve of her right buttock.

She was naked!

And now she knew why Lia had cut the back of her thigh, Chloe thought frantically, as she tried to twist away from the English nobleman’s hands. Only he held her pinned to his tall frame by one gloved hand tightening on her buttock. She could feel the press of his black satin evening clothes touching her naked skin from her knees to her breasts. All at once he tilted her head back roughly with his fingers on her chin. She whimpered in fear, caught helplessly against the heat of him.

“Who are you so afraid of, my little Asian whore, that you would mar your own beauty so?” he asked harshly, twisting her chin higher.

Take the gag off,
Chloe pleaded with her eyes.
Take the gag off and I will tell you.

“Do
not
look at me like that,” he suddenly snarled, and then he released her, backing away. “Brandy-colored doe’s eyes on a venomous bitch!” he hissed.