To Lure a Proper Lady (25 page)

On the threshold to a small sitting room, he flatted himself against the wall. Turning his head just enough, he spotted his quarry. Barrows, yes. The same man he'd seen in the woods at Sherrington Manor sat on a settee, one leg over his knee, as if he was calmly gossiping over tea. Except, as he chattered, he picked his nails with a boning knife.

“I reckon some of these paintings might have fetched a decent sum. The only problem is they're too easy to trace.” Barrows let out a sigh.

From this angle, Dysart couldn't see Lizzie, but she must be present, perhaps facing the estate agent. He made eye contact with Riggs, sending him a silent message.
Follow my lead.

Riggs nodded.
Understood.

“Pity,” Barrows went on, “but Sherrington ought to give me twice what they're worth to have his daughter back, surely.”

Dysart pulled his pistol and burst into the room. The
click
of the hammer cocking echoed through the space. “The only thing you're going to get is an appointment with the hangman.”

In a flash, Barrows sprung. Not at Dysart, but at Lizzie, who occupied another chair, bound hand and foot, a strip of cloth securing her jaw.

Barrows hauled her to her feet and held her in front of him, the point of the knife digging in just below her ear. “Don't even think of pulling the trigger. I'll slit her throat.”

Lizzie's eyes went wide with fear, but Dysart forced himself to ignore her. His entire being concentrated on Barrows.

“You don't really want to do that.” Dysart kept his tone low and authoritative.

“Don't push me.”

From behind the gag, Lizzie let out a whimper. A small cut beneath her jawline proved Barrows had already terrorized her with the knife.

Dysart tamped down the surge of anger that accompanied this observation. Now was no time to let his emotions gain the upper ground. The tangible presence of Riggs at his back helped center him.

Slow and steady. Calm. Ten feet, maybe, separated them. If he could get close enough, he had a chance.

“I'm not pushing you.” He took a step forward, looking Barrows in the eye.
Focus on me, not the firearm. Focus on what I'm saying.
“I'm asking you to see reason.”

“Reason.” Barrows laughed, the sound harsh in the empty house. “That's a good one. Is it your idea of a joke?”

“You've been with the family for years.” Another step, nice and easy. “Why would you wish harm on them after all this time?”

“Wouldn't you like to know?”

“Why don't you tell me?” Almost there. One more step and he'd be within striking distance.

“No. I know what you're doing. You're trying to worm a confession out of me.”

“Maybe I just like a good story.” He lunged.

Lizzie screamed, the sound muted behind the linen binding, but with that scream, her shoulders wrenched. Somehow, she broke Barrows's grip and dropped. The knife hit the carpeted floor with a dull
thud.

But Barrows had changed target. As Dysart bowled into him, Barrows grabbed Dysart's wrist, the one holding the pistol, and twisted. Head down, Dysart shoved, but the man, for all his slighter build, stood his ground, immovable as a brick wall.

Cruel fingers dug into Dysart's forearm.
No!
He could not allow himself to lose control of the weapon. But Barrows was relentless.

Dysart's fingers slipped on the pistol's butt. He kicked, trying to snare Barrows's legs and knock him off balance.

Though Dysart's blow met with air, Barrows stumbled.

Riggs? No, Lizzie.

Somehow, despite her bindings, she'd thrown herself under his feet.

Dysart staggered to avoid her. Too far. With Barrows already unsteady, they both wobbled. The floor tilted. Reflexively, Dysart's finger tightened on the trigger.

With an echoing
bang,
his pistol went off. As he hit the floor, pain exploded through his body, and the world went black.

A mountain collapsed on Lizzie, forcing the air from her lungs. Burning pain raked her chest, but when her vision cleared, she realized her error. That massive load was not a mountain.

It was a body.

Panic clawed at her, yet she had no breath left to scream.

Move.

She couldn't respond to that visceral urge, either. The bonds about her wrists and ankles held her fast. Something warm and wet soaked into her breeches. Oh, God.

She forced her head to pivot and looked into Dysart's face. His eyes were closed, expression slack, and his pallor…that was an alarming shade of gray.

Don't be dead. Please, don't be dead.
Her heart slammed into her rib cage to the rhythm of that thought.
No, you can't be gone. Not now. Not so soon.

But that hot wetness continued to spread. A coppery scent filled her nostrils, and her stomach clenched.

Harsh grunts accompanied by the dull
thud
of knuckles colliding with flesh filled her ears, yet she ignored the sounds. They weren't important. Only Dysart.

With her shoulders and hips she pushed at him, until she was able to break free and see the source of that wet heat. Through her gag, she gasped. Blood pumped from a tattered hole in Dysart's thigh, an ugly red stain expanding, and she was powerless to stop it.

“Help!” Somehow she managed to croak the word, but it rang in her mind as an incoherent moan.

From somewhere above came a bone-jolting
crack,
followed by the heavy
thump
of another body slumping to the floor. Silence. Then a tug at her wrists. The cold blade of a knife slid along her skin.

No!

Before she could struggle, the bite of the ropes eased. Hands tingling as feeling returned to them, she tore off the gag and faced her savior—a complete stranger, but he had to be one of Dysart's cronies. From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of Barrows lying in a heap.

“Leave me,” she urged. “I'm not important. For pity's sake, summon a surgeon.”

The stranger had already shifted to Dysart, crouching and using his knife to cut Dysart's breeches away from the wound. “If you'll permit me, I've had some training.”

When Dysart came back to his senses, his skull felt as if it had been stuffed full of cotton wool. Damn muzzy-headed sensation. Some bastard had fed him laudanum.

His right thigh burned as if the devil himself had taken a poker and rammed the red-hot iron clear through the muscle. That would explain the opiate. Reluctantly the threads of his memory wove themselves back into a semblance of a pattern. Barrows. A standoff. A knife. Lizzie.

Shite.

No, she was all right. She had to be. He'd heard her voice in his mind, entreating him to wake up. Her soft hands had pushed the hair off his forehead in a lingering caress. Her lips had brushed his. That had been real. Hadn't it?

He didn't want to open his eyes and find out it wasn't.

A muffled chattering reached his ears. Yes, that
was
her voice. “You may not care for your future inheritance, but
I
do.” Damn, she didn't sound very happy, either. She was giving somebody what for.

Dysart let himself smile, but the feeling behind it only lasted until he heard the reply. The words were indistinct, but he'd recognize that insufferable cultivated accent anywhere. Snowley. What the hell was he doing in London?

“Papa was right about one thing,” Lizzie said. “You do need someone with sense who can oversee the workings of the estate for you.”

For that matter, what in hell was this place? Dysart lay on a mattress, one comfortable and wide enough that it couldn't belong to some coaching inn or his mean rented rooms. He chanced raising an eyelid. The light filtering through heavy bed-hangings was sufficient to tell him it was daylight outside this small cocoon. He imagined Lizzie on the other side of those draperies, on the threshold to a large bedchamber, Snowley still in the passage.

A smug sense of satisfaction rolled through Dysart at the idea of Lizzie standing guard over his bedchamber. Keeping Snowley at bay. Except Snowley could only wish to have dealings with Lizzie—and the last dealings between her and that idiot had involved a proposal.

“I can accept then.”

Despite the blankets covering him, his blood ran cold. Shite, he'd missed a few exchanges. What had she just accepted?

“That will do.” A newcomer had joined the conversation. Riggs. At least Lizzie had called upon his abilities, and not those of one of the quacks her father preferred. Dysart would rather trust a man who had picked up his surgical skills under fire during the war than someone who relied on book learning and theory. “If you insist on going over important matters, I request you do so elsewhere. My patient needs rest, not this disturbance.”

If Lizzie voiced a protest, Dysart did not catch it.

A moment later, the bed hangings parted to admit Riggs along with an annoying amount of sunlight. “Ah, you're awake.”

“If you want to call it that,” Dysart muttered. “I've no doubt you're going to make me regret it.”

“I can administer more laudanum if you like.”

“I don't like. I prefer to know what's going on. And to that end, what is going on?” He couldn't ask whether Lizzie had just accepted a proposal, at least not without giving away a number of tender emotions he'd rather not have Riggs discover.

“You mean with regard to Barrows?”

“Ye can start with him.”

Riggs peeled back the blankets and busied himself with unwrapping the bandage about Dysart's thigh. “I turned Barrows over to the magistrates. Without doubt, Newgate will have another resident before the week is gone.”

Dysart gritted his teeth as Riggs unwound the final layer of linen. To judge by the stinging, the fabric had stuck to his skin.

“You're quite lucky,” Riggs commented. “The ball went clean through the muscle. If it had broken the bone, I may not have been able to save your leg. As for the artery…”

Dysart nodded. He'd seen what a pistol ball to a major blood vessel did to a man.

A suspicious grin stretching his lips, Riggs prodded at a sensitive spot, provoking a hiss of pain. “I thought you were made of tougher stuff than that. You swooned over a flesh wound.”

If Riggs could tease, everything was going to be fine. Still, Dysart didn't have to tolerate such treatment. “Stick to the case. What did Barrows say in his confession?”

Riggs slathered the wound with some manner of burning ointment. A pungent odor of eucalyptus filled the air. “As you may have guessed, he's been fleecing the duke for years. He claimed to need extra blunt to keep his ailing mother in medicines.”

“Don't they all?” After the way Barrows had threatened Lizzie, Dysart wasn't about to extend the slightest bit of charity to the man.

“I believe he also has an affinity for horse racing.”

Dysart grunted. “Don't they all?”

Riggs shrugged and pulled out a clean length of bandage. “In the last year, he's become careless. He was so desperate for funds that he sold Pendleton a mare he had no right to.”

“Boudicca.”

“Barrows sent Pendleton a horse of much lower quality. Naturally Pendleton noticed and demanded his money back. Barrows ran to Town to try and sell off what he could to appease Pendleton, but that's where he got caught.”

“He didn't know he had you on his arse.”

Riggs propped the injured leg on a pillow and began to wrap it. “Or you.”

“What about Sherrington's health troubles?”

“Most of those are in his head, but Barrows helped things along. A little arsenic here and there to ensure the man stayed in his chambers more than he looked after the estates.”

“Or the account books,” Dysart added.

“Those, too.” Riggs tied off his fresh bandage, pausing just short of patting his effort.

“So who was Lady Elizabeth arguing with?” Dysart forced a tone of mild disinterest. Mostly he wanted to be certain he hadn't dreamed those overheard snippets of conversation.

If Lizzie had accepted Snowley's offer, Dysart would have to do some accepting of his own, no matter how much it hurt. For it would hurt, more than his damned leg. More than anything he'd ever experienced.

It's the way of things,
he reminded himself harshly.
She never was for you.

Apart from an all-too-brief time.

“Some cousin,” Riggs replied. “Funny name.”

“Snowley?”

“That's it. Who looks at a newborn babe and decides it's a Snowley?”

“The nobs.” At some point Dysart would learn to squeeze more than two syllables at a time past the constriction in his throat.

“Speaking of which. I wanted to talk to you the other day—”

“Other day?”

Riggs patted Dysart's shoulder the way one pats a puppy on the head. The rotten bastard. “You've been insensible for four days. Raving with fever for part of it, but that's all to be expected.”

God, what had he said? No, he didn't want to learn he'd made Lizzie some flowery declaration while he was half out of his gourd with fever and opiates. “The other day,” he prompted.

Riggs rubbed his chin. “I don't know if you'd be interested, but if you ever decide to leave Bow Street, I've got enough jobs to keep me busy. I could use a good partner.”

If Dysart could have sat up straighter, he would have. “What do all these nobs get up to that ye need help?”

“You wouldn't believe it if I told you. Mostly it's husbands wanting to catch their wives in a tryst or vice versa. I think you'd be ideal.”

“Ye do? Why?”

“Because you're one of them, aren't you?”

Christ, what had he done to tip his hand? Riggs was good, true, but Dysart had got away with his ruse for years. “How do ye reckon?”

“You slipped with Barrows. When you confronted him, you were talking to him just like a bloody earl's son. You did it again when I first came in.”

Because he was a bloody earl's son. One who was completely and utterly buggered.

“So what do you say?” Riggs nudged.

“I'll think on it.”

If Lizzie thought she could get away with murder, she'd kill Snowley. Dysart might not arrest her for such a deed, but she didn't know Riggs at all—beyond him possessing surgical skill gleaned in the army and being a former Bow Street Runner. Even Riggs might turn a blind eye, once she explained the circumstances.

Her cousin had appeared on the doorstep to berate her for leaving a party. “Insufferably rude,” he'd termed her actions. She'd give him insufferably rude.

He refused to appreciate the gravity of what had happened. She didn't think she could explain it in any clearer terms than “Barrows has crippled the estate's finances, and you're concerned about the opinions of a few party guests.”

“But Lady Whitby can do our reputations a great deal of damage.” That had been his counterargument.

Lizzie had thrown up her hands, but inside she'd wanted to sink into the floor. The reality of Papa's vision had hit her with the full force of a racehorse driving hard to the finish line. Snowley required a wife with common sense. Not only that, said wife must possess the spine to keep him in line.

And Lizzie possessed both those qualities.

She was going to have to respond to his proposal. She was going to have to say yes.

Even if she was in love with another man. The thought ripped through her chest. Her feelings went far, far deeper than those she experienced during their single night of passion. The truth had fallen on her every bit as hard as Dysart's inert body the moment she'd looked into his inanimate face. The moment she feared deep in her gut that he was dead.

Having dismissed her cousin, she paced now in front of the door to the chamber where Dysart lay healing. Riggs was still in there with him, but the moment the surgeon came out, she was going to demand to see Dysart, although she had no idea what she'd say to him. She could hardly confess her feelings and then tell him she intended to marry another.

But she needed to see him, alive and awake. She needed to touch him. She needed to drink her fill of him while she still could.

The door opened, and Riggs emerged.

“Might I see him now?”

Riggs's gaze penetrated the same way Dysart's did. She felt as if he could see beneath her muslin morning gown straight through to the feelings in her heart. Or he might simply have observed the way she'd chewed her nails to the quick over the last four days. Either way, he knew. “As long as you don't tire him, yes, you may.”

With a nod, she brushed past him into the guest bedchamber. Dysart lay in the midst of an enormous bed, his injured leg propped on a pillow. Late afternoon sunlight cast golden squares across the counterpane and gilded his bare chest. A heavy layer of reddish stubble covered his cheeks and chin, and his complexion had taken on its usual healthy coloring.

He'd never looked more handsome.

“My goodness, have you got anything on under those blankets?” she blurted. Heat raced up the back of her neck. Could she have possibly come out with anything more awkward?

He raised the counterpane and glanced down. “I don't appear to. But I'm fairly sure I heard Riggs tell you not to tire me.” He paused a beat. “He always did have a penchant for ruining a man's fun.”

A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, and relief, glorious blessed relief, washed through her. Not only because he was clearly on his way to recovery, but also the tension that had blemished their last parting seemed to have dissipated. If only their relations could remain so easy. But the moment she told him about Snowley, she suspected all that strain would return.

“You can come closer,” he suggested. “That is, unless Lady Whitby is lurking on the other side of that door waiting to catch us doing something scandalous.”